By Stuart Mitchner
Kafka in ecstasy. Writes all night long….
—Max Brod, October 1912
On April 13, the Czech migrant who has been residing at 225 Madison Avenue since November 22, 2024, will be leaving town. I’ve had almost four months to visit the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibit commemorating Franz Kafka’s June 3, 1924 death and yet here I sit in my study with a copy of Diaries 1910-1923 open to a facsimile of the undated first page, which begins with a single sentence: “The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past.”
At home, I can see the German sentence in Kafka’s handwriting and know what it says thanks to the English translation on the facing page. At the Morgan, while I’d be in the presence of the actual notebook, it would be under glass, as would Kafka’s unintelligible handwriting, the room would be crowded, and I would be distracted by the metropolitan rush of my first walk in the city since the October 2019 J.D. Salinger centenary at the New York Public Library. more
Mexico’s Mysterious Stranger” is the way James Agee characterized B. Traven in his February 2, 1948 Time review of John Huston’s film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I’ve been haunted by Traven’s multi-faceted invisibility ever since last week’s column on the “disappearing poet” Weldon Kees, who told a friend in his last phone call in May 1955: “I may go to Mexico. To stay.” My interest in Traven began in earnest on Albert Einstein’s birthday, March 14, Pi Day in Princeton, after hearing that Traven’s The Death Ship (Das Totenschiff), published in German in 1926, is the novel Einstein named when asked what book he’d take to a desert island.
