A Barely Passing Grade on the Test of Time
On Kafka, lame seagulls, and high school scribblings.
The fact that someone rescues your ancient and feeble high school magazine from oblivion is a kind of survival, if only a minor form.
A year or two ago, someone out of the blue wrote to me and told me she had discovered a copy of my high school literary magazine and was “glad to see I was still writing.” She told me she particularly liked my short story, “Time Past” in the magazine. The story was a combination of Vonnegut and Bradbury — I remember little of it except for its “unstuck in time” aspect (I had recently read Slaughterhouse Five). I recall little else about the story except for my mother praising it, which was all the encouragement I needed. I sent it out to The Atlantic first, promptly receiving a form rejection, and then submitted it to my high school literary magazine, which was starved for content. The (other) editors immediately accepted it, along with a dozen or more of my poems. My school, St. Andrews in Sewanee, Tennessee, had fewer than 200 students at the time, and I pretty much owned the literary magazine. I wasn’t the editor, so this wasn’t completely a case of self-adoration, but it was close. I thought my poems and stories were a display of unfettered genius and I felt pretty happy with the issue, but very unhappy with the name of the magazine: Time’s Waste. I lobbied heavily against it, but was overruled. I argued that the title made it sound like the contents were a waste of the reader’s time, but the other three members of the staff liked the sound of it and maybe they were exercising a little passive aggressive revenge on my own self-importance.
So when this stranger contacted me about finding and reading my high school lit mag, I suppose I should have been gratified, but I was flummoxed, gobsmacked. Amazed that she would track me down and tell me she was “glad I was still writing.” So was I.
Unfortunately. my fifteen-year old daughter also unearthed this literary magazine when we were sorting through some papers. She was less generous. She read in a pompous voice a horrible little Haiku-ish poem I had written that adorned the back cover.
And the great saint fell
He did not hear the weeping of the lame seagull.
Classic.
“Well, anything sounds bad,” I told her, “if you read it in that voice.”
But of course, it was bad. It was a stain upon literature. While I want some of my work to survive “the test of time,” I’d really prefer to be the one who decides what works those are, if any. Unfortunately, that’s almost never the case unless you burn everything from your past that you dislike, as Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to do. Even that wouldn’t work now that so much is preserved online. It pains me that this pitiful reminder of how poorly I have written remains in the world and is either remarked upon or politely ignored by gentler souls than my daughter. Should I have kept the poem from publication as well as all my other feeble literary efforts from the time? I didn’t have the foresight. I didn’t even really know what I was getting myself into.
Franz Kafka’s friends, principally, Max Brod, considered him a genius and not only encouraged but virtually browbeat Kafka into allowing the publisher Kurt Wolff to look at some of his work with an eye towards publishing it. When he handed over the manuscript in person to Wolff, he said, “You do me a great honor by considering my work and you would do me an even greater honor in rejecting it.” Kafka wasn’t being coy. He was serious in that he didn’t believe he was ready to publish. To him, what he had produced were mostly scribblings – he aimed high and he didn’t want to publish something he couldn’t be proud of. By the end of his life, he felt he only had a few stories worthy of publication.
Kafka’s close friends, Franz Werfel and Brod, were much more famous than he was during his lifetime, and published quite a lot more than Kafka. One of Werfel’s books, The Song of Bernadette, was even made into a popular Hollywood movie. But I bet that few readers today have heard of Werfel, and fewer have read him. You might have heard of Brod, but only most likely in relation to Kafka. Brod disobeyed his friend’s wishes to burn his manuscripts and helped turn Kafka into one of the most famous writers who ever lived.
Kafka kept a diary at Brod’s urging, and his diaries have been published, too. Certainly, he would have been horrified at that thought. Perhaps it’s a kind of trespass to read them, but they give us a great insight into the way his mind worked, what he thought was important and what he thought was unimportant. He hated literary chit chat and gossip. He only gave two readings in his life, one in his hometown of Prague and one in Munich. This wasn’t because he was shy; he was indeed a bit shy, but he once acted as the impresario for a production of a Yiddish play and introduced it to an audience. At the first reading he gave, the audience, nearly all writers themselves, swooned over his story, one newspaper even heralding it as the debut of a great new talent. The reviewer was right, but Kafka’s own reaction was muted, even disdainful. The accolades were nice, he said, but he would much rather have spent the evening writing. At his second reading in Munich, he read his story, “The Penal Colony,” a gruesome but profound piece about the commandant of a prison camp who tortures his inmates by killing them with a machine that literally writes the crimes they have committed onto their bodies. This time, his audience was less appreciative and several people fainted. This reaction only reinforced Kafka’s own self-doubts about his writing.
In retrospect, I think that all my contributions to my high school magazine weren’t a waste of time, though everything I contributed seems pretty awful to me now. Kafka was right that you don’t want to publish something you can’t later be proud of. But I think that this admonition should exclude our earliest scribblings. Great saints and lame seagulls were what I needed to write about then. Was I really ever so earnest?
The fact that someone rescues your ancient and feeble high school magazine from oblivion is a kind of survival, if only a minor form. A barely passing grade on the test of time. The fact that it reaches across decades to be read by a complete stranger remains a kind of miracle and a triumph, if only a minor one. That these works have no value at all, not even to me, doesn’t bother me now, as they were just dry runs for everything else I’ve since written. I can’t say that anything I’ve written since will have any more staying power than my lame seagulls — the occasional stranger remarking that they’re glad I’m still writing. To what purpose, I’m never sure. I don’t think it has to do with greatness, or at least a different kind of greatness than the commonly accepted notion of it. Was Kafka great before he became world famous? If Max Brod had never promoted his work, would he still have been great? I’d say yes.