I Knew I Shoulda Taken That Left Turn at Albuquerque

I have always secretly admired people who could read a newspaper while eating.  It bespeaks co-ordination, dexterity, and automatic digestion, none of which attributes I seem to possess.  It also gives one an air of being a man of affairs, and I long ago abandoned the attempt to look like a man of affairs.  I even find it difficult, some mornings, to look like a man.

-- Robert Benchley, "Read and Eat"

So I was reading Robert Benchley's 1936 collection My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew tonight while I ate dinner, and I was amused by his references to his foil and imaginary friend Mr. MacGregor, who always seems to be handy though Benchley carefully states that "he doesn't sleep here."  On the other hand, Benchley complains that MacGregor always leaves "a lot of work undone (I am always the fall guy who ends up by doing the work around the house)".  I began to muse on subtexts.  I don't know (or care) anything about Robert Benchley's innermost desires, though I know he was heterosexually married; I'm talking about the milquetoast persona he created in his humorous writings.  I'm sure "Benchley" and MacGregor were just good friends, homosocial as could be.

So I switched to my old posts on the Birth of the Modern Homosocial, and the rather overwrought defenses of various historical and fictional figures' Kinsey Zeroness.  Which in turn reminded me that I'd heard reports that a recent biographer had suggested that Franz Kafka might have been That Way.  I did some searching to see if there was any substance to these speculations and found a few reviews of the historian Saul Friedlander's brief biography Frank Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt (Yale, 2013), which told me what evidence lay behind Friedlander's speculations.

That evidence turned out to be a bit more substantial than I expected, but there doesn't seem to be much of it.  For example, this passage from Kafka's diary, which his friend and executor Max Brod censored in the English translation (the censored bits are in brackets):

Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.

It sounds like Kafka wanted B. to want to go home with him.  Again, this isn't much, but it seems to make clear that Kafka was erotically drawn to another male and knew it.  "There are also," the novelist John Banville wrote in his review of Friedlander's book, "some admiring glances thrown in the direction of a couple of handsome Swedish youths. It is hardly a damning testament. What is perhaps most significant is the fact that Brod felt it necessary to make these quiet elisions, since it suggests he had definite suspicions about his friend’s sexual inclination."

Where on earth does "damning" come from?  The striking thing here is that Banville treats Friedlander's speculations about Kafka's possible bisexuality as accusations.  A decent person would see Kafka's desire for B. and the handsome Swedes as rather sweet, and his "struggle" with it sad, just like his complicated, frustrated desires for women.

Here's another bit from another review, quoting Friedlander:

“Today in the coffee-house with [Franz] Werfel,” Kafka wrote in April 1914. “How he looked from the distance, seated at the coffee table. Stooped, half reclining even in the wooden chair, the beautiful profile of his face pressed against his chest … His dangling glasses make it easier to trace the delicate outlines of his face.”

Hey, can't a bro admire another bro's beautiful profile without somebody making a federal case out of it?  But this isn't all.

Later again, in mid-November 1917, Kafka wrote to Brod about a dream, the ambiguity of which he himself commented on: “If I go on to say that in a recent dream I gave Werfel a kiss, I stumble right into the middle of Bluher’s book. But more of that later. The book upset me; I had to put it aside for two days …” Bluher, a leading figure in the German youth movement, wrote about male erotic bonding in his 1917 work The Role of Eroticism in Male Society.

Ah yes, a manly kiss between normal manly guys.  And it was a dream, waddaya want anyhow?

The same reviewer continues:

Long before these confessions, Friedlander notes, Kafka was writing in his diary about posing for an artist in the nude at age 19 as a model for St. Sebastian. The picture of Kafka the serial womanizer stripping off his clothes in a Prague studio in 1912 and allowing another man to tie him to a post and paste fake arrows on his chest is slightly jarring even in the 21st century (actual pictures would be yet more jarring still – do they exist? If they ever surface, will we claim we were unprepared?). Friedlander shows that he knows this by presenting it all with becoming gravity, and he has a deeper purpose in doing so at all: his contention is that deep sexual ambiguities and doubt form yet another instructive layer in the complex literary gift prudish Brod bequeathed to readers everywhere.

Apparently there was more homoeroticism in Kafka's life (and perhaps his work) than this, but these examples are what the reviewers I found quoted.  Of course some gay writers and bloggers got all giggly about this, and treated Friedlander's speculations as gospel.  (I refuse to link to them.)  I hope I can fit Friedlander's book into my busy reading schedule sometime in the next century, but for now: What Kafka himself thought about his lust for other males isn't clear, and most likely we'll never know.  I think it's important, though, that he recognized what his feelings were, and it doesn't seem to me that he struggled with them quite as much as Friedlander and Banville, among others, wish he had.  Were these little stories really "confessions," I wonder?  On the surface that word is right down there with "damning."  I suppose one would have to read the diaries at length to get a sense of what Kafka meant by recording them, and whether these epithets come from him or represent the hangups of these guys who are writing about him.

Reiner Stach, another recent Kafka biographer, told the Guardian that Kafka's fears and obsessions about sex were "perfectly normal."  I'm not persuaded.  Yes, fear of venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy were widespread, and quite reasonable, and in that sense normal.  Yet those fears didn't stop men from going out and having sex anyway.  There were many brothels in Europe and the US back then, and syphilis and gonorrhea were epidemic scourges.  One might almost call having a sexually transmitted disease "perfectly normal."

Stach said:

“I don’t know why it persists. Kafka had homosexual fantasies, but everyone does. He had a really intense access to his own subconscious, more than we might have, and this is why he is such a great writer. So, he had homosexual, bisexual, sadistic, masochistic and voyeuristic fantasies and all of these appeared in his works, which is typical for writers like Kafka. But you can’t conclude that he was any one of those things himself.”

I think this is nonsense.  Even if "everyone" has homosexual fantasies, that wasn't accepted in Kafka's day, and probably not now.  I'm always suspicious when someone tries to brush aside potentially embarrassing information with "everybody does that."  "Typical for writers like Kafka" is also a red flag: how many "writers like Kafka" are there?  His fans generally treat him as sui generis, and he was certainly very unusual.  I don't know that he had more access to his subconscious than most people, or how that in itself would make him a great writer.  And if someone has, and cultivates, homosexual, "bisexual," sadomasochistic and voyeuristic fantasies, it's not damning or an accusation to say that he was homosexual, bisexual, sadomasochistic, or a voyeur, even if he didn't act them out.  Stach reveals himself here to be, not a sophisticated, cosmopolitan observer, but a rather crude and provincial one.

The idea that it doesn't count if you don't have overt sex is one of the older "defenses" in the book, used by the crudest most bigoted sexual cops when someone they like turns out to be not quite the paragon of purity they want him to be. "You don't have to be one to play one" is also standard.  At least no one -- that I've seen so far -- has invoked "The modern homosexual hadn't been invented yet."  Kafka lived in the milieu of the newborn Modern Homosexual, and he was evidently well-read enough to know it.

I find it depressing that this embarrassment over, yes, "perfectly normal" areas of human experience is still so much with us.  Of course the embarrassment is perfectly normal too.  It's just nothing to be complacent about.  Meanwhile, I'm saying nothing about "Benchley's" confessed relationship with his imaginary dachshund friend Friedel Immerman.