By Stuart Mitchner
It’s impossible for me to ignore Franz Kafka when the month of June begins with his June 3, 1924 death and ends on the verge of his July 3, 1883 birth. And if you’re writing a column to be published on the first day of July — first days have a way of looming — you’re attuned to the artists who entered and left the world on that date. Like James M. Cain in 1892, he who helped put the “noir” in film noir with novels like Double Indemnity, and like William Wyler in 1902, the director of Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, and a personal favorite, The Good Fairy with Margaret Sullavan irresistible in the title role; thus, after fighting throughout the making of the film, the director and the star eloped to Mexico immediately afterward.
The July 1 deaths include Sylvia Sidney (1999), who brightened Fritz Lang’s You and Me, and Robert Mitchum (1997), who looms darkly over Out of the Past and numerous noirish unmissables. Most remarkable of all is the death-date coincidence of Marlon Brando in 2004 and Karl Malden in 2009, mortal enemies as Rio and Dad Longworth in One-Eyed Jacks and best friends forever in life.
Writing It All Over Again
Literature’s most momentous July 1 death may be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s in 1899. During the previous decade, according to The Washington Post, she began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin over again. As “a result of dementia,” she was sure that she was “engaged in the original composition,” spending several hours every day inscribing passages almost exactly word for word, “unconsciously from memory,” as if the story was coming to her for the first time.
Rewriting her historic masterpiece was not the only thing that enlivened the last decade of Stowe’s life, judging from what her Hartford neighbor Mark Twain observed in his Autobiography: “Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.”
These examples of Stowe’s bizarre behavior would have charmed Franz Kafka.
The Power of One Word
“You can never underestimate the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” according to Mark Christian Thompson. Translated the year it was published, 1852, “there was no lag time at all, and it’s never been out of print in Germany since then.” The weighty subtitle of Thompson’s book Kafka’s Blues — Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic — belies the excitement of his Eureka moment reading Kafka’s Amerika. When he came upon the English word “Negro,” in a novel written in German by a Czech writer in the early 1910s, it was “like an explosion — I mean, there was a German word for being black, but he didn’t use it. I thought, ‘This can’t be an isolated incident, there must be other, related things happening.’ Then it was incumbent upon me to figure it out.”
When asked in a 2017 Johns Hopkins magazine interview how Kafka’s perspective on blackness might have been formed, Thompson “automatically” thought of jazz before bringing up Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “which was a huge, huge novel in German-speaking lands.” Presumably if there were any documented evidence that Kafka had read Stowe’s novel, Thompson would have cited it. Instead, he noted that when Kafka was living in Berlin he was “intimately familiar with cabarets and night clubs” and “would also think in terms of the anti-Semitism of his day,” as well as “connections made between Jews and Africans, Jews as Africans, Africans as Jews, and so on, by way of a common origin theory which assumed some type of essential connection between blacks and Jews that went back to Africa.”
On “Incredibility”
In fact, “Negro” is much more than a word to Kafka, it’s the name that Karl Rossman, Amerika’s embattled teenage hero, has been writing down instead of his own when applying for jobs. In the last chapter, wherein Karl applies for a position as a technician in the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, the idea of an applicant signing in as “Negro” startles the chief clerk and head of the bureau, “as if Karl had touched the high water mark of incredibility.” Even though the chief disagrees (“But you surely haven’t written down Negro!”), the clerk handling the application process puts it in the form (“‘Yes, Negro’”) while his superior persists in saying, apparently to no avail, “He isn’t called Negro.” After Karl is hired, the announcement board carries the inscription: “Negro, technical worker.”
The synonym for “Jew” and “Negro” occurs in the opening sentence of Kafka’s most famous work, “The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung),” wherein Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect (ungeheueres Ungezuiefer, or “monstrous vermin”).
“Various Profane Expressions”
In the opening paragraph of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Stowe introduces the reader to a “Man of Humanity,” she distinguishes the slave trader from the gentleman by way of his conversation as “free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar … garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.” But such is the profane power of the expression she does transcribe, it continues to be stigmatized as the “n-word” by men and women of humanity.
“Classic Comics”
When I read the Classic Comics version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the age of 6, Simon Legree scared me more than the murderous monster I’d encountered in the comic book version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawn by Rolland H. Livingstone with a raw ferocity that made the villains in super hero comics like Captain Marvel and Superman look tame, Legree made frequent vicious use of terms like “black beast” and “black dog,” as well as the n-word. Worse, the crude images of Tom and other slaves being beaten bloody (in Tom’s case, fatally) gave me nightmares, waking and sleeping. No moral lesson was absorbed, just sheer revulsion inspired by racist cruelty.
The comic book begins by quoting the opening lines of the “Declaration of Liberty” and ends with a vision of happy Blacks dancing, the word balloon overhead proclaiming “Someday they’’ll all be free, no race or religion, on the face of the earth was meant to enslave another!”
July 1, 1917
My senior high school history teacher made the mistake of giving what seemed to be a boyhood account of the East St. Louis race riots, which began on July 1, 1917, and, according to Wikipedia, “raged for nearly a week, leaving nine whites and hundreds of African Americans dead, and property damage estimated at close to $400,000. More than six thousand black citizens, fearing for their lives, fled the city.” In the course of overdramatizing his account, the teacher used the n-word more than once, to which the shocked class of seniors responded with eloquent silence until the most outspoken called him out.
On a Lighter Note
There are some omissions from my prelude on the birth date July 1, including the French novelist George Sand (1804-1876), the Golden-Globe winner Leslie Caron (now 94), whose career began with An American in Paris, and Farley Granger (1925-2011), who I saw recently in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and admired in They Live By Night and Strangers on a Train. Perhaps most memorable of all is Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020): Robin Hood’s Maid Marian; Scarlett O’Hara’s Melanie in Gone With the Wind; and Charlotte Brontë in Devotion.
Last Word
Finally, it’s impossible for me not to close with Franz Kafka. Numerous choice entries from his July 1916 diaries include July 4: “I woke to find myself imprisoned in a fenced enclosure which allowed no room for more than a step in either direction” and July 13: “Then open yourself. Let the human person come forth. Breathe in the air and the silence.”