Links on Jane Austen's moral philosophy

Thomas Rodham on Austen as a moral philosopher. (Here's Rodham's earlier post on Austen at his blog, Philosopher's Beard.)

Rose Woodhouse responds to Rodham's claim that Austen's insights as a virtue ethicist came 'at the expense of psychological insight'.

Sarah Emsley's book, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, is reviewed by Peter Graham.

Maria Comanescu on 'Aristotelian Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels'.

From Alice MacLachlan's review of E. M. Dadlez' Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume:

Many philosophers, most famously Gilbert Ryle and Alastair MacIntyre, have argued for an Aristotelian reading of Austen: in doing so, they draw on themes of moderation, the importance of habituation, the happiness that comes from practicing virtue with moderate resources, and the role granted to pleasure in the good life. Dadlez grants these Aristotelian elements in Austen, but argues that insofar as they are present in Austen, they are also present in Hume.

From Karen Stohr's 'Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility' (pay wall, via Muse): 'I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing.' Stohr's paper is in Philosophy and Literature, a search of which turns up several more papers on Austen and philosophy.

Mark Canuel focuses on the character of Fanny in Mansfield Park in 'Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong' (pay wall, via JSTOR).

Philosophy professor Theodore M. Benditt on 'Fanny's Moral Limits'.

Sticking with Mansfield Park, Lorrie Clark follows up Ryle's suggestion (in 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' [pdf]) that Austen's novels take a stance similar to Shaftesbury's moral philosophy: Shaftesbury's Art of "Soliloquy" in Mansfield Park.

In his 'Jane Austen: a Female Aristotelian' (pay wall, via Sage), John Ely says, 'Through her novels, she reforms an Aristotelian ethics. She Christianizes it-again largely following the influence of Shaftesbury.'

On Austen's religious stance, here's a review (to which I liked in an earlier post) of L. M. White's Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Siris thinks the relevance of Shaftesbury is overestimated.

In his After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre compared Austen with William Cobbett. There's an essay by MacIntyre called 'Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues' in this study guide for Mansfield Park (published by Ignatius Press). I can't identify its provenance.

Sarah Emsley on Mansfield Park.

In 2010, Joyce Kerr Tarpley published (with Catholic University of America Press) Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Eric Lindstrom in 'Austen and Austin' (pay wall, via T & F): 'Not until [J. L.] Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.'

A new collection on Austen's aesthetics from Rowman & Littlefield:

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen’s understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen’s connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art.

In 2004, Cambridge University Press published Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, which is the focus of this brief review.

Roundup on recent English translations

A shot from Carol Reed's The Third Man.

From John Gray's review of a new translation of Curzio Malaparte's The Skin:

If you want a vividly realistic picture of the state of Naples when it was liberated, you should turn to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 – another blackly comic book that is also luminously sane. If you want to enter into the delirium and cruelty of the period, it is The Skin you must read.

I like Gray's juxtaposition here of Lewis' greater accuracy with Malaparte's greater truth. An embellished account may be truer to life. This reminds me of a similar contrast between Blunden's Undertones of War and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That: Blunden stuck closer to the facts while Graves, despite his greater freedom with the truth, gave us a book that better conveys what it was like (at times) to be there.

W. W. Norton & Company has issued Susan Bernofsky's new translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here's an excerpt, and here's an essay that Bernofsky adapted from her Afterword. Rebecca Schuman reviews the new translation in Slate.

Schuman reviews two more books on Kafka (h/t LGH). And here are two reviews of Reiner Stach's Kafka biography: one by John Banville and one by Stephen Mitchelmore.

Robert Pogue Harrison reviews Zibaldone, a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's notebooks, all 2592 pages of them. The translation was produced by a team at the University of Birmingham. Joshua Cohen calls Leopardi's notebooks 'one of the greatest blogs of the nineteenth century'. Tim Parks on the translation of 'zibaldone': 'The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes....'

From Mark O'Connell's review of W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country (Jo Catling's translation of which has just been released in North America by Random House):

Sebald has a way of viewing the world whereby seemingly minor misfortunes or cruelties are made to stand for catastrophes too terrible to be directly observed.

Here's an excerpt from Sebald essay on Robert Walser. Here's an interview of Catling and Anthea Bell on translating Sebald.

Alma Books publishes Sandor Marai's poems in English: 'This collection, the first and only edition of Márai's poems in the English language, presented in John Ridland's and Peter V. Czipott's brilliant verse translation, and with an introduction by Tibor Fischer, offers a comprehensive selection spanning the author's whole career.'

Zsófia Szilágyi on a newly discovered manuscript by Sandor Márai: 'Confessions of a Bourgeois is undoubtedly one of Márai’s most significant books, with one of the most beautiful endings in Hungarian literature, narrating the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that reached the writer in an idyllic summer milieu. “Princip has aimed precisely. Exactly into the middle of our lives”, as Márai wrote elsewhere.'

David van Dusen on Miklós Szentkuthy's newly translated Marginalia on Casanova, which is 'Szentkuthy’s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s.' Nicholas Lezard included Marginalia in his list of the best paperbacks of 2013. The translation was published by Contra Mundum Press. Rhys Tranter liked it.

Here's Rainer Hanshe on Szentkuthy's Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

Biographer Bengt Jangfeldt on “the battle for Mayakovsky”.

Amanda Lewis on Haruki Murakami and the Nobel Prize. Several more pieces on Murakami.

Blunden's morbid poetry in Undertones of War

One of the best books that I read last year was Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War. Though a work of prose, Blunden's WWI memoir bears marks of the author's poetic skill. Indeed, it was no surprise to learn that an editor of London Magazine, G. S. Fraser, once ran excerpts from Undertones as free verse in that journal. I don't know which passages Fraser selected, but I hope he included this bit from chapter 20, where Blunden is dodging shells in a quagmire of wrecked trenches while confronting 'the thought of being pitched bleeding into the gummy filths and mortifications below.'

Another choice passage appears in chapter 12, which is titled 'Caesar Went into Winter Quarters'. Blunden there describes a trench as having been 'blasted out by intense bombardment into a broad shapeless gorge, and pools of mortar-like mud filled most of it.' Later in the same paragraph, he says that the men

were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing – ... in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway’s dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly. ... The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. (Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, ch. 12)

Notice the 'mort-' words. Men are 'mortified' in the mud, likened to 'mortar-like' material fit for holding a door in place. The mud sucked away their humanity.

Santanu Das has examined the role of mud in WWI narratives. In connection with the above passage, he says: 'While shelling killed and mutilated, mud insidiously took away human subjectivity: it rendered the living human being a Thing, formless and foundationless.' (For more reflection on this excerpt from Undertones, see pp. 67-8 of Das' Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature.) Mud is a formless (or 'shapeless') morass in which distinctions fade. In it, 'death and life [are] much the same thing'. In this chaos, dying itself loses its meaning -- there can't be a dying if life and death are one.

In chapter 24, while describing his situation after an attack, Blunden says: 'Inside, the pillbox was nearly a foot deep in water, which was full of noxious and rancid matters, metamorphoses, God knows what – scire nefas.' Such ominous allusions to what lurks in pools and streams appear throughout Undertones. Earlier, in chapter 20, we find this observation:

The water below, foul yellow and brown, was strewn with full-sized eels, bream and jack, seething and bulged in death. Gases of several kinds oozed from the crumbled banks and shapeless ditches, souring the air. One needed no occult gift to notice the shadow of death on the bread and cheese in one’s hand, the discoloured tepid water in one’s bottle. (Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, ch. 20)

'Seething and bulged in death.' Pure poetry! And there's that word 'shapeless' again applied to the landscape. The juxtaposition of food and oozing gases suggests some sort of chthonic digestive process in which forms are broken down and obliterated in 'rancid ... metamorphoses'.

Similar patterns appear in Blunden's 'A Battalion History', in which Blunden says that his unit

had become accustomed to two views of the universe: the glue-ridden formless mortifying wilderness of the crater zone above, and below, fusty, clay-smeared, candle-lit wooden galleries, where the dead lay decomposing under knocked-in entrances. (Edmund Blunden, 'A Battalion History', as quoted in Hew Strachan's 'Introduction' to Undertones of War [Penguin Classics, 2010])

Anglicans -- mostly literary, some musical

Rowan Williams on 'the point of Narnia', which includes an excerpt from his new book on C. S. Lewis, The Lion's World: a Journey into the Heart of Narnia. Here's an interview with Williams: 'Why Rowan Williams loves C. S. Lewis'.

Peter Hitchens on Lewis.

Steve Donoghue reviews Daniel Swift's Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age.

From John Stubbs' review of John Drury's new biography of George Herbert: 'By then Donne was the dean of St Paul's and was finding new self-definition in a venue that demanded preaching "loose as the wind, as large as store" to fill its vast Gothic chamber. Herbert's path, on the other hand, lay towards minimalism, the quietness of retreat.'

A book by Laura Mooneyham White: Jane Austen's Anglicanism (on Google Books). Reviewed here.

'Is there an Anglican culture? Anthony Trollope and the Barchester novels.'

From a review of Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: a Life: 'The family included Quakers, Ulster Protestants, Wesleyan Methodists, Evangelicals, Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics and one famous Catholic priest, Mgr Ronald Knox. Fond of all (or most) of them, Fitzgerald decided that schisms were pointless and that all religions were really one, but also that faith was essential for life.'

An article on Rose Macaulay: '"Oh dear, if only the Reformation had happened differently": Anglicanism, the Reformation and Dame Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)', by Judith Maltby, appears in The Church and Literature. This volume also includes 'Jesuit Pulp fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civiltà Cattolica' by Oliver Logan.

I haven't yet read Macaulay's Towers of Trebizond but I've found these choice quotations from it online:

Then he stopped laughing, and said in the voice one uses when a friend has been killed by a shark, "You heard about poor Charles?"

I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet.

"Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The camel, a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump) from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe, had been a parting present, its saddle-bags stuffed with low-carat gold and flashy orient gems, from a rich desert tycoon who owned a Levantine hotel near Palmyra… I did not care for the camel, nor the camel for me, but, as I was staying with aunt Dot, I did what she bade me, and dragged the camel by its bridal to the shed which it shared with my little Austin and, till lately, with my aunt’s Morris, but this car had been stolen from her by some Anglican bishop from outside the Athenaeum annexe while she was dining there one evening.

I wonder who else is rambling around Turkey this spring. Seventh-day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, writers, diggers, photographers, spies, us, and now the BBC.

'Between 1991 and 1999 D.M. Greenwood produced a series of 9 ‘Ecclesiastical Whodunnits’ centred on the character of Deaconess Theodora Braithwaite. D.M. Greenwood is in fact Dr Diane M. Greenwood who, after teaching classics, took a position as what she described as a ‘low-level ecclesiastical civil servant’' in the Church of England.

Philip Hensher on the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth: 'She has her revenge: on her 100th birthday, all her books are in print, and every one is loved. We Pymmians toast her, even if we reflect as we raise our glasses, like Dulcie Mainwaring, that “there should have been wine… but she drank orange squash”.'

'Pym’s world is inhabited by an eccentric cast of winsome curates, pompous vicars and canons, enthusiastic students, vague professors, badly dressed clergy wives, aging men who live with their cranky mothers, bored civil servants, crotchety librarians, "splendid spinsters," dotty retirees, professed agnostics, titled nobility, "distressed gentlewomen" and discreet homosexual couples.'

Barbara Pym and the Sermon: 'If the sermons reported in the novels fail to satisfy her most reflective characters, a consideration of Barbara Pym’s own long-standing interest in John Henry Newman may offer insight into the kind of sermon that would have satisfied her and her creations.'

Rev. Richard Coles, formerly of the Communards. 'Former popstar, BBC presenter and parish priest Reverend Richard Coles talks to Caspar Melville about faith, doubt and dachsunds.' 'When he applied to train for the priesthood, the church’s medical officer asked if he had taken non-prescription drugs and, if so, which ones. ‘‘I only knew their street names, and he only knew their pharmacological ones. It was a very, very long phone call.’’'

Extraordinary philosophy links

Erik Desmazieres' illustration for Borges' 'Library of Babel'

Source of above image.

From Philosopher's Zone, 'We need to talk about Hegel' -- Joe Gelonesi talks to Paul Redding about Hegel.

On John Stuart Mill's annotations of Emerson's Essays:

When Mill turned to the Essays themselves, there was a good deal of marking up in the margins – which confirms that a passage caught his attention – and frequent asides, many of them simply a damning word or two .... If ‘sense’ was present, the more heavily annotated essays suggest that Mill thought ‘nonsense’ prevailed.

On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg talks to David Wootton, Michael Moriarty, and Michela Massimi about Pascal.

From the same source, Mel Bragg, Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk, and Julia Tanney on ordinary language philosophy.

Ever the Leibnizian, Borges countenanced extraordinary language philosophy:

There was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. (Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel')

From the mid-1980s, an article on 'Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy' by L. E. Goodman. Some of the medieval Islamic philosophers influenced Ramón Llull (whose ars combinatoria was to have captured the 'interrelationships of Platonic forms'). Llull's ideas influenced Leibniz's notion of a characteristica universalis, which was essential to Lebniz's dreamed of unified and universal science. Llull, Leibniz, and Borges figure prominently in William Woof's 'Borges, Cervantes & Quine. Reconciling Existence Assumptions and Fictional Complexities in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”', which appeared in the 1999 volume of Variaciones Borges.

On WHY? Radio, Joseph Margolis on 'The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?'

From Philosophy Bites, 'Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy' and John Tasioulas on human rights.

Steven Nadler on why Spinoza was excommunicated.

Samuel Moyn on dignity in recent books by Jeremy Waldron and Michael Rosen.


The Mind Body Problem: An interview with Ned Block from Imaginal Disc on Vimeo.

Delmore and Lou

James & Alma Agee with Delmore Schwartz (1939)

Source of above photo.

Zachary Braiterman draws attention to Lou Reed's days at Syracuse University, where Reed took classes with the poet Delmore Schwartz (on whom Saul Bellow based Humboldt's Gift). A classmate, James Gorney, says Schwartz sometimes went drinking with Reed and him.

Reed loved poetry, but I didn't think he was really a poet until I read his 'O Delmore how I miss you: dreams from his teacher', a testimonial to Schwartz' influence. It was published as the Preface in New Directions' re-issue of Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Here's an audio file of Reed reading from the eponymous story of the collection (the title of which was drawn from an epigraph in a volume of Yeats' poems). The story was first published in the Partisan Review in 1937. Here are Lee Smith's reflections on Reed's ode to his mentor.

Late in his life, in 2007, Reed created a scholarship at Syracuse University. He called it the Lou Reed/Delmore Schwartz Scholarship.

Reed's song 'My House' was partly about Schwartz. According to that link, Reed said, 'Delmore Schwartz was my teacher and friend. He was the smartest, funniest, saddest person I'd ever met. He had a large scar on his forehead he said he got dueling with Nietzsche. I was Dedalus to his Bloom.' (I can't find the original source for that quotation.) An earlier song by the Velvet Underground, 'European Son', was dedicated to Schwartz.

Menachem Feuer has a post on the relation between Schwartz and Reed.

Schwartz studied philosophy in New York with Sidney Hook and proceeded from there to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. He was drawn to Harvard because ... well, because it was Harvard but also because of Alfred North Whitehead. While he didn't complete his doctorate, Schwartz received high grades at Harvard and retained a lasting admiration for Whitehead. Indeed, he prefaced one of his poems, 'Heavy Bear...', with a quotation of Whitehead.

Another of Schwartz' philosophical associates was William Barrett, who worked with Schwartz at the Partisan Review.

Hear Schwartz reading his poem 'Swift'.
 

Arthur Danto, 1929-2013

Arthur Danto's obituary and a reminiscence by one of his colleagues at The Nation.

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Danto:

Premonitions of that defection were there for us to see for some years before, when in his editorial judgements at the Journal of Philosophy and in his stray remarks he would betray a mild weariness with the way Philosophy had gone: the tedium of some of its professional protocols, the barbarous idiom of some of its writing, the lack of chivalry in some of its argumentative combat, and the routines of its reinvention of familiar and tired ideas.

Santiago Zabala on Danto:

Not only was Danto a leader within the academy as the author of classical studies on Nietzsche and aesthetics and as president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society of Aesthetics, but he was also among the most important art critics in the world. Since 1984 he was an art critic for The Nation and Artforum and received several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, the Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1996, and the French Prix de Philosophie in 2003.

Michael Kelly's interview of Danto in 2000 at BOMB Magazine.

Update (Nov. 4): Here's Leonard Schwartz's 1-hour interview with Danto from Feb., 2007.


s
Arthur Danto: 01/17/2006 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

Some Weimar links

In this 1922 photo are (from left to right): Wieland Herzfelde, Eva and George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and John Heartfield.

A new collection of papers on Weimar culture from Princeton University Press: Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy. In includes an article by Frederick Beiser on the neo-Kantians. Here's the Table of Contents with abstracts for each paper.

Eileen Battersby reviews Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs: the Story of a Moralist.

'Kurt Tucholsky -- Advocate of the dying Weimar Republic'.

Friedhelm Greis on Tucholsky. More Tucholsky: 'In Berlin, Kurt Tucholsky discovered his stage, he wrote the lyrics for revues and literary cabarets - honed, polemical texts with a shot of ribald humor. His first record appeared, a shellac treasure with the song "When the Old Motor Ticks Again." It was a massive hit.'

Entries on Tucholsky and others at Berlin: The City as Body, The City as Metaphor, which is the site for a course at Stanford University.

Avner Shapira on Irmgard Keun:

If the two novels she published in the twilight era of the Weimar Republic turned her into a literary star, then the Nazi ban led to her being forgotten for a very long time. Only near the end of her days was she rediscovered and the recipient of widespread recognition. ... "Doris may be a refreshing character - funny, charming and very human," continues [Hanan] Elstein. "But she also embodies the ignorance, systematic blindness and apathy - blinded by the materialistic plenty and the lack of political awareness that aided the rise of the Nazis in 1933."

From 2008, Ian Buruma on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Recordings of George Mosse's 1979 lectures for a course called 'European Cultural History: 1880-1920'. The lectures that begin with Lecture 23 seem to focus on Weimar.

Historical Dictionary of the Weimar Republic.
 

Links concerning Polish literature in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria

Krakow is now a UNESCO City of Literature. Here's a long list of authors who lived in Krakow.

Sławomir Mrożek, a playwright and native of Krakow, died last August.

'Basia Howard writes about Tadeusz Różewicz, Poland’s most translated author, considered by many to be of the same stature as Szymborska and Milosz.' Here's Różewicz's bio and a page about one of his translated collections of poetry (They Came to See a Poet). He studied in Krakow but has spent much of his life in Wroclaw.

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, an M. D., critic, and satirist, spent part of his youth in Krakow. He moved to Lviv, where he was among the professors who were massacred by the Germans in July, 1941.

Gabriela Zapolska was active in the theater scene in both Krakow and Lviv. Her play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska is available in English translation.

Józef Wittlin received some of his education in Lviv. He studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna, where he befriended Joseph Roth, whose works he would translate into Polish. Wittlin also translated Homer into Polish. He was in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, which was the subject matter of his only novel, Salt of the Earth (reviewed in this pdf). In his diaries, Gombrowicz identified Wittlin with 'bourgeois demonism. ... He is a bourgeois who got the bourgeois pulled out from under his feet. In this lies his demonism'. G's diary contains more remarks on Wittlin, who also tuns up in the diary of Marc Szeftel (of Pnin fame). Wittlin eventually moved to New York.

The YIVO entry on Polish Literature has a photo of Wittlin with his wife in Lviv and ends with several brief bios of other Galician Jewish authors who wrote primarily in Polish, chief among whom was Bruno Schulz.

Essays, aphorisms, facts

Vienna Court Opera, 1902

From Michael Hofmann's review of the new Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann book of Kraus:

Can aphorism be a secure repository for a reputation? I think only by accident, and if there are no more than one or two of them. And better one than two. ... Kraus, of course, took care to write essays as well. Many of his aphorisms are taken from his essays, whose typical mode is to fog or struggle or tunnel or insinuate themselves from one aphorism to the next, sometimes three or four to the page. Just as Shakespeare seems to be full of quotations, so Kraus is full of aphorisms.

More about Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann-Kraus.

Noel Gallagher has no time for Shakespeare, who just made stuff up. Noel Gallagher likes reading only factual stuff, so he might have time for Morrissey's brand new autobiography, a Penguin Classic. Autobiographies are factual, classical ones more so. (Then, again, Gallagher might be turned off by Morrissey's literary references.)

As someone pointed out on Facebook,  it's not true that Gallagher will ever be found in a champagne supernova or that he will never die. When he sang lyrics to the contrary, he was just making it up.

More about Morrissey's brand new classic autobiography, which is already #1 with a bullet on the UK charts.

Kraus stalked the actual-factual in cafés. Kurt Wolff on Kraus:

It was only on rare occasions that I witnessed the side of Kraus that flourished in café conversations, an activity to which he sacrificed thousands of hours--although "sacrifice" is probably the wrong word, since he clearly thrived in this atmosphere. ... The café was where he picked up a great deal of information not to be found in the newspapers, which sooner or later he could put to good use.

But then, Wolff adds, Kraus worked on this material in long hours of nocturnal hard work, like Kafka, which implies it wasn't just information that Kraus wrote. He, too, was makin' stuff up.

The Wolff quotation is from Kurt Wolff: a Portrait in Essays and Letters (1991), which the University of Chicago Press has just this month issued as a paperback. Probably the letters are factual.