The Use and Abuse of Literature (16 page)

After Anne Frank’s death in Bergen-Belsen, the diary was given to her father by a family friend. Hoping for publication, Anne had already revised her diary, with one version containing real names and the other pseudonyms. Otto Frank restored the names of family members to the edited account, cut some sections that were critical of Anne’s mother or revealing about the daughter’s adolescent sexual feelings, and the diary was then published in Germany and France in 1950, in the United Kingdom two years later, and—under the title
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
—in the United States in 1952. A play based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and a 1959 film,
The Diary of Anne Frank
, was both a critical and a commercial success. The diary began to be regularly taught in schools and colleges, even as some scholars began to criticize the softening and romanticizing of Anne’s character in these popular adaptations. Humanitarians and writers like Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson
Mandela, and Václav Havel (himself a playwright) commended it for its example and inspiration.

But the transformation of Anne Frank’s
Diary
into a ubiquitous work of art was not a seamless development. In a front-page panegyric in
The New York Times Book Review
in 1952, on the occasion of the diary’s first publication in the U.S., Meyer Levin called Anne a “born writer” and the book a “classic” that “becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls.”
³⁸
The diary immediately skyrocketed from its five-thousand-copy first printing into a nationwide best seller. But Levin never told the
Times
that he had a personal and financial interest in the book: he had asked Otto Frank if he could write a play based on the diary. When his version was rejected in favor of the one written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who had worked on the screenplay of
It’s a Wonderful Life
), Levin criticized the choice as a way of removing Jews and Jewishness from the Anne Frank story in the service of making it a “universal” tale of heroism and the human spirit, and he sued Otto Frank, accusing him and others of depriving Levin of his opportunity for fame and fortune. Levin’s suit failed, and his own reputation suffered, yet some of his incidental observations about the mythologizing of Anne Frank have been sustained.

The play and the film showcased Anne’s observation “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” making this uplifting sentiment the last line of the play, although it was written before she was arrested and taken to the camps. The diary actually goes on to discuss “the suffering of millions” for several pages. The result, as many critics have noted, was the production of individual pathos and heroism rather than the story of a terrible, unthinkable event. In Germany at the end of the 1950s, Theodor Adorno reported “the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, said: ‘Yes, but
that
girl at least should have been allowed to live.’ ”
³⁹
Allowing that it was “good as a first step toward understanding,” Adorno added, “the individual case, which should stand for, and raise awareness about, the terrifying totality, by its very individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot.”

Hannah Arendt commented in 1962 that the romanticization of Anne
Frank was a form of “cheap sentimentality at the expense of great catastrophe,” and the historian Lawrence Langer observed, on the occasion of the publication of a “definitive” critical edition of the diary in 1986, that the young author’s “journey via Westerbork and Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died miserably of typhus and malnutrition, would have led her to regret writing the single sentimental line by which she is most remembered, even by admirers who have never read the diary.” Cynthia Ozick, writing in
The New Yorker
a decade later, was so critical of the “funny, hopeful, happy” Anne created by the stage play—and by the elimination of almost all Jewish references in favor of “universal” ones—that she suggested it might have been better for the diary to have been burned. Among other things, she noted, the “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced … infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” diary gave aid and comfort to the Germans by softening the story and avoiding any reference to the Holocaust—a view that had been earlier expressed by Bruno Bettelheim in the pages of
Harper’s.
⁴⁰
In the classroom, according to recent pedagogical studies, this has been somewhat borne out, as eighth-graders have tended to read the diary as “hopeful,” even a tale of adolescent romance, resisting the unwelcome information about the family’s fate and Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen. At least one student said that piece of knowledge had contributed to “ruining” the story.
⁴¹

This complicated, imbricated, and passionate set of histories surrounding the diary of Anne Frank poses an especially interesting problem for the overarching question about what is, or isn’t, literature. Many of those most perturbed by the softening of the story and the omission of specific mentions of Jewish identity and the Holocaust are writing from the perspective of historical accuracy and responsibility. Meyer Levin felt personally aggrieved, not only as an author but as a Jew; Bettelheim deplored the effect the altered diary had on readers, especially children, who were led to think that Anne survived the war. Ozick felt strongly that sentimental versions erased both death and Jewishness.

Audiences and readers, whether they are self-exculpating midcentury Germans, as in Adorno’s anecdote, or twenty-first-century schoolchildren,
respond to the dramatic, streamlined, “universalized” arc of a narrative culled from the work of the young girl Levin called a born writer—a story shaped (or “distorted”) for the times, the book market, and the magnified focus of stage and screen. Those who praise the text do so on grounds they often call explicitly “literary”
⁴²
—as Meyer Levin did in that first review in
The New York Times
. And Ozick’s litany of things the diary had become were all, starting with “bowdlerized,” descriptions of editorial, aesthetic, and commercial interventions.
⁴³

Whether
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
or any of its spinoffs (the Broadway play, the Hollywood film) is literature may not be quite the right question.
⁴⁴
When considered in a literary context, it has generated a certain set of responses: the diary is sometimes dismissed or critiqued as naive or sentimental, sometimes lauded as universal and profound. Viewed as cultural history or as historical record, the “same” diary has produced both anger and sorrow, together with a desire, personal and professional, to correct the record, or at least to tell the rest of the story—the part deemed missing from the text as it has been read (or underread) for literary purposes. The frame, the context, will determine how the text is read, assessed, regarded, appropriated, and understood.

What is to be said, then, about the diary of a young girl, preserved against the odds while its author and her family perished? Without the translations into play and film, would the diary, however edited, have attained legendary status? If the process of universalization had not involved, as so many critics complained, the eclipse or erasure of both the specifically Jewish and the catastrophically genocidal frames of the story, would there still have been resistance to the process of making Anne Frank into a timeless and universal heroine?

Words like
timeless
and
universal
are always problematic because they seem to belong to the world of religion rather than the world of literary interpretation and analysis. Such terms indicate a stoppage of time rather than the inevitable changes that come with time’s passage. In the case of the diary of Anne Frank, we have a striking example of what happens when reading something as literature in the context of recent and
tragic history underscores the tension between literature and history. If it is history, can it be changed in the service of (someone’s idea of) art? Does treating the diary as literature inevitably create a climate that is conducive to underreading, to stereotyping of a heroic kind that is in its own way as destructive as the negative stereotypes generated by social prejudice and ignorance?

If so, I think it is because we have forgotten the power of literary reading. When what isn’t literature becomes literature, its power is not diminished but augmented. There is no guarantee that reading such a text as literature will produce a historically faithful or politically agreeable assessment. We might place the text in the context of genres other than tragedy or children’s literature, the two most familiar categories through which the
Diary
has been read. Other literary options abound, from the historical (the fact that the diary is a mode with its own conventions, one similar to the early epistolary novel) to, for example, the saint’s life, the locked-room mystery, the noir thriller, the captivity narrative. Anne’s diary is also available for Freudian readings, feminist readings, or readings about the paradoxical functions of language.

Anne Frank was a reader, and she wanted to be a published author. Many of her admirers felt, with Meyer Levin, that she was a born writer, and her diary has been prized by writers for being literary. She describes at great length the act of writing (another good genre for this text, which is all about scenes of instruction). If we give the text the credit for being literary, we cannot at the same time so diminish it to the point that we assume it has only one meaning. We need to allow the activity of
becoming literature
to go where it goes, to understand that literary patterns sometimes write through their authors even as authors think themselves to be controlling the scene.

I understand the desire of some critics to keep the diary as part of the historical record of the period, and I see the way in which Anne’s literary celebrity—from the time of the publication of the diary in the United States but especially since the success of the play called
The Diary of Anne Frank
—undercut or usurped the place of more difficult, complex, painful, and necessary information about the Holocaust. In such contexts, human suffering is the topic, and human inhumanity a vital
theme. But when a text, in this case the diary, is part of a
literary
investigation, such issues of morality, ethics, and lessons about life are not the whole story. The power of the literary is always divorced from the typical, however much it may be appropriated to support the idea of the type. Once more, it is
how
the story means, rather than
what
it means, that is the literary question. Anne Frank produced her diary in two versions, one with pseudonyms and other literary devices, the other supposedly without them, which is to say that the devices lay beneath the surface, at the level of the text’s unconscious. Even without the intervention of her father, who omitted some things and changed others—and the subsequent textual history that produced a critical edition—this mode of literary production opens the diary to the possibility of a sophisticated reading and analysis that is entirely respectful of the text while also reading it against the grain. The protests against such readings would presumably come from the side of the supposed supporters of the literary, not from the side of historians and philosophers. For what multiple literary readings of the diary will surely produce is not a single story but many. Some of these readings will speak of the indomitability of the human spirit, and some, inevitably, will not.

Another way of investigating the question of what is or isn’t literature might be to look not only at the history of taste but also at the way authors and texts are lost and found. This is not as symmetrical a process as the phrase implies. The publication of Herbert Grierson’s
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler
, described as “Selected and edited, with an Essay,” occasioned one of the most influential reviews of the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets,” which first appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement
in October 1921. Reviews in the
TLS
, we might note, were unsigned until 1974, when critical anonymity, once the rule rather than the exception, began to seem outdated. “The Metaphysical Poets” explained, contextualized, and offered strong readings of poems by such poets as John
Donne, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Abraham Cowley (not to mention the modern French poets to whom Eliot compared them). At the same time, it also began to articulate various critical terms, like “unified experience,” “dissociation of sensibility,” and the value of difficulty, that would influence both the writing and the teaching of poetry (and literature) for much of the ensuing century. “[I]t appears likely,” the review announced calmly, “that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult
. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”
⁴⁵

The poems of John Donne had been in and out of print since their initial publication in the 1630s, but it was hardly the case that his works were deemed essential to the emerging curriculum of English departments in the early years of their development. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were the Renaissance poets everyone read. For centuries Donne had been regarded as “knotty” (full of intellectual difficulties; difficult to explain or unravel), a word still used to describe his verse. (It’s arguable that some also considered them naughty, especially when they were the work of a poet who went on to be an Anglican preacher.) Some nineteenth-century poets, notably Coleridge and Browning, read Donne and admired him. Browning’s dramatic monologues are strongly indebted to Donne for their abrupt, direct address to the reader and their use of colloquial speech rhythms. But for the most part Donne was an interesting sidebar rather than a central figure for poets and readers of this period. The taste for knotty, witty, intellectual poetry in English had waned. Then came the one-two punch of Grierson’s edition and Eliot’s review, and within a few years, Donne’s poems were the featured centerpieces of some of the most striking and influential works of literary criticism by the teacher-scholars who came to be known as New Critics.