Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), Untitled (Bébé Marie), early 1940s, papered and painted wood box, with painted corrugated cardboard floor, containing doll in cloth dress and straw hat with cloth flowers, dried flowers, and twigs, flecked with paint, 59.7 x 31.5 x 13.3 cm. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
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Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), Untitled (Bébé Marie), early 1940s, papered and painted wood box, with painted corrugated cardboard floor, containing doll in cloth dress and straw hat with cloth flowers, dried flowers, and twigs, flecked with paint, 59.7 x 31.5 x 13.3 cm. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
Kenneth Gross
– Introduction –
A mong the lost manuscripts of Franz Kafka are some letters from a doll, written to an unknown girl. Kafka had encountered the girl while walking in a park in Berlin in 1923, in the company of Dora Diamant, his last companion. The child was weeping in despair at the loss of her doll. He talked with her. Unhesitating, he told her that the doll was not lost, but travelling. She had sent him a letter. Consoled but still suspicious, the girl insisted on seeing the letter. Kafka went home and composed it, bringing the page next day to the park, and continuing over a few weeks to frame further letters. The doll, though loving the child, had grown tired of living with the same family for so long. The letters carried the doll’s story forward (within the compressed time of doll reality) to an engagement, wedding preparations, marriage, even finding a house, developments such as prevented her returning home to her former mistress.
Diamant told this story to Kafka’s biographer, Max Brod, and to other scholars (as her own biographer Kathi Diamant reports); she stressed the pains he took in writing the letters, working with as much intensity as on his own stories. What would he have written in ix
