Two Years With Franz

July 26, 2018·58 min·2 clips

Franz Wright's unsent love letter to Beth, found in a Boston University archive box that had never been opened, is read aloud in full.

The setup is openly self-conscious. Andrew Leland remembers The Organist beginning with literary magazine editors who wanted radio to be stranger than another author interview. They wanted an essay. That matters, because the story that follows treats literary life as mood, attachment, archive, and doubt, not a neat profile. Beth comes in through a question. The narrator asks how she knew something about Franz, and the answer lands in a Waltham living room at sunset. Her memory starts at Emerson College, where she studied with him in Translating German Poetry and Prose, before the psychotic break the narrator ties to his decline. The details are oddly physical. Beth is tan and long-haired, a Rhode Island woman who cared for goats and sat bolt upright in class. Franz notices. On the last day, he asks her for a Pepsi, and the tiny errand suddenly feels loaded. Then winter closes in. Beth loses the key to her apartment, goes to Franz's door, sits there while he works, and watches the snow gather around her infatuation. She says the impossible thing out loud. The sentence shocks even her, because it turns private longing into a blunt marriage proposal to the teacher she loves. After that, Franz disappears. The story keeps stretching: six silent years, Beth's fellowship in Germany, then a letter sent to her parents' house. The archive refuses to tidy it up. When the narrator asks if she still has the letter, the room is dark, and desire has turned into a paper trail he still cannot stop following.

As heard by us

An essayistic portrait of Franz Wright that blends criticism, narrative, and archival memory.

The piece turns to Franz Wright and lets classrooms, silence, archives, and a letter sent years later to Beth's parents' house do the heavy lifting.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want an hour-long literary story about poet Franz Wright, memory, and archival unease.

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