Life Sentences (14 page)

I have only to consider my situation and immediately, expressed in a phrase, an image arises to excuse and explain me. I shall set this phrase loose in one of my literary lives. For instance, here I am writing to Felice about myself (is there another subject?): “My life consists, and has essentially always consisted, of attempts at writing, largely unsuccessful. But when I don’t write, I wind up on the floor at once, fit for the dustbin.” Of course, when I teach myself to be a bug, that is exactly where I shall end—dead in a charwoman’s pan. Scooped away like the breath of a whistle. In the same letter I go on to brag of how thin I am, but I shall be thinner when I write “A Hunger Artist.” Then I shall resemble a small pile of old clothes.

But if you need any further demonstration of the way my genius
works (and the occasional necessary unfriendliness of my biographer), consider the October 1912 expulsion of the Turks from the Balkans. The Turks were taking a beating and there were stories of atrocities, with photographs disgracing the pages of the papers. Max Brod’s diary reports: “Took a walk with Kafka; the misery of the Turks reminds him of his own.” Brod, for his part, writes a piece of poetic doggerel in which the misery of the Turks “brings to mind the misery of everyone who ever lived.” Stach’s comment—“It is difficult to imagine a starker contrast to his friend’s response to the war”—is cutting, I admit, but if the misery of the Turks causes Brod to consider the misery of mankind, and myself to complain of mine, Brod’s result is a verse shallow as a spoon, while I make mine into a masterpiece deep as the darkness in man that frightens us all. War, and the revitalization of death—
DEATH LIVES
! that’s how you’d put it on a poster—was as real right then as the smoke from my father’s factory chimneys.

As for ordinary living, we shall have our servants do that for us, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam said. It is a problem most serious writers face, because society is not prepared to pay for the poet’s trip on its tram, and is equally unwilling to play a nanny in the home life of some novelist. It is not an offer of
vissi d’arte
, or
vissi d’amore
, by itself; it is marriage, family, work, recognized worth in the world, versus art, idleness, subversive thought, pointless practice, useless effort, repeated failure; and even if success is found in some solitary achievement, its fruit is seedless and dry and secret. It sometimes seems to be a brutal choice between being a fool or a philistine. The philistine lives, but shamefully; the foolish artist endures, repeatedly, semi-imaginary deaths and real neglect. For me this common problem was exacerbated by the closing cultural fist I found myself caught in: there was the provincial city, Prague, inside Prague the community of Germans, inside them the network of the Jews, among the Jews the family Kafka, within that—Franz—its son and heir, within him—me—the writer, longing to get out of my given skin, to escape my relatives, my race, my religion, my responsibilities,
this entire region of the world … though when Kafka went I would take along his language.

But instead of escaping into the wide world, Franz withdrew. I wrote in code stories he couldn’t finish, stories he couldn’t bear to publish, pages he locked away in drawers as much to keep them in as anyone out. On those sheets I set down his private fears, yearnings, angers, resentments, his guilt and his remorse, as indifferently as a range of hills. I wrote of rented rooms from which the furniture would be removed. I built castles without kings, imagined courts without judges, without jurors, without justice, presented matters of fact that made no sense, created a clarity that was obscure, inflicted torments upon my characters that had no cause no name no amelioration no resolution. In so doing I demonstrated the divinity that belongs to art. An art that belonged to me.

Here, in Reiner Stach’s biography, are five years of my life—only five—all his pages based on all of mine; though he has promised to give me two more lifetimes in succeeding volumes. It will be a wonder that even I shall wonder at. Reiner Stach does not endeavor to pin me down; rather he tries to follow me through my transformations; and when he is perplexed, and his data is divided in its recommendations, he discusses his dilemma with the reader. I listen in, because I don’t have any answers. That is the marvelous and exasperating mystery of it. I am, like the rest of us, ultimately unknowable. Yes, I remember what Socrates told the Athenians, but the self was itself a discovery in those days, so the philosopher could scarcely be aware of the quarreling bunch each one of us now represents. Neither the public official nor the reclusive author is the same Franz who signed “my” prodigious letters. Indeed, Franz is one of literature’s supreme artists of the envelope and its hidden epistle—that private communication that is nevertheless meant to be heard by the whole world. On the other hand, I—monk and metaphor—find it difficult to finish anything, and have kept my novels and my stories short, enigmatic, impersonal. That other Franz wrote nonstop, at daunting length, to women, and kept a diary the way some Germans
keep their dogs: they feed them, comb their coats, and take them for their daily walks.

Reiner Stach is convinced that Kafka would have been horrified by the idea that any other eye than that addressed, much less the world’s eye, might become privy to his correspondence, and Stach halts the progression of his story for a fine essay on the nature of the letter and the epistolary culture of the time. During 1912 at least one hundred letters are written to Felice Bauer in Berlin, who must have felt the burden of response grow heavier by the week. Letters work upon the mind in the absence of the body, whose only presence can be felt in a personalized penmanship or perhaps through a fragrance captured in a kink of the envelope, or absorbed by the paper, now so intimate a thing, since it has been inscribed by a mind the way skin is sometimes caressed by a lover’s fingers. Letters bring news, companionship, business, affection, but also pain. They are full of gossip, mischief, lies, flattery, and similar, though softer, misconstructions. They are not always meant to please, and confessions that wound their writer may wound their reader too. Remember the diabolically contrived machine of torture that I imagined for “In the Penal Colony”? how it inscribes the broken letter of the law upon the body of its guilty party, deeper and deeper digging its point into the transgressor until he expires? Letters routinely sent and received create still further, still more binding expectations. “I will not suffer if no letter comes,” I reassure my postmark lover. Yet if there is but the briefest delay I beseech her like a baby—“Dearest, don’t torment me like this!” Days or weeks can lie like lakes between send and receive. Perhaps a message has gone astray or fallen into the wrong hands. One day her ink may refuse to dry. Something like that has been expected. Perhaps her end of the correspondence has teetered to its demise. The totter will not rise.

Unlike conversations, replies are pondered and positioned as though they were chess pieces. And are read, reread, and assessed under varying circumstances, many moods. They become bundles. They can be wrapped in ribbon. They can crouch in an attic to leap
upon a generation far away. But in the normal course of things, to receive one is to receive a sweet—to keep unopened in a pocket until a quiet unmolested moment is available, or to tear open with the urgency of lust opposed by buttons. Stach observes:

Letters may strive to seem natural, conversational, easy, off-the-cuff. They aren’t. They are mostly contrived. The absence of another face, the foreclosure of immediate response—of interruptions, questions, objections—and the inability of smiles, frowns, gestures, exclamations to burst in upon the quiet calm of composition: these felicitous conditions permit the letter to become more apparently candid, more duplicitous, more sincere in appearance, more hypocritical at heart; and because they are “evidence,” because they are “on the record,” and because they can be intercepted, stolen, snooped, leaked, they can be exceedingly guarded, especially self-serving, ardently devoted to their future in an archive. And if these letters are by Keats or Flaubert or Rilke, they become art. As art they require that postal distance the letters can then complain of. Their words make love of the kind the mind makes when the mind fears its body may not measure up. What did I write to Felice? “If I had saved all the time I spent writing letters to you and used it for a trip to Berlin, I would have been with you long ago, and could now be gazing into your eyes.”

When Franz’s relationship with Felice was at an end, she saved his letters; he burned hers. Burning was what the insurance adjuster had in mind—sometimes—for my own letters too, as well as my diaries and many of my manuscripts, but his scribbled intentions,
meant for Max Brod yet tossed in a drawer and by no means consistent, suggested a will that was hardly undivided and resolute, rather one familiar with all the strategies that pride and high opinion may employ, including humility, even abasement. On his way to Berlin, where he intends to meet with Felice and settle the question of their engagement (I break it off), Franz writes to his sister, Ottla (July 10, 1914): “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.” This sentence, however, proceeds like a parade. There is a P.S.: “Regards to all. You mustn’t show my letter or let it lie around. You had best tear it up and throw the shreds from the
pawlatsche
[balcony] to the hens in the courtyard from whom I have no secrets.”

During the brief period this biography covers, in which I managed to write most of my major works, I am so busy being Dr. Kafka during the day, and spend so much of my time and energy every night writing Franz’s letters to this poor puzzled patient victim of my waffling, that even Reiner Stach’s judicious treatment of their inception, making, and appearance is quite swamped by Franz’s pathological self-absorption—preoccupations that quite cripple the state of mind a writer needs to succeed at any substantial project in prose, namely a calm and knowing control of the elements of his art, and the kind of focus common to laboratory lenses.

And how did I break it off? This pre-Internet love affair? I broke off my three engagements. I broke off my three books. They were engagements too. What finished them, in a sense, finished me. If you listen at the break point of
Der Verschollene
 … (called
Amerika
by Max Brod, but now renamed
The Man Who Disappeared
by Reiner Stach’s fine translator, Shelley Frisch, and by Michael Hofmann in his version for Penguin Classics [1996], or, as you might also say,
The Man Who Went Missing
) … if you listen you can hear notes struck that were struck at the conclusion of “The Judgment,” for that story really contains most of my motifs and themes—the sound of water under a bridge while traffic passes over it; a two-way crossing above,
a one-way fall below; marriage, finance, and fornication hidden like a gift in one fist, or death and oblivion in the empty palm of the other. In this case, my characters, and, of course, myself in the guise of one of them, are traveling by train into the mountains—in Hofmann’s splendid rendering which retains the tumbling of the sentence—

The Trial
, you remember, ends with a knife in my namesake’s heart, while a sense of shame so strong that it will outlive him—for he is dying, as he says, “like a dog”—is the single pain he feels. At the frayed ends of
The Castle
, one version of the text, where it slowly dies away with the indecision of a river, refers to K as a man “going to the dogs.” And I—I confess, it is I—I write to Max Brod, what my diaries confirm, that I have fantasies in which “I lie stretched out on the ground, sliced up like a roast, and with my hand I am slowly pushing a piece of this meat toward a dog in the corner.” Whether it is the breath of death that comes to warn me and make my face shudder, or death itself that follows the blade as it twists into the heart, or the broken shell of a humiliated self that is shoveled up by the maid, I shall be already buried in the body of another creature when it dies, I am determined on it. There I shall live forever.

How did I break it off with Felice? I began by casting my ultimate refusal in the form of a proposal. All my letters testified to my dependency if not to my devotion. She knew I needed her. What would be the point of pressing a suit so continuously worn? So I simply listed all my shortcomings … again and again: “I am basically a cold, selfish,
and insensitive person despite all my weakness, which tends to conceal rather than mitigate these qualities.” It was an odd but calculated way of putting it, as if my weaknesses hid my strengths (that I was cold? selfish? insensitive? these were strengths?); because they
were
an artist’s strengths: an artist must be ruthless, sacrificing self as well as lovers, family as well as friends, to the conditions of his calling. That is the romance we have woven about writing and the artist’s life. The considerable competence of Dr. Kafka in his assessor’s position (about which I have told Felice little) is a real weakness, because it keeps him in his cage. My devotion to Felice is a real weakness, because it draws me into a life of bourgeois responsibilities. My obsessions, my insecurities, my vacillations are strengths, because they excuse me from duty; they dissipate my ardor; they weaken my marital resolve. I am cruel to be kind. I am sparing my beloved the burden of my love.