BOOKS OF THE DAY
Franz Kafka's Boswell
DR MAX BROD'S relation to Kafka must be without parallel in literary history. It was Dr. Brod's devotion and discernment which pre- served the greater part of Kafka's writing • as friend and literary executor, uniquely qualified to re-interpret Kafka's strange instruc- tions, he has saved and is gradually presenting as a connected whole the work of one of the half-dozen most original writers of the last fifty years. From the beginning he understood the capacity of his friend's genius and also the danger that it might survive only in fragments. He was Kafka's most constant and intimate friend from their first meeting at the University in Prague, in 1902, until Kafka's death, in 1924. He has collected, with a respect and affection which are directly communicated, memories and records of the conversa- tions, diaries and letters of his friend. Against this background it would be ungracious and irrelevant to comment on this book as a definitive biography ; it is not a definitive biography. It appeared in German in 1937, when, as the last sentence of this first edition rather naively says, Huxley, Bennett and Hugh Walpole, among many others, had recognised Kafka's importance. It is an untidy Collection of records and reminiscences, interspersed with comment, designed to satisfy early curiosity about Kafka's personality ; it was apparently written in a great hurry. Perhaps the author thought that he ought not to withhold all his fascinating material until he could produce a final work, that a first sketch would in the interval be better than nothing. If he did, he was overwhelmingly right ; for, in spite of its very evident vices of style and arrangement, this book, even when re-read after ten years, seems a great story of genius and individuality, in virtue of the quotations which it con- tains. It is a pity that the facts and records are not systematically arranged and allowed to speak for themselves ; but, although much is withheld, what is given is magnificent in itself. "The tremendous world I have in my head! But how can I release it and release myself without tearing myself apart? And it is a thousand times better to tear myself apart than to keep it in check or buried in me. That is what I am here for, of that I am quite clear." He seems to have written his stories, sometimes in an incredibly short time, even a whole story in one night, in a state of ecstasy, or at least of intense absorption. His genius was a direct expression of his " dream-like inner life " (his own words); he was in this respect totally unlike Flaubert, whom he so much admired. He carried his whole world with him, and there was no great problem of style or form ; the problem was to find the solitude and sympathy and independence which would make -" release" possible. The spare and gentle sentences, the sudden irony, and the exact observa- tion of detail, were, like his terrible or humorous images, the ordinary processes of his thinking. He was an Olympian and not .a contrived or tortured writer. " I have my mandate," he said. The torture came only in his adjustment to the public world, above all to his father and family and to marriage ; the problem was how to live and write, not how to write. But even the familiar pattern of his struggle with his father was given a universal significance, not only in the extraordinary Letter to My Father, published in part in this book, but also in his stories. That much of Kafka's life was pervaded by childish fear of the disapproval of his philistine .father is not in itself particularly revealing ; but the part which his father played in forming the imagery of his inner life is important to the understanding of his work. His father became the remote and arbitrary law-maker and judge, who would neither allow the stranger a place in practical life nor forgive his loneliness.
There are other illuminations of the material of Kafka's stories. His drudgery in the offices of the Workers' Accident Insurance in Prague provided the material for his exact observation of individual suffering aggravated by the rules of petty bureaucracy ; from his diary: " Wept over the account of the trial of twenty-three-year-old Marie Abraham, who, through want and hunger, strangled her almost nine months old child with a tie which she was using as a garter and which she unwound for the purpose." The idiosyncrasy of his style is shown even in this as in every other quotation from his letters, diaries or conversation, particularly his passion for the exact details of ordinary life, the simplicity and the avoidance of rhetoric and abstraction. His personality seems to have corresponded closely to his writing, and something of the enchantment appears in this book , neither as a writer nor as a person was he neurotic, porten- tous or solemn, as so many of his imitators and admirers have been. It is for these reasons irritating that he should so often have been- exhibited as a specimen in the fashionable cults of morbidity. It is true that he studied Kierkegaard's theology, and that there is a superficial resemblance in their hesitations and self-torture when in love ; but the causes and circumstances were different. Bilt nowhere in his writing, not even in his diaries and aphorisms, is there trace of the sick egotism of those preachers who have used his name, Kierkegaardians, Existentialists and others. If he read Kierkegaard, he also read constantly Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol and the Old Testa- ment, and it is these four influences, if any, which can be found in his stories.
Kafka is before everything not .a preacher or metaphysician but a teller of stories, which once read are never forgotten ; the stories are at once simple, comic and frightening ; they are unforgettable, because the situations which they present are, for certain kinds of people, universal situations in their lives, and there is a quiet remorse- lessness in the lucidity of their presentation. If by chance one picks lip a .translation of The Great Wall of China in'a circulating library without ever having heard of Kafka (as I originally did), one's first impression is that here states of mind are somehow described or communicated which have never been „described before ; second, of the wonderful economy and suggestiveness of the images and the detail ; lastly, the reader is aware of a dark background of metaphysical and moral intention behind the clear light of the story. Then, enquiring further, one may discover that Kafka said, " Ever since I can remember I was so concerned about the problem of spiritual existence that everything else was indifferent to me," and not be surprised by the discovery ; and one may pursue the enquiry into the dark background among the diaries and aphorisms, so far only published in German. But The Castle and The Trial, available in excellent translations by Willa and Edwin Muir, remain in the foreground ; and they are stories ; the meaning of them, both comic and pathetic, is contained in themselves ; they are not meta- physical tracts. +hey certainly do illustrate "the problem of spiritual existence," as do most of the world's best stories in different degrees.
It is interesting that, according to Bred, when Kafka read his stories to his friends, it was their humour which emerged most directly ; he and his friends laughed throughout a first reading of the rather terrifying first chapter of The Trial. The imaginative gaiety and moral seriousness in their strange combination were as much part of his life as of his books. " Our art consists of being dazzled by the truth," and the truth about the human condition often seemed to him not only uncomfortable but also absurd. Mr. Humphreys Davies' translation of this book seems entirely adequate. An English collected edition of Kafka will be undertaken as soon as Dr. Brod has finished re-editing the German collected works ; in the interval this short biography is very valuable. But only the collected edition of his works will show the purity and originality of his genius, free from interpretation and sentimentality,, "and also the relation of his doctrine to his writing. STUART HAMPSHIRE.
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