Glad to be gloomy
David Caute
KAFKA by Nicholas Murray Little, Brown, £22.50. pp. 440, ISBN 0316724793 'D o you suppose it is true
that one can attach girls to oneself by writing?'
Franz Kafka once asked his estimable friend Max Brod. What did he mean? — by writing morbidly masochistic love letters to Felice, Milena, Dora et al., or the aphrodisiac impact of creating, then suppressing, enigmatic allegories like The Trial and The Castle? Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a repulsive, bed-bound insect might achieve magnetic libidinal power when performed at the Roundhouse by Steven Berkoff, but that had to wait some 50 years after Kafka's early death in 1924. Going by Nicholas Murray's excellent new biography, too much of his fragile compositional energy went into Hamletic letters to a long succession of girlfriends — Joseph K, womaniser! — and too little into the masterpieces which we possess only because Brod (happily) defied his friend's injunction to destroy them after his death.
Kafka hated to be happy, much preferring gloom, cosmic and ontological. Our current self-promoting pipsqueaks could learn from his masterly self-depreciation: 'What I have written was written in a lukewarm bath. I have not experienced the eternal hell of real writers,' he complained to the faithful Brod. As for the girls destined to be 'attached' (he was handsome and always sartorially immaculate), semidetached was his preferred idiom, however often he made proposals of marriage. 'I feel there is one too many of us; the separation into two people is unbearable,' he informed the long-suffering Felice Bauer (and one cannot marry oneself, he did not bother to add). Nicholas Murray's nannyish comment — 'This gives us a glimpse into Kafka's inability to formulate a mature relationship with another person' — may provoke a chuckle, even if laughing about Kafka is verboten in the Freudian torture chambers of Vienna, Berlin and New York. Kafka's prescription for a bearable existence was solitude in a windowless room, his ears stuffed with Ohroplax earplugs, but he was often found naughtily pursuing the healthy outdoor life, or trying to put on weight by short-lived bouts of eating.
One who may have experienced the subliminal force of Joseph K's negativity was an old general, Ludwig von Koch. Finding himself placed at the same table as the vegetarian K in Dr von Hartungen's sanatorium, the general failed to appear one morning, having shot himself. One can only conjecture the cause of the break
down. Kafka may have remarked the previous evening, 'How pathetically scanty our self-knowledge is, General, compared to our knowledge of this room in which we sit.' Pause. 'There is no such thing as observation of the inner world; K continues, writing in a blue notebook as he speaks, 'the inner world can only be experienced, not described.' The General grunts nervously. 'I am on trial,' K tells him calmly. 'There are no charges, no specifics. I have offended the Law, which was made to punish me alone. You remind me of the Chief Procurator, whom I have never seen.' That night General Ludwig von Koch succumbed to third-degree angst.
'I have vigorously absorbed the negative elements of the age in which I live,' Kafka confided to one of these blue octavo notebooks.
1 have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity — admittedly now slack and failing — as Kierkcgaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer mantle — now flying away from us — as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.
Nicholas Murray comments, 'He registered the full pressure of the contemporary.' In a way he did — a shame that Tom Stoppard's play Travesties could not have fitted K into the 1916 Zurich scenario alongside James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and
the polished forehead of pressurised contemporaneity, Lenin. Indeed probably the most fertile period in Kafka's writing was during the second half of 1914 when the slaughter had commenced. Grounded in Prague, Kafka sat out the first world war in a condition of deep hibernation. In the immaculate shine on his shoes we find no reflective glimpse of the Bolshevik revolution or, nearer to home, the Spartacist rising in Berlin. The war ended, the Habsburg Emperor abdicated, the Czech Republic was proclaimed, and Herr Kafka retained his job at the Institute because he was fluent in Czech, unlike most Germanspeaking Praguers. Indeed 'the full pressure of the contemporary' was most horribly experienced by his surviving family, mistresses and friends: all three of his sisters were murdered in Nazi death camps. Ottla, his favourite, having divorced her Aryan husband to save his life, was sent to Theresienstadt, where on 5 October 1943 she volunteered to accompany 1,260 children from the camp on a 'special transport'. 'Their common destination,' Nicholas Murray's final line informs us, 'was Auschwitz.'
Books about Kafka fall into three main categories: the work, the life, the legend. Nicholas Murray's sensible and carefully researched study is mainly about the life and diurnal detail, with Kafka's fiction struggling for air under the press of love affairs, family relationships, the epic struggle with an overwhelming father to whom he addressed the most famous of recriminatory letters, travels, sanatoria, intellectual and literary influences (Flaubert was a favourite), Judaism, anti-Semitism, the zeitgeist. Equally cursory is Murray's treatment of Kafka the legend: a single sentence suffices to tell us that neither Nazis nor communists could tolerate this decadent writer, but surely one needs to know more about the work and the legend in order to understand why another 'life' is needed. One suspects that Kafka's life and personality, his love affairs and morbidity, have ousted The Trial, The Castle, The Penal Colony, Amerika and Metamorphosis as the focal point of the current Kafka industry, a trend already apparent with the publication of Klaus Wagenach's Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life in 1984. Few are interested today in the fact that Kafka's work became the field of a fierce contest between communist reformists and diehards in the 1960s — indeed the Prague Spring of 1968 can be said to have forced its way up out of K's grave in the New Jewish Cemetery.
Previous page
