Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Luckily for the peace of their various households, they were both sluts. If Auden had been as big as stickler for tidiness as he was for punctuality he would never have had his pinny off. Chester was an inspired cook, though wasted on Auden, who preferred good nursery food and lashings of it. A toilet innocent of Harpic, a sideboard barren of Pledge, the New York set-up on St Mark’s Place was not an apartment for the fastidious. Those who are not as other men often like a place just so, and the wonder is that none of the visiting bits of fluff didn’t nip round and do a spot of post-coital dusting. One who did lend a hand, though very much not a bit of fluff, was Vera Stravinsky. Chester’s working surfaces included the bathroom floor, and, paying a call of nature, Mrs Stravinsky spotted what she took to be a bowl of dirty water standing there. In a forlorn attempt to give the place a woman’s touch, Mrs Stravinsky emptied the contents into the washbasin, only to discover later on that this had been the pièce de résistance of the meal, a chocolate pudding. The basin was incidentally the same basin in which Auden routinely pissed. Where, one wonders, did one wash one’s hands after one washed one’s hands?

  Auden was wise to want no biography written. The more one reads about him, the harder it is to see round him to the poetry beyond, and he grows increasingly hard to like − just as it grows hard for one’s thinks to be all thanks. In the tribute that came out the year after his death, edited by Stephen Spender, much was made of how cosy he was. He grows less cosy by the memoir, even if one like Ms Farnan’s is less than fair. Particularly hard to take is the ‘All do as I do’ side of him that early on bullied off Britten. It’s a masculine characteristic, and it stands out so painfully because he happily lacked other masculine characteristics that often cluster round it. He didn’t care much for fame, for instance, or go in for self-advertisement, was careless about his reputation, and was unmoved by criticism. So much about him is mature and admirable, he seems a bigger baby for what is not. It was Kallman who found Auden dead in 1973, lying in his hotel bed in Vienna after a poetry recital the night before. Kallman knew Auden was dead because he was lying on his left side, and he never lay on that side. It is just this side of him that’s hard to take, the rules he made for himself but which others were expected to know and observe. If he hadn’t in his later work made such a point of domestic virtue and the practice of loving kindness it might not matter so much. ‘You’re not the only pebble on the beach,’ one wants to say. ‘Grow up.’ Grow up, or don’t grow old.

  There will be other memoirs. There are currently at least three published in America that haven’t yet appeared here. In one of them, Auden: An American Friendships, by Charles Miller, the peculiar gouging of his face is put down to ‘a medical condition known as the Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome, which also affected Racine’.* The skin seemed to divide up into clints, like the limestone Auden praised − the best remark about that coming, I think, from David Hockney. Auden sat to Hockney, who, after tracing those innumerable lines, remarked, ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ At this rate it can only be a matter of time before we are told that too.

  * It was a condition Auden could be thought to have called down by some lines in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’:

  ‘However proud,

  And mighty, of his trade, he [the artist]’s not allowed

  To etch his face with his professional creases,

  Or die from occupational diseases.’

  Kafka at Las Vegas

  I have written two plays around if not altogether about Kafka, and in the process have accumulated a good deal of material about and around the Prague insurance man. Some of this is fanciful − sketches and speculations that never had a hope of being included in either piece. Some of it is the kind of stuff that’s always left over after writing a play − the speeches one has not managed to get in, or the jokes that have had to be cut out and which are invariably the jokes and the speeches of which the playwright is most fond. Indeed he often thinks them the heart of the play, whereas the director (who never had to sweat over them) can see they’re diversions, distractions or ornament: not wanted on voyage. There is a word for this kind of thing which I have just come across (and, having come across it, can’t think how I’ve managed so long without it); it is paralipomena − the things omitted but which appertain and are put in later as afterthoughts. It describes half my life as well as the notes that follow.

  There are many perils in writing about Kafka. His work has been garrisoned by armies of critics, with some fifteen thousand books about him at the last count. As there is a Fortress Freud so is there a Fortress Kafka, Kafka his own castle. For admission a certain high seriousness must be deemed essential, and I am not sure I have it. One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself. Like the Hebrew name of God, it is a name that should not be spoken, particularly by an Englishman. In his dreams Kafka once met an Englishman. He was in a good grey-flannel suit, the flannel also covering his face. Short of indicating a prudent change of tailor, the incident (if dreams have incidents) serves to point up the temptation to English Kafka and joke him down to size. The Channel is a slipper bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom. This propensity I am sure I have not escaped, or tried to; but then there is something that is English about Kafka, and it is not only this self-deprecation. A vegetarian and fond of the sun, he seems a familiar crank; if he’d been living in England at the turn of the century and not in Prague one can imagine him going out hiking and spending evenings with like-minded friends in Letchworth. He is the young man in a Shaw play who strolls past the garden fence in too large shorts to be accosted by some brisk Shavian young woman who, perceiving his charm, takes him in hand, puts paid to his morbid thoughts, and makes him pull his socks up.

  Charm he certainly had, but not at home. Chewing every mouthful umpteen times so that at meals his father cowered behind the newspaper, Kafka saved his charm for work and for his friends. Home is not the place for charm anyway. We do not look for it around the fireside, so it’s not so surprising Kafka had no charm for his father. His father, it seems, had none for anybody. There is something called Home Charm though. In the forties it was a kind of distemper, and nowadays it’s a chain of DIY shops. In that department certainly Kafka did not excel. He was not someone you would ask to help put up a shelf, for instance, though one component of his charm was an exaggerated appreciation of people who could, and of commonplace accomplishments generally. Far from being clumsy himself (he had something of the dancer about him), he would marvel (or profess to marvel) at the ease with which other people managed to negotiate the world. This kind of professed incompetence (‘Silly me!’) often leads to offers of help, and carried to extremes it encourages the formation of unofficial protection societies. Thus Kafka was much cosseted by the ladies in his office, and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical unwisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s.

  One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The snag is that when the person doing the marvelling goes on to do great things this can leave those with the commonplace accomplishments feeling a little flat. Say such a person goes on to win the Nobel Prize: it is scant consolation to know that one can change a three-pin plug.

  Gorky said that in Chekhov’s presence everyone felt a desire to be simpler, more truthful and more oneself. Kafka too had this effect. On his entrance into a room‘, wrote a contemporary,’ it seemed as though some unseen attendant had whispered to the lecturer, “Be careful about everything you say from now on. Franz Kafka has just arrived.”’ To have this effect on people is a not unmixed blessing. When we are on our best behaviour we are not always at our best.

  This is
not to say that Kafka did not make jokes in life and in art. The Trial, for instance, is a funnier book than it has got credit for, and Kafka’s jokes about himself are better for the desperate circumstances in which they were often made. He never did win the Nobel Prize, of course, but he contemplated the possibility once in fun and in pain, and in a fairly restricted category (though one he could have shared with several contemporaries − Proust, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence among them). When he was dying of TB of the larynx he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so physically painful to make), ‘I think I deserve the Nobel Prize for sputum.’ Nothing if not sick, it is a joke that could have been made yesterday.

  Dead sixty-odd years, Kafka is still modern and there is much in the present-day world to interest him. These days Kafka would be intrigued by the battery farm and specifically, with an interest both morbid and lively, by the device that de-beaks the still-living chickens; by waste-disposal trucks that chew the rubbish before swallowing it; and by those dubious restaurants that install for your dining pleasure a tank of doomed trout. As the maître d’ assists the discerning diner in the ceremony of choice, be aware of the waiter who wields the net: both mourner and executioner, he is Kafka. He notes old people in Zimmer frames stood in their portable dock on perambulatory trial for their lives. He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth. He would be unable to endorse the words of the song by Simon and Garfunkel, ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail’, feeling himself (as he confessed to one of his girlfriends) simultaneously both. And in a different context he would be concerned with the current debate on the disposal of nuclear waste. To be placed in a lead canister which is then encased in concrete and sunk fathoms deep to the floor of the ocean was the degree of circulation he thought appropriate for most of his writing. Or not, of course.

  Kafka was fond of the cinema, and there are short stories, like Tales of a Red Indian, that have a feeling of the early movies. He died before the talkies came in and so before the Marx Brothers, but there is an exchange in Horse Feathers that sums up Kafka’s relations with his father:

  BEPPO: Dad, I’m proud to be your son.

  GROUCHO: Son, you took the words out of my mouth. I’m ashamed to be your father.

  The Kafka household could have been the setting for many Jewish jokes:

  FATHER: Son, you hate me.

  SON: Father, I love you.

  MOTHER: Don’t contradict your father.

  Had Kafka the father emigrated to America, as so many of his contemporaries did, things might have turned out differently for Kafka the son. He was always stage-struck. Happily lugubrious, he might have turned out a stand-up Jewish comic. Kafka at Las Vegas.

  Why didn’t Kafka stutter? The bullying father, the nervous son − life in the Kafka household seems a blueprint for a speech impediment. In a sense, of course, he did stutter. Jerky, extruded with great force, and the product of tremendous effort, everything Kafka wrote is a kind of stutter. Stutterers devise elaborate routines to avoid or to ambush and take by surprise troublesome consonants, of which Κ is one of the most difficult. It’s a good job Kafka didn’t stutter. With two Ks he might have got started on his name and never seen the end of it. As it is he docks it, curtails it, leaves its end behind much as lizards do when something gets hold of their tail.

  In thus de-nominating himself Kafka was to make his name and his letter memorable. Diminishing it he augmented it, and not merely for posterity. Κ was a significant letter in his own time. There were Ks on every banner, palace and official form. Kafka had two Ks, and so, in the Kaiserlich and Königlich of the Habsburg Emperors, did the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Emperor at the time was Franz Joseph, and that comes into it too, for here is Franz K. writing about Joseph K. in the time of Franz Joseph K.

  There was another emperor nearer at hand, the emperor in the armchair, Kafka’s phrase for his father. Hermann Kafka has had such a consistently bad press that it’s hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy for him, as for all the Parents of Art. They never get it right. They bring up a child badly and he turns out a writer, posterity never forgives them − though without that unfortunate upbringing the writer might never have written a word. They bring up a child well and he never does write a word. Do it right and posterity never hears about the parents; do it wrong and posterity never hears about anything else.

  ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, and if you’re planning on writing that’s probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven’t fucked you up, well, you’ve got nothing to go on, so then they’ve fucked you up good and proper.

  Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said, ‘Oh! How much I would have preferred her to have been happy.’ Like Kafka, Simone Weil is often nominated for secular sainthood. I’m not sure. Talk of a saint in the family and there’s generally one around, if not quite where one’s looking. One thinks of Mrs Muggeridge, and in the Weil family it is not Simone so much as her mother who consistently behaves well and elicits sympathy. In the Kafka household the halo goes to Kafka’s sister Ottla, who has to mediate between father and son, a role in weaker planetary systems than that revolving round Hermann Kafka which is more often played by the mother.

  Kafka may have been frightened that he was more like his father than he cared to admit. In a letter to Felice Bauer, Kafka indulged in the fantasy of being a large piece of wood, pressed against the body of a cook ‘who is holding the knife along the side of this stiff log (somewhere in the region of my hip) slicing off shavings to light the fire’. Many conclusions could be drawn from this image, some glibber than others. One of them is that Kafka would have liked to have been a chip off the old block.

  Daily at his office in the Workers Accident Insurance Institute Kafka was confronted by those unfortunates who had been maimed and injured at work. Kafka was crippled not at work but at home. It’s hardly surprising. If a family is a factory for turning out children then it is lacking in the most elementary safety precautions. There are no guard rails round that dangerous engine the father. There are no safeguards against being scalded by the burning affection of the mother. No mask is proof against the suffocating atmosphere. One should not be surprised that so many lose their balance and are mangled in the machinery of love. Take the Wittgensteins. With three of their five children committing suicide, they make the Kafkas seem like a model family. One in Prague, the other in Vienna, Kafka and Wittgenstein often get mentioned in the same breath. Socially they were poles apart, but both figure in and are ingredients of the intellectual ferment of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Not at all similar in character, Kafka and Wittgenstein sometimes sound alike, as in Wittgenstein’s Preface to his Philosophical Investigations:

  I make [these remarks] public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another − but, of course, it is not likely. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own, I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.

  Though Nabokov was sure he had travelled regularly on the same train as Kafka when they were both in Berlin in 1922, Kafka and Wittgenstein could meet, I suppose, only in the pages of a novel like Ragtime or in one of those imaginary encounters (Freud and Kafka is an obvious one) that used to be devised by Maurice Cranston in the days of the BBC Third Programme. But if Wittgenstein had never heard of Kafka, Kafka would certainly h
ave heard of Wittgenstein. It was a noted name in Bohemia, where the family owned many steelworks. A steelworks is a dangerous place, and the Wittgenstein companies must have contributed their quota to those unfortunates crowding up the steps of the Workers Accident Insurance Institute in Poříč Street. So when Kafka did come across the name Wittgenstein it just meant more paperwork.

  It must have been a strange place, the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, a kingdom of the absurd where it did not pay to be well and loss determined gain; limbs became commodities, and to be given a clean bill of health was to be sent away empty-handed. There every man carried a price on his head, or on his arm or his leg, like the tariffs of ancient law. It was a world where to be deprived was to be endowed, to be disfigured was to be marked out for reward, and to trip was to jump every hurdle. In Kafka’s place of work only the whole man had something to hide, the real handicap to have no handicap at all, whereas a genuine limp genuinely acquired cleared every obstacle and a helping hand was one that had first been severed from the body. The world as hospital: it is Nietzsche’s nightmare.