Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Kafka’s career in insurance coincided with the period when compensation for injury at work was beginning to be accepted as a necessary condition of employment. Workers’ compensation was and is a pretty unmixed blessing, but it did spawn a new disease − or at any rate a new neurosis. Did one want a neurosis, the turn of the century in Austro-Hungary was the time and place to have it, except that this condition was a product of the factory, not the drawing-room, not so richly upholstered or so literate or capable of literature as those articulate fantasies teased out at 19 Berggasse. Compensation neurosis is a condition that affected and affects those (they tend to be women more than men) who have suffered a slight accident at work, and in particular an accident to the head: a slight bump, say, a mild concussion, nothing significant. Before the introduction of compensation such a minor mishap was likely to be ignored or forgotten. With no chance of compensation there was no incidence of neurosis; grin and bear it the order of the day. But once there is the possibility of compensation (and if the − scarcely − injured party does not know this there will be well-wishers who will tell him or her) then the idea is planted that he or she might be owed something. One does not need to be a conscious malingerer to feel that some recompense is perhaps called for, and from this feeling is bred dissatisfaction, headaches, wakefulness, the whole cabinet of neurotic symptoms.

  With Lily in The Insurance Man I have assumed that such a case did occasionally get as far as the Workers Accident Insurance Institute. If so then here was one more hopeless quest going on round the corridors of that unhappy building. This kind of quest, where what is wanted is the name of the illness as well as compensation for it, has something in common with Joseph K.’s quest in The Trial. He wants his offence identified, but no one will give it a name; this is his complaint. Until his offence is named, he cannot find a tribunal to acquit him of it.

  Kafka and Proust both begin on the frontiers of dreams. It is in the gap between sleeping and waking where Marcel is trying to place his surroundings that Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a beetle and Joseph K. finds himself under arrest. Metamorphis and The Trial are the two works of Kafka that are best known, are, if you like, classics. Classics − and in particular modern classics − are the books one thinks one ought to read, thinks one has read. In this category particularly for readers who were young in the fifties come Proust, Sartre, Orwell, Camus and Kafka. It isn’t simply a matter of pretension. As a young man I genuinely felt I ought to read Proust and Eliot (though it did no harm to be seen reading them). However, a few pages convinced me that I had got the gist, and so they went on to the still uncluttered bookshelf beside Kafka, Camus, Orwell and the rest.

  The theory (or one of them) these days is that the reader brings as much to the book as the author. So how much more do readers bring who have never managed to get through the book at all? It follows that the books one remembers best are the books one has never read. To be remembered but not read has been the fate of The Trial, despite it being the most readable of Kafka’s books. Kafka on the whole is not very readable. But then to be readable does not help a classic. Great books are taken as read, or taken as having been read. If they are read, or read too often and too easily by too many, the likelihood is they are not great books, or won’t remain so for long. Read too much they crumble away as, nowadays, popular mountains are prone to do.

  The readers or non-readers of The Trial remember it wrong. Its reputation is as a tale about man and bureaucracy, a fable appropriate to the office block. One recalls the office in Orson Welles’s film − a vast hangar in which hundreds of clerks toil at identical desks to an identical routine. In fact The Trial is set in small rooms in dark houses in surroundings that are picturesque, romantic and downright quaint. For the setting of The Trial there is no blaming the planners. It is all on an impeccably human scale.

  The topography that oppressed Kafka does not oppress us. Kafka’s fearful universe is constructed out of burrows and garrets and cubby-holes on back staircases. It is nearer to Dickens and Alice and even to the cosiness of The Wind in the Willows than it is to our own particular emptinesses. Our shorthand for desolation is quite different: the assembly line, the fence festooned with polythene rags, the dead land between the legs of the motorway. But it is ours. It isn’t Kafka’s. Or, to put it another way, the trouble with Kafka is that he didn’t know the word Kafkaesque. However, those who see The Trial as a trailer for totalitarian bureaucracy might be confirmed in this view on finding that the premises in Dzherzhinsky Square in Moscow now occupied by the Lubyanka Prison formerly housed another institution, the Rossiya Insurance Company.

  Joseph K.’s first examination takes place one Sunday morning in Juliusstrasse, a shabby street of poor tenements. The address he had been given was of a gaunt apartment building with a vast entrance that led directly into a courtyard formed by many storeys of tenement flats.

  Futile to go looking for that courtyard in Prague today. It exists, after all, only in the mind of a dead author whom you may not even have read. But say you did go looking for it, as a Proust reader might go looking for Combray, or Brontë fans for Wuthering Heights, and say even that you found the address: it still would not be as Kafka or as Joseph K. describes it. These days the stone would have been scrubbed, the brick pointed, the mouldings given back their old (which is to say their new) sharpness in what the hoarding on the site advertises as a government-assisted programme of restoration and refurbishment. Go where you like in the old quarters of Europe it is the same. Decay has been arrested, the cracks filled; in Padua, Perpignan and Prague urban dentistry has triumphed.

  The setting for Joseph K.’s first examination is a small room with a low ceiling, a kind of upstairs basement, a rooftop cellar. It is a location he finds with difficulty, since it can be reached only through the kitchen of one of the apartments. It is this block of apartments, let us imagine, that has now been restored, the architect of which − grey hair, young face, bright tie and liberal up to a point (architects, like dentists, being the same the world over) − here shows off his latest piece of conservation:

  What we had here originally was a pretty run-down apartment building. The tenants, many of whom had lived here literally for generations, were mainly in the lower-income bracket − joiners, cleaners, factory workers and so on, plus some single ladies who were probably no better than they should be. I believe the whole district was rather famous for that, actually. My problem was how to do justice to the building and improve the accommodation while (single ladies apart) hanging on to some sort of social mix.

  Stage I involved getting possession of the building itself, which, since it’s situated in the heart of the conservation area, we were able to do by means of a government grant. Stage 2 was to empty the apartments. Happily many of the tenants were elderly, so we could leave this largely to a process of natural wastage. When the overall population of the building had come down to a manageable number, Stage 3 involved locating this remnant in local-authority housing on the outskirts. Which brings us to Stage 4, the restoration and refurbishment of the building itself.

  Initially what we did was to divide it up into a number of two-and three-bedroom units, targeted, I suppose, at lawyers, architects, communications people − the kind of tenant who still finds the demands of urban living quite stimulating. We’ve got one or two studios on the top floor for artists of one kind and another − photographers and so on − and a similar number of old people on the ground floor. Actually we were obliged to include those under the terms of the government grant, but, though they do take up some very desirable space, I actually welcome them. A building of this kind is after all a community: old, young − variety is of the essence.

  The particular unit associated with the gentleman in the novel is on the fifth floor. Trudge, trudge, trudge. I’m afraid the lifts are still unconnected. Bureaucracy, the workings of.

  And so they go upstairs to the fifth floor as Joseph K. went up that Sunday morning in the novel, looki
ng for the room where his examination was set to take place.

  ‘Actually I remember this particular apartment,’ says the architect, ‘because it was a bit of an odd one out. Whereas most of the other flats amalgamated quite nicely into two-and three-bedroomed units, this particular one wouldn’t fit into any of our categories. Here we are. You come into a small room, you see, which has obviously served as a kitchen …’

  ‘Yes,’ says the visitor. ‘That’s described in the book.’

  ‘Never read it, alas,’ says the architect. ‘Work, pressure of. Come in, have supper, slump in front of the old telly-box, and that’s it for the night. However, this kitchen rather unexpectedly opens into this much larger room. Two windows, rather nicely proportioned, and I think once upon a time there must have been a platform at the far end.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the visitor. ‘That’s in the book too.’

  ‘And does he mention this?’ asks the architect. ‘This rather attractive feature, the gallery running round under the ceiling?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the visitor. ‘People sat up there during his examination. They were rather cramped. In fact they were so cramped they had to bend double with cushions between their backs and the ceiling.’

  ‘Is that in the book?’ asks the architect.

  ‘Yes. It’s all in the book,’ says the visitor.

  ‘Really,’ says the architect. ‘It sounds jollier than I thought. I thought it was some frightful political thing. Anyway, we had a site conference, and all of us − architects, rental agents and prospective tenants − agreed it would be a great pity to lose the gallery. Someone suggested converting the place into a studio, with the gallery as a kind of sleeping-area, but that smacked a little bit of alternative lifestyles, which we were quite anxious to avoid, so in the end we’ve given it a lick of paint and just left it, the upshot being that the management are probably going to donate the room to the tenants. If it has some connection with this fellow in the novel perhaps we could call it after him.’

  ‘The Joseph K. Room,’ says the visitor. ‘But what would you use it for?’

  ‘Well, what will we use it for?’ says the architect. ‘I don’t want to use the dread words “community centre”, with all the overtones of bingo and the Saturday-night hop. But it could be used for all sorts. As soon as you say the word “crèche”, for instance, you’ve got the ladies on your side. Encounter groups and suchlike; keep-fit classes. And then, of course, we have the Residents’ Association. What we are hoping, you see, is that the residents will join in. After all, this is a co-operative. Everybody needs to pull their weight, and to that end all the tenants have been carefully − I was going to say screened, but let’s say we’ve made a few preliminary inquiries in terms of background, outlook and so on. Nothing so vulgar as vetting, you understand, but if we are all going to be neighbours it makes for less trouble in the long run.

  ‘And supposing anybody does step out of line − stereo going full blast in the wee small hours, ladies coming up and down a little too often (or indeed gentlemen in this day and age), kiddies making a mess on the stairs − then in that event I think this room would be the ideal place for the culprit to be interviewed by the Residents’ Association, asked to be a little more considerate and even see the error of their ways. After all, I think a line has to be drawn somewhere. And the Joseph K. Memorial Room would be just the place to do it.’

  In our cosy little island, novel readers must seldom be accused of crimes they did not commit, or crimes of any sort for that matter: PROUST READER ON BURGLARY RAP is not a headline that carries conviction. Few of us are likely to be arrested without charge or expect to wake up and find the police in the room, and our experience of bureaucracy comes not from the Gestapo so much as from the Gas Board. So The Trial does not at first sight seem like a book to be read with dawning recognition, the kind of book one looks up from and says, ‘But it’s my story!’

  Nor is it a book for the sick room, and seldom to be found on those trolleys of literary jumble trundled round the wards of local hospitals every Wednesday afternoon by Miss Venables, the voluntary worker. The book trolley and the food trolley are not dissimilar, hospital reading and hospital food both lacking taste and substance and neither having much in the way of roughage. The guardian and conductress of the book trolley, Miss Venables, seldom reads herself and would have been happier taking round the tea, for which the patients are more grateful and less choosy than they are over the books. But in the absence of a Mr Venables, and because she has no figure to speak of, Miss Venables is generally taken to be rather refined and thus has got landed with literature. The real life sentences come from judgements on our personal appearance, and good behaviour, far from remitting the sentence, simply confirms it and makes it lifelong. Kafka was always delicate, and his father therefore assumed he was a bookworm − an assumption his son felt was unwarranted and which he vigorously denied.

  Miss Venables is not a bookworm either, seldom venturing inside the books she purveys, which she judges solely by their titles. Most patients, she thinks, want to be taken out of themselves, particularly so in Surgical. In Surgical, novels are a form of homeopathy: having had something taken out of themselves, the patients now want something else to take them out of themselves. So coming out of Surgical Miss Venables finds her stock of novels running pretty low as she pauses now at the bedside of a patient who been admitted, as he has been told, ‘just for observation’. Presumptuous to call him Mr Kay, let us call him Mr Jay.

  ‘Fiction or non-fiction?’ asks Miss Venables.

  ‘Fiction,’ says Mr Jay, and hopes he is going to do better than last week. Last week he had wanted a copy of Jake’s Thing, but could not remember the title and had finished up with Howards End.

  ‘Fiction,’ says Miss Venables (who would have come in handy in the Trinitarian controversy), ‘Fiction is divided into Fiction, Mystery and Romance. Which would you like?’

  Truthfully Mr Jay wants a tale of sun and lust, but, daunted by Miss Venables’s unprepossessing appearance, he lamely opts for Mystery. She gives him a copy of The Trial.

  How The Trial comes to be classified under Mystery is less of a mystery than how it comes to be on the trolley at all. In fact it had originally formed part of the contents of the locker of a deceased lecturer in modern languages and had been donated to the hospital library by his grateful widow, along with his copy of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. This Miss Venables has classified under Children and Fairy Stories. So, leaving Mr Jay leafing listlessly through Kafka, she passes on with her trolley to other wards and other disappointments.

  It does not take Mr Jay long to realize that he has picked another dud, and one even harder to read than Howards End. What is to be made of such sentences as ‘The verdict doesn’t come all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict’? Mr Jay has a headache. He puts The Trial on his locker beside the bottle of Lucozade and the Get Well cards and tries to sleep, but can’t. Instead he settles back and thinks about his body. These days he thinks about little else. The surgeon, Mr McIver, has told him he is a mystery. Matron says he has baffled the doctors. So Mr Jay feels like somebody special. Now they come for him, and he is carefully manoeuvred under vast machines by aproned figures, who then discreetly retire. Later, returned to his bed, he tries again to read but feels so sick he cannot read his book even if he really wanted to. And that is a pity. Because Mr Jay might now begin to perceive that The Trial is not a mystery story and that it is not particularly about the law or bureaucracy or any of the things the editor’s note says it is about. It is about something nearer home, and had he come once again upon the sentence ‘The verdict doesn’t come all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict’ Mr Jay might have realized that Kafka is talking to him. It is his story.

  In the short story Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up as a beetle. Nabokov, who knew about beetles, poured scorn on those who translated or depicted the insectified hero as a cockroach. Kafka did not
want the beetle depicted at all, but for the error of classification he is largely to blame. It was Kafka who first brought up the subject of cockroaches, though in a different story, Wedding Preparations in the Country. ‘I have, as I lie in bed,’ he writes, ‘the form of a large beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I believe.’ Cockroach or not, Gregor Samsa has become so famous waking up as a beetle I am surprised he has not been taken up and metamorphosed again, this time by the advertising industry. Since he wakes up as a beetle, why should he not wake up as a Volkswagen? Only this time he’s not miserable but happy. And so of course is his family. Why not? They’ve got themselves a nice little car. The only problem is how to get it out of the bedroom.

  The first biography of Kafka was written by his friend and editor Max Brod. It was Brod who rescued Kafka’s works from oblivion, preserved them, and, despite Kafka’s instructions to the contrary, published them after his death. Brod, who was a year younger than Kafka (though one somehow thinks of him as older), lived on until 1968. The author of innumerable essays and articles, he published some eighty-three books, one for every year of his life. Described in the Times obituary as ‘himself an author of uncommonly versatile stamp’, he turned out novels at regular intervals until the end of his life, the last one being set during the Arab–Israeli war. These novels fared poorly with the critics, and were one able to collect the reviews of his books one would find few, I imagine, that do not somewhere invoke the name of Kafka, with the comparison inevitably to Brod’s disadvantage. This cannot have been easy to take. He who had not only erected Kafka’s monument but created his reputation never managed to struggle out of its shadow. He could be forgiven if he came to be as dubious of Kafka’s name as Kafka was himself.