And so on and so on. An annual report, ostensibly submitted by Kafka, is titled “Accident Prevention Rules for Wood Planing Machines,” and recommends the use of a cylindrical spindle. It is accompanied by illustrations of mutilated hands. In the wake of World War I, with its tens of thousands of maimed and shell-shocked soldiers, he was to see far worse.
For Kafka, none of these lawyerly obligations, however demanding, counted as work. No matter that his acumen and skills were regularly rewarded with promotion by the pair of bookish and obliging men who were his superiors, and though he was deemed so valuable that they contrived to have him exempted from military service, he felt depleted, and even assaulted, by the very papers his own hand produced. Of this necessarily official language he wrote bitterly, “I am still holding all of it in my mouth with revulsion and a feeling of shame, as though it were raw flesh cut out of me (that is how much effort it cost me) . . . everything in me is ready for lyrical work, and a work of that kind would be a heavenly resolution and a real coming alive for me, while here, in the office, because of such a wretched document I have to tear from a body capable of such happiness a piece of its flesh.” And again, with the emphasis of despair: “real hell is there in the office; I no longer fear any other.” And yet another tightening of the vise: “For me it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no way out except insanity.”
At two o’clock in the afternoon, at the close of the six tormenting hours in the office, he escaped to the family apartment, a noisy and crowded habitat that was less a refuge than a second entrapment. Seven persons occupied these cramped and untranquil rooms: the blustering bullying paterfamilias, the compliant mother, the three daughters, the discontented son yearning for privacy and quiet, and a live-in maid. Kafka’s bedroom, the burning vortex of his nocturnal writing, lay between the parlor and his parents’ room; it was a passageway for his father’s comings and goings, early and late, trailing his bathrobe. And the apartment, like the office, had its own distinct raison d’être: it was the ground, the support, and the indispensable source of administrative personnel for the family shop, a successful fancy-goods emporium with numerous employees. Since both parents put in many hours there, and all family members were obliged to do the same, in this way the shop fed the apartment, and the apartment fed the shop. Hermann Kafka, the son of a shochet—a ritual butcher—had risen from a burdened childhood in a backward rural village to bourgeois respectability, and was impatient with any deviation from conventional expectations. Ottla, the youngest daughter, was attracted to the countryside and aspired to farming—a far cry from her duties in the shop. Franz was still another riddle. At the dinner table he confined himself to an ascetic diet of mainly fruits and nuts, masticating each mouthful thirty-two times, according to the nutritional tenets of Fletcherism. But his most controversial habit was sleeping in the afternoon after leaving the office: this was to secure a usable wakefulness for the sake of his work—his true work—in the apartment’s welcome middle-of-the-night silence. Sleeping in the afternoon, during shop hours? To the business-minded father, this was incomprehensible; it was delinquent.
Kafka’s delinquency became still more scandalous when he was recruited to take on the ownership and management of an asbestos factory, in partnership with the ambitious husband of his newly married sister Elli. Hermann Kafka approved of his son-in-law’s entrepreneurial plans, but since family money was being dedicated to this enterprise, and the young man was an untried stranger, it was imperative that a blood relation contribute to the stability and probity of the business. At first Kafka attempted to fulfill a commitment he had never sought—the literature-besotted son as industrialist!—and grudgingly gave his afternoons to the factory, which meant sacrificing his nights. Despite his father’s irritable proddings, he could not keep up even a pretense of interest (he was at this time far more absorbed in the precarious fortunes of the Yiddish players he had befriended), and at length the business failed. The record Kafka left of it is oblivious to product and profit-and-loss; and though conceivably he might have appraised the factory and its perilously superannuated machines through the eyes of the workers’ accident official, it was instead the fevered midnight writer who observed “the girls in their absolutely unbearably dirty and untailored clothing, their hair unkempt, as though they had just got out of bed, their facial expressions set by the incessant noise of the transmission belts and by the separate machine that is automatic but unpredictable, stopping and starting. The girls,” he went on,
are not people—you don’t say hello to them, you don’t apologize for bumping into them; when you call them over to do something, they do it but go right back to the machine; with a nod of the head you show them what to do; they stand there in petticoats; they are at the mercy of the pettiest power. . . . When six o’clock comes, however, and they call it out to one another, they untie their kerchiefs from around their necks and hair, dust themselves off with a brush that is passed around the room and is demanded by the ones that are impatient, they pull their skirts over their heads and wash their hands as well as they can, they are women, after all; . . . you can no longer bump into them, stare at them, or ignore them; . . . and you do not know how to react when one of them holds your winter coat for you to put on.
The kerchiefs, the skirts, the brush, the washing, the coat: Walter Benjamin, in his discriminating musings on Kafka, concludes that “the gesture remains the decisive thing.” “Each gesture,” he writes, “is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself.” And it is the factory girl’s simple act of helping with a coat that has the power to embarrass, perhaps even to shame, the owner.
This drama of the minutely mundane was what Kafka demanded of Felice Bauer; it was an inquisition of the humdrum, a third degree of her every movement and choice. He wanted a description of her blouse, her room, her reading, her sleeping; what her employment entailed; how she was occupied when at leisure (she liked to go dancing, she practiced gymnastics). He wanted to claim and envelop her altogether. He repeatedly asked for her photograph, and he repeatedly sent his own. When in their accelerating daily—sometimes hourly—correspondence she abandoned the formal Sie and addressed him familiarly as Du, he fell into a trance of happiness.
Felice, a distant relation of Max Brod’s visiting from Berlin, was introduced to Kafka at the Brod family dinner table. It was, apart from Brod’s parents, a meeting of young people. Felice was twenty-five, Max twenty-eight, Kafka twenty-nine. Stach announces this unwittingly portentous occasion with a trumpet blast: “The history of human events, like intellectual and literary history, highlights certain dates; these are engraved in the cultural formation of future generations. . . . The evening of August 13, 1912 . . . changed the face of German language literature, of world literature.” These grand phrases might have been applied to the somewhat more modest purpose of Kafka’s presence that night: he and Brod had planned to look over a collection of sketches that Brod had long been urging his reluctant friend to agree to publish. The final decision about the order of the pieces was consummated in a colloquy after dinner, and what was to become Kafka’s earliest publication, Meditation, was at last ready to be sent off. From the point of view of Kafka’s biographers, though, what changed the face of world literature was not this small book by a little-known writer too perfectionist to release his work without lacerating self-doubt; it was the face of Felice Bauer. If not for the blizzard of revelatory letters that swept over her, enraptured and entreating to begin with, and then dismissive and retreating, Kafka’s ponderings and sufferings during five crucially introspective years would have remained a vacuum: cries unheard, crises unrecorded.
Hers was a wholly ordinary face. Kafka, sitting across from the young woman from Berlin, at first mistook her for the maid. “Bony empty face,” he later wrote, looking back at his initial impression, “displaying its emptiness openly. A bare throat. Her blouse tossed on. . . . A nose almost broken. Blond, somewhat stiff, unappealing hair, and a strong ch
in.” He did not note the two black moles that are prominent in one of her photos, though absent in others, or, in nearly all of these, the bad teeth masked by closed lips. He learned that she worked for Parlograph, a firm selling dictation machines, having risen from typist to managerial status, and often traveling to trade fairs as company representative. If her looks and dress failed to attract him, her independence, reflected in her conversation, did. That she frequently read through the night impressed him. When she mentioned that she was studying Hebrew, he was captivated, and before the evening was over, the two of them were planning a journey to Palestine together—after which Kafka did not set eyes on her again for the next seven months. When he began to write to her, it was as a smitten and instantly possessive lover.
The Felice of Kafka’s tumultuous letters was an imagined—a wished-for—figure. The actual Felice was an intelligent, practical, reasonable, efficient, problem-solving, generous woman who very soon recognized that she had been singled out by an uncommon rapture stirred by an uncommon nature. She was more than willing to respond, but every accommodating attempt resulted in a setback. He complained that she was not open enough; yet according to the standards and constraints of the proper middle-class background that defined her, how could she be? Her father was living apart from his family, her unmarried sister was suddenly pregnant, her brother had to be shipped off to America to escape reckless money entanglements. When these secret shames were finally disclosed, they were scarcely what put off Kafka; her habit of silence would bring him a deeper dismay. He had sent her an inscribed copy of Meditation, and though he appealed to her, piteously, for a comment (“Dearest, look, I want to have the feeling that you turn to me with everything; nothing, not the slightest thing should be left unsaid”), she never replied. Perhaps she could not: what was she to make of writing so enigmatic? She went to the theater, she read Ibsen; still, what was she to make of, say, “Trees,” a story, if that is what it was, of four perplexing sentences? How was she to fathom such a thing?
For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, but they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.
His passionate explanation—“I am made of literature and nothing else”—led to misunderstanding. Pragmatist that she was, she counseled moderation. And worse yet: it led to what she took to be understanding—she had begun to sense in him “seeds of greatness.” And with all the sympathetic warmth of wishing to please him, she stumbled into a critical misjudgment (she offered to be close to him while he wrote) and lost him altogether. His shock at this innocent proposal turned into vehement resentment, bordering even on revulsion, as if she were intending to fleece him of his survival as a writer; and shock, resentment, revulsion culminated in one of his most wrenchingly monastic images of artistic self-entombment:
Once you wrote that you wanted to sit by my side as I write; just keep in mind that I cannot write like that (even so I cannot write much), but in that case I would not be able to write at all. Writing means revealing oneself to excess, the utmost candor and surrender, in which a person would feel he is losing himself in his interaction with other people and from which he will always shy away as long as he hasn’t taken leave of his senses—because everyone wants to live as long as he is alive. . . . Anything that writing adopts from the surface of existence . . . is nothing, and caves in on itself at the moment that a truer feeling rattles this upper ground. That is why one cannot be alone enough when one is writing; that is why it cannot be quiet enough around one; the night is not night enough. . . . I have often thought that the best kind of life for me would be to stay in the innermost room of an extended locked cellar with my writing materials and a lamp. . . . What I would write! From what depths I would draw it up!
Here he was assuring the woman who trusted she would soon become his wife that the prospect of her coming near would threaten his capacity to live, and that rather than have her sit beside him, he would prefer to be immured underground. This ruthless detachment continued through two painful official engagements (the later embroiling him in the off-putting ritual of choosing the marital furniture and the conjugal apartment), until he had depleted Felice down to the very lees of her usable sustenance.
In the vista of Kafka’s life, Felice is a promontory, partly because she occupied so large a tract of it, but also because of a simple bibliographical datum: she kept his letters. (He did not preserve hers.) She kept them through her marriage, and through her emigration to America in 1936, when escape from Nazi Germany became imperative, until her unremarked death in 1960 in a New York suburb. Beyond—or below—the promontory are the foothills, lesser outcroppings that reflect the configuration of the greater. Or put it that the letters to Felice expose the template, the very genome, of Kafka’s character as it has revealed itself to biographers, and to Stach in particular; and by now they are seen to be literature as much as the canonical work itself. They underlie a binding continuum: from the diaries to the letters to Felice to the letters to Milena Jesenská to the letters to Max Brod to the prodigious one-hundred-page letter to Kafka’s father—and even to a single sketch, ink on paper, drawn by Kafka. A stark black stick figure, stick elbows bent, stick legs outstretched among stick legs of table and chair, all of it spider-like. The spider’s body—a human head—rests on the table. It is an image of defeat, surrender, despair, submission.
Milena Jesenská came to Kafka as a translator; in every way she was what Felice was not. Her eyes were as pale as Felice’s, but rounder, and her nose was round, and her chin, and her mouth. Felice was a conformist: the furniture must be heavy and ornate, signaling a settled and prosperous marriage. Milena was a rebel, and to earn money in a lean time she was not above carrying luggage for travelers in the Vienna train station. She was a nimble writer and an ardent if contrarian spirit: “a living fire,” as Kafka described her to Brod. Her mother was long dead, and her father, an eminent professor of dentistry, recognizing her exceptional gifts, sent her to an elite high school for Czech girls, where the classics and modern languages were taught and the arts were encouraged and cultivated. She and a handful of like-minded classmates made it a habit to loiter in Prague’s literary cafés, where she encountered Ernst Pollak, ten years her senior, whom she eventually married. From her father’s standpoint it was an insurrectionist act that estranged him from his daughter. The professor was a Czech nationalist, hostile to Germans, and especially averse to their Prague subdivision, German-identified Jews. After futilely confining Milena in a mental institution for some months, he dispatched her and the social embarrassment of her Jewish husband to Vienna—where, in a period of serious postwar scarcity, food was even harder to come by than in Prague. Only yesterday the capital of an empire, Vienna was now a weakened and impoverished outlier, despite its lively literary scene. It turned out to be an uneasy match: Pollak was a persistent philanderer and a dissatisfied writer manqué, impressively voluble in bookish circles but stymied on the page. It was he who introduced Milena to Kafka’s still sparse publications, which inspired her to render “The Stoker” into Czech—the story that was to become the opening chapter of The Man Who Disappeared, his abandoned early novel. Kafka was admiring and gratified (“I find there is constant powerful and decisive understanding,” he told her), and their correspondence began, rapidly turning intimate: Kafka’s second limitless outpouring of letters to a young woman who kindled his longings and embodied his subterranean desires.
But if Felice had been a fabricated muse, as unresponsively remote from his idée fixe as a muse ought not to be, Milena was no muse at all. She provoked and importuned him from a position of equality; she was perceptive and quick and blunt and forward. Almost instantly she startled him: “Are you a Jew?” And though he had rarely spoken to Felice of the disquieting Jewish consciousness that perpetually dogged him (a self-punishing sensitiveness he and Brod had in common), to Milena he unburdened
himself with a suicidal bitterness that in one ferocious stroke reviled and mocked the choking anti-Semitism he knew too well:
I could sooner reproach you for having much too high an opinion of the Jews (me included) . . . at times I’d like to stuff them all, as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest, wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve all suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again, and keep doing this until the end.
She had to put up with this; yet she summoned him, and he came, and in the Vienna woods one afternoon they lived out an idyll, the two of them lying on the forest floor, he with his head on her half-exposed breast. Together they schemed how she might leave Pollak; in the end she could not. He was himself not free; he was at this time engaged to be married to Julie Wohryzek, a young woman whom Hermann Kafka, threatening and berating, disapproved of as déclassé; unlike Felice, she was not suitably respectable. Her father was a penniless cobbler and the shammes of a synagogue—worse, she occasionally fell into a low Yiddish phrase, and still worse, she had a “loose” reputation. Kafka had met her at a boardinghouse passing for a tuberculosis sanitorium; like him, she was there to convalesce. When Milena swept in, he disposed of this inflamed but short-lived attachment as no better than a dalliance, to be blown away like a stray straw. A space, then, was cleared for Milena: a landscape wherein the intellectual could be joined to the erotic. She filled it with her certainties and uncertainties, her conviction too often erased by ambivalence. Kafka’s uncertainties ran deeper, and his mode of retreat was well practiced: “We are living in misunderstandings; our questions are rendered worthless by our replies. Now we have to stop writing to one another and leave the future to the future.” To Brod, Milena sent an epitaph to the marriage that both she and Kafka had evaded. “He always thinks that he himself is the guilty and weak one,” she wrote. “And yet there is not another person in the world who has his colossal strength: that absolutely unalterable necessity for perfection, purity, and truth.” Milena outlived Kafka by twenty years. In 1944, she was arrested for sheltering Jews and aiding their flight; she perished in Ravensbrück.
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays Page 11