In the next weeks, the more Franz castigates himself, the more Felice refuses to understand what he is talking about. He begs her: “Don’t shut your eyes, don’t give in to illusions, I will never change. My need to keep up an uninterrupted exchange of letters with you comes not from love but from my unhappy disposition.”
She swears that if she continues to write him, it is not—as he thinks—out of pity. She is bound to him.
Tired of wrangling, they pass on to other subjects. The talk is of the incidents of daily life, of friends, books, the weather. Felice has promised to take swimming lessons, Franz is unhappy that she is making no progress. He asks her: “Are you learning with the help of a pole or do they have you on an apparatus?”
He describes his new neighbor to her, a Czech who writes erotic novels, a splendid and enviable man with a natty little French goatee, a slouch hat straight from Montmartre, and a cape draped over his arm. On another day, he mentions that he broke his fine shaving mirror. It made him shake with annoyance.
Felice has toothaches, Franz is worried. On the day of the extraction, he is anxious and cannot sleep. One’s head spins.
3 Kafka never went on a trip without slipping this book into his luggage.
4 Kafka drew details of daily life in America from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he read with great enjoyment and recommended to his father.
The Triumph of Time and Disillusion5
Truly, everything is as it was. Please don’t worry unnecessarily,” Felice writes, exasperated by Franz’s insistence. “Everything is as it was” has a wonderful ring to it, but Franz is convinced of the contrary, even when Felice manages to shake his firmest convictions. He has tried to push her away in the hopes of sparing her greater suffering. He has failed. He is thoroughly relieved—he would have been destroyed if she had expelled him (“expelled” is the term he uses), and he is distraught that she has not done so. He struggles with his anxiety attacks and his fits of despair. He could have built the pyramids, he jokes, with the effort it takes him “to cling to life and reason.”
To settle his nerves, he decides to take a practical course in gardening. Manual labor calms him, as he knows. A year or two earlier, he had tried his hand at carpentry. The experiment had been a success. He liked everything about the work, from the smell of the wood chips to the rasp of the saw. The workshop had been flooded with light, the craftsmen calm, sturdy people, intent on their tasks, taciturn but good company. Only the press of other obligations had made Franz give it up.
At the end of the workday he goes for the first time to Nusle, a lively suburb of Prague. He discovers, on stepping off the tram, a neighborhood of modest houses surrounded by open and unfenced vegetable gardens. There is a great deal going on around him. Children are playing in the streets, fighting over American swings, young girls are singing next to a merry-go-round, somewhere a brass band is playing, workingmen on their way home talk in clusters and drink beer, while others hoe their garden plots.
The vegetable gardener is waiting for him in front of his land at the appointed place. He hands Franz a spade and shows him how to use it, to spread his legs slightly and bend his knees, lean forward from the waist, keep the neck relaxed.
“Use the spade as a lever, uproot the whole thing.”
The man looks at his pupil’s white, slender hands and thinks that he’s an idle fellow, unlikely to stay the course.
“Small motions, slower, you don’t want to hurt your back. Drive the spade with your foot.”
Franz is wearing only a shirt and trousers. It is cold, and a fine April rain falls intermittently. He continues assailing and moving the heavy soil all the same. Soon he is sweating and developing blisters on his hands, but he feels a happy fatigue. “This dull, honest, useful, silent, solitary, healthy, strenuous work,” he writes Felice that evening, “is not without significance to someone who has led a desk-and-sofa life, allowing himself continually to be assailed and deeply moved.” On subsequent days the crunching sound of the earth stays in his ears.
His body becomes heavier, straighter, his sense of his own dignity is reinforced. “I feel,” he writes to Max, “like a Fury that has been tamed.”
He breathes more easily because Felice has not replaced him. He was so frightened! On a business trip to Frankfurt, she attended a trade exhibition where she came in contact with a great many people and answered none of his letters. Franz imagined that she had met a vigorous, well-dressed, healthy, and amusing young man who took his place. He went through the hell of being abandoned. He panicked, ran to his good friend Max: “Please write to Felice, I absolutely must know.”
The fear of losing her was strangling him. The next day he received a few words from her. Life returned.
“Love me a little, Felice. Do you feel how much I love you? Do you feel it?” he writes, forgetting the thousand warnings he has given her.
Subsequently, he asks for, he insists on, a second meeting in Berlin at Whitsun, in mid-May.
“I must, must, see you, Felice.”
He agrees to everything. Meet her parents? At home? Attend the reception they are giving for the engagement of her brother, Ferry? Good idea. Everything seems like a good idea.
He is already concerned about the clothes he will wear on his visit: a black suit? He would feel more comfortable in his normal summer suit.
“Should I bring flowers for your mother? And what kind of flowers?”
A stream of questions. He returns to the subject so often after Felice no longer wants to discuss it, directs her so insistently to think more deeply about it, that Felice starts writing less often. In her short, laconic letters, he sees only the words “in haste” and “again in haste.”
“My eyes hurt at the very sight of these words.”
“You’re the one hurting me, I am sad and tired,” she answers.
Sad and tired. How could she not be? Franz’s indecision, his contradictions, his tyranny, his demands, his complaints have worn her down.
By introducing him to her family, the young woman is leading him toward marriage, and he knows it. For the moment, he is preoccupied with one thing only: Felice has not thought enough, or perhaps not thought at all, about the confession he sent her. Her quick dismissal of it obsesses him, casts a pall on their future.
What does he expect from her? Either she must drive him from her life or else accept the prospect of marriage without coitus, free him from an obligation he feels unable to meet. He even suggests that they not live in the same city. Discussing this with her is the real reason for the second meeting.
He arrives in Berlin early on the morning of Sunday, May 11, 1913. He will leave again on Monday, May 12, in the evening. It is Whitsun, the weather mild and spring-like. He arrives at the home of Carl and Anna Bauer in the middle of the afternoon. His knees wobbling, he walks across their drawing room toward Felice. A shudder of aversion runs through him. He sees gold gleaming in his beloved’s mouth as she opens it to greet him: “this gleaming gold, a truly hellish luster for this inappropriate spot, and that grayish yellow porcelain” horrify him. He lowers his eyes, wants only to escape. At that precise moment, he feels with certainty through his whole body that no, he will never be able to possess this young woman.
There are many people in the drawing room. Franz is in such a state of confusion that he is persuaded the people around him are giants, shaking their heads in resignation at his own small size. Felice, in high spirits, flits from person to person. The moment she stands next to Franz, her liveliness fades, her gaze wanders, she endures his silence or the stupid things he has to say. She finds that he looks unwell.
“You seem exhausted,” she says.
He doesn’t hear her. The suspicious glances that Frau Bauer casts at him frighten him particularly. Dressed all in black, sad, watchful, stiff, a stranger among her own family and friends, Frau Bauer looks disapprovingly, almost contemptuously, at the strange specimen her daughter has brought home. A man who seems ill at tim
es, at others absent, dumb mostly.
Then all at once, before the copious buffet laid out in the dining room, before the astonished guests, Franz stops being tongue-tied. In an excited voice, he tells the gathering about his vegetarianism. He pointedly helps himself to just a few vegetables, drinks only water. Only Erna, Felice’s sister, shows any sympathy. The others turn their backs on him.
Noticing the vacuum he has created around himself, Franz senses disaster. He has not managed to steal even a quick kiss from Felice, and she has hardly given him the chance. When, haggard and crestfallen, Franz decides to leave the reception, Felice accompanies him as far as the hall. Franz grabs her hand, pulls off her glove, and kisses her bare palm. He thinks he sees an angry frown on the young woman’s face. He flees, his head reels, something in his breast is breaking.
The next morning, they meet alone in the street for a few minutes. Felice, distracted and in a bad mood, has no idea where she stands. Her parents, her brother, her close relatives, her friends were all eager to meet this young man “of the two hundred letters” who was dying of love. What they saw was a ghost. They barely hide their disappointment. Standing stiffly on the sidewalk, her face a mask, her eyes avoiding his, Felice is clearly bored. Franz, at a loss, can’t find the words he came to say.
“I cannot live without her. Nor can I live with her.” This thought runs through his head as he throws his clothes into his bag. He is back in his room at the Hotel Askanischer Hof, preparing to return to Prague. He cannot possess this woman, but he wishes that he were entirely within her, or she within him. The separation into two people is unbearable.
Once more at home, he writes her the next morning and almost every day thereafter (May 12, 13, 16, 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, and 28). He also writes her almost every day in June (June 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, and 29). In July he writes her another sixteen letters. All of them urge her to reflect on the situation more, to be franker, more mature. He mentions glancingly, in the last line at the bottom of a page, a detail of negligible importance: “I am correcting the page proofs for the first chapter of my American novel, The Stoker: A Fragment, which is about to be published in an inexpensive series, 80 pfennigs.”
“But,” he adds, “the moment I talk about anything other than you, I feel lost.”
Not only has Felice made no comment to him about his texts, she has not even mentioned the articles in the German press praising his writings. He is forced to ask her to obtain them for him in the hopes that she will read the reviews and think more highly of his talents as a writer.
She is clearly tired of hearing about his terrible confession, and appears not to believe a word he says, to the point of completely ignoring his finely wrought and stubbornly presented arguments. Is she no longer reading his letters?
On June 16 there is an arresting new development. After laying out interminable arguments, he asks her for the first time, “Do you wish to be my wife? Do you?”
These two question marks seem to leave him stunned. He is unable to write another word that day, the next, or the day after. Apparently destroyed by the proposal, it is only on the fourth day following that he is able to resume his question to the woman who has been his intended since the moment he first glimpsed her.
He finishes his letter with this strange avowal: “I have to say that I am horribly afraid of our future and of the unhappiness that could result from our life together.”
It is clear that he expects his proposal of marriage to draw a refusal. Each of their disastrous meetings in Berlin has persuaded him that Felice is unsure of her feelings toward him. Yet she accepts his proposal. Lower-middle-class girl that she is, she requires that he formally ask her father for her hand, although she is twenty-seven years old. She is absolutely set on observing this convention.
Franz promises several times to write her father but puts off the chore day after day and week after week. He has a more immediate task at hand. Caught short by Felice’s acceptance, he starts in on a most unusual trial. Never has a lawyer presenting a brief against himself been more eloquent or offered so many decisive arguments. He must lose this trial on which his future as a writer hangs. His life depends on it.
He starts off pleading his case in a minor key, but the volume increases until it deafens Felice. The young woman has just said, “Yes, I want to be your wife.”
He answers, “Then you are prepared in spite of everything to take up this cross, Felice? Attempt the impossible?”
“Yes, you will make a good, kind husband.”
“You’re wrong, you wouldn’t manage to live two days at my side. I am a soft worm crawling on the ground, I am taciturn, unsociable, gloomy, brooding, selfish, and a hypochondriac. Could you bear to lead the life of a monk, as I do? I spend most of my time locked away in my room, or else wandering the streets alone. Could you stand to be completely separated from your parents, your friends, and everyone else, since I cannot conceive of our life together in any other way? I want to spare you unhappiness, Felice. Step out of the accursed circle into which I have forced you, blinded as I was and am by love.”
He advances the calamitous fact of his perpetual tiredness. She is strong, does she not recognize that he is in poor health?
“What comes between you and me,” he says, “is the doctor. I am frail. Insomnia and constant headaches have robbed me of my strength.”
“Don’t keep on about it,” answers Felice. “Stop tormenting me.”
He then writes to her describing what married life will be like: “You won’t get much help from me. I leave the office around 3, eat lunch, sleep until 6 or 7, bolt something down, then shut myself in my study. Could you really stand such a husband?”
“Yes.”
“Think carefully, Felice, think carefully! You would lose Berlin, the office, the work you enjoy, an existence almost free of care, life in the bosom of your family. In Prague, a provincial town, you will hear a language you don’t speak, you will live in a petit bourgeois household, without any brilliant society, you will have to forgo pretty dresses, travel third class, sit in poor seats at the theater.”
He warns her of another danger: since the only good in him is literature, he will spend their free time, their nights, and their vacations at his writing, leaving her to be alone.
“I know your inclination for writing.”
“My inclination?” (He chokes with indignation.) “My inclination? I hate everything that is not literature! If I had to stop writing, I would stop living.”
Tired of the abuse, Felice interrupts this useless and exhausting correspondence. They have agreed on nothing when, by common consent, they decide to take their vacations separately. She will go north, to the island of Sylt in the Baltic Sea. He will go south, to Italy.
5 Title of an oratorio by Handel.
Riva, the Italian Interlude
On September 6, Franz accompanies his director at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, Dr. Robert Marschner, to Vienna. Marschner has a very high opinion of his subordinate;6 and Franz in turn admires him (but then he bows down before everybody!) because the man types so fast and shares his taste for poetry. One day, while callers waited in the hallway for their appointments, Franz and Robert read poems aloud behind the closed door of the office.
Spending a week together, they visited the International Congress for First Aid and Accident Prevention. Also taking place on September 6 was the Eleventh Zionist Congress, attended by the daughter of Theodor Herzl. Franz sat in on a few sessions out of curiosity. He left them disappointed, having heard only the usual shrill arguments. To Max, a militant Zionist, he sends a dispiriting account.
On September 14 he leaves Vienna, a city he dislikes. “It is a vast, moribund village,” he writes, “where the gay become morose and the morose even moroser.”
Finally on vacation, he spends a night alone in Trieste and proceeds to Venice by boat. Crossing in a gale, he is seasick, and it is raining hard when he lands in the City
of the Doges. Wet through and through, he runs from church to church, barely able to see the facades of the palaces, hidden as they are behind sheets of gray water. He spends two melancholy days there. In Verona it is even worse. He is surrounded by entwined couples. “The idea of a honeymoon,” he writes to Max Brod, “fills me with horror. Couples are an odious sight to me. If I want to make myself sick, I have only to imagine myself with a woman, my arm around her waist.”
He seeks refuge in a cinematograph theater, perhaps the Pathé di San Sebastiano, and the film that he sees (he doesn’t give its title) brings tears to his eyes.
From this city of lovers, he sends a few lines that he thinks might be the last: “What are we to do, Felice? We must part ways.”
Now to the interlude.
An Italian interlude on the magical shores of Lake Garda at Riva. It is a warm, luminous autumn, the water and the parks are soft in color, lightly veiled in mist. Franz has taken up residence at a sanatorium that offers hydrotherapy treatments under Dr. von Hartungen. Along the lakeshore are deck chairs, where guests spend endless hours in the sun. Franz goes for a long swim every day, often to one of the nearby islands.
Meals are taken communally around a large table. Forced to make conversation with his neighbor, a retired general who peppers him with questions, Franz’s feelings of emptiness and grief grow more acute.
At the start of the second week, a young girl, her auburn hair tied back in a red ribbon, takes a seat beside him at lunch. She wears a garnet-colored velvet dress, set off by a white lace collar, and has the fragility, the troubling innocence, of a child. When Franz, suddenly voluble, asks her questions, her round cheeks and neck turn red. He is fascinated by the perfection and whiteness of her teeth, the softness of her skin, he longs to untie the ribbon and touch the hair that falls to her shoulders.
Kafka in Love Page 4