Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  The trees, grass and flowers wore their most sumptuous garb. The birds of early spring grew silent: the cocks had hidden themselves away, moulting, and the hens were fasting on their nests hatching their eggs. The animals were busy seeking food for their young. What with sowing and ploughing, the peasants were more harassed than ever.

  Some of the peasant lore—frogs are woken from hibernation by thunder, a mushroom detected by the human eye will cease to grow—is perhaps open to scientific refutation, but the observations that the roach is a lonely fish and that roach soup makes people brood would seem hard to argue. Prishvin himself asserts with mystic authority: “The orioles are very fond of choppy weather. They like the sun to come and go, and the wind to play with the leaves as with waves. Orioles, swallows, gulls and martins have a kinship with the wind.”

  Man’s interpenetration with nature takes many forms: superstition, lore, and annual rite, as in the Nettle Feast; scientific probing and investigation, as in Prishvin’s research; pantheistic communion (“I … sat down on a soft mossy hillock under a pine-tree and began to sip the tea slowly, musing and gradually merging with the life around me”); and hunting. There is a great deal of hunting and killing here—more than a modern nature-lover expects. Prishvin at one point steps forward to reassure the squeamish: “There is no need to pity the animal, my kind-hearted readers, we’re all due for it sooner or later, I for one am almost ready.…” To hunt successfully, one must empathize with the animals, think like them; in this immemorial way Man draws close to his fellow creatures. The strategies of foxes, the scruples of wolves are fascinatingly noted. And the minds of the dogs trained to hunt at Man’s side are wonderfully well explored. With Olympian humor Prishvin explicates the urinary truce agreements of competing dogs; he triumphantly psychoanalyzes the feminine pretenses of his disappointing pointer, Kate, her nose dulled by two housebound years in Moscow, and rejoices when her nose revives in the country wind. Nature for Prishvin not only spreads itself externally but lies within the mind of a dog, a fox, even a fish or mayfly. He tiptoes toward the mysteries of the woods; he marvels at the snoring sound that emerges from a tree holding a sleeping wood-grouse and speculates on its source:

  I suppose that the sound comes from the fluttering feathers when a large bird breathes under its wing in sleep. However, I shouldn’t swear to it that wood-grouse do sleep with their heads under their wings. I am judging by the domestic fowl. It’s all surmises, stories and speculation, whereas the real world of the woods is little known.

  Though he was something of a scientist, there is little in Prishvin’s grasp of nature that corresponds to Loren Eiseley’s paleontological perspective or Joseph Wood Krutch’s biological microscopy. He is, like Thoreau and John Muir and Annie Dillard, confrontational in his dealings with the outdoors, and existential, his own consciousness his keenest exploratory tool. Nature to Prishvin appears “little known,” and the riddles that concern him—how do wood-grouse snore? why do the jackdaws come to see off the migrating rooks?—are ones that a closely observant child might ask. He restores us, in an anecdote like that of the old itinerant nurse who successfully pleaded for mercy with the wolves, to the pre-medieval Europe of the fairy tales, when animals spoke with dignity on behalf of their own societies and men shared with all life a single network of sensation and motive. The semi-centenarian is thrilled to be alive, he tells us more than once. His descriptions of days—especially of that magical hour before dawn, which he is always avid to witness—have a sublime freshness:

  There was a morning moon. The eastern sky was clouded. At long last a strip of dawn showed from under the heavy blanket, and the moon floated in deeper blue.

  The lake seemed to be covered with floes, so queerly and abruptly had the mist broken up. The village cocks and swans gave voice.

  An Adamic freshness of earliest morning is what one finds in Prishvin; we see the earth being created, and its elemental patterns established:

  The most exquisite and mysterious time of the day is that between the first streak of light and sunrise, when the pattern of the leafless trees just begins to be outlined. The birches seem to have been combed downwards, the maples and aspens upwards. I witnessed the birth of the hoarfrost, saw it shrivel and whiten the old yellow grass and glass the puddles with the thinnest film of ice.

  The vibration of our animal existence is in him, as well as those tentative motions of mind whereby Man began to subdue his magnificent, riddle-filled environment. The first inklings of morality, of conscious manliness, issue from a hunter’s encounters: facing a bear, Prishvin experiences the click of courage, perceiving that “the struggle between the proud free man and the coward was inevitable and needful for it’s the coward in us that puts us to the test. One could not talk oneself into bravery as one could not stop the heart from thumping more and more violently. I thought it would burst in a moment, but then came the line beyond which there was no struggle, the coward was vanquished and I turned into a mechanism with the precision of a steel spring in a clock.” And death, awareness of which separates us from our fellow animals, is banished by natural busyness: “I am no longer young, that’s true, but I am as busy as ever and keep my cup brimming full. And as long as I can keep it so, all thoughts of death are empty.” Handed down by a more academic stoicism, such consolation might ring hollow; but Prishvin speaks in the unforced voice of nature herself and, with a characteristically Russian blend of fatalism and exuberance, imparts to us her ageless imperatives.

  To The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka

  Published on the Centennial of his Birth

  All that he does seems to him, it is true, extraordinarily new, but also, because of the incredible spate of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking short the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined. Sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself.

  —KAFKA, “He” (Aphorisms)

  THE CENTURY since Franz Kafka was born in 1883 has been marked by the idea of “modernism”—a self-consciousness new among centuries, a consciousness of being new. Sixty years after his death, Kafka epitomizes one aspect of this modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain. In Kafka’s peculiar and highly original case this dreadful quality is mixed with immense tenderness, oddly good humor, and a certain severe and reassuring formality. The combination makes him an artist; but rarely can an artist have struggled against greater inner resistance and more sincere diffidence as to the worth of his art.

  This volume holds all of the fiction that Kafka committed to publication during his lifetime:* a slender sheaf of mostly very short stories, the longest of them, “The Metamorphosis,” a mere fifty pages long, and only a handful of the others as much as five thousand words. He published six slim volumes, four of them single stories, from 1913 to 1919, and was working on the proofs of a seventh in the sanatorium where he died on June 3, 1924, of tuberculosis, exactly one month short of his forty-first birthday. Among his papers after his death were found several notes addressed to his closest friend, Max Brod. One of them stated:

  Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these: The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor and the short story: Hunger-Artist.… When I say that those five books and the short story can stand, I do not mean that I wish them to be reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best. Only, since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them.

  The little canon that Kafka reluctantly granted posterity would, indeed
, stand; “The Metamorphosis” alone would assure him a place in world literature, though undoubtedly a less prominent place than he enjoys thanks to the mass of his posthumously published novels, tales, parables, aphorisms, and letters. The letter quoted above went on to direct Brod to burn all of Kafka’s manuscripts, “without exception and preferably unread.” Another note, written later, reiterated the command even more emphatically; and Dora Dymant, the young woman with whom Kafka shared the last year of his life, obediently did destroy those portions of the Kafka hoard within her keeping. But Brod disobeyed. Predictably: while Kafka was alive Brod had often elicited manuscripts from his excessively scrupulous friend and was instrumental in the publication of several of them. In Brod’s words: “he knew with what fanatical veneration I listened to his every word.… During the whole twenty-two years of our unclouded friendship, I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a post card.” In a conversation of 1921 he warned Kafka he would burn nothing. And so with good conscience the executor issued to the world The Trial and The Castle—both novels unfinished and somewhat problematical in their texts but nevertheless stunningly realized—and a host of lesser but still-priceless fragments, painstakingly deciphered and edited. Kafka and Shakespeare have this in common: their reputations rest principally on texts they never approved or proofread.

  This volume, then, holds as well many stories in various states of incompletion. Some, like “The Village Schoolmaster” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” seem fatally truncated, their full intentions and final design destined to remain mysterious. In some others, notably “Investigations of a Dog,” the author appears to have played out his inspiration without rounding out the story; Kafka’s need to explore this conceit of philosophical speculation in a canine world where human beings are somehow unseen (“a sort of canine atheism” one commentator has called the phenomenon) has been happily exhausted before an end is reached. The failure is purely mechanical and we do not feel cheated, since the story’s burden of private meaning has been unloaded—there are scarcely any pages in Kafka more sweetly and winningly autobiographical than these. In still other of these uncompleted stories, such as “The Great Wall of China” and “The Burrow,” the end is even nearer, and we do not wish for any more. According to Dora Dymant, “The Burrow” had been concluded, in a version she destroyed, with a “scene describing the hero taking up a tense fighting position in expectation of the beast, and the decisive struggle in which the hero succumbs”; though there is poignance in this—“the beast” was Kafka’s nickname for his disease, to which he was to succumb within a few months—we are glad to leave the burrowing hero, fussily timorous and blithely carnivorous, where he is, apprehensively poised amid menaces more cosmic and comic than anything his claws could grapple with.

  “The Burrow” and “The Great Wall of China” belong with the best of Kafka’s creations; their fantastic images are developed with supreme elegance and resonance. The German titles of both contain the word Bau. Kafka was obsessed with building, with work that is never done, that can never be done, that must always fall short of perfection. His manuscripts show Kafka to have been a fervent worker, “scribbling” (as he called his writing) with a stately steadiness across the page, revising rather little, but ceasing when authenticity no longer seemed to be present, often laying down parallel or even contradictory tracks in search of his prey, and content to leave his works in an “open” state like that of his Great Wall—their segments uncertainly linked, strange gaps left, the ultimate objective shied from as if too blindingly grand. Not to write for money or the coarser forms of glory is common enough among modern avant-gardists; but to abjure aesthetic “finish” itself carries asceticism a step further, into a realm of protest where such disparate modernists as Eliot and Pound (in the intrinsically fragmentary nature of their poetry) and Rilke and Salinger (in their capacities for silence) keep Kafka company. Incompletion is a quality of his work, a facet of its sincerity.

  Hearing Kafka read aloud from his youthful works “Description of a Struggle” and “Wedding Preparations in the Country” instantly convinced Max Brod that his friend was a genius: “I got the impression immediately that here was no ordinary talent speaking, but a genius.” You who are picking up this volume in innocence of the author, however, might do well to skip these first two titles and return to them when initiated. Repeated readings of these grouped fragments have left them, for me, not merely opaque but repellent. “Description” was composed no later than 1904–5, when Kafka was in his early twenties. It is full of contortions both psychological (“I had to restrain myself from putting my arm around his shoulders and kissing him on the eyes as a reward for having absolutely no use for me”) and physical (“this thought … tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees”; “I screwed up my mouth … and supported myself by standing on my right leg while resting the left one on its toes”). There is something of adolescent posturing here, or of those rigid bodily states attendant upon epilepsy and demonic possession. The conversation seems hectic, and the hero and his companions pass a mysterious leg injury back and forth like the ancient Graeae sharing one eye. Self-loathing and self-distrust lurk within all this somatic unease; the “supplicant” prays in church at the top of his voice “in order to be looked at and acquire a body.” A certain erotic undercurrent is present also, and in “Wedding Preparations” the hero, Eduard Raban, is proceeding toward his wedding in the country. This narrative at least boasts a discernible direction; but we strongly feel that Raban, for all his dutiful determination, will never get there. The typical Kafkaesque process of non-arrival is under way. And in truth Kafka, though heterosexual, charming, and several times engaged, and furthermore professing that “marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all,” never did manage to get to his wedding.

  The charm that these disquieting, abortive early pieces exerted upon Brod and other auditors (for Kafka used to read his work aloud to friends, sometimes laughing so hard he could not continue reading) must have largely derived from the quality of their German. The lucid and fluent English versions by the Muirs and the Sterns can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity. “Writing is a form of prayer,” Kafka wrote in his diary. Thomas Mann paid tribute to Kafka’s “conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear, and correct style, [with] its precise, almost official conservatism.” Brod likened it to J. P. Hebel’s and Kleist’s, and claimed that “its unique charm is heightened by the presence of Prague and generally speaking Austrian elements in the run of the sentence.” The Jews of Prague generally spoke German, and thus was added to their racial and religious minority-status a certain linguistic isolation as well, for Czech was the language of the countryside and of Bohemian nationalism. It is interesting that of the last two women in Kafka’s life—two who abetted the “reaching out” of his later, happier years—Milena Jesenská-Pollak was his Czech translator and helped perfect his Czech, and Dora Dymant confirmed him in his exploration of Judaism, including the study of Hebrew. He wrote to Brod of the problems of German: “Only the dialects are really alive, and except for them, only the most individual High German, while all the rest, the linguistic middle ground, is nothing but embers which can only be brought to a semblance of life when excessively lively Jewish hands rummage through them.” Though fascinated by the liveliness of Yiddish theatre, he opted for what Philip Rahv has called an “ironically conservative” style; what else, indeed, could hold together such leaps of symbolism, such a trembling abundance of feeling and dread?

  Kafka dated his own maturity as a writer from the long night of September 22–23, 1912, in which he wrote “The Judgment” at a single eight-hour sitting. He confided to his diary that morning, “Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.” Yet the story is not q
uite free of the undeclared neurotic elements that twist the earlier work; the connection between the engagement and the father seems obscure, and the old man’s fury illogical. But in staring at, with his hero Georg, “the bogey conjured up by his father,” Kafka broke through to a great cavern of stored emotion. He loved this story, and among friends praised—he who deprecated almost everything from his own pen—its Zweifellosigkeit, its “indubitableness.” Soon after its composition, he wrote, in a few weeks, “The Metamorphosis,” an indubitable masterpiece. It begins with a fantastic premise, whereas in “The Judgment” events become fantastic. This premise—that Gregor Samsa has been turned overnight into a gigantic insect—established in the first sentence, “The Metamorphosis” unfolds with a beautiful naturalness and a classic economy. It takes place in three acts: three times the metamorphosed hero ventures out of his room, with tumultuous results. The members of his family—rather simpler than Kafka’s own, which had three sisters—dispose themselves around the central horror with a touching, as well as an amusing, plausibility. The father’s fury, roused in defense of the fragile mother, stems directly from the action and inflicts a psychic wound gruesomely objectified in the rotting apple Gregor carries in his back; the progression of the sister, Grete, from shock to distasteful ministration to a certain sulky possessiveness and finally to exasperated indifference is meticulously sketched, with not a stroke too much. The terrible but terribly human tale ends with Grete’s own metamorphosis, into a comely young woman. In a strange way this great story resembles a great story of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”; in both, a hitherto normal man lies hideously, suddenly stricken in the midst of a family whose irritated, banal daily existence flows around him. The abyss within life is revealed, but also life itself.