Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  But generally the surviving letters show him as a working man of letters, rather abjectly currying favor with the better-known, hinting to peers of possible literary favors they might bestow, seeking to wangle a leave from his depleting teaching post, complaining of writer’s block, lamenting his second book’s cool reception (“No one besides you has had one good thing to say about it”). To Romana Halpern he confessed, “It seems to me I have swindled the world by some sort of flash or glitter when there is nothing inside me.” His real writing—passionate, luminous, warped by its own destiny—he saved for publication, as in his almost absurdly original afterword to a translation of Kafka’s The Trial, in an eloquent riposte to a challenge by Witold Gombrowicz’s and a warm review of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, above all in the imaginative episodes waiting to take their place somewhere in the next book of fiction. The greatest letters, like those of Kafka and Keats, are written by those with few other outlets; the individual recipient becomes a public. The Schulz letters salvaged here are not, by and large, of this unstinted quality; he did, after 1934, have a literary public and a role to play—burdensome, perhaps, for one so basically private—within a vivacious, Polish cultural world that was about to be crushed.

  * The quote in fact is not from King Lear but Love’s Labour’s Lost: Act I, scene i, lines 105–7. Berowne says:

  At Christmas I no more desire a rose

  Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,

  But like of each thing that in season grows.

  † Consider, speaking of lists, the sequential piling-on in this evocation of a shower: “strings of rain hiss on the pavement, the earth almost breathes aloud, water gurgles, drums, pats, and rattles against the windows, tiptaps with a thousand fingers in the spouts, runs in rivulets, and splashes in puddles, and one would like to scream with joy, one sticks one’s head out of the window to cool it in the dew from heaven, one whistles, shouts, and would like to stand barefoot in the yellow streams rushing down the streets.”

  ‡ In 1960, he had ordered some of these lions shot, “because instead of defending the Palace they had admitted the traitors.”

  § From the introduction to Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by the translator, Celina Wieniewska. The sole eyewitness account of Schulz’s murder comes from Izydor Friedman. His response to Jerzy Ficowski’s appeal for information, as quoted in the footnotes to Letters and Drawings, does not contain the motivation offered above, though it does give the name of the Gestapo agent who killed Schulz—Guenther. Friedman buried the body that night at a site he could not later identify; the Jewish cemetery no longer existed.

  BIOGRAPHIES

  The Process and the Lock

  THE NIGHTMARE OF REASON: A Life of Franz Kafka, by Ernst Pawel. 466 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.

  The Nightmare of Reason is full of information and intellectual energy and should be read by everyone who cares about Kafka; it fills in many of the gaps and firms up some of the soft spots in Max Brod’s indispensable but unavoidably personal biography of his friend, and offers a more contoured, searching version of the life than Ronald Hayman’s staccato Kafka, of two years ago. However, one wishes that Ernst Pawel had found a slightly different tone in which to write. His prose, like his title, comes on too strong; his literary voice, as it details the earthly adventures of his quiet, almost unfailingly tactful protagonist, echoes at times the “booming parade-ground voice” of that much-maligned father, Herrmann Kafka. There is something bullying and hectoring about Mr. Pawel’s approach as he boxes the young Kafka into a rather too classically Freudian Oedipal mess, with a coarse, crass father, a distant, distracted mother, two younger brothers both dead in infancy, and three little sisters to reinforce Franz’s emotional arrest. “The symbiotic entanglement with his family,” the biographer states in no uncertain terms, “the haunted pursuit of a mother lost to him along with two rivals killed by his own lethal fantasies, the obsessive struggle against the omnipotent father, spawned a rage so overpowering that it all but crippled his instincts and left him firmly locked in guilt beyond understanding.” Mr. Pawel is, in his early pages, a dues-paying member of the “must have” school of biography:

  As a mother, Julie no doubt did her best; but having never been mothered herself, her best was a kind of corseted tenderness that must have felt like ice to the touch.

  By this time, however, he must—at least at the conscious level—have come to terms with his mother’s emotional distance.

  The mob that for some days took over the streets of the city and beat up anyone who looked like a “dirty kike” must have given him clues to his identity that were hard to miss.

  Emotional health and even flitting happiness were strangers, in Mr. Pawel’s schematization, to the Kafka household. If Franz, the first and only surviving son, was “a child hating his father to the point of murder,” his amiable relations with his sisters did not bode well, either: “They were good to him, he was fond of them, but at bottom the mirror-smooth harmony of these blood relations, so seldom ruffled by even the merest wisp of rivalry or jealousy, points to cold blood and vast distances.” A triad of boldly declarative sentences takes us deep into the scarcely knowable: “Kafka grew up hating his body. He dreaded physical intimacy. Sex to him was the quintessence of filth, the antithesis of love.” To be sure, passages from the diaries and letters are cited in support of Mr. Pawel’s stark analysis; yet his tone throughout seems more of a prosecutor’s than an admirer’s. Innocent bystanders are suddenly indicted: Robert Klopstock, who with saintly devotion nursed the dying Kafka and who eventually became a universally esteemed pulmonary surgeon in the United States, is described as having “an ego as fragile as a raw egg” and as bombarding Kafka with “near-paranoid reproaches followed by abjectly hysterical apologies.” Brod, though given his due elsewhere, gets batted down for “sentimental twaddle, at best the aging, childless Brod’s projection of his own pietistic feelings.” The European statesmen of 1914 are “criminals and imbeciles”; the Austrian military command is made up of “hopeless clowns.” Even a long-dead English author, alluded to in one of Kafka’s letters, gets hauled into court: “Swift, with a love life considerably more muddled than Kafka’s, kept his marriage a secret, had no known progeny, and his expertise in child-rearing was most convincingly demonstrated in ‘A Modest Proposal.’ ” A certain exasperation tinges the characterization of Kafka himself; his two attempts at getting married, to Felice Bauer and Julie Wohryzek, especially quicken Mr. Pawel’s impatience. As he tells it, Felice, “numbed by the mute pleas of her would-not-be lover, who looked and acted like a moonstruck teen-ager, realized that left to his own devices he would forever go on wallowing in self-pity.” The vocabulary as well as the viewpoint of Herrmann Kafka colors the young Kafka’s engagement to Julie Wohryzek: “The prospect of his son—a shlemiel in many ways, but still, a doctor of jurisprudence and a scion of the House of Kafka—marrying the daughter of a petty shammes doubling as shoemaker was nothing less than a slap in the face, a direct assault on his own hard-won social status.” Why, oh why, the text seems to sigh, can’t Kafka be sane like us, and handle these women like a man?

  There can be no doubt that the obsessive fear of sex, or more specifically of wallowing in lustful filth and degradation not with a paid hooker or lower-class shopgirl but with the virginal mother image he secretly worshipped and wanted to love, did, in fact, account for much of the tension of the relationship.

  A little more doubt, in dealing with the virtual embodiment of it, might have been becoming to the biographer.

  Mr. Pawel’s prosecutorial edge is no accident; he has a case to prove. He wants to rescue Kafka’s Jewishness from those who, following Brod’s lead, would make of him a crypto-Christian allegorist and saint, and from those who would simply enroll him in the Teutonic pantheon of German-language classics:

  … to read him as a latter-day Kleist, to trace his inspiration back to primordial Angst or Kierkegaard, and to invoke Goethe, Dick
ens, and Dostoevsky is to confuse form and substance, is to miss the essence of who he was and what he was struggling to discover within himself. Kafka’s true ancestors, the substance of his flesh and spirit, were an unruly crowd of Talmudists, Cabalists, medieval mystics resting uneasy beneath the jumble of heaving, weatherbeaten tombstones in Prague’s Old Cemetery.

  He quotes a letter from Kafka to Brod on the difficulties of assimilation:

  Most of those who started to write in German wanted to get away from their Jewishness, usually with their fathers’ vague consent (the vagueness of it was what made it outrageous). They wanted to get away, but their hind legs still stuck to the fathers’ Jewishness, while the forelegs found no firm ground. And the resulting despair served as their inspiration.

  Mr. Pawel diagrams the peculiar position of Prague Jewry in Kafka’s lifetime; compelled, under the Hapsburg regime, to identify with Bohemia’s German minority, they were thus doubly distrusted, by the Germans as Jews and by the Czechs as Germans. Kafka and his father were typical of the generational progress. Herrmann, son of a kosher butcher in the ghetto of the Czech village of Wossek, left home at fourteen as a peddler and, after Army service, came to Prague, married a wealthy brewer’s daughter, and founded a successful drygoods wholesale business. Franz, raised in middle-class style by nurses and governesses, attended compulsory German-language schools whose student bodies were preponderantly Jewish. In 1900, some eighty-five percent of the roughly thirty-five thousand German-speaking citizens in the Prague population of 420,000 were Jewish. The Kafkas were unusual in bearing a Czech name—kavka means “jackdaw”—and in speaking Czech at home. In the Prague pogrom of December 1897, Herrmann Kafka’s establishment was spared by the Czech mob, and Franz Kafka’s charmed career at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia continued when this bureaucratic organization was taken over in 1918 by the newly created Republic of Czechoslovakia: under the Hapsburg monarchy, he had been one of the Institute’s two token Jews; under the Czechs, he became the token German. By Mr. Pawel’s analysis, Kafka’s generation of Prague Jews, minimally observant and trained for assimilation, found most paths barred by “an endemic anti-Semitism.” “The fathers, smugly content with having overcome piety and poverty, groomed their sons for roles they could never hope to play. The sons, however, found themselves locked out of the show altogether; and trapped between promise and reality, they drifted into literature as a way out of the impasse.” Indisputably, Kafka, from his exhilarated discovery of Yiddish theatre in 1911 to the dreams of moving to Palestine that lit up his last months in 1924, was a man in search of the Jewishness that he felt his father had failed or refused to transmit to him. And yet, turning from Mr. Pawel’s brief to Kafka’s own works, one is struck again by how submerged their specifically Jewish elements are, by how directly his parables apply to the whole Western spiritual condition. The Nightmare of Reason quotes Simone de Beauvoir, raised as a Catholic, on the effect Kafka exerted on the postwar French intelligentsia:

  Faulkner, all the others, told us remote stories; Kafka spoke to us about ourselves. He revealed to us our own problems, confronted by a world without God and where nonetheless our salvation was at stake. No father had embodied the Law for us, but the Law was inflexibly engraved in us just the same.

  Mr. Pawel’s insistent references to the coming Holocaust shadow his narrative of Kafka’s life in a way that felt to this reader somewhat unnecessary and rhetorical. It is necessary and instructive to be told what anti-Semitic riots raged in Prague during Kafka’s lifetime, and to be given samples of the widespread racist journalism and speechifying of the time. It is eye-opening to learn that Kafka, safely employed at the Institute, refused to sponsor the application of an Orthodox Jewish friend, on the grounds that “The institute is off limits for Jews,” and to learn that he himself wrote of Jews, to Milena Jesenská, “Sometimes I’d like to stuff them all into the drawer of my laundry chest, wait a while, then open the drawer a little to see if they’ve all been suffocated, and if not, close the drawer again, and so on to the end.” It is a piquant flourish, perhaps, to add, apropos of little Franz’s first day at school, that, “Earlier that year, in the not too distant Austrian town of Braunau, one Clara née Plözl, wife of the customs inspector Alois Hitler, had given birth to another of the emperor’s subjects, a sickly infant whose survival seemed doubtful. He survived.” We are reminded as well, in connection with Kafka’s move to Berlin in 1923, that that same year “an Austrian ex-corporal led a handful of crazies, ex-officers, and other thugs in a coup.” Yet in these touches, and in the frequent authorial foretelling of the mass murder that in the 1940s overtook Kafka’s three sisters, Milena Jesenská, Brod’s younger brother, and many other characters in Kafka’s story, there is a danger of making Hitler the hidden hero of that story, and the Holocaust its culminating event. It is a doubtful presumption that “the figure of the head torturer [in “In the Penal Colony”] is a prescient portrait of Adolf Eichmann, drawn from life.” It is not true, as the biography’s last paragraph claims, that “The world that Kafka was ‘condemned to see with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable’ was our own post-Auschwitz universe, on the brink of extinction.” Kafka saw his own world, which held the seeds of the future, the traces of the past, and the timeless dilemmas of human existence. To make him a prophet of the Holocaust or of the totalitarianism that has overtaken Prague is to turn his art into magic and into a magician a man who found everything difficult, problematical, fraught, almost impossible. He died in 1924, and his visions were entirely based upon evidence that had accumulated up to that year.

  In the presentation of this evidence Mr. Pawel’s book is most valuable. The basis, structure, and personnel of the schools Kafka attended; the coffeehouse society of Prague’s Jewish intellectuals; the kind of work Kafka with such oft-disclaimed competence performed for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute; the life and death of the mysterious asbestos factory of which he was part-owner and reluctant manager (Kafka, in fact, had more real experience of industrialism than all but a few modern writers); the biographies of the succession of women with whom he was involved; the labyrinthine changes of address and sanitorium that make up his history of residence; the contribution that the flu epidemic of 1918 made to Kafka’s debilitation and eventual demise; World War I as it reverberated in imperial Prague—all this is set down with clarity and authority. Further, Mr. Pawel is shrewd and vivid, though brief, in treating the works themselves, sidestepping most of the tortuous commentary with such observations as, of The Castle, that Kafka “worked when, and only when, the spirit was upon him, guided strictly by its dictates rather than by any preconceived ideological road map, translating the dilemmas of his life into the paradoxes of his fiction,” and “From several tentative drafts of further chapters in his notebooks it seems clear that the novel’s growing complexity had outrun the author’s power to control it—as suitable a conclusion to this extraordinary work as any that could be imagined.” Born in Germany, the biographer has translated all the quotations afresh, pointing out some nuances (Der Prozess = “the process” as well as “the trial”; Das Schloss = both “the castle” and “the lock”). He places in a perspective of reasonable doubt Grete Bloch’s claim (which Brod accepted) to have borne Kafka’s child and Gustav Janouch’s claim to have accurately transcribed Kafka’s remarks of twenty-five years before. All of Kafka’s major works are fixed in the time and place of their creation, along with the fallow periods when Kafka was given over completely to distraction and exhaustion. The biography supplies, in short, the full context in which the Kafka phenomenon emerged. How a brutish father and ineffectual mother produced a sensibility so subtle and tender, and how the bustling, gossipy literary bohemia of Bohemia, whose typical talents were facile and prolix, like Brod’s and Franz Werfel’s, nurtured an artistic vocation so austere and fanatic, are mysteries that research can scarcely touch. What research can touch Mr. Pawel here displays, albeit w
ith a brusqueness that might have made Kafka wince. Kafka’s life, so closely bound up with his work, fascinates us, it may be, unduly, at the price of a certain coarsening. As Elias Canetti has written in his own violation of the Kafka enigma, his brilliantly probing essay on the Letters to Felice: “There are writers, admittedly only a few, who are so entirely themselves that any utterance one might presume to make about them must seem barbarous.”

  Eliot Without Words

  T. S. ELIOT: A Life, by Peter Ackroyd. 400 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1984.

  Peter Ackroyd, at the end of two solid pages acknowledging thirty-nine libraries, collections, and archives plus twenty-seven individuals who aided the extensive research on his life of T. S. Eliot, confesses: