The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  There was, indeed, a prophetic tone in Kafka’s work; he did dwell on the deadening effects of the modern bureaucratic state, he was keenly aware of the growing racial tensions in Czechoslovakia after the proclamation of independence in 1918; and it was true, too, that he was fascinated by Hasidism and Zionism, he learned Hebrew, he even toyed with the idea of migrating to Palestine. But Brod’s Kafka was somehow Brod-like, a Kafka for a certain place, viewed from a certain perspective: all subsequent study and scholarship has been in effect a revision of this initial Kafka given to history.

  Both Stach and Friedlander are revisionists in this tradition, seeking a clearer picture. Stach’s work, quite overwhelming in its subtlety and scope, succeeds in this task on multiple levels: embedding Kafka in the tempo of his times, highlighting the links between Kafka’s tales and the dramatics of early twentieth-century Expressionist film and theatre, placing the work firmly in the Germanic literary descent-line, bringing out the half-known story of the dying writer’s last, most poignant romance. Friedlander offers an even more startling re-reading: his study is of great intensity and textual closeness; and he finds evidence that Brod suppressed little telling hints of erotic feelings for children in the diaries and manuscripts: was this, Friedlander wonders, the true root of the shame that convulsed Kafka and forms the cryptic bedrock of his literary persona? A reading of Kafka’s letters suggests the depth of the psychodrama that was under way.

  Here he is, writing to Brod two years before his death, his best-known works all behind him: ‘Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child’s lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one’s stories in the sunshine. Perhaps there are other forms of writing, but I know only this kind; at night, when fear keeps me from sleeping, I know only this kind.’ This was the tone of Kafka’s internal landscape: it was to this landscape that he travelled when he sat at his writing desk. There were elements in common between his quest for the absolute and the mood of the age – but this tone of doom in the cradle of being is something new. Perhaps the most crucial of all the necessary reassessments, then, concerns the initial reception of Kafka’s work and the reputation he won in his lifetime.

  Stach makes clear that Kafka was far from a struggling, underappreciated author. The contrary was the case: his uniqueness was quickly recognised. At first, of course, Brod seemed to outshine him, in the sense that Brod was better connected and a more assiduous publicist, but Kafka’s sparse writings were spotted and singled out as soon as they appeared in print. Robert Musil, the author of The Man Without Qualities, made a point of meeting Kafka and admired his work; Kurt Tucholsky praised him to the heavens; Thomas Mann realised his significance; as for Franz Werfel, who shared Kafka’s background and was the greatest star of literary Vienna, he wrote Kafka a fan letter for the ages: ‘Dear Kafka, you are so pure, new, independent and perfect that one ought to treat you as if you were already dead and immortal. What you have achieved in your last works has truly never existed in any literature, namely taking a well-crafted concrete story that is almost real and making it into something all-encompassing and symbolic, that speaks to a tragic dimension of mankind.’

  Stories such as Metamorphosis or In the Penal Colony were so fierce, so unrelenting in their attack, they simply could not be read as standard features of the literary landscape. Kafka was on his own; he knew it; his first readers knew it too. In the years after his death, his work continued to circulate quite widely. It came into the hands of a new generation – among them the last hothouse flowers of central Europe before the shadows fell. In their various ways, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Gershom Scholem and Elias Canetti all saw Kafka as a master beyond compare. The notoriously self-involved Canetti actually wrote a book devoted to ‘Kafka’s Other Trial’. This is not so much a case of influence as of priority. Kafka proved to be the pathfinder: he led the way – into a future with an expiry date.

  How, then, to account for what Kafka has become in the years since? The Kafka who lived and breathed, wrote and agonised, in Prague, Berlin and a score of health resorts and clinics strewn through German-speaking Europe – that figure is no more.

  He has been refashioned, he is an emblem for the times: to be precise, for post-war modernity. Just as Mozart, that irreducible genius in whose work sweet and bitter fuse impalpably, became the mascot of the eighteenth century, his heritage role bodied forth in the grotesque ‘Mozartkugeln’ of marzipan on sale at every street-corner confectioner in Vienna or in Salzburg today, so Kafka has been pressed into service as the imagined symbol of our age. His gaunt, consumptive face stares out from a hundred film posters. His haunted eyes incarnate alienation. His books are read as tales of the individual crushed by the bureaucratic system, he is delicacy and sensitivity, he is innocence in a world of dark and hidden forces. In short, he has been assimilated to his pallid victim-hero Joseph K. in the pages of The Trial.

  His name has been reduced to an adjective: when we wish to designate something grotesque and malformed in the administrative strata of our societies, it is Kafkaesque – we invoke him, we look to his vision, or what has been confected as his vision of the world: he even became a noun for a while in the years of Soviet and Czechoslovak Communism, when ‘Kafkarna’ was the term dissidents used to describe the plots and provocations of the all-surveying, paranoia-disseminating secret police. This is quite a fate for a writer: to be loved and revered and not be understood or known.

  Brod is only partly responsible for this betrayal: the creation of the Kafka image was in great part an international concoction, well-judged to buttress theories about the soulless modern state and the dark Freudian monsters lurking in the heart of man. The key to the creation of the emblem was his estrangement from the routines and the humdrum of his time and place. Kafka as universal required the erasure of Kafka the specific, the German-speaking writer, at home in busy, independent Prague. Stach, Friedlander and their like are thus engaged in a corrective exercise. Their new ‘K.’ has loves and foibles, he is agonised by his relationship to Judaism, he is fond of clothes and the latest movies, he is a gifted administrative figure, he is dazzling and seductive as much as still and strange.

  It is the storm whipped up around the angel of history that these new assessors are writing against – in vain. How not to see Kafka in the dark gleam of retrospect? How not to end a biography as Stach ends, with a note remarking that all three of his sisters and a great part of his network of friends died in German concentration and extermination camps? This ‘catastrophic blow to civilisation’ left nothing of the world Kafka knew intact, his biographer concludes: ‘Only his language lives.’

  But alongside it, now, is a clearer picture of what he was, and what came to him in the confluence of his imagination and his life. The denouement was slow, and hard.

  Kafka formed a last romantic tie, with Dora Diamant, a young woman, Polish-born: she cared for him and nursed him. Her role in his life only became evident with the publication of a memoir-narrative a decade ago.

  The treatments Kafka was subjected to in the last phase of his illness were intensive. He looked back on what he had written and came almost to fear his own texts, as well he might: the title story of the collection he was proofing in his final weeks, The Hunger Artist, described a man who no longer wished to eat – Kafka, when he worked through its pages, was no longer able to take solid food into his mouth. He knew it. Death was looming, death, his constant subject, the natural completion of his arc in writing.

  It has been easy, very easy, until now, to bring his fiction into his life, to think, with sentiment, that Kafka, just like poor, pale Joseph K., was quickly, quietly hustled from the world and silently dispatched. But here is the great corrective Stach’s last volume brings: Kafka
is seen most truthfully as a writer who loved life, he was an ever-shifting blur of sight and thought, he was more vivid than others because of his internal rigour, not less.

  At the Kierling sanatorium near Klosterneuburg, his last weeks were lived out in a constant bout of pain. Professor Tschiassny came in on one occasion and surprised Kafka with the news his throat was looking better. Dora came into the room and found him in tears. He embraced her repeatedly and told her ‘he had never wished for life and good health as much as he did now’.

  Things, though, took their course: consumption consumed him; there was no escape. He was given morphine in greater and greater doses; he sent Dora away so she would not have to see him die, but his resolve failed: he called her back. She sat at his bedside and held up a bunch of wild flowers to his face. ‘And Kafka, who had appeared to be unconscious, raised his head one last time.’

  The Weekend Australian Review

  Oh Walt, You’re a Leaky Vessel

  David Malouf

  A good many writers of fiction have also in the course of a busy writing life produced memorable poems, George Meredith for one, Thackeray for another, and several poets have produced single novels that stand as undisputed masterpieces: one thinks immediately of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Mörike’s novella Mozart’s Little Journey to Prague. But few writers have an equal reputation in both fields: Goethe in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Hugo in France; in England Hardy, maybe Kipling.

  D.H. Lawrence is surely one of the few. In a frenetic publishing life, and during many moves – from England to Germany in 1912, and on to Italy; to Australia, Mexico and the United States in the 1920s, and finally to Spain and the South of France – he worked simultaneously, and always at the highest intensity, on novels, poems, travel books, criticism, reviews. There is no time after he began in 1909 when his notebooks are not filled with poems, and no time in his publishing life when he is not between novels and volumes of short stories, either preparing collections of poems or seeing them through the press.

  All of this needs careful tracking. There are multiple typescripts. Postage, because of his travels, forms part of the story, and so does accident. So does interference or confiscation by the customs authorities in the cause of public decency. The fact that he was seldom at hand when the poems were being edited means that many of the publications are corrupt, and they may also differ for another reason. Because of Lawrence’s subjects, and the language he uses, many of the poems were at the last moment expurgated by the publisher or withdrawn, not always after consultation with Lawrence (again the matter of distance) and not always with his consent. All this is thoroughly dealt with in this new Cambridge Edition in two volumes: one for the poems and Lawrence’s prefaces to the various collections (this is the first complete and corrected edition of the poems); a second for the vast critical apparatus such an undertaking involves, the variant versions, notes on each poem and on the publication of each book and its reception – even a note on pounds, shillings and pence.

  The result is a triumph. Readers of Lawrence who are curious, as we should be, about how these poems came into being – their provenance and history, how each one is related to Lawrence’s circumstances at the moment of his writing and where it stands in the complex development of his thought – have every reason to be grateful, both to Christopher Pollnitz, the editor, and to the press. This is an immense achievement. The information it provides is easy to deal with but also, if the reader wishes, to ignore. The first volume – chronology, introduction, poems – is a beautiful thing to have in one’s hands. The second, equally beautiful, is a useful and reliable one to have close by on a shelf.

  Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness. Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with and, except for what I had picked up from films – the accidental influence, in Hollywood movies of the late thirties and early forties, of German Expressionist theatre and décor and, on the soundtrack, German contemporary music – the first modernist sensibility. I was twelve, going on thirteen, in my first months at Brisbane Grammar. As the bright Latin form, we were skilled at the sort of analysis and parsing that in those days was regular drill in Queensland primary schools, so we did nothing in our English class but read. The Lawrence poem in our class anthology was ‘Snake’, and it was like no other poem I had ever heard – I say ‘heard’ because poetry always began for me in those days as a reading aloud. I did with it immediately what I had been encouraged to do with any poem that in some way stuck me, or which puzzled or eluded me. I got its music into my head (prima la musica), and its logic or lack of logic, by learning it off by heart. Like many poems learned by heart at that time, it is still with me.

  What mesmerised me was the poem’s rhythms, and the perfect ease with which the lines, long or short, contained each thought and added it to the ‘story’. And the openness of that story as confession. Lawrence’s readiness, with no hint of self-consciousness or posing, to give himself away. I had never struck anything like that either. I took it as a kind of lesson in how I might deal with my own feelings, even the ones I was ashamed of.

  In learning the poem by heart, what it had to tell – the experience it embodied but also the rhythms of its discoveries, each one as it arrived – became mine; I had made it mine, along with the voice that expressed it. This might have robbed the thing, through easy familiarity, of its challenges. Instead, odd lines, in my head as they now were, stood out suddenly and confronted me so that I had to confront them.

  ‘The voices of my education said to me / He must be killed’ – but Lawrence did not want to kill the creature; could the voices of our education be wrong? I had never been presented with that idea. And clearly, in this case, they were wrong. In attacking the snake Lawrence had sinned – but wasn’t the serpent the very embodiment of sin? This serpent, in opposition to what the Bible asserted, was holy, because it was another creature like us, part of a Creation that was also holy – was that it? So the Bible was mistaken on that score also. Everything in the poem seemed to question and reverse what I had till now been told. There was a new sort of pleasure in this, each line as it turned was full of surprise and discovery.

  There is a good deal in that schoolboy response that I would stand by still, and re-reading the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), I experienced again, in their simple-seeming but complex statements, line after line, the same discomfort and release of that twelve-year-old. But what strikes me now is how carefully prepared I had been to meet this challenge by all those long afternoons with our State School Readers; through the three weeks we had spent on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the Queensland School Reader in Grade Seven, and our explorations, in Grade Six, in the story of Pluto and Persephone (along with Lord Leighton’s vivid illustration), of the pagan underworld Lawrence was evoking and inviting me, if I was daring enough, to recognise as my world also and share:

  And I thought of the albatross

  And I wished he would come back, my snake.

  For he had seemed to me again like a king,

  Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

  Now due to be crowned again.

  And so I had missed my chance with one of the lords of Life.

  Lawrence’s move – between September 1920, when he writes the first full poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and the completion of the manuscript in February 1923 – out of a strictly human and personal world into the world of the creatures, is an extraordinary liberation. These winged, beaked, taloned creatures, these slow-moving earth-creatures with carapace shells, and fish, bats, snakes, mosquitos – nature’s fantastic work of invention and play; these infinite variations on a life force that responds, with elegance and surprise and every condition of large and small, of quick and slow, in designs of so much surprise and utility and grace, call up in Lawrence a similar spirit of playful and inventive making. In his own spirit
of fantasy, and with the liveliest humour and wit, he becomes a psalmist and celebrant of the animist creed – lyric, parodic, lightly critical; a master of reflective observation; an imitator of nature’s own utilitarian caprice.

  No more brooding on whether or not he is loved. No more stewing over the smallness of human needs and views, or the way ‘mind’ perverts and desecrates the purities of sensation. The creatures are above or beyond all that. Their world is all instinct and immediacy, but clean, and since they know nothing of the moralities, guiltless. The joy Lawrence takes in their otherness is childlike, as Blake’s was; of a kind where innocence is a state beyond experience, but where one needs to come through experience to reach it. He never puts a foot wrong. Rhythm and cadence both follow and preclude sense, and contain and fix it. Entering into becomes a form of reflection, but also of self-reflection, each encounter producing its own tone and truth:

  When did you start your tricks,

  Monsieur?

  … Are you one too many for me Winged Victory?

  Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

  ‘Mosquito’

  Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides

  … joie de vivre, and fear, and food,

  All without love.

  To have the element under you like a lover I didn’t know his God.

  I didn’t know his God.

  Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us.

  ‘Fish’

  A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight.

  In China the bat is symbol of happiness.

  Not for me!

  ‘Bat’

  Challenger,

  Little Ulysses, fore-runner,