The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  By May 1909 he is asking de Lauris about ‘Guermantes’ (‘which must have been the name of some people as well as a place’), insisting in his next letter: ‘No, Georges, I am not writing a novel.’ By the next month, what he still refers to as ‘Sainte-Beuve’ (‘I’m hard at work on it though the results are execrable’) has already become the first draft of A la Recherche, and by mid-August he is offering it to a publisher, Vallette: ‘I am finishing a book which in spite of its provisional title, Contre Sainte-Beuve, souvenir d’une matinée, is a genuine novel and an extremely indecent one in places. One of the principal characters is a homosexual … Perhaps, before giving me a definitive answer, you would like to have a sample of this production. I could in a few days have the first hundred pages copied for you very legibly, or even typed. But they are of the greatest purity. If the thought of the others frightens you and you would like to be reassured on the point (there isn’t a hint of pornography) I can have a few passages copied for you but the text is not absolutely definitive.’

  Knowing what we do of Proust’s methods, and how the novel was to expand over the next decade and more, that last admission may raise a smile, but the point is that the first version of the book was already done.

  Of course it was not done, and never would be; it was a work that was to remain open till the very last to every sort of contingency. To the explosive effect of his developing relationship with the young chauffeur Agostinelli, who has been on the scene as early as August 1907, driving Proust round Normandy ‘like a cannonball’ while they looked at cathedrals, but as no more at that point than a charming servant; the equally explosive effects of the War.

  All that was still to come. What we see in these present letters, or rather do not see, is the crystallisation in Proust’s mind of all those diverse elements of his interest that, in a series of flashes we can only imagine, were to coalesce and take shape as a new substance altogether. It is a process any writer will recognise, but one that can never, while it is happening, be analysed, or later reconstructed: a sense, the moment a new work begins to seed, of the whole universe attending, taking an interest, turning itself as it were in the book’s direction, so that everything one comes across – in the daily papers, in the street, in what begins to come up out of the depths of memory – out of the depths too of an experience one may not yet have had – immediately finds a place there, in indissoluble connection. Proust tells us, and his correspondents, nothing of this, but that it was happening – that the points were beginning to connect – is undeniable in what suddenly, miraculously, appears. It was a process that was to go on till the very end; and we hear nothing of that, either.

  My own guess is that the key date for Proust was Tuesday, September 26, 1905, the day his mother died.

  He was a devoted son. Filial piety is a kind of religion with him. He never misses an opportunity here to write to a friend who has lost a parent – there are at least a dozen such letters; he even wrote to people he hardly knew, like Henry van Blarenbergh. His most passionate outburst in these volumes is over a novel whose author, Paul Léautaud, had committed the sin of treating family feeling with cynicism:

  But M. Léautaud’s Amours! I won’t speak of the book’s moral baseness, because I should be incapable of doing so. I don’t know any words that could express the pain I felt on seeing a human being feign sentiments beside which those of the cruellest murderer would be estimable …

  The phrase ‘the cruellest murderer’ sits oddly here when we recall Proust’s extraordinary essay ‘Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide’ (an ambiguous enough title) that he must have written in the same month, January 1907. The piece appeared in Figaro on February 1st.

  Henry van Blarenbergh, recipient of one of those famous letters of condolence on the death of his father, had stabbed his mother to death, then shot himself. Proust, in writing of the affair, raises what might have seemed, as he put it, a matter of mere ‘blood and madness’ to a point where it can be likened to ‘one of the Greek dramas, the performance of which was almost a sacred ceremony’. It ends with a paragraph that was cut by a sub-editor. We know this from an exchange here with Gaston Calmette, the editor of Figaro, in which Proust quotes the passage:

  ‘Let us remember that for the ancients there was no altar more sacred, surrounded with more profound superstition and veneration, betokening more grandeur and glory for the land that possessed them and had dearly disputed them, than the tomb of Oedipus, at Colonus, and the tomb of Orestes at Sparta, that same Orestes whom the Furies had pursued to the feet of Apollo himself and Athene, saying: “We drive from the altar the parricidal son.”’

  The death of his mother was sacred to Proust, there is no doubt of that, but the sacred for him had its terrible side, and he must have known, obscurely, and perhaps even consciously, that he could only come into full possession of his life, and of his work too, when she was gone; partly because certain aspects of his nature had to be hidden so long as she was there to be a witness of them, as we see in the emergence in his later letters of the Charlus in him, but also because, to become the centre about which he can begin to compose his book, she had to move into the most active part of his soul, into memory. Part of his horror of losing her, one feels – how large a part we can only guess – was the terror of what he would have, eventually, to do. Only he can have known at this point what this might be, and how the elements of the great possibility were more and more pushing him towards an act of final dedication and withdrawal.

  This second volume ends, very fittingly, with the work that was done at last to insulate him from the flushing of his neighbour’s cistern and all the ‘noise of the Boulevard, between Printemps and Saint Augustin’.

  This was in the apartment in his uncle’s house, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, which he subrented. The old apartment in the Rue de Courcelles, which he shared with his mother, like the family house at Illiers, was free now to enter the more fruitful realm of ‘time past’, of recall, and some of its furniture, as we see here in a letter to Mme Catusse, went into a depository, to be presented later (another odd note in the history of Proust’s filial piety) to the male brothel he helped finance for ‘Jupien’.

  Writing to Antoine Bibesco in July 1904, Proust says: ‘I’ve described my life since your departure exclusively in frivolous terms but you are well aware of course that “this is the apparent life” and that “the real life is underneath all this”.’ (He is quoting from Ruskin and in English.)

  These letters belong to the apparent life, but it is what is underneath that matters. The ‘apparent Proust’ we already know only too well, as a snob, a dilettante, a neurotic invalid, social butterfly, fusspot, closet ‘Salaïst’ or practiser of ‘Josephism’. What is not so well known is what a kind and considerate man he was (see the letters here to Mme Strauss), and how generous he could be:

  Too ill to reply to anything in your letter, to which I’ve so much to reply. But I wanted to write to you simply to say this trivial thing: You say that your prize gave you pleasure only because of the thirty louis. Do you then need money at the moment? As you know, I now alas have my little fortune at my own disposal. It isn’t very large since I can’t keep the only thing in the world I care about, the flat in which I’ve lived with Mama these last few years. But thank heavens it would enable me to put whatever you wanted at your disposal, if you had the least need of money. And with what pleasure. Don’t tire yourself answering me. Just a figure, if you want anything. (To Robert Dreyfus, around 25 June 1906)

  But there is also his larger and deeper compassion.

  After all the bitterness of the Dreyfus affair, whose shadow still hangs over these letters, and with the full account of it, in his case, still to come, he is able to write to Mme de Noailles of General Mercier’s appearance before the assembly on July 13, 1906:

  In spite of my great pity for General Mercier he’s an out-and-out scoundrel … All the same, when I think that I organised the first list in L’Aurore to demand a revision, an
d that so many politicians who were then wild anti-Dreyfusards now mortally insult on the floor of the House this old man of seventy-five who was courageous enough to appear, surrounded by a hostile pack, with nothing to say, knowing that he would have no argument to put forward except that the procedure (of the Court of Appeal!) had been irregular, illegal, and in camera! … It’s horrible to read, for even in the wickedest man there’s a poor innocent horse toiling away, with a heart, a liver and arteries in which there’s no malice, and which suffer.

  This points more clearly than the long parade of characters in these letters who might be ‘sources’, to what made A la Recherche possible, to what it was in the ‘apparent’ writer of these letters that was preparing ‘underneath’.

  Scripsi, 1989

  KAFKA

  I CAN THINK OF no twentieth-century writer, not even Proust, who works so close to the facts of his own life as Kafka; the facts, that is, of his inner life. As he put it in Letter to the Father in November 1919, ‘My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast … But how little all that amounted to! It is only worth talking about at all because it has happened in my life.’

  That life was over in 1924. Kafka was forty-one. But the works he left, the two unfinished novels, The Castle and The Trial, such stories as ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘Before the Law’, ‘The Burrow’, seem at this distance among the most personal responses we have to what happened in Europe in the two decades that followed his death: the development of opposing but related ideologies into murderous dictatorships of Left and Right, each with its own fanatical adherents, its departments of exemplary punishment under the Law, its secret police, informers, show trials, camps of correction, camps of extermination. In 1943–44 all three of Kafka’s sisters and their families disappeared into one or another of the killing machines of the Third Reich. Was Kafka unusually prescient?

  His own explanation is altogether simpler. He had merely, as he tells us – but to an intense degree – absorbed ‘the negative aspects of his own time’; by applying himself, with the forensic skill and meticulous attention to detail of the trained insider, to the world immediately around him: to its banalities, but also to what was comic and perverse and sinister and even monstrous in it, working outwards from his family and from the vantage point of a provincial capital of the highly bureaucratised Kaiserlich and Königlich Austro-Hungarian Empire of which he was himself an assiduous functionary.

  So many of the facts of Kafka’s life read like unlikely happenings from the stories. When the vast institution of the Empire collapsed at last in November 1918, after a humiliating defeat in the First World War and under the pressure for independence of its subject nations, a medal was on its way to Kafka for his years of dedicated service to a now vanished Emperor.

  The Kafkas were Czechs but German-speaking. After a brief period in the family business (his father Herman, the son of a country butcher from Southern Bohemia, was the owner of a large clothing warehouse on the outskirts of Prague), Kafka worked for a time in a legal office, served a year as intern in the law courts, then for fourteen years, from 1908 until his retirement in 1922 when he was already dying of tuberculosis, was an official of the semi-governmental Workers’ Accident Institute, for which he wrote three important reports: Mandatory Insurance in the Construction Industry and Measures to Prevent Accidents (in Factories and Farms), 1908, and Workers’ Accidents and Insurance Management, 1911 – titles that might go unremarked alongside ‘Report to an Academy’ and ‘Investigations of a Dog’ among the stories, and share with ‘The Burrow’ (‘Der Bau’) a meticulous concern with the minutiae of construction (Bau) and the many precautions that must be taken in the cause of insurance and safety. A good deal of what Kafka was occupied with at his place of work gets carried over, in a parodic way, into the stories, and the ‘office style’ that was in force there determines their tone, the disturbing dryness with which even the most appalling situation is presented as simply one of many variations on the normal; as in what is perhaps the best known of his stories, ‘Die Verwandlung’ of 1912, whose German title, with its native derivation, is plainer, more homely and down-to-earth than the one we know it by, ‘The Metamorphosis’.

  The members of a Prague family wake one morning in their comfortable apartment to find that their son and brother, a commercial traveller, in accordance with the body’s unpredictable laws of transformation, either in developing the symptoms of a disease (tuberculosis for example, or elephantiasis, or multiple sclerosis), or, in the psychosomatic manner proposed by such psychoanalysts as Freud, Georg Groddeck or the William Stekel of Onanism and Neurosis or Sadism and Masochism, has in a single night assumed the form – hard carapace, several thin legs like feelers – of a giant cockshafer or beetle. The story’s originality lies less in the fantastic nature of its events than in the attitude Gregor Samsa takes to his new condition and his family’s determination to treat it as a misfortune like any other; to be accepted, and quietly come to terms with, like any other of life’s unhappy vicissitudes.

  Kafka was never, like his contemporaries Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Musil, Hermann Broch, Stefan Zweig, a full-time professional writer. But from 1909 onwards he published regularly in newspapers and periodicals – some local, some within the wider German-speaking world – and between 1913 and 1924 printed five collections of his longer stories; a sixth, The Hunger Artist, went to the printers at the end of 1923 and was published in the Prager Presse on April 20, six weeks after his death.

  These are the works that Kafka refers to in the note he left for his friend Max Brod, who was to be his literary executor: ‘Of all my writings, the only books that can stand are these: The Judgement, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor and the story “The Hunger Artist”.’ If we except ‘The Burrow’, ‘The Great Wall of China’ and ‘Investigations of a Dog’, which are only technically unfinished, and the three novels, also unfinished, this constitutes all his major works of fiction. It was the novels, America, The Trial and The Castle, that he directed Brod to destroy.

  What this suggests is an ambitious and hard-working writer, deeply embedded in the dailiness of living and in his own culture and times. For all his private difficulties, he was neither isolated nor unrecognised. In close contact with other writers, widely read in all branches of German literature, he goes to lectures and public readings by visiting authors and critics, admires Dickens, goes to the movies and laughs; sees Wedekind’s Erdgeist (‘Lulu’) and finds it ‘clear, even in retrospect, so that one goes home peaceful and aware of oneself’; refreshes himself again and again, as Mann does, with the clarity and cheerfulness of Goethe; reads Lenz ‘incessantly – such is my state – he restores me to my senses’; discovers, in the midst of his own engagement difficulties, Kierkegaard, and finds ‘As I suspected, his case, despite the essential differences, is very similar to mine’; notes in his diary, ‘Afternoon at Werfel’s with Max Pick, read In the Penal Colony aloud, am not entirely dissatisfied except for its glaring faults … Werfel read some poems.’

  Two insights into the decisions he made as a writer are worth a closer look.

  One is from a diary entry of January 1912:

  It is easy to recognise in me a concentration of all my forces in writing. When it became clear to my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left me empty of all those activities which were directed towards joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflections, and above all music. Naturally I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself.

  It was late in the same year, on the night of September 22–23, that he wrote, in a single burst, ‘The Judgement’, the first story in which he felt his powers were fully expressed.

  The other is the second part of his posthumous directive to Brod:

  When I say that these five books may stand, I do not mean that I wish them to be rep
rinted 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 might want to, from keeping them.

  This sort of equivocation, this giving with one hand and taking back with the other, is typical. Kafka is forever torn between self-expression – self-display – and self-abnegation; the wish to put himself forward and assert his existence, to make his presence felt, and the wish to ‘disappear’; between ‘singing’, like the heroine of ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’ (in his case, reading his stories aloud), or performing on the variety stage like the Ape of ‘Report to an Academy’ – and silence.