The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  The urge to perform as a writer is as existentially necessary to him as singing is to Josephine, even if, as in her case, it is only ‘the usual squeaking’. It can be altruistic (Josephine’s singing somehow protects her endangered mouse folk) but is nonetheless in both senses ‘vain’. Firstly because it is open to the charge of self-indulgence; secondly because it leads nowhere, that is, ‘falls on deaf ears’. Then there is the case of the Hunger Artist whose equivalent of writing or singing is rigorously to abstain from food, which, however spectacular it may be as a public performance, has no existential justification at all. As he confesses on his deathbed, he starves himself ‘because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’ When the Hunger Artist is replaced in his cage, it is by a panther, a creature who behaves ‘naturally’, and does not starve himself, or sing like Josephine, or learn, like the Ape, to mimic humans, or justify his existence, as Kafka does, by writing, and he does not miss his freedom, either – that freedom that the Ape tells us was ‘not to be her choice’, because in the panther’s case ‘his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too’.

  For Kafka, the context for all these questions – freedom, spiritual nourishment, existential self-expression and fulfilment in writing – was the family.

  There was the expectation, for example, that he should marry and become a father himself. Marrying, as he puts it, ‘founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing’. His engagement to Felice Bauer, and the correspondence between them, makes up one part of the story, as does his second engagement, also broken, to Julie Wohryzek; and Kafka did in fact father a son: to one of Felice Bauer’s friends, Grete Bloch, though he never knew it. (The boy died, aged seven, in 1921; Bloch was murdered by a Nazi soldier in 1944.) But Kafka’s deepest engagement was with his father.

  ‘The Judgement’, the first of the finished stories with which he was genuinely pleased, deals with a low-key quarrel between father and son that ends in the son’s accepting the sentence of death his father has casually delivered, by rushing out of the house and drowning himself in the river below – the earliest dramatisation of a range of anxieties and obsessions that Kafka would explore more fully elsewhere: guilt before some unspecified but irresistible law; a court that is tyrannical but whose terms cannot be questioned; shame, self-immolation as an act of spiritual self-justification. But the son’s disproportionate reaction, and the story’s appeal not to psychology but to some more impersonal agency or force, leaves its meanings unclear. What it refers back to in Kafka’s own situation finds its clearest expression seven years later in the Letter, where the Father appears as a distant and unresponsive but undeniable stand-in for God.

  The Kafkas, father and son, were often in bitter disagreement. As an assimilated Jew, Herman Kafka was scathing, for example, of his son’s preoccupation with Jewishness. As early as 1911 Kafka writes in the diaries of ‘the Jewish question’ and its solution; of the ‘transitional state’, as he puts it, of European Jewry, whose end is at that point ‘unpredictable’.

  When, six months later, a troupe of Yiddish actors sets up in a Prague café, Kafka becomes one of their regular patrons (he speaks of a dozen plays), and his father warns him, ‘Whoever lies down with dogs gets up with fleas,’ a phrase Kafka never forgives, and which he refers to eight years later, in the Letter. Meanwhile Kafka turned to Jewish history, Talmudic studies, Jewish literature, and in December 1911 writes admiringly of such small national literatures as Yiddish and Czech, describing them as ‘the keeping of a diary by a nation, which is entirely different from historiography, and results in a more rapid (and yet always closely scrutinised) development’, though he thinks of himself as belonging to a larger one, German, and within that as being quite unconnected to its Jewish strand. As late as 1922 he distinguishes his particular tone and style from the kind of ingratiating appeal to an audience that the anti-semitic Hans Blüher identifies, in his Secessio Judaica, as unmistakeably ‘Jewish’.

  The immediate occasion of Letter to the Father was the failure, in November 1919, of Kafka’s last attempt to marry, which becomes, in the writing, his final effort to justify himself to the one judge whose approval he wants but who will never, he knows, grant it to him. Within the sphere of family theology it is also, and more importantly, Kafka’s definitive attempt to vindicate himself to the author of his existence:

  For me as a child, everything you shouted at me was positively a heavenly commandment. I never forgot it, it remained for me the most important means of forming a judgement of the world, above all of forming a judgement of yourself. And there you failed entirely. Since as a child I was together with you chiefly at meals, your teaching was to a large extent about proper behaviour at table. What was brought to the table had to be eaten up, there could be no discussion of the goodness of the food – but you yourself often found the food uneatable, called it ‘this swill’, said ‘that brute’ (the cook) had ruined it … Please understand me rightly, these would in themselves have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, the man who was so tremendously the measure of all things to me, yourself did not keep the commandments you imposed on me.

  The arbitrariness of the laws, the injustice of their imposition, opens up for the child here a vision both of the divine law and the laws of the state. The result is a formulation that anticipates, as more than one commentator has observed, the racial laws of two decades later, from which there was no escape because the crime had been created to fit the man: guilt was a question not of doing but of being. ‘The world,’ as Kafka puts it, ‘was divided for me into two parts … one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me, and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned only with government, with the issuing only of orders and with annoyance at their not being observed.’

  Readers of Kafka will immediately recognise here the situation of K in The Trial, but also that of the old man in ‘Before the Law’. What might also be recognisable is the spiritual state of the Kafkian hero, which, since it has its grounds in inequality of power, is also a political one: ‘I was continually in disgrace. Either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, since they applied after all only to me, or I was defiant, and that was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you; or I could not obey, for instance, because I had not your strength, your appetite, your skill, in spite of which you expected it of me as a matter of course; this was the greatest disgrace of all. What moved me in this way was not the child’s reflections but his feelings.’

  That last sentence is important because it relates not simply to the means by which Kafka understood his predicament but to what he was led by when he reproduced it, in so many forms, in his writing.

  It was, for example, by drawing on his own obsession with punishment, his own self-destructive need to make the realisation of guilt coincident with the moment of execution, that he was able to create, in ‘In the Penal Colony’, a situation that dramatises from both sides, that of executioner and victim, the punishment camps of a later decade. As it was through his own fanatical attachment to the source of tyrannical power, the father, that he is able to conceive, in the young officer of the story who climbs into his own death-machine, the most convincing image we have in fiction of the dedicated Nazi.

  Kafka knew all about these emerging types of his own generation, whose lives would fulfil themselves in a future he would not live to see, because he had already discovered in himself what they embodied of the ‘negative aspect’ of the time.

  As for the coming tyranny, the following passage is not, as we might imagine, a premonition of the Führer’s table-talk at Berchtesgaden but another evocation of the paterfamilias of Prag
ue:

  From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meschugge, not normal … You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left but yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person, not on reason.

  Speaking towards the end of the Letter of what writing meant to him, he says:

  I have already indicated that in writing and in what is connected with it, I have made some attempts to escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me. Nevertheless it is my duty to watch over them, or rather, my life consists in this, letting no danger that I can avert, indeed no possibility of such a danger, approach them. Marriage is the possibility of such a danger, admittedly also the possibility of the greatest advancement; for me however it is enough that it is a possibility of danger!

  Writing was the one area in which he could declare his independence. What he meant by that, and what he sacrificed to achieve it, is clear from an earlier passage:

  If I want to become independent in the particular unhappy relationship in which I stand to you, I must do something that will, if possible, have no relation to you at all; marrying is, it is true, the greatest thing of all and provides the most honourable independence, but it is at the same time in the closest relationship to you … Precisely this close relation does lure me towards marrying. I picture the equality that would arise between us, and which you would be able to understand better than any form of equality, as so beautiful precisely because I could then be a free, grateful, guiltless, upright son, and you could be an untroubled, untyrannical, sympathetic, contented father. But to this end it would be necessary to make all that has happened as though it never happened, which means we ourselves would have to be cancelled out. Being what we are, marrying is barred to me through the fact that it is precisely and peculiarly your most intimate domain.

  The painful irony here is that the real cancelling out, the refusal to propagate, the destruction of the line, is accepted in favour of the moral cancelling out of one’s own experience. But this acceptance of extinction in fact, while asserting the continuance of moral and spiritual existence, is exactly what Kafka is all about. It is like the end of The Trial, where Josef K dies ‘like a dog’. ‘“Like a dog!” he said,’ and then, as that famous sentence goes on, ‘it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him’.

  That shame, both for himself as victim and for his executioners, is the small assertion of identity, of having once been alive and present, that survives for Kafka as the expression of a fate, an individual existence and end, that has been willingly embraced.

  Few of the stories reach this point. But the dry precision of Kafka’s narrative, unlike the baroque playfulness of later fabulists, is itself an acceptance of fate. The circumstances may be repeatable and therefore ordinary, but they are made extraordinary by being accepted (claimed) by the protagonist as uniquely his. Fate as Kafka reveals it is a series of events in which the end is determined the moment the various Ks of the novels or stories accept that this, and this only, is the life, the story they are in.

  The hypersensitive canine in ‘Investigations of a Dog’, one of the last of these stories (summer 1922), is concerned, like his creator, with ultimate questions: canine nature, the earth and the sources within it of ‘nurture’, the ‘incantations’ that are associated with nurture, and, as the canine puts it, a question that is especially close to Kafka, ‘How long will you be able to endure the fact that the world of dogs, as your researches make more and more evident, is pledged to silence and always will be?’

  This dog, like the Hunger Artist, devotes himself to fasting, but unlike the Hunger Artist he does it in good faith, since, though in the canine world fasting is forbidden, he believes that ‘the highest effort among us is voluntary starving’.

  Close to death from hunger, he is visited by a beautiful hound, a hunting dog who insists that he move off. The canine refuses: ‘For I noticed – and new life ran through me, life such as terror gives – I noticed from almost invisible indications, which perhaps nobody but myself could have noticed, that in the depths of his chest the hound was preparing to upraise a song. “You’re going to sing,” I said. “Yes,” he said gravely, “I am going to sing, soon, but not yet.” “You’re beginning it already,” I said … “I can hear it already, though you deny it,” I said trembling … the melody, which the hound soon seemed to acknowledge as his, was irresistible … But the worst was that it seemed to exist solely for my sake …’ – once again like the door in ‘Before the Law’, through which only one man could enter and was closed to him, but which here is open.

  This story (with its prohibitions against fasting, which the canine defies, its imposition of silence, which is also defied), though it too is unfinished and full of essential contradictions, is suspended on a positive note.

  We might recall that in speaking, in a diary entry of 1911, of what the necessity of writing had emptied him of, what Kafka saw as standing above all else, even sex and eating, was music. Now, what the canine turns to at last as being, for canines, the link between nurture and earth, is ‘incantation’; and though music, like fasting, is forbidden, and he has no talent for it, he recognises in his need to pursue the science of music an ‘instinct – singular perhaps – but by no means a bad one’.

  The dog has previously admitted that ‘the only strange thing about me is my nature, yet even that, as I am always careful to remember, has its foundation in universal dog nature’. He is one of those who, like his creator, is ‘crushed by the silence, and longs to break through it; literally, to get a breath of fresh air’.

  In the final words of this almost final story, Kafka goes beyond anything, I think, in the rest of his writings: ‘It was this instinct,’ he writes, ‘that made me – and perhaps for the sake of science itself, but a different science from that of today, an ultimate science – prize freedom higher than everything else. Freedom! Certainly such freedom as is possible today is a wretched business. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession.’

  Nation Review, 1978

  (revised and expanded, 2010)

  THE MIDDLE PARTS OF FORTUNE – HER PRIVATES WE

  ‘It is good that a man should throw dice with God once in his life’

  – Frederic Manning, Letter to William

  Rothenstein, July 1916

  FREDERIC MANNING WAS AN Australian from a well-to-do Catholic family; his father was Lord Mayor of Sydney. He came to England, aged fifteen, in 1897, with his tutor Arthur Howard Galton, and lived until 1921 at Edenham near Bourne in Lincolnshire, where Galton was vicar. A classical scholar, intellectually refined and disablingly fastidious, he wrote for the Spectator and Eliot’s Criterion, was close for a time to Pound and later to T. E. Lawrence, and between 1907 and 1926 published one long poem, The Vigil of Brunhild, two slim volumes of verse, a series of imaginary conversations, Scenes and Portraits, on philosophical themes (the conflict between Fate and individual will), and the introduction to a study of Epicurus. In all ways unlikely, one might have thought, to be the anonymous author of a book whose ‘language’, when it was published in 1929 – the same year as All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms and Goodbye to All That – caused a minor sensation, and which Hemingway would call ‘the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have read’. But then, everything about The Middle Parts of Fortune is unlikely.

  Between August and December 1916, Manning, already in his middle thirties, had served as a private on the Somme. He wrote The Middle Parts of Fortune, in just a few weeks of intense productivity, on the urging of the publisher Peter Davies, to whom it is dedicated: ‘To Peter Davies who made me write it’. Davies, who knew his man, took the manuscript ‘sheet by sheet’ before Manning could re-write it out of existence. ‘What
an escape!’ the author admits. Originally published in a limited edition by ‘Private 19022’, it was quickly cleaned up for general release under the new title Her Privates We and sold fifteen thousand copies in three months. The original text was not reprinted until 1977.

  Manning’s protagonist, Bourne (we never learn his first name), though educated and a ‘gentleman’, is a private as Manning was, with no desire for the commission he is so frequently urged to seek. He has friends in England who shower him with parcels, but except for a farmer’s wife who sends him a pork pie they are not identified and we hear nothing of Bourne’s relations with them. He comes to us, good-humoured and gregarious as he is, with no past history and no evolving history in the present. Manning calls his spirit ‘ironic’, refers to a ‘malicious imp in his heart’, and remarks, in passing, that his tendency to take no part in his fellow privates’ lively debates springs from a sense of ‘isolation … since he was not of their county, or their country, or their religion, and he was only partly of their race’. This is both very precise and not, and we hear no more of it. Otherwise we see of Bourne only what belongs to action, observation, reflection in the here and now, with no backward glances.

  This is unusual in the central character of a novel; but only perhaps if what we have in mind is the English-language novel of class and character. Manning seems closer here to some of his European contemporaries – Kafka, Musil, Hermann Broch – than to Forster or D. H. Lawrence. For all that The Middle Parts of Fortune is so often praised for its realism, its refusal to idealise or conventionalise brute fact, what is more characteristic of Manning is the ease with which he moves from the actual to the abstract or metaphysical; as when, observing the perplexity of men on an exercise that takes them over one landscape as practice for an attack on another, he tells us: ‘What they really needed was a map of the strange country through which their minds would travel on the day, with fear darkening earth and filling it with slaughter.’