The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  66

  Journey to the Interior

  WHEN Dante thanked Brunetto Latini for teaching him “how man becomes eternal” through the written word, he was speaking for the Western tradition. The writer aimed to create something with an independent life outside himself. But the writer who chronicled a world inside himself could well believe that world was bounded by his life. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) repeatedly said, “I consist of literature, and am unable to be anything else.” When he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-one in a sanatorium outside Vienna on June 3, 1924, he left notes to his friend Max Brod instructing him to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts and not to republish any of his works already printed. By then Kafka had published only fragments from his prodigious imagination.

  If Brod had obeyed his friend’s instructions, Kafka would hardly be known to the world of letters. But Kafka was in character when he left his instructions to the one person in the world who had his complete confidence and who therefore could be trusted (as he had assured Kafka in advance) not to carry out these instructions. So Kafka’s writings survive in an aura of uncertainty whether he even intended them to reach us. Kafka’s fame in Western letters is itself a tease, fruit of the loyal disobedience of his closest friend.

  Kafka created a whole new world of rich ambivalence and tantalizing ambiguities. Even as a young man of twenty-one, before he had begun serious writing, he seemed clear enough on the kind of books that should be written.

  I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

  (Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger)

  Within himself Kafka would create adventures as engrossing as Gargantua’s Parisian frolics or Don Quixote’s knightly sallies. In his short, sedentary, tuberculosis-ridden life, he lived centuries “in my own interior.”

  Born in Prague to a prosperous Jewish family in 1883, he went there to school and university. He made his living in Prague and took only brief summer trips to the countryside, to Paris, Switzerland, and Berlin, and a week’s pilgrimage with Brod to Goethe’s Weimar. His last eight years were spent in hospitals and sanatoriums.

  Kafka’s life was surrounded by inhibitions, of which his father, Hermann, became the unpleasant symbol. From the countryside, Hermann Kafka had come to Prague, married the daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, and prospered as a merchant in fancy goods. As he climbed the social ladder in the status-conscious Jewish community, he remained acutely conscious of status. Kafka recorded later in his undelivered “Letter to His Father” the sources of his fear. As a child one night he kept whimpering for water, and would not stop after repeated warnings. His father came into the bedroom, snatched him up, carried him out to the balcony in his nightgown, and locked the door. “I subsequently became a rather obedient child, but I suffered inner damage as a result.… I kept being haunted by fantasies of this giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night, and for almost no reason at all dragging me out of bed onto the balcony—in other words, that as far as he was concerned, I was an absolute Nothing.” His acquiescent mother could not repair the damage, nor was she a bulwark against Hermann’s uncomprehending hostility to Franz’s literary life.

  Kafka’s obsession with the father-son relationship even led him once to give Hermann a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Kafka hoped Franklin’s description of his pleasant relationship with his own father, in a memoir written for his son, would awaken Hermann to their problem. But Hermann sarcastically dismissed the gift as a feeble defense of Kafka’s vegetarianism.

  The very language that Franz spoke and in which he would write was an instrument of oppression. From Vienna, German-speaking emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, seeing the Czech language as a vehicle of disloyalty, separation, and disorder, required the education of the literate classes in German. In Franz’s youth the bitter language question was agitated with violence. Hermann Kafka himself was at home in the Czech language, which helped his business in Czech-speaking Prague. But Franz went to German-speaking schools, received his law degree from the German university in Prague, and wrote in German. Still, he sympathized with the Czech independence movement, and occasionally attended Czech mass meetings and debates.

  The grand constricting and nourishing fact of Franz’s life was his Jewishness. The repression of Jews, a leitmotif of all European history, had touched Kafka’s own family. Franz’s grandfather, Jakob Kafka, born in a one-room shack in a Czech village in 1814, was the second of nine children. “A surly giant of a man,” reputed to be able to lift a bag of potatoes with his teeth, he made his living as a kosher butcher. Under the Austro-Hungarian laws designed to curb the Jewish population, only the eldest son in any Jewish family was allowed a marriage license. And since Jakob had a stepbrother elder by a year, he could not marry or have legitimate children. After the Revolution of 1848 the Hapsburg monarchs, desperate for an antidote to the rising demands of contending nationalities, sought to make allies of the Jewish peddlers and moneylenders. They granted full citizenship to all the Jews in the empire, which included the right to settle in cities, to enter previously closed trades and professions, and to marry at will. The thirty-four-year-old Jakob could finally get married, which he promptly did, to the daughter of his next-door neighbor.

  Franz’s father, Hermann, was of the first generation of “liberated” Jews. Along with many others, Franz’s family seized the opportunity to become “non-Jewish Jews—Austrian citizens of the Mosaic faith.” “At bottom, your guiding faith in life,” Franz wrote in his “Letter to His Father,” “consisted of the belief that the opinions of a certain Jewish social class were unassailably correct; since these opinions were also part and parcel of your own personality, you actually believed in yourself. Even this still contained enough Judaism, but not enough to pass on to the child; it dribbled away in the process. Part of the problem was the impossibility of passing on the memories of one’s youth, the other was the fear you inspired.” Franz’s “religion” remained uncertain and elusive, but his Jewish identity was never in doubt. Yet his boredom in the synagogue, the rowdiness of the Passover Seder, the charade of the bar mitzvah, led him to think that “getting rid of the faith” might be “the most reverential of acts.” Now that the Jews were no longer living in their ghetto, his Jewishness separated him by an invisible wall.

  This Jewish sense of being different was all the more tantalizing because it was not closely tied to dogma or ritual but consisted only of being thought of by the world and oneself as indelibly different. Its residue, a sense of “otherness,” of living in a larger community but not being wholly part of it and not quite understanding why not, would qualify Kafka to be the prophet and the acknowledged spokesman of modern man’s sense of “alienation.” The story of Kafka’s life is how these and other forces pushed him back into himself, and made him a pioneer into the wilderness that he would explore and re-create in words.

  Kafka’s qualifications to express twentieth-century man’s bewilderment were reinforced by the bureaucratic routine of his own employment and his observation of the industrial technology that he could only partly comprehend and could not control. No dweller on any Left Bank, he earned his living in the mainstream of the new industrial bureaucracy. After receiving his law degree at the university, and serving the legal internship for the civil service, he secured through his uncle’s influence a job in the Prague branch of an Italian insurance company. Oppressed by the meager pay for nine hours a day
for six days a week, he dreamed “of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries.”

  Within a year, in 1908, the father of a schoolmate helped him move to a position at the Workers Insurance Company for the kingdom of Bohemia. This company, half private, half public, had been set up in Prague following Bismarck’s example, to give Czech workers their rights to accident insurance against injuries on the job. Luckily this was a “single shift” job from 8:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. six days a week, and would be Kafka’s only paid position for the rest of his life. Workmen were not getting their rights, and “the company seemed little more than a dead body, whose sole sign of life was its growing deficit.” The situation soon changed with a new director who was willing to resist the employers’ violent protests. In the insurance company, according to his superiors, the twenty-five-year-old Kafka showed “superb administrative talent” by filing papers for injured workers, drafting policy statements on compulsory insurance, and writing brochures to inform workers of their rights.

  To discover and prevent risks on the job, Kafka was assigned to inspect neighboring factories outside Prague in the rapidly growing industrial complex of northern Bohemia. There he viewed the costs of the new industry, in fingers lost and arms and legs crippled. He was both impressed and discouraged by the “modesty” of the men. “They come to us and beg. Instead of storming the company and smashing it to little pieces, they come to us and beg.” The hopeless quest for justice glimpsed in The Trial and The Castle was rooted in this personal experience. “Wept over the account of the trial of twenty-three-year-old Marie Abraham, who, through want and hunger, strangled her almost nine-month-old child with a tie which she was using as a garter and which she unwound for the purpose. A thoroughly typical story.”

  At the insurance company he was supposed to classify trades by their degrees of risk and to find ways to prevent accidents. Apparently he never thought of himself as a first-class bureaucrat, despite the high opinion his superiors held of him. Noting a certain naiveté, they admired his regularity, his devotion to duty, and his good nature. Kafka was on his way to a respectable career.

  But in 1912, the turning point of his life, he became a born-again Man of Letters. “Who is to confirm for me the truth or probability of this,” he wrote in his March diary, “that it is only because of my literary mission that I am uninterested in all other things and therefore heartless.” This destiny, he explained to himself, was shaped by “my talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life … my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle.”

  We do not know the precise cause of his self-discovery. One element may have been his summer pilgrimage with Brod to Weimar pursuing the spirit of Goethe and Schiller. Using the additional vacation he had because of “a pathological nervous condition manifesting itself in nearly continuous digestive disturbances and sleep problems,” he went for a three weeks’ “cure” to Justs Jungborn (Just’s Fountain of Youth), an open-air resort in the Harz mountains that featured nudism, vegetarianism, and Eastern mysticism. With the motto “Light, Air, Mud, Water,” the resort was known to specialize in “raw vegetables and uncooked ideas.” In the “sun-and-air parks” guests walked about naked, but Kafka refused to conform and so was called “the man in the swim trunks.” Outside they wore “reform” clothing and sandals designed by the proprietor, who lectured on “Nature and Christianity.” The Jungborn vegetarian diet that Kafka followed in later years emphasized “various nut meats—which must be recognized as the central ingredient in human nourishment.” There was a Bible in every room and Kafka seems then to have made his first effort to read both the New and the Old Testaments. Unfortunately nudism and vegetarianism were not strong enough medicine for what ailed his body.

  At twenty-nine, Kafka had discovered himself as a writer, as he recorded in his diary for September, 1912:

  This story, “The Judgement,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water.… How everything can be said, how, for everything, for the strangest fancies there awaits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.… Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and soul.

  (Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger)

  A parable of Kafka’s life, “The Judgment” is a bizarre tale of a son who decides to marry, and is about to write the news to an old friend in Russia. He goes to his aged father to ask whether he should send the letter. The father, unaccountably offended, accuses the son of deceiving him. “You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there? I don’t believe it.” Upset by the son’s “deception” the father collapses and the son puts him gently to bed. Then the father confesses that he himself has been writing to that friend, who “knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letters unopened while in his right hand he holds up my letters to be read through.” After another accusatory interchange, the father concludes, “An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly you have been a devilish human being!—and therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!” At which the son rushes out of the house, leaps over the railing at the water’s edge, and into the water to drown. “Dear parents,” the son exclaims as he leaps, “I have always loved you all the same.”

  In the next months Kafka began to write Amerika. Then he wrote his best-known piece, “The Metamorphosis,” which he called an “exceptionally repulsive story.” Gregor Samsa, an ordinary traveling salesman living with his father, mother, and sister, awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. At first, in his “regular human bedroom,” he tries to ignore his transformation, but his family cannot. Since Gregor can no longer contribute to the family support, they must take in boarders. The family tries to keep him confined to his room, but they cannot, nor do they feed him properly. The horrified boarders move out. To the family’s relief, Gregor the insect dies. Then his sister “bloomed into a pretty girl with a good figure … it would soon be time to find a good husband for her.”

  Kafka had begun his ceaseless exploring of the wilderness within, both stimulated and obstructed by abortive love affairs. In his “Letter to His Father” he blamed Hermann for not having prepared him for the good life—“marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and even guiding them a little.” In August 1912, at Max Brod’s house, he met Brod’s distant relative Felice Bauer, who was twenty-four and had come from Berlin on her firm’s business. He was much taken by her but the next morning was already worried that she had distracted him from his revision of Amerika with some “stupidity.” They announced their engagement in June 1914, but broke it off stormily in a few months, while he explained to himself that it was “because he felt chained by invisible chains to an invisible literature.”

  And now he was relieved at “the feeling that my monotonous, empty, mad bachelor’s life has some justification. I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness.” His health was already weak enough to make him “physically unfit for military service,” and he was not drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. In March 1917 he was once again engaged to Felice. Then one morning that summer, to his horror, Kafka began spitting blood, disclosing the “illness which had been coaxed into revealing itself after [five years of] headaches and sleeplessness.” The doctor gave him a Kafkaesque reassurance. “All city dwellers are tubercular anyway, an inflammation of the lung tips (one of those figures of speech, like saying piglet when you mean big fat sow)
isn’t all that terrible; a few tuberculin injections will take care of it.” But he would never recover.

  All the rest of his life he would be taking intermittent sick leave, trying one sanatorium after another, as described in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Tuberculosis would force him to take his pension and retire from his insurance job in 1922, at the age of thirty-nine. This now provided still another reason to break off his engagement to Felice, and Kafka welcomed so “miraculous” a release from office routine. He gave an inward and conspiratorial explanation of his disease:

  What happened was that the brain could no longer endure the burden of worry and suffering heaped upon it. It said: “I give up; but should there be someone else interested in the maintenance of the whole, then, he must relieve me of some of my burden and things will still go on for a while.” Then the lung spoke up, though it probably hadn’t much to lose anyhow. These discussions between brain and lung which went on without my knowledge may have been terrible.

  (Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger)

  Naturally he saw his father in this conspiracy. “If my father in earlier days was in the habit of uttering wild but empty threats, saying: I’ll tear you apart like a fish—in fact, he did not so much as lay a finger on me—now the threat is being fulfilled independently of him. The world—F[elice] is its representative—and my ego are tearing my body apart in a conflict that there is no resolving.”