by Alan Bennett
Truthfully Mr Jay wants a tale of sun and lust but daunted by Miss Venables’s unprepossessing appearance he lamely opts for Mystery. She gives him a copy of The Trial
How The Trial comes to be classified under Mystery is less of a mystery than how it comes to be on the trolley at all. In fact it had originally formed part of the contents of the locker of a deceased lecturer in Modern Languages and had been donated to the hospital library by his grateful widow, along with his copy of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. This Miss Venables has classified under Children and Fairy Stories. So leaving Mr Jay leafing listlessly through Kafka she passes on with her trolley to other wards and other disappointments.
It does not take Mr Jay long to realize that he has picked another dud, and one even harder to read than Howards End. What is to be made of such sentences as ‘The verdict doesn’t come all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict.’? Mr Jay has a headache. He puts The Trial on his locker beside the bottle of Lucozade and the Get Well cards and tries to sleep, but can’t. Instead he settles back and thinks about his body. These days he thinks about little else. The surgeon Mr Mclver has told him he is a mystery. Matron says he has baffled the doctors. So Mr Jay feels like somebody special. Now they come for him and he is carefully manoeuvred under vast machines by aproned figures, who then discreetly retire. Later, returned to his bed, he tries again to read but feels so sick he cannot read his book even if he really wanted to. And that is a pity. Because Mr Jay might now begin to perceive that The Trial is not a mystery story and that it is not particularly about the law or bureaucracy or any of the things the editor’s note says it is about. It is about something nearer home, and had he come once again upon the sentence ‘The verdict doesn’t come all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict’ Mr Jay might have realized that Kafka is talking to him. It is his story.
In the short story Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa wakes up as a beetle. Nabokov, who knew about beetles, poured scorn on those who translated or depicted the insectified hero as a cockroach. Kafka did not want the beetle depicted at all but for the error of classification he is largely to blame. It was Kafka who first brought up the subject of cockroaches though in a different story, Wedding Preparations in the Country. ‘I have, as I lie in bed,’ he writes, ‘the form of a large beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I believe.’ Cockroach or not, Gregor Samsa has become so famous waking up as a beetle I am surprised he has not been taken up and metamorphosed again, this time by the advertising industry. Since he wakes up as a beetle why should he not wake up as a Volkswagen? Only this time he’s not miserable but happy. And so of course is his family. Why not? They’ve got themselves a nice little car. The only problem is how to get it out of the bedroom.
The first biography of Kafka was written by his friend and editor Max Brod. It was Brod who rescued Kafka’s works from oblivion, preserved them and, despite Kafka’s instructions to the contrary, published them after his death. Brod, who was a year younger than Kafka (though one somehow thinks of him as older), lived on until 1968. The author of innumerable essays and articles, Brod published some eighty-three books, one for every year of his life. Described in The Times obituary as ‘himself an author of uncommonly versatile stamp’ he turned out novels at regular intervals until the end of his life, the last one being set during the Arab–Israeli war. These novels fared poorly with the critics and were one able to collect the reviews of his books one would find few, I imagine, that do not somewhere invoke the name of Kafka, with the comparison inevitably to Brod’s disadvantage. This cannot have been easy to take. He who had not only erected Kafka’s monument but created his reputation never managed to struggle out of its shadow. He could be forgiven if he came to be as dubious of Kafka’s name as Kafka was himself.
Never quite Kafka’s wife, after Kafka’s death Brod’s role was that of the devoted widow, standing guard over the reputation, authorizing the editions, editing the diaries and driving trespassers from the grave. However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.
Kafka was a minor executive in an insurance company in Prague. In Kafka’s Dick this fact is picked up by another minor executive in another insurance firm, but in Leeds seventy-odd years later. Sydney, as the insurance man, decides to do a piece on Kafka for an insurance periodical (I imagine there are such, though I’ve never verified the fact). As he works on his piece Sydney comes to resent his subject, as biographers must often do. Biographers are only fans after all, and fans have been known to shoot their idols.
‘Why biography?’ asks his wife.
Sydney’s answer is less of a speech than an aria, which is probably why it was cut from the play
I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men, their fears and their failings. I’ve had enough of their vision, how they altered the landscape (we stand on their shoulders to survey our lives). So. Let’s talk about the vanity. Read how this one, the century’s seer, increases his stature by lifts in his shoes. That one, the connoisseur of emptiness, is tipped for the Nobel Prize yet still needs to win at Monopoly. This playwright’s skin is so thin he can feel pain on the other side of the world. So why is he deaf to the suffering next door; signs letters to the newspapers but holds his own wife a prisoner of conscience? The slipshod poet keeps immaculate time and expects it of everyone else, but never wears underwear and frequently smells. That’s not important, of course, but what is? The gentle novelist’s frightful temper, the Christian poet’s mad, unvisited wife, the hush in their households where the dog goes on tiptoe, meals on the dot at their ironclad whim? Note with these great men the flight and not infrequent suicide of their children, their brisk remarriage on the deaths of irreplaceable wives. Proud of his modesty one gives frequent, rare interviews in which he aggregates praise and denudes others of credit. Indifferent to the lives about him he considers his day ruined on finding a slighting reference to himself in a periodical published three years ago in New Zealand. And demands sympathy from his family on that account. And gets it. Our father the novelist, my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages, just don’t catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
Death took no chances with Kafka and laid three traps for his life. Parched and voiceless from TB of the larynx, he was forty, the victim, as he himself said, of a conspiracy by his own body. But had his lungs not ganged up on him there was a second trap, twenty years down the line when the agents of death would have shunted him, as they did his three sisters, into the gas chambers. That fate, though it was not to be his, is evident in his last photograph. It is a face that prefigures the concentration camp.
But say that in 1924 he cheats death and a spell in the sanatorium restores him to health. In 1938 he sees what is coming – Kafka after all was more canny than he is given credit for, not least by Kafka himself – and so he slips away from Prague in time. J. P. Stern imagines him fighting with the partisans; Philip Roth finds him a poor teacher of Hebrew in Newark, New Jersey. Whatever his future when he leaves Prague he becomes what he has always been, a refugee. Maybe (for there is no harm in dreams) he even lives long enough to find himself the great man he never knew he was. Maybe (the most impossible dream of all) he actually succeeds in putting on weight. So where is death now? Waiting for Kafka in some Park Avenue consulting room where he goes with what he takes to be a recurrence of his old chest complaint.
‘Quite curable now, of course. TB. No problem. However, regarding your chest you say you managed a factory once?’
‘Yes. For my brother-in-law. For three or four years.’
‘When was that?’
‘A long time ago. It closed in 1917. In Prague.’
‘What kind of factory was it?’
; ‘Building materials. Asbestos.’
This is just a dream of Kafka’s death. He is famous, the owner of the best-known initial in literature and we know he did not die like this. Others probably did. In Prague the consulting rooms are bleaker but the disease is the same and the treatment as futile. These patients have no names, though Kafka would have known them, those girls (old ladies now) whom he describes brushing the thick asbestos dust from their overalls, the casualties of his brother-in- law’s ill-starred business in which Hermann, his father, had invested. A good job his father isn’t alive, the past master of ‘I told you so’.
In the last weeks of his life Kafka was taken to a sanatorium in the Wienerwald and here, where the secret of dreams had been revealed to Freud, Kafka’s dreams ended.
On the window sill the night before he died Dora Dymant found an owl waiting. The owl has a complex imagery in art. Just as in Freudian psychology an emotion can stand for itself and its opposite, so is the owl a symbol of both darkness and light. As a creature of the night the owl was seen as a symbol of the Jews who, turning away from the light of Christ, were guilty of wilful blindness. On the other hand the owl was, as it remains, a symbol of wisdom. It is fitting that this bird of ambiguity should come to witness the departure of a man who by belief was neither Christian nor Jew, and who had never wholeheartedly felt himself a member of the human race. He had written of himself as a bug and a mouse, both the natural prey of the bird now waiting outside the window.
Alan Bennett
1987
Characters
Kafka
Brod
Linda
Father
Sydney
Hermann Κ
Kafka’s Dick was first performed in an earlier version at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 23rd September, 1986. The cast was as follows:
Kafka, Roger Lloyd Pack
Brod, Andrew Sachs
Linda, Alison Steadman
Father, Charles Lamb
Sydney, Geoffrey Palmer
Hermann K, Jim Broadbent
Julie, Vivian Pickles
Director, Richard Eyre
Designer, William Dudley
Lighting Designer, Mark Henderson
Sound, Christopher Shutt
Music, Effects and Arrangements, George Fenton
Dances, David Toguri
Act One
SCENE 1
The date is immaterial, though it is around 1919.
Kafka, a tall, good-looking man is sitting in a chair, dying. Max Brod, his friend, is smaller, slightly hump backed, and very much alive.
Kafka Max.
Brod I hoped you were sleeping.
Kafka Max.
Pause.
Brod What?
Kafka I think I shall die soon.
Brod says nothing.
Did you hear me, Max?
Brod Let’s cross that bridge when you come to it. You’ve said you were dying before.
Kafka I know. But I won’t let you down this time, I promise.
Brod Kafka, I want you to live.
Kafka Forgive me. If I die …
Brod What’s this if? He says he’s dying then suddenly it’s ‘if’. Don’t you mean ‘when’?
Kafka When I die I want you to do me a favour.
Brod Come to the funeral, you mean? Look, this is Max, your best friend. I’ll be up there in the front row.
Kafka No. The funeral can take care of itself.
Brod Pardon me for saying so, but that’s typical of your whole attitude to life. A funeral does not take care of itself.
Kafka (overlapping) I know, Max. I know.
Brod Take the eats for a start. You’re dealing with grief- stricken people. They want to be able to weep secure in the knowledge that once you’re in the grave the least they’ll be offered will be a choice of sandwiches.
Kafka But after the funeral … this is very important … I want you to promise me something, Max. You must burn everything I’ve ever written.
Brod No.
Kafka Stories, novels, letters. Everything.
Brod What about the royalties?
Kafka I’ve published one novel and a few short stories. Does it matter?
Brod But where would they go in a bereavement situation?
Kafka My father, where else? Which is another reason to burn them. I’ve got stuff in technical periodicals to do with my work at the insurance company. Don’t worry about that …
Brod But the rest I burn, right?
Kafka Yes.
Brod That is your honest decision?
Kafka Cross my heart and hope to die.
Brod That’s not saying much; you are going to die.
Kafka Max, I mean it. All my works burned. Understand?
Brod All your works burned.
Kafka Everything. When I go, they go. Finish.
Brod You’ve got it. Message received and understood.
Pause. Brod starts to go.
Kafka Where are you going?
Brod To buy paraffin.
Kafka Max. Stay a minute. After all, my writings are worthless. They wouldn’t survive anyway. They don’t deserve to survive.
Pause.
Don’t you think so?
Brod You’re the one who’s dying. I’m Max, your faithful friend. You say burn them, I burn them. (Going again) Maybe I’ll get petrol instead.
Kafka Max! (Pause.) If you want to read them first, feel free … just to remind you.
Brod (going again) No. I read them when you wrote them. If I’m going to burn them I may as well press on and burn them. Only …
Kafka (brightening) What?
Brod Well, I ask myself, are we missing an opportunity here? Why not juice up the occasion? … Ask one or two people over, split a bottle of vino, barbecue the odd steak then as a climax to the proceedings flambé the Collected Works? Anyway, old friend, don’t worry. All will be taken care of.
Kafka Good. Still, if in fact you can’t get hold of all my stuff, no matter. Some of it has been published. It could be anywhere.
Brod You’re kidding. I mean, what are we saying here? This is your faithful friend, Max. Kafka wants his stuff burned, Max will find it and burn it. It won’t be difficult. You’d be surprised how helpful people are when it’s a dying wish.
Kafka But I’m in libraries, Max. You can’t burn them. Metamorphosis, my story about a man who wakes up as a beetle. That’s in libraries. Ah well. I shall just have to live with that.
Brod Don’t be so negative. Here’s the plan. I go to the library, borrow your books, go back and say they’ve been stolen. Then it’s burn, baby, burn.
Kafka Some are in America. London. Paris.
Brod So? I’ve always wanted an excuse to travel. I can’t wait. Max Brod. Search and destroy! (Pause.) Hey, you look really depressed.
Kafka Wouldn’t you be depressed? I’m dying.
Pause.
Brod Look. Vis-à-vis your books. I’ve just had a thought.
Kafka (clutching at a straw) Yes?
Brod Maybe I won’t burn everything. Not every single copy. Could you live with that?
Kafka Well … I … I’m not sure. I really wanted them burnt …
Brod Can I just let you in on my thinking? We’re in 1920 now, right? You’re going to die soon … give a year, take a year, say 1924 at the outside. Well, less than ten years later we get the Nazis, right? And, as prefigured in some of your as yet unrecognized masterpieces (which I’m going to burn, I know, I know), the Nazis seize power and put into operation the full apparatus of totalitarian bureaucracy.
Kafka Max, I saw it coming.
Brod You did.
Kafka Would that history had proved me wrong, Max.
Brod Would that it had. Only, tragically it didn’t. Because in 1933 the Nazis are scheduled to stage their infamous Burning of the Books …
Kafka Burn books? Who in his right mind would want to burn books? They must be sick.
Brod The Nazis r
ansack libraries for what they term decadent literature. Film shows Brownshirts bringing out books by the armful and casting them into the flames.
Kafka In civilized Europe! I can’t bear it. It’s tragic. It’s insane. (Pause.) Max. Which books in particular?
Brod Freud. Proust. Rilke. Brecht.
Kafka Er … anybody else?
Brod Hemingway. Thomas Mann. Gide. Joyce …
Kafka Max … Don’t I figure?
Brod Well, this is the point… I’ll have burnt your stuff already.
Kafka But nobody will know that.
Brod Exactly. People will look at the credits and say: They burnt Proust. They burnt Brecht. They burnt Joyce. Where is Kafka? Not worth burning, maybe.
Kafka God. I was depressed before. Now I’m suicidal.
Brod Maybe I can fix it.
Kafka You think?
Brod I can see it now: a shot of flames licking round a book jacket, the name Kafka prominently placed.
Kafka Dreadful.
Brod Sure, but burn one and you sell ten thousand. Believe me, if the Nazis hadn’t thought of it the publishers would.
Kafka Max, I’m still not sure. Do I want to survive?
Brod Of course you do. I’m a successful novelist, so I’m headed that way myself. I know you’ve got talent. You haven’t made it big yet, in fact you haven’t made it at all, but once you’re dead I’ve a hunch your fame is going to snowball. Who knows, you could end up as famous as me. Whereas, you burn everything, you’ve squandered your life.
Kafka You’re right.
Brod Believe me, in ten years’ time, your stuff is going to be classic. That one you mentioned, Metamorphosis, where he wakes up one morning and finds he’s a cockroach. Brilliant.
