Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

It is important, when reading Kafka, not to read him too Brodly.

Take this passage from Brod’s 1947 biography: “It is a new kind of smile that distinguishes Kafka’s work, a smile close to the ultimate things-a metaphysical smile so to speak-indeed sometimes when he used to read out one of his tales for us friends of his, it rose above a smile and we laughed aloud. But we were soon quiet again. It is no laughter befitting human beings. Only angels may laugh this way…” Angels! It is often underestimated, how much talent is required to be a great reader. And Brod was not a great reader, let alone a great writer.

True. Maybe we can say instead that Brod was a great talent spotter. [44]Of his own literary capacities, Brod had few illusions. His friendship with Kafka was monstrously one-sided from the start, a thing carved from pure awe. They met after a lecture on Schopenhauer, given by Brod, after which Kafka approached the lecturer and accompanied him home. “Something seems to have attracted him to me,” writes Brod. “He was more open than usual, filling the endless walk home by disagreeing strongly with my all too rough formulations.” The familiar pilgrim’s pose, two steps behind the prophet, catching wisdom as it falls. [45]These days we tire of Brod’s rough formulations: for too long they set the tone. We don’t want to read Kafka Brodly anymore, as the postwar Americans did so keenly. It’s tempting to think, had we ourselves been those first readers, we would have recognized at once-without such heavy prompting-the literary greatness of an ex-ape talking to the academy or tiny Josephine “piping” for her mouse people. I wonder.

There exists a second Brod account of Kafka reading aloud:

We friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter.

Here the crime of Kafka’s first biographer is rather benign: a slight overdose of literary respect. Brod couldn’t quite believe Kafka was being funny when he was being funny. For how could Kafka, in his fearful earnestness, be funny? But it’s strange: Kafka revisionism is also, after a fashion, in love with Kafkaesque purity. We can’t credit the Brodish idea that Kafka writes of “the alienation of modern man”-too obvious. And how could Kafka be obvious? How could Kafka be anything that we are? Even our demystifications of Kafka are full of mystery.

But if we’re not to read Kafka too Brodly, how are we to read him? We might do worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend, Begley yet believes in the “metaphysical smile” of the work, the possibility that it expresses our modern alienation-here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter writer who once asked a correspondent, “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.” The diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic form, can have written “I” as frequently as he. People and events appear rarely; the beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed equally with the fact he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote the fictions was a man of many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of himself:

I completely dwell in every idea, but also fill every idea… I not only feel myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

I am the end or the beginning.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often-and in my inmost self perhaps all the time-I doubt that I am a human being.

One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do. Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars, tending to plump instead for Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and every now and then frankly mendacious. The result is something we don’t expect. It’s a little funny:

It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps…

This, writes Begley, is “Kafka’s characterization (in a moment of despondency) of the letters that he and Milena exchanged [and it] is not far off the mark for many of them, and applies with even greater force to many of the letters to Felice.” Certainly the love letters are repetitive; there is something mechanical in them, not deeply felt, at least, not toward their intended recipients-the sense is of a man writing to himself. Impossible to believe Kafka was in love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the “bony, empty face, that wore its emptiness openly… Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin”; Felice with her bourgeois mores, her offer to sit by him as he worked (“In that case,” he wrote back, “I could not write at all”), her poor taste in “heavy furniture” (“A perfect tombstone,” writes Kafka, describing a sideboard of her choosing, “or a memorial to the life of a Prague official”). For Kafka she is symbol: the whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of himself. The occasion of their engagement is the cue to explain to her (and to her father) why he should never marry. The prospect of living with her inspires pages of encomia on solitude. Begley, a fiction writer himself, has an eye for the way fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give it away. You might say he has Kafka’s number: “It’s all there in a nutshell: the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the conquest of Felice as its goal; reflexive flight from that goal as soon as it is within reach; insistence on dealing with her and their future only on his terms; and self-denigration as a potent defense against intimacy that requires more than words.” Poor Felice! She never stood a chance. In his introductory letter Kafka claims: “I am an erratic letter writer… On the other hand, I never expect a letter to be answered by return… I am never disappointed when it doesn’t come.” In fact, counters Begley, “The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters compulsively and copiously, and turned into a hysterical despot if they were not answered forthwith, bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.” Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”-a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are traps,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men everywhere, in order to drag them down into the Finite.” [46]It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path. À propros: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was “a willful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:

I do not think so… He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a watch-sometimes. [47]

Kafka’s mind was like that; it went wondrous fast-still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as readers turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons (the family resemblance between the two writers was noted by Larkin himself [48]). In this matter, Kafka has a less judgmental biographer than Larkin found in Andrew Motion; Begley, though perfectly clear on Kafka’s “problems with girls” does not much agonize over them. Literary nerds may enjoy the curious fact that for both those literary miserabilists (close neighbors on any decent bookshelf) modern heating appliances appear to have served as synecdoche for what one might call the Feminine Mundane: