 © Paul Dusenbury, Collage by Steve Rowse
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Looking for Kafka Click to read Click to |
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© Paul Dusenbury, Collage by Steve Rowse
|
Looking for Kafka Click to read Click to |
Looking for
Kafka
I’m looking for Kafka—I mean, for books by him, possibly even a first edition,
as you might say to a friend or a dealer, "I’ve been looking for Kafka lately,
anything published during his lifetime." And I’m looking for Franz Kafka
himself, the writer behind and inside every story, sentence, and phrase, such as this from
his notebooks: "Writing as a form of prayer."
We lack, we’ve lost, the past, and because old books, rare or not, inhabit that past, benchmark it, we feel we can redeem the past, literally buy it back: At least these forty or fifty cubic inches of paper and cloth haven’t utterly fallen away!
A first edition (that magical term!) matters because it was hoped for, overseen, proofed, and welcomed by the author. It bespeaks authenticity, purity, originality, and brings you flush up to its creator. Perhaps this copy Kafka himself saw in Prague, and maybe even touched—remember his meager print runs (one or two thousand) and limited distribution. And if a first edition bears Kafka’s own inscription, then you (with your second mortgage) pass into the inmost circle.
Kafka cared acutely about the visual, tangible quality of his publications, though they might not meet the almost religious standard he set for his art. "All I ask for is the largest possible typeface," he wrote to the publisher of his first collection, and a month later: "The sample page you so kindly sent me is altogether exquisite." On another occasion he rejected a binding: "One can hardly look at it except with disgust." After a manuscript had been wrested from him and had overcome various obstacles to appear in print, the generous type and format of a "fine book," Max Brod tells us, could give Franz "genuine pleasure"—a pleasure, I like to think, not immeasurably distant or different from my own.
Kafka was even more fastidious about correcting proofs. In a letter to his publisher Kurt Wolff, who vigorously and faithfully served him from 1913 on, Kafka rejoices at the chance to see a second set of proofs for his story "The Judgment," because he catches a "terrible typo: ‘bride’ [Braut] instead of ‘breast’ [Brust]."
Reading those proofs, a few months later, Kafka recalled how "the story came out of me like a regular birth, covered with filth and slime." Writing, for Kafka a form of parturition no less than of prayer, displaced whatever else life had to offer him.
We do Franz Kafka an injustice, we compound the injustice his art already registers, to regard him as unrelievedly mournful and macabre. His friends record frequent episodes of sweetness and lighthearted humor. Kafka once wrote to Max Brod about his job, a fairly high position in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Bohemia: "I’ve got so much to do! In my four district headquarters . . . people fall as if drunk off scaffolds and into machines, the planks all tip, there are landslides everywhere, the ladders all slip, what people put up falls down, what they put down they fall over themselves. I’ve got headaches from all these girls in china factories incessantly hurling themselves down stairs with piles of crockery."
The clarity and concreteness of Kafka’s sometimes Chaplinesque vision underlie another comic moment, a great moment in Western civilization. In 1914, shortly after war broke out, Kafka read aloud the first chapter of The Trial. Now keep in mind what happens there: Joseph K. awakens one fine morning to find himself rudely arrested under dubious authority for an unspecified crime. So Kafka sat and read. "We friends of his," Brod says, "laughed quite uncontrollably when he let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that at moments he couldn’t go on reading." The scene is akin to Lewis Carroll reading his young friends the Knave of Hearts’ trial, where hilarity jostles with horror as in Kafka’s tale. Opening my copy of The Trial, I try to conjure up Franz Kafka in 1914, laughing so hard he had to stop reading, and it almost softens the pain of imagining him ten years later, dying voiceless from tuberculosis of the larynx.
Kafka’s scruples over his books went deeper than typeface and format. Take The Metamorphosis (another hard gem to find): "As Gregor Samsa awoke one fine morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect." Because Kafka deliberately refrained from specifying the kind of insect—dung beetle, cockroach or whatever—he was alarmed that his publisher might use an illustration of it. "Not that, please not that!" Kafka said. "The insect itself cannot be depicted. It can’t even be shown from a distance." The point is, this story’s matter-of-fact absurdity and ambiguity must take shape only sentence by sentence, for the ear and for the mind’s eye.
Even more than The Metamorphosis, where a human being is rendered subhuman, Kafka’s other major novella, In the Penal Colony, is regularly seen as a presentiment of Nazi totalitarianism. In that story an ardently detached officer demonstrates the capacities of an ingenious apparatus, whose steel-toothed harrow inscribes a sentence—the very words of legal judgment—on the back of a guiltless prisoner. While it may extend the appeal of these works to see them as prophetic, really they probe inward into Kafka’s own world and self. Alongside its vision of dehumanization and unjustifiable justice, In the Penal Colony makes writing itself into torture or punishment. And when the officer perishes in his own machine, that may make Kafka’s severest judgment on his writerly vocation.
He withheld In the Penal Colony from publication for five years. Finally, in 1918, Kurt Wolff promised him a "fine edition" of "this composition, which I love quite inordinately, though my love is mixed with a certain horror at the terrible intensity of its frightful material." Kafka agreed, and (in a letter written on Armistice Day) made a very specific request about the officer’s death at the story’s climax. After the words "through his forehead went the point of the great iron spike," Kafka wanted—and got—"an extra-large free space between paragraphs," as he put it. Critics have since wondered why. Perhaps that free space would leave time for the story’s point to sink in?
Despite acute wartime shortages, In the Penal Colony was printed on fine handmade paper with a two-color title page and sharply etched print. A small portion of the one thousand copies, including the one I now have, came in a bibliophile edition with half leather binding. Every once in a while, when no one’s in my study, I take my copy down and stroke the leather a little and check to make sure that after "the great iron spike" there is still Kafka’s "free space."
"I believe," the twenty-year-old Kafka wrote a dear friend, "one should read only those books that bite and sting . . . a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." And a decade later: "My whole existence is directed toward literature, I’ve held fast to this direction till my thirtieth year; if once I forsake it, I simply will not live anymore." But as if responding to such drastic demands, Kafka’s own body forsook him. Desperately ill, he still entered into earnest and impossible liaisons with women, continued Hebrew study for a year with Puah Ben-Tovim, and began writing The Castle.
At a Jewish children’s camp in 1923, suffering from TB, Kafka met the only woman with whom he was able to have a close, harmonious relationship. Dora Dymant, half his age and from a spiritually strong Polish-Jewish family, lived with Kafka and cared for him throughout his last year. They had the notion of emigrating to Palestine, and Kafka wrote to a kibbutz asking if he might serve as its accountant. They even thought of starting a restaurant in Tel Aviv, with Dora in the kitchen and Franz waiting on tables—a fantasy that seemed to Kafka not much more improbable than surviving the winter cold, inflation, and scarcity of 1923 Berlin.
He did survive that winter, but just barely. Staring out from his last photograph, under thick dark hair, is a face with deep-set eyes, mouth very faintly smiling, ears jutting above sunken cheeks. With the help of Dora and a young physician friend, Robert Klopstock, Kafka lived just long enough to correct his last set of proofs. He entitled this collection A Hunger Artist, after his story about a sideshow entertainer whose great achievement consists in fasting publicly. The artist reveals in his dying words that he has starved only by necessity, "because I couldn’t find the food I liked." This story smacks of Kafka’s own frustrated yearning as an artist, which makes it all the more ironic that he could hardly eat or talk during his last weeks. He used conversation slips, one of which actually refers to the proof copy for A Hunger Artist: "I want to read it now. Perhaps it will excite me too much, but I have to experience it afresh."
Although the book appeared shortly after his death, scholars are reluctant to call it a posthumous publication—he saw it through to the end. I try not to let a kind of Kafkalatry, a reverence for the pathos here, inflate my attitude toward the (lamentably frayed) copy of A Hunger Artist I came by last fall. But I don’t always succeed.
Books have their fate, and the fate of Kafka’s seems symptomatic. Ten years after In the Penal Colony appeared, its one thousand copies were not sold out. And in 1935, the president of the Reich’s Literature Chamber ordered the Berlin Gestapo to "seize and confiscate" Kafka’s complete works as "harmful and undesirable"—Kafka, who once wrote: "What have I in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself . . . ." Later it was this alienation, as much as his Jewishness, that made Kafka suspect in the Soviet bloc. The question came up: Is he the mouthpiece or critic or victim of decadent bourgeois imperialism? All of these, we would say, which is why ten thousand copies of The Trial were snapped up the day it was reissued in Prague in 1958. And his lucid mysteries keep their freshness, keep making their demand, which is why the manuscript of The Trial recently sold for close to a million dollars.
Franz Kafka’s stories speak, however enigmatically, for human freedom and for spiritual presence. When photos of the crowds celebrating in Prague’s Wenceslas Square came out several years ago, I found myself scanning the faces, looking for those familiar dark staring eyes and those capacious ears . . . looking—for Kafka.
Profile
John and Mary were an island of calm in the political storm. They were warm and sympathetic—pure intellectuals who talked ideas the way other people talk sports. To an undergrad like me they seemed very old, nearly thirty, and cloaked in authority. John and Mary spent hours listening and offering encouragement. John read my poetry and, in his office on the quad, gave comment. "In a poem," John said, "what comes after must have something to do with what comes before." A simple statement, yet one that I’ve been thinking about every week for the past twenty-five years. And then there was John’s way of reading my longer poems. He would speak for five or six minutes about each word in the first line, one at a time, until I felt like begging for mercy. Words belong to families, John taught me, words have character, words pick up associations from the contexts in which they are used.
The following spring John and Mary came to dinner less frequently. Mary was pregnant, and in June she gave birth to a girl, Sarah. I remember talking to John in his office. "A difficult birth," he said. John had put his feelings into a poem. I talked to Mary on the phone: she was hurting. We spoke of God’s love.
Mary was completing a degree in history, was the mother of a young child, and academic jobs in the Bay Area were like snow in Saudi Arabia. I had placed her in my hero class and wanted her to write a big, complicated book—to show what it was possible for me to accomplish. But it looked as though Mary was down for the count, so that left John. As a scholar, John was a writer, which gave me hope. In the spring of 1970, he completed the manuscript of his first book, a careful scholarly study on Max Beerbohm. "What’s next?" I asked. John was tired. He had spent months rewriting his manuscript and sending off letters for permissions. He was not thrilled with the idea that, as my hero, he needed to speed up his literary output. "No thanks," he said. "I’ll never write another." John was discouraged and so was I. John Felstiner was a thoughtful man. He had something to give to the world. But his wit and warmth and depth hadn’t come through in his initial effort.
After school I ended up in Seattle. Every few years I wrote to John Felstiner. His wife had somehow managed to juggle motherhood and a career. She’d completed her degree and was teaching at San Francisco State. And she’d given birth to a boy, Alek. John was translating from Spanish and German, writing articles, and he wrote a book on Pablo Neruda. He began a study of Paul Celan, a Jew and a poet from Bukovina (Romania) who survived World War II and made it to Paris where he lived and married and wrote. And where, in April 1970, he threw himself off a bridge into the Seine.
Several years ago, John gave a talk at the University of Washington. My wife and I sat in. It was a raffish, high-spirited affair, a dozen comparative literature teachers speaking to one another in four or five different languages. This was academics, and John was in his element. He spoke with great enthusiasm on scholarly approaches to Celan.
John’s daughter Sarah is grown up now, and recently moved to Wallingford, a Seattle neighborhood not far from mine, to be with a kite maker from Yale who set up shop near Seattle’s Lake Union. John’s son Alek is still living at home. He’s a music buff, everything from Mozart to Nirvana. Last fall, John and Mary came to Seattle to visit. Mary told me about her book To Paint Her Life, the story of the artist Charlotte Salomon, a Jew who came very, very close to escaping the Holocaust. On Saturday evening, John read from his new book at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Pioneer Square—a basement room, exposed brick, clanking glasses from the bistro on the other side. The scene at Elliott Bay was familiar to me, very low key, nothing intimidating like twelve Ph.D.s speaking in tongues. But John seemed nervous and, as he waited to speak, I realized that he was outside his world, facing a live, nonscholarly audience. As John waited, more and more people walked in. Now I was nervous. John’s talk would have to be from the heart. Risky. A rebuff by this crowd, and there’d be nothing left but a wet spot on the white, tile floor.
John told about writing Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. For fifteen years, John had lived in the mind of the brilliant, quirky poet. John went to France. He met Celan’s widow, worked in Celan’s libraries in Paris and Normandy. He wrote this book a little at a time. John quoted letters from readers. One man put John’s book on the same shelf as the Bible. A woman was deeply moved. Here it was, I realized, the book I’d waited 25 years to read.
The audience at Elliott Bay applauded. John autographed, then he and I and Mary and Sarah retreated to the other side for lattes.
—Scott C. Davis
Bio
John Felstiner
Place of residence: Stanford, California.
Birthplace: New York.
Grew up in: New York and New England.
Day job: Teacher.
Education: B.A. and Ph.D., Harvard University.
Books: Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980). Paul Celan:
Poet, Survivor, Jew, (Yale, 1995).
Awards: Commonwealth Club Gold Medal (Translating Neruda). British
Comparative Literature Association, First and Second Prize in Translation. Council for the
Advancement and Support of Education, Gold Medal (Kafka).
Current project: Translating Paul Celan.
Favorite book: Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions by Denise Levertov.
Belief: Jewish.
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