Mark Bold

“As Shakespeare spoke for mankind on the threshold of the modern world, you speak mankind’s farewell in the authentic voice of the twentieth century.”

Alan Bennett directs these words at Kafka from the character of Max Brod (Kafka’s best friend and executor) in his play Kafka’s Dick. There is no doubting Kafka’s position as one of the greatest writers of modernity, but the writer and man himself tends to be hidden in the shadow of this reputation, or, more often perhaps, confused with the main characters in his stories and novels. The story of his life may be quite well known to readers of Kafka through the publication of his diaries and voluminous correspondence with the women he was often engaged to, but it is to rescue Kafka from the simplifications of the adjective Kafkaesque that Murray has written this new biography.

Throughout the 80 years since his death, Kafka has been misunderstood, reinterpreted and often adopted by all flavours of isms. At first he was treated as a religious writer (perhaps with the encouragement of Max Brod, who ensured the posthumous publication of his writings and wrote his first biography) or an allegorist. Then a history-less Kafka was adopted by existentialists and absurdists. His depictions of life in the 20th century had a terrifyingly vivid and, some have said, visionary quality. Even when the diaries and letters were published later in the century, at last giving the writer some background, they only presented one side of a much more complex (and upbeat) character, ignoring much of the influence of location and history in their minute observations of neurotic and spiritual concerns. So Murray begins his narrative by stressing that while Kafka was a writer whose concerns and influence seem universal, he was “a particular man in a particular place at a particular time” [p5]. From the start, he wants to avoid the abstraction that has caused such misrepresentation of the man himself.

The location is Prague and the time is history is towards the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where kafka’s family’s Jewishness is just about tolerated by the Habsburgs. Kafka’s father had worked hard to move from life in rural Bohemia to acceptance by the German-speaking elite of metropolitan Prague. He was a robust and insensitive man, unlike his son, and never allowed the latter to forget the hardship he had gone through to achieve the social status they maintained. The relationship with his father, and with authority in general, is one of the main themes of Kafka’s writing and it is in the early family scenes in Murray’s book that he brings out this major influence. The family dynamic, and the character of the city itself, which Kafka was rarely to leave, leave long shadows across the literature Kafka produced in his life. He described this time and the difficult, perhaps impossible relationship in the Letter to the Father that he wrote many years later. Murray draws heavily on this in his descriptions, as he will be able to draw on the exacting detail with which Kafka described his existence and relationships throughout his narrative. Kafka himself produced perhaps his most famous work from this claustrophobic family crucible - Metamorphosis, which, in her obituary after Kafka’s death, Milena Jesenská described as “the most powerful book in modern German literature” [p387].

Murray sketches the development of Kafka as an unusual character - his amazing wide eyes and striking face, his immaculate appearance and animated hands, his boyish charm and cheerfulness. He insists on stressing his subject’s sexual experiences, or ‘initiation’ as he repeatedly terms it, to counteract claims that Kafka was perhaps impotent or a repressed homosexual and hence failed in relationships with women later in his life. The young Kafka was attractive to all who came into contact with him, a very social animal with many intellectual pursuits and political interests. The impression readers of his diaries and letters will have, of course, is a man driven to distraction by insecurities and impatient dissatisfaction with himself. Murray ensures that, while tackling this very dominant (and gradually destructive) side of his subject, we do not forget his boyish nature and charming humour, which continue all through his short life.

Murray’s book’s epigraph sets up the main conflicts to come. Two quotations from Kafka declare that he is nothing but writing, and another from his friend Brod that he is unable to compromise. As he matures, so these aspects of his character gradually create an ever increasing tension in the developing writer. As the self-analysis in his detailed diaries begins, so emerges the character that is becoming obsessed with his health and spiritual well-being, and increasingly concerned about his status as a Jew. He is hypersensitive to noise and adopts food fads and eating disorders. From the acute degree of his sleeplessness, it is not surprising that some of his characters enter their nightmare experiences upon waking up, like Josef K in The Trial or Gregor in Metamorphosis. The man who wrote that he wanted nothing but to write seemed to be distracted by anything other than the act of putting pen to paper. And then, as his torment through merely existing seems enough, he meets a woman, and the real trial begins.

The volume of correspondence that went back and forth between Kafka and Felice Bauer is bigger than Murray’s biography. It is difficult to read the constant doubts and self-recriminations, the hesitations and apologies, but Murray tries to keep the narrative moving while stressing the tensions that led to the couple’s engagements and then separations, the repeated attempts at unity. Many writers have tried to illuminate the processes and causes of this disastrous relationship, which seemed to impel him to create his best writing, most notably (after Kafka himself, of course) Elias Canetti in Kafka’s Other Trial, so Murray does not need to linger over explanations. Perhaps Kafka was afraid of the disruption of intimacy between himself and his writing if another person entered his life through marriage. He was certainly not prepared to compromise himself and his honesty to make the relationship work.

It is through this fundamental theme that Murray and his subject are perhaps most widely separated. Whereas biographer Murray has been concerning himself with meanings to the literature and possible influences, the exemplars of Flaubert, Grillparzer, Dostoevsky and Kleist as writers who sacrificed themselves for their art, the directness of the language and the overwhelming realism of authorial approach - academic writing that is performed at arm’s length, Kafka is meanwhile screaming with pain as his literature is dragged bloody and incomplete from the tensions and paradoxes inside its author’s disturbed, neurotic and hypersensitive being. “Writing that springs from the surface of existence - when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up - is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake” [p155].

Kafka’s writing turns progressively darker and more tortuous. From a relatively optimistic novel The Man Who Disappeared (a happy ending was planned) came, in a Kafkaesque order, The Judgement, then The Trial, conducted at the same time as the sentence (In The Penal Colony). As his Angst made his writing so vivid and haunting, so depictive of a modernity out of control, so it destroyed his relationship and began to destroy his very being. As the engagement was abandoned for the last time, so Kafka coughed up blood and realised he was dying of tuberculosis. This physical decay he repeatedly blamed on his mental and spiritual disintegration.

But, navigating between the troubled marriages of close friends, and tormented by his own inadequacies, clutching Kierkegaard and penning spiritual aphorisms, Kafka becomes involved with another woman, and seems intent on repeating the torments of his previous trial. Murray hints again that Kafka could not keep his eyes off the ladies in his now regular visits to sanatoria. He first involves himself with a shopgirl, Julie Wohryzek, then complicates this by falling for his translator, Milena Jesenská. All the time, Murray reminds us, Kafka’s reputation was growing through the publication of a small fragment of his writings, while his health was declining through the inordinate amount of Angst he was tormented by. The achievement of the literature produced is shown to have had a great price to the author who produced it. Murray draws out what is perhaps the most poignant description of this relationship of an artist to his art from Kafka’s story The Fasting Artist, “No one who does not feel it can be made to grasp what it means.” [p339]

But for all the impressions gained from reading the diaries and letters, the stories and novels themselves, and the foregoing lifestory, as we approach the last years and months of Kafka’s life, we find a surprising new twist. We find him living with Dora Diamant, a woman he loved and who loved him, who did not care for his writing but cared for him. From the troubling family claustrophobia, we find Kafka enjoying his last months in Berlin in a frugal household, but, it appears, free of the tensions that had created his writing. Murray paints these times tenderly, as if his subject deserves the quiet and calm consideration after his long ordeal.

Of course, on his deathbed, he had no idea that his reputation and influence would become so important. This is the core of Alan Bennett’s play, in which the writer comes to modern day Leeds to discover his renown, and the adjectival form of his name. The intervening time has proved the quality of the tormented writer’s contribution to world literature. As Murray says, “He understood his time and its darker side. His machines of experimental death, his nightmare visions of totalitarian cruelty, his deep understanding of the fate of the Jewish people, cannot now be read - for we are different readers, readers with unwelcome knowledge - innocently.” [p313]

MURRAY, Nicholas (2004) Kafka. London: Little, Brown