Genius of the Blackest Impulses

By LANCE MORROW

LETTERS TO FRIENDS, FAMILY AND EDITORS by Franz Kafka; translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Schocken; 509 pages; $24.50

W.H. Auden once wrote: "Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." Kafka has achieved a peculiar sort of extended immortality, alive not only in his books but also as an idea, an item of vocabulary employed by people who never read a phrase he wrote. It is an odd fate for the haunted functionary of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague: his magnificent hallucinations have collapsed in the public mind to the scale of a worn-out adjective--one that turns the Beelzebub he implied (totalitarian bureaucracy, the Holocaust, the Gulag) into something only slightly more menacing than the Cookie Monster. "Oh, wow," protests the 17-year-old asked to prove she is old enough to drink. "That's really Kafkaesque."

No one was more Kafkaesque than the original. His dying wish was totalitarian. Before he was finally killed by tuberculosis in 1924, he entreated his friend Max Brod to burn his books--to destroy the unpublished masterpieces (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika) that posthumously raised his estate from weird minor talent working in the ruins of Austria-Hungary to premonitory genius of the century's blackest impulses. Brod of course refused; it remained for both the Nazis and the Soviets to suppress Kafka's works--a neat case of reality confirming the artist's point.

Kafka was fairly prolific in his 41 years; besides his major novels and some 30 stories, he left two volumes of revealing, intensely personal diaries. His Letters to Milena and Letters to Felice, two women he loved, have already been printed, as well as the 1919 Letter to His Father. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors brings together his remaining correspondence. It is, presumably, the last to be heard from Kafka.

All through his letters, even when the writer seems almost cheerful and (for him) sociable, one feels his strange, alarming spirit.

Sometimes, it is Germanically heavy with melodrama. "Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward," he writes Max Brod in 1922, "but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits ..."

The majority of letters are written from sanitariums that Kafka inhabited with restless, despairing frequency during his last years. The eerie, lucent prose quickens into something like paranoia. Kafka fights for sleep: "Enemies everywhere ... Two hundred Prague schoolchildren have been quartered here. A hellish noise, a scourge of humanity." Not quite whining, he painfully records the rise and fall of his temperature, the coughs, the catarrhs, the betrayals in his body, the bats in his soul. "The phantoms of the night," he says, "have tracked me down." Earlier: "The physical illness is only an overflow of the spiritual illness." Kafka is both physically and metaphysically in touch with death, as if some thin, tight wire were strung from here to there, and made lovely, disturbing sounds. It is distressing to monitor his illness for so long. One knows not only that Kafka's death must arrive in 1924, but also what will come of his larger presentiments: Kafka's three sisters will all die in concentration camps, the Nazis' extension of what Kafka imagined.

Still, there are moments when the writer practically dithers with good-hearted advice to lovelorn friends. At such times, he seems rather sweetly engaged in life's daily emotional traffic, even though Kafka was aware that he could never experience what Thomas Hardy called "the wonder and the wormwood of the whole."

Kafka's spirit was as precise as hallucination, but triply or quadruply removed, adrift, isolated: a German-speaking Jew living in Prague in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emotionally overpowered by his father. Interesting, if futile, critical combats have been waged over the question of whether Kaf ka was merely a talented neurotic or a visionary genius. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1950: "Kafka is being wildly overdone . . . The trouble with Kafka was that he could never let go of the world--of his family, of his job, of his yearning for bourgeois happiness--in the interest of divine rev elation, and that you cannot have a first-rate saint or prophet without a faith of a much higher potential than is ever to be felt in Kafka."

Thirteen years later, the critic George Steiner countered: "Kafka's nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis. But that does not diminish its uncanny relevance." As Steiner elaborated, Kafka "was, in a literal sense, a prophet . . . He saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering. The Trial exhibits the classic model of the terror state. It prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers. Since Kafka wrote, the night knock has come on innumerable doors."

Technology--nuclear weapons, microcomputers, killer satellites--may have rendered some of Kafka's nightmares obsolete. And we have lived so long with the absurd, retailed for so many years by so many depressing Frenchmen, that it bores us. But Franz Kafka's works still serve the primary function he described in a 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Excerpt

"Sometimes a naive person will wish, 'I would like to be dead and see how everyone mourns me.' Such a writer is continually staging such a scene: He dies (or rather he does not live) and continually mourns himself. From this springs a terrible fear of death ... he has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived. .. In reply to this, one might say that this is a matter of fate and is not given into anyone's hand. But then why this sense of repining, this repining that never ceases? To make oneself finer and more savory? That is a part of it. But why do such nights leave one always with the refrain: I could live and I do not live. The second reason--perhaps it is all really one, the two do not want to stay apart for me now--is the belief: 'What I have playacted is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree. Of course the writer in me will die right away, since such a figure has no base, no substance, is less than dust. He is only barely possible in the broil of earthly life, is only a construct of sensuality. That is your writer for you. But I myself cannot go on living because I have not lived, I have remained clay, I have not blown the spark into fire, but only used it to light up my corpse.' It will be a strange burial: the writer, insubstantial as he is, consigning the old corpse, the longtime corpse, to the grave. I am enough of a writer to appreciate the scene with all my senses, or--and it is the same thing--to want to describe it with total self-forgetfulness--not alertness, but self-forgetfulness is the writer's first prerequisite. But there will be no more of such describing. But why am I talking of actual dying? It is just the same in life. I sit here in the comfortable posture of the writer, ready for all sorts of fine things, and must idly look on--for what can I do but write?"

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