King of Infinite Space: Louis Begley’s Kafka Book

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The New York Sun

“Prague doesn’t let go,” Franz Kafka wrote when he was 19, and in one sense he was completely right. He was always planning to move to Berlin, but lived for most of his life in an uncomfortable room in his parents’ house. His stories and novels are full of local landscapes and fantastic reflections of the crumbling bureaucracy of his corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He wrote in Prague German, a distinctive and rather pure version of what was then an international language.

The novelist Louis Begley, in “The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head” (Atlas & Co., 224 pages, $22), his shrewd, lucid, and sympathetic new portrait of Kafka (1883–1924), politely speaks of “something akin to provincialism” in his subject’s culture. Kafka was well-read, but in the literature of the past. He did not know the work of Rilke, or Conrad, or Proust, or Joyce. He seems never to have heard of Richard Strauss. He did, it seems, once look at a painting by Picasso.

RELATED: Man and His Maker: Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father.’

Kafka’s social life was similarly limited. All of his male friends were Jewish, and so were all the women who mattered in his life, except the Catholic Milena Jesenská. And if he found no comfort or solidarity in the Jewish community — “What have I in common with the Jews,” he asked himself in his diary, “I have scarcely anything in common with myself” — he expressed his own form of Jewishness in his every attitude. He wrote to Milena, acknowledging the exaggeration of the formula but persisting with it all the same, that not one second of calm has been granted me; nothing has been granted me, everything must be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past as well — something that is, perhaps, given every human being — this too must be earned, and this probably entails the hardest work of all.

This is not a uniquely Jewish experience, but it was Kafka’s Jewish experience, the fruit of a life of comparatively successful assimilation in a world of perpetual anti-Semitism. Mr. Begley finds a precise and surprising phrase for it: profound fatigue. “Other people — so it sometimes seems to a Jew — do not need to spend their lives justifying their right to exist.”

Mr. Begley’s discreet and suggestive aside, implying both that appearances matter and that they can always be unreliable, even wrong, hints at the other Kafka story, the one that gets him out of the Prague prison almost from the moment he starts writing. Kafka’s great works are the reverse of provincial, or rather put the very idea of the provincial to work in strange ways. They often revolve around “the man from the country” who finds himself in strange and perplexing circumstances. The man appears most recognizably in the story “Before the Law,” which in turn reappears in the novel “The Trial.” This man is smart, nervous, sometimes arrogant, sometimes humble, and always in the wrong place, always out of touch, unable to connect with or understand the culture he thought he was a part of (in “The Trial”) or wants to be a part of (in “The Castle”). He is never at home, and although he sometimes behaves as if he wants to be — indeed as if this is all he wants — it is not at all clear that home is what he is after.

In a wonderfully curious (and funny) passage in “The Castle,” Frieda, the woman the protagonist K. has taken up with, suggests they leave the village and escape the world that centered around the castle K. is so anxious to enter. They could go to Spain or the south of France, she says. This is pretty startling, given the bleak fairy-tale atmosphere of the novel — it’s as if the characters in “The Lord of the Rings” suddenly thought they might take a break in Miami or Cancun. But K.’s response is even stranger, representing “a contradiction he didn’t bother to explain,” as Kafka puts it. He can’t leave, he says, because he wants to stay. Why else would he have come? “What could have attracted me to this desolate land other than the desire to stay?”

In “K.,” his own idiosyncratic study of Kafka, the Italian writer Roberto Calasso says the phrase means that “the wasteland is the Promised Land.” The observation is astute, but the paradox is perhaps too easy, and too close to the now unfashionable religious interpretations of Kafka associated with the writer’s close friend and first biographer, Max Brod.

Mr. Begley also glances at the same passage and more modestly says, following K. himself, that “it doesn’t explain” what the speaker wants. It doesn’t explain, but it does show. K. is not attracted by the desolation, he is driven by a desire for home that overrides all objections. The desolation ensures that the desire will remain a desire; that home, even if K. should by some freakish accident manage to settle there, will not be any place like home. In this sense Prague had to let go, or rather never even had a grip — Kafka was always somewhere else.

Kafka left a huge literary and philosophical legacy — “his works,” Mr. Begley says, “have been translated into all languages with a written literature” — but no literal will. Like one of his own fictional bureaucrats he left precise but impossible instructions in his desk. The instructions were precise about what he wanted — everything he had written was to be burned, except for a handful of stories — and impossible because Brod, the person the instructions were addressed to, was firmly convinced that Kafka was a genius. He had no intention of burning the materials, and had already told Kafka that he would not.

“The Trial,” “The Castle,” and “Amerika” appeared in German in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively, and several volumes of stories, notebooks, and diaries followed. Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged, on and off, for five years, surfaced in America in 1955; his letters to Milena were published in Germany three years earlier.

Most readers, and certainly most scholars, have given up worrying about this massive invasion of privacy and disregard of distinct wishes, and it is one of the refreshing features of Mr. Begley’s “biographical essay” that he tackles the problem head-on. “However much one believes that it is the writer’s absolute prerogative to decide which of his works are to be published … one must be grateful that the novels and the late short stories have survived.” As the phrasing makes clear, Mr. Begley is not himself grateful for everything. He doesn’t think the “personal papers” are covered by the argument of literary value and he sees the claim that Milena would have “had no objection” to the publication of her correspondence with Kafka as “far-fetched.” But Mr. Begley is not squeamish, and indeed much of his book concentrates on Kafka’s tangled letters to the women he loved and/or dreamed of marrying. We can be attentive to the facts, once we have them, his practice suggests, without being grateful either for their arrival or their mode of arriving — to do otherwise would be a kind of willful blindness. The advantage of this picture that emerges, which presents “this marvelous man” as a tormentor of women he would not let go, is that we understand more clearly than ever that marriage, for Kafka, was like home for his characters: a desolate land he could always pretend he wanted to settle in.

Mr. Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of “Literature and the Taste of Knowledge,” among other books.


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