Life With Father

IN THE BOILING CAULDRON of tortured artists. Franz Kafka must surely hold a place of honor. Born at a bad time, in a worse place, and raised by a middle-class family that had little use for writers. Kafka spent his life floundering in a morass of guilt and self-hatred. Never quite convinced of his right to exist, he wore himself down with ceaseless self-dissection, suffocated in an office job the talent he knew he had, and often tried to sabotage his most precious relationships. Although he never formally committed suicide-a failure he gloated over with particular relish--he quite possibly had a hand in bringing on the tuberculosis that killed him at age 41. As for the writings that were not published during his lifetime--two unfinished novels, a large number of stories, diaries and letters--he asked his close friend and first biographer, Max Brod, to "burn it all as soon as possible."

In Kafka: A Biography, Ronald Hayman carefully traces the close connection between the circumstances of Kafka's life and his work, bringing his sometimes puzzling and abstract fiction comfortably down to the human realm. The book is also valuable as a slap-in-the face for anyone who has flirted with the idea of a life of self-punishment; for, although Hayman wants to "emphasize what is positive in Kafka's negativism," he cannot help leaving us with the rather tragic picture of a tortured artist who served self-torture more dutifully than art.

Which is not to condemn Kafka in the least, for his suffering was truly awful: Hayman believes that it was quite an achievement for the writer to have salvages as much as he did from his despair. Even Edmund Wilson, in an essay that otherwise sternly downplays the importance of his work, concedes that "the cards were stacked against poor Kafka in an overpowering way."

First, there was his religion. Most present day Americans must have trouble appreciating the peculiar horrors of turn-of-the-century Prague for a Jew. "Anti-Semitism," a phrase now used to describe segregated country clubs, meant frenzied riots and accusations of ritual murder. And since the Kafkas were doing their best to assimilate, feeling a meaningful religious identity was (until relatively late in his life) almost impossible for Franz. Second, there was his nationality (German), making him an outsider twice removed while in Prague. And then there was his father. Hayman stresses Kafka's relationship with his father as the principal formative influence upon his character, suggesting that it subliminally provided the subject matter for much of his writing. Physically imposing, with a frightening temper that he vented very discriminately on his children and the Czech employees in his fancy-goods shop. Herman Kafka terrorized young Franz with threats, public humiliation and arbitrary commandments. Kafka's earliest memory was of being whisked out of bed one night and dumped outdoors--punishment for being thirsty. Whoever said The Trial was "puzzling and abstract"?

Hayman clearly lays out these nightmarish circumstances, and if they somehow seem grotesquely comical, the cumulative effect on Franz was anything but funny. He was crippled for life by an overwhelming conviction of his own vileness, and his biography. Hayman says, is "a series of hesitations in the process of condemning himself and carrying out the execution."

Those hesitations might well have been the best execution he could unconsciously devise, he hesitated about moving out of his parents' home, staying on until he was over 30, despite the constant noise and lack of privacy, he hesitated about leaving Prague, passing up an opportunity to study literature in Munich when he was 19 and confining himself to the city except for business trips and sanitorium stops: he hesitated about leaving his job with the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, despite the drain on his energies and the interference with his creative work; and finally, in his relationships with women, to whom he was naturally attractive, he hesitated repeatedly, unable to sustain in person the epistolary intimacies he handled so well. It was in this last area that Kafka felt most inadequate, most overshadowed by his father; although he believed that the greatest human duty was to have a family, he could never allow himself to intrude on his father's domain. Also frightened by any possible interruption of his writing, he never wanted to marry badly enough to go through with it--until his last love, by which times he knew he was dying. And then, appropriately, her parents refused to consent.

Without his writing, his only lifeline to sanity and order, Kafka's life might have ended in suicide or madness. But Kafka's fiction, as Hayman consistently show, was an outlet for his self-destructive fantasies and aggressive impulses, an ongoing psychotherapy. If he could not solve his inner conflicts in real life nor counteract his growing feeling of isolation, then he could at least face them in literature, and perhaps gain the "illusion of having both under control." Hayman begins the book with a short chapter that underlines Kafka's skill at using his fiction both to confront and masochistically magnify his fallings as a person, Kafka's short story. "The Judgment"--in which a father condemns his son for being a "devilish human being" and pronounces his death sentence, which the submissive son faithfully carries out--is a pivotal point in Kafka's ego-defensive writing.

THERE IS LITTLE to find fault with in Hayman's presentation. Sticking closely to Kafka's letters and diaries, which together form a most extensive record of his inner life, and quoting liberally therefrom, he is not obtrusive. His analytical passages seem to have been inserted into the narrative with maximum concern for short. American attention spans; they are humble and mostly insightful, free of excessive jargon-mongering, aware of the crushing bulk of Kafka criticism and content to suggest the clearest connections to the immediate moment of his life. If there are any complaints, they are that he is sometimes a bit oversolicitous and that he reminds us too often of Kafka's literary identification with animals. Although that is a recurrent and important trait in his writing, it is not terribly oblique--by the third or fourth mention. Hayman is bating a dead horse. Otherwise, he succeeds in emphasizing his main points. If there seems to be repetition, it is only because the same few struggles dominated Kafka's life and informed his work.

As for Hayman's attitude towards Kafka, it is, not surprisingly, less reverential that Max Brod's; Brod's biography seemed to be written chiefly as an antidote to the view that anyone who created Gregor Samsa must have been a dark and morbid character, though Brod's work is honest and engaging, we almost lose sight of all the self-torture in the radiance of the saint-like glow. Hayman's biography is more balanced, but also admiring (as anyone must be) of Kafka's incredible lack of cynicism, even as he was dying.

Having developed tuberculosis of the larynx in the last few months of his life, he stopped eating, effectively becoming the hunger artist he had created in one of his most famous and revealing stories. But yet he took pleasure in other people's pleasure, and in a somehow wondrous bit of real-life symbolism, asked other people to take deep draughts of water and beer in front of him. Kafka never hated the world like he hated himself, and his endless capacity for empathy is for Hayman, one of the earmarks of his genius.

Now, Kafka is world-famous celebrity, and may be he's getting the last laugh for all those years of parental disfavor. Not only is he recognized as an important stylist, but he has even been hailed as the quintessential recorder of modem alienation, prophesying in works such as The Trial and "In the Penal Colony" the rise of totalitarianism. Marxists and theologists alike slug it out in studies with titles like The Kafka Problem. The Kafka Debate and even There Goes Kafka; there has even been talk of setting up an East-West dialogue. But the splendor of his posthumous relationship only throws into relief the incessant--and, in part, needless--suffering of his life.

Ronald Hayman's biography is excruciating to read. Though the survival of Kafka's work, at lest, is consoling, all the high-school tragedy course rot about our uniquely human capacity to suffer makes it no easier to witness his writhing. Grab another beer and shake your heads. Poor Kafka. Why he clung so desperately to his father, why he endlessly romaticized him and even incorporated a piece of his shopkeeper, artist-as-vermin mentality--these are questions that Hayman knows are unanswerable. How 'bout that Gresor Samsa--transformed into a dung beetle so he kills himself with sorrow watching his family carry on the breadwinning without him. And with all that space on the ceiling where you crawl till your heart's content!