CHAPTER 33

The Life to Which I Belong (1974)

Review of Franz Kafka’s Letters to Felice

Put away all questions of should. I cannot deal with them. Should these letters have been published; or Kafka’s books?1 Should Max Brod have kept his promise? And Emily Dickinson’s packets of poems? And Byron’s papers in John Murray’s fireplace? And Lady Burton?2 Should this child have been born, whose mother said, “No, I will not have the child”?3

They do exist, and I cannot talk about should. I need these letters; I take Max Brod’s responsibility on myself. What a piece of pretentiousness! Simply, I read and read these letters, and try to imagine the lost others, and the letters from Felice, the young woman who lived far away in Berlin, with war, work, many kinds of separation between them, and all the time this heroic life being poured on her in an attempt not like any other I know.

This “review” has been put off for months, while all the others were being published. I have seen little squibs that say that these are sad letters, tragic letters of a marriage attempt that was doomed from the start. Something is happening here that is quite different in nature from all that.

These letters are the attempt to show the entire person to the beloved, in preparation for an enduring relationship. Preparation for marriage, as living together might be thought of as real in itself, and also a preparation. Sometimes these two people spoke of “going to Palestine,” also.4 Five years in Prague, with a permanent relation to writing and with a tidal, deep, foreboding relation to this woman, to his family, and to some partly-known, partly-unknown opponent within himself. This opponent turns out to be tuberculosis, death, suppression of the written work; and also the last wills and commands and even a suicide letter. The “opponents,” along with his friend and ally, Max Brod, may have been Kafka’s protectors. But we know that part of the story: the stories were published, and the unfinished novels. They were saved and turned loose into our world, and a future world. Max Brod did go to Palestine, to Tel Aviv, and lived to see this process moving fully, the full life of his surpassed promise.5

For whom were these letters and fictions written? For whom is a child conceived? This is rhetoric, having nothing to do with the young man Kafka.

When Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in the summer of 1912 in Prague, he was working for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Company (as he continued to do). A recent entry in his diary had said: “The moment I were set free from the office, I would yield at once to my desire to write an autobiography.”6 The letters to Felice are, in a certain way, that autobiography. They must be taken with his other writings and his diaries. But Kafka wrote them to Felice. It was she who had to receive them. She had to come to the decision about marrying him. Twice they were engaged, and finally the engagement and the letters ended.

“A hail of nervousness pours down upon me continuously,” he writes, after “Oh, the moods I get into, Fräulein Bauer!” and he adds, “What I want one minute I don’t want the next. When I have reached the top of the stairs, I still don’t know the state I shall be in when I enter the apartment. . . . But oh, what has happened to the trip to Palestine?”7

In October of their first season, the letters are becoming necessary. He understands his continual and “circular complaining.”8 It is the way he moves. New emergences are beginning to tear at him. A letter is not answered, it has been lost; he knows he must write to Felice, he must know what she is doing when the letter arrives, when she writes to him, when she doesn’t write. He, in Prague, follows her in all imagining as she goes to the theatre in Berlin—all good except for one, at which he had yawned, a yawn wider than the stage—and at her office, and on her journeys—why had she gone first-class?—and in her packing, and what she is going to read.

It is long past his death, we know Kafka, we pretend to be wise after the fact, and we see the signals of terrible danger. Can a man tell his beloved this much about himself, all the fever of his dread, all the diseases of his hope and his body? What kind of beloved will accept this surf of precise anxiety, the detail of truth? Could an older woman with a family take this? Who? George Sand?9 Some wise woman with a house, money, her own children? A man? Verlaine?10 A dragon?

October 31, 1912—“Dear Fräulein Baeuer, Just look, how many impossibilities there are in our letters.”11

November 1, 1912—“. . . . Just as I am thin, and I am the thinnest person I know (and that’s saying something, for I am not stranger to sanatoria), there is also nothing to me which, in relation to writing, one could call superfluous, superfluous in the sense of overflowing.”12

Max Brod, in that same month, writes a letter to Felice that at first glance seems defensive and possibly harmful, too descriptive of Kafka’s drawbacks, really an act of disservice. But this letter of Brod’s continues: “. . . conflicts arise which one must try and help him to overcome with understanding and kindness, aware that such a unique and wonderful human being deserves to be treated in a different way from the millions of banal and commonplace people. . . . Franz suffers greatly from having to be at his office every day until 2 o’clock. In the afternoon he is exhausted, so all that is left for the ‘profusion of his visions’ is the night. This is tragic. And there he is, writing a novel that puts everything I know in the way of literature in the shade. What might he not achieve if he were free and in good hands!”13

The figure of Franz Kafka begins to take on darkness, lightness, ardor, a dramatic grace, as these scenes fill. One identifies, as in a fine play, with both people—in the finest plays, it is with everyone that one identifies. But not the parents, who go through Kafka’s pockets and read his letters, who come down heavily, oppressively upon his life with the demands of their disappointments. It is not until much later in this book that the reader suddenly learns that Kafka, who is thirty, is living in a room that is between the living room and his parents’ bedroom. Slowly, one understands that his mother has made inquiries in Berlin about Felice Bauer, and “one hears particularly that you are an able cook.”14 The question then comes up: will Felice want to cook the vegetarian meals that Franz eats?

The warnings come: his sense of unreality, his illnesses, his need to write every day. The apartment he finds for them, in wartime Prague, has no kitchen. The whole setting-forth of the way of life that Kafka needs, in order to do his work, in a tight regime that will allow him to earn a living, to rest and eat, and then to get to work until the deep hours of the night.

It is the war that is tearing at them. “Once the war has come to an end without causing too much destruction, presumably conditions will be quite favorable,” Kafka writes in March 1915.15 But he warns Felice that she must not hope for—is it beautiful children? is it any children?

All the time, the writing is growing, the flat, marvelous stories, the novels and parables. Alongside these torments, this drama which Kafka has set up to make it all impossible for them both. He must have a doctor’s examination; but if the medical report is good, he will know not to believe it.

He writes to Felice’s mother, “As I have often observed, heard, and said, I am not altogether easy to get on with, not even for myself . . .”16

And now the encroachment of silence. “Dearest, not a single word, for days and days.”17 Suddenly, glimpses of possibility, trips, plans, promises, letters speaking of Flaubert, Dickens, the chances of their happiness.

In this superb translation by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth, trust is made for the reader of the English version. But in the pits of expression, Kafka says to Felice about another apartment he has found in Prague, “you would have to do” for a short time “without a kitchen of your own, and even without a bathroom.”18 In the next letter, the stab comes. The opponent.

In September, 1917, the first “hemorrhage of the lung” arrives.19 After the headaches and suffering, what Kafka calls “neurasthenia,” the diagnosis is of tuberculosis in both lungs.20 Kafka now sees himself clearly as two combatants, “as you know,” he writes to Felice, and tells her that the better of the two belongs to her.21 “A decisive stab” has been delivered by one of the combatants, and he rushes to accept the decision.22

The drama of the long struggle belongs with The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis, the Parables, and the other stories.23 Franz Kafka and Felice are here as characters of ramifying reality, full of gifts and forebodings, of great riches to us, dangerous beyond belief and charged with dailiness that we know from his stories and our dreams and waking lives.

What I would really like to do is to keep a diary of events during the time of thinking about Kafka’s letters. The endless thinking about Felice. What happened to her in America? Are her children in New York?24 That man who passed me on 48th Street yesterday, could he have been Felice’s son?—he had something of her look. Certain facts make their entrances among the dreamlike realities of the Diaries and Letters. Here is Kafka, sending his manuscript off—or, rather, Max Brod, sending the book off—to Kurt Wolff. And here, today, is Helen Wolff suddenly met on 48th Street—that extraordinary woman with whom I have a certain work to do, to my happiness.25

For months, I could not think at all about these letters, or write. This happened, too, when I first read Metamorphosis. His hand—somebody’s hand—was about my throat for a long time. Don’t make assumptions, Muriel, don’t think that because your parents, too, were Bohemian-German Jewish that these smiters you read are not there for everyone who reads. But let nobody think that I will tell what happened in my parents’ living room the night of my thirtieth birthday.26

Kafka saying, “And since that is the life to which I belong, it can never be exhausted by scrutiny.”27

(American Poetry Review, 1974)