1913 (14 page)

But then, in March 1913, he suddenly receives a letter from Leipzig, from the Kurt Wolff Verlag. They would like to publish a volume of his poems in their new series, ‘Der jüngste Tag’ (‘The Day of Reckoning’). Will things turn out for the best after all?

Rainer Maria Rilke has the sniffles.

On 9 March the profoundly depressive 32-year-old Virginia Woolf sends the manuscript of her first novel,
The Voyage Out
, to her publishers. She has worked on it for six years. It also happens to be the day when her future lover Vita Sackville-West comes of age, having reached twenty-one. But for now Virginia Woolf is trapped in some very old spiders’ webs. The publisher to whom Virginia Woolf sends her manuscript is her half-brother Gerald Duckworth. Together with his brother George, as we know now from secret diary entries, he clearly threatened or abused her as a child.

The Voyage Out
, the novel about the unmarried, childless Rachel
Vinrace, already contains many of the central elements of Virginia Woolf’s later major works. There is an appearance by one ‘Mrs Dalloway’, for example, who will later achieve independence as the heroine of a novel, and Rachel also has a ‘room of her own’, the title of an important later essay. In
The Voyage Out
Woolf has her male protagonist give a startling account of the situation in 1913:

But that ‘silent, unrepresented life’ went on. Barely fifty copies of the book were sold in 1913, and by 1929 it was only 479.
The Voyage Out
was a difficult journey for Virginia Woolf.

Franz Marc wants to illustrate the Bible with some artist friends. In March 1913 he writes to Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Erich Heckel and Oskar Kokoschka. He himself – and this can hardly come as a surprise – chooses the Creation story and creates new animals every day, blue horses that have no need of blue riders.

Terrible things are happening in Prague. On 16 March Franz Kafka actually writes to Felice: ‘A direct question, Felice: would you have an hour free for me any time at Easter, on Sunday or Monday, and if you did, would you think it a good thing if I came? I repeat, an hour at any time, I would do nothing in Berlin but wait for you.’ Felice immediately says yes. And as the post is quicker in 1913 than in 2013, on 17 March Kafka already writes, as expected: ‘I don’t know if I’ll
be able to come.’ Then on 18 March:
‘Essentially
the obstacle to my journey still exists and will, I fear, continue to exist as an
obstacle
, but it has lost its significance so, as far as that goes, I could come.’ Then, on 19 March: ‘If I were to be prevented from travelling after all, I would send you a telegram by Saturday at the latest.’ On 21 March the uncertainty is cemented: ‘Felice! It’s still by no means certain whether I’ll be coming; the decision won’t be made until tomorrow, the millers’ convention still hangs over our heads.’ Supposedly, and this is his marvellous excuse, at Easter he might be sent by his insurance company to the convention of the Czech Millers’ Association. Then new worries – and also, as with Musil, symptoms of neurasthenia: ‘But I must have a good sleep before I see you. I have slept so badly this week, much of my neurasthenia and many of my white hairs come from insufficient sleep. As long as I have slept properly when I meet up with you!’ Then, on 22 March, the day he is supposed to set off (and will, in fact, set off), he writes these big words on his envelope to Felice: ‘Still undecided. Franz.’ Three words, an autobiography.

Hard to believe, but the next letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer really does bear the letterhead of the hotel ‘Askanische Hof, Berlin’, from where he writes in a panic on the morning of Easter Sunday:

He had arrived at Anhalt Station late on Easter Eve, probably hoping to see her on the platform so that they could celebrate their resurrection together. But she didn’t come. He paced uneasily back and forth along the platforms. Then sat in the waiting room so that
he wouldn’t miss her. Then, after endless minutes of waiting, he leaves for his hotel. Can’t sleep. As soon as day dawns, he leaps up and shaves. Still no sign of Felice.

It’s Easter Sunday in Berlin. Franz Kafka is sitting in his hotel room, gloomy weather outside, he kneads his hands, stares at the door in the hope that a messenger may come, and stares out of the window, in the hope that an angel might.

Then, eventually, she must have called. She has strong nerves. They drive out into the Grunewald. Sit side by side on a tree trunk. That’s all we know. It’s a strange gap in this double life – after seeing every breath and every day reflected in two to four letters, now all of a sudden: nothing.

On 26 March Kafka writes to her from Prague: ‘Do you know that since I got back you have been more of an incomprehensible miracle than ever?’ That’s all we know about that Sunday in Berlin. An Easter miracle, at any rate.

That’s Kafka’s life in that March of 1913. But there is also the ‘work’. So a letter arrives from Leipzig, from Kurt Wolff, who is at the centre of all German-language literature that spring: ‘Herr Franz Werfel has told me so much about your new novella – is it called
The Bug
? – that I would like to meet you. Will you send it to me?’ The most famous German short story of the twentieth century, called
The Bug
? One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams he found himself turned into a bug? Of course not. So Kafka writes to Wolff: ‘Don’t believe Werfel! He doesn’t know a word of the story. Once I’ve had it written up in a presentable version, of course I would be delighted to send it to you.’ And then: ‘The next story I have,
The Metamorphosis
, has not yet been copied out.’ And that was how
The Metamorphosis
came into the world.

Robert Musil lives with his wife in the 3rd District of Vienna, at 61 Untere Weissgerberstrasse. He is a man with many qualities. He is neatly turned out, fit, his shoes are the shiniest in all the coffee houses of Vienna, and for an hour every day he does sit-ups and knee-bends. He is incredibly vain. But he emanates the quiet power of self-discipline. In a special little notebook he records every single cigarette he smokes, every time he sleeps with his wife he puts a ‘C’ in his diary, for ‘coitus’. Order is all.

But in March 1913 he’s had enough. He can bear his dull job as Librarian, Second Class, at Vienna’s Technical University no longer. He feels small and weak, and at the same time called to higher things, to a novel of the century. But he is not certain that this isn’t just a sign that he’s going slowly but surely round the bend. Or whether he should quit his job.

At last, on 30 March, he gets an appointment with the neurologist Dr Otto Pötzl. He waits for two hours. Then the first thing he does is give the doctor a copy of his first book,
The Confusions of Young Törless
. He inscribes it ‘To Dr Pötzl, with fond memories’. In the days of his increasing suffering he is consoled by the memory of the times of Dante. He writes in his diary: ‘But what is considered mental illness in 1913 might have been mere eccentricity in 1300.’ But what would the doctor say? Today they would call it ‘burn-out’; in those days they said, ‘He’s suffering from the manifestations of a serious cardiac neurosis: attacks of pounding heart with a racing pulse, palpitations when falling asleep, disturbances of the digestion with the related psychical phenomena: a depressive state and with high levels of physical and psychical fatigability.’ In 1913 this was summed up under the heading of ‘neurasthenia’. People mocked, but in the official world of the imperial–royal monarchy the word was immediate grounds for leave of absence. So, at the request of the library, one Dr Blanka writes an ‘official medical report’: ‘Herr Dr. Phil. Ing. Robert Musil Kk. Bibliothekar Wien III unt. Weissgerberstrasse 61 reveals considerable symptoms of neurasthenia, in consequence of which he is incapable of working.’