Kafka in Love (24 page)

I
remember that during the first year I lived in Copenhagen, in a big house by a lake where Frederiksborg Castle was reflected with its green copper roof and its eight towers, I listened from morning till night and without tiring to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the only long-playing record I owned. My ear for music is not particularly good, in fact far from it. Years have gone by—I don’t want to count how many—but I still recognize Mahler from the piece’s opening strains. In order to absorb a work, I have to spend a long time with it.

I have been listening to Franz Kafka for aeons. His
Letter to His Father
is a book I have read and offered as a gift many times. Twice I have seen it performed on the stage. The second time, only a few weeks ago, the actor had a paunch and a provincial accent. He spoke in such a listless, drawling monotone that I got a headache and left.

Kafka, who dreamed of being an actor, read his own texts with forceful passion, and his friends’ responses were wildly enthusiastic.

More has been written and continues to be written about Kafka than about any other writer—the interest elicited by the man and his work has not diminished over time. Yet, despite the public’s great appetite for works about the author of “The Metamorphosis,”
The Castle
, and
The Trial
, his own writings are no longer very widely read.
The Castle
makes us anxious,
The Trial
brings back unpleasant memories, and “The Metamorphosis,” which made his friends laugh, provokes our tears.

Why have I written another book about this writer? And how did the idea come to me?

In his
Kafka
, Pietro Citati tells, very briefly, a marvelous anecdote that I had never heard before. Kafka, walking in a park in Berlin, encounters a little girl in tears; she has lost her doll. For days I pondered this meeting, the twenty or so letters that he wrote as coming from the
doll. What did he tell this child to console her? I spent an inordinate amount of time composing a children’s story, “Kafka and the Doll.” And I wondered, Who is this Dora who records the event? At the time, I knew of only one woman in Kafka’s life, Milena.

A friend gave me the collected works of Kafka, four fat volumes on Bible paper in the Pléiade edition, published with extensive notes and commentary. I concentrated on the
Diaries
and the correspondence, taking pleasure in comparing the letters written on the same day to Felice, to Max, to Ottla, savoring the differences in tone: plaintive when he addresses his first fiancée; warm and playful when he answers his sister; firm, precise, ironic, affectionate when he asks his friend for a favor. If he recounts his “night of mice” to several people, for instance, he turns it into an exercise in style, introducing variations in the story and the rhythm, taking a voluptuous pleasure in fixing life’s moments, these images on the film-roll of memory, in a way that we feel. Physically.

His correspondence, richer even and more regular than his diaries, lays out Franz’s daily life for us (yes, I call him by his first name). The hours, days, and years run past, a river that takes its time, meanders, widens, strays, dries up, and suddenly accelerates to the speed of a scherzo.

Here is the street along which he strides briskly, a straw boater on his head, here is Chotek Park, where he reads Kleist or Strindberg in the shade of an old tree, and here is his Hebrew teacher coming to meet him, bent under the weight of a photographic enlarger. And at nightfall, Franz pushes through the door of the Yiddish theater, where he is the first to applaud his friend Yitzhak Löwy. He casts his eyes over the audience, sets down a few lines in the notebook he always carries: “Shoulders that want to emerge from a sleeved dress” and “A face sprinkled with ashes.”

Now at his office, the insurance company where he is kept so busy, he complains with a humor that predates Chaplin “of all the young women in porcelain factories constantly launching themselves into the stairway carrying great heaps of crockery.” One night, I saw him cry at the movies, join a group of friends at the Café Arco, dine in disgruntlement at his parents’ table, brush his hair at great length one boring Sunday. I followed him on each of his trips. The roofs in certain neighborhoods of Paris appear to me not as they are today but as I saw them when I read his “Travel Diaries.”

We have none of the letters that Felice, Julie, Milena, or Dora wrote to the man who loved and pursued them as few women have been loved and pursued. We have not a
line that they wrote, with the exception of eight of Milena’s letters to Max. But Franz captures their image with such intensity—their tenderness, their irritation, their need, and their fear—that they enter the film he projects for us, become its stars. We follow their surges toward him and their backing away, we envy the passion they provoke, we empathize and are impatient with them—but what would I have done in their place, faced with a man who goes crazy when he is kept from writing?

From my prolonged study of his correspondence, the cardiogram of a breaking heart, I came to believe that the woman he loved most, or best, was neither Milena, nor Dora, but his youngest sister, Ottla. When his tuberculosis is diagnosed, is it not to her that he runs for shelter, to her farm in Zürau, where he spends the most peaceful eight months of his life? Is it not to her that he writes: “I never feel so well as when I am with you”?

How did you go about your work? my translator has asked me.

I started by writing a play, imagining each scene, the movements and dialogue, the location and lighting—film has accustomed us to such techniques. But it was always Kafka who held center stage; he alone spoke, he alone elicited the replies of Felice, of Julie, of Milena, of Dora, and of dear Max, the confidant of classical theater. I never
made the sacrilege of putting words in Franz’s mouth that he hadn’t actually written. But I tinkered with the dates, the locations, and the speakers.

Once the play was finished, I was at a loss. Dissatisfied. I quickly realized that I had gone in the wrong direction. And I started all over again, both with my reading and my writing, taking exactly the same subject, Franz’s singular loves, from the evening of his meeting Felice until his death.

Without realizing it, I tried to make the characters come alive and enter into dialogue, drawing farther and farther away from traditional biography. I wanted to see Franz, wanted to hear him as I had seen and heard him through all his letters: alert, anxious, thoughtful, generous, insufferable, demanding, jealous, insomniac, guilty about feeling guilt, and dependent but with a great longing for independence and freedom. And happy to be, as Franz says somewhere, “only literature.”

No, I didn’t write a classic biography, and I forgot to ask myself along the way what genre my writing fell into.

Fiction or nonfiction? Moments of life, perhaps? Snapshots taken on the fly? With hardly any retouching?

I finished
Kafka in Love
more than a year ago, but I continue to spend time with the Kafka family, so much does it resemble my own. We didn’t live in Prague, a city
I have never visited, but in a small town in Tunisia. My mother is Hermann Kafka, but in a more exaggerated form, and my father is Julie, but fainter. He passed on to me only his fear of my mother, and he allowed her to tyrannize us in peace. We, too, went to synagogue only on the night of Yom Kippur, and our apartment, which was small and crowded, was even noisier than the Kafkas’. Like Franz, I stopped feeling ashamed of my body once I started going to the swimming pool, and I have been known to savor the sweetness of being ill. Yet I am a long way from having deciphered the body of his work, an enigma for centuries to come.