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| Kafka postcard, available at zazzle.co.uk |
If
Franz Kafka were living today do you suppose he could get a start in the
writing game, recessive type that he was? You’d hope so; but then it is a
self-promoting business, not ideal for one who reviewed his life’s work and concluded
that the bulk of it ought to be consumed by fire. On the one hand it’s hard to
imagine Kafka on Twitter; yet undeniably the man had a gift for aphorisms. 'In
the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world' – that’s 65
characters right there.
Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) turned 100 this year. At
least, 1915 is when it was published, which is to say finished; and Kafka, of
course, didn’t finish all that much. He did the main work on the story in the
autumn of 1912 and completed a version of it on December 7 of that year.
However, negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances –
inter alia The Great War, during which one prospective publisher (Robert
Musil!) was called up, and another stopped printing – got in the way. But in
1915 it finally appeared, and has since come to be considered among the most
famous, and greatest, short stories in the history of literary fiction.
On
this centenary occasion I’ve had the pleasure of writing a long preface to the
reissue of a rare translation of The
Metamorphosis by A.L. (Albert Lancaster) Lloyd (known as ‘Bert’), which
was, as of 1937, the first complete single-volume English version. (Lloyd, a
folk musicologist, singer, arranger and author, was a key figure in the
reflorescence of English folk music after the Second World War.) You can buy this edition as a Faber Find priced £4.99.
Meanwhile
BBC Radios 3 & 4 are about to launch a major commemorative celebration of
Kafka's work, for which playwright Mark Ravenhill has written a new adaptation
of The Trial. Mark and I were on Radio 4's Open Book last week talking to
Mariella Frostrup about Kafka's imaginative genius, his women troubles, and his
great and strangely neglected sense of humour. It starts at 13:16 if you follow this link.
Myths
have accumulated around Kafka, largely because they are compelling myths, and
this is one of the greatest of writers – as George Steiner has argued, perhaps
the only author one can be thought to own a letter of the alphabet. Kafka made
his own world on the page – recognizable but not quite real, precisely detailed
and yet dreamlike – and it still feels original and hugely influential. Once
you know that world, you do tend to see it around you.
Though
his great fame was posthumous Kafka did have a reputation to speak of during
his lifetime. Something else that happened in 1915 was that the winner of the
prestigious German-language Theodor Fontane Prize, dramatist Carl Sternheim, bestowed
his prize money upon Kafka as a mark of writer-to-writer respect. (Imagine a
Booker Prize winner today declaring from the dais that he wanted to hand his
£50,000 to another more deserving scribbler.)
One
danger with great writers, though, is that you can stop reading them, and so lose
sight – or retain only a stale notion – of what constituted their greatness.
The trappings of the ‘Kafkaesque’ are easily recalled, especially the sense of
an individual at the mercy of a big impersonal bureaucracy, feeling after a
while that he can’t but take it personally, and haunted by the sense that
perhaps, after all, he deserves it. And anyone who has glanced at Kafka’s
biography knows about The Father: Hermann Kafka, strapping son of a butcher,
ex-serviceman and purveyor of fancy goods, against whom Franz (Hermann’s only
son) felt inadequate in every way
Certainly
Kafka suffered neurotic misery, but then that is the making of many a writer. In
his case he seemed to feel it could be no other way and probably ought to be so:
writing, he decided, was to be in ‘the service of the Devil’, a pact that never
turns out in one’s favour. (As he wrote in a letter of July 1922, two years
before his death from tuberculosis: ‘I have not bought myself off by my
writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was
sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’)
But
Kafka, though a wounded man, wished nonetheless to make an exhibition of his
stigmata. And there’s something almost chilling in how he could step aside from
himself, perceive his own plight, and twist it with such finesse into supple fictional
shapes that had the force of parable.
That’s
only the bare scratch of a start, though, in all one might say about Kafka.
Revisiting him in order to write about him I was struck anew by how many
stories he composed from the perspective of creatures: Investigations of a Dog, A Report to an Academy, Josephine the Singer, The
Burrow. Simply put, it’s as if Kafka were saying, ‘You’re in the body you’re
in, it makes the problems it makes, and the soul protests its fate whatever.’
Josephine and The Metamorphosis were recently re-imagined
for children in My First Kafka: Runaways,
Rodents, and Giant Bugs, written by Matthue Roth and illustrated by Rohan
Daniel Eason. I find this a pleasing and fresh turn in the more tired anthropomorphic
bent of books aimed at kids. But that’s not to say the original wouldn’t work
for them. For instance, I began composing my Metamorphosis preface beside a swimming pool during a family holiday
last summer, and at one point a nine-year-old friend of my elder daughter
picked up my old Penguin edition of Kafka’s original and started to question me
about it, closely and with mounting curiosity. I like to think she had sensed something wise - sacred, even - in those pages. Kafka will tend to make you feel that way about books - such was his presence, now, then and, one somehow imagines, always.
