Too Late for a Card
High Miles
(1883). At the time, Prague was part of the Hapsburg Empire of Bohemia.
He grew up in a Jewish ghetto in Prague, speaking German, in a family
that identified themselves as Czech. He lived almost his entire life
with his parents, even after graduating from law school and holding a
steady job at the government-run Workman's Accident Institute � a place
where he oversaw the implementing of safety measures. His work helped
prevent lumber workers from losing their limbs.
His family's apartment in the Jewish ghetto in Prague was tiny, noisy,
and subject to the rule and whims of his tyrannical father. Kafka once
noted, "I want to write and there's a constant trembling in my forehead.
I'm sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole
apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. � Father breaks down the door
of my room and marches through with the bottom of his bathrobe dragging
behind him. Valli shouts through the foyers as if across a Parisian
street, asking if father's hat has been brushed. The front door makes a
noise like a sore throat � Finally, father is gone, and all that remains
is the more tender, hopeless peeping of the two canaries."*
In that noisy claustrophobic apartment with his parents and three
sisters, Kafka would hypnotize himself to get in a frame of mind to
write. He said, "Writing � is a deeper sleep than death � just as one
wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk
at night."
Kafka was terrified of his father, who convinced his son early on and
again and again that he was a failure in life and would never amount to
anything. Kafka stuttered around his father, but no one else.
Kafka spent his life steeped in self-loathing, and he had a number of
psychosomatic illnesses. To cure his perceived illnesses, he tried all
sorts of herbal and natural healing remedies. He went through a phase
where he chewed each bite he put into his mouth a minimum of 10 chews.
And he became vegetarian, eating mostly nuts and fruits, and followed a
regimen of doing aerobics in front of an open window. He was actually a
physically robust and healthy young man, but he was neurotic in a number
of ways. He confessed that he had "a boundless sense of guilt," and one
of his friends wrote that Kafka was "the servant of a God not believed in."
He was engaged to a woman in Berlin for five years, then broke it off
with her. He wrote to her, "After all, you are a girl, and you want a
man, not an earthworm." They were engaged a second time, and broke it
off again. Their distant relationship was carried on almost entirely by
writing letters. He once said: "Letter writing is an intercourse with
ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own,
which emerges between the lines of the letter being written. � Written
kisses never reach their destination, but are drunk en route by these
ghosts."
Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, a month shy of his 41st birthday.
All of his sisters later died at concentration camps in the Holocaust.
Not much of Kafka's work was published during his lifetime. Kafka had
instructed his friend Max Brod to set his manuscripts on fire upon his
death, but Brod refused, and instead edited and published Kafka's work.
Kafka's best-known work is The Metamorphosis, which begins, "As Gregor
Samsa awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself
transformed in his bed into an enormous bug."
His book The Trial begins, "Someone must have been telling lies about
Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one
morning."
Kafka has been made into an adjective, "Kafkaesque," a literary allusion
dropped into conversation from time to time by people who may or may not
be familiar with his work, which is actually full of humor. "Kafkaesque"
has come to be used to describe things of a gloomy, bizarre, eerie,
nightmarish, or doomed nature, and is often applied to bureaucratic or
institutional situations.
Kafka once wrote in a letter to a friend: "The books we need are of the
kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the
death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as
though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from
all human habitation � a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea
within us."
* All quotes by Kafka are translations of Kafka's German into English by
David Zane Mairowitz, except for the final quote ("The books we need
�"), from a translation by Willa and Edwin Muir.