Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,26

readers, we would have recognized at once—without such heavy prompting—the literary greatness of an ex-ape talking to the academy or tiny Josephine “piping” for her mouse people. I wonder.

There exists a second Brod account of Kafka reading aloud:We friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter.

Here the crime of Kafka’s first biographer is rather benign: a slight overdose of literary respect. Brod couldn’t quite believe Kafka was being funny when he was being funny. For how could Kafka, in his fearful earnestness, be funny? But it’s strange: Kafka revisionism is also, after a fashion, in love with Kafkaesque purity. We can’t credit the Brodish idea that Kafka writes of “the alienation of modern man”—too obvious. And how could Kafka be obvious? How could Kafka be anything that we are? Even our demystifications of Kafka are full of mystery.

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But if we’re not to read Kafka too Brodly, how are we to read him? We might do worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend, Begley yet believes in the “metaphysical smile” of the work, the possibility that it expresses our modern alienation—here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter writer who once asked a correspondent, “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.” The diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic form, can have written “I” as frequently as he. People and events appear rarely; the beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed equally with the fact he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote the fictions was a man of many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of himself:I completely dwell in every idea, but also fill every idea. . . . I not only feel myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

I am the end or the beginning.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt that I am a human being.

One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do. Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars, tending to plump instead for Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and every now and then frankly mendacious. The result is something we don’t expect. It’s a little funny:It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps. . . .

This, writes Begley, is “Kafka’s characterization (in a moment of despondency) of the letters that he and Milena exchanged [and it] is not far off the mark for many of them, and applies with even greater force to many of the letters to Felice.” Certainly the love letters are repetitive; there is something mechanical in them, not deeply felt, at least, not toward their intended recipients—the sense is of a man writing to himself. Impossible to believe Kafka was in love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the “bony, empty face, that wore its emptiness openly. . . . Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin”; Felice with her bourgeois mores, her offer to sit by him as he worked (“In that case,” he wrote back, “I could not write at all”), her poor taste in “heavy furniture” (“A perfect tombstone,” writes Kafka, describing a sideboard of her choosing, “or a memorial to the life of a Prague official”). For Kafka she is symbol: the whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of himself. The occasion of their engagement is the cue to explain to her (and to her father)