Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,27

why he should never marry. The prospect of living with her inspires pages of encomia on solitude. Begley, a fiction writer himself, has an eye for the way fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give it away. You might say he has Kafka’s number: “It’s all there in a nutshell: the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the conquest of Felice as its goal; reflexive flight from that goal as soon as it is within reach; insistence on dealing with her and their future only on his terms; and self-denigration as a potent defense against intimacy that requires more than words.” Poor Felice! She never stood a chance. In his introductory letter Kafka claims: “I am an erratic letter writer. . . . On the other hand, I never expect a letter to be answered by return. . . . I am never disappointed when it doesn’t come.” In fact, counters Begley, “The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters compulsively and copiously, and turned into a hysterical despot if they were not answered forthwith, bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.” Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”—a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are traps,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men everywhere, in order to drag them down into the Finite.”46 It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path. À propros: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was “a willful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:I do not think so. . . . He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a watch—sometimes.47

Kafka’s mind was like that; it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as readers turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons (the family resemblance between the two writers was noted by Larkin himself 48). In this matter, Kafka has a less judgmental biographer than Larkin found in Andrew Motion; Begley, though perfectly clear on Kafka’s “problems with girls” does not much agonize over them. Literary nerds may enjoy the curious fact that for both those literary miserabilists (close neighbors on any decent bookshelf) modern heating appliances appear to have served as synecdoche for what one might call the Feminine Mundane:He married a woman to stop her getting away

Now she’s there all day

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

She takes as her perk

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

And the electric fire49

I yield not a particle of my demand for a fantastic life arranged solely in the interest of my work; she, indifferent to every mute request, wants the average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the factory, good food, bed at eleven, central heating. . . .50

Yet as it was with Larkin, Kafka’s ideas about women and his experiences of them turn out to be different things. Women were his preferred correspondents and inspiration (in 1912, the Felice correspondence51 competes with the writing of Amerika; in 1913, it wins), his most stimulating intellectual sparring partners (Milena Jesenská, with whom he discussed “the Jewish question”), his closest friends (his favorite sister, Ottla) and finally the means of his escape (Dora Diamant, with whom, in the final year of his life, he moved to Berlin). No, women did not drag Kafka into the finite. As Begley would have it: the opposite was true. Usefully, Begley is a rather frequent and politic employer of modifiers and corrections. In reality, the truth was, the opposite was true. Kafka told his diary the only way he could live was as a sexually ascetic bachelor. The truth was he was no stranger to brothels. Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka’s writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then a sleep until 7:30, then