Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,28

exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11:00 P.M. (as Begley points out, the letter and diary writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two or three o’ clock, once even till six in the morning.” Then, finding it an “unimaginable effort to go to sleep,” he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. Yet “when Felice wrote to him . . . arguing that a more rational organization of his day might be possible, he bristled: ‘The present way is the only possible one; if I can’t bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow.’ ” It was Brod’s opinion that Kafka’s parents should gift him a lump sum “so that he could leave the office, go off to some cheap little place on the Riviera to create those works that God, using Franz’s brain, wishes the world to have.” Begley, leaving God out of it, politely disagrees, finding Brod’s wishprobably misguided. Kafka’s failure to make even an attempt to break out of the twin prisons of the Institute and his room at the family apartment may have been nothing less than the choice of the way of life that paradoxically best suited him. It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer’s equivalent of the dater’s revelation: He’s just not that into you. “Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents’ apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn’t write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve his self-esteem.” And here Begley introduces yet another Kafka we rarely think of, a writer in competition with other writers in a small Prague literary scene, measuring himself against the achievements of his peers. For in 1908, Kafka had published only eight short prose pieces in Hyperion, while Brod had been publishing since he was twenty; his close friend Oskar Baum was the successful author of one book of short stories and one novel, and Franz Werfel—seven years Kafka’s junior—had a critically acclaimed collections of poems. In 1911, Kafka writes in his diary: “I hate Werfel, not because I envy him, but I envy him too. He is healthy, young and rich, everything that I am not.” And later in that same year: “Envy of the apparent success of Baum whom I like so much. With this, the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.” Of course, that wool ball—a throwaway line in a diary!—reminds us how little call he had to envy anyone.

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The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing. . . . Thus what has resulted was a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.)

A perfect slice of Kafka. On May 3, 1913, Kafka’s diary conceives of a butcher’s knife “quickly and with mechanical regularity chop[ping] into me from the side,” slicing thin, parma ham style, pezzi di Kafka. . . . The quote above is like that: it has the marbled mark of Kafka running through it. It traces a typical Kafka journey, from the concrete, to the metaphorical, to the allegorical, to the notional, which last—as so often with Kafka—seems to grow obscure the more precisely it is expressed. From this same quote Begley efficiently unpacks Kafka’s “frightful inner predicament,” born of his strange historical moment. A middle-class Prague Jew (“The most Western Jewish of them all”) both enamored of and horrified by an Eastern shtetl life he never knew; a Jew in a period of virulent anti-Semitism (“I’ve been spending every