Word: kafka
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...BOILING CAULDRON of tortured artists. Franz Kafka must surely hold a place of honor. Born at a bad time, in a worse place, and raised by a middle-class family that had little use for writers. Kafka spent his life floundering in a morass of guilt and self-hatred. Never quite convinced of his right to exist, he wore himself down with ceaseless self-dissection, suffocated in an office job the talent he knew he had, and often tried to sabotage his most precious relationships. Although he never formally committed suicide-a failure he gloated over with particular relish...
...Kafka: A Biography, Ronald Hayman carefully traces the close connection between the circumstances of Kafka's life and his work, bringing his sometimes puzzling and abstract fiction comfortably down to the human realm. The book is also valuable as a slap-in-the face for anyone who has flirted with the idea of a life of self-punishment; for, although Hayman wants to "emphasize what is positive in Kafka's negativism," he cannot help leaving us with the rather tragic picture of a tortured artist who served self-torture more dutifully than...
Which is not to condemn Kafka in the least, for his suffering was truly awful: Hayman believes that it was quite an achievement for the writer to have salvages as much as he did from his despair. Even Edmund Wilson, in an essay that otherwise sternly downplays the importance of his work, concedes that "the cards were stacked against poor Kafka in an overpowering...
First, there was his religion. Most present day Americans must have trouble appreciating the peculiar horrors of turn-of-the-century Prague for a Jew. "Anti-Semitism," a phrase now used to describe segregated country clubs, meant frenzied riots and accusations of ritual murder. And since the Kafkas were doing their best to assimilate, feeling a meaningful religious identity was (until relatively late in his life) almost impossible for Franz. Second, there was his nationality (German), making him an outsider twice removed while in Prague. And then there was his father. Hayman stresses Kafka's relationship with his father...
...Institute, despite the drain on his energies and the interference with his creative work; and finally, in his relationships with women, to whom he was naturally attractive, he hesitated repeatedly, unable to sustain in person the epistolary intimacies he handled so well. It was in this last area that Kafka felt most inadequate, most overshadowed by his father; although he believed that the greatest human duty was to have a family, he could never allow himself to intrude on his father's domain. Also frightened by any possible interruption of his writing, he never wanted to marry badly enough...