Kafka's Love Letters
MILANO, PAOLO
Kafka's Love Letters Letters to Milena. By Franz Kafka. Schocken. 238 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Paolo Milano Teacher and critic, Queens College I know a man who is convinced that Franz Kafka, in...
...rather they are pre-existing in his nature...
...Her own letters to Kafka have unfortunately disappeared...
...A dispassionate reading of Letters to Milena seems to confirm that extreme view...
...But can we forget that such is the stuff of which moral genius is made...
...their meetings were rare and poignant...
...What ultimate communication did Franz want to convey to Milena...
...He had a good knowledge of modern psychology, but also an articulate distrust for it...
...In other words, he was resolved to charge the simplest gesture with the heaviest load of responsibility...
...Milena died in 1944, twenty years after her friend, in a German concentration camp...
...a few stories and letters have dazzled her...
...And here is what he thinks of letter-writing: "It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts...
...A few quotations may be helpful...
...Of what we call "neuroses" he has this to say in one of these letters: "All these so-called illnesses, sad as they may appear, are matters of faith, efforts of souls in distress to find moorings in some maternal soil...
...Kafka, I feel, was a man who had committed himself to be relentlessly attentive to life...
...It is fortunate, he also thought, that very few human beings are capable of such an effort...
...The definition is correct but partial??the emphasis, I think, is misplaced...
...Haas, who has edited the Letters with love and intelligence, calls them, in his preface, "an orgy of despair, bliss, self-laceration and self-humiliation...
...In my friend's opinion, the nightmare world of The Trial or The Castle is not a picture of the human condition as interpreted by a writer, but a report on the way the man Kafka actually lived it...
...Milena, about to divorce her husband, had a warm admiration for Kafka and a sympathetic touch of TB...
...We begin to understand why Kafka refused so stubbornly to consider himself a "writer...
...If we don't like being disturbed, we may call Kafka's need an "obsession...
...Kafka, it is true, never tires of writing to his friend that love between them is impossible, because he cannot live up to it...
...He was so well aware of this danger that he considered himself a victim of his vocation...
...Such is indeed the way of life of those, to quote an American poet, who dare "in secret place/ That awful stranger, consciousness,/ Look squarely in the face...
...Franz was then, as practically always, vaguely engaged to a bourgeois girl...
...Here is one of the recurrent warnings, which Kafka addresses to himself: "Of course, Milena doesn't know you...
...Reviewed by Paolo Milano Teacher and critic, Queens College I know a man who is convinced that Franz Kafka, in his literary work, intended to be an absolute realist...
...Their friendship was deep but not long (erotically, it is hard to say how far it went...
...He himself was??in fact, he could hardly avoid it...
...What is, then, the final meaning of these unparalleled letters, of this agonizing record of a resolution-not-to-live...
...It was a moral problem, or, more accurately, a religious and metaphysical dilemma...
...Finally, I want to record the gratitude we owe to James and Tania Stem, whose translation of Letters to Milena is impeccable...
...His is indeed an extraordinary attitude...
...And, in the same passage, he speaks of "community," of religious community...
...she is like the sea with its vast volume of water, and yet, mistaken, tumbling down with all its strength, when the dead and above all distant moon desires it...
...and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one's ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing...
...At bottom, however, the conflict that plagued the sender of these unique messages was not psychological...
...Such moorings, however, are after all not an isolated, interchangeable property of man...
...This, of course, led him often into a state of paralysis...
...Not psychologically, though, but rather in the sense of weighing, at each step, the moral import and the meaning of every one of his acts...
...Kafka's anguished cry to his friend, as I hear it, seems to say: "I am unworthy of being loved, and you, Milena, are mistaken about the object of your feelings...
...She had left Kafka's letters with a German critic, Willi Haas, who recently resolved to publish them...
...In 1920, at the age of 38, Kafka was a tubercular writer of great promise and some repute when he met his Czech translator, Milena J., a lively and gifted woman of 24...
...They also prove, I feel, that Kafka faced in exactly the same spirit the daily problems of his own life and the metaphysical questions which haunt the characters of his stories...
...I will try, briefly, to ground my interpretation on what Kafka himself thought of his condition...
...and he implores Milena, incessantly, to postpone their meetings or to give them up altogether, since they would only cause mutual torture...
...It is a fact that these intimate love letters are indistinguishable, in tone as well as in substance, from Kafka's "fiction...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
