Living a Life of Literature

...Though he was frequently sidetracked into studying law, working for an Italian insurance company, or assisting in his father's factory, his devotion to his imagination did not waver...

...One need only add that the man who left us a world where chaos reigns was, as his friend Mil-ena Jesenska saw, "an artist of so scrupulous a conscience that he remained on the alert even when others, less keen of hearing, regarded themselves as being already in safety...

...I lack all sense of family life...

...In 1923, the year before his death, he met Dora Dymant and began to live with her...

...Later he wondered: "What have you done with your gift of sex...

...It would appear, though, that something more than absolute devotion to writing kept Kafka from attempting marriage...

...In happy contrast, I Am a Memory Come Alive gives us the artist first-hand, frantically waging war against his personal demons, seeing himself on a collision course with doom...

...In recent years I have spoken hardly more than 20 words a day to my mother, and I exchange little more than a daily greeting with my father...

...They make their rounds of libraries, then finally descend upon his friends and abandoned mistresses to ask: "What was he really like...

...Slowly dying, in conflict with those who loved him and those who wanted to, a man in whom depressions found fertile ground, Kafka fought back to leave us The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, and the numerous short stories...

...In a letter to his father written in November 1919, he recalled the fears of his youth: "I was, after all, weighed down by your mere physical presence...

...There was I, skinny, weakly, slight...

...In fact, Kafka saw himself throughout the 40 years that he lived as atrophied "in the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music...

...you strong, tall, broad...

...I have followed this direction unswervingly until my 30th year, and the moment I abandon it I cease to live...

...It is pleasing to read, not only because anyone's fight for his life ought to hearten us, but because we are spared the meanderings of someone else's explanations, some professor's overheated analysis stretched to absurdity to prove a notion...

...A mere trifle, indeed so small as not to be perceived, decided between its failure and success...

...Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what's more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things...

...To my married sisters and brothers-in-law I do not speak at all, although I have nothing against them...

...My whole being is directed toward literature," Kafka explained to Carl Bauer, the father of Felice, to whom he was twice engaged...

...But it might easily have succeeded...

...Around the country, legions of graduate students looking for PhD topics, armed with pencils, microfilm and tape recorders, act as minor sleuths, wanting to know everything about an author-what kind of food he ate, whom he slept with, the color of his underwear...

...And since psychoanalysis has become the rod for measuring the meaning of the most insignificant acts, one can usually only look forward to misinterpretations about the passions that drove some author to paint his bathroom red...

...Andre Maurois' comment on Proust-Never was the calling of writer clearer...

...It was a failure, in the end that is all that they will say...

...It was his ebbing strength that made him turn away from these not so minor celebrations of existence, and he wrote, knowing that he did not have long, to hold on to a semblance of life...

...I am taciturn, unsociable, morose, selfish, a hypochondriac, and actually in poor health...

...Because he loved perfection, writing was a torture, albeit a holy one and something in which he luxuriated...

...A tubercular and introverted young man, Kafka found in his robust father's manners and speech and style everything that disturbed him, everything that played on his anxieties...

...never was a life more totally dedicated to work"-applies to Kafka as well...

...I remember, for instance, how we often undressed in the same bathing hut...

...Reviewed by Orde Coombs Contributor, "Harper's," New York "Times Magazine" In a society as voyeuristic as ours, the writer's life has become almost as important as his work...

...Yet what self-doubts, what demons he had to contend with...

...When people say that he wrote for a period of 14 days, what this really means is that he wrote for 14 consecutive evenings and 14 consecutive nights...

...Nahum N. Glatzer has put this collection together with sensitivity and skill...

...In a memoir that is a paean of praise to the man who "embodied my conception of what a human being should be," she noted: "Kafka had to write because writing was the very air he breathed...

...To write his books, he sacrificed family, love, friendship, and marriage...

...And how he wrote...

...He breathed it in the rhythm of the days on which he wrote...

...This was no mere generation gap, for Kafka was fighting for the right to be what he wanted to be...

...Born on July 3, 1883, the son of a businessman, he always knew he wanted to be a writer...

...But then when we stepped out of the bathing hut before the people, you holding me by hand, a little skeleton, unsteady, barefoot on the boards, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes, which you, with the best of intentions, but actually to my profound humiliation, always kept on showing me, then I was frantic with desperation and at such moments all my bad experiences in all spheres fitted magnificently together...

...In The Penal Colony, for instance, he observed of the bachelor's fate: "It seems so dreadful to stay a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, to lie ill gazing for weeks into an empty room from the corner where one's bed is, always having to say goodnight at the front door, never to run up a stairway beside one's wife " Similarly, at age 38 he lamented that he was "without forebears, without marriage, without heirs, with a fierce longing for forebears, marriage and heirs...

...The purpose of all this, presumably, is to enter the private world in which the writer creates his fantasy, and of necessity lives...

...Kafka's life was anything but easy...

...Everything I am, and am not, is a result of this...