The Patient in Number 13

...Surprisingly, no critic I know has found in this the explanation for the given name of the hero of The Trial: Franz' other half...

...There are many extended passages of sound sense, too...

...Pawel explains the endless cures and refusals to shoulder responsibility —Kafka did not move out of the paternal dwelling till very late in life—partly as a reversion to childhood as the pampered patient or looked-after son, and partly as Jewish and Kafkaesque self-hatred: "He displayed all the classic symptoms of an overweening aggression turned inward, suicidal self-hatred, agonizing indecision, hypochondria, manipulative self-pity, insatiable demands for love beyond any hope of satisfaction, and, in addition, the perennial somatic complaints, from chronic headaches and insomnia to lassitude and digestive disturbances...

...Of solid interest, too, are the writings of Martin Green-berg, Walter'Sokel, Marthe Robert, and the symposium, The World of Franz Kafka, edited by J.P...

...Next, Pawel gives us Kafka's political, ideological, religious development: his interest in Czech matters, yet siding with Austria during the war...

...this is particularly dangerous in the case of Kafka, whose writings are open to so many interpretations that just listing— or refuting—them could fill a bigger book than Pawel's by itself...

...did excellent services to injured workingmen (if necessary, against the company...

...But there are serious flaws, and I don't mean trifles like the reference to the great actress Ger-trud Eysoldt as "Eyesoldt...

...Among his father's ancestry, Franz could have found to boast of merely a butcher able to lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth...

...The management regularly promoted him (though his pay, to the end, was far from lavish) and granted him generous vacations and leaves of absence when his health or hypochondria required them...

...Pawel's book offers eminently sensible critical insights, much too rare these days...

...squalid living conditions and ambivalent relations with the siblings of whom only the youngest, the magnanimous Ottla, became a real friend...

...And this wrap-up to a fine biography: " His.work is subversive, not because he found the truth, but because, being human and therefore having failed to find it, he refused to settle for half-truth and compromise solutions...

...he preferred to acknowledge only his mother's forebears, who included some renownedly learned, mystical, even saintly Jews...

...We are given the relevant family, ethnic and social background of the neurosis along with its specific, individual symptoms...

...In a later diary entry, Kafka was to write: "Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being together...

...On the next-higher level, we get painful cliches: "What he felt in his bones was a reality beyond appearances...

...The Nightmare of Reason—the title itself, focusing on the Jew beneath the Goya, is not unsuggestive—covers mostly familiar ground but in a spirited, graphic, incisive manner, lacking neither wit nor compassion...

...Kafka is most fascinating as neurotic genius: wise child and perpetual patient...

...For non-German-speaking readers, the biographer feels rightly compelled to make up his own translations...

...But worst of all are the occasional bits of portentousness and just plain overwriting...

...He was, in fact, a prime candidate for suicide, except that, as he told himself, "If you were capable of killing yourself, you would no longer have to do it, so to speak...

...No contradiction, I suppose, for the father of paradoxes...

...There is one additional problem...

...He's the patient in No...

...The war was over...

...I see their in-sides and have to stop quickly...

...total opening of body and soul," he wrote another time...

...For Heaven's sake, it surely can't be done at random...

...Besides, there is plenty of Kafka criticism in English, most notably Erich Heller's Franz Kafka, and his essay on Kafka in The Disinherited Mind...

...Second, Hayman adverts fairly consistently to Kafka's fictional writings, and draws biographical inferences...

...It is all there: agonizing friction with the formidable yet also collapsible father...

...Two major differences are perspicuous...

...But even Hayman's rendering of will-kurlich as "at random" should more properly read "arbitrarily...

...On the whole, his writing is accomplished, sometimes elegant...

...But this intelligent woman has nothing much previously unsaid to say...

...Ernst Pawel does justice, too, to the four main women in Kafka's life, as well as to some of the lesser ones...

...Elsewhere he noted how hard this was: "The sentences literally crumble in my hands...

...Thus when, at the non-end of Amerika, the hero takes off on a train for parts unknown, Pawel comments: "Unknown to Karl Rossmann, alias Franz Kafka, that is...

...Poor Kafka—all his life he was the patient in No...

...Pawel further observes, "This tension between faith and reason, the dynamic, ever-precarious balance between essentially irreconcilable opposites, is at the heart of Jewish tradition"—and, he claims, of Kafka'soeuvre...

...similarly, the upsurges of hope and positive action are given equal play with the dejection and accidie...

...unrequited yearning for a full, perhaps excessive, motherly love...

...For example: "But even the most sane and sensitive reading [of "The Judgment"] is necessarily tied to the subjective bias of the interpreter and, at best, can only illuminate whichever side he happens to be on...

...What Pawel has done mainly is sift the enormous available material (the Letters to Felice alone are 600 jam-packed, sticky pages that test a biographer's extracting aptitude) and organize the key insights...

...A biography of Kafka today is not likely to dig up much new material...

...At 26, she was close to spinsterhood and proceeded to make Herrmann—lovelessly—a hardworking, dutiful and caring wife...

...Too bad about that overworked "crystalline," but otherwise exemplary...

...Certainly Kafka hurled himself in later life (if someone who died just under 41 had such a thing...

...his at first sporadic then intensive involvement in Judaism, though never officially joining the Zionists for all his sympathy with their cause...

...Some weaknesses, mostly stylistic, remain...

...eight people take part in a conversation, when do you speak up in order not to be considered taciturn...

...Yet writing was not the only thing that tyrannized Kafka...

...Pawel sums up Kafka's first real intercourse, at 20, with a shopgirl: "As always he passed the test, and found the experience exactly as he had expected he would—dirty, degrading, depressing...

...It was in this atmosphere that a burly, hustling, upward-mobile country peddler named Herrmann Kafka married —lovelessly—Julie Lowy, the daughter of a thriving Prague brewer...

...First, Hayman's text covers 304 pages...

...Or consider the question the unworldly young Kafka addressed to the urbane Brod, as Pawel translates: "If...

...Although on some bibliographical problems—the lacunae in the Letters to Milena, the roadblocks in bringing out the critical edition of Kafka's works— Pawel has fresh things to report, these are peripheral matters...

...He was beloved by his co-workers from top to bottom...

...Stern...

...But being a person who "was constitutionally incapable of tackling any task, no matter how trivial, with . . . indifference," he naturally threw himself into writing with utmost fanaticism...

...And, with lacerating eloquence, on another occasion: "If [the writer] wants to escape madness, he really should never leave his desk...

...In another letter he said, "It also occurred to me that my death would interrupt my writing more decisively than if I remained alive...

...Pawel has, for instance, interviewed in Israel the octogenarian Dr...

...problems with teachers, some of whom were actually good, and fears of not graduating...

...Peace had broken out...

...In a biography literary criticism is perforce condemned to an ancillary role...

...Let us end, however, on a deservedly positive note...

...As Pawel points out in the bibliography, "the literature dealing with Kafka and his work currently comprises an estimated 15,000 titles in most of the world'smajor languages...

...Book-length biographies (some of them translations) are no rarity in English, yet the one close competitor to Pawel's book in recent years is Ronald Hayman' s Kafka (1982), a worthy effort in its own way...

...And by refraining from rummaging in the texts, he avoids the trap of oversimplification that Hayman falls into...

...I miss particularly one emblematic episode (recorded by Hayman), in which the already renowned Franz Werfel tried to obtain for the still little-known, moribund Kafka a private room in the Wiener Wald Sanatorium, and the chief physician responded: "A certain Werfel has written to say I should do something for a certain Kafka...

...Just as one could not and would not drag a corpse out of his grave, I cannot be made to leave my desk at night, either...

...The author has, commendably, tried to make The Nightmare of Reason a work of literature in itself...

...hence stirring and tremendously exciting...

...But who's Werfel...

...He was their child, last in a long line of disbelieving believers, wild visionaries with split vision who found two answers to every question and four new questions to every answer in seeking to probe the ultimate riddle of God...

...a] descent to the dark powers," and added, movingly, "Perhaps there are also different ways of writing, but I only know this one...

...into the study of Jewish lore and the Hebrew language, and harbored hopes of emigrating to Palestine with the woman he loved (not always the same), thereto start a restaurant with her as cook and himself as waiter...

...To Brod he confided that writing "is a reward for serving the devil...

...He must cling to it by his teeth...

...Though he clearly knows his German and English, there are some strange lapses, as when the Saale (halls) of a castle become "chambers," or playing billiards is Americanized into "shooting pool...

...One level up, comes an unfortunate trendiness, with references to "the public sector" and the Russian eagle as "the big bird," not to mention repeated use of the buzzword "basically...

...Reviewed by John Simon Turn of-the-century Prague was, despite some relatively liberal policies of the Imperial Austrian government, no easy time and place to be a Jew...

...Though assimilation to Austrianness was partially possible, most of the better jobs were not available to Jews, and the Empire itself, on foundations getting ever shakier, was less than a safe bet...

...13, yet the final irony, as Pawel points out, is that "the would-be suicide of long ago had become a model patient who desperately wanted to live...

...After some floundering and one disastrous employment, Kafka managed —through connections—to obtain a relatively prestigious job at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute, where there were practically no Jews...

...If onedoes not mind too much idiosyncrasy or ob-fuscation, there are also Walter Benjamin, Nabokov, and Roland Barthes to consider...

...The extra space allows Pawel to dig deeper into the background, to give ample sketches of some of Kafka's significant friends and contemporaries, to write in many respects a history of ideas...

...Pawel restricts himself to discussing the major fictions, and those briefly and unbiographically...

...at night, when fear keeps me from sleeping, I only know this one...

...Paw-el's, 448...

...A faddist in matters of health (embracing such alienating doctrines as Mullerism and Fletcherizing), a vegetarian who drank large quantities of raw milk (which may have caused his TB), Kafka was continually undergoing cures that usually benefited him little and sometimes actively harmed him...

...comradeships with several students, most of whom became well-known, and even a platonically homoerotic crush on one of them...

...It surely cannot be done deliberately...

...All it took was an alleged ritual murder of a Christian by a Jew, and a sub-Russian but vicious enough pogrom was on...

...we have since found out where those trains ended up, some forty years later...

...Puah Menczel, who, as a young girl, taught Kafka Hebrew...

...Or this: "Open to question—wide open, with blood oozing out of the gaps—was only whether he would squander these gifts...

...wrote up safety measures that were to save lives and limbs...

...eight people are sitting on the fringes [am Horizont] of a conversation, when and how is one to take the floor in order not to be considered uncommunicative...

...As Pawel says, "Kafka' s true ancestors, the substance of his flesh and spirit, were an unruly crowd of Talmudists, Cabalists, medieval mystics . . . seekers in search of reason for their faith...

...Compared to them, Kafka came to writing belatedly, as he did to sex, and was at first highly secretive about it...

...Here, too, he had minor affairs with fellow patients (whether platonic or not is difficult to determine), and here he met one or two of his fiancees...

...Pawel traces admirably Kafka's literary and other friendships, notably with Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, and a few others...

...But for the synagogue and orthodoxy Kafka never had any use, rejecting ultimately all fathers, heavenly or earthly...

...The Czech nationalists, as yet fiercely repressed, held out little promise, being even more anti-Semitic than the Austrians...

...All his life, well before tuberculosis took over and drove him into hospitals, he spent sojourns of various lengths in pensions or sanatori-ums (or even, happily, in his sister Ottla's village), recuperating from various forms of fatigue, illness, or phantasms...

...On the historical, political, social, and family background, Ernest Pawel's new biography, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka is especially good...

...Thus we get such fine lapidary formulations as "if writing alone justified his life, it also justified his not living his life...

...For what a critic like Walter Benjamin sees as 'the unmasking of the corrupt and parasitical world of the fathers' is also the oedipal conflict, the struggle between freedom and authority, and the confrontation between God and man...

...The only way to write [is] with...

...On the lowest level, there are slips of grammar, e.g., "Each following their own routine," and a clumsy back formation such as "adolescing...

...Considered indispensable, he was kept out of World War I against his own wishes, and when, upon the inauguration of the Czech republic, most top employees were replaced, Kafka was one of the very few to be respectfully kept on...

...Hayman is better: "If...

...and traveled across the country and familiarized himself with lowly existences which elicited the sympathy for the underdog that informs much of his writing...

...He has also provided the necessary setting and background —and is particularly good on the ambivalent way the current regime plays up Kafka for the tourist trade but bans his books...

...Kafka I know...

...Then come the stirrings, rather late, of sex, toward which Kafka retained a lifelong deeply troubled attitude, involving few compunctions with whores and semiprofessionals but much fear of "nice girls...

...In visions wrested from his innermost self, and in language of crystalline purity, he gave shape to the anguish of being human...

...What I need for my writing," he was to apprise Felice, the first of his four fiancees or quasi-fiancees, "is seclusion, not 'like a hermit,' that would not be sufficient, but like the dead...

...Of their four children the eldest alone was male: Franz, born July 3, 1883, and named after the emperor Franz Joseph...

...So Jews were torn between assimilation to creaky Austria or unfriendly Czech nationalism—unless they risked embracing a Zionism reprehended by both...

...Finally, he does not shy away from drawing certain risky but worthwhile conclusions...

...changes of fields in university study, to settle uneasily on the law Kafka was never to practice...

...It is to Pawel's credit, therefore, that he largely stays off textual explication and extrapolation: The life, the autobiographical writings, the reminiscences of contemporaries are more than sufficient...

...Perhaps only the last months of painful dying from a tuberculosis that had attacked the larynx and made mere swallowing an unbearable pain receive less than their full due...