It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps…

This, writes Begley, is “Kafka’s characterization (in a moment of despondency) of the letters that he and Milena exchanged [and it] is not far off the mark for many of them, and applies with even greater force to many of the letters to Felice.” Certainly the love letters are repetitive; there is something mechanical in them, not deeply felt, at least, not toward their intended recipients-the sense is of a man writing to himself. Impossible to believe Kafka was in love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the “bony, empty face, that wore its emptiness openly… Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin”; Felice with her bourgeois mores, her offer to sit by him as he worked (“In that case,” he wrote back, “I could not write at all”), her poor taste in “heavy furniture” (“A perfect tombstone,” writes Kafka, describing a sideboard of her choosing, “or a memorial to the life of a Prague official”). For Kafka she is symbol: the whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of himself. The occasion of their engagement is the cue to explain to her (and to her father) why he should never marry. The prospect of living with her inspires pages of encomia on solitude. Begley, a fiction writer himself, has an eye for the way fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give it away. You might say he has Kafka’s number: “It’s all there in a nutshell: the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the conquest of Felice as its goal; reflexive flight from that goal as soon as it is within reach; insistence on dealing with her and their future only on his terms; and self-denigration as a potent defense against intimacy that requires more than words.” Poor Felice! She never stood a chance. In his introductory letter Kafka claims: “I am an erratic letter writer… On the other hand, I never expect a letter to be answered by return… I am never disappointed when it doesn’t come.” In fact, counters Begley, “The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters compulsively and copiously, and turned into a hysterical despot if they were not answered forthwith, bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.” Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”-a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are traps,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men everywhere, in order to drag them down into the Finite.” [46] It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path. À propros: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was “a willful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:

I do not think so… He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a watch-sometimes. [47]

Kafka’s mind was like that; it went wondrous fast-still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as readers turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons (the family resemblance between the two writers was noted by Larkin himself [48]). In this matter, Kafka has a less judgmental biographer than Larkin found in Andrew Motion; Begley, though perfectly clear on Kafka’s “problems with girls” does not much agonize over them. Literary nerds may enjoy the curious fact that for both those literary miserabilists (close neighbors on any decent bookshelf) modern heating appliances appear to have served as synecdoche for what one might call the Feminine Mundane:

He married a woman to stop her getting away

Now she’s there all day

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

She takes as her perk

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

And the electric fire [49]

I yield not a particle of my demand for a fantastic life arranged solely in the interest of my work; she, indifferent to every mute request, wants the average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the factory, good food, bed at eleven, central heating… [50]

Yet as it was with Larkin, Kafka’s ideas about women and his experiences of them turn out to be different things. Women were his preferred correspondents and inspiration (in 1912, the Felice correspondence [51] competes with the writing of Amerika; in 1913, it wins), his most stimulating intellectual sparring partners (Milena Jesenská, with whom he discussed “the Jewish question”), his closest friends (his favorite sister, Ottla) and finally the means of his escape (Dora Diamant, with whom, in the final year of his life, he moved to Berlin). No, women did not drag Kafka into the finite. As Begley would have it: the opposite was true. Usefully, Begley is a rather frequent and politic employer of modifiers and corrections. In reality, the truth was, the opposite was true. Kafka told his diary the only way he could live was as a sexually ascetic bachelor. The truth was he was no stranger to brothels. Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka’s writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then a sleep until 7:30, then 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 wish

probably 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.