[Note: I used Kafka’s Letters to Felice as diligently translated James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth for this post.]
March 4, 1914.
This is the name and the date where the story begins to masticate its conflict. In order to appease the tenderhearted, I should add that the letter sent on this date by Franz Kafka to Grete Bloch, Felice Bauer’s close friend, does nauseate me, if only because its motions are recognizable. Perhaps they are recognizable to anyone who has been engaged, or consigned by promise to marry a person whom they would ultimately fail.
Leave-taking is everything; and I shall die on this hill while taking my leave of it, and pausing at Franz’s signature, for it is here that the game appears most clearly, the glimmer of a ball in the air as he tells her that he is tired and will continue the letter tomorrow— I recognize he is saying that she is now part of his writing, as marked by a promise of continuance, before signing off—
Farewell, and please go on being a good friend to your (how shall I put it)
Franz K.
who in recognition of the sun has but the icy coldness of his room, which he prefers to keep to himself.
A few weeks later, on March 20, at the cusp of locus where the ides of March open into the season of Aries, Franz tells Grete that he wrote a "long letter to F. — possibly, probably my last," the italics being my own. And he places her in the same category as Felice, telling her that she is "the best, kindest and sweetest creature," a statement he acknowledges as risky, which he prefaces by saying that he is "about to say something immensely stupid", not the said thing but the fact that he says it. Surely no more stupid than the opening of his letter to his Grete on March 22nd, with its carefree ode: "Dear Fraulein Grete and Child of Spring, out on the Ring a huge, never-ending funeral procession is passing . . . " He tries to convince her to move to Berlin, or stay in Berlin, where he and Felice have found their apartment.
On April 9, a few weeks later, Franz writes to Felice— she wants to meet Max Brod and his wife, but Franz is embarrassed, and he looks for words to explain this, or to excuse it— and signs his letter with the following:
No, Fraulein Bloch is not coming. I like her very much.
Franz
On April 13, 1914, Franz's mother brushes off a gushing letter to Felice's mother, referring to Felice as "Daughter," and celebrating her engagement to Franz.
A day later, Franz begins his letter to Felice: "Dear Fraulein Grete, it would be nicer if instead of the telegram I were holding your hand." And now I excerpt the letter in full because it is so jarring, given his engagement to Felice ("F."), and the labor being done to begin their lives together at that point.
One day later, on April 15, 1914, the author steps into the world he is creating… Italics, once again, are mine—as they will be for the duration of this post.
Another letter to Grete, on the following day, which refers to her letter, and which seems to indicate a guilty feeling that Grete has vis-a-vis her friend, Felice, a guilt that locates itself within letters, or correspondence:
Meanwhile, to Felice, on the following day, Franz writes a brief note that seems comradely more than intimate, his signature does not include "yours", makes no claim to being known in a special way by her, and the use of the initial in lieu of proper name carries Felice differently, as if to demarcate a distance or difference between the person she was in his early letters and the character she has now become in something like a novel, where he uses an initial to designate a character, particularly K. in The Castle.
My italics pick out the way Franz indicates to his fiancee that he wishes she would hasten the "appointed date" which may refer to the date that she leaves her job in Prague, or it may refer to the date of their meeting—- but it could also refer, perhaps, to the fantasied elocutionary effects of the judgement to come.
"I have this perception, F., which is why my confidence in our future is great," he writes, insinuating something like a desire for understanding— a desire that the author knows is elusive, dishonest, mired by ghosts, but which drives the plot of his life.
And so perhaps it is significant that he sends a letter to Grete on the very same day. He is, after all, pleased with Grete, for she answers his letters immediately, and she provides pieces of herself, her life, her days, for his imaginary, which he has asked of Felice for years now, in his desperate demands that she write more to him, and more often, and more constantly, and more completely—
And then, on the following day, another letter to Grete, a letter that speaks of Felice and her friendship to Grete, a letter that seems to hold no loyalty to anyone except the story Franz is trying to discover.
What intrigues me is the loyalty he feels to their correspondence, or to the letters themselves, which he begs Grete not to "burn", despite his coming marriage to Felice. One could revisit Kafka’s statements to Max Brod in his final will and testament here, noting that Brod might have known his friend very well, a position that Kafka iterates himself across his epistles to Brod over the years.
The writer in me shudders at her inability to recognize whether Franz is playing his cards in order to force life to a point that makes writing possible, or whether he is unconsciously setting the stage for the judgement — because it is spring, it is the month of April, and for some reason, this month brings uncanny urges for self-destruction, despite the blooms and the greens and the beauty showered upon the world.
Certainly, one can only wonder what Franz was thinking when he sent a letter to Felice Bauer's mother the next day, a letter which (again) I reproduce in full, if only to clarify the extent to which the correspondence, itself, is a novel, a fiction, a story about other things . . .
In the same vein, in the same tenor of joy, Franz sends a letter to Felice on the day that he sends a letter to her mother, reassuring her of his love for her daughter, and asking for her assistance in nudging Felice to cut all ties to Prague and invest in Berlin.
This letter opens with a sentence that echoes….
I pause here, and stop the excerpt, because nothing else happens and nothing of significance is uttered beyond this point. But cordiality proceeds apace… as it must, since Kafka will pillory nothing quite as ruthlessly as he pillories the conventions of manners and grace.
Two days later, Franz sends a letter to Grete:
It is no secret that Grete appears The Metamorphosis, and Franz anticipates her response by pivoting away from it, emphasizing that she doesn't ‘like’ his writing, and planting a seed that can inform her dismay when she finally reads it and feels as if she is recognizing herself within the horror of an imputed betrayal.
What does it mean to create tension in a novel or short story? Isn't the creation of tension dependent precisely on the lies or excuses we tell ourselves in order to justify decisions that resemble tragedy, or partake of that resonant timbre? I am not asking. Ignore my question marks. This is how writing works. And how it fails.
Listen, imagining is half the labor. So imagine a calendar sitting on a desk, with dates colored for F, and dates colored for G, and then you understand why the following day Franz devotes his correspondence to his fiancee.
As I mentioned before, so much of the future can be read in Kafka's signatures, in the valences of his signing-off, and there is no 'yours' in this note to Felice— such personal notations have been absent for a while now— despite the speaker’s urging that they marry sooner.
Fast forward to the next F-colored date, three days later, where "the man from Breslau" enters the picture:
He has staked out this act of being in his room— "I, too, must be free to be in my room" — as the space of the fantasy and the imaginary desire for another. The man from Breslau gives Franz the right to play with Grete, and perhaps a part of the author genuinely believes that this trade in fantasies is appropriate. Certainly I would not in stand in judgement of such belief.
What I cannot answer (and maybe the ghost himself cannot answer this) is a question that would be formulated as follows: Does Franz believe that Felice is doing with others what he is doing with Grete, and — if so — does it bother him?
On the same day, he mentions to Felice that he is "receiving plenty of congratulations, though certainly not as many as you", and he urges her towards the encounter he also planned with Felice: "You wouldn't like to go to Gmünd for a day? I should like to very much. Send me your sister Elsa's address! Was your mother satisfied with my letter? And have [Brod's) Petticoat Government and the Werfel arrived?"
But April 26th is a long day for Franz, a day of devoted correspondence, as he turns towards Grete, mixing the colors on his calendar dates in a suite of frenzy, and issues the following:
This is one of my favorite passages from his letters to Grete, the portion of about ‘pseudo-relationships’ and insignificance, which is to say, it is where the author tells us what letters mean to him, and why nothing can last between humans who exist just to be written.
As for the man from Breslau, Felice responds to Franz's letter and attempts, perhaps, to reassure him. I cannot imagine how she phrases this reassurance, or what lines she draws in order to separate her fiancee’s fantasies from her own lived experience. Nor can any of us know this exactly, since Felice Bauer's decision to trash all her correspondence with Franz Kafka makes sense in a way that way isn't literary so much as realistic.
Nevertheless, Franz opens his response to this (burnt) letter by Felice with a reference to misunderstanding:
I stop the excerpt here, if only to observe that the description of the apartment is evocative and wonderful in the way that only Kafka can be wonderful, particularly when he is not playing the character known as Franz who has been written into a novel about the failed engagements of a couple named Franz and Felice.
As the month of April draws to a close, Franz reassures Grete, and draws her closer in order to insist on her virtue, to chase away her pangs of conscience for betraying her friend.
This time, I stop the excerpt here in order to inaugurate a memorial silence—-
A silence in which it makes sense to restate Kafka's commitment to self-destruction, in his own words, which I read (or misread) as a testimony of loyalty to the purity of his writing, and the instances forged from life that become a text: I who, in my relations with you, always have the feeling that there are only two kinds of pure, tearless happiness, touching the very limits of our strength: to have a person who is true to one, to whom one is true; and secondly to be true to oneself and spend oneself utterly, burn oneself up without leaving any ashes.
From one silence to another, as it were:
I cut off the narrator, in the fury of his dread—- for the sake of music, and to assuage my own fury at Kafka for failing me, personally, by never truly liking Bach, which might be his most aberrant opinion, as judged by the subjective legislator known as my own opinion.
How comforting to know what we must fail each other where it matters most, and, in that vein, here is Leoš Janáček’s Suite for String Orchestra (1877), that speaks in counterpoint to heartbreaking machinations the author has contrived in order to imagine the book he must write:
And now, I let the author conclude, in his own words, with the note left in the margin of the letter he has written while living in his parents’ home, where noise and family life keep him from writing the book, and where the scene is so perfectly set for a judgement— although such a scene could be quickly ruined if the mother who is thrilled for her son’s marriage to Felice should happen to chance upon the letters moving between him and Grete Bloch.
But, before allowing him this conclusion, I reiterate the words that he assembles with the last pounding of the heart, and the meaningless rules or conventions that bind the restless body to a chair in a room where the author must imagine the book that destroys him.
Because so far I have achieved everything I set out to achieve, not at once, never without detours, in fact usually on the return journey, always with the utmost effort, and, as far as one could judge, almost at the last moment. Not too late, but very nearly too late, invariably with the last pounding of the heart. Nor have I ever achieved the whole of what I aimed at; in fact, the whole was usually no longer there; and even if it had been, I couldn't have coped with all of it; nevertheless, I did acquire a large part of it and usually the most important part. These rules that one discovers for oneself are quite meaningless in themselves, of course; yet they are not without meaning for understanding the character of the person who has found them, especially since once found they assume over him a kind of physical dominance.
