Kafka's Trials

THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA, 1910-1913 (345 pp.)--Edited by Max Brod--Schocken ($3.75).

In 1910, when Franz Kafka was 26, he began keeping a diary. His personality was already obsessed by anxieties that he never shook off, and his writing was a presentiment of his later books. These diaries are more than a personal record; they seem to illuminate large areas of modern life and literature. Nothing quite like them has appeared in this century.

By writing "all my anxiety entirely out of me" and by jotting down whatever transient impression or narrative fragment entered his mind, Kafka hoped to achieve an emotional catharsis. In an early entry, he said of his writing that "my doubts stand in a circle around every word." He might have added--around every deed. Kafka was a man impaled on the spears of scruple: he could not be satisfied with the approximations of truth most men accept, but had to burrow into them and try to redefine them.

Revolt by Half. All of Kafka's anxieties were crystallized in his relationship to his stolid and conventional middle-class father, who exerted "the bewildering effect that all tyrants have whose might is founded not on reason, but on their own person." The elder Kafka thrust all his massive sarcasm and scorn on his son in order to turn him into a successful businessman. Had he merely rebelled and broken from his father, Kafka might have gained endurance and maturity. His tragedy was that he could neither completely acquiesce nor completely rebel.

He wished to devote all his time to literature, yet yearned for the satisfactions of conventional family life. He thought of his "possible future wife and possible children," only to realize that his ill health (he died of tuberculosis at 40) would prevent him from having either. "It seems so dreadful to be 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 . . . never being able to run up a stairway beside one's wife . . . having to admire other people's children . . ."

Fragments of Parable. Strewn through the diaries are numerous fragments of stories, beginnings of the books now recognized as profound parables of modern life. Here the reader, observing Kafka's imagination at work, can understand why so many conflicting interpretations have been offered of his writing.

One revealing critical remark about Kafka was made by French Novelist Albert Camus: "It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of this work to offer us everything and to confirm nothing."

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