Tormented Soul

THE PENAL COLONY (320 pp.)--Franz Kafka--Schocken ($3).

THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA, 1914-1923 (343 pp.)--Schocken ($3.75).

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

With this sentence, Franz Kafka begins The Metamorphosis, a novelette filled with the Czech author's own terrified and terrifying sense of life. Gregor Samsa, a timid, unsuccessful salesman slaving for his family feels rejected and unwanted. At the end, he hears his sister say of his insect-self, "We must try to get rid of it." The Metamorphosis appears, with 43 other Kafka stories and "short pieces," in The Penal Colony, a collection recently published in the U.S. Like the more famous novels, The Trial and The Castle (TIME, April 28, 1947), all the stories are marked with the surface simplicity of fairy tales, and by Kafka's obsessive torment of spirit.

Bond of Blood. The second and last volume of The Diaries (the first appeared last year) reveals the crescendo of this torment, as it filled tuberculous Franz Kafka's own final years, up to his death in 1924, at 40. His father, a stolid and self-possessed businessman who was a living reproach to the introspective writer, was always at the center of his thoughts. He loved his father and admired him; he also feared and hated him. The "bond of blood too is the target of my hatred; the sight of the double bed at home, the used sheets, the nightshirts carefully laid out, can exasperate me to the point of nausea."

In the years the diaries were kept, Kafka became engaged to a generous and efficient young businesswoman. For five years the affair dragged on, but Kafka finally broke off because the girl could never understand his way of living and because he feared that as a sick and. indigent writer he would be a burden to her. In his diary he yearns for marriage and normal happiness; the thought of children makes him ecstatic. Once an apartment was rented and furniture bought, but his self-doubts forced him to turn back. In one entry he sadly and ironically remarks that his fiancee "wants the average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the [family's] factory, good food, bed at eleven, central heating"--just the things the author of The Metamorphosis could not give a woman.

Gentle Hands. In his last year Kafka knew a moment of happiness. He met a young Polish Jewish girl at a seaside camp, and teased her as she scaled fish: "Such gentle hands and such bloody work." For a few harried months she lived with him, making him once again want to live and write. He even asked her Orthodox father for permission to marry her, explaining that he was not a religious Jew but "a repentant one, seeking conversion." But it was too late; his lungs were withering.

What redeems these diaries from sheer morbidness is Kafka's herculean determination to find health and purpose in his writing. Even when he thought of suicide, he drove himself to his desk. Writing "is my struggle for self-preservation ... Go on working regardless of everything." He went on working to the end.

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