Post Office

By R.Z. Sheppard

LETTERS TO FELICE by FRANZ KAFKA Edited by ERICH HELLER and JURGEN BORN Translated by JAMES STERN and ELISABETH DUCKWORTH 620 pages. Schocken Books. $17.50.

Nobody could be clearer about the incomprehensibility of the world than Franz Kafka. Novels such as The Trial and The Castle, stories such as "The Metamorphosis," "The Hunger Artist" and "The Burrow" are the Grimm's fairy tales of the modern cloven spirit. Ordinary men awake to find they are helpless insects, or are found guilty of unknown crimes by unknown judges. One man wastes away in a cage, not because he is being starved but because he has never found the kind of food he might want. No grails are to be found in Kafka, no word or gesture ever turns frogs -- or beetles -- into princes.

Like dreams, Kafka's fables flow naturally out of their private coherence. He was a master at using familiar realistic detail to divine the hidden currents of fear and inconsolability. His influence has been enormous since Max Brod -- friend, literary guardian and biographer -- had Kafka's novels published posthumously despite the author's dying instructions to burn them.

Kafka has inspired much fiction and literary criticism. In a recent issue of American Review (No. 17), Philip Roth contributed a compassionate sketch of Kafka that -- yes -- metamorphosed into an autobiographical fantasy. Roth imagined that Kafka did not die of tuberculosis in 1924 at 41, but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew-school teacher and suitor of his maiden aunt.

Roth's feat of scholarship and imagination is an excellent place to begin Letters to Felice, now published for the first time in English, Kafka's confessional correspondence to the nice Jewish secretary from Berlin who from 1912 to 1917 was twice his fiancee but never his bride. Erich Heller's introduction, though heavily written and somewhat abstract, does pinpoint Kafka's "moral hypochondria ... a man ready to feel guiltily responsible for what he knows to be a flaw in the order of the world."

Kafka never married, though he needed the idea of woman. He spent most of his passion on postage stamps.

Only in the last, painful year of his life did he taste real happiness with Dora Dymant, a 19-year-old Hebrew scholar. As sympathetic companion, nurse, mistress and daughter figure, she telescoped into those fleeting months all that Kafka had sought in a woman.

Kafka met Felice in 1912 at Max Brod's Prague apartment. He was 30 and still entertained hope of marriage to a bright, cheerful, uncomplicated girl. A month after her return to Berlin, his first letter began a seduction aimed not at getting Felice to bed but at idealizing her on a pedestal where she could intensify his feelings of inadequacy.

"I am in the mood for continual and, as it were, circular complaining," he writes, as the formal Sie changes to the intimate Du. In two and sometimes three letters a day, Kafka compiled a monumental case history of his neuroses. Each balanced sentence, each self-lacerating perception seems to be an end in itself. It is almost as if Kafka set up the situation so he could write about the turmoil it caused him. He despised himself for still living at home with his mother and father, a bluff haberdasher whom Kafka attempted to blame for his neurasthenia. For the full treatment read Letter to His Father (Schocken Books, 1953), 45 pages of controlled rage, respect, affection and revulsion.

Though his letters to Felice point shakily toward marriage, Kafka tells her only of his drawbacks. He claims to be weak and easily fatigued. He raises the suspicion of impotence: "You are a girl and want a man, not a flabby worm on the earth." He writes how he hates his civil service job at Prague's Workers' Accident Insurance Institute.

He presents himself as hopelessly mendacious, God's own holy spoiled brat. Nobody expresses that blind human appetite for having everything at the same time as well as Kafka: "I strive to know the entire human and animal community, to recognize their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideals, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone ... to become so pleasing that in the end I might openly act out my inherent baseness before the eyes of the world without forfeiting its love--the only sinner not to be roasted."

In November 1912, Kafka reports that he has half-completed "an exceptionally repulsive story." It is "The Metamorphosis," and he explains to Felice that it springs from "the same heart in which you dwell." Because he is wedded to writing, he warns that his wife would necessarily lead "a monastic life."

Still, after only a few face-to-face meetings, they became engaged during Easter 1914. Almost immediately Kafka's letters began to carry complaints of headaches and increasing insomnia. By July the engagement was over.

The letters continued, however.

During the summer of 1916, Franz and Felice spent a week together in Marienbad. If there was any physical intimacy between them, the letters make no allusion to it. One month after the announcement of the second engagement in July 1917, Kafka writes Felice of his first tubercular hemorrhage. He seems to have broken the news with a sense of relief. TB was not only a way out of marriage but, he believed, nature's final judgment--the fatal wound caused by his warring selves.

Felice Bauer's letters to Kafka have never been located. It is obvious from his later correspondence that she had despaired of any future with him. Within a short time she married a successful German businessman. For Kafka, such a conclusion had probably been clear from the beginning. By marrying he would not be gaining a wife but losing a penpal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.