III

KAFKA AND THE PROSPECT OF MARRIAGE
(1912-1921)

Without forebears, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for forebears, marriage, descendants.¹

… Even under the most favorable circumstances, it is probable that in a happy union I would despair.²

What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate things.³

In 1912 Kafka not only began enthusiastically to compose his first great works but also met F. B. and came to grips with the problem of marriage. To say that he took the problem seriously is an understatement: he recognized it immediately as the dramatic choice of his life. The problem had two aspects: first the problem of marriage itself, which was already enough to frighten him; then the nature of his relations with F. B. and the prospect of a common life with her. These two problems were naturally indissolubly interlinked, yet the solution of one would not contribute to the solution of the other. In other words, Kafka might decide that he was capable of living with his fiancée and still not believe himself fitted for marriage—and vice versa. Here comparison with Amiel, and to an even greater degree with Kierkegaard, is inescapable. Forever reluctant, these men were unnerved by the very prospect of marriage which pointed up “the impossibility of living.”

With Kafka as with Kierkegaard,⁴ the father’s example inspired the vision of marriage: patriarchal authority suffused the image of the hearth (Max Brod sees in a story such as “Eleven Sons” the symbol of Kafka’s desire for fatherhood, for “founding a family, which can be held up against the father’s example as something of equal value”).⁵ First let us follow Kierkegaard’s itinerary, which Kafka seems to have taken as his model. Kierkegaard, who then planned to devote his life to the ministry, became engaged (September 10, 1840) to Regine Olsen the day after his father died. All too soon, however, his joy gave way to dreadful hesitations, with the result that he was unable to accept the notion of marriage. His Diary yields only an imperfect explanation of his mental state and casts even less light on the true reasons for his definite break with her, in October of 1841. “The only thing that consoles me,” wrote Kierkegaard in the fall, “is that I could be about to die and still, at the hour of my death, confess this love which I shall never dare to confess as long as I am alive and which by the same token constitutes my happiness and my grief.”

Like Kafka, Kierkegaard was crushed by the weight of his own destiny. How could he have dared to have another person share it? How could he think of marrying when he sensed his almost disembodied nature? A “born spirit,” as his translator Knud Ferlov realized, he saw persons only against a background of clear ideas. He knew that there was something incorporeal about himself, “something that makes it impossible for anyone to see me every day and have a real relationship with me. To be sure, in the light overcoat in which I exhibit myself daily the situation is different, but in my home anyone would see that I live essentially in a world of spirits. I have been engaged to her for a year, and she has not really known me.”

This exaggerated shyness was so transparent that the young lady’s father had gone so far as to promise his future son-in-law never to set foot in their home if Kierkegaard would consent to marry Regine! To free his fiancée Kierkegaard thought that he had to disguise himself as a seducer, and he took this role so seriously that he was probably the only one actually to be deceived by the production. Nevertheless, the responsibility for the break weighed heavily on him. When he learned of Regine’s engagement to her first suitor, Fritz Schlegel, he did not forgive her any more than he forgave himself for it.

Alone with himself thereafter, Kierkegaard no longer had any occupation other than his work, any support other than the presence of God. In leaving Regine, he had “chosen death.” Cut off forever from happiness, he devoted himself to his work, to preaching “the ultimate things” to his blind comtemporaries.

We find similar incidents, but a much more complicated development, in Kafka’s amorous experience. He speaks approvingly of marriage: “To get married, to found a family, to accept all the children that are born, to maintain them in this uncertain world, and even, if possible, to give them some guidance,” he wrote to his father, “is in my opinion the utmost that a man can achieve.”

But Kafka, subtle hair-splitter and self-destroyer, immediately adds: “That so many people apparently succeed so easily is no proof to the contrary, for in the first place only a few actually succeed, and in the second place these few do not ‘accomplish’ this task but only ‘submit’ to it.” He is acutely aware that he is “as ill-suited as possible” for marriage; his experience with life is “practically null”; as for the “practical advice” (“Give it up”) offered him by his father during his adolescence, he was scandalized by it and refused to take it seriously. His real motivation for marrying was something else: as we have already noted, the state of bachelorhood terrified him. Reduced to his own existence, “having neither past nor future,” the bachelor has only the moment, the space which he occupies in life becomes smaller and smaller, and when he dies, the shroud is exactly what he deserves. “Bachelorhood and suicide occupy the same degree on the scale of knowledge.” Marriage, on the other hand, would make Kafka equal to his Father: “I could be a free son, grateful, not guilty, upright, and you, a father who would no longer oppress me, no longer tyrannize me, but would be compassionate and pleased.” But the son would have to possess the qualities of the Father, and he was already unable to bear living alone. Would marriage give more strength, more “resistance” to his existence? That was the heart of the problem.

Once more Max Brod played the role, involuntarily this time, of the Deus ex machina, presenting Kafka to a friend in Berlin, the young lady referred to in the Diary as F. or F. B. Kafka described the meeting, on August 13, 1912, in the seemingly indifferent tone which he often affected in speaking of himself.

When I arrived at Brod’s house on August 13, she was seated at the table, and I nevertheless mistook her for a maid. Although I was not at all curious to find out who she was, I accepted her right away. Bony, insignificant face that wore its insignificance openly, slender neck, blouse flung over her shoulders, she seemed to be dressed in every detail as a housekeeper even though this was by no means true as I was able to verify later, nose almost broken, blond, rather straight, unattractive hair, strong chin … As I sat down I looked at her for the first time: once seated, I already had a firm opinion of her.

Notwithstanding this rather unromantic description, Kafka had to confess that he was deeply moved and soon thought of marriage, though without managing to exorcise the anguish still connected with this word. The interminable correspondence initiated after F. B. returned to her family could only alarm the young lady concerning the intentions of this strange correspondent, more adept at explaining himself than at committing himself. Max Brod quotes the rough draft of a letter (November 9, 1912) which dwells on the fears of his friend.

Dearest Fräulein, you must not write to me any more, and I shall not write to you any more either. I could not fail to make you unhappy if I wrote to you, and I myself am beyond all help. To admit that to myself, I did not have to count every stroke of the clock all night long, for I was fully aware of it before my first letter, and since I tried to cling to you in spite of everything, I would deserve to be cursed if I were not already cursed … Quickly forget the ghost that I am and live in happiness and peace as you did before.

Kafka’s hesitations were to last for almost five years. During this time he, like Kierkegaard and Amiel, would never stop weighing the advantages and disadvantages (the latter always more compelling than the former) of the two solutions between which he could not make a choice. In successive pages of his Diary he oscillates like a pendulum between praise of solitude and homage to marriage. Even though he deplores “the afflux of blood in his head and its sterile reflux,” he is beset by an almost constant ebullition of images and themes. If he could be sure of reconciling literary production and married life, he would elect marriage. Modestly he recapitulates the arguments “for and against my marriage.” His long, conscientious balance sheet, dated July 21, 1913, lists the following points:

Inability to bear living alone, not inability to live, quite the opposite; it is even unlikely that I can live with someone, but I am unable alone to bear the onslaught of my own life, the assault of time and old age, the vague stimulus of the desire to write, my sleeplessness, the near approach of madness. Alone, I am unable to bear all this, I shall add naturally “perhaps.” My union with F. will confer new strength, new powers of resistance on my existence.

A little later, however, he adds “I must be alone a great deal. All that I have accomplished is the result of solitude.” We have already called attention to his next observations.

I hate everything which is not connected with literature. Conversations bore me, paying calls bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me insufferably. Conversations remove the importance, the seriousness, and the truth from everything I think.

Fear of being tied down, of overflowing into another personality. Then I would never again be alone … Single, I might perhaps really give up my job one day; married, I can never do this. Everything given to the woman would be taken from literature. This, above all else, must not be!

There is more; carnal union (as an obligation and pattern of conduct) horrifies him. “Copulation is punishment for the happiness of living together.” The sole possibility of tolerating marriage is “to live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor.”

In short, the balance sheet remains negative.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising to find that Kafka looks upon breaches of their relationship with sorrow perhaps, but also with a sense of relief. After the first break, August 13, 1913, he writes:

What I may suffer, what she may suffer is nothing in comparison with the mutual suffering that will ensue. I shall recover slowly, she will marry, that is the only possible outcome when two human beings are involved. We two cannot blast a road through the rocks for ourselves; it is enough for us to have wept and tormented ourselves for a whole year because of that. She will understand that from my last letters.

But he adds immediately: “If she does not, I shall surely marry her for I am too weak to refute what she thinks about our mutual happiness, and completely unable to resist undertaking, insofar as I am able, what she considers to be possible.”⁶ Still, pleasure—“punishment for the happiness of living together”—must be ruled out. Candidly Kafka raises questions. What will F. B. think? Will she understand?

Thus for days Kafka struggles against contradictions from which there is no escape—in a labyrinth in which he exhausts his mental strength in the attempt to overcome these contradictions—caught between the horror of loneliness and the terror of marriage, between fear of disappointing his fiancée by abandoning her and fear of destroying her by marrying her.

For five years his attempts to reach a decision dominated his life and were the source of “his literary works and his religious qualms.”⁷ The hopeless situation into which he had slowly forced F. caused him to feel that he had an obligation to marry her—an obligation which was “ineluctable but not without limit.” He drew up a lengthy statement, intended for the father of his beloved, in which the lucidity of his poignant confession is infused with dark humor which could reasonably be expected to lead to the rejection of his request. The following are extracts from this letter, truly of capital importance.

My job is unbearable because it is inconsistent with my sole desire and my sole vocation, which is literature. Since I am nothing except literature, since I cannot and will not be anything else, my job could never inspire me but it could sidetrack me completely. I am almost at that point now. I am constantly being overpowered by nervous disorders of the worst kind, and this year, marked by the worries and torments occasioned by my future and your daughter’s, has definitely proven my lack of resistance….

Contrast me with your daughter, this healthy, gay, unpretentious, robust person. As I have told her in about five hundred letters, although she has pacified me each time with a “No” based on grounds that are in truth hardly convincing, the fact remains that, if I have any foresight in the matter, she is certain to be unhappy with me. This is not simply a consequence of my external situation; it stems rather from a flaw in my true nature, for I am withdrawn, silent, unsociable, unsatisfied. I cannot, however, claim title to a predisposition to unhappiness, for it is only the reflection of my aim. Conclusions can at least be drawn from my way of life. Well! I live with my family, the best, most loving persons—and yet I am stranger than a stranger. To my mother I have not spoken twenty words a day, on the average, for the past several years; with my father I have hardly chanced to exchange anything more than daily greetings. As for my married sisters and brothers-in-law, I do not speak to them at all, yet am not on bad terms with them. The reason is simple: I have not the slightest thing to say to them. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it upsets me or handicaps me, even if this sounds presumptuous. At the same time, I lack any sense of family life; at best, I am simply an observer. I have no feeling of kinship and look upon visits as spiteful intrusions on my privacy. Marriage could not change me, no more than my job can change me.

Here is the true reason for his retreat from marriage: loneliness in his vocation. Kafka often records this fact in his Diary. For instance, this sentence, written in 1911, throws much light on his thought: “Apart from human relations, there is in me no visible deceit. The limited circle is pure.”

Still, his hesitations were to last a long time: tacit engagement at the end of 1912, broken in the summer of 1913; official engagement in April, 1914, broken the following July; relations restored in 1915, new engagement the next year, followed by a new, definite break!

In his inmost self Kafka knew that it was impossible for him to change his life. But he clung to the notion of marriage, while he began to see that solitude would provide the answer to his problems. That is why he said ironically that he would marry an old maid with buck teeth once he reached the age of forty! All those around him urged him to marry. Like Mme. Alphonse de Lamartine and Mme. Adrien Proust—like every mother—Frau Kafka thought that marriage and children would reduce her son’s excessive interest in literature “to the dose which cultivated people need.” When he heard such statements Kafka, who still hoped that he would one day fall suddenly in love with a girl, thought that “if he remained a bachelor like his uncle in Madrid, this would not be a catastrophe.”

With every passing month, he became more firmly attached to his loneliness which was an integral part of his life. It was the climate of his spiritual life, the necessary precondition for his sojourn in the strange world which he had already glimpsed. Still, every time he broke with F. B., like Kierkegaard he passed judgment on himself and condemned himself. He had deserted his duty, destroyed the future of the one he loved. “I shall isolate myself from all others, blotting them out of my consciousness. I shall be an enemy to everyone. I shall speak to no one.” Blissful remorse, bitter delight!

The same penchant for self-destruction is discernible in the penultimate love affair of his life—his rash, poignant relationship with Milena Jesenská. Kafka was tormented by fear throughout the affair, as if he had a presentiment that the companion whom he had wrenched from her family for a brief period had already been promised to the Hell of Ravensbruck. The “burning bond” that united them quickly became “a wall, a mountain, or more exactly, a tomb.”

Separated from her husband, Milena belonged to an old Prague family which had been prominent since the battle of White Mountain.

Milena herself reminded one of a great lady of the sixteenth century; she was a character like those sought by Stendhal in the old Italian chronicles—Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole—passionate, bold, indifferent, circumspect in her decisions, but unscrupulous in the choice of means when it came to the satisfaction of her passion.… Her love was boundless, her goodness boundless, her resourcefulness boundless.… her demands boundless.⁸

Correspondence between Kafka and his Czech translator, begun in 1920, at Merano, had resulted in a passionate love affair. But Kafka warned his friend that it was “impossible for me to live as human being.” He was wedded to a being more to be feared than a legitimate spouse, “to anguish,” his way of participating in existence: “if it ceases, I abandon life as easily as I close my eyes.” Here he is referring not to a crisis that recurred at regular intervals but to a permanent threat, indissolubly linked to his own life: “I shall never cease to inspire fear, especially in myself.” Love itself, beginning with “hideous flesh,” simply intensifies the threat. “No sanatorium will ever cure him,” his friend sadly observes. “He will never recover so long as he suffers from this anguish which involves not only me but everything that lives without shame—for example, the flesh. The flesh is too denuded; it cannot tolerate being seen.” Milena’s love is the knife with which he, a new Baudelaire, probes his wounds. Finally, Kafka comes to love his fear just as Baudelaire his decadence: “She is worthy of love and nothing else in me.” Thus gradually but inexorably, he draws close to the madness that he dreads and invites.

Happiness is denied, love impossible. Besides, how would Kafka bear the burdens of conjugal life and the responsibilities of a father? To a friend he confides: “What I have to do, I can only do alone. Become clear about the ultimate things; the Western Jew is not clear about them and therefore has no right to marry.”

God had not allowed him to escape from paternal authority by introducing the blood of an alien wife into the familial community. Kafka, moreover, was perfectly aware of the choice which had caused him to reject the provisional responsibility of a father to his children (which ceased, he thought, at their majority) in favor of the responsibility of the creator to his creation, which never ceases. By remaining a bachelor, he could concentrate all his strength on this creation.

On a more subtle level Pierre Klossowski undertakes through careful exegesis to draw a parallel between Kierkegaard’s and Kafka’s retreat from marriage and the sacrifice of Abraham. “Kierkegaard,” he writes, “in renouncing his fiancée, sought to reproduce in his own life Abraham’s gesture of faith beyond which the temporal would be returned to him in the eternal, as Isaac was returned to Abraham. But Kafka does not see the possibility of salvation.”⁹ In fact, Kafka himself recalled Abraham’s situation: Abraham dreams of the sacrifice but cannot believe that he has been called upon to make it. Thus, Kafka concludes, “on the way he is transformed into Don Quixote.” What then, Klossowski asks, is at the root of such irony if not the feeling of having had nothing to sacrifice? “And so Abraham’s gesture remained inimitable.”

Whatever the radical reason for his choice, the die had been cast: Kafka’s sole posterity would be his creation. He had renounced marriage to preserve his creative self. He left his job for the same reasons when he became aware of the exclusive character of his literary vocation.

Everything converged in this direction and left no time for those talents associated with the joys of sex, food and drink, philosophical reflection, and first and foremost, music. I have grown thin in every way. It was necessary because my strength was so meager to begin with that it could serve my literary aim after a fashion only if concentrated exclusively on it.¹⁰

When he fell sick, his malady seemed to him to be a sign sent by God to legitimatize his solitude. He was finally going to be able to “become clear about the ultimate things.” Afflicted by tuberculosis in September of 1917, he felt as if he had had a great weight lifted from him: it was not himself, he reasoned, but God who had made him incapable of living. Without love, without a profession, without friends, alone at last, free at last, placed “under the protection of an affliction,” he was to be able to limit himself to “the unquestionable.” It was not “laziness, ill will, or lack of skill” that had caused him to be a complete failure (“in family life, friendship, marriage, profession”) but “the absence of soil, air, law”: “to create these for myself—that is my task.” He has ceased to be a stupid overgrown child: “I am an end or a beginning.”

Nothing was given to him from the outset. He had to achieve everything: at the price of his happiness, health, life, and, perhaps, the integrity of his spirit.

NOTES

1.  Diary.

2.  Diary.

3.  Conversation with Max Brod.

4.  Cf. Pierre Boisdeffre, “Solitude et Communion chez Kierkegaard et chez Kafka,” in Mélanges Georges Jamati.

5.  Max Brod, Franz Kafka (English edition), p. 139.

6.  Diary.

7.  Max Brod, op. cit.

8.  Alexandre Vialatte, introduction to Lettres à Milena (Paris: Gallimard, 1956).

9.  P. Klossowski, introduction to Journal intime de Kafka (Paris; Grasset, 1945).

10.  Diary.