The Sons Read online

  Now consider, Felice, the change that marriage would bring about for us, what each would lose and each would gain.… You would lose Berlin, the office you enjoy, your girl friends, the small pleasures of life, the prospect of marrying a decent, cheerful, healthy man, of having beautiful, healthy children for whom, if you think about it, you clearly long.… Instead of sacrificing yourself for real children, which would be in accordance with your nature as a healthy girl, you would have to sacrifice yourself for this man who is childish, but childish in the worst sense, and who at best might learn from you, letter by letter, the ways of human speech.

  During the five years of their correspondence, ostensibly to frighten Felice away from him, Kafka paints a grim portrait of the monastic solitude his writing requires, an everlasting “night” during which Felice would bring him his meals in a dark, subterranean writing chamber. In August 1917, four years after his first proposal, Kafka coughed blood; his tuberculosis was diagnosed the following month, the engagement with Felice broken off definitively in December for reasons of “health.” In fact, Kafka saw his illness as merely the physical symptom of a wound that had been opened the night he wrote his first son story, “The Judgment,” and entered into direct conflict with his father.

  Increasingly, writing became a means of doing battle with his father, and patriarchal authority in general. It is in this period that Kafka considered collaborating on an anti-patriarchal journal with Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud who, in a cause célèbre of the Expressionist movement, had been arrested, at the request of his father, and interned in a psychiatric clinic. In 1917, Kafka published a collection of somber, violent stories called A Country Doctor, which he dedicated to Hermann Kafka in a combative spirit. Here again, literary paternity is opposed to biological procreation. One of the stories is entitled “Eleven Sons”; when asked about the significance of this title, Kafka replied that the sons were “simply eleven stories” he was working on at the time. In another story, “A Dream,” he relates a vision of his own literary immortality: as Joseph K. sinks into an open grave, his name in gold letters writes itself across the tombstone with mighty flourishes.

  The meaning of such literary gestures, no matter how aggressive, was no doubt lost on Hermann Kafka who, when presented with a copy of the book dedicated to him, instructed his son to “put it on my bedside table,” where it remained, unread. Two years later, in November 1919, still smarting from his father’s refusal to let him marry Julie Wohryzek, the daughter of a synagogue custodian, on the grounds that it would have “dishonored” the family name, Kafka sat down to write a one-hundred-page “lawyer’s letter” indicting his father for the tangle of aborted literary projects and frustrated marriage attempts that had left him, at the age of thirty-six, still a son. In many ways the “Letter to His Father” formulates explicitly the same critique of the bourgeois family that Kafka had put into literary terms seven years earlier in The Sons. The very first pages of the letter begin to play with titles, dialogue, and images from the earlier stories. Kafka speaks of his father’s “judgment” of him and compares their fight to that of bedbugs, which not only bite but suck their enemy’s blood. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the letter details the contradictory education he received as a child and that also thwarts his literary progeny:

  What was brought to the table had to be eaten, the quality of the food was not to be discussed—but you yourself often found the food inedible, called it “this swill,” said “that cow” (the cook) had ruined it.… Bones mustn’t be cracked with the teeth, but you could. Vinegar must not be sipped noisily, but you could. The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy.… In themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me.

  What takes place at the dinner table is repeated in Hermann Kafka’s numerous stories of his difficult childhood with which he would reproach his children for their comfortable, middle-class existence. Under other conditions, Kafka writes, such stories might have been educational, might have encouraged him to endure similar torments and become like his father. “But that wasn’t what you wanted at all,” he maintains; such efforts to “distinguish oneself in the world” were labeled ingratitude, disobedience, treachery, and madness. “And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to [imitate you] by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.” This contradictory pedagogy finally culminates in the impossibility of establishing an independent domestic life, a state Kafka longingly describes as an unattainable Eden. “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come,” Kafka writes in the “Letter to His Father,” “is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing.” Yet Hermann Kafka’s nature blocked him from this realm:

  Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions—and marriage is not among them.

  Reading the “Letter to His Father” together with The Sons, one understands that the early stories are also a form of personal correspondence. For a writer who once declared that he was “made of literature,” the distinction between fiction and autobiography must have seemed irrelevant. Thus Kafka often used his novels and stories to negotiate problems in his personal life. To Felice he once declared that his novel The Man Who Disappeared would give her “a clearer idea of the good in me than the mere hints in the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” Later in their correspondence, when the relationship had reached an impasse, he asked Felice if her father was familiar with “The Judgment.” “If not, please give it to him to read,” he requested. And in the “Letter to His Father” he also admits the inherently epistolary origin of his literary texts: “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you.…”

  It is no coincidence that The Sons abound in letters and scenes of letter-writing. Letters mark turning points in the stories, written means of mediating effectively in human relations. After Gregor Samsa’s death, the family sits down to write letters of resignation to their employers—a new life is beginning. In “The Stoker” Karl’s true identity is suddenly established by his Uncle Jacob with a letter written by the family servant. But the best example is “The Judgment,” whose sudden composition seems to have been triggered by Kafka’s first letter to Felice Bauer. The story begins with Georg playing dreamily with a letter he has just finished to a friend in Russia, takes a decisive turn when Herr Bendemann announces that he too has been corresponding with the friend, and concludes with what is in essence Georg’s suicide letter: “Dear Parents, I have always loved you.”

  This is not the place to enter into the intricate and persistent relations between Kafka’s writing and his personal biography. It is enough to note that the “secret connection” between the literary portrayal of sons also links the stories to Kafka’s own poignant letter to his father. Taking Kafka’s lead, we might consider The Sons as extended, indeed infinite letters, more revealing in their own indirect, literary way than “the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” By the same token, his extended letter to Hermann Kafka (which he showed to his mother but never sent to his father) can be read on a par with the other literary works. It tells the most moving “son story” of all, the story of a writer whose very literary identity and vision depended on his condition as a son.

  Only in the last year of his life did Kafka manage to break away from his parents and Prague, to live in Berlin with a young Jewish woman from Poland named Dora Dymant. Despite the advanced state of Kafka�
�s tuberculosis, they planned to marry; but Dora’s father, an Orthodox rabbi, objected. Thus Kafka stayed a son all his life, and after his death, in June 1924, was brought back to Prague to be buried in the family plot, where his parents were placed a few years later. Today his name is inscribed on the single family tombstone, just above his father’s name.

  MARK ANDERSON

  *This is the title chosen by Max Brod when he published the novel after Kafka’s death. Kafka’s title was actually Der Verschollene, or The Man Who Disappeared.

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

  AMONG THE COUNTLESS examples of translation of modern European literature into English there are few critically influential and truly potent texts. The Muirs’ translations of Kafka are surely among them. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Kafka—from the 1930s through the 1950s especially—was at least as well known, at least as much read, and subjected to at least as much interpretation as the German Kafka. One does not idly tamper with such texts; in a sense, they have become a kind of holy writ, for better or worse. And taken all in all, it has been for the better, we are bound to say. It would be neither fair nor, indeed, well informed to call them inadequate or to dismiss them out of hand as outdated. They contain passages of great brilliance and solutions that still cannot be improved upon.

  But there are problems with them. The English texts do contain mistakes, awkward passages, evasions, lapses in cadence and rhythm, avoidances of deliberate humor, and a few hopelessly snarled sentences. And there are, as well, a number of brutal, self-perpetuating typographical errors; they have dug themselves in and will not be budged from printing to printing.

  For our present purposes, however, quite modest guidelines have been set down: to get rid of the few outright errors in the translation of these four texts; to untangle some of the more congested locutions; to expunge archaisms; and to replace with more suitable renderings what by now are correctly seen, in this country at least, as somewhat quirky Briticisms. Instead of retranslations, we have made adjustments.

  A line-by-line comparison of the Muir (and Kaiser-Wilkins) versions with the present “adjusted” versions will reveal a great many small changes, but nothing that will cause alarm. The reader will discover, for instance, that Georg Bendemann, that upwardly mobile young businessman, and his father no longer live in a “ramshackle” house (that never did make any sense). Mother Samsa, collapsed in her chair toward the end of the story, a symbol of the utter and final rejection of the insect son, is “now sound asleep,” no longer “not quite overcome by sleep” (a tiny but appalling typo that for years has left open the unlikely possibility that she still acknowledges her son, is still with him on his third and final crawl back into his bedroom—thus can the substitution of a t for a w lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of a key moment). No longer do the “wards” of the stoker’s little sea-chest “snap home”; it is simpler, if less picturesque, for the bolt to snap shut. And so on. Such changes, and there are many of them here, have been made toward the ultimate goal of getting the flow and sound of Kafka in English to approximate the astonishing style of the German.

  Still, such changes do not diminish the marvellous work done decades ago by the Muirs and others. The present texts are still theirs in nearly every sense.

  ARTHUR S. WENSINGER

  The Judgment

  THE JUDGMENT

  For Fräulein Felice B.

  IT WAS A Sunday morning at the very height of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his own room on the second floor of one of a long row of low, graceful houses stretching along the bank of the river, distinguishable from one another only in height and color. He had just finished a letter to an old friend who was now living abroad, had sealed it in its envelope with slow and dreamy deliberateness, and with one elbow propped on his desk was looking out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank with their tender green.

  He was thinking about this friend, who years before had simply run off to Russia, dissatisfied with his prospects at home. Now he was running a business in St. Petersburg, which at first had flourished but more recently seemed to be going downhill, as the friend always complained on his increasingly rare visits. So there he was, wearing himself out to no purpose in a foreign country; the exotic-looking beard he wore did not quite conceal the face Georg had known so well since childhood, and the jaundice color his skin had begun to take on seemed to signal the onset of some disease. By his own account he had no real contact with the colony of his fellow countrymen there and almost no social connection with Russian families, so that he was resigning himself to life as a confirmed bachelor.

  What could one write to such a man, who had obviously gone badly astray, a man one could be sorry for but not help? Should one perhaps advise him to come home, to reestablish himself here and take up his old friendships again—there was certainly nothing to stand in the way of that—and in general to rely on the help of his friends? But that was as good as telling him—and the more kindly it was done the more he would take offense—that all his previous efforts had miscarried, that he should finally give up, come back home, and be gaped at by everyone as a returned prodigal, that only his friends knew what was what, and that he himself was nothing more than a big child and should follow the example of his friends who had stayed at home and become successful. And besides, was it certain that all the pain they would necessarily inflict on him would serve any purpose? Perhaps it would not even be possible to get him to come home at all—he said himself that he was now out of touch with business conditions in his native country—and then he would still be left an alien in an alien land, embittered by his friends’ advice and more than ever estranged from them. But if he did follow their advice and even then didn’t fit in at home—not because of the malice of others, of course, but through sheer force of circumstances—if he couldn’t get on with his friends or without them, felt humiliated, couldn’t really be said to have either friends or a country of his own any longer, wouldn’t it be better for him to go on living abroad just as he was? Taking all this into account, how could one expect that he would make a success of life back here?

  For such reasons, assuming one wanted to keep up any correspondence with him at all, one could not send him the sort of real news one could frankly tell the most casual acquaintances. It had been more than three years since his last visit, and for this he offered the lame excuse that the political situation in Russia was too uncertain and apparently would not permit even the briefest absence of a small businessman, though it allowed hundreds of thousands of Russians to travel the globe in perfect safety. But during these same three years Georg’s own position in life had changed considerably. Two years ago his mother had died and since then he and his father had shared the household together; and his friend had, of course, been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief normally caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be comprehended so far away from home. Since that time, however, Georg had applied himself with greater determination to his business as well as to everything else. Perhaps it was his father’s insistence on having everything his own way in the business that had prevented him, during his mother’s lifetime, from pursuing any real projects of his own; perhaps since her death his father had become less aggressive, although he was still active in the business; perhaps it was mostly due to an accidental run of good fortune—that was very probable indeed—but, at any rate, during those two years the business had prospered most unexpectedly, the staff had to be doubled, the volume was five times as great; no doubt about it, further progress lay just ahead.

  But Georg’s friend had no inkling of these changes. In earlier years, perhaps for the last time in that letter of condolence, he had tried to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and had enlarged upon the prospects of success in St. Petersburg for precisely Georg’s line of business. The figures quoted were microscopic by comparison with Georg’s present ope
rations. Yet he shrank from letting his friend know about his business success, and if he were to do so now—retrospectively—that certainly would look peculiar.

  So Georg confined himself to giving his friend unimportant items of gossip such as rise at random in the memory when one is idly thinking things over on a quiet Sunday. All he desired was to leave undisturbed the image of the hometown which his friend had most likely built up and accepted during his long absence. And thus it happened that three times in three fairly widely separated letters Georg had told his friend about the engagement of some insignificant man to an equally insignificant girl, until, quite contrary to Georg’s intentions, his friend actually began to show some interest in this notable event.

  Yet Georg much preferred to write about things like these rather than to confess that he himself had become engaged a month ago to a Fräulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family. He often spoke to his fiancée about this friend of his and the peculiar relationship that had developed between them in their correspondence. “Then he won’t be coming to our wedding,” she said, “and yet I have a right to get to know all your friends.” “I don’t want to trouble him,” answered Georg, “don’t misunderstand, he would probably come, at least I think so, but he would feel that his hand had been forced and he would be hurt, perhaps he would even envy me and certainly he’d be discontented, and without ever being able to do anything about his discontent he’d have to go away again alone. Alone—do you know what that means?” “Yes, but what if he hears about our marriage from some other source?” “I can’t prevent that, of course, but it’s unlikely, considering the way he lives.” “If you have friends like that, Georg, you shouldn’t ever have gotten engaged at all.” “Well, we’re both to blame for that; but I wouldn’t have it any other way now.” And when, breathing heavily under his kisses, she was still able to add, “All the same, it does upset me,” he thought it would not really do any harm if he were to send the news to his friend. “That’s the kind of man I am and he’ll just have to accept me or not,” he said to himself, “I can’t cut myself to another pattern that might make a more suitable friend for him.”