The Best Australian Essays 2014 (20 page)

Other minor characters are brought to life in a quick phrase or two: a teacher whose laugh ‘sounds rubbery, sticky, like a tyre on a bumpy road'; a girl who, according to schoolyard gossip, ‘laid down with a GI in the scrub … and he gave her a packet of cigarettes. She said it was immense.'

But the spiritual meanness of Australian society that White had anatomised in such earlier novels as
Riders in the Chariot
(1961) and
The Solid Mandala
(1966) is not the real focus of his concern in
The Hanging Garden.
Even the grotesque Mrs Bulpit is allowed her relaxed moments. ‘I'm not all that gone on foreigners, but she's a human being, isn't she?' she says of Eirene; generally she does her best for the two children under her care without understanding either one in the least.

Several motifs that are sounded in the fragment hang in the air with little indication about how White meant to use them. One of these is the garden of the title, which seems destined to bear some symbolic weight but in the fragment is simply a place where the children go to get away from their keeper. Another is the shrunken head brought back from the Amazon by the father of a school friend of Eirene's, which immediately enters her private world as a sacred talisman. But the most intriguing motif is the
pneuma
that Eirene remembers being spoken of on the island in the Cyclades where she spent a year with her father's family.
Pneuma,
she tells Gilbert, cannot be explained in English. The truth is, she has only the vaguest of ideas herself.
Pneuma
is in fact one of the more mysterious forces in both ancient Greek and early Christian religion.
Pneuma,
issuing from deep in the earth, is what the oracle at Delphi inhales to give her the power of prophecy. In the New Testament
pneuma
is the wind that is also the breath of God:

Similarly, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit
[pneuma]
.'

Like the Panageia, the all-powerful mother goddess whom Eirene also recalls from her time on the island,
pneuma
belongs to the syncretic popular religion of rural Greece, fast vanishing in our day, a religion in which archaic elements survive embedded in Orthodox Christianity. White clearly intends
pneuma
to be more than a mere marker of Eirene's Greek origins.
Pneuma,
Eirene obscurely feels, watches over Gilbert and her; White may well have intended it to foreshadow the breath or spirit that takes over the artist and speaks through him or her, and thereby hinted at what the future would hold for his two characters.

In Greece, Eirene reflects, memories are ‘burnt into you'. Not so in Australia. In Australia there is no sense of mortality: ‘Australians are only born to live.' At moments like these, Eirene becomes a mouthpiece for insights that do not realistically belong to an adolescent girl, however much possessed by
pneuma.
Whereas Eirene's younger sensibility is represented in a mix of narrative modes, with interior monologue predominating, the narrative of her adolescence seems to confront White with troublesome technical difficulties. He makes her keep a diary, but then seems to be unsure whether her narration is identical with what she writes in the diary or whether it is some later, more mature elaboration of what she wrote there, or whether keeping a diary is simply girlish activity that has nothing to do with how her story is told. Of course we should not forget that what we are reading in
The Hanging Garden
is only a draft (according to Marr a second draft). But failure to find a plausible voice for the maturing Eirene may well be a sign that White was losing interest in the project as a whole.

White had a deep attachment to Greece, principally through Manoly Lascaris, whom he met and fell in love with in Alexandria during the war, and with whom he came to share the rest of his life. White's 1981 memoir
Flaws in the Glass
contains a lengthy record of their travels together in Greece. For a period, he writes, he was ‘in the grip of a passionate love affair, not so much with Greece as the idea of it'. At one time he and Lascaris thought of buying a house on Patmos. ‘Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility.' It is possible that through Gilbert (standing in for himself) and Eirene (standing in for Lascaris) he hoped, in
The Hanging Garden
, to explore more deeply feelings of despairing rage at a beloved country that has fallen into the hands of a brash, greedy, nouveau-riche class.

White explores sexual feeling between the two refugee children without false delicacy. Gilbert fights against giving in to his feelings for ‘this dark snake of a girl', yet as he masturbates her image comes unsummoned, ‘standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together … haunting him'. He is baffled by Eirene's power over him. ‘She was nothing to him, another kid, a
girl,
a Greek …' Yet when, years later, he writes his first letter to her, he calls the letter ‘a line from your fellow reffo', as if to concede he has accepted their common destiny.

Eirene's feelings for Gilbert are more complex, and indeed constitute the heart of the fragment. While she is still prepubertal, sexual interest in him is at war with fastidious distaste for his clumsy boy self. She has a dream in which he tears off her clothes in the school toilet and discloses not a ‘flower ringed with fur' but a ‘baby's wrinkle', to the jeers of the watching children. In other dreams, fragmentary memories crop up of witnessing her parents in a sexual embrace, of her mother's flirtations with other men. In these dreams she figures as the excluded other, angry, helpless, the one who wants but is unwanted.

Then as she reaches sexual maturity her feelings grow less confused. On their last night before they are separated, the two go to bed together and are intimate without having sex in the usual sense of the term. Eirene is able to feel quite motherly toward the sleeping boy. She will look back on him as ‘almost part of myself, the one I have shared secrets with, the
pneuma
[which] I could not explain, but which he must understand'.

At her new school Eirene is adopted by a fashionable classmate named Trish. Trish confides that what engage her most are money and social success. What of Eirene?
‘Love
I think is what I'm most interested in,' Eirene replies. Trish shrieks with laughter. ‘That's not very ambitious Ireen you can have it any night of the week.' Eirene is mortified; yet even so, she is sure she is on the right track. Love, but more specifically ‘transcendence', is what she is ultimately after. Whatever transcendence stands for, it seems to have no grip in the Australian landscape; yet

New York Review of Books

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Nicolas Rothwell

Franz Kafka woke abruptly at four a.m. on 11 August 1917. Something was wrong with his throat. There was saliva in his mouth: he couldn't swallow it, it kept welling back up. He got out of bed and lit a lamp – then he realised it was blood, clotted blood. It filled his mouth, it was thick and salty on his tongue. He rushed over to the washstand: out it poured, deep red into the white bowl, for minutes on end. He looked up from where he stood. He stared out at the street, he saw the looming silhouette of the Prague Castle in the gleam of dawn. At last the flow faltered, then stopped. He lay back down on his bed, and slept. Some while later, his housekeeper, Ruzenka, came in to wake him and make breakfast. She saw the bloodied washstand at once.
‘Pane Doktore,'
she said, in Czech. ‘You don't have long to go.'

In a letter describing this episode, one of his life's fulcrum events, Kafka runs through his reactions with great precision and great calm, as if those moments had marked a kind of liberation for him – and that morning serves as the hinge-point of a remarkable new biographic study by Reiner Stach, devoted not only to the author but to the surrounding circumstances of his life: a work that is at once complete and fragmentary, definitive and tentative, allusive and revelatory – in short, sublimely Kafkaesque, almost as if it had been dreamed into being by the benign ghost of the writer himself.

From the day of his first pulmonary haemorrhage, Kafka's fate was fixed. He viewed the tuberculosis that had made its home inside his lungs as a special presence, ‘an illness bestowed on me'. His thought swerved more and more towards the bare bones of things. He had already written the book for which he is best known today, that punishment fantasy
The Trial
– it lay in his desk in manuscript, unknown. In September, he made a decision to travel to the tiny village of Zurau in the Bohemian countryside to convalesce. While there, he wrote a letter to his long-suffering fiancee, Felice Bauer: its words were dark as night. There were two combatants at war inside him, he declared, and their confused war raged incessantly. The blood was not coming from his lung but from a stab delivered by one of these combatants:

It is thought and writing of this kind that dominates the movement of Stach's narrative. Stach aims to write at Kafka's level, to push through to his subject, to be worthy of him. The upshot is two volumes that have already been widely praised as definitive, as triumphs of the biographic art – a third, dealing with Kafka's youth, was delayed in the vain hope that key archival sources would be released: it is due to be published at last, out of sequence, this year.

By chance, Stach's long, fine-grained, hyper-detailed account of Kafka's last decade appeared in the same month as a very different portrait of the writer's life: a slender sketch of his social and cultural background and the role that background plays in his best-known texts. It is the work of the distinguished Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, who was himself brought up in prewar Prague and has always felt a special closeness to Kafka and his words. The two books complement each other: they do much more than merely advance our appreciation of Kafka and his milieu. Previous biographies have presented him as inert, passive; these versions provide motives for his actions and his inaction, they make him flesh and blood. Stach provides us with the texture of Kafka's experiences and the events surrounding him; Friedlander reads the writings with eagle eyes, attuned to the nuances and lurking clues in every phrase. Yet both biographers, inevitably, fall short in their attempts to catch and clarify Kafka's elusive art. It is the sheer stuff of it that escapes them, the sudden jumps of insight and the transformations within it that stay concealed and veiled. Stach describes in detail the raw magma of Kafka's mid-period writing – the so-called ‘octavo notebooks' of 1916–17, each about eighty pages in length – a compact size, suitable for carrying around town in his breast pocket:

It is a jungle: drafts, feints and explorations – yet wherever the words of a tale or story emerge, they are clear, and set: ‘Precisely where the perfection is beyond any doubt, the creator of these texts seems quite sure of himself. The author as creator ex nihilo.'

But those words set down, if studied closely, do at least lead back towards the life: and the life provides their fitting frame. With the deftest of touches, Stach succeeds in establishing a context for his hero – and he goes beyond the familial and professional worlds that previous biographers have seen as the sole key to Kafka's work.

His subject is a man recognisably under the influence of politics and world events: they filter into the novels and the shorter fictions in telling ways. Thus the darkest of Kafka's published stories,
In the Penal Colony,
gains new resonance when seen in the atmospherics of its time and against the backdrop of the trench warfare under way on the eastern front. In much the same way, the death of Emperor Franz Josef and the impending demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire stand behind
An Imperial Message,
one of Kafka's shortest and most haunting tales. Chapter by chapter, detail by detail,
The Years of Insight
binds the writer and the writing together – works that had seemed beyond life, inexplicable, take on a different kind of depth.

Some preliminary conclusions can be drawn: a reassessment shimmers into view. For us, readers of these studies, the idea we have of Kafka changes: he can no longer be quite what he was made into by his first associates or by the coterie of admirers who saw the condition of modernity mirrored in his work, and paused to see little else.

The course of Kafka's literary career is well known thanks almost entirely to his closest friend and constant advocate, the ambitious Prague man of letters Max Brod. The two met while Kafka was still a student at the Charles University. He cut a striking figure: he was tall, elegantly dressed and handsome; he was also thin, reserved and pale. He was the only son of an inner-city Jewish family, assimilated, prosperous, without strong intellectual or literary leanings. At that point Brod was already on the road to making his own career in books and journalism: he drew Kafka out, encouraging him, promoting his fledgling efforts. It was Brod who placed Kafka's first stories and introduced him to the editors who would publish him; Brod who was the chief confidant and first listener to Kafka's readings of his painstakingly redrafted manuscripts; Brod, too, who eventually became Kafka's literary executor and had responsibility for presenting the posthumous work.

In this capacity, when sifting through Kafka's papers after his death, Brod came across the following lapidary note, written on the cusp of his final illness:

Comprehensive instructions! Brod ignored them: that decision preserved
The Trial
and
The Castle
for the world, as well as the diaries and letters that seem increasingly to contain the molten core of Kafka's genius.

But inevitably, given Brod's position, the Kafka that was offered to the world was his version: he edited the manuscripts and tidied them up, he made himself the canonical interpreter. Brod had fled from Nazi Europe to Palestine, and the account of Kafka he perfected had a romantic tonality about it. Kafka the unknown genius tormented by the demons of the twentieth century, overwhelmed by the horrors of regimented, bureaucratic life, shadowed by anti-Semitism, alienated, haunted. Such is the Kafka Brod opted to highlight – with much justification.

There was, indeed, a prophetic tone in Kafka's work; he did dwell on the deadening effects of the modern bureaucratic state, he was keenly aware of the growing racial tensions in Czechoslovakia after the proclamation of independence in 1918; and it was true, too, that he was fascinated by Hasidism and Zionism, he learned Hebrew, he even toyed with the idea of migrating to Palestine. But Brod's Kafka was somehow Brod-like, a Kafka for a certain place, viewed from a certain perspective: all subsequent study and scholarship has been in effect a revision of this initial Kafka given to history.

Both Stach and Friedlander are revisionists in this tradition, seeking a clearer picture. Stach's work, quite overwhelming in its subtlety and scope, succeeds in this task on multiple levels: embedding Kafka in the tempo of his times, highlighting the links between Kafka's tales and the dramatics of early twentieth-century Expressionist film and theatre, placing the work firmly in the Germanic literary descent-line, bringing out the half-known story of the dying writer's last, most poignant romance. Friedlander offers an even more startling re-reading: his study is of great intensity and textual closeness; and he finds evidence that Brod suppressed little telling hints of erotic feelings for children in the diaries and manuscripts: was this, Friedlander wonders, the true root of the shame that convulsed Kafka and forms the cryptic bedrock of his literary persona? A reading of Kafka's letters suggests the depth of the psychodrama that was under way.

Here he is, writing to Brod two years before his death, his best-known works all behind him: ‘Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one's stories in the sunshine. Perhaps there are other forms of writing, but I know only this kind; at night, when fear keeps me from sleeping, I know only this kind.' This was the tone of Kafka's internal landscape: it was to this landscape that he travelled when he sat at his writing desk. There were elements in common between his quest for the absolute and the mood of the age – but this tone of doom in the cradle of being is something new. Perhaps the most crucial of all the necessary reassessments, then, concerns the initial reception of Kafka's work and the reputation he won in his lifetime.

Stach makes clear that Kafka was far from a struggling, underappreciated author. The contrary was the case: his uniqueness was quickly recognised. At first, of course, Brod seemed to outshine him, in the sense that Brod was better connected and a more assiduous publicist, but Kafka's sparse writings were spotted and singled out as soon as they appeared in print. Robert Musil, the author of
The Man Without Qualities,
made a point of meeting Kafka and admired his work; Kurt Tucholsky praised him to the heavens; Thomas Mann realised his significance; as for Franz Werfel, who shared Kafka's background and was the greatest star of literary Vienna, he wrote Kafka a fan letter for the ages: ‘Dear Kafka, you are so pure, new, independent and perfect that one ought to treat you as if you were already dead and immortal. What you have achieved in your last works has truly never existed in any literature, namely taking a well-crafted concrete story that is almost real and making it into something all-encompassing and symbolic, that speaks to a tragic dimension of mankind.'

Stories such as
Metamorphosis
or
In the Penal Colony
were so fierce, so unrelenting in their attack, they simply could not be read as standard features of the literary landscape. Kafka was on his own; he knew it; his first readers knew it too. In the years after his death, his work continued to circulate quite widely. It came into the hands of a new generation – among them the last hothouse flowers of central Europe before the shadows fell. In their various ways, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Gershom Scholem and Elias Canetti all saw Kafka as a master beyond compare. The notoriously self-involved Canetti actually wrote a book devoted to ‘Kafka's Other Trial'. This is not so much a case of influence as of priority. Kafka proved to be the pathfinder: he led the way – into a future with an expiry date.

How, then, to account for what Kafka has become in the years since? The Kafka who lived and breathed, wrote and agonised, in Prague, Berlin and a score of health resorts and clinics strewn through German-speaking Europe – that figure is no more.

He has been refashioned, he is an emblem for the times: to be precise, for post-war modernity. Just as Mozart, that irreducible genius in whose work sweet and bitter fuse impalpably, became the mascot of the eighteenth century, his heritage role bodied forth in the grotesque ‘Mozartkugeln' of marzipan on sale at every street-corner confectioner in Vienna or in Salzburg today, so Kafka has been pressed into service as the imagined symbol of our age. His gaunt, consumptive face stares out from a hundred film posters. His haunted eyes incarnate alienation. His books are read as tales of the individual crushed by the bureaucratic system, he is delicacy and sensitivity, he is innocence in a world of dark and hidden forces. In short, he has been assimilated to his pallid victim-hero Joseph K. in the pages of
The Trial.