Franz Kafka's Diaries - Review

Kafka's account of his own life is a study in quiet suffering

The Diaries of Franz Kafka are essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of three great works of 20th century literature - Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle, but they also provide us with a priceless insight into the tortured genius who penned them. The diaries span the crucial years in Kafka's creative life - from 1910 to 1923 (the year before he died from tuberculosis) and chart the writer's development both as an artist and as a man who was perpetually ill at ease with himself and the world about him. It was by scribbling away in the notebooks that became his diaries that Kafka perfected his art as a man of letters.

The Diaries fulfilled three essential functions. First and foremost, they allowed Kafka to record his impressions of life, an activity he particularly enjoyed. These may be descriptions of things he sees whilst out walking or lengthier accounts of his frequent associations with Yiddish theatrical folk. In a less positive vein, he may complain about the soul-destroying drudgery of his work, difficulties with his father and sisters or the level of noise in his place of residence, a constant irritation to him. Through his customarily detached, lucid prose, Kafka provides us with a vivid description of life in overcrowded Prague in the early decades of the 20th century - the city where he spent virtually all of his life, mostly living at home with his parents. With its seething mass of humanity and ancient oppressive architecture, the Prague that Kafka records resonates strongly with the settings of his great novels, whilst accounts of the Kafkas' domestic arrangements evoke the texture and substance of his most powerful short stories, The Judgement and Metamorphosis.

Every so often, Kafka departs from the realm of the mundane and gives rein to his imagination. Some of these creative outbursts run to just a few lines, maybe a paragraph, but occasionally they expand to a reasonably sized short story, some serving as the first draft for a work that he would later develop into a longer piece. Of these the most interesting is an uncompleted rural fable covering nine pages entitled Temptation in the Village, dated June 1914. Eight years later, Kafka would develop this into his magnum opus, The Castle. Since Kafka is writing for his own amusement, he has the freedom to wander wherever he chooses, and there is a spontaneity to these sketches that is both dazzling and vertiginous.

The other purpose to which Kafka put his diaries is the one familiar to most diary writers - a place to dump his sorrows and whinge about the general awfulness of existence. Throughout his period of chronicling, Kafka appears morbidly anxious about his health and repeatedly comments on his recurring headaches and bouts of extreme lassitude. Being too exhausted or too distracted to devote himself to his favourite activity - writing - appears to be Kafka's main source of discontent. In his darker moments, whilst in the grip of a deep depression, he surrenders himself to bitterness and self-pity.

Most of his ire he directs towards his professional engagements, which he never comments on in a favourable vein. Kafka particularly resents having to work at his father's factory, work for which he is totally ill-suited. His antipathy for his father, a man he both reveres and secretly loathes, comes across strongly in many passages, albeit with less of the pent-up fury and critical self-analysis that feature in his famous Letter to the Father. Casual allusions to suicide are recurrent, the most graphic being a paragraph written in September 1915 in which Kafka imagines 'a magnificent gush of blood' after slicing into the carotid artery with a knife, almost like a ritual self-sacrifice. This is a similar fate to the one he alotted his alter ego Josef K. in The Trial.

Between 1912 and 1920, Kafka's main private preoccupation appears to be whether or not to marry. He says surprisingly little about the woman he was most romantically involved with at this time - Felice Bauer - and from what we read there seems to be an obvious lack of commitment to the relationship on his side. Despite his evident fondness for Felice (referred to in the diaries by the initial F), Kafka is visibly torn between what he considers a social obligation - to get married and raise a family - and his intense personal need for freedom to make a career as a writer. Kafka reasons that, were he to marry, he would have to spend even more time in the office to earn the money needed to support his wife and family, and this meant he would have to give up writing altogether, something he could never do. In the end, after labouring the pros and cons several times, Kafka convinces himself (and us) that marriage is not such a good idea and F suddenly disappears from the chronicle.

After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in the summer of 1917, Kafka's devotion to his diary begins to taper off markedly. 1918 passes without comment and subsequent entries are more scanty and desultory. As the symptoms of the illness that would ultimately claim his life in 1924 became more apparent, Kafka's self-pity and self-loathing are expressed in phrases that are ever more barbed and pithy. By 1923, the year in which the diary breaks off altogether, the physical pain of Kafka's condition and the accompanying mental anguish are already unbearable. The urge to write is failing him and his thoughts seem to wander without any desire to direct them towards a coherent end. The diaries conclude with an entry dated 12th June 1923 in which Kafka appears morally and physically defeated: 'Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits, becomes a spear against the speaker'. A year later, almost to the day, he would be dead and buried. The writer's account of that last year of decline is mercifully kept from us.

After Kafka's death, it was left to his literary executor Max Brod to arrange and edit the author's notebooks for publication, a process which he describes in a postscript in the Schocken Books imprint of the diaries. According to Brod, the diaries do not offer a fair account of their writer but have a tendency to place an undue emphasis on the sombre and self-critical side of his nature. A greater balance is achieved by reading the main diaries in conjunction with the travel diaries which are included at the end of the volume.

Written between 1911 and 1912, the travel diaries record Kafka's holiday excursions in the company of his most intimate friends (including Max Brod). They reveal a very different Kafka to the one that we find in the main diaries. Instead of the introspective, self-hating loner flitting between the unbearable mundanities of existence and wild imaginary constructs, we see Kafka as a carefree young man thoroughly engaged with life and seemingly enjoying every moment of it. He writes with an insouciance and relaxed sense of humour that exists nowhere else in his oeuvre other than his first novel, Amerika.

Holidays always put us in a better frame of mind, allow us to see things from a sunnier perspective, and so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Kafka should be so transformed by his leisurely peregrinations across Europe. There is a kindly benevolence to his descriptions of the odd folk he encounters on his sojourns, from baker's boys to usherettes. Occasionally, when the weather turns bad or he twists his ankle, the familiar Kafka whingebag pops up again, but for the most part the mood is upbeat and we cannot help warming to the energetic charmer who leaps off the pages of the travel diaries - going to concerts, picking cherries, chasing girls and generally having a good time of it.

Through his diaries, Franz Kafka gives us the most complete picture of himself that we could ask for. The range of experience that these encompass, from active engagement with the outside world to the most intense of solitary reflections, make them a compelling read and a major literary achievement in their own right. Together with his numerous letters, they represent an essential component of Kafka's written output and not only enhance our appreciation of a true literary genius but also help us to see his magnificent novels and short stories in a whole new light. The work of Franz Kafka is rich and endlessly fascinating, not least because it seems to say so much about the world in which we now live.