British biographer Nicholas Murray reflects on Kafka's life — this month is the 100th anniversary of his death
Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Murray in 2005
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Born in 1883 Prague to a German-speaking, Jewish family, Franz Kafka is one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century.
He was known for his absurdist writing, including the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial, The Castle and The Man Who Disappeared. He died of tuberculosis in 1924 when he was only 40 — and this month marks the 100th anniversary of his death.
In honour of his literary legacy, we revisit a 2005 conversation with English writer Nicholas Murray who wrote Kafka's 2004 biography.
Kafka's appeal
"I read him first when I was a young person, an undergraduate, I was a student of literature and I was discovering all these great names for the first time. And it seemed that there was, at the time, in the late 60s early 70s, no greater name than Kafka's. The Trial, for example, was one of those books that you really felt you had to read. And I've sort of lived with him all that time.
"I think the appeal is very much what the appeal has always remained, an intriguing strangeness and originality. There is no one actually quite like Kafka. He's unique. Just the extraordinarily uniqueness of his imagination didn't seem to me to be analogous to anything else that I was reading at that time.
There is no one actually quite like Kafka. He's unique.- Nicholas Murray
"One of the interesting features about him is this extraordinary conjunction of a wonderful simplicity and clarity of style with an opacity of meaning. So we always know where we are with him from one point of view, and from another point of view we don't. He's endlessly mysterious and enigmatic.
"And yet the actual language is a language of great clarity and purity, there's an interesting paradox there."
His parents' response to his writing
"His father — and bear in mind the sort of man he was, the sort of life he'd had, hardly any schooling, battling to make himself — the leisure of literature and art, was something that was never granted to him and he was a fairly rough, rumbustious businessman who had no real understanding of his son's writing. He didn't read it; it meant nothing to him.
"Kafka's mother was equally unhelpful, famously referring to her son's work as a pastime which infuriated both him and his friend Max Brod, because to them literature was a matter of life and death, it was certainly not a hobby or something to while away the time.
To them, literature was a matter of life and death, it was certainly not a hobby or something to while away the time.- Nicholas Murray
"So I think it was a kind of more or less complete incomprehension and perhaps it's worth saying that most of the writing that we know, the three major novels, were all published posthumously. I mean, it would be wrong to create the impression that Kafka was unknown in his lifetime. He was known to a sophisticated small literary readership at the time. He didn't die in complete literary obscurity, but the major works that we now know him by were published posthumously."
A paradoxical personality
"The books can sometimes seem to be rather unremittingly grim. But he had a sense of humour. One could see it in his letters, a light touch. He could also be, of course, obsessive and tragic and so forth in those same letters, but he had a light wit and humour and warmth.
"So although he was maybe a very solitary figure, rather quiet and reserved in many ways, he also had a genuine warmth with people which responded to. He was popular with his circle in Prague and they went out to the cafes and the bars. Although he did spend long hours silently in his room writing, he also had a sociable side too.
"He enjoyed swimming. He went rowing. He enjoyed walking. And very much he was an open air sort of person. He didn't do a great deal of travelling. He tended to move around. He loved going and staying in health spas and so on and luxuriating in the air and some various quack cures and remedies that were around at that time, in the beginning of the early 20th century. He was a great consumer of those.
"He was always noticed by his friends for being very well turned out. He had a very acute sense of being well dressed and so on. He was very, very stylish. He was something of a hypochondriac, I suppose. He was often genuinely ill and often spent a lot of time, I think, worrying about being ill. He fretted a lot about his health.
"And of course he did in fact die very prematurely from tuberculosis of the larynx. So he wasn't making that up. But there's I think his health was definitely a problem for him because he, his whole life in, from his point of view, was dedicated to the art of writing, and sometimes his body and his health let him down. Sometimes it was his family, sometimes it was having to go into work. He perceived all these obstacles to writing, which seemed to be put in his way and made him even more determined to carry on. He was never deterred."
On writing Kafka's biography
"I think I came to see him more and more as a real human being. I was familiar with his works, writing, his literary profile, as it were, but I think I developed a sense of someone who was a real human being. All the strange and haunting and enigmatic qualities of his writing was someone who made sense in a way whose life had, extraordinary as it was, a logic and a coherence and an interest.
"And I also think I found him to be an attractive personality. Now you might deduce from the books, a sense of someone being rather perhaps cold or remote or distant, but I think there was, in his relationships with his friends, you see it in his private correspondence, a warmth and a generosity of spirit, which I think is what animates these books. And if they were merely a kind of lament or protest or a cry of dissatisfaction, such as one sees in the pages of one of his piece, A Letter to the Father, then they would be lesser works. But I think they're imbued with a very profound sense of an interesting personality behind them."
Nicholas Murray's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
