By Elias Canetti (1905-94), this was published in 1969.

The subtitle of this book is The Letters to Felice. And the letters in question, from Franz Kafka (1883-1924) to Felice Bauer, his on-again-off-again fiancee, appeared in 1967 (Felice having sold them to her publisher in 1955).

Canetti says that they "penetrated me like an actual life", and he argues very cogently that they offer essential clues to interpreting The Trial.

I knew nothing about Canetti's book until it was introduced to us in Henry Eliot's read-along of The Trial. But it makes for very interesting reading.



First, who is Elias Canetti? Well, he's fascinating, too... He was born in Ruse, Bulgaria (yes, like Michael Arlen). But his biography is the ultimate in cosmopolitan: "Canetti belongs to a Sephardic family whose members, in 1492, were driven out of the town of Canete, situated between Cuenca and Valencia. For several hundred years, the family lived in Turkey, but in the course of time, settled in Bulgaria. In 1911, Elias Canetti went to England with his parents; after his father’s sudden and premature death in 1913..., the family moved to Vienna. Between the years 1916 and 1924, Elias Canetti attended schools in Zuerich and Frankfurt-am-Main. He then studied science in Vienna... In 1938 he went to France; sometime later, he moved over to London." He spent his last 20 years in Zuerich, where he died. And he was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

He wrote in German (I didn't know that until I'd finished reading Christopher Middleton's English translation, published in 1974).

Canetti's book-length essay is divided into two parts. The first dissects Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer; the second applies what is disclosed in the letters to the storyline and atmosphere of The Trial.

1.

Kafka met Felice Bauer in Max Brod's apartment on 13 August 1912. She is strong, decisive, and resilient; she has studied Hebrew; she's a Zionist. She's in Berlin, and he's in Prague. But there is daily correspondence, and he asks her hundreds of questions.

Clearly, she acts as a kind of muse: "Two nights after his first letter to her he writes The Judgement, at one sitting, during a single night, in ten hours. One might say that with this story his self-assurance as a writer was established..." Then come The Stoker, and more chapters of America (a novel). During a two-week pause in his writing of the novel, he writes The Metamorphosis. It's "a magnificent period": "He was feeling what he needed to feel: security somewhere far off, a source of strength sufficiently distant to leave his sensitivity lucid, not perturbed by too close a contact..."

But he's a difficult one... In December he sends Felice his first book: Meditation. She doesn't really respond, so he starts to doubt her discernment. Meanwhile, he's jealous of other authors she reads. "And his writing, which was his very life, began to falter." The "paradise" of those first three months was gone.

Meanwhile, there have been two weddings in Kafka's circle. But they don't encourage him to follow suit: "His aversion to marriage as a way of life... is now more pronounced than before... He begins to sense that Felice is a danger to him; ... he lets her feel this."

He must have been a trying correspondent. His letters are full of complaints about noise, his family, his insomnia; he makes no bones about his conviction that he is not marriage material, and anyway he doesn't want children...

And then she asks him about his plans... "Needless to say I have no plans, no prospects," he replies. He wants to visit Berlin: "He wishes to see Felice again, to frighten her away by appearing in person, since his letters have failed to do so." They will be meeting for the first time in seven months; it's only the second time they've seen each other at all. He dithers all week. He goes. She's not expecting him, but they eventually meet. They decide to meet again at Whitsun (Felice's initiative): "One has the impression that Felice has now set them both a goal, and that she is trying to infuse into Kafka the power to reach a decision."


Elias Canetti

Felice can't win, really. If she writes less, he wants her more...

So now he expresses a desire to meet her parents. Her family seems "resigned" rather than enthusiastic about Felice's choice: "I felt so very small," he says, "while they all stood around me like giants with such fatalistic expressions on their faces."

He promises to write to her father. He delays. Then he writes her a "treatise", in which he asks her to marry him: "There has never been a more curious proposal of marriage," says Canetti. He tells her all the bad things about himself: "He sets fundamentally impossible conditions for marriage and counts on a refusal, which he desires and provokes."

But she consents. "And now begins his unrelenting struggle against the engagement. This persists for the next two months and ends in flight... He pleads the case against himself like an advocate using all available means."

Hearing nothing from him, Felice sends her friend Grete Bloch to Prague to mediate. This becomes another complication Kafka is uber-curious about her. They correspond. Canetti comments: "There is something playful about these letters -- a very rare feature in the earlier ones -- and quite undisguisedly he is asking for Grete's affection."

He complains less. And Grete becomes a sort of alter ego. But the distance he achieves through this correspondence encourages him to try again with Felice. Again, he asks her to marry him. Initially, she resists, but eventually she agrees, and they become engaged, first unofficially, and then formally through a ceremony that takes place at the Bauer family home on 1 June.

But he still feels something for Grete: "During the course of his very hard struggle for Felice, there came into being his love for the woman without whom he could not have survived this struggle -- Grete Bloch. The marriage would only be complete, to his thinking, if she were included... Through the presence of Grete Bloch he would have brought into the marriage the love he felt for her."

Now, that's a really strange idea...

Then, however, it's as though Grete crosses to Felice's side. Kafka continues to write to her, expressing his fears about the upcoming marriage. She warns Felice that things aren't right, and so Kafka is summoned to Berlin to face the "tribunal". This meeting (of friends and family) takes place on 12 July, just six weeks after the official engagement, and leads to its breaking off.

And Kafka began to write The Trial in August 1914.


Vienna, 1989. Under threat as a Jew in Vienna after the Anschluss, Canetti fled in 1938

2.

For Canetti, it's very clear: The arrest in The Trial equates to the engagement. Kafka's diary certainly points in that direction: "Was tied hand and foot like a criminal. Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, placed policemen in front of me, and let me look simply like that, it could not have been worse. And that was my engagement; everybody made an effort to bring me to life, and when they couldn’t, to put up with me as I was."

Could Fraeulein Buerstner, the young woman in The Trial whom Josef K. clearly fixates on, be a stand-in for Greta, Canetti wonders: "Kafka’s longing for her is there, with strength and immediacy. The arrest, which derived from that tortured process of the engagement with Felice, has been transferred into the room of the other woman. K., who was aware of no guilt at all during the morning, becomes guilty through his conduct during the night, through his attack on Fräulein Buerstner. For 'he was pleased with it'. The complex and almost insoluble situation in which Kafka found himself placed at the engagement is thus explicated by him with startling clarity in the first chapter of The Trial. He had very much wanted Grete Bloch to be present at the engagement, and had even shown an interest in what dress she would wear... Despite his endeavours as the novel proceeds, K. does not manage to speak with Fraeulein Buerstner about what has happened. She skilfully evades him, very much to his annoyance, and his nocturnal attack on her remains secret, intact, shared by the two of them."

The execution in The Trial therefore equates to the "tribunal", the meeting of friends and family convened when the engagement was going wrong. Canetti: "The outcome of the matter, the breaking of the engagement, was as he had wished; on that count he could only feel relief. But what hurt him, what most deeply shamed him, was the public nature of the proceedings. The shame at this humiliation, the gravity of which can only be rightly measured against his pride, remained with him, concentrated: its fruit was The Trial, and it flowed undiminished into the last chapter." At the end, K. gives up any resistance...

In August 1914, Kafka is writing. When Grete and Felice re-establish contact, he fears Felice is again becoming "the center of everything". He writes to Felice explaining that he needs to defend his work against her. He needs to focus on The Trial. Even writing letters to her disturbs him.

February 1915. It's their first meeting since the "tribunal". He's still concerned to prioritize his work: "She," he says, "indifferent to every mute request, wants the average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the factory, good food, bed at eleven, central heating... We were alone two hours in the room. Round about me only boredom and despair."

And she resets his watch... Canetti explains what a bad idea that was: "That his watch is differently from other people's means for him a tiny piece of freedom."

Kafka is massively susceptible to the feeling of humiliation (a sentiment that recurs repeatedly in The Trial); and he always struggles against what he perceives as superior power. Just as he butted heads with his father, so the thought of having a family of his own makes him butt heads with Felice.

The two get engaged for the second time in July 1917. But it's off again by the end of the year.

Helping this process of disintegration along is Kafka's lung haemorrhage. He visits a specialist, who tells him the bad news: "The pronouncement from this authoritative quarter, which he now compelled himself to recognize, freed him from Felice, from his fear of the marriage, and from the profession he hated. But it tied him forever to his sickness, of which he was to die." Not that they initially knew how serious it all was. But he informs Felice. There's another meeting, and the penultimate letter. As Canetti puts it: "Finally he tells her a secret, in which even he does not believe at present, but which must be true: he will never be well again. With this he kills himself off for her, and he withdraws from her now by a kind of suicide projected into the future." He feels nothing for her any more. There's one last cold letter, rebuffing her wish for a reconciliation.



***

The Trial, as we saw, is susceptible to multiple layers of interpretation. So it's unlikely that this relationship is ALL that it's about. Still, it seems very plausible, as Canetti argues, that a strong personal element shaped the mood that inspired it, and provided the emotional energy to embark on it.

I found this book an illuminating read. Making it more powerful still was its intersection with what was going on in our own lives at the time I was reading it.

As we thought about buying a house, Kafka's fear of commitment really resonated with me... As we weighed up whether to make an offer -- pledging ourselves to the house, as it were -- I found myself wanting something to step in and stop it all, just as Kafka did ("be honest with your father, Felice, since I haven't been... [and] with his help step out of the accursed circle"). Why? Because for him -- and for us -- the commitment is just all too terrifying. Like Kafka, I recognize what it is to want something, and yet not want it; to feel on one level that something would be good and right and rewarding, and on another that it would be overwhelming and all-consuming, leaving no room for other drivers in life.

Kafka is also terrified of domesticity... He writes, regarding her views on an apartment: "What you wanted was perfectly reasonable: a pleasant, pleasantly furnished, family apartment, such as is inhabited by all families of both your and my social standing... But your whole idea about the apartment, what does it show? It shows that you agree with the others, not with me... These others, when they get married, are very nearly satiated, and marriage to them is but the final, great, delicious mouthful. Not so for me, I am not satiated, I haven't started a business that's expected to expand from one year of marriage to another; I don't need a permanent home from whose bourgeois orderliness I propose to run this business -- not only do I not need this kind of home, it actually frightens me. I am so hungry for my work...; here, however, the conditions are antagonistic to my work, so if I set up house according to your wishes under these conditions, it would mean... that I am attempting to make these conditions permanent, which is the worst thing that can befall me."

I completely get that, too. There's something so demanding, all-consuming, and irreversible about a house...

On the other hand, it sounds as though Kafka almost welcomed his illness as a way of getting out of all that stuff. That can't be good... And he lived just a few more years, so he didn't have to worry about providing for his old age, or showing solidarity with aging friends and family members. Kafka's life was a brief blaze of glory. Most of us -- thank goodness -- have both more history and more future to manage.

In our case, let's hope that, unlike Kafka and Felice, we can love our little house without being overpowered by it...