The Crows
and Also the Diaries of Franz Kafka
I’ve been reading the diaries of Franz Kafka lately. There’s a new translation, new as of last year anyway, by Ross Benjamin, of the uncensored original notebooks. In his preface to the diaries, Benjamin writes that Kafka has long been “seen as the representative genius of the modern age.”1 Certainly, his reflections on the role of the individual in bureaucratized, industrialized nations feel incisive and relevant to me. I’ve also had the sense for a while that Kafka holds a sort of key to living with anxiety. Since so few of us, it seems, live entirely without anxiety, he takes on a great importance in my imagination.
But, more pertinent to the diaries themselves, Benjamin notes that in his translation he seeks to have the effect “of catching Kafka in the act of writing.”2 We are meant to see the writer at work, and, predictably enough, that often means seeing the writer complain about writing. I expect that most of us with literary pretensions will recognize ourselves in such complaints, and Kafka has a wonderful way of complaining. Take the following entry as an example: “Sunday, 19 June 10 slept woke up, slept, woke up, miserable life.”3 Such economy! Such accuracy of expression! It’s better than internet memes!
Anyway, here I’ll include a few passages from Kafka’s diary pertaining to the struggle to write. I quote him to wash myself of culpability for expressing similar sentiments. Note that nonstandard punctuation in these entries reflects the punctuation Kafka actually used in his notebooks and has not been edited in Benjamin’s translation.
In the first of the passages I’ll reproduce, Kafka writes about dictating a report at work and struggling to find the right word toward the report’s conclusion. He suffers a long, awkward moment with the typist, in which her expectant fidgeting makes it ever more difficult for him to find the right word, and then:
At last I have the word “stigmatize” and the sentence that goes with it, but still hold everything in my mouth with a feeling of disgust and shame as if it were raw meat, cut out of my own flesh (so much effort has it cost me). At last I say it, but retain the great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work and such a work would be a heavenly dissolution and a real coming alive for me, while here in that office for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness of a piece of its flesh.4
Well, what writer aspirant hasn’t complained that their day job saps them of the energy they need to write their novel, their sonnet cycle, whatever, the work that really matters to them? At the same time, how few have put it quite so well. Kafka was also perhaps more justified in his sense that he was “ready for a literary work” than most of us are. Nevertheless, composing business emails and writing corporate reports can feel like an injury to a person who knows that they could be writing something with real personality and meaning. Alas that we must do such things to earn our bread.
The conflict between office and writing desk is a common theme in the diary, something he notes again on December 18, 1910:
evening ½ past 11. That I, as long as I am not freed from my office, am simply lost, that is clear to me above all, it’s only a matter of holding my head as long as possible high enough that I don’t drown. How hard that will be, what powers it will have to draw out of me is apparent in the mere fact that today I didn’t adhere to my new schedule, to be at my desk from 8-11 in the evening, that at present I don’t even regard this as such a great misfortune, that I have only hastily jotted down these few lines in order to get into bed.5
How comforting it is, somehow, to see that Kafka tried to set himself a writing schedule in the evenings, and that he failed often enough for this complaint to come into the diary. I have done the very same thing, certainly, said to myself, “I will write at least 500 words each day after work, 1000 preferably,” and then done so for a week before loosening my grip little by little, until writing a few lines in my journal sufficed to bed down my writer’s guilt, and at last gone back to a simple life in which I am not trying to write a novel.
And lest we think that Kafka sees office life as bad and the writer’s life as good, let’s take this entry: “I frail as before and always. To have the feeling of being bound and at the same time the other, that if one were unbound it would be even worse.”6 He does not make explicit reference to writing here, but given that he writes these sentences after mentioning that he had been with a group that regularly got together to read their literary works to each other, it’s not a big leap. Here we see ambivalence: one advantage of having a 9-5 is that it gives daily life a predictable structure. We might be trapped in that structure, but in some ways it is preferable to the alternative, a life in which each day might be entirely different from the last, in which we cannot even predict our own actions. To use an old church analogy, the latter life is like being a kite without a string, or so we might imagine. Haruki Murakami, in his Novelist as a Vocation, argues that the steadiness of formal employment is good for the would-be novelist, and uses Kafka as an example in favor of his point.7
Let’s also not paint Kafka as totally disgusted with his weakness, contemptuous of himself. He writes on December 22, 1910, the day following the previous quoted passage, “Today I don’t even dare reproach myself. Shouted into this empty day it would have a disgusting echo.”8 Perhaps these words indicate that he knew when to leave himself well enough alone, to allow himself his frailty. I can think of many empty days when I would have been well served by such an attitude.
Though, as in the first entry I quoted, Kafka had a clear sense of his own literary potential, he was often unsure that he was equal to it. In January of 1911, he writes:
How can I, as I am today, measure up to this; I would have to search for a year before finding a true feeling within me and in the face of so great a work I’m supposed to be somehow entitled to remain seating in my chair in a coffeehouse late in the evening plagued by stray winds of a digestion that is bad despite everything.9
One thing that strikes me about this entry is the sense of bewilderment at how great artistic effort is supposed to fit into the workaday world. This was not a new concern in 1911, nor is it a question we have resolved in 2024. In any case, Kafka did not complain about the office because he felt he deserved to be writing in coffee shops instead. Deserving doesn’t seem to enter into the calculation. His complaints of digestion, too, are unpleasantly familiar.
One more passage, and then I’ll have cited most of the relevant entries as far as I’ve read in the book. This one has to do with how people who want to be writers are socialized, and features a memory of a family scene from youth. He sat at the table at his grandparents’ house, where much of the extended family was gathered, and wrote. Some way through the afternoon, he remembers:
An uncle who liked to laugh at people finally took from me the sheet of paper, which I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me without even laughing and said only to the others, who followed him with their eyes “The usual stuff,” to me he said nothing. Though I remained seated and bent as before over my thus unusable sheet of paper, I had actually been driven out of the social sphere with one push, my uncle’s judgment repeated itself in me with now almost real significance and even within the family feeling I got an insight into the cold space of our world, which I had to warm with a fire I first wanted to seek.10
I am not a Kafka expert and cannot say how formative this experience probably was on his psyche. I am glad to say that I have no memories as bad as that. If anything, I was encouraged from a young age by parents and teachers to develop my literary voice. The discouragement from pursuing the path of a writer, the “insight into the cold space of our world,” came later.
I’ll close with an observation that is tangentially related to the diaries of Franz Kafka. This week, as I have sought to keep up my own writing schedule, I have spent a lot of time at the public library, reserving glass-walled study rooms for two hour blocks in the hopes of getting something done in that relatively novel environment. I wind up observing people through the glass walls for much of the session, but that is useful stuff, even if it does not immediately contribute to present projects. On my way into the library the other day, three or four crows cawed raucously in the trees in front of the building. I started hearing a crow far closer than that, but when I looked for it, I saw only an older woman on the path to the library door. As I watched, a crow cawed from the trees, and she cawed back. She was uncannily convincing. She saw me watching and gave a tiny smirk. Then she went inside and spent at least the next two hours staring at her laptop. What work such a crow-impersonator might do, I cannot begin to guess.
Ross Benjamin, “Translator’s Preface: Glimpses into Kafka’s Workshop” in The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books: 2022), vii.
Benjamin, “Translator’s Preface,” xiv.
Kafka, The Diaries, 7.
Kafka, The Diaries, 27.
Kafka, The Diaries, 67.
Kafka, The Diaries, 69.
I don’t have the citation handy, alas, but trust me, it’s in there.
Kafka, The Diaries, 69.
Kafka, The Diaries, 73.
Kafka, The Diaries, 74.