The Meowmorphosis (18 page)

Franz’s relationship with his father was troubled, which certainly could not be surmised by anyone reading his works and counting up the good fathers on their fingers, then collapsing into a pit of despair when they find more unfeeling, evil father-devils than can be had in a Joss Whedon story.

Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Gustave
Flaubert, who like Kafka never met a horrible circumstance that didn’t thrill him to the bone. From 1889 to 1893, Franz attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys’ elementary school near the meat market. His Jewish education was lackadaisical, limited to his bar mitzvah at age thirteen and attendance at synagogue four times a year with his father; like any modernist child flirting with the sensual trends of nihilism, he did not enjoy this at all. After elementary school, he was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, where he learned, wrote, and spoke German.

It was there that the cats first found him.

It began innocently enough: Stray cats, of which central Europe has no paucity, began to follow little Franz to school. At first he didn’t notice, but eventually it became impossible to ignore as the stream of cats thickened and then began waiting outside his classrooms for him to emerge. The other students withdrew from Franz, recognizing perhaps the presence of a genius in their midst, or possibly a witch, or, even more possibly, someone who smelled altogether too much like fish. Kafka began to suspect all these things of himself as well, but since he had already decided that his father was a villain for the ages, he knew he could tell no one and would have to sort it out on his own.

Admitted to Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, Kafka studied chemistry for a valiant two weeks before absconding for the law, since the literary opportunities offered by dark satires of the inner workings of chemistry are few. Law provided a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father and required a longer course of study, giving Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history.

Like many university students, Kafka attended meetings of anarchist and anti-establishment clubs. Like many university students, his commitment to them was dependent on how many drinks he had had and whether he was on good terms with the treasurer that week. Hugo Bergmann, who attended the same elementary and high schools as Kafka, had a falling out with his feline-friendly classmate during their last academic year because “Kafka’s bloody cats and my peace of mind just could not get along. The synthesis of cats and politics did not yet exist.” Kafka sometimes wore a red carnation to school to show his support for socialism—or to look dapper, it is unclear which. He later stated, regarding the Bohemian anarchists: “They all sought thanklessly to realize human happiness. I understood them. But in the end human happiness was not really my concern, nor the aims of my writing, for books ought to be bludgeons to gouge out all our better parts rather than light entertainment. I was unable to continue marching alongside
them for long without … company.”

He hoped that as he grew older his youthful feline magnetism would fade; yet the cats followed him and even increased their surveillance, taking up positions outside his dormitory and watching him through the night. Kafka began to show signs of mental deterioration, especially once the cats began to bring him presents in the form of pigeons and rats, conveniently exsanguinated for his use. He began to write tracts on the nature of the cat’s soul; this brought him to the attention of the young thinker Max Brod, who unlike Kafka would go on to become a prolific, balanced, industrious, and well-liked writer of eighty-three works but, for mysterious reasons understood only by sociopathic cats and literary critics, would be remembered mostly for being his antisocial friend’s literary executor.

Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906, and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. Obviously, this internship had no effect on him whatsoever.

On November 1, 1907, Kafka was hired at a large Italian insurance company. He was unhappy with his working hours—the onerous and unusual shift from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.—since it made it extremely difficult to concentrate on his writing. Indeed, the lack of sleep caused his personality to split; it was rumored that one side of Kafka’s persona traveled around
Bohemia starting underground boxing clubs while the other side continued to work miserably as an insurance adjuster.

On July 15, 1908, he resigned and, two weeks later, found employment with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, investigating the personal-injury claims of industrial workers and assessing compensation. From this we may assume that Kafka was surely well liked and had many genuine friends. According to several reports, Kafka invented the hard hat while working for this Bohemian OSHA—but an independent tribunal who claimed to have seen it all disputes the claim, since by then the poor man was obsessed with cats and their behavior and spent little time actually doing his job and quite a lot more cross-examining a certain Siamese.

Hounded from place to place by these cats who seemed to be driven by some weird mechanism to regard him as their personal deity, Kafka’s work began to drift more and more toward the dark and paranoid instead of the light comedy sketches that had so delighted his university friends. Perhaps we lost a great comedian in that lost Kafka—a Bohemian Belushi, a Czech Carlin. Alas! But we must press on.

His father, angling for literary immortality as a wretched bastard, often referred to his son’s job as insurance officer as a
Brotberuf
(“bread job,” done only to pay the bills). While Kafka
claimed loudly and to everyone who would listen that he despised the job, he was in fact a good worker, entrusted with compiling the company’s annual report. As a sign of his skewed perception of the world and growing—shall we say, feline?—desire to torture others with the products of his mind, he was so proud of the results that he sent copies of this exciting business document to friends and family as holiday gifts. One may assume his father did not appreciate the gesture. The cats, however, who now numbered in the dozens and pressed into the legs of Kafka’s trousers when he walked to work in the mornings, felt the report was well written and precise, though perhaps the sentences ran a little long.

Due to the split in his character discussed earlier, Kafka was reportedly able to remain committed to his literary work and boxing clubs. He and his friends were known collectively as the Little Prague Circle; they fought crime and wrote short modernist allegorical tales. Franz Kafka: insurance adjuster by day, literary rebel by night, and always, always the cats, watching him, watching him, and how could he focus on his comedy with their slitted, terrifying eyes on him and his father belching out pot roast and judgment at the dinner table? No, it would have to be something else, something more, a story, perhaps, about an animal who was not really an animal …

In 1911, his brother-in-law Karl Hermann fulfilled the
moral duty of brother-in-laws everywhere and asked Kafka to invest in a surefire scheme he had come up with, namely, the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann and Company. Kafka felt very good about this prospect at first, mainly because he knew nothing in particular about asbestos or how it reacts with minds already on shaky ground, and he dedicated much of his free time to the business. During that period, his writing became more and more, as Max Brod put it, “crazy pants.”

Truly, Franz Kafka was a model for the modern office worker: deeply unhappy, but spending his weekends working on his “novel” and messing around with asbestos. Many employees of various corporations in our present world can take inspiration from the fact that this hero of the workers died alone and miserable, and, long after his death, a large number of equally unhappy people became obsessed with his work, to the point of literary critics being forced to find some merit in it, however they might have been more personally inclined to watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and drink microbrews. I think it is safe to say he is an inspiration to us all.

IN 1912, MAX BROD
introduced Kafka to Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a Dictaphone company. Over the next five years they corresponded a great
deal, met occasionally, and twice were engaged to be married. Their relationship finally ended in 1917. That same year, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis—since the man could not catch a break with both hands, during his convalescence he was forced to live with his family, most notably his mother and sister Ottilie. We can assume that made no impression on his literary mind, and that Kafka was an unusually kind and large-hearted man, since his portraits of young women and sisters are so generous and subtle.

During this period, the cats suddenly vanished from his life—repelled by his illness or perhaps his literary output, Kafka could not be sure. He developed a terror of being perceived as repulsive both physically and mentally, though his mother assured him that he impressed everyone with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence, and dry sense of humor. Again, even the casual reader must be impressed with Kafka’s visionary and forward-thinking approach to life, working a dead-end job, talking to a disinterested woman over long-distance communication, and living with his mother.

From 1920 onward Kafka developed an intense relationship with Bohemian writer Milena Jesenská. It did not last. In July 1923, during a vacation to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic, he met the improbably named Dora Diamant and moved to Berlin
in the hope of distancing himself from his family’s influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived in sin with Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family.

And the cats returned, this time a hardier breed of German forest cat, who insisted on watching though the windows whenever Kafka and Diamant made love, which really made everyone involved uncomfortable. Kafka began to observe and report on the behavior of the cats, keeping a notebook of their doings that would provide fuel for his more feline-oriented works. Indeed, it can safely be assumed that nothing Kafka ever wrote was actually about the behavior of humans—who, in general, behave like kindergarten teachers, journalists, and insurance adjusters rather than like sociopaths, which are mercifully rare. In cats, however, that psychic state can be considered standard factory issue.

Kafka’s tuberculosis worsened in spite of his use of naturopathic treatments (which certainly shocks this biographer to the core), and he returned to Prague before receiving treatment in Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium, near Vienna, where, given the state of European sanatoriums, it is perhaps better that he died on June 3, 1924, apparently from starvation. I think we can all surmise what occurred: The cats followed him to the hospital, and, knowing how much more grandly his work, which
so beautifully showcased them, would be received after he died—a living modernist writer is essentially useless to anyone—they stole his food and devoured it themselves. His body was ultimately brought back to Prague, where he was buried on June 11, 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery. If you were to visit today, you would find the place crawling with feral cats paying homage to their unhappy deity.

When Kafka died, he requested that his friend Max Brod destroy his unpublished works, writing: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me [is] to be burned unread.” However, Brod, a very good friend, ignored this request and instead published
The Trial, Amerika,
and
The Castle.
Upon signing the publication contracts, Brod let his hand fall onto the head of his own handsome cat, who looked well satisfied.

KAFKA’S WRITING
attracted little attention until after his death, as is proper for any writer of worth. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories and never finished any of his novels—as is proper for a prefigurer of the modern working male, unless of course
The Meowmorphosis
is to be considered a novel. If one looks carefully, however, one can see the cats of Prague creeping and crawling through all Kafka’s stories, almost as though all these tales are one, and all concern one enormous, bewhiskered thing.

An interesting note regarding translation: Many translators point out that Kafka made great use of the peculiar German habit of moving verbs willy-nilly so that sentences sometimes spanned an entire page. Kafka’s sentences thus deliver an unexpected twist just before the full stop—a twist that, like the discovery of Waldo in the upper corner of a carnival scene, illuminates the sentence as a whole. This is very irritating. The effect is achieved by the construction of the German language, which often requires the verb to be positioned at the end of the sentence. The translators insist these constructions cannot be duplicated in English—but that is mainly because they have been abused by schoolmasters and are now deathly afraid of the run-on sentence. A more truly insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author’s intentional use of ambiguous terms or words that have several different meanings. The cad! This biographer cannot believe that ambiguity and multiple meanings continue to be tolerated by modern readers.

One such instance is found in the first sentence of this very work,
The Meowmorphosis.
English translators have often rendered the word
Ungeziefer
as “insect” or “cockroach”; in Middle German, however,
Ungeziefer
literally means “unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice,” or, as the clever and true thinker will recognize: cat.

1. The name Samsa follows the same pattern of letters as Kafka. Do you think Kafka may have been trying to make a point here?

2. The manager notes that Gregor’s work performance has lately been poor. Do you think his manager is just an ass? Or is it possible that Gregor is not quite the blameless victim in his own existence that he’d like to believe?