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These diaries are choppy; Benjamin compares them to studio outtakes. They often read like poetry. Here’s one entry in its entirety, in lines Rilke or Havel or Milosz would envy:
Claqueurs in the French theaters: commanders in the orchestra. Ha-ha for the next rows, dropping of newspaper for the men on the gallery
Brod’s many elisions, Saul Friedlander wrote in his 2013 biography of Kafka, were responsible for “leading an entire generation of commentators astray.” The issues that most tortured Kafka, except for his writing, tended to be sexual in nature.
The passages that express his physical interest in men matter because they help tap into some of the sources of his alienation. Brod cut a line in which Kafka notices a “large bulge” in another man’s pants on a train, for example. He ended this sentence at its comma: “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.”
Kafka’s diaries, as is well known, are punishing in their sense of isolation and torment. These traits take on a grainier quality here. Kafka frequently felt, as an artist, “the imminent possibility of great states that would tear me open and make me capable of anything,” but these states were frustrated, again and again, by his day job, by the confusions of family and female companionship, and by physical frailty compounded by sleeplessness and constipation. He secreted his work slowly, as an oyster does its shell. He was not made for his times — or for any times, really.
Yet more conviviality sneaks into these complete diaries. Kafka spent so many nights at the theater (he admired the way Goethe kept supplies of wine and cold food in his box), and was so opinionated about what he saw, that he might have moonlighted as a theater critic.
He befriended members of struggling troupes and developed crushes on some of the actresses. He was perceptive about why even cheap theater so moved him:
The sympathy we have for these actors, who are so good and earn nothing and in other ways too get far from enough gratitude and fame, is actually only sympathy over the sad fate of many noble endeavors and above all our own.
During his lifetime, Kafka published six slim books but was essentially unknown. He expressed no sense of occasion upon their release; fame seemed to interest him not at all. He did often read his work aloud to friends, laughing as he went along.
These diaries are perhaps most interesting for including, as Brod did not, Kafka’s rough drafts and false starts on his stories. You watch his voice develop in something like real time.
Kafka witnesses his nephew’s circumcision. He goes sledding. (In photographs, you can see through Kafka to the little boy he used to be.) He weeps at the movies. He contemplates suicide.
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