Kafka is not difficult to read, because he employs a style of the utmost calm, lucidity, and simplicity. The surface narrative, however, is deceptive. He is trying to suggest, using familiar images and seemingly commonplace episodes, the disturbed condition of modern man. We may put it this way: There is, for Kafka, a Goal. But is there a Way? Kafka, though he belonged to no sect and was devoid of any trace of mysticism, was a deeply religious man. He thought of his writing, not as a pro- fession, but as a form of prayer to a God who continually eluded him. His heroes suffer from lostness, alienation, an inability to identify themselves. It is a feeling many of us have had. But at the same time they are seeking some redemptive grace (the Castle perhaps symbolizes this), which they vaguely sense. They have no place in the universal order; yet surely there must be one. In this sense Kafka may be said to be a metaphysical novelist, in some respects akin to the less ago- nized Borges.
In some of his shorter works—especially The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony—Kafka seems to foresee the dehuman- ization, the terror, and the bureaucratic tyranny of our epoch. They are chilling stories, recounted in quiet prose, parables of guilt and punishment, that strike to the very heart of our age of anxiety.
Though he died over seventy years ago, Kafka is contempo- rary. A neurotic genius, he was perfectly equipped to create a visionary world that reminds us of our real one.
C.F.
113
D.H. LAWRENCE
1885-1930
Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
It is hard to realize that when Lawrence died of tuberculosis he was only forty-five. From 1911, when his first novel appeared, to his death in 1930, no year passed without the appearance of at least one book. In 1930 there were six, and his posthumous works (excluding the extraordinary Letters) total another dozen or so. While producing so prodigiously, Lawrence was traveling widely, meeting and influencing large numbers of people, working at various hobbies, and engaging
in the unhappy controversies caused by his uncompromising ideas. This frail, thin, bearded man—novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, painter, and prophet—had a central fire of energy burning inside him. He stands out as one of the most alive human beings of his time.
Lawrence was born of a Nottinghamshire coal miner and a woman greatly superior to her husband in education and sensi- tivity. His early life, dominated by his mothers excessive love and his excessive dependence on it, is portrayed quite frankly in the first part of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence excelled at school and for a few years was a schoolmaster. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, a member of a patrician German family, and in 1914 married her. The latter part of his life was one of almost continuous wandering. In exotic primitives and undeveloped countries he sought the equivalent in fact of the life-feeling that blazes in his fiction.
This life-feeling attracts some readers, alienates or shocks others. You will not be able to tolerate Lawrence at ali unless you understand that he was neither poseur nor hysteric, but a prophet with a message fervently believed in, a message with which he sought to change the day-to-day behavior of the human race. The message is implicit even in so early a book as Sons and Lovers, which is certainly the one with which to start one's reading of Lawrence. It is to be found more particularly in The Rainbow, Women in Love (perhaps his masterpiece), and Lady Chatterley's Lover, one of his poorest novйis.
We must understand that Lawrence was an absolute revo- lutionary. His rejections were complete. He made war against the entire industrial culture of his and our time. He felt that it had devitalized us, dried up the spontaneous springs of our emotions, fragmented us, and alienated us from that life of the soil, flowers, weather, animais, to which Lawrence was preter- naturally sensitive. Worst of ali, he thought, it had withered our sexual lives. For Lawrence sex was not merely something to enjoy. It was the key to the only knowledge he prized— direct, immediate, nonintellectual perception of reality. As early as 1912 he was writing, "What the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true." (To some readers this will seem pernicious nonsense.)
He hated science, conventional Christianity, the worship of reason, progress, the interfering state, planned "respectable" living, and the idolization of money and the machine. It is easy to understand therefore why he was forced to live, though bravely and even joyfully, a life of poverty, struggle, and defi- ance. Aldous Huxley [117], who knew him well, described him as "a being, somehow, of another order." It does at times seem that he drew his energy from some primai source most of us cannot tap. In this respect as in others he reminds us of the prophet-poet Blake [63].
His books are not constructed, as Conrad's are [100]. They flow, eddy, flash, erupt, or sing in accordance with the electric changes in the authors own personality as he composed. Unless you are willing temporarily to accept this personality, his books may seem intolerable.
But Lawrence wants you to do more. His view of the novel was deeply moral. The novel, he passionately believed, "can help you not to be a dead man in life." He wants nothing less than to change you, to reawaken in you an intensity, a joy in life that he felt humanity was losing or had lost.
It is hard to say whether a century from now Lawrence will be thought of as a major prophet (as well as a remarkable artist) or merely as an oddity of genius.
The careful reader of the above paragraphs will suspect that I do not really like Lawrence as a human being and that I am doing my best to disguise my feelings. This new edition gives me an opportunity to be more honest. There was a fascist streak in Lawrence and we cannot really tell how wide it was. He once wrote: "The great mass of the population should never be taught to read and write. Never." As I have elsewhere noted, this is "one of the most remarkable statements ever made by a man who lived largely on his royalties." It is also worth remembering that, as the son of a poor miner, Lawrence was himself born into "the great mass." Had it not been for his country's enlightened universal education, he might never have become D.H. Lawrence. Never.
It has taken us some time to acknowledge that Wagner was both a genius and a swine. Of the genius Lawrence we may say, at the very least, that his character included some unpleas- ing traits.
C.F.
114
TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO
1886-1965
The Makioka Sisters
Tanizaki was born only two decades after Natsume Soseki [104], but he clearly belongs to another generation, walking confidently on the modernist path blazed so arduously by Natsume and other Meiji Period intellectuals. He was born into a prosperous Tokyo merchant family at a time when Japan's commercial prospects were booming, and grew up feeling quite comfortable with the modern, highly Westernized urban envi- ronment of Tokyo at the turn of the century.
Tanizaki attended Tokyo Imperial University but was expelled for nonpayment of fees before graduating—an act of rebellion, one supposes, since he was not short of funds. He began to publish short stories while he was in his early twen- ties; "The Tattooist" (1910) first brought him to the attention of Japan's literary world. He became infatuated with Western literature and material culture, and this is reflected in his early stories and film scripts.