Busting a few Kafka myths

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: James Hawes calls it the building blocks of the K.-myth. That Franz Kafka’s will ordered that all his works should be destroyed; that Kafka was virtually unknown in his lifetime; that he was terrified of his brutal father; that he was crippled for years by the TB that he knew must inevitably kill him; that he was incredibly honest about his failings with the women in his life — too honest; that his works uncannily predict Auschwitz. “Unfortunately”, says Hawes, “they are all rubbish”. In a witty, satirical biography (or should we call it an anti-biography?) Hawes debunks some of the myths surrounding Kafka, starting by using an extraordinary discovery — Kafka’s pornography.

And lest you think Hawes, who has made his name as a comic novelist (A White Merc with Fins), is being funny again, he lets drop the fact that he is a time-served Kafka scholar, so you have to take him seriously.

Hawes asks Kafka readers to “stop condescending to the past” and see Kafka as he really was, warts and all. He was definitely not a mysterious genius, says Hawes, nor a lonely middle-European Nostradamus, far from it. Kafka lived life to the hilt, suggest Hawes, visited brothels and dated waitresses, was rich and suitably famous in the literary fraternity. “…the notion of Franz Kafka being a well-groomed young professional man-about-town with money a plenty in his pockets, who enthusiastically frequented brothels and regularly consorted with a penniless but pretty waitress/artiste of whom he had fond memories years later, hardly agrees with the icon of the tortured quasi-saintly genius…”

Everything Kafka wrote, says Hawes, “every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary… is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant… yet no one has ever shown his readers Kafka’s porn.” Kafka not only kept his collection locked at his parents’ place, if he went on holiday, he took the key along. The porn Kafka ordered, suggests Hawes, “paid for, and kept carefully hidden away would, even today, put the journals firmly on the top shelf”.