[In the following review, Howe describes Brod's Kafka biography as “painfully self-conscious and unsatisfactory.”]

Max Brod is in an impossible position. A lifelong friend of Kafka, he is himself a writer and is therefore expected to write a biography. But in the eyes of the world he has become a mere figure in the Kafka myth; he has lost independent existence. He is evidence. An ordinary citizen could perhaps tolerate such a relationship, but for a writer it is self-obliteration. No wonder then that, despite its value as a document, Brod's book [Franz Kafka] is so painfully self-conscious and unsatisfactory as a biography.

What we expect from Brod is recollection, portraits, conversation, detail, minutiae; a memoir of personal experience which may illuminate his friend's genius. We expect more from him than from Kafka's other intimates because as a novelist Brod was at least in a position to grasp Kafka's problems. But even as a memoir this book is uneven.

There are some very good things in it. A partial portrait of Kafka as human being does emerge—a very stirring and lovely portrait. Kafka was one of those rare souls incapable of the ordinary dishonesties which we all practice as a matter of course; he had a compulsive urge toward the center, the inner core, of a human structure or relationship. Even when he indulged in private ironies or little games of secrecy, he meant them as oblique, yet somehow more direct, versions of the truths which burned in him and eventually helped destroy him. He was not delicate or shy or precious; nor did he have any bent toward the weird or bizarre. Like his books, he can only be understood in the most central and typical terms of modern existence; as Brod points out, he was in this world. Perhaps the greatest tribute which Brod pays to him and which his narrative independently suggests is his remark that Kafka deeply and unequivocably respected people, so much as to provoke the periodic crises which paralyzed his life. In turn he expected others to respect him. Taken seriously, as it was by Kafka, this was an impossible program.

All this Brod suggests with genuine feeling. The last part of the book, describing Kafka's illness and his love affair with Dora Dymant, reaches a high emotional level: a threnody of genius destroyed after its first surge of productivity.

But there are parts of the book which, even as memoir, are simply annoying. Brod tries to deny the relevance of Freudian concepts to Kafka's relationship to his father, as if they were somehow sordid or disrespectful to Kafka's genius. As it happens, Kafka's relationship to his father was the major fact of his personal life, and it is most clarified by psychoanalytical concepts—the extracts from Kafka's remarkable Letter to My Father quoted by Brod make that clear enough. (Which is not the same at all as the crude error of viewing Kafka's novels as mere projections of that relationship.) Brod, however, attempts a rather prissy refutation of the Freudian analysis of Kafka's father-complex. But he need not fear; it will not soil Kafka's memory—on the contrary, it will only bring him closer to all of us.

Similarly Brod becomes a bit queasy when he describes Kafka's love affairs; he takes too seriously his own remark that Kafka was on the way to becoming a saint. (Were that true, Kafka would be a bore; who can get excited about a mere saint?) And here we reach a major weakness of Brod's book: too much Brod and not enough Kafka. We are simply not interested in Brod's reflections on life; they are a nuisance when they interrupt his recollections of Kafka. The same difficulty extends even to Brod's writing: how can his prose interest us when it is interspersed with long quotations, ablaze with genius, from Kafka's diaries and letters?

For all its faults, the memoir is unique and therefore indispensable. The difficulty, however, is that a satisfactory biography of Kafka cannot be written as a mere memoir. His external life is of least importance; it is more true of him than of most writers that his life is in his works. A biography of Kafka must therefore be primarily a criticism of his work, a comprehensive theory of Kafka's meaning. This Brod does not achieve, and I doubt that it is possible for him. He was too close to Kafka to view him in perspective. He offers several interpretations: the novels as versions of man's striving toward God and as comments on the situation of the Jews, in whom Kafka became increasingly interested in his later years. I do not question the validity of these theories, only their sufficiency.

For the younger generations Kafka is now assuming a special meaning, one which it is rather difficult for Brod's generation to include. In a sense Kafka no longer belongs to Brod's generation; he belongs to the generation which has experienced the full results of the contemporary débâcle and must now live most of its life in the aftermath. Perhaps he will belong even more fully to the next few generations.

Kafka's great contribution now—it may not be fifty years hence—is an incomparable vision of the modes, the moods, the patterns of contemporary existence stripped of all its contingency. That is why he provokes in us such powerful emotional reactions, why we feel that he speaks especially of and for us. He is not merely our exposed nerve, as has so often been said; he is that nerve at the extremity of its quiver—only in that sense is his Jewishness relevant. This is of course not an interpretation of Kafka, but I think it points the direction to a satisfactory one.

Kafka as viewed by the theologian, the sociologist, the psychoanalyst, the existentialist, the Jewish nationalist—each has validity, but only if subsumed under a more general and immediate vision. We cannot speak for the future, we feel only what he means now.

What, then, of the “universal relevance” claimed for him? Surely, it may be said, his work is not merely of transient significance. I agree, but I should want only to add that most of the current theories of universal relevance in terms of which Kafka is interpreted are themselves largely indices of our time. For us the present is enough, more than enough, and Kafka belongs uniquely to it. For us the present seems almost “universal” too—perhaps that is what Kafka meant when he wrote in his diary, “Everything that happened to me was forever.”