“Freely pouring his emotions into the letters, Kafka is, by turns, passionate [‘I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough’], self-deprecating [‘my energies have always been pitifully weak’], possessive [‘I am jealous of all the people in your letter, those named and those unnamed, men and girls, business people and writers’] and downright bossy [‘Please answer all these questions in great detail’].” —Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters, by Michiko Kakutani, published Saturday, April 2, 1988
Kafka first met Felice Bauer at a dinner party. “After weeks of agonizing, he wrote her his first letter, in which he shyly introduced himself as the man who sat across the table and handed her photographs of a vacation trip. He was soon writing to her at least once a day and imploring her to reply in kind.”
Like most socially and emotionally disabled writers, Kafra fell in love behind words. Mostly his words. It’s disturbing how we can commit our slippery souls to someone (anyone) through letters; epistolary relationships are often better than the real thing, especially if you’re a narcissist (to ascertain mathematically if you are a narcissist, solve this equation: writer = narcissist). The transaction is more like falling in love with yourself, or at the very least, falling in love with your control of an artifice that confines a not-real you and a not-real her (you and she and it are just what you’ve assembled in your fickle mind/bulleted heart, as per your desires and aversions).
“If a day goes by without a note from Felice, he berates her for disappointing him, then abjectly apologizes in his next letter for making her feel guilty, for having become such an insufferable burden. He complains incessantly about his ill health – his headaches, his insomnia, his nerves, then turns reporter, bombarding her with questions about her work, her habits, her personality: ‘What exactly happened at your house on Sunday?’ ‘What do you wear at the office? And what does the main part of your work consist of?’ ‘What is the meaning of you having had a backache during the day and of you not feeling very well when you wrote on Sunday evening?'”
These relationships meet a familiar (and still devastating) end: “the moment that Felice started to respond to his entreaties, the moment when marriage became a serious possibility, Kafka began to backpedal furiously, desperately trying to convince her of his unsuitability as a husband. He says he has misled her, that she has failed to understand who he really is.”
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Letters to Felice, by Franz Kafka, edited by Erich Heller and Jurgen Born; translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth
Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, by Elias Canetti and translated by Christopher Middleton
