The elegant old lady opposite me in the train compartment smiled, and we talked intermittently during our long journey through the central European night. She had come from Prague, she told me in charmingly old-fashioned English, and I mentioned I’d been reading Kafka. She smiled again, saying she knew the writer in her youth (our conversation was in the early Seventies) and how much he liked books printed in large type. I asked about Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend, biographer and literary executor. “Ah, Brod,” she sighed, and said no more. It might be a trick of memory on my part, but I seem to remember a quizzical note in her voice.
I have not come across anything confirming that Kafka had a liking for large-print books, and it may have been a legend my fellow passenger was passing on. But for me her story illustrates how little we knew of Kafka. We are in Brod’s debt for refusing to follow his friend’s instruction to destroy his unpublished work after his death, but it was not only his writings that the faithful amanuensis edited. He also handed on a simplified and redacted view of the man. Our inheritance from Brod is a picture of the writer as a solitary, disembodied soul, a cipher of metaphysical anguish and existential dread who was only by accident a human being with formative social relationships and a specific place in history.
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