Текст книги "The Complete Stories (forword by John Updike)"

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The Complete Stories

Franz Kafka

Copyright © 1971 by Schocken Books Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York.

Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

The foreword by John Updike was originally published in The New Yorker.

Foreword copyright © 1983 by John Updike.

Collection first published in 1971 by Schocken Books Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.

The complete stories.

(Kafka Library)

Bibliography: p.

1. Kafka, Franz, 1885-1924 – Translations, English.

I. Glatzer, Nahum Norbet, 1903– . I. Title.

ü. Series.

PT2621.A26A2 1988 833'.912 88-18418

ISBN 0-8052-0873-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Contents

Copyright

Foreword by John Updike

TWO INTRODUCTORY PARABLES

Before the Law*

An Imperial Message*

THE LONGER STORIES

Description of a Struggle

Wedding Preparations in the Country

The Judgment*

The Metamorphosis*

In the Penal Colony*

The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole]

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor

The Warden of the Tomb

A Country Doctor*

The Hunter Gracchus

The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment

The Great Wall of China

The News of the Building of the Wall: A Fragment

A Report to an Academy*

A Report to an Academy: Two Fragments

The Refusal

A Hunger Artist*

Investigations of a Dog

A Little Woman*

The Burrow

Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk*

THE SHORTER STORIES

Children on a Country Road*

The Trees*

Clothes*

Excursion into the Mountains*

Rejection*

The Street Window*

The Tradesman*

Absent-minded Window-gazing*

The Way Home*

Passers-by*

On the Tram*

Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys*

The Wish to Be a Red Indian*

Unhappiness*

Bachelor's Ill Luck*

Unmasking a Confidence Trickster*

Sudden Walk*

Resolutions*

Dream*

Up in the Gallery*

A Fratricide*

The Next Village*

A Visit to a Mine*

Jackals and Arabs*

The Bridge

The Bucket Rider

The New Advocate*

An Old Manuscript*

The Knock at the Manor Gate

Eleven Sons*

My Neighbor

A Crossbreed [A Sport]

The Cares of a Family Man*

A Common Confusion

The Truth About Sancho Panza

The Silence of the Sirens

Prometheus

The City Coat of Arms

Poseidon

Fellowship

At Night

The Problem of Our Laws

The Conscription of Troops

The Test

The Vulture

The Helmsman

The Top

A Little Fable

Home-Coming

First Sorrow*

The Departure

Advocates

The Married Couple

Give it Up!

On Parables

Postscript

Bibliography

Editors and Translators

On the Material

Chronology

Selected Writings on Kafka

Back Cover

* Published during Kafka's lifetime.

FOREWORD

By John Updike

All that he does seems to him, it is true, extraordinarily new, but also, because of the incredible spate of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking short the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined. Sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself.

– KAFKA, "He" (Aphorisms)

THE century since Franz Kafka was born has been marked by the idea of "modernism" – a self-consciousness new among centuries, a consciousness of being new. Sixty years after his death, Kafka epitomizes one aspect of this modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain. In Kafka's peculiar and highly original case this dreadful quality is mixed with immense tenderness, oddly good humor, and a certain severe and reassuring formality. The combination makes him an artist; but rarely can an artist have struggled against greater inner resistance and more sincere diffidence as to the worth of his art.

This volume holds all of the fiction that Kafka committed to publication during his lifetime:* a slender sheaf of mostly very short stories, the longest of them, "The Metamorphosis," a mere fifty pages long, and only a handful of the others as much as five thousand words. He published six slim volumes, four of them single stories, from 1913 to 1919, and was working on the proofs of a seventh in the sanatorium where he died on June 3rd, 1924, of tuberculosis, exactly one month short of his forty-first birthday. Among his papers after his death were found several notes addressed to his closest friend, Max Brod. One of them stated:

Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these: The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctorand the short story: Hunger-Artist. . .When I say that those five books and the short story can stand, I do not mean that I wish them to be reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best. Only, since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them.

* The single exception is "The Stoker," published as Der Heizer, Ein Fragmentin 1913 but now incorporated, in German and in English, as the first chapter of Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika.

The little canon that Kafka reluctantly granted posterity would, indeed, stand; "The Metamorphosis" alone would assure him a place in world literature, though undoubtedly a less prominent place than he enjoys thanks to the mass of his posthumously published novels, tales, parables, aphorisms, and letters. The letter quoted above went on to direct Brod to burn all of Kafka's manuscripts, "without exception and preferably unread." Another note, written later, reiterated the command even more emphatically; and Dora Dymant, the young woman with whom Kafka shared the last year of his life, obediently did destroy those portions of the Kafka hoard within her keeping. But Brod disobeyed. Predictably: while Kafka was alive Brod had often elicited manuscripts from his excessively scrupulous friend and was instrumental in the publication of some few of them. In Brod's words: "he knew with what fanatical veneration I listened to his every word. . . during the whole twenty-two years of our unclouded friendship, I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a post card." In a conversation of 1921 he warned Kafka he would burn nothing. And so with good conscience the reverent executor issued to the world The Trialand The Castle -– both novels unfinished and somewhat problematical in their texts but nevertheless magnificently realized – and a host of lesser but still priceless fragments, painstakingly deciphered and edited. Kafka and Shakespeare have this in common: their reputations rest principally on texts they never approved or proofread.

This volume, then, holds as well many stories in various states of incompletion. Some, like "The Village Schoolmaster" and "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," seem fatally truncated, their full intentions and final design destined to remain mysterious. In some others, notably "Investigations of a Dog," the author seems to have played out his inspiration without rounding out the story; Kafka's need to explore this conceit of philosophical speculation in a canine world where human beings are somehow unseen ("a sort of canine atheism" one commentator has called the phenomenon) has been happily exhausted before an end is reached. The failure is purely mechanical and we do not feel cheated, since the story's burden of private meaning has been unloaded – there are scarcely any pages in Kafka more sweetly and winningly autobiographical than these. In still other of these uncompleted stories, such as "The Great Wall of China" and "The Burrow," the end is even nearer, and we do not wish for any more. According to Dora Dymant, "The Burrow" had been concluded, in a version she destroyed, with a "scene describing the hero taking up a tense fighting position in expectation of the beast, and the decisive struggle in which the hero succumbs"; though there is poignance in this – "the beast" was Kafka's nickname for his disease, to which he was to succumb within a few months – we are glad to leave the burrowing hero, fussily timorous and blithely carnivorous, where he is, apprehensively poised amid menaces more cosmic and comic than anything his claws could grapple with. "The Burrow" and "The Great Wall of China" belong at the summit of Kafka's oeuvre; their fantastic images are developed with supreme elegance and resonance. The German titles of both contain the word "Bau."Kafka was obsessed with building, with work that is never done, that can never be done, that must always fall short of perfection. His manuscripts show Kafka to have been a fervent worker, "scribbling" (as he called his writing) with a stately steadiness across the page, revising rather little, but ceasing when authenticity no longer seemed to be present, often laying down parallel or even contradictory tracks in search of his prey, and content to leave his works in an "open" state like that of his Great Wall – their segments uncertainly linked, strange gaps left, the ultimate objective shied from as if too blindingly grand. Not to write for money or the coarser forms of glory is common enough among modern avant-gardists; but to abjure aesthetic "finish" itself carries asceticism a step farther, into a realm of protest where such disparate modernists as Eliot and Pound (in the intrinsically fragmentary nature of their poetry) and Rilke and Salinger (in their capacities for silence) keep Kafka company. Incompletion is a quality of his work, a facet of its nobility. His briefest paragraphs and riddles sufficiently possess the adamancy of art.

Hearing Kafka read aloud from his youthful works "Description of a Struggle" and "Wedding Preparations in the Country" instantly convinced Max Brod that his friend was a genius: "I got the impression immediately that here was no ordinary talent speaking, but a genius." You who are picking up this volume in innocence of the author, however, might do well to skip these first two titles and return to them when initiated. Repeated readings of these grouped fragments have left them, for me, not merely opaque but repellent. "Description" was composed no later than 1904-5, when Kafka was in his early twenties. It is full of contortions both psychological ("I had to restrain myself from putting my arm around his shoulders and kissing him on the eyes as a reward for having absolutely no use for me") and physical ("this thought. . . tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees"; "I screwed up my mouth. . . and supported myself by standing on my right leg while resting the left one on its toes"). There is something of adolescent posturing here, or of those rigid bodily states attendent upon epilepsy and demonic possession. The conversation seems hectic, and the hero and his companions pass a mysterious leg injury back and forth like the ancient Graeae sharing one eye. Self-loathing and self-distrust lurk within all this somatic unease; the "supplicant" prays in church at the top of his voice "in order to be looked at and acquire a body." A certain erotic undercurrent is present also, and in "Wedding Preparations" the hero, Eduard Raban, is proceeding toward his wedding in the country. This narrative at least boasts a discernible direction; but we strongly feel that Raban, for all his dutiful determination, will never get there. The typical Kafkaesque process of non-arrival is underway. And in truth Kafka, though heterosexual, charming, and several times engaged, and furthermore professing that "Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all," never did manage to get married.

The charm that these disquieting, abortive early pieces exerted upon Brod and other auditors (for Kafka used to read his work aloud to friends, sometimes laughing so hard he could not continue reading) must have largely derived from the quality of their German prose. These lucid and fluent translations by the Muirs and the Sterns can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity. "Writing is a form of prayer," Kafka wrote in his diary. Thomas Mann paid tribute to Kafka's "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear, and correct style, [with] its precise, almost official conservatism." Brod likened it to J. P. Hebel's and Kleist's, and claimed that "its unique charm is heightened by the presence of Prague and generally speaking Austrian elements in the run of the sentence." The Jews of Prague generally spoke German, and thus was added to their racial and religious minority-status a certain linguistic isolation as well, for Czech was the language of the countryside and of Bohemian nationalism. It is interesting that of the last two women in Kafka's life – two who abetted the "reaching out" of his later, happier years – Milena Jesenská-Pollak was his Czech translator and helped teach him Czech, and Dora Dymant confirmed him in his exploratory Judaism including the study of Hebrew. He wrote to Brod of the problems of German: "Only the dialects are really alive, and except for them, only the most individual High German, while all the rest, the linguistic middle ground, is nothing but embers which can only be brought to a semblance of life when excessively lively Jewish hands rummage through them." Though fascinated by the liveliness of Yiddish theatre, he opted for what Philip Rahv has called an "ironically conservative" style; what else, indeed, could hold together such leaps of symbolism, such a trembling abundance of feeling and dread?

Kafka dated his own maturity as a writer from the long night of September 22nd-23rd, 1912, in which he wrote "The Judgment" at a single eight-hour sitting. He confided to his diary that morning, "Only in this waycan writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul." Yet the story is not quite free of the undeclared neurotic elements that twist the earlier work; the connection between the engagement and the father seems obscure, and the old man's fury illogical. But in staring at, with his hero Georg, "the bogey conjured up by his father," Kafka broke through to a great cavern of stored emotion. He loved this story, and among friends praised – he who deprecated almost everything from his own pen – its Zweifellosigkeit,its "indubitableness." Soon after its composition, he wrote, in a few weeks, "The Metamorphosis," an indubitable masterpiece. It begins with a fantastic premise, whereas in "The Judgment" events become fantastic. This premise – the gigantic insect – established in the first sentence, "The Metamorphosis" unfolds with a beautiful naturalness and a classic economy. It takes place in three acts: three times the metamorphosed Gregor Samsa ventures out of his room, with tumultuous results. The members of his family – rather simpler than Kafka's own, which had three sisters – dispose themselves around the central horror with a touching, as well as an amusing, plausibility. The father's fury, roused in defense of the fragile mother, stems directly from the action and inflicts a psychic wound gruesomely objectified in the rotting apple Gregor carries in his back; the evolutions of the sister, Crete, from shock to distasteful ministration to a certain sulky possessiveness and finally to exasperated indifference are beautifully sketched, with not a stroke too much. The terrible but terribly human tale ends with Crete's own metamorphosis, into a comely young woman. This great story resembles a great story of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"; in both, a hitherto normal man lies hideously, suddenly stricken in the midst of a family whose irritated, banal daily existence flows around him. The abyss within life is revealed, but also life itself.

What kind of insect is Gregor? Popular belief has him a cockroach, which would be appropriate for a city apartment; and the creature's retiring nature and sleazy dietary preferences would seem to conform. But, as Vladimir Nabokov, who knew his entomology, pointed out in his lectures upon "The Metamorphosis" at Cornell University, Gregor is too broad and convex to be a cockroach. The charwoman calls him a "dung beetle" (Mistkäfer)but, Nabokov said, "it is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly." Kafka's Eduard Raban of "Wedding Preparations" daydreams, walking along, "As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think." Gregor Samsa, awaking, sees "numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk." If "numerous" is more than six, he must be a centipede – not an insect at all. From evidence in the story he is brown in color and about as long as the distance between a doorknob and the floor; he is broader than half a door. He has a voice at first, "but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone," which disappears as the story progresses. His jaws don't work as ours do but he has eyelids, nostrils, and a neck. He is, in short, impossible to picture except when the author wants to evoke his appearance, to bump the reader up against some astounding, poignant new aspect of Gregor's embodiment. The strange physical discomfort noted in the earlier work is here given its perfect allegorical envelope. A wonderful moment comes when Gregor, having been painfully striving to achieve human postures, drops to his feet:

Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand.

When "The Metamorphosis" was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka, fearful that the cover illustrator "might want to draw the insect itself," wrote the publisher, "Not that, please not that!. . . The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance." He suggested instead a scene of the family in the apartment with a locked door, or a door open and giving on darkness. Any theatrical or cinematic version of the story must founder on this point of external representation: a concrete image of the insect would be too distracting and shut off sympathy; such a version would lack the very heart of comedy and pathos which beats in the unsteady area between objective and subjective, where Gregor's insect and human selves swayingly struggle. Still half-asleep, he notes his extraordinary condition yet persists in remembering and trying to fulfill his duties as a travelling salesman and the mainstay of this household. Later, relegated by the family to the shadows of a room turned storage closet, he responds to violin music and creeps forward, covered with dust and trailing remnants of food, to claim his sister's love. Such scenes could not be done except with words. In this age that lives and dies by the visual, "The Metamorphosis" stands as a narrative absolutely literary, able to exist only where language and the mind's hazy wealth of imagery intersect.

"The Metamorphosis" stands also as a gateway to the world Kafka created after it. His themes and manner were now all in place. His mastery of official pomposity – the dialect of documents and men talking business – shows itself here for the first time, in the speeches of the chief clerk. Music will again be felt, by mice and dogs, as an overwhelming emanation in Kafka's later fables – a theme whose other side is the extreme sensitivity to noise, and the longing for unblemished silence, that Kafka shared with his hero in "The Burrow." Gregor's death scene, and Kafka's death wish, return in "A Hunger Artist" – the saddest, I think, of Kafka's stories, written by a dying man who was increasingly less sanguine (his correspondence reveals) about dying. The sweeping nature of the hunger artist's abstention is made plain by the opposing symbol of the panther who replaces him in his cage: "the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it." In 1920 Milena Jesenska wrote to Brod: "Frank cannot live. Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He possesses not the slightest refuge. For that reason he is exposed to all those things against which we are protected. He is like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed." After Gregor Samsa's incarnation, Kafka showed a fondness for naked heroes – animals who have complicated and even pedantic confessions to make but who also are distinguished by some keenly observed bestial traits – the ape of "A Report to an Academy" befouls himself and his fur jumps with fleas; the dog of "Investigations" recalls his young days when, very puppylike, "I believed that great things were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my voice, things which must be wretchedly thrown aside if I did not run for them and wag my tail for them"; the mouse folk of "Josephine the Singer" pipe and multiply and are pervaded by an "unexpended, ineradicable childishness"; and the untaxonomic inhabitant of "The Burrow" represents the animal in all of us, his cheerful consumption of "small fry" existentially yoked to a terror of being consumed himself. An uncanny empathy broods above these zoomorphs, and invests them with more of their creator's soul than all but a few human characters receive. So a child, cowed and bored by the world of human adults, makes companions of pets and toy animals.

Kafka, in the long "Letter to His Father," which he poured out in November 1919 but that his mother prudently declined to deliver, left a vivid picture of himself as a child, "a little skeleton," undressing with his father in a bathing hut. "There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what's more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things." Hermann Kafka – "the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority" – was a butcher's son from a village in southern Bohemia; he came to Prague and founded a successful business, a clothing warehouse selling wholesale to retailers in country towns. He was physically big, as were all the Kafkas (Franz himself grew to be nearly six feet*), and a photograph of 1910 shows more than a touch of arrogance on his heavy features. No doubt he was sometimes brusque with his sensitive only son, and indifferent to the boy's literary aspirations. But Hermann Kafka cannot be blamed for having become in his son's mind and art a myth, a core of overwhelming vitality and of unappeasable authority in relation to which one is hopelessly and forever in the wrong. It is Franz Kafka's extrapolations from his experience of paternal authority and naysaying, above all in his novels The Trialand The Castle,that define the word "Kafkaesque." Like "Orwellian," the adjective describes not the author but an atmosphere within a portion of his work. Kafka's reputation has been immeasurably enhanced by his seeming prophecy, in works so private and eccentric, of the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalized paranoia. But the seeds of such vast evil were present in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, and Kafka was, we should not forget, a man of the world, for all his debilities. He attended the harsh German schools of Prague; he earned the degree of Doctor of Law; he had experience of merchandising through his father's business. He worked thirteen years for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia – his speciality was factory safety, and his reports were admired, trusted, and published in professional journals. He retired as Senior Secretary, and a medal of honor "commemorating his contribution to the establishment and management of hospitals and rest homes for mentally ill veterans" was on its way to him as the Hapsburg Empire collapsed in 1918. Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent bureaucracy he projected nightmares that proved prophetic. A youthful disciple. Gustav Janouch, who composed the hagiographic Conversations with Kafka,once raised with him the possibility that his work was "a mirror of tomorrow." Kafka reportedly covered his eyes with his hands and rocked back and forth, saying, "You are right. You are certainly right. Probably that's why I can't finish anything. I am afraid of the truth. . . One must be silent, if one can't give any help. . . For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed."

* His application for employment at the Assicurazioni Generali gives his height as 1.81 meters, or over five foot eleven.

Janouch also says that Kafka, as they were passing the Old Synagogue in Prague (the very synagogue Hitler intended to preserve as a mocking memorial to a vanished people), announced that men "will try to grind the synagogue to dust by destroying the Jews themselves." His ancestors had worn the yellow patch, been forbidden to own land or practice medicine, and suffered onerous residence restrictions under the emperors. Kafka lived and died in a relatively golden interim for European Jewry; but all three of his sisters were to perish in the concentration camps. The Kafka household had been perfunctorily observant; Hermann Kafka had been proud of the degree of assimilation he had achieved, and the Judaism he had brought from his village was, his son accused him, too little; "it all dribbled away while you were passing it on." Kafka's mother, Julie Lowy, came from an orthodox family and remembered her grandfather as "a very pious and learned man, with a long white beard." As if to assert himself against his father, Franz took a decided interest in Jewishness; his diary of 1911 records:

Today, eagerly and happily began to read the History of the Jewsby Graetz. Because my desire for it had far outrun the reading, it was at first stranger than I had thought, and I had to stop here and there in order by resting to allow my Jewishness to collect itself.

He taught himself considerable Hebrew and, with Dora Dymant, dreamed of moving to Israel. Yet churches loom larger than synagogues in Kafka's landscapes, and he also read Kierkegaard. His diary of 1913 notes:

Today I got Kierkegaard's Buch des Richters [Book of the Judge,a selection from his diaries]. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine. At least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.

Kierkegaard's lacerating absolutism of faith would seem to lie behind the torture machine of "In the Penal Colony" and the cruel estrangements of The Trial,and to have offered Kafka a certain purchase on his spiritual pain. But in 1917 he wrote Oskar Baum, a fellow writer in Prague, "Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me." Kafka came to resign himself to inaccessibility; of his theology it might be said in sum that though he did not find God, he did not blame Him. The authority masked by phenomena remained unindicted. In his shorter tales an affinity may be felt with the parables of Hasidism, that pietist movement within Judaism which emphasized, over against the law of orthodoxy, mystic joy and divine immanence. Certain of the parables share Kafka's relish in the enigmatic:

A man who was afflicted with a terrible disease complained to Rabbi Israel that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said: "How do you know, friend, what is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?"

[Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim,Vol. ü]

But there is little in the Hasidic literature of Kafka's varied texture, his brightly colored foreign settings and the theatrical comedy that adorns the grimmest circumstances – the comedy, for instance, of the prisoner and his guard in the penal colony, or of the three bearded boarders in "The Metamorphosis." The Samsas, one should notice, are Christian, crossing themselves in moments of crisis and pinning their year to Christmas; Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his "liveliness" and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European – that is to say, predominantly Christian – malaise.

It is the shorter stories, too, that sparkle most with country glimpses, with a savor of folk tale and a still-medieval innocence. They remind us that Kafka wrote in a Europe where islands of urban, wealth, culture, and discontent were surrounded by a countryside still, in its simplicity, apparently in possession of the secret of happiness, of harmony with the powers of earth and sky. Modernity has proceeded far enough, and spread wide enough, to make us doubt that anyone really has this secret. Part of Kafka's strangeness, and part of his enduring appeal, was to suspect that everyone except himself had the secret. He received from his father an impression of helpless singularity, of being a "slave living under laws invented only for him." A shame literally unspeakable attached itself to this impression. Fantasy, for Kafka even more than for most writers of fiction, was the way out of his skin, so he could get back in. He felt, as it were, abashed before the fact of his own existence, "amateurish" in that this had never been quite expressed before. So singular, he spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man's cosmic predicament.