172
Kafka nodded.
"Like Caspar Hauser?" I said.
Kafka laughed.
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Much worse than Caspar Hauser. I am as lonely as-as Franz
Kafka."
I first came across the name of the mysterious foundling, Caspar
Hauser, who appeared in Nuremberg in the year 1828, in the poems
of Georg Trakl. Later Lydia Holzner lent me Jacob Wassermann's
long novel,
Caspar Hauser or The Sluggish Heart.
On that occasion Franz Kafka remarked:
"Wassermann's Caspar Hauser has long ceased to be a found–
ling. He is now legitimized, settled in the world, registered with the
police, a tax-payer. Moreover, he has abandoned his old name. He
is now called Jacob Wassermann, German novelist and householder.
In secret he also suffers from sluggishness of heart, which gives
him
pangs of conscience. But he works
it
up into well-paid prose, and so
all is for the best."
I was given two books by G.
K.
Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
and
The Man Who Was Thursday.
Kafka said, "He is so gay, that one might almost believe he had
found God."
"So for you laughter is a sign of religious feeling?"
"Not always. But in such a godless time one must be gay. It
is a duty. The ship's orchestra played to the end on the sinking
Titanic.
In that way one saps the foundations of despair."
"Yet a forced gaiety is much sadder than an openly acknowl–
edged sorrow."
"Quite true. Yet sorrow has no prospects. And all that matters
is prospects, hope, going forward. There is danger only in the nar–
row, restricted moment. Behind it lies the abyss.
If
one overcomes
it, everything is different. Only the moment counts. It determines
life."
We spoke about Baudelaire.
"Poetry is disease," said Kafka. "Yet one does not get well by
suppressing the fever. On the contrary! Its heat purifies and illumin–
ates."
