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Milena rarely met, and as Mr. Haas remarks, "their love was essentially
a letter-love, like the love of Kierkegaard or Werther."
Not quite. Kafka was more enterprising than Kierkegaard, not to
mention Werther. When he and Milena did meet, it was almost cer–
tainly to go to bed. Neither his diaries nor the present letters makes
any secret of his fierce intermittent sensuality. This, he tells Milena,
"had something in it of the eternal Jew, wandering senselessly through
a senselessly obscene world." And although the affair looked hopeless
from the start, neither of them abandoned it without a moral struggle
as fierce as the sensuality. At first Kafka is tempted: he is eager for
some permanent union. But before long he is writing, "we never can
or will live together." His reasons arc many: he is a Jew as she is
not, he is too old, too sick, and anyway she is only "dazzled" by his
writings. Conceivably, his very passion for her is generated by his mortal
illness and despair.
If
he "belongs to her," it is by virtue of "this wholc
monstrous dust which 38 years have kicked up and which has settled
in my lungs." She on her side combats and derides his scruples but
cannot prevail against the monstrous dust, which is his accumulated
experience of tragedy. She must remain his "angel of death."
They had, besides, a number of lesser misunderstandings. They
brought into the affair too many of their friends. Kafka induces Milena
to correspond with Max Brod: they fail to hit it off. Milena asks Kafka.
to hunt up in Prague an old acquaintance of hers named J armila: the
issue is doubtful. Some acrimony is created by a mysterious mission
which Milena has urged him to undertake and which she thinks he
has bungled. Meanwhile there is Ernest, Milena's husband, toward whom
Kafka is oddly propitiatory, not only because Ernest is a rival but because
he is that-to Kafka-enviable thing, a Husband. Finally there is "the
girl," Kafka's fiancee of several months (the "J.W." of the diaries),
whom he is trying to break with: the girl also writes to Milena. Thinking
of Milena, her husband and himself, Kafka describes the situation as
"torture
a
trois,"
but he seems to have miscounted.
And indeed love, their love, is constantly represented by Kafka as
a disastrous experience. For Milena it will mean "to leap into an
abyss"; for
him
she is "the knife which I turn within mysclf." Kafka's
ambivalent feeling for love and marriage is well known. It had, at
this point, brought him failure in three major campaigns (the one en–
gagement to "J.W.", the two separate engagements to "F.B."), and he
was becoming intensely conscious of himself as a veteran with many
wounds and no trophies. "Sisyphus was a bachelor," he noted in his
diaries during those years. In the case of Milena, however, one suspects
that special irritants were at work and that her being young, romantic,
