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good-humored composure: certainly it is often humorous, a kind of
intricate teasing. Here as in his stories he keeps to the imponderable
line between horror and farce, the physical and the spiritual, the in–
tensely personal and the brilliantly impersonal. Even his macabre jokes at
the expense of the Jews recall Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which he
knew. For the rest, one constantly surprises his invention at its charac–
teristic work. Milena's husband, whom he used to see in the Prague
cafes, had "the peculiarity of being called to the telephone several times
during the evening. Presumably there must have been someone who,
instead of sleeping, sat by the telephone dozing, his head on the back
of his chair, and who sat up from time to time to call him." The letters
abound in anecdote, parable, paradox (a little too much of this last).
The entire experience with Milena is thus translated into Kafka's ani–
mated moral idiom-as he says, "rearranged for my orchestra." (The
effects are probably much attenuated in English although the transla–
tion sounds convincing).
But it would be to take an intolerably high line with these letters
to assert that the humor and eloquence relieve the impression of suffer–
ing. That impression is indelible ; and to our present age, with its cult
of the reconstructed ego and the busy life, Kafka's letters will come
as intrusive reminders of the lost art of being unhappy. This art, which
one may call the art of introspection, gives Kafka his peculiar authority
in suffering. It permits him to see his own life in something like its
entirety and to connect it, by way of observation and myth, with the
life of everyone. It is with more than authority, with pride, that he
says to Milena: "I believe I understand the Fall of Man as no else."
F. W.
Dupee
THE IMITATION OF LIFE
MIMESIS. By Erich Auerbach. Tra nslated by Willard Trask. F'rinceton
University Press. $7.50.
Mimesis,
which essays nothing less than a study of the repre–
sentation of reality in Western European literature since the time of
the Greeks, was written in Istanbul during the war years, where very
little scholarly or critical material was available. With few exceptions,
Auerbach had to depend simply on the texts of the works themselves.
This is his preferred method under any circumstances, however, and it
kept him from getting lost in the vast exegetical literature under which
most of the writers he treats are buried.
In the manner with which Leo Spitzer has already made us ac-
