BOOKS
ELIOT AN 0 KAFKA
T. S.
Eliot: A LIFE. By Peter Ackroyd.
Simon and Schuster. $24.95.
THE NIGHTMARE OF REASON: A LIFE OF FRANZ KAFKA. By Ernst
Pawel.
Random House $25.50.
Firstrate critical biographies are scarce at any time. But
by some rare coincidence, two superb ones of perhaps the two most
dominating figures of modern writing were published last year. Peter
Ackroyd's biography is the first full-length life of Eliot. Ernst Pawel's
is the latest but by far the fullest and the best in a long line of books
about Kafka.
Eliot and Kafka were as different as two contemporary writers
could be. But they had some things in common. Eliot, in my opinion,
despite recent efforts to downgrade him, is the most influential and
representative modern poet and critic; Kafka, I think, is the most
powerful modern writer, whose life as well as his work goes to the
heart of modern experience, of our own experience. They had other
things in common: Eliot had an agonized life, and his poetry was, in
part at least, the deployment of that agony; Kafka's life was a torture
which he transformed into his fiction. But they were separated by a
cultural and personal chasm. Eliot was an Anglo-Saxon hybrid, a
middle-class American with an elite education and a marginal sen–
sibility finding a niche in the bohemian byways of the British upper
class. Kafka was a Czech Jew, navigating through the tensions be–
tween his Jewishness and the minority existence of the Czechs on the
one side, and the larger world of German and international litera–
ture on the other. And because of the pressures of Kafka's family life,
as well as the oppressiveness of the traditional culture surrounding
him, his neurotic and intellectual needs combined, both in his life
and his work, in an ambivalent struggle against authority. Eliot, on
the other hand, because of the disorder he found in himself and in
democratic society as a whole, engaged in a lifelong search for order.
Kafka's fiction vainly sought some moral authority - perhaps in the
form of God-while succumbing to authority through guilt. Eliot's
poetry dramatically reflected the chaos of his own life and shaped it
into that of modern existence - especially in the earlier poems–
while asserting the authority of religion .
Ackroyd's biography is a masterpiece of sophisticated inquiry
