446
PARTISAN REVIEW
that , more than any other writer , he shifted the sensibility of modern
poetry and the direction of modern criticism . Eliot's earlier poetry ,
particularly , found an "objective correlative" in Eliot's own idiom of
the mood and the images of modern life - resembling in this respect
the combination of inner and outer world so characteristic of Kafka's
achievement. In his critical writing, Eliot's drive toward order led
him to extreme positions, even to a kind of esthetic anti-Semitism
early in his career, which we cannot excuse or explain away; but it is
worth noting that he was right about the disorder of life in the
democratic West - prophetically so . Yet at his best Eliot established
a model of incisiveness and textual awareness for contemporary
criticism. In bad times, each age and each culture gets the writer it
deserves; in good times they get the writer they need. Eliot filled this
need for the Anglo-American world in the early modernist period .
Pawel's biography of Kafka, masterful in its own way , is quite
different from Ackroyd's .
It
lacks Ackroyd's British suavity and
moderation, but it is an exhaustive and judicious account of both
Kafka's life and work . For one thing, while preserving the lonely,
melancholy, neurasthenic picture of Kafka, it makes clear that he
was neither a loner nor a literary eccentric, by placing him in the in–
tellectual world of Prague, Vienna, and Berlin . Perhaps unjustifi–
ably , the picture we got from Brod , Kafka's friend and first biog–
rapher, and from other writings about Kafka, is of a person turned
inward , a symbolic if not entirely a real hermit, whose life was the
sum of his neuroses and his obsessive writing, which, Kafka pro–
claimed, made his life more bearable. Pawel, however, makes us real–
ize how much he was not only intellectually but socially a part of his
culture. He knew most of his literary contemporaries and read widely
in European and American literature. He was also aware of most of
the movements of his day, some of which he supported , some of
which he dismissed. This gives us a truer sense of his work: dispell–
ing the romantic notion that it was spun simply out of his sufferings
and his dreams , and the psychologized one that literature can be just
a projection of self. Pawel's book helps us to see that without the ex–
ample of
literature,
Kafka could not convert personal experience into
literature.
Where else could that impeccable prose have come from–
that uncanny use of language to fuse private feelings with worldly
vision , detail of observation with moral generalization, dark obses–
sions with light and witty perceptions. How else could a neurotic - or
psychotic - Czech Jew become part of the mainstream of modern lit-
