Ronald Hayman

Artaud being one of those people I knew about by the time I was 22, much of what I've read by & thought about him belongs to my personal ancient history. Skimming thru this bk again to refresh my memory makes me realize how deeply Artaud's influence runs thru things that've interested me since. EG: in Peter Brook's adaption of Peter Weir's "Marat/Sade" - an amazing film that I rewatched recently & found as potent as ever. Artaud himself played Marat in Abel Gance's film re Napoleon. R. D. show more Laing was also influenced by Artaud. & then there's the whole notion of Van Gogh "suicided by suicide" - something I understand all too well. All in all, reading Artaud is probably not enuf - reading this bk will help put him even more in perspective. show less

Ronald Hayman’s “Kafka” constitutes the first detailed biography of Franz Kafka, having been published in 1982. Its historical status is surprising, given the large volume of works that had been devoted to the author by the early 1980s. It was preceded by the 1937 account by Kafka's close friend Max Brod, one notoriously hagiographic, and unreliable due to its biases, errors, and sociopolitical agenda. Despite the historical value of Hayman's work, it has been superseded by a series of show more subsequent biographies, notably the spectacular 3 volume magnum opus by Reiner Stach.

While less definitive than its successors, Hayman’s book has some merit in providing an account of the life of the famed author, and in helping to dispel the considerable mythology that surrounds Kafka’s life and psyche in the popular imagination. Bearing in mind its status as the first semi-reliable account, the author did prodigious digging to construct this work. In fact, the acknowledgements reveal that he was able to access private papers held by Max Brod’s secretary (documents that may still have eluded Kafka’s biographers), as well as to draw on recollections of two of Kafka’s nieces. The result is a full-scale account of Kafka’s life, offered in considerable detail. Further, Hayman puts his subject in the context of the social and political environment in Prague, an environment in which the Kafka family counted as a double minority, being both Jewish and German.

Notwithstanding its merits, Hayman’s biography suffers from a large number of dubious inferences and questionable assertions. Given the fragmentary material available to the author, he drew conclusions that may or may not be true. For example, we’re told that the young Franz “may have felt responsible” for causing deaths of his two younger brothers, each of whom died of illnesses in infancy. Likewise, when his mother stayed home from work towards the end of her second pregnancy, young Franz “must have felt happy to see more of his mother.” Kafka (we’re told) had a “death wish”, he may have harbored sexual fantasies about his sister Valli; and his habit of sleeping with the window open may have been associated with “an irrational faith in cold air as an anti-sexual antiseptic”. Hayman takes accounts from Kafka’s detailed, unpublished “Brief an der Vater” (Letter to Father) as true accounts of his childhood – rather than as the highly subjective and self- serving recollections of Kafka as an adult. Kafka’s notes in his diary are treated similarly. Hayman also lends credence to the now-discredited “recollections of Gustav Janouch, written and published decades after Kafka’s death. Other questionable features include Hayman’s inference that Kafka and Milena had sex during their visit in Vienna, and that at his funeral, Dora Dymant threw herself into his grave in anguish. To the author's credit, he casts serious doubt on the claim that Kafka fathered a child with his fiancé's friend Greta Bloch, a claim for which evidence is nearly non-existent.

Despite issues of small inaccuracies and unsupported inferences, Hayman’s biography goes a long way towards helping the naïve reader understand the enigmatic figure that was Franz Kafka. He interprets Kafka as writing about himself throughout his career as “his father’s victim” – and that this is the key to understanding his work. While supportable, this interpretation goes too far (in my view) and fails as applied universally to his diverse writings, published and unpublished. Fortunately, Hayman makes no serious attempt to analyze Kafka's writing in detail, leaving that to the armies of literary critics.

It may be revealing that Reiner Stach never mentions Hayman’s biography in his own work, nor does he cite it in his long list of references. The omission is both purposeful and significant. Clearly, Stach’s work is preferable; but for readers seeking less of a reading commitment than its 1800 pages, I consider that Hayman’s biography has its merits, and it contributed to my understanding of Kafka's strange, perplexing personality. For biographical alternatives that are still shorter, Robertson’s “Kafka: A Very Short Introduction” and Jeremy Adler’s “Franz Kafka” are highly recommended. show less

Franz Kafka was the author of a significant body of fiction, particularly short stories. His writing shaped the writing of many subsequent authors in the mid and latter parts of the 20th century and it has also been a staple among teachers of English and creative writing in high school and college.

That said, Kafka was basically a mystery to me. I avoided traditional English classes as much as possible throughout my education and had only read one of his stories, perhaps the most renowned, show more The Metamorphosis, while engaging in some pseudo-intellectual posturing while an undergraduate. But I do like reading biographies and learning what made people tick and shaped their significance in life, so with my skeletal knowledge and negligible first-hand experience, I picked up a copy of Kafka: A Biography(New York:: Oxford University Press, 1982) by Ronald Hayman. And learn of Kafka I did.

My understanding is that Hayman’s work was the first significant biography of Kafka, except for the volume written by Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend. While he published little during his own life Kafka not only was a prolific author but he was also a diarist and near-compulsive letter writer. Kafka left his estate in the hands of Brod, with the instructions to destroy all of his unpublished work. Brod ignored this request, leading to the eventual publication of Kafka’s fiction, and in death renown as a writer he never conceived of in life. Drawing from access to the three types of writing Kafka generated Hayman has written thorough account of Kafka’s life, with particular attention to the influence of significant relationships on his fiction.

First, throughout his entire life, from birth until his death at age 40 from tuberculosis, Kafka had a difficult relationship with his father, which was frequently reflected in his stories. While he lived in the same home as his parents until he was in his 30’s there was an emotional distance with his father that never diminished. At times Kafka longed for this to end but it never did, partly because his father, a businessman, had an overriding concern for physical stability and the language of emotions was one that perhaps he never desired to learn. And it also didn’t end because Kafka was an adept saboteur of his own emotional well-being.

The wide variations in his emotional state was on full display in his correspondence, particularly with his fiancé’s. He was engaged three times, twice to the same woman, but never married. In each case he frequently swung back-and-forth between drawing closer and creating distance between himself and the women. Brod, his friend since law school, was both a witness and occasional sounding board to the convulsed state of Kafka’s inner life for 20 years, and their letters to each other provide rich insights into Kafka’s mind.

One of Kafka’s laments was that he never had sufficient time to devote to his writing. He held what today would be considered a ‘day job’ in the insurance industry, working on his writing in his spare time. He also had a tendency to have lapses in his writing life, once ending a productive period of several months with two years of virtual inactivity before beginning again to write with intent. Consequently several of his works had long lapses between their starting and ending. This was despite the fact that he believed his best writing was done when he worked virtually non-stop.

I found Hayman’s biography to be well-balanced, providing a portrait of the basic structure of Kafka’s life and the things that shaped it, only a few of which I’ve touched on here. Reading it has given me a desire to seek out more of what Kafka wrote, and what I have perhaps missed, from his body of work. show less

Like most people, I knew that Marquis de Sade was the inspiration for the word 'sadism'. I also knew that he had written books noted for their explicit descriptions of sex, rape and torture. This was just one aspect of his character, however, and this book exposes us to others. Though he subscribed to and, in many cases, practiced the libertine philosophy, this was by no means unique or even unusual for the nobility of the eighteenth century. Sade spent much of his life in prison, not show more because of these practices (though this was the excuse given) but rather, due to the political maneuvering of his mother-in-law. Though I find Sade's view of life distasteful, if not sickening, I understand how he came upon it and, at times, I even pity him. Hayman's book is not always a pleasant read, but it is an informative one. show less