‘The world […] and I in insoluble conflict have torn apart my body.’ His body – His Majesty, the Body, he ironically stylized it – would not do the things he asked of it, principally write, in spite of the daily open-air exercises and such things as rowing, swimming, carpentering and gardening. ‘Nothing can be accomplished with such a body,’ he wrote in his habitual categorical way; though a fairer observer, his biographer Klaus Wagenbach, describes him justly and every bit as categorically, as ‘a strikingly beautiful, slender, tall man, with nothing of the hermit about him’. An unusually physical approach to writing (and to life) left him ridiculously vulnerable. Everything is in his writing; nothing is anywhere else:

It is easy to recognize a concentration in me of all my forces on writing. When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities that were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so light that only collectively could they even halfway serve the purpose of writing. (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, Schocken Books, 1988, p. 163.)

It was at night that his weaknesses were at their strongest and his strength at its weakest. Often in his diaries he talks of writing in, or writing himself into, a state of unconsciousness. This could be miraculous, as it was on 22 September 1912, the night he wrote the story, ‘Das Urteil’ (‘The Judgement’), which, to the end of his life, stood for the way these things should be done; but it could also be unpredictable, subject to revision, to disappointment, or to shame. ‘Even night is not night enough,’ wrote Kafka. Night is a pocketful of change in front of a fruit-machine; it has no optics, no prudence and no settled opinion. Things done at night are regularly menaced by incompleteness or immoderateness, and by a change of heart or change of mind. The great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer writes about his own experience, but it’s the same thing (in the poem ‘Baltics’, the translator is Patty Crane):

You might wake up during the night

and quickly throw some words down

on the nearest paper, in the margins of the news

(the words radiant with meaning!)

but in the morning: the same words don’t say anything, scribbles, slips of the tongue.

Or fragments of the great nightly writing that drew past?

Tranströmer has a vastly different tone from Kafka, an easy irony, an easy wisdom, an easy relativism; he knows, as Kafka endearingly seems not to, that things look different in the morning. (Inexplicably and wonderfully, just below the lines quoted, he has ‘They set up his student K as the head prosecutor’.) Still, Kafka or not, this ‘fragments of the great nightly writing that drew past’ (since I read it, the phrase wouldn’t let me go) is precisely what we have in The Burrow.

Kafka always wrote in jags or streaks, and then for months or years little or nothing that survived. His last companion, Dora Diamant, with whom he lived, dying, in Berlin, thinks he wrote ‘The Burrow’ in one night, or at least the greater part of it. All the stories collected here are the product of three or four ‘hot’ phases – mostly clustered around its longer pieces – in 1917, in 1922, and in the winter of 1923–4. But it was ever thus. He wrote two drafts of Amerika/ The Man Who Disappeared in a matter of weeks each; he wrote The Trial in the space of a few months in 1914; similarly The Castle in 1922; and abandoned each of them. His production was hectic, excessive, fiercely doubted, or it was nothing. It also had a tendency to double up against itself. Kafka interrupted Amerika for three weeks in November 1912 to deliver himself of Metamorphosis; he similarly suspended work on The Trial for eleven days – nights – and wrote ‘In the Penal Colony’ and the final ‘Oklahoma’ chapter of Amerika. He is like a painter – he is like Max Beckmann, who worked at night, by artificial light, and from what you might call a real imagination – who either paints nothing, or works on several canvases at once.

Night offers a seeming monopoly of consciousness; a certain self-aware solipsism; strange auditory conditions; sensitivity to light; Bengal noon for the nerves. A mixture of heightening and deadening, of privacy and vulnerability. Spatial relations are unclear, sensory prompts unpredictable, immediate, oddly, even frighteningly effective (perhaps ‘The Silence of the Sirens’, certainly ‘The Burrow’). Oscar’s friend Franz in the first story here, ‘In the City’, rubs his eyes with his two little fingers, and later scratches at his throat behind the goatee beard, ‘in that closer intimacy one has with one’s body after sleep’, as Kafka sumptuously puts it. Night is organic, is appetite and fear, is the day of (a phrase I love) the ‘regulation dog’. It is creatureliness and mystery: ‘tears of joy and relief still glitter in the hairs of my beard when I awake’. Fighting and eating – the simple creature dreamily asserting itself – are never so much desired as they are here in Kafka – not even by Hemingway. It is when the unnamed, unspecified denizen of the burrow (come in, Vladimir Nabokov) on the one hand has a thrilling, visceral fear of ‘the pursuer’s teeth clamped on my thighs’, and on the other yearns for free passage, ‘then at last I could run at him’ – a different him – ‘free of all concerns I could leap at him, bite him, tear his flesh, chew it and drain his blood and cram his carcass down there with the rest of the quarry’.

Kafka’s subjects here are largely businessmen and beasts, either paired (‘The Village Schoolmaster’, ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’) or separately (on the one hand ‘My Business’ or ‘The Married Couple’; on the other, ‘A Cross-Breed’ or ‘Investigations of a Dog’).