For Kafka any surface, even the surface of love, can generate its black swarm of disturbing possibilities. This is how life seemed to him. Obstacles start from the ground wherever he looks – his Jewishness, passport difficulties, trains, lack of sleep, her husband, his own office obligations, his state of health, his sister’s wedding. Disaster or distraction (and for him there is little difference between the two) surround him like a design for living. This is the design found in his fiction, which reflects a view of life as a proliferation of obstacles splitting off into more obstacles, bewildering the brain by their multiplicity and movement. His fears become almost laughable when he tells Milena he is afraid of lifting a tumbler of milk to his mouth ‘because it could easily explode in my face, not by chance but by design, and throw the splinters into my face’.

His letters (hers have been lost) show their relationship growing into passionate and, for him, tormented love. Who else but Kafka could find hostility in happiness? It could burst in his face and really consist of the fragments into which he analyses it. He reviles himself for his inadequacy, for his fears, for the corrupting influence he brings to a life as natural and open as hers. This happiness is too terrifying. ‘Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself.’

In his diary when he was writing The Castle he described his life as a hesitation before birth. ‘Not yet born and already compelled to walk the streets and talk to people.’ As usual, he exaggerates. All art has been called opportune exaggeration, and Kafka carried this to extremes. It is his method. In the novels and letters as well as his diaries, feeling is given extraordinary form. Talking about hesitation before birth is his way of saying life appears to be a succession of loose ends, always provisional, a hesitant progression, seemingly without connection or conclusion. Is this chance or design? He must believe in design behind the apparently accidental, or he would not assume birth beyond hesitation. He is not yet complete, not yet born. His correspondent is perhaps one who can complete him. He can address her as ‘Mother Milena’. He speaks of her ‘life-giving power’. She becomes for him a kind of earth-mother who can smooth into oblivion the hesitations of consciousness. He tells her he wants only ‘to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and stay like that through all eternity’.

Kafka and Milena met in Vienna for four days, the longest time they spent together. Later Milena told a friend that Kafka forgot his fears. ‘There was no need for the slightest effort,’ she said, ‘everything was simple and straightforward …’ His nervousness disappeared. But fear is not so easily lost, especially fear bred in the bone. ‘I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed,’ he wrote to her, ‘to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be experienced only in these bones.’

After Vienna, alone in his room with the paper on which he writes, he abandoned himself again to fear. He confesses that the possibility of living with Milena does not exist. Those happy days become in retrospect merely a time when ‘I looked over my fence … I held myself up by my hands, then I fell back again …’ To Kafka the torment of love was that, like practically everything else, it created an indefinite fear which threatened the bounds of his strength. It is as if relationships, to objects and events as well as people, are visible to him only in the hieroglyphs of fear.

Kafka’s writing is an effort to find meaning in the central fact of his existence, and this central fact is inexplicable fear. In a strange way, this fear justifies his existence too, and we have the seeming paradox of the man who claimed he had spent his life resisting the temptation to end it also claiming that without fear he could not live.