This explains his unusual insistence to Kurt Wolff on having the stories published as quickly and as often as possible: he needed the social legitimation that only a published work would confer, in his parents’ and Felice’s eyes. Stories thus had to be written, given his name, printed, and sent out into the world as his children, his “sons.”

Eventually, however, literary paternity posed an obstacle to an actual marriage and real children. The dilemma is already evident in the long, tormented marriage proposal Kafka wrote in June 1913, a few days after the publication of “The Judgment” and “The Stoker.” A model of ambiguity and counterstatement, the proposal relates directly to the conflict between literary and biological paternity:

Now consider, Felice, the change that marriage would bring about for us, what each would lose and each would gain.… You would lose Berlin, the office you enjoy, your girl friends, the small pleasures of life, the prospect of marrying a decent, cheerful, healthy man, of having beautiful, healthy children for whom, if you think about it, you clearly long.… Instead of sacrificing yourself for real children, which would be in accordance with your nature as a healthy girl, you would have to sacrifice yourself for this man who is childish, but childish in the worst sense, and who at best might learn from you, letter by letter, the ways of human speech.

During the five years of their correspondence, ostensibly to frighten Felice away from him, Kafka paints a grim portrait of the monastic solitude his writing requires, an everlasting “night” during which Felice would bring him his meals in a dark, subterranean writing chamber. In August 1917, four years after his first proposal, Kafka coughed blood; his tuberculosis was diagnosed the following month, the engagement with Felice broken off definitively in December for reasons of “health.” In fact, Kafka saw his illness as merely the physical symptom of a wound that had been opened the night he wrote his first son story, “The Judgment,” and entered into direct conflict with his father.

Increasingly, writing became a means of doing battle with his father, and patriarchal authority in general. It is in this period that Kafka considered collaborating on an anti-patriarchal journal with Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud who, in a cause célèbre of the Expressionist movement, had been arrested, at the request of his father, and interned in a psychiatric clinic. In 1917, Kafka published a collection of somber, violent stories called A Country Doctor, which he dedicated to Hermann Kafka in a combative spirit. Here again, literary paternity is opposed to biological procreation. One of the stories is entitled “Eleven Sons”; when asked about the significance of this title, Kafka replied that the sons were “simply eleven stories” he was working on at the time. In another story, “A Dream,” he relates a vision of his own literary immortality: as Joseph K. sinks into an open grave, his name in gold letters writes itself across the tombstone with mighty flourishes.

The meaning of such literary gestures, no matter how aggressive, was no doubt lost on Hermann Kafka who, when presented with a copy of the book dedicated to him, instructed his son to “put it on my bedside table,” where it remained, unread. Two years later, in November 1919, still smarting from his father’s refusal to let him marry Julie Wohryzek, the daughter of a synagogue custodian, on the grounds that it would have “dishonored” the family name, Kafka sat down to write a one-hundred-page “lawyer’s letter” indicting his father for the tangle of aborted literary projects and frustrated marriage attempts that had left him, at the age of thirty-six, still a son. In many ways the “Letter to His Father” formulates explicitly the same critique of the bourgeois family that Kafka had put into literary terms seven years earlier in The Sons. The very first pages of the letter begin to play with titles, dialogue, and images from the earlier stories. Kafka speaks of his father’s “judgment” of him and compares their fight to that of bedbugs, which not only bite but suck their enemy’s blood. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the letter details the contradictory education he received as a child and that also thwarts his literary progeny:

What was brought to the table had to be eaten, the quality of the food was not to be discussed—but you yourself often found the food inedible, called it “this swill,” said “that cow” (the cook) had ruined it.… Bones mustn’t be cracked with the teeth, but you could. Vinegar must not be sipped noisily, but you could. The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy.… In themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me.

What takes place at the dinner table is repeated in Hermann Kafka’s numerous stories of his difficult childhood with which he would reproach his children for their comfortable, middle-class existence. Under other conditions, Kafka writes, such stories might have been educational, might have encouraged him to endure similar torments and become like his father. “But that wasn’t what you wanted at all,” he maintains; such efforts to “distinguish oneself in the world” were labeled ingratitude, disobedience, treachery, and madness. “And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to [imitate you] by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.” This contradictory pedagogy finally culminates in the impossibility of establishing an independent domestic life, a state Kafka longingly describes as an unattainable Eden. “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come,” Kafka writes in the “Letter to His Father,” “is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing.” Yet Hermann Kafka’s nature blocked him from this realm:

Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions—and marriage is not among them.

Reading the “Letter to His Father” together with The Sons, one understands that the early stories are also a form of personal correspondence. For a writer who once declared that he was “made of literature,” the distinction between fiction and autobiography must have seemed irrelevant. Thus Kafka often used his novels and stories to negotiate problems in his personal life. To Felice he once declared that his novel The Man Who Disappeared would give her “a clearer idea of the good in me than the mere hints in the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” Later in their correspondence, when the relationship had reached an impasse, he asked Felice if her father was familiar with “The Judgment.” “If not, please give it to him to read,” he requested. And in the “Letter to His Father” he also admits the inherently epistolary origin of his literary texts: “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you.…”

It is no coincidence that The Sons abound in letters and scenes of letter-writing. Letters mark turning points in the stories, written means of mediating effectively in human relations.