K IS FOR CORONATION

In July of 1937 the reviews of the first English translation of Franz Kafka's The Trial were published in the British press (Frank Swinnerton in the Observer found it “enjoyable” but “unintelligible”). The Coronation of King George VI had been celebrated on the 12th May of that same year (at a cost of £454,0001) and in his study the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, writing admiringly about the Coronation -“Faced with the present turbulence on the Continent it [the British people] has wanted to affirm the never-changing customs that regulate its life” — highlighted the Coronation's deeper significance for anyone wanting to understand better the British people: “...to be able today to follow in its past without using it so as to stop living for the future, to be able to exist in the very now, the present being only the presence of the past and the yet-to-come....”2 “£454, 000, well spent” he might have added.

If we start from the proposition that things happen for a reason, then there is a reason why The Trial was translated into English and why it was published in Britain in 1937. That is to say, there are things unique to Britain that determined that the book had to be published at that time and in that place. The novel tells us something about Britain; and Britain tells us something about the novel. If we look quickly from one to the other, like an illusionist's trick, we should hopefully see a picture emerge from the blur of movement.

The English translation of The Trial was published by Victor Gollancz, a company with a reputation for taking risks with new authors. It shared a large advert on page 5 of the Observer on the 11th of July 1937 with L.A.G. Strong's new novel The Swift Shadow.3 Kafka's name was there in large block capitals with a star at either side and the comment “Unique among modern writers.” Someone in the publicity department decided that the following would look good on the dust jacket, “The Trial, although only now translated, may justly be called one of the most famous — and, many would add, one of the the really great — novels of our time.” What more could you ask for? Well, for a start, that Victor Gollancz publish more that a thousand copies of the novel. At at time when twelve thousand copies would have been the norm, a thousand is someone in the accountancy department saying “Let's not get carried away with all this really great novels mularkey.” So, The Trial didn't swamp the book shops of Great Britain, but Kafka was already a highly respected writer. Stephen Spender had included him in his book of literary criticism The Destructive Element published two years previously in 1935. Commenting on Kafka's depiction of power in The Castle Spender described him as “the visionary who distrusted his own visions.” (This, by the way, was the English translation of The Castle that sold only five hundred copies. The publisher, Martin Secker, then decided to sell the option it had on The Trial to Victor Gollancz for fifty pounds. Which was what Victor Gollancz did with its rights to The Trial. He sold them onto Secker and Warburg who republished it with much more success in 1945). On the 19th May, 1935 Isaiah Berlin had written to Spender, “You said in your book [The Destructive Element] that Kafka doubted his vision. I want to go further and say that he was ironical about it, made jokes about it, as people who can to whom a landscape is so familiar that it is the natural object of reference, jokes and all.”4 The novelist Edward Upward had invented the fantasy world of Mortmere with his friend Christopher Isherwood, written Journey to the Border; for this he was “...thought of as the potential English Kafka, the young writer who would make English Marxism imaginative.”5 Victor Gollancz wrote a letter to Edwin Muir telling him that “...it [The Castle] happens to be precisely the kind of book of which I am a connoisseur”6; and in 1941 Auden in a letter to Margaret Church wrote: “-the influence of Kafka is almost entirely due to Edwin Muir's brilliant translations.”7 In 1930s (and 40s) Britain, if you were a writer (prose, poetry, criticism), an intellectual, on the left and young(ish), you'd better make sure you had somewhere in your book collection at least one novel by Kafka. And you'd better have something clever to say about him.

Frank Swinnerton, book critic for the Observer, and at forty six too old to be considered by the Young Turks I've just mentioned as anything but forty six and too old, was an exception. By his own admission he “...had no pride in culture...; I was neither highbrow nor a spokesman for “this generation”. I absorbed but did not parade.”8 His preference was for “short and lucid” novels “because he wishes every reader to learn from his comment[s]....”9 So, no hob-nobbing with the young writers of the left for him. His reviews are to be direct and informative; his tastes catholic but eschewing the deliberately obscure; in short a man who is not afraid to write that while he enjoyed reading The Trial he understood not a word of it. Incomprehensible or not, he included it in his Best Novels of the Year, picked from the one thousand five hundred he read that year. But who was Frank writing for? Even if we add on the five hundred people who bought The Castle to the one thousand copies of The Trial (assuming of course that by the end of the summer of 1937 all copies had been sold), that comes to the grand total of one thousand five hundred. When the Observer recommended in What to Pack — II (an anonymous article of August the 8th) that The Trial should be part of that August's reading, let's not fool ourselves that it fell into anything more than a handful of suitcases. But some of those suitcases may have belonged to Spender, Auden, Lewis, Berlin and Upward.10

This leap across the generations was a feature of the appeal of The Trial to its first readers in English. Its translators, Edwin and Willa Muir, were born during the reign of Queen Victoria, came of age during the reign of her son and were influenced and participated in the modernist movements that characterized the first years of her grandson’s monarchy. Reading An Autobiography by Edwin Muir, (Edinburgh, 1993), who with his wife Willa translated both The Castle and The Trial, I went first to the index to check the references to Kafka. There are four. Edwin and Willa produced what the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English called “...the classic version of Kafka's novel in English read throughout the world in popular editions” and he doesn't have a lot to say about it.12 But why should he? Every generation, every reader, every writer reads its own novel, That also applies to a novel's translator. Or in the case of Edwin and Willa, translators. It's clear from some of his comments that the novel he read was very different from the one I read. For example, “We spent our summer in Penn translating, and too much of our lives wasted in the following years in turning German into English. It began as a resource and hardened into a necessity.” How, I asked myself, could translating one of the world's classic novels ever be a “necessity?” But of course, why would he have written anything else? He didn't know what reaction would follow the book's publication or the subsequent re-printings.13 He and Willa must have been attracted to the book, an essay on Kafka makes his admiration clear,  otherwise they wouldn't have “wasted” so much of their lives translating it. But, as his comments make clear, The Trial for them was also work.

What of Great Britain? What does the publication of the English translation of The Trial tells us of it? Oddly enough I believe that an answer can be found in the wonderful Mass Observation Day-Survey May Twelfth 193714. In its attempt to capture the mood of the country on Coronation day the importance of taking a scientific approach is emphasised repeatedly, the aim being “...to apply the methods of science to the complexity of modern culture”. Mobile Squads of Observers roam the streets of the capital, phoning headquarters with their notes and observations; the whole enterprise presented in terms of making a film — “Close up and long shot, detail and ensemble...”. Even the dreams of the Observers are included because as the editors explain they were “...trying to act as recording systems, and we can use them as recorders...of certain fantastic aspects of the day.” It would be easy to mock this identification of the human consciousness with the passivity of a recording device, to be played back at a later time and interpreted in light of other data. But it would be impossible to deny that their desire to look at a national event such as the Coronation and, by using modern sociological techniques, shape the range of personal experiences of it into a recognisable whole was genuine. The newspapers of the day too wanted to let the world know that Britain was now a modern country: Scotland Yard radio vans monitoring the procession; a breakfast given to procession officials, “...the fish and sausages have been chosen for their heat-retaining qualities. The grapefruit has been added in acknowledgment of the changing fashion in English breakfasts”; even the weather was used to emphasise that this Coronation was a modern one, “It is much too early yet to make any definite forecast based on scientific principles. All that can be done is to assess the probabilities in the light of past records. These make cheerful reading”15.

Not all is modern in this summer of 1937. The old Britain is still a strong presence in the lives of its people. References to class present themselves regularly in the observers' accounts of the dress of bystanders in London, or the speech of an old man in a street party in Lancashire. Tipsy toffs drive “swell” cars; the poor listen to the radio through the windows of those who can can afford them, and to the question “How did the workers have enough money to buy drink in the middle of the week?”, the answer is “Well, we knew it was a holiday, so we saved, and I expect the poorer people borrowed from their neighbours.”16 Reading the Observers' descriptions of what happened on the day, they seemed at times to owe more to the England of the seventeenth century and the World Turned Upside Down, rather than the a country going “...forward quietly, determinedly and confidently to even greater glories and a more prosperous future” as Colonel Moore said in the Glasgow Citizen on the 22nd of March. What he thought of the events in his own city isn't recorded, which is probably a good thing. The folk from the poor end of town, the High Street, got hold of the paint used to brand cattle and the women and young girls painted their faces red and blue; gangs began lighting fires in the side streets using wood stolen from demolition sites and at night fights broke out as people tried to catch the last bus and tram home. In Birmingham young girls shouted rude things at the soldiers. In London, policemen told people to get down from trees while ignoring the drunks that filled the streets. On May Day in London, a procession four miles long had marched in support of striking bus drivers carrying red flags, clenching their fists and singing The Red Flag. What happened?The King had a meeting with the prime minister Stanley Baldwin, where he “studied” the situation. So, all wonderfully British (perhaps “English” would be better; in Scotland the ceremonies not only made no reference to the country just to the south of them but seemed to omit mentioning even the king) but has it all got to do with The Trial?

This is a society in flux. It's conscious that it is undergoing tremendous changes but it hasn't decided yet what final form its going to take on. Yes, its class structure permeates every aspect of society; yes, it's hidebound when it comes to tradition but it's increasingly open to change. Victor Gollancz was an intelligent and dynamic man, committed to progressive social change as a means of improving the lot of working people in Britain and stopping the spread of fascism abroad. The Left Book Club provided a focal point where like-minded people could come together and feel they were part of something new; people who wanted to see fundamental changes in Great Britain17. In all of this, there was a heightened sense of the modern; from Stephen Spender urging us to “immerse ourselves in the destructive element” to watching the Coronation on television as far afield as Ipswich.18 And yet...Remember Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher? First, read this comment from the Archbishop of Canterbury on the Coronation Service, “It is no mere paradox to say that the very merit of these rites is precisely that they are in a sense “out of date””19. There's no information on when he said it but both of them must have made their comments within weeks of each other. It's as if Ortega Y Gasset had read what the Archbishop wrote and thought “That's what I like about the British.” “Like” would be too small a word; later in his comments Ortega Y Gasset wrote, “Y esto es ser un pueblo de hombres”, “This is what it is to be a country of men.” We're the country that goes forward by standing still; we're the country that greets the future warmly while looking squarely in the eyes of the past; we're the country that could read what Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang wrote and nobody would say “What on Earth does that mean?” We're the country that published the first English translation of Franz Kafka's The Trial in June of 1937. It's in this country that the work of a German-speaking Jew from Czechoslovakia who died from tuberculosis twelve years previously and who ordered that all his writings be burned would be published, because that's just the kind of thing we would do.

1H. Jennings and C. Madge, May the Twelfth (London, 1937)
2J. Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid, 2008), my translation.
3You can pick up a first edition of it for about ten pounds. Five thousand will get you a first edition of The Trial. This would make an interesting line graph. Two sets of data: the second-hand value of both books in the years following their publication. When do the two lines diverge? Does the gap ever close? When does the value of The Trial take off?
4H. Hardy, Isaiah Berlin, Letters, 1928 — 1946 (Cambridge, 2004)
5R.B. Singh, The English Novels During the Nineteen-Thirties (New Delhi, 1994)
6S. Hodges, GOLLANCZ The Story of a Publishing House 1928 — 1978 (London, 1978)
7P.E. Firchow, W.H. Auden Contexts for Poetry (University of Delaware Press, 2002)
8 F. Swinnerton, Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences, 1917-1940 (London, 1963)
9F. Swinnerton, Observer, (London, July 11th, 1937)
10In 1934, sales of the Observer came to a little more than 2% of the Sunday newspapers market in the UK.
11She said this in our parents' living room in the early afternoon of 5th April, 2009.
12O. Classe, Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English (London, 2000)
13 Of the writers I mentioned above, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis, among the first readers of The Trial, Edwin Muir describes them as “A new generation...nurtured on strange fruit...they appeared to belong...to the present...as if they had been forged by it alone.” He's done all the work, but Kafka's books belong to them.
14The Coronation took place in May of 1937. The book was published by Faber and Faber in the autumn of that year. The publication of The Trial falls between the two of them, July 1937.
15It poured.
16H. Jennings and C. Madge, May the Twelfth (London, 1937) p192
17What they weren't prepared to do was to shoot anyone, least of all the King, to achieve it. The Observer known as CL 2 (married, Left Wing, atheist) sent in her written account of the Coronation. She wrote that as the procession passed she was “Surprised to find lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.”
18 Sixty three miles from the transmitter. BBC engineers estimated the signal would only travel twenty five miles.
19H. Jennings and C. Madge, May the Twelfth (London, 1937)