a LitHub piece from last November...
...
At the beginning of November I found myself
in Prague with enough loyalty points at the Accor Chain to get myself a room in
a fancy hotel way out of my usual league. There was one particular room in one
particular hotel that I had been eyeing for years and much to my amazement I
found that it was available.
The
hotel was the Sofitel Century Old Town and the room was the Franz Kafka Suite.
The Century Old Town occupied the former Austro-Hungarian Workmen's Accident
Insurance Institute and a second floor office of this building was the place where
Kafka had toiled as a lawyer from 1908 - 1922. This office and the room behind
it had been converted into the Kafka Suite.
Kafka’s
childhood home was long gone but for Kafka fans like me it was incredibly
thrilling that for enough cash or Accor Reward Points you could spend the night
in his old office.
I
checked into the Century Old Town at two o’clock on a brisk November Tuesday in
Prague to find that the room was not quite ready. Housekeeping was doing a quick
final vacuuming I was told and I was given a voucher for a free beer at the bar
which suited me just fine.
When
the room was all set I walked up the wide, restored nineteenth century
stair-case and found myself outside the Franz Kafka Suite where a little plaque
confirmed me that this was indeed Kafka’s actual place of work. I put the key
card in and opened the door.
The
first thing that confronted me inside the room itself was pitch blackness. The outer
door closed behind me and rather like – I fancied –Gregor Samsa I too was
trapped in a bourgeoisie hell of the indoors.
“Aha!”
I thought, you need to find the little slot to put your card in to get the
lights to come on. I fumbled around and I did find the slot, but when I inserted
my card the blackness remained.
I
began to feel a little buzz of excitement. The Kafka Suite was deliciously Kafkaesque
already. What fresh thrills and terrors lay ahead? The exhilaration began to dissipate
when I turned my phone light on and realized that I wasn’t in a fiendishly
difficult psychological maze partly of my own making, no, I was in an ordinary
hallway and there was a problem with the electricity.
After
a bit more fumbling I discovered the fuse box and although everything was in
Czech it was pretty obvious which circuit had been blown by the vacuum cleaner.
I flipped the switch and hey presto the lights came back on.
Out
of the hallway I discovered that the Kafka Suite was gorgeous. The back room
contained a generously proportioned bed, a huge bath, a luxurious shower and
dual washbasins. But the front of the suite was definitely where the action
was. The front room was an enormous light filled chamber with a sofa, a dining
table and a writing desk that looked out onto the street.
This
had been Kafka’s actual writing office. He had mostly prepared legal briefs
here (the book to read on this is Franz Kafka: The Office Writings edited by
Stanley Corngold) but you could imagine him working on short stories and
letters in his lunch break or doodling away at ideas in the margins of his
jotter.
The
room was minimalist and contemporary, painted a bright umber with a portrait of
Kafka himself lying against the wall in one corner. There was a bookcase
containing mostly French hardbacks by second tier novelists of the first half
of the twentieth century, but there were also a few modern paperbacks as well presumably
left there by previous guests. I had no qualms at all about leaving a copy of
my novel Rain Dogs on a high shelf where hopefully it will remain unnoticed for
years.
I
unpacked, showered and then made a beeline for the writing desk. I
had been to Prague as a student backpacker years ago so I wasn’t that
interested in sight-seeing, rather, I had come here to work.
The
theory of literary osmosis is dubious at best but for a writer it is hard to
resist the lure of attempting to compose something in the place where great
literary icons did their thing.
I have tried this game before and it hasn’t exactly
worked out. In the old British Museum Reading Room I found what was allegedly
Karl Marx’s seat while I was studying philosophy at University College London.
The Marxian seat didn’t help me at all with my essays which were uninspired and
generally terrible. A couple of years later at Oxford I frequented the Eagle
and Child pub where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to read and write. The epic
fantasy novel I began there mercifully disappeared into a crashed hard drive
never to be retrieved.
A
few years after that in Paris I toiled as a plongeur during the day while
spending my evenings at the Deux Magots café. I was trying to emulate Sartre,
Camus and De Beauvoir’s philosophizing while drinking enormous bowls of coffee
and attempting to smoke Gitanes; but all I got from that experience was a
massive jittery headache and a hacking cough.
My
most notorious attempt at literary osmosis was in the piano bar of the Ambos
Mundos hotel in Havana in 2008. For most of that year I’d had writer’s block
and with a deadline looming I took the drastic step of flying to Havana via
Mexico City so I could work in the place where Hemingway supposedly wrote For
Whom The Bell Tolls. Maybe I too could write my magnum opus here I thought and
initially things went quite well. I got a notepad and paper and the ideas
flowed. Half a dozen mojitos later I was writing gibberish and after a couple
more cuba libres and mojitos I was attempting to push the deft piano player off
his stool so that I could give the well heeled clientele my version of All The
Little Puffer Trains Down By The Station.
I
wasn’t going to let that happen again. This
time I was going to write at Kafka’s desk (sort of) in Kafka’s office over
looking the bustling Na Porici Street.
The
Kafka Suite had generously provided its visitors with paper, pens and a rather
nice mechanical pencil.
I
took out the pencil and a sheet of paper and stared at the blank page for a
long, long time.
Then
I did a little Kafka portrait in the corner of the page, then another little
doodle of a cockroach. I did a pretty good drawing of myself scoring the
winning goal in the World Cup Final. Then I went to the book shelf and tried to
read Georges Bernanos’s Journal d'un curé
de campagne for a bit but found it pretty hard to get into.
Back
to the dreaded blank page. I
wrote a couple of opening lines and crossed them out and got a fresh sheet of
paper and stared at that for a while.
I
looked through the window at the building opposite. This must have been Franz’s
view when he was writing those bloody insurance reports. It was an attractive
building and on the third floor there was a large, peculiar sheep bas relief highlighted
in gold paint. If it was there back then Kafka must have stared at that sheep
for hundreds of hours. He did in fact write one short story about a sheep: ‘A
Crossbreed’ which is a story about an animal that is half-cat, half-sheep with
odd eating habits and dietary restrictions. It’s not his best work if I’m
honest.
The
sheep did not inspire me. I wrote a spoof Raymond Chandler short story once set
in Ireland called The Big Sheep. It wasn't a great story and The Big Sheep Part 2 didn’t seem like a
very good idea.
Unlike
a lot of fancy hotel rooms in the Kafka Suite it is possible to open the window
and let the city smells and street noise come pouring in. I pulled a chair
close to the window ledge and watched the trams, cars and tourists go by for a
while. There were more tourists and cars than the Prague of a hundred years ago
but I imagine the citizenry riding the #26 tram was much the same.
It
began to get dark. I
noticed a beer cellar across the street called La Republica. I found my laptop
and Googled it and discovered that it served liter steins of Czech beer and pre
war staples of Czech cuisine such as pork ribs, schnitzel and pretzels.
“Maybe
I’ll just go over and have one stein and a pretzel and then I’ll come back and
do some serious work,” I thought.
Unfortunately
that decision put an end to the possibility of the McKinty Magnum Opus getting
started in Kafka’s office, for La Republica was a very amenable beer cellar
indeed. It was full of Irish people, one of whom, as is the way of such things,
knew my sister.
I
had a very good night with a bunch of new friends. The bar wasn’t that far away
from the salon where Kafka, Max Brod and Albert Einstein used to hang out,
booze and chat, so I think they would have approved. When
I got back to the Kafka Suite I was in no fit state to write anything at all.
But
eventually the room did stop spinning which was nice and I settled down in the
enormous, ridiculously comfortable bed.
-->
After a night of peculiar dreams I woke up
next morning transformed into a middle aged bibliophile who had written nothing
at all in Kafka’s room but who was maybe finally over his literary osmosis
addiction and was sort of ok with that.
Everybody knows the advice publishers and agents give to young writers: start in the middle and keep it fast, fast, fast to the very end! And that's still pretty good advice if you're all about story and turning pages. But what if you're not? What if you want people to focus on the words and take it easy and read your book slow? Well then you're probably living in the wrong age aren't you? We're the age of quick cuts and page turners and memes and vines. Why watch a whole movie when you can watch a youtube video telling you everything wrong with it in 15 minutes?
Joel and Ethan Coen have said that the biggest literary influence on their cult stoner movie The Big Lebowski (1998) was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And from the title and structure of their film you can certainly see what they are talking about. Both works are classic visions of Los Angeles and both films follow similar trajectories: a foil gets involved with a disabled rich man, the rich man's daughter, and a runaway from his family who gets mixed up in pornography. Joel Coen has also said that he was influenced by Robert Altman's 1970's remake of Chandler's The Long Goodbye which gave us a slightly baked version of Marlowe played by Elliot Gould. So the Chandler influences are real and obvious but I want to argue that there's a deeper structure to The Big Lebowski which comes not from Raymond Chandler but from Dashiell Hammett.
I've been rereading Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless and its very enjoyable the second go round. (If you're into audiobooks I bet the audiobook of this is amazing.) 
The one book I will never regret buying is The Complete Essays Of George Orwell which costs 30 bucks in the Everyman edition but for that 30 bucks you get 1400 pages of Orwell's best stuff. If you can't hack that then get the selected essays and if you can't hack that then please do yourself a favour and click the link and read one of my favourites Inside The Whale below. 
I
looked through the window at the building opposite. This must have been Franz’s
view when he was writing those bloody insurance reports. It was an attractive
building and on the third floor there was a large, peculiar sheep bas relief highlighted
in gold paint. If it was there back then Kafka must have stared at that sheep
for hundreds of hours. He did in fact write one short story about a sheep: ‘A
Crossbreed’ which is a story about an animal that is half-cat, half-sheep with
odd eating habits and dietary restrictions. It’s not his best work if I’m
honest. 
