A Letter to a Dearest Friend

To my Dear Friend F.K.

As I lay dying, I take part in the all too common pastime of dying men. Reflecting upon my life and my decisions. Deciphering which decisions led to a more fulfilling and prosperous life and which decisions I have grown to regret.

As I lay dying, I think of that little black book and the twenty thousand dollars paid out by the publishers. A book full of your words and your pain and your sorrow that I had capitalized upon despite your dying wishes.

As I lay dying, I think only of you, my dearest friend, and the many things I’ll ask you once we are reunited. I wonder what thoughts you must’ve had as you lay dying half a lifetime ago.

Your message was clear, “Everything I leave behind me in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned, unread and to the last page.” but why would you ask this of me? Me, the man who pushed you to publish the precious few works that you had published in your lifetime. Me, who had praised every work you dared share with me, though not all of it was worthy of praise. Me who had seen in you what the rest of the word, what even you could not. A kindred spirit. A man worthy of admiration. A genius hindered only by his own self-doubt and mental anguish. Forgive me dear friend but I pray that in rejecting your expressed demands, as you must have known that I would; I have adhered to the demands of a deeper, wiser, truer you.

I often think about that fateful night at your estate. Your funeral had just ended and I remember taking inventory of the precious few people who had bothered to show. I remember knowing that you had been done a disservice, that if the world had only known how brilliant you were and you had gotten over your petty internal squabbles that you may have earned enough to fight this horrible sickness or at least been remembered after you passed. I remember crying in a room with hardly enough people to fill the first row and going on and on about your many ideas, your many aspirations, your many interests that would now never see the light of day. I remember cursing you after my speech had concluded and we were finally alone together.

You were a loser dear friend, not because you were incapable of greatness but because greatness came so naturally to you. Because you insisted on denying the world of this greatness out of the fear that some may judge it. Of course, some would judge it, just as some would judge the works of Edgar Allan Poe or William Shakespeare but the masses would adore it. I told you in life just as I told you in death that your work needed to be seen and you needed to show it but you were too selfish to see it with all of your self-loathing and cries for pity. What was there to pity? Your life was no harder than mine. I had my share of reservations, of failures and disappointments. You think I never wanted to quit? You think I never wanted to lock all of my works away and entrust you, dear friend, to cleanse the world of it? Except I persevered as you never could. I grew past my reservations and I made something of my life that you had only dreamed of up until the point of your bitter and lonely and pathetic end.

Yet as I lie here dying I feel that I am the pathetic one between us, dear friend. In the forty years since your death, my name has been eclipsed by yours such that one cannot utter my name without uttering yours, yet they often speak of yours while forgetting mine entirely. I bear you no ill will for this admittedly minor discretion. I know that if I respected your wishes this never would have taken place yet I feel a tremendous amount of guilt knowing that my current prosperity and the success I have amassed is due entirely to you. I only wish you could have lived to see it, dear friend. They love you, they love the messages you have left scattered among your modest body of work. They love the time and effort, and yes, the pain that you have exhausted to create these beautiful pieces of work. I miss you so dearly, dear friend, that I welcome the sweet embrace of death so that she can reunite me with you. I only hope that I can provide for you in the next life as you have provided for me in my current one, as I had tried to provide for you.

I can still remember looking over page after page of scattered writings before coming across a little black book that you had filled to the brim with notes and amendments; many of which you were never able to rework into your stories. I sat for hours losing myself in your tapestry of words and crying because you believed that something so beautiful should be destroyed and forgotten. It wasn’t hard for me to draw a connection between this book and Its author. This man had lost everything and been forced from his home and tried for a crime he never committed. I couldn’t help wonder if this is how you felt. A man with great promise and potential who was too confused by the world to navigate its complexities. I wanted so badly to speak to you again, just one more time to tell you that you did it, that you had finally created your magnum opus, but of course, you weren’t there to hear it.

As I read I could hear your final wishes echoing in my head. "Burn it, burn it all, burn every word you’ve ever written, and let your life amount to nothing." I’m sure you would have liked that, to have been right all of these years and to finally be rid of all of your earthly burdens but I couldn’t do it. Your words needed to be seen, if not by the world then at least by me. I don’t think there was a single page in that room that I destroyed, not even the vague beginnings of stories that frustrated me so thoroughly because I knew that if you had mentioned them to me, I would have told you to keep writing. I wanted to have that black book published, to know definitively how much your hard work had been worth. I know there are many today who view me as a crook or a conman for profiting off of my dead friend’s work but you know as well as I do that if I never saw a cent of that advance, I would have published it all the same.

Twenty thousand dollars. Back in 1925 that might as well have been two hundred thousand. I thought it was a mistake, that he had miscalculated or that I had somehow misheard him but said it again, twenty thousand dollars. I was ecstatic for quite a while before you crept into my mind and reminded me that you deserved this small fortune, but what could I do? You had no wife or children. No family that supported your craft. I kept the money for the same reason you chose me to burn those books. Because I was the only person in your life that would understand. The only one who deserved to see the fruits of your labor if you could not. I was the only one who loved you because of your eccentric mind and not in spite of it.

I didn’t bother writing my name anywhere upon that little black book and instead allowed yours to soak up the spotlight. That way every man who laid eyes on your book would know your name and only yours. I recall the publisher relaying messages meant for you, asking what inspired you to write so beautifully and honestly, wishing they had heard of you sooner so that they could have heard your words before your passing and encourage you to keep writing before it was too late. There were a few that asked when your next book would be written and although these questions seemed like nothing but honest, albeit somewhat humorous mistakes at the time, these last couple years they’ve taken on a more profound meaning to me.

They believe you’re still alive and in a way they are not wrong. Even now your name is being uttered in every classroom across the western world, used to express how hopeless or bureaucratic a process may be, how dreary and tedious a life has become, how kafkaesque the world is without you. The Trial has become a household name and The Metamorphosis has seen a resurgence since you have passed, I told you it was just bad marketing. Everywhere they know you. Everywhere they love you. But none will love you as I do Franz Kafka, my dearest friend, I hope to see you soon and I know you will be happy to greet me.

Your Dearest Friend

-Max Brod