Frederick R. Karl: Biographer And Historian

"Writing biography will always be a speculative venture."

Surely few can speak with more authority on the art and science of biography than Frederick Karl, who has taken on no fewer than four daunting giants of literature - Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, George Eliot, and Franz Kafka - and is well aware of the pitfalls in trying to capture the ephemeral smoke of personality.

"I surround a subject with every possible context - social, literary, cultural, psychological, historical - but in the end, there's no way of knowing if you've really caught the person."

Breakthrough "Conrad"

Mr. Karl was in his 40s and a professor at the City College of New York when Farrar Straus published his first biography, a huge study of the life and work of Conrad.

He had written his dissertation on the author of "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness," had been teaching about Conrad for years, and had collected some 4,000 of his letters (which he later edited and published in eight volumes).

"It suddenly occurred to me that I knew more about Conrad than anyone else alive," he said during a recent interview at his East Hampton house.

The breakthrough book was to launch him on a second career.

"Kafka" Disappeared

While "Joseph Conrad: Three Lives" was received with great acclaim, "Franz Kafka:Representative Man," subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism," did not fare so well. Where the subject is a literary icon, a biographer must not only create a convincing and cohesive portrait but also overcome the prejudices of all those readers - and reviewers - who have already formed their own opinions.

The reception of this deeply felt and painstakingly researched biography - "the culmination of 30 years of thinking about and studying Kafka" - was, Mr. Karl admitted, one of the great disappointments of his life.

"I thought I'd written a great book," he said, "but it just disappeared." The reviews, he said, were generally positive but, like the one in the make-or-break New York Times Book Review, were buried on back pages.

Identification

The biographer felt a particularly deep kinship with Kafka, he said, with whom he shared an eastern European Jewish background.

In fact, said Mr. Karl, such was the degree of identification that he found he had "problems with countertransference" and had to take great care not to impose his own views and experiences on Kafka.

"It was a very precarious way of proceeding," he observed.

Rootless Childhood

Mr. Karl, who admits to being a workaholic, claims a rootless childhood figured largely in his development as a writer and professor.

He grew up in New York City during the Depression, and the family never stayed in one place for very long:

"The game in the 1930s was that you paid one month's rent and then you got to stay about six months before they threw you out."

He never had a chance to develop any social skills, he said wryly, and was always an observer, never a participant.

Temporary Years

With each move - sometimes twice in a year, once to as far away as Miami - came a new school. There was never time to make friends or become attached to a neighborhood.

"This is something that doesn't leave you. It's formative. You're really being shaped by the temporary quality of experience."

When he was a teenager, his parents finally settled down. Mr. Karl went to Flushing High School (as did two other East End biographers, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Edward Butscher), and from there straight into the Navy during World War II.

A Year Abroad

He was 19 when the war ended and never had a chance to leave the country. But his military service qualified him for the G.I. Bill, which took him to Columbia University, then to Stanford for a master's degree, and almost through his Ph.D. when he returned to Columbia in 1951.

By this time Mr. Karl was married and his wife, Dolores, was working while he completed his dissertation. Deciding they had enough money saved, and correctly forecasting that Europe would never again be so cheap, the couple took a year off from responsibilities to travel.

They lived in Florence and Rome, often sleeping on trains to save on hotel bills. Mr. Karl read the Bible from beginning to end ("perfect train reading - it's compact and it lasts a long time"). They spent a month in London, where it rained every single day.

For less than $20 a month, in a village outside Paris, they rented a wing of a deserted chateau. There was an echoing bedroom containing nothing but a bed, a bathroom "about a thousand miles away," and a two-burner stove.

If they wanted a taste of Paris night life, the lack of a late train home often meant sleeping in a park.

Back in the States a full-time teaching job at City College was waiting, with a big apartment, three daughters in five years, a house in Westchester - the life of family stability, hard work, success, and recognition that Mr. Karl must have dreamed of during his unstable childhood.

Academic Grants

The next time the Karls went to Europe, to live for two years in France and Italy, it was with the aid of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. More time was spent mending the children's bicycles than watching the dawn in the Bois de Boulogne.

Deborah is now a literary agent, Rebecca teaches history at New York University, and Judith works at the United Nations.

During those years Mr. Karl published "A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad," "The Contemporary English Novel," and a novel of his own, "A Quest," based on an episode in the life of one of his landladies.

In Florence in 1955, he and his wife stayed in a crumbling pensione owned by the brilliant, neurotic, and unhappy former mistress of Carlo Levi.

When Levi, the author of "Christ Stopped at Eboli," was in hiding from the Fascists, she concealed him for two years. Later, however, he abandoned her.

A great subject for a novel, thought Mr. Karl, but "The Quest" never really took off.

"It was a pretty depressing book," he conceded.

They Made A Deal

Returning to America in 1967, Mr. Karl became heavily involved with Students for a Democratic Society, in protest against the Vietnam War.

"The war was an atrocity," he said. "Nothing has ever hit me like that."

He and his wife, meanwhile, had agreed to a deal: She returned to work and he took over the house and children, while continuing to teach and write.

"It was a circus," said Mr. Karl, "That it worked at all was mainly good luck. We told the kids they couldn't get sick - and they didn't."

In time, Mrs. Karl became a vice president of J.P. Morgan. She eventually set up a business of her own.

Second Career

It was when the girls were older and away at boarding school, and his wife was on a banking assignment in London for a year, that Mr. Karl took up his second career as a biographer.

The success of "Joseph Conrad" enabled him, at the beginning of the 1980s, to move from City College to New York University, with a lighter teaching schedule.

"American Fictions: 1940-80," a cultural history of the nation seen through fiction, followed, and then the extremely influential "Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist," which covers the years 1895-1925 and takes in aspects of literature, art, and music.

When Mr. Karl began work on his 1,200-page biography of Faulkner, he settled in Faulkner country for a while and taught at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

"Which was an experience in itself, seeing that everyone else was a heavy drinker - Willie Morris, Barry Hannah. . . ."

For the teaching year of 1990-91, the biographer was awarded a prestigious endowed visiting chair at the University of Hawaii.

Hawaii: "The Worst"

"It was more than boring," said Mr. Karl, groaning. "I didn't like the faculty, I didn't like the climate, the scenery, the lack of seasons. . . ." His wife disliked it just as much, and, since she was not committed to staying, didn't.

Nevertheless, in Hawaii - "the worst year of my adult life" - Mr. Karl wrote 1,000 pages of a biography of George Eliot in five months.

"I was getting a huge salary for doing almost nothing, so instead of feeling sorry for myself, I sat down and wrote the first draft. I also went on long walks and got in great shape. I walked all over Honolulu - you could kill three or four hours a day that way - and lived mainly on Kentucky Fried Chicken."

Happily Home

"I told my students to be sure not to miss the final exam, because two hours after it was over I was catching a plane out," said Mr. Karl, who remembers grading exam papers on the flight home to New York City.

Happily back now at N.Y.U., he is halfway through a cultural history of America in the 1970s: "Pop, high culture, sports, everything - the works."

Nine times a year, he gives a working seminar for professional biographers, although, said Mr. Karl, he will probably not write any more biographies of his own.

"There's no one else I'm interesting in writing about," he said firmly, and, among literary figures, "there's no one else who needs to be written about."