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LETTERS TO FELICE by FRANZ KAFKA Edited by ERICH HELLER and JURGEN BORN Translated by JAMES STERN and ELISABETH DUCKWORTH 620 pages. Schocken Books. $17.50.

Nobody could be clearer about the incomprehensibility of the world than Franz Kafka. Novels such as The Trial and The Castle, stories such as "The Metamorphosis," "The Hunger Artist" and "The Burrow" are the Grimm's fairy tales of the modern cloven spirit. Ordinary men awake to find they are helpless insects, or are found guilty of unknown crimes by unknown judges. One man wastes away in a cage, not because he is being starved but because he has never found the kind of food he might want. No grails are to be found in Kafka, no word or gesture ever turns frogs — or beetles — into princes.

Like dreams, Kafka's fables flow naturally out of their private coherence. He was a master at using familiar realistic detail to divine the hidden currents of fear and inconsolability. His influence has been enormous since Max Brod — friend, literary guardian and biographer — had Kafka's novels published posthumously despite the author's dying instructions to burn them.

Kafka has inspired much fiction and literary criticism. In a recent issue of American Review (No. 17), Philip Roth contributed a compassionate sketch of Kafka that — yes — metamorphosed into an autobiographical fantasy. Roth imagined that Kafka did not die of tuberculosis in 1924 at 41, but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew-school teacher and suitor of his maiden aunt.

Roth's feat of scholarship and imagination is an excellent place to begin Letters to Felice, now published for the first time in English, Kafka's confessional correspondence to the nice Jewish secretary from Berlin who from 1912 to 1917 was twice his fiancée but never his bride. Erich Heller's introduction, though heavily written and somewhat abstract, does pinpoint Kafka's "moral hypochondria ... a man ready to feel guiltily responsible for what he knows to be a flaw in the order of the world."

Kafka never married, though he needed the idea of woman. He spent most of his passion on postage stamps.

Only in the last, painful year of his life did he taste real happiness with Dora Dymant, a 19-year-old Hebrew scholar. As sympathetic companion, nurse, mistress and daughter figure, she telescoped into those fleeting months all that Kafka had sought in a woman.

Kafka met Felice in 1912 at Max Brod's Prague apartment. He was 30 and still entertained hope of marriage to a bright, cheerful, uncomplicated girl. A month after her return to Berlin, his first letter began a seduction aimed not at getting Felice to bed but at idealizing her on a pedestal where she could intensify his feelings of inadequacy.