Easing out of,
Winding down
the 25 year plus year young Handke Project…a saga nearing its end…a
round-up of sorts… musings… ruminations… a final ramble!
For
Karl Heinz Braun, Marie Colbin, myself, and I imagine for Klaus Peyman, too, now…
and les autres……
Names cited in this communication: Marie Colbin, in
extenso, Erich Wolfgang Skwara =in extenso , Hans Hoeller, Karl Wagner, Raimund Fellinger, Peter Hamm, Michael DiCapua=in
extenso, Roger Straus, Steve Wasserman, Edmund Caldwell, H.M. Enzensberger= in extenso, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss,
Hans Werner Richter, Jürgen Becker, Lothar Struck= =in extenso ,
Sophie Semin, Libgart Schwartz, J., Fredi Kolleritch, Fabjan Haffner, Elisabeth
Schwaegerle, Klaus Kastberger, Tom Barry, Scott Abbot, J. Brokhoff ,
Heinrich Detering, David Coury, Frank Pillip, Donald Daviau, Neil Gordon= in extenso, William Gass, Robert Silvers, Oh Tannenbaum, Jim
Krusoe, Dennis "The Mutton" Dutton,
Robert Wilson [editor of American Scholar], Michael McDonald,[of The Amurrican
Interest], Krishna Winston, Siegrid Loeffler, J.l. Marcus, Hubert Burda,
Siegfried Unseld, Mr. and Mrs.
Milosevic, etc.
“The
world is discoverer.” WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, Peter Handke
What
would I have done without Handke’s work, Handke my “tit-bird,” my passerine,
the past 20 some years it occurs to me as I try to summarize the involvement in
such a huge body of work? To some extent with the author himself. Traveling the
Handke high and byways… from trembling heights to the most horrific, gold leaf…
and dung beetles reviewers… [ ";mais une marée de merde en bat les
murs, à la faire crouler."]
Little could I have imagined, even if I’d thought
in those terms, that in May 1966, in Princeton, I would behold a kid looking
like a fifth Beatle destined to become an Austrian postage stamp in his life
time:
The now count von und zu Griffen whom I
encountered while trying, successfully I might say, to get out of those reaches,
except of course linguistically where the more the better, both high and low.
And
now easing out of a twenty some year involvement in writing about it,
championing it, criticizing it too, decimating swinish reviewers, linking up
with some wonderful scholars, with at least one more play to read and the
recent Nachtbuch [jottings of the first thoughts as you wake up at
night, one finger still in the forever dream dialogue world:
[„Am Ende werde ich etwas sagen, ein
bißchen“
[At the end I’ll say something, a bit.]
„Manchmal, wenn man redet,
redet man immer weiter“ [Sometimes when one talks one goes on talking.]
„Die Woche über spielen sie
Ping-Pong, am Samstag spielen sie Pong-Ping.“ – „Ja, die Wespen leben in
Ketten“ [During the week they play
ping-pong, on Saturda the play ping pong.
‘Yes, the wasps live as a series of chains.]
„Sind Sie der, der hinter der
grauen Holzhütte mir ein Gedicht vorgetragen hat?“ [Are you the person who recited a poem to me behind
the grey wooden hut.]
„Der Papst weiß sicher, daß er verdammt ist“ [The Pope must know
that he is damned.“
„Die Kinder haben sich über
ihn lustig gemacht, aber nicht zu sehr“ [The children made fun of him, but not too much.]
„P. H. im Neunten Land?“ –
„Neunmal kennt er das Land nicht“ [P.H. in the Ninth Land?“ „He does’t know the
land mine times.] The reference is to
Handke’s book “Farewell to the Dream of the Ninth Land” – the land of peace –
his reaction to Slovenia’s becoming an independent country.
an
enterprise it must take considerable grandiosity to peddle, excerpts from the
dialog forever on-going interiorarity, albeit here the foam of the unconscious,
and do so without elaborating the fantasy or dream underlying. I.e. from the excerpt that Jung & Jung has
posted as a teaser it does not appear that our genius spouts genius brilliances
as the first thing on waking. Reading 500 of them may of course reveal a
pattern. 50 dreams of Handke’s would have been a lot more interesting! And
analyzed by the man who can write in dream syntax and images if need be! Lothar
Struck who has gone a bit soft in the noodle [see the end for an elaboration of
this statement] reading so much Handke has an appreciative review of this
trivia at Glanz & Elend which I have also put on the page devoted to the Nachtbuch
at:
And
no doubt there will at least be one other narrative of whatever order of
difficulty – the 25 k Don Juan, the Handke book most recently published
in the United States, as they say, “hat es in sich,” which means it got only
stupid reviews… and I have one more ramble to write, on Handke’s poetics. Handke
is no esthete but he certainly has an aesthetic. In the Kastberger/ Schwägerle interview in the Kastberger edited collection of mostly
first rate essays and fascinating primary material Freiheit des Schreibens
[Zsolnay, 2110] Handke says he does not have a poetics. He articulates his
poetics in their sufficiency in the 1981 Walk About the Villages.
Perhaps Handke forgot, Handke is quite good at forgetting, just the way he is
at turning guilt feelings off, or perhaps he was waiting whether the
interviewers might remember Villages as I haven’t come on a one scholar
that notes its influence on the work that follows… as far and recently as the
2003 Del Gredos. I am not planning to check to what degree if any Handke
hoes to these poetics, but am interested in the change in narrative procedure
from 1964 Hornissen to the present, perhaps I will come up with
something. But that would seem to be it, yes there will also be an assaying on
what I call “the psychoanalysis of reading,” which would be inconceivable
without having looked closely at Handke’s prose, its entrancing capacities… and
then to go on servicing the blogs and
the scriptmania sites:
having
one page devoted to each title at the
and to each play at the
and the endless trivia which pours from
the star’s publicity machine:
I have the load of another life-time’s
work left… am being granted only half of one even though I am just growing
another set of teeth.
Let
me say right off that I could not have imagined that Handke might write
anything as magnificent as some of the prose works, both short and long, and
the plays he did after his richest work, the last of which of his I had the fortune
to translate [no matter that Villages then became a most interesting
kind of Albatross and all around heart test, failures nearly all around], the
1981 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES… which also mattered a lot to Handke so that the
correspondence over that piece, and the way Handke made suggestions to my
wrestling match with the text also proves the only interesting part of our
correspondence [see the postscript to the Ariadne Books edition which quotes
the relevant passages]. I had thought one might stop with that… I certainly
hoped that it would be my “swan song” to translating, but then some things were
offered that I liked, say the work of Josef Winkler.
Among the works subsequent to Villages,
each masterly in its own way, but none as rich sometimes so in a different way,
I number The Repetition [1986], The Afternoon of a Writer [1987],
the 1988 Absence film as novel as film rewrite of Parsifal that introduced the filmic element into prose writing - an
underlying filmic feature which again becomes prominently experiencable by the
good, that is a reader in the 2003 Crossing the Sierra Del Gredos [the
protagonist, bankieress, like her author, constantly sees herself as actress in
a film] thus enabling the kind of manifest precision between reader and text
that occasionally transpires in the dream screen dyad analyst analysand,
fantasies meshing, in a to and fro; and the 1984 novel that set me off on this
trek, Der Chinese des Schmerzens which ever so unfortunately is titled Across
in English, instead of, say, The Chinese
of the Water Torture. That Handke would write not only in dream images [Afternoon
of a Writer] but in dream syntax in the 1995 One Dark Night I left my
Silent House… [Edmond Caldwell also has an interesting note on what he, in
analogy, calls “the Handke effect” at:
http://thechagallposition.blogspot.com/
is
perhaps not all that surprising coming on the heels of brilliant innerworld
outerworld projection screen beginnings and knowledge of how deep syntax works
[1]. One way or the other, Handke remains a verbally, textually activist
author. It would be quite something to organize a year long course just around Handke’s work, going
back to Thucydides, Euripides, Aeschylus and working your way up the present in
hopscotch back and forth kind of way.
Anyhoo,
these kinds of writerly communicative matters I have mulled since my early days
as a kind of Joycean Jamesian who still thinks James’ prefaces to his novels
are the best things that have ever been written on that subject…
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/
and
it is for these innovations, for the sake of the logos and what Handke has contributed to it that he deserves the
Nobel, the availing of new utensils, the ability to communicate inner states,
spell the reader into reading. Virginia Wool I imagine might not commit suicide
if she had those means at her disposal. As a person, scarcely. Unfortunately.
You’d have to extirpate the “Bruno Handke” part, that metempsychosis that
possesses him, too.
Subsequent
the just cited achievements comes a more serious change than the prior actually
rather gradual one from works such as Der Hausierer 1967 [“The
Panhandler,” as it might be called in English, it exists in some Romance
languages], Short Letter long Farewell 1971, Goalie’s Anxiety 1969
and A Moment of True Feeling [1971] to Left-Handed Woman 1974 and A
Slow Homecoming [1978], the latter two belonging very much together in
their mood of withdrawal and direct turn toward the mytho-poeic. As I just wrote
Karl Wagner: “aber ich lass
mir doch nicht das ‚Sein’ noch ‚die Natur’ von Heidegger verderben.“ Ernst Bloch said something similar about the
Left’s leaving nature to the Nazis.
One of
Handke’s published notebook excerpts, Fantasien der Wiederholung, 1988 –
Wiederholung does not just mean to
repeat but to retrieve – announces
this more important change, departure; and with respect of these kind of pronunciamentos Handke can be trusted
not to be too fickle. [Udderwise, the fellow who berates “facts people” on the
occasion of Suhrkamp Verlag’s – his chief publisher’s - move there from
Frankfurt, proclaimed, just the other month in Berlin, “facts win!” Handke
wins, it’s a fact!
First results from this change from over-reliance
on impressionist phenomenological serial notation and extremely well-crafted
prose - to different narrative procedures – if Across [1984] and The
Repetition [1986, the counter-part to the 1972 Sorrow beyond Dreams]
aren’t already way signs toward that change - are the late 80s early 90s
assayings of Tiredness, the Juke Box and The Day that Went
Well: circling and interrogating his subjects, incorporating the settings
where they are composed [something done incidentally by many writers is here as
a compositional principle]. Getting his feet wet in a new mode, Handke quickly
mastered it to his usual virtuoso capacities: Day. “The line of beauty”
– isn’t it really the line of the breast? The new tack eventuates in that great
weaving of the six sides of his artistry on the canvas-ground on which he then
lived in the Chaville woods outside Paris, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay [1993].
[After all, from the beginning Handke has created conscious literary works of
art, the “as if” of fantasy realized as text or play, a little too real for
comfort at times.] There follows the somewhat mixed bag One Dark Night I
Left My Silent House [1994] – I say “mixed bag” because aside its many
marvels I could well do without Handke’s recit’s
on “the modern” woman or that narcissism means that at least you love yourself!
Wow! Whoopeedooda! If you know your Handke texts you read of his affinity for
idiots, and sometimes the autist truly is daft and not just in the Greek
“everyman” sense of the word.
Unique, too, are Crossing the Sierra Del Gredos
[2001], Don Juan [as told by himself] a juicy, taut rope that holds the strains
of an aging conflicted sneaky Eros, both dark and light, with an easy and very
playful left wishfulfilment hand [2004], and the somewhat Wagnerian – so it
strikes me - Kali [2007] a kind of operatic film, that I need to reread
once more, it is so strange, so different from anything that has gone before; the
reportage The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca [2008] where Handke shows that he
has that stuff, too, - read Hans Hoeller’s essay on Velica in Freiheit
- after a lot of superfices along those lines – that is one of the great pleasures of
reading Handke, he neither bores himself nor his readers by repeating himself, he
explores the formal possibilities of a way of doing things, develops - altogether,
the whelming distinctive works prove a consternation to no end of lazy moron
reviewers who cannot even describe a book as they try to peg it for their
pittances.
Some of the most extraordinary writing Handke has
done is in the 2005 novel Moravian Nights – at a few moments, around its
tunnel section, this seismograph felt the earth tremble within the act of
reading classical prose, a first for me, a book that yet I find both formally
and morally dubious [See “Tough Love for Peter Handke”
morally
dreadful for its lying way to dispose of Marie Colbin’s charge that has been
facing him all these years [2], formally since, overall, it does not live up to
his own previously demonstrated abilities, and I am someone who is quite
willing to assess Handke within his own terms, unless to be sort of Larry
Rivers sketchy on such a big canvas is something he had in mind: I find no
evidence of such an idea, which doesn’t mean that I am not missing something. Moravian
is basically a big hotch-potch loosely held together; a kind of ramble such as
this; if it weaves it does so by happenstance; some sections such as the
defense for beating the bejesus out of Marie Colbin or one the Congress on
Noise are formalized to the fare-the-well, others are paltry, one in Cordula/
Split, where Handke wrote his first novel, in 1964, Die Hornissen/ Los Avispones/
The Hornets t’would be in English] and where it appears he abandoned his
first girl friend, and with child, creating a bastard as his own father did
creating him, who however took care to stay in touch with the mother Maria
Sivec, which old G.F now haunts him, an old crone, this section is stupendously
well rendered, realized, visually, dramatically… past and present merging, very
filmic too… El Greco, Dostoyevsky come to mind… The section of a trip to the
Kosovo and the bus driver’s fury in the form of his iterating the song Apache
and you become part of the throb of deep dark fury. – But, as I wrote one of his two editors,
Raimund Fellinger, at Suhrkamp Verlag, the other is the critic Peter Hamm, it
wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the model in the novel for the house-boat hotel,
the hotel boat “Luna” on the Morawa River in deepest darkest south-east Serbia,
on which Morawian Nights is allegedly told, if the “Hotel Luna/ Morawa”
unloosed during a Spring flood from amongst the reeds where it is tethered and
washed into the Danube and down into the Black Sea – ample time to bring a few
sections and the whole up to Handke’s usual snuff – and we can have Marie
Colbin running alongside on the shore and have her get stuck in a moor! - But what
an overall continuous performance! Since early on! As an analyst I would posit
since earliest bed time days in Berlin early winter 1944 !
And
then there are the plays: The Hour We knew Nothing of Each Other, the
summa of every aspect of his early dramatic work [I know I am right in thinking
of Handke as a kind of Schubert who found himself in the world of words], the
second time – the first is Ride Across Lake Constance, the ultimate inversion
of a boulevard piece - that he cleans out an audience’s clock and makes them
see the world anew as does his verbal magicking in the Sierra del Gredos
novel;
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
the
great 1987 Art of Asking not yet done - I nearly say of course - in that
desert the Unites States of self-involved Philistines and clothes horses and miserable
artistic directors, that disneyfied garbage pit, what would Joyce put into
Leopold Blooms stream of consciousness these days is a thought I have
entertained; biggest island on the earth no matter all that globalization. The
1991 Voyage by Dugout: The Play about the Film about the War, which
finally exists in a fine translation by Scott Abbott, too, is crying for a
performance; the 2008 Till the Day
that Parts Us is about to be published by Seagull/ University of Chicago
Press. Not that some of the less successful work, say The Essay on Tiredness
or the play Preparations for Immortality - it starts off like
gangbusters but its formalism quickly and oddly turns hollow, like Phillip
Glass - or the plays Traces of the Lost, which strikes me, who has only
read it several times, as a redo of Hour, or the 2004 Subday Blues
- I find it a monotonous read no matter how perfectly and incrementally-timed
formally [and I find monotony in this instance of little use] - which appears
to “play” well, I may be wrong because of having got used to Handke writing
“Lese Dramen,” [dramas just to be read], these would be stellar works by others
who do not set their own expectations as high as our versatile pro, Peter
Handke.
I
am leaving out the cumulation of diary volumes, [its inception is the 1974 Weight
of the World - “for those to whom it matters” is its epigraph, and boy
would it ever prove found meat for this analytic wolf! - and the 1983 Geschichte
des Bleistifts, the 1988 Am Felsfenster Morgens, the 1988 Fantasien
der Wiederholung, the 2001 Gestern Unterwegs, the 2100 Nachtbuch
as well as the forthcoming Unterwäsche
{Verbrecher Verlag, 2111] is a body of self-involved self-exhibitionism and
self-discovery – with little consequence but for the work – that, if this trove
can be judged at all, only in the forthcoming many years when they are compared
with the now archived notebooks [whence they were sold for five hundred
thousand Euros each to a German and an Austrian archive, whence these edited selections
derive; by the time of the second German edition, Gewicht/ Weight had
been edited down, t’was a little too much nakedness after all of the frequently
hideous self, some beauty marks allowed but not the entire horror show. At any
event: Scholar mice, get on your marks!
Ullrich
von Buelow has a fine introduction to this material in Kastberger’s Freiheit.
Also left out from this list is the handful of texts occasioned by
Handke’s involvement in the disintegration of the 2nd Yugoslav federation.
Though I obviously regard the 1999 play Voyage by Dugout and the 2008 reportage
Velica Hoca among Handke’s premier works, and much like the non-travel Abschied
vom Neunten Land [written on the occasion of Slovenia becoming independent
in 1991, “Leavetaking from the 9th Land”] no matter in disagreeing
with its perverse contra-factual argument, and find lots to like in the three
travel books the 1993 Justice for Serbia, the 1994 Sommerlicher
Nachtrag [A Summer’s Postscript] and the 1997 Unter Tränen Fragend [Questioning in
Tears], I find wretchedly arrogant and sloppy the 2003 Rund um das Tribunal
[Circling the Tribunal – in Scheveningen/ DeHague, the Yugoslav war crimes
trials] and especially the 2004 Die Tablas des Damiel [The Ponds of
Damiel, in southern Spain, drying out, analogously, to the now no longer
federated mutually fructifying Yugoslav states] especially so coming from
someone who nearly completed his Dr. Jus. in 1964 because the sought-after
sinecure of Austrian cultural attaché had been obviated, Handke felt so
confident as a writer after his first novel had been accepted by Suhrkamp
Verlag. Not that Tribunal and Daimiel are devoid of all merit, or
of interest and of all kinds of gems; the worst of course is that you realize:
here is someone who made himself notorious in an odd kind of defense of the
Serbians against an idiotic mass media attack – indeed the world made it so
easy that he actually ought to have taken the trouble
to speak the language of political economy and the psychology of identity, say,
have become a Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html
]
- Handke visits Milosevic
in jail, has been a friend of the family for years, has had his plays done in
Belgrade, including Voyage, as he has been keeping the company of the
powerful since his earliest days, from actual princes to the Caesars of
Industry like Hubert Burda, Handke becomes even more infamous by attending and
displaying himself at the funeral and playing mourner to the hilt as only
someone who is now an actor who mouths the requisite obscenities in the Quodlibet
of the World Stage can, and as someone who purports to be an expert on the
disintegration of Yugoslavia [and Voyage convinces the reader that he is
quite expert indeed] then refuses to testify as an expert witness for the
defense, nay, even to write a simple letter!
For reasons of personal experience to which I will come, I was not all
that surprised at my ultimate exhibitionist prima donna’s copping out on that
score, ugh, a witness at such a trial is pretty well boxed in, he cannot come
and go as he pleases; he is in the cross fire; that would be a bit too much of
the sought after lime light, it would singe the wings of the fink. As Erich Wolfgang Skwara [the “Don Juan” who
appears “with the same woman” in No-Man’s-Bay], a wonderful tattle-tale,
once said to me, in the early 90s, while we both expressed our confidence that
the genius would bring off that great weaving performance: “Let’s see what he’s
up to now.” – It was walking arm in arm with Umberto Ecco at the Frankfurt
Bookfair on publication of that wonderful book. - Something you can count on is
Handke popping off to the media, whose darling for copy he has been since his
earliest days, when a possible competitor for the limelight is in the news. The
latest of this, as of this writing, September 2010, our careerist calls fellow
Austrian novelist Grstein… “a careerist.” I actually am no longer all that
annoyed, but like a patient dog owner who laughs or shrugs at a spouse’s tick.
Moreover, these proclamation are made, as of old, under a righteous aegis, no
matter that Handke in Die Tablas des Daimiel even makes fun of how in
the court of night conscience he manages no matter to come out ahead, and uses
Ivo Andric’s: “Mistakes by others that highlight equivalent errors of our own
precipitate a moral disappointment that permits us to assume the strict and
noble stance of both judge and victim and gives rise to an inner state of moral
euphoria. This euphoria distances us swiftly and surely from the process of
personal moral perfection and makes of us terrible and merciless and even
bloodthirsty judges. “ Signs by the Wayside as an epitaph to Voyage by Dugout, but subsequent to writing Daimiel
quickly berated Günter Grass for allowing himself to be inducted into the Waffen
SS at age 17 [a well known matter already in the 60s, may the day come that
your volunteering for the Marines or the Special Forces of all kind acquire
that kind of iconic obloquy] because “everyone knew what the Waffen SS” was, to
which I once said and will say again: “and at age 30 one knows not to smack
one’s two year old crying daughter’s head if one is in irritated rage because
there is a flood in the basement and she is bawling, rape one’s supposed friend’s
girl friends and keep beating up women.” When Handke, asked
about Enzensberger’s position on the Kosovo war, replies: “Hans Magnus Enzensberger redet wie ein Politiker und
moechte die UÇK bewaffnen. Der weiss immer, wo’s lang geht, ein grinsender
hoehnischer Zuschauer, der menschgewordene Hohn. Der islamische Sufi Djalâl-ud-Dîn
Rûmî sagt: „Sie tragen bedruckte Seiden nicht als Ornament, sondern um ihre
Schoenheit zu bewahren. Enzensbergers
Sachen sind das Gegenteil, Ornament zur Verhoehnung der Schoenheit. [Hans Magnus Enzensberger talks like a politician and would
like to arm the UÇK. He is someone who always knows what side to take, a
grinning, derisive observer, derision in human form. The Islamic Sufu
Djalâl-ud-Dîn Rûmî says: “They wear printed silk not as an ornament but to
retain their beauty.” Enzensberger’s stuff are the opposite, ornamentation to
deride beauty.” then Handke, in this instance, not only manifests his
extraordinary envy of a Suhrkamp compadre who displaces a bit of the limelight
and is indeed an enviable essayist, but also ever so unfortunately it seems to
me, a certain extreme hatred of his own compulsion to dress up like a beauteous
Modepuppe since his appearance on the
world stage, and who certainly has adjusted himself with the changing times;
that is, such extrojective projections smack of self-hatred,
a narcisstic conflict on the deepest level [it is always good to re-read the
end of The Afternoon of a Writer [1987], if you seek first hand evidence
of the split, the conflict that is so productive, it manifest itself in these
projections which are entirely lacking in truth-content of any other kind; and
in that sense are quite naïfly, unself-consciously uttered, is my guess. Or
perhaps there is even malice aforethought as in the well-prepared knife for H.
M. E. As predictable as the midnight hooting of my pair of great horned owls,
not as pleasant. That description of Enzensberger, however, must have
been lying rehearsed on the tip of the tongue for years, it indicates a
conflict within Handke about his own narcissism, and points to the grievous
narcissistic wound [s] he suffered as a child. See:
for the full of this. Such projections only tell you
something about the projector! Alas!
However, the public Handke is not only a
better self advertiser than most others in that field; after all, there really
is something to advertize, to show off, compared to say two American mama’s
boys like Alan Ginsberg or Norman Mailer, by the compensatorily competitive
exhibitionist, or to sulk and not show off if something has made him petulant.
One very funny instance occurred a few years back when Handke had a Croatian
magazine and T.V. crew to his place in Chaville. Normally Handke now takes even
the closest friends immediately for a walk mushroom hunting or at least out in
his garden. Without my dwelling on Handke’s plethora of symptoms I am still
more than uncertain why he cannot bear to have, especially men, in a room with
him, especially his room, for any length of time, whether this is due to the
persistence of nausea at other bodies that he says he experienced first at the
Tanzenberg seminary, or nausea in combination with other determinants. However,
once a camera is present the nausea apparently is overcome by the love of
self-display, and he cooked up a wonderful meal for the crew. This was also the
instance where, rather touchingly he refused to believe that Dubrovnik/ Ragusa
had been shelled during the wars, a matter that a quick look at You-tube will
confirm. - The legions of others who are so euphoric, in Ivo Andric’s terms, stretches
across the political spectrum and what a horror it was to behold, and still is,
what the disintegration of Yugoslavia elicited along those lines. Lice and
bedbugs with pony tails. The more ignorant the more media possessed the more
righteous the more euphoric. Handke felt that the 68ters really always wanted
to have a fight. My guess at the near unanimity of righteousness among a port a
prêter
intellectual class that might have
informed itself was the relief in not having to confront its own immense
criminal glass house in which they live more or less comfortably.
Handke’s involvement in the disintegration and my trying to sort out
the reasons for it, and then the reasons of why the way that Yugoslav cookie
crumbled as it did, altogether took up about a year of my life, and although I
would have rather devoted it to other matters, and other matters Handkean, I
must say that ultimately I am glad I did. Had it not been for his involvement I
might have gone along with the media generated consensus - after all what can I
or could I have done about any of it, that must be one reason why the millions
tune out, that sense of over-whelming impotence - and not taken the time to
really sort out why the Hutsies and the Tutsies savaged each other, and I might
say with Hennery the K. of Wurstburg on the Hudson “Let them kill each other.”
One question that bugs me is that if the media is allowed to be as entirely
sloppy and righteous in finding devils in this dark age for the pool of hatred
to attach to, why must Handke be perfect in each and every instance, why is it
dangerous – to whom – if he might be a bit parti
pris? The unending low level skirmishes in that area: e.g. Professor
Brokhoff and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s recent attempt to tie Handke
to Srbrenice at the anniversary of that massacre that put that town on the map.
For all this see
During
the course of my puzzling out Handke’s involvement and following that parallel
war “Handke versus the Media” [my first attempt at on-line nearly “real time”
pursuit of a story] I had my friend, the physician Franz Angst, send Handke my
first ruminations on the subject that you can now find on line at the site that
collects a lot of material relating to it:
I
made it a point to change one citation from Handke’s texts to make it appear as
though he were taking sides against one of the tribes, to test whether he had
actually read the text. Surprisingly he liked it, found my misinterpretation,
nonetheless if my effort didn’t elicit one of Handke’s usual insults! Yup, I’d
caught the guy, and he can’ handle being caught out, the man who said that as
soon as he is caught he lies, honest in that respect at least.
Nonetheless, I continue to be puzzled: in 1987 I
was appreciating the immense effort Handke had made to install his Slovenian
grandfather as a father figure, to acquire a Slovenian identity to displace the
hated German Bruno Handke Stepfather experienced as father, the preparation of
his own Slovenian-German dictionary, learning the language well enough to be
able to translate from it, and I am someone who can really appreciate the great
intra-psychic effort that that entails, laboraverimus!
And what if he had done so while also being with a good enough psycho-analyst?
After all, the trouble with most analyzands seems to be that they do not work.
They either remain attached and passive or go from shrink to shrink, and many turn
into bullshit artists of the worst kind, or believers in one or the other
father or mother figures of the discipline, disciples, the earliest disciples
really were useful, Freud’s, but no more are are needed.
“Travailler
come un bête!” However, within the last decade Handke has become a Serbian
nationalist, with a piece of Serbian land, is awarded the Kosovo’s St. Lazarus
prize! Is holding hands with the ultra-nationalist candidate for president,
says that “if I who have never voted were allowed to vote in this election I
would vote for Nikolaic.” With all the other prizes and the many showy trips to
that region and to the Kosovo we then did not have the time to receive that
particular one in person. I was really looking forward to that photo – Handke holding
the Cross of St. Lazarus with a blackbird perched on top of it! Perhaps it’s
just orneriness. You can take the kid of Carinthia, but you can’t get the
Carinthian out of him?
#
Had
Handke not gotten off in London on his trip to Scotland in 1987 thus missing
the continuation of the flight, been one of the dead of Lockerbie, is a
reminder of what such a life cut short would have meant, let us also bethink
Walter Benjamin’s 1941 suicide and the death of all those talents whose lives
were snuffed by the Nazis and Stalin and their everywhere successors. In the
event of Handke being mourned as one of the victims of Lockerbie I would
certainly have written the several essays on what became involved in
translating his early plays and how much of myself became involved in
translating Walk About the Villages during critical, heightened
circumstances in the early 80s. See
http:www//handketrans.scriptmania.com/
for
that and for some great essays by Fabjan Haffner and Elisabeth Schwägerle on that wonderful subject - and
I would certainly have written my “case history” of Handke since, as timing
would have it, I was reading the 1984 Chinese des Schmerzens [Across,
1987], the year of its American publication, and I would have been alerted to
Handke’s “caseness” as he describes its protagonist ‘Loser’, “a case” – how
great or interesting and complicated and unusual a “Wounded Love Child” case I
could not have imagined…
&
what
an education tracking down his profusion of symptoms provided!, a plethora, to
explore: the after -effects of the long term exposure to violent primal scenes;
a few weeks on what might produce Handke’s occasional color blindness; all his
nausea’s including of the eye balls; eventually an exploration of the whole
spectrum of autism; all this in combination with being his depressive mother’s
love child: perhaps writing all the time is the chief symptom??? That would be
incredible: a symptom seeking to cure itself? Actually that makes sense! Since
he is the master of his realm then, moreover writing has calmed his anxiety
from early on, it worked until his panic attacks subsequent to being left by
his wife; thereafter, he also needed valium, everything that is regarded as
“die Wende”, the big change can be attributed perhaps valerian?
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
Tilman
Moser in his essay on Handke’s 1973 A Moment of True Feeling in Romane
Als Krankheitsgeschichten [Novels as Case Histories – 1975] certainly
failed to tease out the origins of Handke’s problematics, didn’t even discover
why the protagonist Keuschnig was so distraught, remains puzzled, wants to
help, much less delved into Handke’s past to at least speculate on possible
connections or avail himself of the “process notes” as which Handke’s
spontaneous notations in the 1974 Weight of the World can be regarded.
Doing so myself for that monograph I found sufficient reasons for my deep
ambivalence about Handke as a person, it didn’t really require Wim Wenders’s
telling me that Handke invariably hurts those closest to him, reading Weight
of the World suffices:[Amina Handke appears at the father’s side and wants
to go potty: Handke notes that he then merely waited for what would happen
then. Which might be what? Certainly it was utterly predictable to the father
that she would soil herself and feel hideous!] You must have seen how
intimidated that child was by age 6 to appreciate the wages of such fatherly
mothering. A three month old Amina Handke was first shown to me in Spring 1969
or 1970 in Berlin, and I thought it was perfectly normal for a father to show
his translator his daughter before we headed out from his dank newspaper piles
filled Prince’s apartment on the Uhland
Strasse to the Ku-Dam to discuss the translation, subsequently you are then
glad not to have been one of the revolutionaries who came calling on Handke who
lacked the interest to look at a child [See: A Child’s Story]. I can
look and go gaga with babies for hours
on end! Women who berate Handke for his educational methods are derided! And
this is the man who then in another half dozen years or so will compose the
“Song of the Child” “When the child was a child” that exists in several dozen
languages now; and a link to which my Google spiders bring me at least once
sometimes twice a day. “Der hat gut schreiben!” It must have been in 1974 that Handke
gave me Als das Wuenschen noch geholfen hat, the book that contains the
three long fugueing poems in the American Nonsense and Happiness. I
started to scratch away at a translation at the Luxembourg airport, I was
flying Air Icelandic, and not only because it was the cheapest flight, and
doing so got an inkling of a troubled being, but did not conceptualize what
troubled Handke in all the books of that period until I became seriously
interested in psychoanalysis. http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
Or: he is one
great copy writer! Handke not only deserves the Nobel Prize but also the United
Copy Writers of the World Association Prize! In the later seventies he wrote me
a few things that have stuck in the mind: “I am nothing but a writer.” – And: “I
am capable of achieving any effect I want as a writer.” Coming from a composer
whom you know to be a genius such statements would be comparatively
unexceptional, coming from such a one who is a writer they are more memorable,
put the watchman on the alert.
In the early 90s I hear from Erich Skwara that
Handke is berating himself for the treatment of his first daughter, writing
after all was easy, meanwhile he had had a second daughter, instead of the wished
for son, but for once psychological-minded, foretell in No-Man’s-Bay how
grievously Oedipal that relation would have been.
The timing is about right: in about 20 years
certain matters dawn on Peter Handke who is not known as a Trottel. In the early 80s I receive a letter saying “thank you
thank you thank you” … for the work I did in the 60s introducing his work into
the US against opposition within the firm that took him on, on the part of one
little stiletto man by the name of Michael DiCapua, meanwhile [then] I’ve
pretty well forgotten all about these labors and also about Handke’s utterly
boorish behavior when he and his buddy Kolleritsch and wife to be about disparu Libgart Schwartz appeared in New
York in 1971 as a piece of Austrian cultured representatives on a 21 cities in
28 days tour [that Handke had thought he might be fit to be a cultural attaché
has always been one of the more amusing fantasies], all around tachycardia but
for Handke who at once went to nearby Rizzolis to check whether any photo of
his had appeared in a German magazine. In a way it is nicer to be thanked that
late after the effect, so this becomes the one time I recall being thanked, it
strikes me as so odd and touching and amusing. Actually, it also the only time,
by any of these authors, German or American! The fine once St. Martin’s Press
and University of Chicago Press editor Michael Denhenny had it right when he
wrote me a few year’s back: “What we do is written on water.”
In the 2005 directly semi-autobiographical ficciones – aren’t we ever coy! – we
allow our runaway second married wife to call us “cold as a salamander” “mama’s
boy.” Self-understanding zilch a New
Yorker would say. Personal experience of all kinds sufficed at that point in
the late 90s in Seattle for Wim not to need to make his observation. The
bastard son of a bastard of a stepfather, Bruno Handke, witnessing that
violence prone rapist, regarded as his father figure for many years, from the
age of 2 until Handke left for boarding school at age 12. See Sorrow beyond
Dreams and read it closely, slowly, and for its details, the dirty tails
will come alive, and on a superficial reading you would never guess that Handke
followed in his stepfather’s footsteps, you would assume that he’d be a chief
feminist, rather than the opposite - that Handke was not an entirely damaged
person, if you wanted reasons, I told myself that I found those in his having
been his mother’s love child, already intra-uterine, albeit suffused by her
depressive state [Thanks again, Dr. Werner Schimmelbusch for that heads-up!].
However, Handke’s tragedy is that he had Bruno Handke for stepfather, for a
father model whose behavior as a man towards women imprinted itself on his
step-son, and at night [also take a look a the Essay on Tiredness and
note how irritated, infuriated and tired Handke becomes when subjected to the
cat on the hot tin roof behavior adjacent his student quarters in Graz; no
doubt Baby Peter was also enraged at his mother abandoning him after he had
been the exclusive lover child while she carried him to term and during his
first two years extra-uterine; one manifestation of possessiveness is that he
cannot bear when one of our would-be
pasha’s extra-marital lovers has another lover; how all the adolescent fatigados are traceable to over-powering
anger], evidently it was Marie Sivec’s tragedy more directly, and that of
Handke’s two half siblings that Bruno fathered with Maria. On the basis of Sorrow,
unless your read closely, you would be astonished to find out that Handke, too,
beats up women… and if further proof is needed that hating your German
stepfather, as Handke ultimately acknowledged was also a form of self-hatred, that
that kind of hating is in every respect useless, will not dispossess, exorcise, this
would seem to be classic proof of that proposition. Although the search for father
figures appeared to reach a kind of closure with the incorporation of the
grandfather in The Repetition [1968] the search for literary fathers, their accumulation has certainly proved fruitful,
ultimately finding grandfather ancestral figures in that realm as well –
Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Grillparzer, Eichendorf, Hermann
Lenz – but the envy-driven hatred of most contemporary near greats or near
contemporary greats such as Grass, Enzensberger, Bert Brecht, Thomas Mann
persists. Handke had the opportunity during his somewhat breakdown in Paris to
avert, in the early 70s, when he saw a therapeutician [see W.O.W.] We are not
responsible for having been traumatized but perhaps for not perpetuating them
by subjecting those closest to us to the same traumas. Psychoanalytic trauma
theory and PTS treatment are in excellent shape. Ah, the stories, the dramas I
could I tell thee about myself! The children of WW II… each family with its own
disintegration [s]. Fortunately, together with a kind of ineradicable
nonchalance, I also inherited my grandfather’s sense of humor who was laughing
again two weeks after he had been liberated from his fourth concentration camp.
Old man Sivec unfortunately did not bequeath anything like that to his
grandchild Peter Handke, but a stellar ability to cuss or to re-inforce the
autist’s Tourettish proclivities, or Handke and I could have laughed our heads
off about the time that I, on reading Across, set out on this odd
venture; friends as never friends have been. Thus my ambivalence about Handke
as a person became more deeply anchored and articulated. However, the genius
work scarcely ever falters, the 250 k words No-Man’s Bay has a few beauty
spots, and there are some dead stretches in the even longer 350 k Del Gredos,
but its sustained Berg and Tal ending
is worth the occasional slog and its three topes
[speed bumps] or it does at least for me and a few other folks I know. What
a payoff! Yes, the world is the discoverer all right, not just of swine as
reviewers but of real readers along the roadside. At that ending I realized how
utterly Handke loved to write, I can’t say I ever came on anything proximate in
the nearly 70 years I have been reading. Lucky fellow, if he’d not been able to
write in that masterly a fashion – if he’d not been able to, long prison terms
for sure, for the fellow is also a Josef Bloch and the Bankieress’s terrorist
brother, with three nearly epileptic fits a day and near ready to run amok at
any moment; and if you read, say, Walk About the Villages, halfway
closely, and are halfway awake, or perhaps know that Handke’s
works are also projections of his Yoknapatawpha-sized Self, there are
stretches, at least during his writing, that he seems very much aware of the
dark sides of the moon - representationally if not conceptually. And I have
become, occasionally, “the dark sister” to his faults and follies.
#
Aside the experience that the
translation of Walk About the Villages provided, I cannot forget that
with the 1978 Alaska Chapter of the title novel of the American volume entitled
A Slow Homecoming Handke proved to be, at least for me, a totally
unexpected medium of my experience of the totality of having been for nine
months in the fairly pristine interior of that region, along the Yukon, working
in the Brooks and Alaska ranges, the immensity of that, from which I returned
with hands full of anecdotes, and a latent sense that the immensity of the
whole might be articulated, but not by me, and then the Handke seismograph appeared
to have done so, after just a couple visits of a few weeks each – the Handke
seismograph as good as Virginia Woolf’s that knows the state of mind your are
in from every letter. I could account for a lot of things and, as compared to
Handke, loved to ask “when and how and why, etc.” and am fascinated by the
mechanisms of the spirit, and in making such accountings, had slithered absolutely
deliciously on answers for years starting in the mid-80s [“Travailler come un
bête!”], but have not been able account for that whelming re-experiencing -
that remained, remains mysterious, inarticulatable. - I had had that wonderful
experience of a complete regression to birth in my analysis and had shed all
[?] the many modes of denial, ah how wonderful: “all defenses down” [with some
really interesting consequences], and knew what the appearance of a “new
canvas” in a dream signified: still, Handke as seismograph via that first
chapter, I, this analytically now fairly well trained critter, keeps scratching
his head; that experience dates back to 1980, Vienna, I was on my way back from
four weeks in Bulgaria and visited Handke on the Mönchsberg:
http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm
Perhaps it was the rich air from the rich
alluvial soil, the loam that the Danube had deposited in that region, near Plodviev.
#
In the St. Monica Mts. in the later
80s, I too was becoming a “king of slowness” as I walked the dusty paths in the
chaparral and tread the heart of a book on Handke out of my being the way a
baby cat treads on its mother teats… slowly, and grown up cats will continue to
re-experience that pleasure when they think you might be their mother cat as
they use your chest as a tread way, and for Handke it appears writing is the
greatest pleasure, the pleasure of the paws, not only in tearing prey apart, and
I fell under the influence of the rhythms, not only of the slowly pounding,
long intervals – such long intervals - surf of the Pacific on the south-facing
beach in Ma-li-bu [ “loud pounding surf” in Cochimi] all the way from the
storms near the Antarctic, the south Pacific, and indeed felt closer to being
than I had… for a long time… but of the rhythms of The Repetition, and
part of the original heart of the undertaking was then accommodated in a long
piece on Himmel ueber Berlin for Jim Krusoe at the St. Monica Review,
whom I allowed to tamp down some of the very long periods in which I was then
writing, although we then agreed, after people had such difficulty
accommodating to them, that he might as well have spared himself that effort.- Thus I continue to be in some awe of
Handke as a writer, how his being communicates itself to you, how he alters
states of mind, of his well honed genius, the person he is when he writes,
since I now know a considerable amount about the threshold state he is in and
what he draws on, and how laboraverimus
he is, what a virtuoso he trained himself to be as of his childhood, a terror
of the whole family, L’Idiot de Griffen! Less awed by the fellow who “scratches
himself at the same spots,” no not merely less so, aspects of the man as a person
make me wretch. See anon unless you have already gathered enough wool.
At that time in the late
80s when I began this work, now winding down - a few plays still to consider, at
least one more prose work I expect - on
reading the 1984 Chinese des Schmerzens [Across, 1987], I was
surprised that though Handke appeared to have become a far better writer than
in the 1973 A Moment of True Feeling, or at least a very different one, the
sentences were more carefully anchored in images, better joined, carpented, he
seemed to have pretty much the same unhappy consciousness, to put it into “phenomenological”
terms… of the Keuschnig of the 1973 novel, murderously inclined, no longer
suicidal. In sections of Across toward the end, when the protagonist-lens-personae
now called Loser is in a bad way, the writing is very much in the same manner
as the poems in “Nonsense & Happiness”, which I translated with great
pleasure – “Life without Poetry,” after all, could be rendered most poetically!
– in that section the narrative method
is not all that different from A Moment of true Feeling, and the true
feeling here would seem to be the act of murder, but where it does not differ
at all is when it takes recourse to the same dissociated state of mind phenomenology
as in “Life without Poetry”
“As a boy when a feeling of
the world overcame me I only felt the desire to WRITE something
now a poetic desire for the world usually
only occurs when I
write something)…
“This fall time passed nearly without me
and my life stood as still as then
when I had felt so low
I wanted to learn to type
and waited evenings in the windowless ante-room
for the course to begin
The neon-tubes roared
and at the end of the hour
the plastic covers were pulled back over the type-writers.
I came and went and
would have not been able to say anything about myself.
I took myself so seriously that I noticed it,
I was not in despair merely discontent.
From Life without Poetry
[October/November 1972, Kronberg]
the fugeing poems of the stormy period
that followed the death of his mother and being left by a highly neglected and
multiply insulted wife, Libgart Schwartz, what he said was the worst thing that
ever happened to him, panic attacks, hospitalization, valerian then did the
trick. Alas. “Poor baby” you might say
to such a one – the once lay-abroad laid low with one fell swoop and all those
broads waiting to get laid again! But would miss what understanding affords.
Some folks learn their lesson from such an experience, some don’t and are
merely even angrier and punish the next broad; or vice versa. Handke would have
wife and live-in partner troubles forever. I am so glad I spent some time with
the Touhamares later. What analysis had made clear was really driven home
there.
I am just now re-reading Across,
going back to the beginning of the project and I notice not only the
resemblances to the distraught period of the early 70s, ten years prior, and it
occurs to me if the work is “meant to be the death mask of the experience”
[Walter Benjamin] why we need a second death mask, albeit one written in a less
suicidal state of mind, and more carefully in the way it builds from its
violent beginnings… A murderous state of mind instead of a suicidal one, quelle
difference? And the “moment of true feeling” is a murderous one! However, it
occurred to me on first reading already that one purpose of the book was to
memorialize, patiently, the surround of Salzburg, and that certainly is well
done, as Stifter would have, and it occurred to me to think when I was alerted
to Handke’s taking the Stifterian turn – probably way back in 1973 when he
completed They Are Dying Out and monopolist Quitt has his factotum Hans
– perhaps also meant as a wonderful riff on Puntilla and his Servant Matti
- read a section from Stifter’s Bergkristalle and then emotes how it
would be to live in that world. Thus back to “restoration
Hardware” Austrian style. And eventually the beater of women is to write: “
„An den morgen
aufgewacht von dem morgenhellen Himmel
über den noch dunklen Dächern
treib aus den den Kaminen schon langsamer Rauch
Die Vögel: sine fine dicentes
Und all Liebe leben.“
Dissociation! Defense! Handke is a
master of it! is I posit since early childhood days! A necessity too! Artistically
this differs not at all form Stephen Deadalus using Rembrandt’s painting of an
old woman paring her fingernails; dissociation, too, has a deep affinity with
“the scientific method.” Analysts become trained in it, at the same time as
they are to focus their empathy in a laser like manner. Handke is so good at
dissociation he can string the observations into musical arrangement, after
all, he is a composer at heart. At empathy not. That is what his analyst told
him in Paris and he happened to agree that he was dissociated from his
feelings. Then he became instead of “too cold” “too hot,” at least for a while.
Across has one of Handke’s great beginnings, which book does not, “Close
your eyes and…” Scotomization here we come – eventually, say by the time of Del
Gredos he has realized that structural re-arrangements a la Cezanne do not
suffice for his kind of realism, that the world can be made magical again at
least in words. Reading the prose of Del Gredos you realize what magical
realism is - old time pot heads and mushroom eaters might think that the guy
had to be high to write that: they cannot imagine what coldness and love it
takes the word chemist to write in a fashion that they are made high and
perhaps re-experience the world as a child does. Nor is the chemist in the lab
who mixes their meds on any kind of high.
Loser is an imagined character I quite
realize, and I quite realize that the problem really starts when Handke tells
Herbert Gamper in their mid 80s book-length interview that these books can all
be unraveled [aufgerollt] from an autobiographical perspective, that the author
all along has been his own material. Perhaps the problem is just one of
thinking in stupid one to one identity relations, and failing to account for
the transformative, compressing act [s] of the imagination. At any event, the
hankering, the naïf belief in the truth of the autobiographical speaks more to
the loss of a sense of reality, which may indeed have to do with the all around
dissociation engendered by the “scientific attitude” and commodification and
monetarization of everything. It appears
to have escaped reviewers notice what a fine Marxist the Bankieress of Del
Gredos is, the Handke of They Are Dying Out who followed the
sometimes very sophisticated Marxists arguments of the 60 and 70s is alive and
well.
#
Toward the mid-80s, having a good drift
on my own problematics and some ways of dealing with their consequences, the
great writer did not just become his own “case” but also my great case that I
then examined as is possible with someone who has been a life long pretty much
“compleat exhibitionist,” a competitive compensatory one at that, since early
childhood. What a profusion of denials riddles Across! That’s what got
me going. Mystifications! On the basis of A Slow Homecoming and Walk
about the Villages I had anticipated a changed being. He only adopts
different personae, no matter that
the couture, the fabric has improved! Better coloring, more solidly grounded. Handke
as a writer is also a great couturier, the person remains pretty much the same,
in later writing you keep running into frequent longings for a second
metamorphosis, a second moment of “true feeling” perhaps… Analysts also practice
gerontology is the only suggestion along that line that I have. Judging by the
evidence of Moravian Night calling yourself or having an ex calling you
“cold as a salamander” and “mama’s boy” is not too promising of
self-understanding coming from an author now well into his 60s.
How
might matters proceed Chez Handke after we have dragged the pretty one home
after we have met her on the bridge from “A Touch of Evil” or she has appeared
of her own accord out of the nowhere of our daydreams, for a while we are still
quite in love and even write love letters, but soon enough we are back at work,
involved in our love of what we love most, another great writing project that
demands utter concentration, the beloved is neglected in every which way, we
emotionally withdraw, the beloved becomes confused, enraged. Moreover, on our
walks and trips we encounter no end of pretty ones who can’t wait to be bedded
by the famous poets, some even become
serious squeezes, meanwhile the beloved is only useful representationally, a
kind of accessory. Given the first good opportunity the trophy runs away or has
an affair of her own… or as in the case of Marie Colbin, starts to make scenes.
Handke’s friend and the recipient of Handke’s Buechner Preis money and now
editor of Die Welt’s literary pages, and quite good at that and a good writer
himself, Herr Heinrich Weinzierl in reviewing Moravian Nights in its
pages, alluded briefly to the there admission of having… not just beaten the
shit out of but – a la la- actually having wanted to kill the pretty beasty, an
admission, long in coming, about ten years that albatross has been dangling,
that is then followed by the most hideous thing Handke has ever written, a
formalist fare-thee-well on the why he had wanted to kill Marie Colbin, she did
not leave him alone for a single second anywhere… it appears the Widrich
residence in Salzburg where Handke was staying lacked housekeys? – nay, she
pursues him in that book as a previous great love pursued the “German writer”
did in A SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL, where the physical representation of pursuit is of an emotional longing. And
one reason Handke certainly fled Salzburg in 1987 was Ms. Colbin who, after she
had been beaten up, would show up at all his venues so that, like the writer in
THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER, the writer had to head out town a ways to a comfy
pub with a good juke box and some Serbian buddies. Weinzierl’s review passes
over this entire section dealing with the beating and the super-formalist
compleat lie with word to the effect, a former girlfriend who interfered with
his narcissistic preoccupation, whereas this is one of the main entry points
into that book which, after all, as do quite a few other works of the last
decade hint at a rapprochement of the wounded love child with the feminine [the
end of SUBDAY BLUES, even the BEAR SKIN WOMAN in VOYAGE BY DUGOUT, most
certainly the 2007 UNTIL THE DAY US PART and the end of MORAWIAN NIGHT,
although it isn’t clear whether that woman
isn’t just the kind of good cook and obedient servant such as Lothar Struck
would be; after all, if you really feel that women present such a danger to
your work, as Morawian makes utterly clear once again especially in the
section where Handke’s great predecessor dramatist Ferdinand Raimund appears
and they contemplate that problem, why keep getting yourself entangled and into
no end of trouble over them? The truly great short novel DON JUAN of course
gives Handke’s complicated answer to the conundrum “prisoner of sex.” However,
if anything has made me wretch it is when Handke is like Bruno Handke, when he
beats up women and lies and is upwardly mobile. Not someone I would take into
the maquis with me, although he might
indeed write a good play on that theme;
we shall see what the self-celebratory Still Storm [Immer Noch Sturm,
2010, Suhrkamp Verlag, to be premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2011] and
its discourse on Slovenian minority Carinthian Partisanen activities – talking about late-comers! - amounts to. A
bit more on that and Handke’s abrogation of the original plans for the premier,
anon.
#
I went back to Handke’s birth and
retraced the first few times I had seen and talked to the fellow. Amazing how
much material is available about a living person, thank you Herr Haslinger for
writing Jugend eines Schrifstellers. At Princeton, in May 1966, sitting
next to the journalist Erick Kuby, whom I had met in Hamburg in 1964 [3], it
was Kuby who knew the name of the upstart who made as I would find out typical
wholesale, rabble-journalist-rousing condemnation – in this instance of the
texts that had been read at that meeting of the Gruppe 47. [“Why did you leave
the Verlag der Autoren?” I once asked, referring to the authors’ collective,
one useful offspring of all those leftist activities of the 60s. “They are
fascists!” Alas. Handke did not want to be just a primus inter pares, but #
Uno, and Siegfried Unseld could make him such a one.] At Princeton, on leaving
the auditorium, I noticed the kind of look fleet over Handke’s face that tells
you – without needing psychoanalytic training – here is someone who will “über
Leichen gehen”, that kind of ambition, a recollection that is connected with
the name of Max Frisch, either the figure of that Frog Prince or a book of his
lying on a table. It was a look I’d seen maybe once before, and recently too
then in literary quarters where shark’s blood flows freely, and it too would be
confirmed, and later I would have one such as a partner in Calcutta on the
Hudson, the city of thieves, whose beard and a certain fawning initially concealed
his voraciousness. This recollection receded, as the one of Handke’s sadism of
which I had got a good whiff at a party in New York receded, but once you have
the smell down it sticks if only way in back of the nasal passages. Friend Ted
Ziolkovsky [a Hesse expert], who had met Handke at Princeton, then mentioned
that the fellow said, as he would also announce to the German media, that “he
was the new Kafka” – never mind that K. never announced anything of the kind,
but difficult to combine with this schnippisch,
happy go lucky image of the Beatelish Rockstar images that the
photogenically so generous exhibitionist has left behind of his 60s and 70s
days:
#
Let us take a look at
two prize related events to check on the development of the publicity machine. About
15 years ago, after Handke had returned the Büchner to that Committee because
of German support for NATO during the disintegration of Yugoslavia [as though
that committee was in any way responsible] but apparently not the money [which
he had given to his friend the fine Austrian writer Weinzierl], Handke said he
would accept no further prizes. Meanwhile he has accepted another half dozen
and turned down a half dozen. I want to focus on just two prizes, one the
Thomas Mann Preis that is given by the Bavarian Academy, the other the Heine
Preis of the City of Düsseldorf. A few years earlier Handke had called Thomas Mann
a "really lousy writer" on the occasion of reading Mann's "A Man
and his Dog" - not a book on which Mann's reputation rises or falls; along
the lines of Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." First Handke doesn't
want to accept that prize, then he does and gives the money back to the academy
to give to someone else. Shortly after he calls the Thomas Mann "a shit
prize." The point is that each and every step of the way is widely
reported, publicity that might just be worth more than the prize. Returning the
money makes you look even better.
The speech and the photo-op at the Milosevic funeral turns into the most extraordinary
saga of them all:
Doesn't
Handke ever play "mourner" to the hilt!
As a consequence a true bozo, Bozonett of the Comedie Française cancels
a truly great Handke play, The Art of Asking, Handke gets an
apology from the French minister of culture, but 99 out of 100 Frogs support
Bozonnet's decision not to have anything to do with a monster who attends the
funeral of a monster. Handke wins a lawsuit against Liberacion or
L'Observateur for defamation of character. My disgust with French intellectuals
nearly tears out my intestines. Siegried Loeffler, the then still editor of Literaturen,
and something of a literary power persuades {?}, the Düsseldorf jury to
award Handke that city's "Heinrich Heine Preis" - Handke is not
exactly a name that you would associate with Heine, but anyhow the name Handke
is such that in the meanwhile it burnishes any prize awarded him. The prize is
worth Euro 50,000 - and it turns out Handke actually needs the money, not for
himself, but so that he can invite all the translators of his pretty great 350
K novel Crossing the Sierra del Gredos to go mountain climbing with him
and the other mountain goats in self-same Spanish mountain range. There is the
to be expected public outcry, the city council won't release the money, Handke
very publicly withdraws his name; his partner in publicity making machine, Peymann,
who runs the Berliner Ensemble, established a “Berlin Heine Prize” and it is
awarded to Handke. Handke and Peymann travel to the Kosovo and award the 50 k
Euros with great T.V. coverage, note the photos marked “Kosovo Enclave” at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE# ]
to a Serbian enclave
there. Eventually Handke gets serious and writes the first rate The Cuckoos
of Velica Hoca, which may have one or the other pro-Serbian
accent, but is not a piece of work that either falls or rises with that
accent, but on the merits of its powers of observation, empathy and
condensation and representation [look at Hans Hoeller’s suberb essay in Klaus
Kastberger’s Freiheit] Can't think of an American writer who might be capable
of anything of the kind. That is, you can have your cake and eat it too and
show it off and do good work at the same time! However, Handke’s sense of
extraordinary self-entitlement only seems to grow with time, most recently
evidenced in the breach of his agreement with Klaus Peymann to premiere his
latest play IMMER NOCH STURM {Still Storm} at the Burg Theater in Vienna and
then transfer the production to the Berliner Ensemble’s home turf; he thinks it
should play longer in Austria… but no, the
opportunity to have the play star in the lime light at the Salzburg
Festival next year obviates all such agreements or sentimentalities about long
affiliation, or, what might have been the proper venue for a play that
entertains some Slovenian partisan activity in the frontera of Slovenia and
Carinthia, say Klagenfurt or Graz. All that counts for this star is to shine in
its own reflection at the most polished mirror. - And at the same time one of
my Google spiders occasionally brings me a report that "the so withdrawn hermit-like
author Peter Handke has deigned, gone out of his way to visit someone or shown some
village the honor to show his face!" “Play the game!” it says in Walk
About the Villages – Handke plays it better than most and has something to
show for it. However, lots of other writers get short shrift – who is the
“space displacer” I feel like asking the author of the wonderful characters by
that name in “The Art of Asking”. Ms. Loeffler’s interceding indicates the
corruption of the German/ Austrian literary establishment. The kid keeps
getting his way, no matter what.
If you looked at the early work, looked
at it closely, that is if you experienced a book as you read it, and what
transpired during its writing you would see not only anxiety but that the
writer by writing succeeded in conquering it, toyed with it, Handke has
retained a certain coquettish quality all along, a very special economics that,
which might just be an additional fillip to overcoming fear: I once found a
perfect example of it in the poem Singular and Plural:
and tried to demonstrate fear being
overcome.
Being your mother’s love child during
the first two years of your life; I would venture that having such a
beautiful mother delight in your being
alive also assures a forever search of the line of beauty in the curvatures and
not only of Mt. St. Victoire, and being able to conquer anxiety through writing
certainly helped give you an even more swollen head! Besides, you knew your
stuff, were a virtuoso in some respects.
At the party that Jakov Lind, Pannah
Grady and I gave for Gruppe 47 members and American writers to congregate at
Pannah’s splendid so benignly lighted apartment in the Dakota, Handke mentioned
that he had eye problems as an explanation for wearing the kind of dark glasses
in the evening that you associated, then, with gangsters at that time of night;
and, possessing well tuned peripheral vision, and being aware of what my
periphery gleaned, noticed, at one point, that the kid had a good shot of
village sadism in him. That his behavior
would not just be boorish but that of an idiot savant who suffered from
autistic episodes with tads of Tourettism thrown in for good measure were
experiences, and a lot of others, that stood very much in the offing! I hadn’t
the faintest that here was someone whose wife and I would have run away with each
other during their visit to NY in 1971, Handke seemed married to Fredi
Kolleritsch just as in Short Letter Long Farewell, our only lacking
money and opportunity; or someone who would rape a girlfriend and say to me the
following week that he had not had any “women aventuras” for a long time,
perhaps it wasn’t even an adventure, but a routine; nonetheless, it sort of
took my breath away; and the girlfriend who had been something rarer than a
great passion, but a “great fondness”, that turned out to be yet another moment
in my “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; as did Mr. Handke’s thinking I was yet
his friend; a lot of women love to be taken hard, a matter about which I feel
more equivocal than Mr. Handke… Darwin, another who explains everything, would
agree. However, Handke had successfully goaded me, and I would keep my distance
except from the work. Thereafter Handke spooked me, and I tried as quickly as
possible not to be alone with him. The writer Michael Brodsky who had come to
Urizen Books via Patricia Highsmith and Handke served that foil at those times.
#
Excursus
At the completion of the intense
onslaughts with which I translated Walk About the Villages around 1983
Handke felt that it was better than any translation he could ever have
conceived. He also noted the “cutting” tone it had acquired, and, most
astonishingly, seemed to forget, at least for a while, that without his
original text nothing of the sort could have been translated. I might have my
dreams, but nothing both that grand and intimate and rich could ever even have
been conceived by them. Thus the original author remained the only one, by and
large, the great exception is Scott Abbot, who has a notion of how good that
work is and whence smithy it was fashioned. Yes, Kurt Beattie, who played Kaspar
here in Seattle, sensed its richness, and I imagine that first rate director M.
Burke Walker did too, in one of whose classes I once discussed it; oh yes, let
me not forget Zeljko Djukic of the Tutatoo Theater in Chicago, but that would
seem to be it. The J. of Handke’s and my mutual acquaintance merely admired the
line “hefty taxes”, so much for heart on that score. It appears also to have
been too rich for the vast majority of the German reading public.
If you regard the second volume of Handke’s
published diary excerpts, Geschichte des Bleistifts, you will note how
carefully Handke prepared himself for that work. Indeed, I was very much in a
cutting mood, if you haven’t, read Kohut’s great essay on Narcissistic Rage.
As fate would have it, my nemesis at Farrar, Straus, a spanieling stiletto
faggot, Michael diCapua, had become editor in chief for his lying master, he
had already tried but failed to sabotage the Handke project of mine back in the
late 60s as he did so many others – a man not noted for a single author of
import save Woiwode if you accord Woiwode that status. I might have told Handke
that my persistence was laying the grounds for a law suit since Roger Straus
had made certain promises but also managed to screw me out of half my royalties
on the Hesse millions I had brought him. See my homepage for my unhappy
adventures in that skin trade: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
In winter 1985, with the promise from
another publisher, P.A.J. Press, I left New York for the city that has the
bridge with that “touch of evil” to Ciudad Juarez, but all I lost was some
street urchins stealing my hat, and another wife and we first spent three
months in those two cities, then a year way up in Lincoln National Forest, a
fix me up hunting lodge, I reverted to hunting and riding ways and M. and I
also did a lot of traveling in the llano
estacado all the way to Big Bend National Forest, all along the Rio Grande
and across the frontera into the
Carmen range, the right kind of wife for that, and, knowing that “nature was
his measure,” kept writing Handke little postcards with nature scenes from
every hamlet along the way. On returning to New York about a year and a half
later the NY publisher who had committed themselves to Villages reneged
on their promise, and I - no longer in a rage but back in hunting mode after that
year in the wild, wrote them a fine drop dead letter, with copies to the PEN
club and to Handke. That finally elicited a response from Handke, I hadn’t
heard from him in about 18 months, to the effect that “It was nice to hear from
me again” and that such a letter as I had written to P.A.J. was something “one
could not do to him.” First thing that puzzled me was this “nice to hear from you
again” – might he not have received any of the postcards and letters in the
interim? Then I tried to imagine what it might be that was being done to him? What
I was doing was for our mutual work. I imagine now that he must have been
referring to his precious self-image – of course he took care of that himself a
few years later during his intercession in behalf of the Serbians.
Handke’s letter ended
with the threat to abrogate our friendship. If you wanted to get my back up,
all you needed was to threaten me, especially during that period, and so I made
sure my retour postcards [it was a few] to a man who was not my friend,
possible friendship had been averted already in the mid-70s, but of whose work
I was more than a friend, were legibly typed on my brand new electronic Brother
typewriter, the first with a bit of computer memory and plastic spool ribbon, and
sent back something to the effect of: “Aren’t we lucky that L. and I in Spring
of 1971, she sure would have suited me fine, and you and J. hasn’t interfered
with this friendship.” And that was that, Handke might have laughed and we’d
really be friends then, I myself had forgotten all about the injury during the
translation of Walk About the Villages, had even been grateful for
having ruined the relationship with the “great fondness” who had revealed
herself to be a schmooze and a macher,
no need for me to be a Leonard to her Virginia, as I forget his wretched, I
call it his “Bruno Handke side” when reading or being under the influence of
the best of him, his work. But no, unfortunately Handke remained true to form
and as “humorless as death,” and my W.A.T.V. being the best translation he had
ever seen did not keep him from going to Ralph Mannheim and having a second one
made. Alas poor Handke is all I can say. However, the appearance of the
Mannheim translation, prior to mine, for once totally infuriated me. You find a
distorted [the usual distorted I would say of matters of this kind] aspect of
part of these events in The Afternoon as a Writer about the alleged
former friend who is traveling from one sierra to the other as he goes mad. Humorless
as death, Handke appears not to have known, hated being caught, lied, and thus
ever so regretfully I must concur with Marie Colbin’s every single point on the
estimate of Handke’s character [2], except
that he was “just a narcissistic writer” as she evidently herself does
no longer as she keeps performing his work, now no longer fails to appreciate
what it takes to become that great a couturier of the language he is to whom
self-image yet seems to matter more than anything, how he appears on stage, and
whose self-image is so wounded and tetchy; and except, hearing and seeing her
perform Handke texts, she certainly is still pretty, but how Handke could have
stood her presence for even one night without putting duct tape over her mouth
is beyond my ears, who knows perhaps he did but she won’t tell us about having
been a victim in a sick relationship for some years:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/09/links-to-videos-of-handke-plays-that.html
I
imagine the part of my derisive reply to Handke’s threat that got to him was
the bit of L. and I having run off together, a reminder of the “worst thing
that ever happened” to him. I had yet to appreciate the devastation that that
act wrought by looking closely at the works of the period 1971 to 1976, Sorrow
Beyond Dreams, Nonsense & Happiness, A Moment of True Feeling, Weight of
the World and how Handke imaginatively writes his way out of his injury by
several acts of withdrawal, Left-Handed Woman and A Slow Homecoming.
And if I had appreciated the devastation then, I might have left out that part
of my reply, I would certainly have been a bit more thoughtful than on
automatic fury. Handke commented on my poems in my Headshots that I
still seemed to be in a fighting mood, I imagine he didn’t think I might fight
him, too. At any event, I was now free of the relationship to the person, of
course not to the texts, to marry those is fine. Lucky me in that respect, in
many ways. I was in a position to remain a getreuer
Korreptitor to his texts, sell our correspondence when I needed to, which
would fetch far more now I imagine, be a tough on idiot critics as I liked,
etc.
Villages was eventually published by Ariadne Press, but is
now out of print. That stellar firm managed to sell 500 copies in about 15
years, little Urizen and Continuum Books sold about 5,000 copies of Innerworld
and Nonsence & Happiness in a few years, of course we submitted
galleys to Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal so the world might know of
the existence of these books instead of the cellars in which Ariadne Press’s
books molder. There was only one more brief letter from Handke indicating that
he had nothing against the publication of the translation being published, to
the word and the text we are true, to not much else. When it devolved that no
one seemed to be or want to translate the great 1999 VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR I
contacted Dr. Hardt at Suhrkamp, who is in charge of foreign rights, and
indicated that I would be willing to translate the text at no charge, and
prepare a translation and a playing version, since I felt that the text a whole
would overwhelm the attention span of my local gnats. Via Hardt Handke
communicated that “I should accept” – little did he seem to know that the last
thing I needed was yet another albatross to shlepp. If we had not been on the
outs this getreue Korreptitor would
have gone on translating all the plays:
got
a few of them published and only a single one of the late great plays performed
in English, The Hour we knew nothing about each other, which works so
well because it is, on one level, as unchallenging as dance theater, and no one
really understands it and its movement, or grace – can’t say that I’ve run into
a single review that comments on that line of beauty that most Handke texts
have.
However, unbeknownst at least to Dr. Hardt, Scott
Abbott, the translator of JOURNEYS TO THE RIVERS [JUSTICE FOR SERBIA] not yet
the friend he is now, was already translating VOYAGE, Conjunctions was even going to run an excerpt until the J.L. Marcus
crime appeared in the NYRB, a task he completed a few years ago, first rate
work, and neither his or my after all fairly connected attempts to get it
staged show any results so far in this garbage heap culture. Here in Seattle I
had initially found interest in Richard White at Cornish, who then never got back to me for a second
date – he was too busy giving away money from the local arts fund, to matters
that never never never will get beyond the borders of these philistine
surrounds. Ditto for all the ones who once claimed “Oh Handke I love his work.”
Bullshit artists, lazy bones, it’s not the system, a better system with these
people would re-create the same culture. I.e. matters are entirely hope-less.
The few are far too few.
B
One instance of Handke appearing and I availing
myself of Michael Brodsky as a foil is the worm hole to matters becoming
novelistic and truly worm eaten. The year must be 1977. Handke did not have
Amina along as he once did as well, and I decided to go to my, one of the two
watering holes in our downtown then urban pioneering idyll, Barnabus Rex, which
was on the north side of that very short block of Captain Duane Street between
Hudson Street and West Broadway, two blocks north of Chamber, half a dozen of
the then still erect WTC, the other was Puffy’s at Jay and Hudson, with author
Jim Stratton as part owner. At Barnabus that night the head bartender of that
shoebox of a bar that had a bar pool-table and a famous juke box and a postage
stamp to dance on, was “Ace”, Andreas Nowa, and I will always recall the way
Ace’s face opened gradually into the most welcoming broad happy smile – Ace had
studied directing but found that directing the extraordinary goings on at
B-Rex, then Mickey’s and ultimately “The Raccoon Lodge,” quite slaked his
directorial thirst – when I introduced Handke to him, whose work he knew of his
own accord. Handke and Brodsky talked, I played pool and danced a bit, I
noticed that the two of them made attempts in that direction, awkward shuffles.
The evening was notable for two matters, one that Laurie Spiegel, with whom I
had taken a loft and lived in Duane Park for two years appeared at the
threshold and promptly fainted at the sight of me happily with friends instead
of being two-by-four tossed by her after I had moved out from her harridans
fifth floor , the strapping Aussie sheep farmer’s son the Maoist Tim Burns carried
her home; and Handke whispering to me out of the nowhere that if I needed $
10,000 for Urizen Books I should call on him. [5] An observation of Handke’s
from that evening has made it into Die Geschichte des Bleistift’s to the
effect that he had seen someone who was both playful and serious. Certainly those were the qualities that had
also attracted me to his work initially, who would eventually call himself, accurately,
“the melancholy player.” If Handke had one actress after another because he
said actresses were “lighter” [I would say the company of a pretty actress make
Handke look better is the reason, and if he feels better he feels less
depressed], all my marriages and marriage-like living arrangements were with
artists, two painters, two writers, one dancer, one daughter of a painter on
the way to becoming a painter herself, and Laurie, the composer, music touched
me most deeply of all, and love of Spiegel Musik, their work exceeded love of
their fleshly presence. From such delusions many a “La Bohéme” is born. Even now I
can fall in love with a poetess just reading a fine translation of a poem,
thank you for laughing Basheva. The fatalities of sons of beautiful mothers.
Let us now fast forward to the early
90s and UC Riverside where I met “sie sind bei Erich Wolfgang Skwara” is how his
answering machine greets you who had met Handke at Martin Walser’s place at the
Bodensee, which I had once visited in 1969. He needed someone to bring the
translation of his wonderful Don Juan novel THE PLAGUE OF SIENA up to snuff and
it sure was a pleasure to do so. Udderwise, as became quickly clear, Skwara was
a decadent, which did not faze me except that he, too, seemed to be one of
those Don Juans who were intent on injuring women. An interesting relationship
might ensue, not a close one ever, I was a bit more awake. In a conversation
between Skwara and Handke which this absolutely wonderful tattle tale gossip
reported Handke explained that his and mine relationship was on the rocks
because I had not repaid the 10 K loan he had made to Urizen Books. Well no, it
was because I had insulted him with my letter, and I recounted Handke’s
proclivities with the fairer sex, roughness of which Skwara himself had gotten
good wind off, and Skwara mentioned that he would take care not to afford
Handke the opportunity to have any of his women! Men! Just like me: in the
later 70s I had a really precocious girlfriend who was studying in Paris and
who it turned out was a double for the young Marie Colbin, who was only in
Handke’s future then, I had made it a point never to take Rachel to visit
Handke, who had moved out of the dark, nicely mysterious extensive
semi-basement on the Rue Montmorency to a small Gründerzeit castle in Meudon, the very one where Left
Handed Woman was filmed, but only to the man who became my favorite author
ever, the aging United Front War reporter Wilfred Burchett and his Bulgarian
very peasant sturdy wife, in Clamart, the quartiér one over from Meudon.
When the firm, Urizen Books, had gone down
and I started on what seemed like a god-send, the translation of WALK ABOUT THE
VILLAGES, in the course of that correspondence, Handke had brought up the
subject of the outstanding loan and wrote that at the time he had made good on
the promise this was a considerable sum for him
- and in retrospect I thought if I had known that I would not have
called on it, and he also wrote that it did not seem to be enough, indeed it
was not, $ 500,000 would have been [see FN # 5], but I wondered whether Handke
had any idea of the finances involved in that curious business of book
publishing where you pay advances it can take many years to recoup, have to pay
salaries and printers and buy paper and afford book sellers credit… If my
father’s example as an extraordinarily capable but pathos drenched businessman
had not made business of any kind such an unattractive proposition I might even
have decided to get myself trained in all aspect of that business in my 20s,
opportunities certainly afforded themselves, and not learned the trade by the
seat of my pants and, but for the hideous partner ship, business was both fun
and surprisingly clean: one bookshop once did not pay up at all during those
seven years, one typesetter once held me up and demanded twice the agreed on
price on final galleys for Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize play Buried Child,
the mob stole the first ten boxes of self-named play from a loading dock and a
“used” book shop downtown had copies before I did. By and large, I could not
even complain about reviewers as I now do about the treatment Handke has been
receiving the past 25 years in this country. Sure, there were these curious
events when a marvelous book such as Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama of the 19th
Century or Gavino Ledda’s Padre Padrone fell entirely through the
cracks, no matter what you as the midwife had done, and you then scratched your
head.
At the time, in the early 80s, I
replied to Handke that I had an inheritance, as I then did, and my will would
mention the debt and consigned the sum to him or to Amina whoever happened to
be alive. Later, when it devolved that Suhrkamp owed me $ 10 K from my
representation work for them from 1969 to 1971, I also wrote him that since
Unseld – as usual I might say – did not honor agreements with the “small
people” might put an extra 10 K on Handke’s Suhrkamp issued American Express
card: Indeed if you are an A-list Suhrkamp author, at least at that time, you
got your own Suhrkamp American Express card and your quarterly royalty
statements were accounted in that fashion; i.e. since you could as it were draw
ahead, these statements were meaningless. Siegfried Unseld basically was a holdup
artist, who if he had done what he did on a street, would have spent time in
jail; since he, however, only did it to a fellow publisher, Roger Straus – I
want a larger share of the mass paperback rights for Hesse – we are talking
hundred of thousands dollars – or we will not permit any other such sales,
moreover we will not sign the second ten book contract – you get away with it, since
you need to continue to be in business with each other, and the only not very
serious consequence is that the agency, Lantz-Donadio and I will stop repping
you. I was touched to read in the recently published Unseld-Bernhardt
correspondence how Bernhardt seemed to know the vulture and held him up the way
an artist can a besotted vulture, I could sympathize with poor Siegfried’s
merciless addiction to genius and culture. Again see my home page http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
for
the depth of criminality in that field. I would not drift into it again, but
follow my childhood love of flora and fauna and try to work as much as possible
in the field.
Since I had translated WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES for
Handke, at his request, I might have brought that up. What amounted to six
months intense work over a three year period eventually earned me $ 650.00. $
500 from the publisher Ariadne Press, $ 150.00 from Partisan Review, and a fine
bottle of California Red from Jim Krusoe at the St. Monica Review, who also
published an excerpt, minus hundreds of dollars in postage and Xerox to find a
publisher. In other words, Handke was lying to Skwara about the cause for his
and mine being personally on the outs. What might a real man have said? [a]
“When I told him that I didn’t like the way he was going about finding a
publisher for the work he insulted him.” Would have been close enough to the
truth. Or [b] I screwed his girlfriend back in the 70s, it never seemed to
bother him then, now he brings it up and claims he and Libgart would have run
away. I and my work don’t need it.”
Lie only when your existince seems to depend on it,
something I have had to do only once. Handke
appears to have learned lying early in life, he even claims that as soon as he
is caught he lies like the dickens, perhaps it is a part of his general feeling
of overall entitlement. In an amazing interview with Rene Mueller, Handke at
one point voices the opinion that he’d like to be a real “Schuft” at some point
in the future, and Mueller, rather wittily, replies that there is certainly
ample time left for that – who as an investigative reporter interviewer seems
to leave something to be desired as he places another Handke interview in the
pages of a feuilliton. Thus poor
Marie Colbin could not be more right about Handke’s character, wrong about his
being exclusively a narcissistic writer; and since Handke is such a split
being, his lousy character does not effect his work too often, not at all when
he is as honest as he is in, say, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES or DON JUAN; in a
mixed bag such as MORAWIAN NIGHTS, severely. As to Kultchur, don’t necessarily reach for your side arm on hearing the
word, but do keep one in your holster when dealing with the vultures.
End
Excursus
After Princeton and the party in New
York in 1966, you might conclude that the fellow had made an impression, that
you would read his first novel and look at his plays, Unseld was certainly
happy that a young author had risen to the occasion, in the background would
remain these hints of darkness. That the dark would manifest itself then also
in the work and in the way the person lived his life might have come as an
unhappy realization, but what of course came as ultimately by far greater a
surprise was the range of the talent and what it could elicit in me and that
there was that much love in the fellow, that he could also be a sweetheart of a
guy, and generous, and helpful, and that he turned out to be a genius, and a
hardworking, well trained one – that came as one of the more pleasant surprises
in my life which would be a far emptier than it is without that encounter; and
I am speaking not just for myself. And that he then afforded me the opportunity
to get off the Handke bus and merely report on what I had experienced and sell
our correspondence of maybe 75 letters for far less than they would fetch now.
In 1966 I certainly had
not the faintest that Handke was someone whose work I might want to translate,
personally he was not someone I was attracted to spend time with. As fate or
whatever would have it, a few years later with a job at FSG I persuaded the
powers that be, with Susan Sontag’s endorsement, to take on a novel of his and
the early plays; playing with translating the plays to see who might be the
right translator – some pages of Self-Accusation - found it a lot of
fun. Thus you became involved, not finding anyone to produce the plays… you [I]
became involved more deeply.
I eventually realized that I was one of
those someones for whom Pound seemed to have said in his ABC of Reading
that one needed only to know a few things really well. The first instance of
that was becoming a Joycean during my senior year in high school [thank you
Yoshira Sonbanmatsu!], although, as I think back, I had also been one of those
German kids who then read each and every 50+ book by the German writer of
adventures set in the Middle East, Central America and the United States Indian
country, and retained a lot of its pretty good geography and knowledge of the
flora and fauna of those regions – although evidently not well enough not to
pursue a big black and white bushy- tailed what I thought cat when, newly
arrived, I found myself living at the edge of the woods in West Orange, New
Jersey in 1950, with unpleasant consequences as the cat raised its tail and
sprayed. Joyce was succeeded, the idea of spending time with Joyceans did not
appeal to me, by a year’s complete involvement with Faulkner, then a year of
Kafka and Co., the idea of becoming a Kafka nut did not prove attractive
either, although Kafka scholars are a nicely variegated lot and he certainly
had great initial responders in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Then
came Brecht and Lukacs, Brechtians for a long time either smoked cigars and
wore their hair the way Brecht did, but again: a variegated lot. Goethe
scholars I have found to be the humanely richest and congenial of that kind,
starting with Harry Pfund at Haverford; and Pound, the idea of being a Poundian
was even less attractive then being a Joycean, he seemed to attract the
genuinely mad and fanatical or soft skulled, and I actually never ploughed
through the Cantos in their entirety, or had the slightest desire to trek to
St. Elizabeth, although certainly everything else was of real benefit I think,
especially to my ear. Faulknerians I never met except for William Styron with
whom I had the one really good conversation about Faulkner after my Freshman
year, Conrad, Henry James, I ought to thank my stepfather, Colonel Richard
Weber who must be getting out of limbo just about now, for having been an utter
Shakespeare nut, one of several endearing qualities, which obviated any further
Shakespeare nuts down the line and certainly helped avoid some serious gaffes
translating Handke who is a kind of Shakespearean talent. Musil… has fine
scholars quite a few of whom I admire greatly, sanity prevails. At any event I
carried these affairs pretty well to the limit and then went on. Later would
come Adorno, who must have the greatest pain-in-the-ass schoolmasterly
followers; and eventually Freud whose complete works I read three times, and
his disciples. What a wealth there! Handke scholarship, best as I can tell, has
attracted some truly talented translators and scholars and fine minds – Scott
Abbott, Karl Wagner, Fabjan Haffner, Hans Höller, Georg Pichler [the one who is at the University of Alcala
in Madrid] Krishna Winston [despite her failure to read the early work and the
idiot advice she gave to Farrar, Straus on KALI], Tom Barry, David Coury, Frank
Pillip, Schmidt-Dengler and some of his students, to mention far too few of
those who then make up for what the reception leaves to be desired… Some scholars are
now so indebted to Handke,
not just in my postage stamp, so much is invested
in him,
that a differentiated assessment, that is an
interesting
assessment, instead of the building hagiography...
will be difficult, these are the pendulums...
to come…
In the U.S. Handke has received a
single review from a peer, William Gass, who then regretted that Steve
Wasserman at the L.A. Book Review only afforded him half the space he wanted
[see the handke-revista-review blog for the Gass’s piece on MY YEAR IN THE
NO-MAN’S BAY.
I was going to make my decimation of
Neil Gordon’s criminally incompetent NY Times Book Review of this round-up, you
can find it at:
as you can the even more detailed job I
did on J.L. Marcus equally stupid but far more damaging piece in the New York
Review of Books. Then there are the sweet nothings that sweet thing say, the
great exception, as mentioned before, was the apparent comprehension of ONE
DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE – J.L. Marcus, desperately looking for signs
of pro-Serbian sentiment even there, missed Handke’s surrogate, the
pharmacist’s nasty insert on some damaged NATO vehicles being pulled north
along the Autobahn of the improbably named Taxham, a kind of Salzburg suburb.
Among introductions, let me not fail to mention Greil Marcus’s fine one to the
NYRB Books edition of SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL.
Then there are the Juergen Brockhoffs, I imagine
that there
must be others of that ilk in the discipline, who
feel as he does, not that all of them are for sale to the FAZ.
Heinrich Detering, someone whose specialty
is the productive conflict of bi-sexual impulses,
Handke might be a fit subject for his approach if he took the trouble to
research what psychoanalysis avail in that respect, preferably doing one
himself so as to be able to speak with some authority, has
an oddly idyllic take on that wonderfully dark DON JUAN, which might just
become, nay already has become my favorite
Handke short novel, his piece can be found at:
and I have devoted a page to Don Juan at:
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/04/review-of-peter-handkes-don-juan-short.html
I had a similar experience to the
Handke reception during my Freshman year in college in reading the swinishness
to which Faulkner’s work was subjected prior to his winning the Nobel Prize
and, optimistic fool I continue to be, did not think I would ever encounter
anything along those lines again. Ah, but if there isn’t that super-swine J. L
Marcus in the NYRB whose infamy I took the trouble to decimate point by point
at:
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html
Neil Gordon, who is even head of a
writing program and who is mentioned individually only because he appears to
have some power is decimated point by ugly stupid point at:
But it is not Gordon who is to be
blamed, it is editors like Oh Tannenbaum, Bob Silvers, Robert Wilson of the
alleged American Scholar who avail
themselves of the likes of Gordon, J.L. Marcus and Michael McDonald, literary
counsel to the American Interest, and
I blame perpetuators such as Dennis “The Mutton” Dutton of “Artdaily” an adjunct of the
Chronicle of Higher Education for such perpetuations to the exclusion of
balancing counter-argument. Nay, after I complained to the Chronicle about his
doing two Michael McDonald idiocies and nothing else, the sweet Mutton me know
a few months down the line that he’d run into something positive but because I
had complained would not do me the favor. And that poor sheep then complains
when I call him petty, and what that has to do with me anyway, or the
conveyance of halfway credible information
As to the Handke’s publishing career in
the U.S., you can lay blame, and squarely at the graves of Roger Straus and
Michael diCapua. Handke collections were in semi-mass paperback with Avon and
Collier Books in the 70s, the New Yorker had
devoted an entire issue to Left-Handed
Woman and run a huge especially tailored except from The Repetition. The plays were done all the time in colleges. Then
F.S.+G. waited approximately 10 years and brought out a collection of three
very different book under the title of its lead novel A Slow Homecoming which three books might have been published in
sequence, as they were written, subsequent to Left-Handed Woman. The transition to a somewhat changed Handke was
lost; even though Weight of the World had done well FS&G did not
follow up with Geschichte des Bleistifts [The History of the Pencil], and
though Kaspar + other Plays went through no end of re-printings and Ride
Across Lake Constance and Other Plays sold out, F.S.G. did not publish a
single of his later greater plays. For that Steve Wasserman during his tenure as
editor of the FSG subsidiaries Hill & Wang – where plays are published - and Noonday Books deserves some of the blame,
or blame the avariciousness of the quarterly statement. And then in the 90s
Roger Straus writes Siegfried Unseld that he has a problem and its name is
Handke! No, whatever circle of hell you dwell in Roger, the name and problem is
Roger Straus, and that Handke must have had near a dozen editors at Farrar,
Straus over the incremental now forty years. Currently F.S. & G. relies on
his chief prose translator Krishna Winston as advisor on what Handke to publish
and not. For reasons of wanting some time to herself and thinking that the
truly very different novel Kali is like other Handke she turned it down.
Not only is this evidence of translator’s megalomania, I can think of at least
a half dozen translators from the German who could do a fine job with that
book, but also of pretense, since Krishna, first rate translator, has not read
any Handke prior to the time she came aboard around 1990 with the death of
Ralph Mannheim, nay I have been trying to prevail on her for years to read Walk
About the Villages. Alas and alas and alas, the wrong kind of amateurishness
of U.S. trade publishing will never cease.
#
Thus, what came as mostly an unhappy
experience as of a certain point were matters incidental to being involved in
Handke’s work, the reception, his mediocre publisher who had dropped the ball
already in the early 80s and still hasn’t really picked it back up, the
controversies… literary intramural food fights… German reviewer lack nothing in
incompetence over folks like, e.g. David Siegel, that Ulrich Greiner and Iris
Radisch are / were chief reviewers for my aunt’s Die Zeit, or that there is an idiot like Hubert Spiegel writing for
the Frankfurter Allgemeine… Oddly enough, the re-invented Neues Deutschland, once the organ of the East German S.E.D.
[Unified i.e. forcibly joined socialist and communist parties of the Peoples
Republic of Germany] does some of the best Handke reviews there! My guess is
because now, no longer a party organ, they still revel in their independence and
their heart continues to beat on the left, and are under the delusion that
Handke, the capitalist, is still a socialist!
Handke of course has his devotees that
unhappily can be as uncritical as Hesse fans used to be. [4] H.M. Enzensberger
has a nasty line about both kinds in one of his poems “first she read Hesse
then Handke” – anyhow, a devotee such as Lothar Struck is what Handke ought to
have as a mother French saint of a wife Portuguese cleaning woman for whom her
son can do no wrong, devoted and soft in the noodle he starts to sorrow that
there will be no more books at a ficciones
such as Morawian Nights, thinks that Handke has never written in as
childlike a fashion before [no child writes such formalist tour de forces,
Lothar! as Moravian has them] is willing to overlook that her son beats
the shit out of women, is astounded by Handke calling Madelaine Allbright
“Ganzhell” and that Handke has some of his own characters make brief
appearances in the book! Alas, what befuddlement will do in our respective Midsummer
Nights Dreams! meanwhile as only mothers can be. Since there are so many that do wrong by Handke,
why not someone who is besotted, like Lothar Struck the wife Handke never had! Yet his many reviews of
Handke's work at his Begleitschreiben blog
http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/
and at the first rate German on-line
Literary Mag
GLANZ UND ELEND contains many fine and
valuable insights
http://www.glanzundelend.de/startseite.htm
Struck thus can be forgiven for losing his mind over
MORAWIAN NIGHTS, sorrowing that this might be the master's last
work, on the one hand reading
autobiographically but then refusing to do
so overall. Lothar is forgiven for this mental lapse, after all if I dwell on the mistakes in love I made for
all the pretty girls, never never never in
literature, if only the wenches had been
books I would not have lost my mind and read some of them better and even loved
some of them better... Struck helps obviate some of junk
perpetrated by German reviewers. It really is not those poor sods who ought to
be blamed but the editors of these organs, one notable exception is the NZZ
[Neue Zuricher Zeitung].
As noted at the beginning of what was
meant to be only 5 k words long: Handke is nearly enshrined in Austria as a
National Treasure despite or perhaps because he is such a unique Popanz; the National Archives there
sprung for an equal amount to the German Marbach archives for their half of his
manuscripts and notebooks; perhaps the Slovenian equivalent will get the future
accumulation, and Handke’s leavings will then be distributed not to the winds
but to the three countries in which he is rooted. Thus scholarship is taking a
somewhat uncritical look at the treasure and making it ready to be exhibited as
a marble statue. However, this photo, with which I will close, would seem most appropriate
to his split nature. When Richard Grey that spectacular Kafka scholar asked me
one day about an ambivalence he sensed in my feelings about my subject, I
explained that you could hang up a lot of clothes on that clothes line,
especially if you looked at all the different matters that you hung on it. But
I can’t say that ambivalence has ever been like this, on the one hand the fellow
elicits disgust on the other, next to my mother, I can’t say I love any one
better.
One day I arrived at Montmorency, 1974 I think, and an Austrian
Backfisch Groupie was there. I sat around for a while thinking what might be
going on, but did not stay long. Calling Handke or his calling me, he mentioned
that he had then exposed himself and that the girl had blushed, precisely of
course the reaction an exhibitionist wants to elicit, and Handke said he did
this when he felt “a bit diabolical.” About ten years later in the make love
not war and love-making is like breathing but for God’s sake don’t fall in love
and into possessiveness of downtown Manhattan of the 70s into the 80s I might
even have asked the girl: do you like making love to two men? It would have
been perfectly normal in Tribeca then. Handke I suspect would have grinned his
famous shit-eating grin. But it wasn’t until I pursued Handke’s childhood
tragedy that I understood why exhibition in all its manifestations was one of
the forces driving his art – not that his so very chaste art elicits
embarrassed blushes from the word, only verbally he does and can, and in his
unceasing need to exhibit himself so competitively and compensatorily and
vocally. However, I recall an analyst saying to me after a performance of
PUBLIC INSULT at the Goethe House in New York that the piece had been as good
as a great communal session in making the audience entirely self-conscious
about being in the world and about language.
Meanwhile my man lives as a
restaurateur of the finest language salad in the Forêt de Chaville, and this “bower bird” in
an even finer retreat on Pheasant lane in
a prairie by a lake:
[1]
Early works: See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Handke#List_of_works
[2-A]
Colbin
Handke introduces his
admission to having beaten a woman, tactical concession defense, as a belated
response to former lover and Lebensgefährte, collaborator on a film now
Erinye Marie Colbin’s going public, during the Handke/ Yugoslavia publicity
wars in the 90s, first in Der Falter, which was picked up
with a description of how
Handke had nearly killed her. ["Ich höre noch meinen Kopf auf den Steinboden knallen. Ich spüre noch den
Bergschuh im Unterleib und auch die Faust im Gesicht... Solange es
Männer gibt auf dieser Welt - Männer wie Dich - einäugig, unnachgiebig,
machthungrig und Ego-breit - wird es auch Waffen geben und somit Kriege... Wer
bist Du denn, daß Du Dich so wichtig nimmst? Bist weder groß, noch edel oder
gar bescheiden und aufrichtig. Ein eitler Schreiber bist Du, der sich sonnt in
der Rolle des 'einsamen Rufers.'... Irgendwie wirst Du diesem Krieg dankbar
sein, denn er befriedigt auf perverse Weise Dein unstillbares Verlangen nach
öffentlicher Anerkennung." A translation of her
statement reads: „I can still feel my head bang on the stone floor. I can
still feel the mountain hiker boots hit my stomach and your fist in my face… As
long as there are men in the world – men like you – one-eyed, unyielding,
power-hungry and egomaniacal – there will be weapons and therefore war… Who are
you, to think of yourself as so important. You are neither great, nor noble nor
modest nor honest. A vain writer is what you are, who suns himself in the role
of the solitary prophet… In some way you will be thankful for this war [The
Yugoslav wars of 1994] because it will satisfy your insatiable longing for
public acclaim.” –
I gives me little
satisfaction [only some] to agree with most of Ms. Colbin’s assessment, who
however herself would I think disavow her statement that he is just a vain
writer – since she herself doesn’t seem to be able not to perform his work, that
is let go. I cannot recall a single instance where Handke in what had been a 20
some year association where he expressed the slightest interest in who I might
be, whence I came, my past, etc. Monomaniacal was fine with me once I got an
inkling of what a genius he was. Yet what surprised me was that someone so
quickly successful might yet be so lonely that he needed to ask me in the 70s
to write to him – once I got a drift on how very different his autism made this
idiot savant, I allowed that it was simply so, not that I necessarily
understood all those equations. Colbin is of course more than right in finding
that the Yugoslav wars afforded Handke a golden opportunity for self-display –
yet some fine works, as detailed above, have resulted from it too. Perhaps we
should just summarize it in your typical all purpose New York Times headline:
“Some good, some bad.” !?
2
b- Colbin]
August 9, 2010
Festwochen Gmunden: Gedemütigte
Frau und Richterin
Marie Colbin
las Peter Handke im Gmundner MYTHOS.
In Peter Handkes Salzburger Jahren Anfang der 80er
war der Schriftsteller der Lebenspartner der Schauspielerin Marie Colbin. Bei
den Festwochen Gmunden las Colbin am Samstag im MYTHOS Handkes Text „Bis dass der Tag
euch scheidet oder eine Frage des Lichts“.
Das MYTHOS in der Badgasse ist ein Ort, an dem nicht über
Qualität diskutiert werden muss. In dem kleinen Geschäft mit großem Anspruch
stehen Film-Raritäten herum, erlesene Literatur und fantastische Vinyl-Platten.
Wer hier Kunde ist, der lässt sich nicht vom Zeitgeist schrecken, der steht auf
Dinge für die Ewigkeit. Mit diesem Anspruch reiste die in Salzburg lebende
Marie Colbin nicht in ihre Heimatstadt. Für die Ewigkeit – was ist das schon,
geht das denn? Sie wollte Peter Handkes im Oktober 2008 entstandenen Monolog
bloß mehr Leben injizieren, als es die blutleere Uraufführung bei den
Salzburger Festspielen im vergangenen Jahr zu Stande gebracht hat. Das gelingt
ihr, mitunter sogar ein bisschen zu lebendig. Sie gibt sich hin, als sei ihr
die Anklage der namenlosen Frau selbst aus der Feder geflossen. Handke reagiert
mit seinem Text auf Samuel Becketts „Das letzte Band“ und dessen Figur Krapp.
Handke bewertete Becketts Werk als die Endstation des Theaters, weil noch mehr
Reduktion nicht zu schaffen sei.
Schweigen ohne Widerrede
„Mit deiner Art Schweigen wolltest du bestimmen über mich, wolltest du mir
dein Gesetz aufzwingen, ein despotisches Gesetz, gegen das es keine Widerrede gab“,
liest und lebt Colbin. Im Raum entsteht eine Ahnung davon, wie es sich zwischen
ihr und Handke abgespielt haben könnte. Colbin ist kleines Mädchen, gedemütigte
Frau und Richterin. Sie stampft, sie marschiert barfuß auf dem eigens
ausgelegten roten Teppich, der sich wie eine Blutspur durch den Laden zieht.
„Neiiiiiiiiin“, schreit sie gellend und wehrt sich gegen die Bilder, die in ihr
aufsteigen, gegen seinen „formvollendeten Gram“ und gegen seine
„Leichenbittermiene“, in der sie „eine verschmitzte, herrlich sinnlose
Lebenslust“ zu erkennen glaubt. Colbin mutet sich ungebremst zu, und als
Adressat ist Handke an diesem Abend nicht mehr aus dem Kopf zu bringen.
Marie Colbin steht kurz davor, ins Filmgeschäft zurückzukehren, im Herbst
wird über die Finanzierung von zwei Projekten entschieden. Bis dahin hat sie
noch einen kleinen Teil ihrer Welt zu retten: das Postamt in ihrem Salzburger
Stadtteil Morzg, das zugesperrt werden soll. Ein Salzburger Freibad hat sie
schon vor dem Abriss bewahrt und damit verhindert, dass anstelle der urbanen
Idylle ein Hotel gebaut wurde. Colbin: „Mit dieser Post ist es genauso, sie ist
ein kleines Kommunikationszentrum, vom Uhu bis zur DVD kriegt man alles, und es
wäre eine Schande, wenn sie es schließen.“ 1400 Unterschriften hat sie schon
gesammelt, die Protestliste wird sie den Zuständigen in Wien zustellen –
freilich per Post.
==============================================
[3-a]
At one point I sat on the podium next to H.M. Enzensberger whom I had met in
1961 at Ruth Landshoff Yorck’s on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. H.M.E.
seemed so bored he was teaching himself Chinese, which would take him probably
less than a month. Aside from Enzensberger I knew a fair number of members of
the Gruppe and their work, I had done long interviews with Uwe Johnson and
Peter Weiss, unfortunately Günter Grass did not allow tape recorders, and I did
not know stenography. The sergeant major of the group who made short shrift of
Handke’s prohibited whole scale attack, only comments on individual texts were
allowed, I had met in Berlin. If I had real personal affinity it was with Peter
Weiss, but what a talented group of people had developed out of the ashes, and
the East Germans were not represented, some Austrians, some Swiss. By Spring
1966 I had spent my Junior year at German Universities; had spent several years
in Germanics in graduate school, which remained impervious to then current
literature, had been a reader for a variety of U.S. publishers, had spent a
year as a literary Scout in Germany with ample time to read, especially at an
aunt’s bookshop in Berlin, even had become somewhat versed in the approved East
German literature, typing was the one of the most useful thing I took away from
high school, no one had mentioned stenography. Had befriended Jürgen Becker, Fritz Raddatz in
Hamburg… had read most everything of the “Wiener Schule” and was developing a good
dim sense of the lay of the different literary landscapes .
[4]
I translated three fairly early Hesse novel in the 60s and it was a chore. I
always admired Ralph Mannheim for bringing Hesse up to snuff in translation.
[5] At that time Urizen was in a bit
of trouble, when was it not, started with $ 200,000 and what expertise I had
and 25 books that I wanted to publish. At that time, 1977, I had just committed
myself to contribute $ 50,000 in capital, but only had $ 20 k, ten from my
father, and 10 that I had earned through some outside editing of the
autobiography of a banker’s wife. Two friends, aside Handke, without being asked
contributed the other twenty. I am still mystified how I might have emanated
that need or been that well liked or at those expressions of confidence at a
moment I was beginning to have some serious doubt about the firm, especially
about the other active partner [the third, Leo Feldsberg, Oberon N.V. was by
and large silent investor who ought to have and certainly had the funds to
invest many a million or at least half a million and the firm could have
established its backlist a bit more quickly and less arduously], Susan Sontag
had just informed me that Wieland Schulz’s [the passport name] moneys derived from his partnership with a
Mafioso in a pornographic dubbing firm, Vicland Productions. I had assumed
until then that Schulz’s working capital of $ 100,000 derived from the little
social documentaries he was making for West German television. Moreover, Schulz
also was beginning to behave just the way Handke himself had described on
meeting him ever so briefly at the premiere of My Foot My Tutor and Self-Accusation
at B.A.M. in Spring 1971. Schulz was showing that he was a shouting nervous
dictator, he had already screwed the other partner out of his $ 50,000
commitment in a venture to make a Midsummer Night’s Dream film where
Judith Thurman received $ 5,000 to write the screen play. For me it became a
question who of the two partner’s was the greater embarrassment, and THIS
threesome had founded what was meant to be a firm “that shared profits with its
authors and was owned by its employees”. [Feldsberg’ residence in Kali,
Colombia was on a hill looking at a hill opposite that the Catholics ascended
on Easter on their knees with Leo cackling as the devout idiots did so. Leo had
one of the great collections of recorded opera, son of a Viennese wine merchant
he had become a rich man courtesy of a $ 25,000 loan from the Danish consul in
the early 40s. Now he wanted to be the impresario that he had dreamed of being
as a young man in Vienna. Leo couldn’t bear to lose a buck on the simplest of
bets, that I guess is how you become and remain a millionaire in this world.]
I did not see a way out of my predicament, but
found ways of introducing moneys into the firm, and found several serious
investors who took one look at Schulz and then passed. Here is the first of my
two grievous errors that led to the demise to the firm. The second even more
grievous and truly fatal one was when our sales manager Hyung Pak showed me
that Schulz was using the firm to sluice money from his off-shore vehicle
Princeton N.V. through Urizen, and that he was taking a salary even when he
didn’t work, Schulz actually, clever [?] fellow, for an alleged investment of $
100,000 managed to take out $ 300,000 from the firm during its approximate
seven year existence. Not only that, he played Feldsberg and me off against
each other, by telling our respective selves that the other wanted Schulz to
run the firm, something that I didn’t find out until I met with Leo after the
firm no longer even existed. At the end, Schulz sold the heart of the firm, its
twelve most valuable titles, for $ 25,000 and kept that money for his Under
the Volcano Venture, a project that he stole from my Spanish director
friend Gonzalo de Herralde Grau one of whose films Schulz had produced out of
the Urizen Office. It was that theft that finally made me see clearly and go
into action, and it turned out that the crazy making Schulz was an utter
coward, as evil so frequently is: served a subpoena he turned blue and fled and
never even showed up in court, thus winning that suit turned out to be child’s
play. Had Handke ever been right about how dark and also at least very German
Schulz was, and discovered in what, five minutes, darkness it took me about
half a dozen years to appreciate. No wonder you might say that I decided to see
an analyst. During the course of the early years of Urizen Books a kind of
sweet dumb and troubled fellow would occasionally show up at Urizen,
progressively more distraught, Victor
Bertini, and he supplied the “Vic” in Vicland [its German pronunciation is the
joke], Schulz’s and his porno-dubbing firm, and he was subjected to the same
financial razzle dazzle that also gradually drove me crazy, so that when I look
back I can see myself behaving like Victor, who was just a soldati, not some smart mobster at all, until the last moment as it
were, but at the last moment Urizen was a
sick horse that had to be put out of its misery; thus it’s failure is
entirely my fault, the fault of my
grandiosity in thinking that my magic could make it survive no matter what.
Schulz eventually fled NY and has gone on to acquire judgments galore in the
European film business, a long trail of destruction lies in his wake:
http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/photo.html
As
someone who knows him observed: “He wants to be caught, and then he wants to do
it again.” i.e. a miserable masochist, and where there is masochism there is
sadism. However, I also felt obligated at the time, and since the fellow also
added the dimension of social history to the firm, and doing it by myself felt
too lonely… I failed to take action until it was too late. But such negligence
and dithering and grandiosity has consequences. However, my failure at least
was not as grave as my grandfather’s in not killing Hitler when he had the
opportunity, as Schleicher’s go-between, and seemed to know what that man’s
ambitions were. My grandmother said that she’s prefer not to have that
gentleman in her house again, the same advice might be passed on to anyone
contemplating having that charmer Wieland Schulz [Keil] over for lunch.
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