My - Michael Roloff’s - Experience with Peter Handke’s
Texts
THEY ARE DYING OUT
=I=
As I mention in a fun essay @
I had no initial intention of translating the
early Handke plays when I acquired them for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the
late 60s, I was just testing what translator to give the work, which then
turned out to be fun, KASPAR becoming a bit strenuous!
[see notes]
Handke’s
performance at Princeton in May 1966 had intrigued me & at the party that
Jakov Lind and Pannah Grady and I gave for the Gruppe 47 at Pannah’s splendid
apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan I had tried to find out what writers
Handke had in mind whose work he objected to at Princeton
(that he called himself “the new Kafka” I only
found out later from Ted Ziolkovsky);
In the query process got a hint of someone who
was certainly spirited in his Beatles get-up and small-checkered brown shirt
with the flower in the button hole and the grin of a village sadist at a
certain very memorable moment at which Alan Ginsberg earned life-long contempt.
The texts of the Sprechstuecke did not come out of the blue for someone who had
become familiar with the work of the Wiener Gruppe – whether I realized
the very classical manner in which Handke even then used language I do not
recall. Comparatively speaking though, my tastes were more conservative at the
time though the term conservative becomes quickly useless, but I was a Musil
man & theatrically a Brechtian who liked and felt close to a lot of German
writers from the 20s and 30S and not only to the postwar crew with whose work I
had familiarized myself during the then past six years.
Of Handke’s prose I did Goalie
but even
though I was reading Roman Jakobson, Wittgenstein and especially Noam Chomsky’s
work on language I did not figure out until later the degree to which Handke’s
dissociative grammatical procedures [Handke had made it a point to consult a
text on schizophrenia and language for the writing of GOALIE] actually worked,
in addition to the evident more standard phenomenology. Thus it will not
surprise the reader that I became especially sensitive to astonishing formal
grammatical maneuvers in later work such as One
Dark Night, Absence & Sierra del Gredos.
Instances where Handke uses dream metaphor – Afternoon of a Writer’s use of dream
metaphor
does not really require recourse to contemporary
analytic psychology, Shakespeare or Faulkner would have been capable of similar
metaphoric efficiency and depth.
Handke’s first novel
Die Hornissen
I realized at once was nothing I could put over
at Farrar, Straus where I had a fief for German literature.
Even now HORNETS presents problems for me in
understanding how it works - perhaps it demands too much work from the reader –
see anon on the subject of how Handke involves the reader in unusual ways.
Had I been a junior editor at Grove, which had
Fred Jordan and Richard Seaver, or at Viking, my own publisher, both places I
would much have preferred to work than at Farrar Straus, I might have persuaded
friend Fred to do Hornets – but was Hornissen sufficiently perverse for this
incarnation of Austro-British love of perversity?
HORNISSEN was too experimental for
me to try it out at FSG where a very limited non-standard experimental work
found a home, Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag’s early novels, and the early Tom
Wolfe – these were all Henry Robbins authors, the one editor with whom I
connected and who soon left. I ought to have tried Hornets out with Susan Sontag who, after all, had endorsed Handke’s
early plays which had helped in putting him over. My oversight I realize in
retrospect!
– FSG’s tenor was conservative. I published Nossack
there, Nelly Sachs, Christa Wolf. These are main-line authors. And some fine
things -including an Adorno reader I had spent a year developing and that Susan
was going to write an introduction to - were shot down by one particular
nemesis [see anon]. I was quite young and had not encountered back-stabbing or
envy until that time, and more insecure than I am now.
–
Matters changed with the publication of Handke’s
second novel, DER HAUSIERR
the book from which he had read at Princeton and
reading an excerpt from which can’t possibly give the reader an idea of how it
works.
The Peddler or Tramp or Intinerant,
Panhandler
as the title might be translated, drew me in at
once for the work & play it required & discipline on the part of the
reader, the lightness with which it treated a fright that is in fact extremely
sinister, and the way literature -
black mask American detective fiction -
is used
as a defense: there!
That is the heart of Handke’s endeavor at that
time!
Defensive/ aggressive – but against what terror!?
It pervades his early work and I understood why
he had also pronounced himself
“The New Kafka”
at Princeton!
{We all recall Franz calling himself “the First”!}
Now that
I’ve had a fine course in psychoanalysis I appreciate
DER HAUSIERER
even more and what lies in back of it!
It was also a very well done work, as delicate
as Virginia Woolf at her best,
and so it became part of the first contract but
was replaced by the far simpler,
straight-forward
GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK
which seems a very logical outgrowth from Hausierer, it so obviously derived, and
there was a time I knew exactly at what point I figured the idea for the later
book had occurred to Handke while he was writing DER HAUSIER. The pre-occupation, obsession with anxiety
and fear and how to overcome it are at their strongest and most complex and
deepest and demanding here, a period which ends
after he had explored anxiety
in the fear drenched
My Foot My Tutor
MF/MT is also the essence of the Master/Slave
& S/M
dialectic.
It is a beautiful text and I think it was
pre-published in TDR, by Erika Munk.
The other fear and terror drenched text is
HOESPIEL I/ Radio Play I
Every sentence each word become drenched in
fearful associations. And yet matters always remain in some sense very
literary, as Bob Giroux remarked about KASPAR who certainly has his terrors,
too. A ritualizing literariness as defence against fear! in childhood night’s
the defender would have been masturbating would be Kohut’s guess. -
One silly question that keeps haunting me is
whether a book like Der Hausierer
might be of homeopathic use, as an inoculation,
instead of taking anti-anxiety drugs! Was Handke
writing as “surrogate” as he was in the early plays? I certainly led a much terrorized
German childhood, too, and bombers were part of it as of Spring 1940.
Meanwhile Handke has pronounced himself the
anti-Kafka,
it took a while to appreciate that.
He was not going to be done in by fear, if he
could possibly help it and had a mother to back him up, internally and externally,
I even found an exemplary example
for the stilling of anxiety in one of the texts
from the early INNERWORLD
where you can see and feel and experience Handke
overcoming anxiety in the writing
Is there
anything more self-empowering and grandiose-making then the ability to conquer
fear,
and not by rationalizing it away?
Thus no wonder that the justifiably anxiety-disposed
Handke would be writing all the time and, as we now know, from Malte Herwig’s
biography
meister-der-daemmerung
The biography may not be
immediately useful in adding to appreciation of Handke’s texts, but Herwig has
done some good “shoe leather” work & come up with a lot of matters, also
quite unfavorable about Handke the person which confirmed certain suspicions I
myself had in that regard.
Handke, the person, who is not the focus, may be
in many respects the most marvelous marvel I have encountered in a not
altogether parched life, but as there is a devil in Ms. Jones there exists a
monster and it is not sacred in Handke.
Nor is how the person and the work relate the
focus here, although this relationship –
= and its varieties -
will be/ cannot help but be entertained in the
Morawian
Night
Discussion.
Handke practiced writing as of an early age the
way some pianists and violinists start out and would say later on
“I am so nervous but everything I write is then
so calm.”
and by the time that he composed
A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
EXCERPT
he wrote me, and probably not only me, that he
“was now capable of doing anything in writing”
- a matter I think you ought to think of as coming from
a composer who now had complete and virtuoso control over his métier –
- = that is he senses he has the right way of presenting
matters in his artistic way -
- something that was confirmed by the composition of the
1981 dramatic poem
- WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
- See anon.
-
By the time of
A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
Handke, however, had suffered anxiety attacks
against which no writing would protect him,
See the three progressively stormier poems in
NONSENSE ANd HAPPINESS
Thus I have always regretted thatI didn’t manage
to get
Der Hausierer
done in English as it has been in all other major
languages.
HAUSIERER requires, asks the same kind of work
on the part of the reader that is asked of audiences at Handke’s plays that
Klaus Kastberger has called attention to,
a matter that requires yet another assaying to
be explored to a further extent.
By that time I myself was getting hooked
also on what the performance of the plays can
effect
When a trial run proved much fun I then did I
all the plays up to and including the 1981
Walk
About the Villages
which,
as I
state in its long postscript
part of it is online at
has it,
had left
me a husk, gasping for air.
Nor had I any intention of participating in the
directing these plays & I would not have I suppose if U.S theater had been
on the ball and friend, actor, author Michael Locascio had not returned from
San Miguel D’Allende in 1070 with his hippie troupe, including one J.B. in
whose arms “The Hammer” breathed his last on some railways ties one cold
Mexican tequila nite,
and we did the first rehearsed readings at a
variety of venues all over New York.
In the instance of
The Ride Across Lake Constance
I had not the faintest what to expect of a
performance
and would never have been able to formulate the
experience if I had not done an analysis and come to understand that what is
called a “good hour” is subliminally cathartic. The
insistent shock therapy of
Offending the Audience an analyst at the Goethe
House performance compared to first-rate group therapy.
Thus I sensed from early on, with all these
texts, that they were experienced in ways other than the more usual drama, not
that drama of every kind constitutes an experience of some kind; but Handke’s
early work I think is best approached via the
“happening” aesthetic.
=II=
As I was leaving from one of these peculiar
early 1970s visits to Handke’s domicile on the Rue Montmorency in Paris -
- Handke, typically, quickly tiring of his visitors
but then, invariably, asking them to come again
(MORAVIAN NIGHT, at the beginning as the guests arrive,
contains an allusion to this modus) -
Handke
gave me a copy of
Als das Wuenschen noch geholfen hat
and said that if I wanted to I might want to
translate its three long poems, which became the volume
NONSENSE & HAPPINESS
in American and was published by Urizen Books in
1976.
Handke himself described these poems as
successor to those in
INNERWORLD OF THE OUTERWORLD OF THE INNERWORLD
which I translated
- again a lot of fun! -
and
published at Continuum Books in 1974.
Only with respect to the chronological truth of
successors however, do these three, successively stormier, poems
relate to the prior very varied collection.
Whereas quite a few of the prior poems featured very concrete moments of
anxiety, these three poems seemed to deal with the time once anxiety had struck
and knocked the recipient’s socks off into a state of panic – and so it is not
all that surprising that around that time Handke ended up in a hospital with a
panic-induced tachycardia attack and started to take valium, two pieces of
information I only gathered later.
So what had happened to the fellow who was
riding high, a multiple best-selling author Buechnerprize winner lay-a-broad
par excellence who had found a way of conquering fear, the anti-Kafka, what had
laid him low?
First of all I would say
The suicide of Handke’s mother,
Maria Sivec
as evidence in Handke’s
SORROW BEYOND DREAMS
seemed to have induced the kind of shocked state
in which that book is so evidently composed.
Secondly, wife # I, the rasante
actress Libgart Schwartz who haunts the “German
author” in
SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL
- (the physical equivalent of her longing I expect is
what Handke sensed but did little to respond to!
had escaped what
Handke ,far in the future, in
MORAVIAN
NIGHT
would describe as
“the cold salamander”
(writing hotly!)
and one would assume, the constant insult of a
multiply cheating husband who himself, in pasha fashion, would of course not
allow even one of his affairs to have a second lover!
A Libgart
Schawartz who sought refuge with Klaus Peymann, the director of Handke’s plays.
All I, translator and Suhrkamp Verlag
representative, knew in 1971, when Handke and his wife and fellow Austrian
cultural package content Freddie Kolleritsch, S.L.L.F. dramaturg, arrived in
New York, was that daughter Amina, who had been shown to me in Berlin
(where I had gone IN 1969 to discuss my translation
of his play KASPAR)
had been
left with Handke’s mother.
That Handke’s wife would leave him unless he
radically changed his way was eminently evident to someone who would have much
preferred not to be the SuhrkRampF agent in New York and to have had the money
to abscond with rasante Libgart,
And during the so typically Elaine’s Big Table
under the table hanky-panky
I failed to slip one of those yellow Elaine’s
matchbooks into her hot clever hands hand with my # and the suggestion
FRISEUR!
And the utterly delightful actress thus did not
have the opportunity to call the number
and ask
“Ist da beim Frisuer”
And I did not have the opportunity to deliver
the line
“Ja, Spezialangebot fuer Schamhaare
heute!”
at which point Handke would
have started to fugue a few years sooner
than he did and we would have been the kind of interesting but typical scandal
that attends the life of authors.
However, the focus here is not on my personal
relationship to the author and on respective lay-abroad-ness and of man-eaters
and Jezebels and space-cadets and bimbos but on Handke’s texts.
Whereas my relationship until NONE-SENSE
had been
chiefly one of great verbal delight
(with some strenuousness in the KASPAR
translation)
but
little emotional involvement,
-as there were few passages in these texts that
were overtly emotional but for one note of pathos in
SELF-ACCUSATION =
the reading of
SORROW BEYOND DREAMS
and translation of the three poems in
NONSENSE & HAPPINESS
started to involve matters of my heart.
However, I also could not help noticing that
during moments of relief from the attack of nonsense - as which Handke
experienced the onslaught of the storm - there were periods of
great musicality in the text
- which have
deeply entered my verbal being so that I have caught myself a few times over
the years in reprieving their mode-
-
This confirmed that if anything would cure him as it
had previously of fear it would be his kind of beauty which pretty much is my
kind of beauty, too. Handke, I recall loved the word “humbug” that I found to
transate “Unsinn/non-sense”
=II-B=
At about the time in 1973 that I returned from a
six-month half-way around the world and back trip on the Hellenic Splendor and sent Handke my translation of the extraordinarily
important
QUODLIBET
(see anon)
I received to translate his
Unvernuenftigen Sterben Aus
{They Are Dying Out]
Handke’s only play with identifiably “real
people”
And a curious work it was for someone who had
made it a point to become well informed what constituted the “new left” [2] for
the various shibboleths of that movement now found themselves in the mouths of
all kinds of business folk, like ideological chaff, or dandruff – which
constitutes the verbal fun of that piece and is one of its few connections with
its otherwise so different immediate predecessor Ride Across Like Constance -
For that reason the play is sometimes regarded
as a critique of capitalism, which I would say is a misreading of a very
ambiguous text that, after all, also contains the ambiguous figure of business
mogul would-be monopolist Quitt who an usual aesthetic appreciator of poetry, Stifter
to be precise. Quitt & his servant Hans, shades of Brecht’s wonderful
Puntilla & his servant Mattei, modeled on
the only mogul of that kind that Handke knew, our mutual acquaintance the Bull
in the Chinashop publisher
Siegfried Unseld & his unhappy first
marriage
THEY ARE DYING OUT
Bob Kalfin at Chelsea theater Co who had done
several of the first Handke productions in New York at B.A.M. turned the play
down & Carl Weber and I, who now worked together, did not get it mounted
until 1979 at the Yale Repertory Company. I myself subsequently always felt
that if I had my druthers I would employ child actors, and the words in young
mouths would in and of itself manifest what a peculiar language it was &
what a thoroughly ambiguous piece it is.
While translating the piece Handke sent one
small change with the note to excuse him that he had lost his concentration
during the writing because he had not been well, a note that I found touching
considering how minor the change was.
Subsequently in texts such as
A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
&
LEFT HANDED WOMAN
you could sense the author recuperating from the
crisis and entering a mytho-poetic way of experiencing.
I think Walter Benjamin’s great metaphor
“The work is the death mask of the experience”
applies to
A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
However, as compared to some other writers of my
acquaintance, Handke had not learned the lessons taught by his first wife’s
leaving. It took the leaving of Wife II, Sophie Semin,
and his winning her back for the “cold
Salamander” to learn to divide home & work space.
=II-C=
QOUDLIBET
which I translated during my six month freighter
trip
[as I did two volumes worth of H. M. Enzensberger
essays]
is in many respect
the very heart of Handke and
it was the one time that my immersion in Joyce’s
FINNEGAN’S WAKE
proved fruitful.
For QUODLIBET is an
auditory projection screen:
The powerful of this world walk about the world
stage mouthing mouthings that are thoroughly ambiguous.
And “As You Like it”
is
“the thing wherein I’ll captures the conscience
of the king”.
The king of the modern stage is of course the
audience.
QUODLIBET/ AS YOU LIKE IT
is the clearest demonstration of Handke’s
ambiguous endeavor,
and of his writing on that
difficult trapeze of ambiguity,
which is then what creates
THE EXPERIENCE
and experienced ambiguity
- at least theoretically -
leads not so much to
INTERPRFETATION
but to confusion which leads thoughtfulness
which leads to…
=III=
=A=
The first
time, in 1980, that I read A GRADUAL HOME-COMING as I translate the title of
the 1979 Handke novel Die Langsame
Heimkehr,
EXCERPT
made - and still does upon each reading - an
unusually powerful impact which methinks may be more than usually entirely subjective
and related to a host of circumstances - certainly it differs greatly from my
relationship to the preceding texts some of which I translated, as I did not
HOMECOMING though I sometimes wish I had or rewrote Mannheim’s translation so
as to impose at least a semblence of Handke’s pathose-drenched rhythms.
My
relationship to this text has a backstory, several. Say, around 1070 Handke
writes me and asks what American winters are like & I reply that New
England winters are like Bavaria, Rocky Mountain winters are like those in the
Alps and if he wants something really different he ought to check out Alaska. –
It appears I forgot about winters in the Midwest and wind sweeping across the
lake into Chicago. – Siberia!
In the
later 70s Handke found time - daughter
Amina secured with mother Libgart Schwartz - to visit Alaska several times, the
final time prior to writing HOMECOMING in Fall 1978. Subsequent to Handke’s leaving
a green satchell in my Urizen Books office and retrieving it upon his return from
a side trip to Frisco I think - we had one of those idyllic evening walks
across the Brooklyn Bridge during a light snowfall. Meanwhile, as of the
mid-70s certain actions of Handke’s – and not his odd ways as a host - had
managed to spook the so spookable me, and emotionally I kept him though not his
texts, at what I thought was a safe distance, and I noticed even then that I
failed to engage where I might have fruitfully to certain comments of his, such
as “how hard” New York was, a comment made within days of his moving into the
Hotel Adams at 86th & Madison & Fifth: after all, for the
discerning, just the sight of folks on Madison and Fifth or Park will suffice,
won’t it?, familiar territory of mine since the mid-1050s, where he was about
to set out to write HOMECOMING, and had one hell of a time getting beyond its
initial sentence which he had been rehearsing internally, so he has stated, for
years: “Sorger had outlived several of
those who had become close to him, had ceased
to long for anything but often felt a selfless love of existence and at times a
need for salvation so palpable it weighed on his eyelids” – it reads in my
slight alteration of Mannheim’s arythmic syntax. – Reading Handke‘s account of
his struggles to get beyond this priestly opening sentence I wonder whether the
truth or untruth of this pathos-ridden sentence may not have been the chief
problem – how many people had Handke been close to aside his mother who had
famously, as Handke made it, committed suicide so that Handke could write his
in many ways most famous book,
Sorrow
Beyond Dreams?
Or close
to for that matter? The wife who had run away + in the early 70s? Freddie
Kolleritch, the dramaturg of
Short
Letter Long Farewell
EXCERPT
looked to
me closer than his wife.
Both still
alive in 2016 & the interesting correspondence with Kolleritch
Schönheit ist die erste Bürgerpflicht
has been
published meanwhile by Jung & Jung.
Unless of
course Sorger is not entirely Handke but an imagined lens and responder
seismograph personae just like the archeologist Loser of
Across
EXCERPT
of a kind that Handke employs, also, in
Morawian
Night
the sort
of thing that might warn readers and especially reviewers from thinking that
these personae and the author are
synonomous or identical with each other, and even if they are? Can the really
be and for how long and when???
–
how so?
–
To throw a
host of wrenches into the forthcoming discussion.
whereas, as readers, they ought to focus and
respond to the text, or rather on what these texts do inside their minds where
their reading eyes have transposed them and where they start to live effect second
lives! – The reading experience, Watson!
- Sorger sounds a though he is lonely is one
matter that I take away from that sentence not that one would expect a young
best-selling author who lives in Paris to be lonely unless (1) he has burned a lot of bridges to those who were
once close to him or (2) is socially just too damn difficult, for reasons
- as we eventually find out – that other
bodies at boarding school nauseated the autistically challenged ultra sensitive
but actually love imbued
complicated
being!
If only
life were simpler!
But if you
want to be one hell of a lot lonelier go to Alaska my friend and muck around in
the snow and unlees you have an assistant Laufer
with you as does Sorger your only companion may be a lone wolf who may be
hungry or just as lonlely as you! – The opening of the book is nearly the
sentence of an old man, isn’t it? It made me think of the Austrian émigré
biologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who went out, the weather
temperate, to check whether some ten foot urbeavers might have survived
the last ice age in a volcanic hotsprings. - At any event, once Handke had overcome
the hump of this sentence the book became the below described event in my life.
It was
during that walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to have dinner at Michael Brodsky’s
that Handke revealed to me that, though he had forgotten that it had been I who
had sung the praises of Alaska
{not that
it takes me to do that!)
he was
going to write a book about Alaska - which revelation elicited instant concern
of mine that anyone would dare something of the kind about such a huge and
varied stretch of the earth after a few visits of a few weeks each. I myself
had spent nine months in interior Alaska and had
worked as a fire fighter along the Yukon and in the Brooks Range and then as a
geological surveyor’s assistant in the Alaskan Range and in the vastness north
of Fairbanks surveying what eventually became the road to Point Barrow and
pipeline; an experience as a whole of a kind that I did not want to repeat,
wanted to leave undisturbed, it acquired a kind of sacred wholeness
incomparable or associatable to any other, but Handke was not interested in my
Alaska stories – he said he was full-up, which I understood since I was still
full-up nearly 20 years after the event. But despite being spooked, the mother
hen in me expressed a certain anxiety and asked if he had done some reading, at
least John McPhee’s wonderful big book.
He had of
course, as I ought to have known.
So much
for initial backgrounding, which
merely needs a few further paragraphs before we can get to the prolegema to the
second significant.
Prior to
returning to Europe Handke told Nancy Meiselas his then editor at Farrar,
Straus that he felt he had fucked up the book – it appears it is a fragment
with a mere three chapters of something that was conceived on a far grander
scale. Grandiosity had come a cropper for once, for whatever reason, perhaps
New York was the reason. Grandiosity would succeed many time during the coming
decades. -
Handke did
not show the m.s. to me and I think we saw each other only twice more during
that visit, and I made sure to have the usual Michael Brodsky buffer along each
time
I did not
want to be alone with Handke if I could help it. If he had not done what he had
done - behave schizophrenically??? - I suspect he would have had a much better
time, I could have shown him a much better time if he had been game, than being
locked up in his room high up in the Hotel Adams over-looking Central Park and
talking at midnight to the Hotel Adam’s doorman as we read Sorger doing in the
later parts of the book, and not complained back in Europe how cold New York
was, and sought refuge with Hermann Lenz and - who knows? - might even have
followed up on the once impulse of living in or around New York. I checked out
for Handke several French lycees in New York that daughter Amina was meant to
attend.
I meself
might have been working hard and late hours and in a difficult relationship
with the working Urizen partner, precarious Urizen a permanent crises since its
founding three years earllier, but I then went out around 10 or 11 p.m and
played and at that time was not living with a lover and didn’t either have a
real steady squeeze and haunted the clubs and wonderful bars in our downtown
world and rarely ended up in bed alone, the darling hussies had become very
forward, it was effortless, and so I had no problem, later, understanding
Handke’s wonderful
Don Juan
(as told by himself)
EXCERPT
where the
Don merely needs to lie back and the deliceuse
clamber into his bed, irresistible heart-breakers the lot of them.
=B=
In Fall
1980 I spent a month working as an ICA cultural exchange parcel in Bulgaria and
as a matter of fact worked my ass off running around trying to create the
bridges for cultural peaceful co-existence and in the process became
progressively more charged, it had to be from inhaling the rich air that the so
rich Bulgarian soil exuded, I was not taking drugs of any kind, but swimming a
lot, and but for one evening,
in Plodviev,
kept my intake of plum brandy to a minumum
& I don’t think my wonderful young philosophical faculty guide was feeding
me anything during our meals and the KGB was easily identified and I was
resolved and succeeded in averting Mata Hari
[oh how
proud I was of meself!]
&
On my
return to the USA via Zurich and Frankfurt I was meant to stop by Salzburg
where Handke had ended up during his gradual – St. Victoire {The Lesson of}-
return.
In Vienna,
the third time in my life, the first had been at age 6 for an operation to
remove an infected vestigial gill, and there had not been a second until the
trip to Sofia – the very prospect of Vienna and I kept falling ill! –
until I took the plane to Sofia, Bulgaria, four weeks prior and now the third
time after debarking Air Bulgaria’s version of the 727 that struck me as
readily convertible into a troop transport.
A few days
rest in Vienna were meant to coincide with one of my most delicious lovers,
acquired during the preceding Frankfurt bookfair, holing up with me at a
pension, who then did not show.
I had not
read LANGSAME HEIMKEHR, no one had sent it to me, and so with time on my hand
and about to see Handke I bought a regretful second edition
and became
progressively more overwhelmed, walked around Vienna, a girl saw me reading the
book and asked if I was Sorger, and by the time I got to Salzburg I felt I had
entirely forgotten the matter that made me so cool towards Handke in New York,
and was one train late and some years ago wrote up the entire visit as
EIN BESUCH AUF DEM MOENSCHBERG
Question
these many years later and after a long self-analysis is still what set off the
whelming reaction to LANGSAME HEIMKEHR.
Yes, the
four weeks in Bulgaria had infused me, I was smiling a lot & if you smile a
lot the pretty ones will smile back and off your are to make love.
I did not
react in the same fashion to any other book at the time.
Upon
returning to New York & the Urizen Book offices Linda Coverdale
[who has
become a fine translator from the French] who had started to work for us, noted
that I seemed to be on something but encouraged it since I was fired up and the
firm needed all the fire it could get.
In
retrospect, I should have used the fire to get the partner fired who had played
the other two partners off against each other & taken over the firm and was
robbing it right and left while I managed to obtain yet one more tax shelter
infusion.
[see
notes]
and the Bulgaria infused energy only gradually wore off, it even
persisted during what I felt was a needed vacation on St. Simon’s Island on the
Georgia Gold Coast.
One
sound-seeming self-explanation for the effect of LANGSAME HEIMKEHR was that the
Alaska experience had been very much of a whole, something very substantial and that I had
never articulated it as I have now certain episodes in my memoir
Screen
Memories.
The
momentous experience of Alaska had laid in wait to be pricked = and Handke’s
book had been the elicitor. None of the other books I had read about Alaska
had; like McPhee’s, they had only contributed to the experience.
And it is
present now: I see scores of rabbits on the frozen brook in the gold mining
area north of Fairbanks, dashing about in the November snow nibbling at the
frozen willows! The lone lonely or starving woolf that accompanied me each
daylight deprived morning on my futile surveyor quests… and whom I tossed
rabbit carcasses.
Talking to
Handke about what the book meant to me and that a girl had mistaken me for
Sorger elicited the comment that during the writing of the book he had only
thought once of me, at which point there occurred to me the idea that,
improbably, he recalled every
thought he
had about a book!
Perhaps if Handke had been willing to hear me
out during our walk across the Brooklyn Bridge during which he said that he was
“full up” with Alaska he might have thought more and perhaps not got stuck at
the beginning? After all, I had my experience of working with the Inuit and how
violent they could be under the influence of alcohol.
In
HOMECOMING it remains mysteriou why the Inuit turns violent. – Knowing Handke
the idea occurs that perhaps he had made the mistake of making a pass at an
Indian maiden! Perhaps just stroked her hair? Yet the irruption of violence is
as mysterious, isn’t it, as Bloch’s suddenly killing the girl he picked up the
night before at the Prater in Vienna, which is preceded by the brilliant
metaphor of boiling water bubbles on the hot plate being like angry ants!
– The violence in Handke, these impulses to
run amok! -
I would
say that Handke’s antennae – the Handke seismograph - the way they picked up
Alaska and transmitted it through his use of language was what triggered and
continues to trigger my reaction to
A SLOW
HOMECOMING
- and to describe the seismograph’s mimosa
hair and how that is translated into language – into lyrical narrative prose –
and how it then find the appropriate sensitive receptor and elicits an
experience if you want to do more than emit impressionistic effusions requires
an essay and scientific experiments. Metampsychosis or Joyce’s - Bloom’s-Molly’s witty play on that words
“met him pike
hoses.”
There are
other Handke texts to which I have had powerful visceral responses
One them
is:
=IV=
WALK ABOUT
THE VILLAGES
Handke’s
great 1982 weaving dramatic poem,one of his most important works,
my
effusion,believe me dear reader,
is a
mere stub
of a tale
of yet another phoenix that turned into an albatross
around this mariner’s neck.
In late
1981 Handke sent me a set of galleys of
Ueber die Doerfer
with a
note that
“it wasn’t
anything for business”
&
I suspect
that the note signified that he had noticed my constant worries about Urizen
Books when he was in New York as well the last time we had met a year earlier
in Salzburg
These worries were nearly at an end at the
time the future albatross reached me as the firm was about to go down in
flames.
[see notes]
.
After
reading the text my response could not have been more positive, but also
realistic in saying that it would tax me to the utmost, as in fact it then did.
Circumstances had it that I would not start on the translation for about a
year.
The
translation took several years and several onslaughts and was completed in 1983
in an extreme state
= the high
point of an analysis=
by myself in a loft, all alone with the text –
occasionally
playing
Credence Clearwater Revival records
and
shouting out the text so
that it
became a translation for voice as the original author, but few others, was the
first to appreciate
[“cutting,
in the good sense” he wrote, unaware of course of my also being in an all-around
cutting mood so that you didn’t really want to get in my way during that period.]
In the process of such an intense involvement
with a text that touched every element of my being and memory, that for the
analysis was already in the heightened state, I felt I got a whiff of how the
desert fathers had come to create sacred texts and it turned out that the
original author had oracled a bit during
its composition, and once again I entirely forgot all about the grave injury
the author had once caused me, and I could see why one might love an author for
his text alone, and I felt rather queasy recalling the veni vidi vici manner in
which I had outplayed him at Tarok in Salzburg in 1980 because it might have
interfered with the composition of that text.
A section from my postcript
which gives a fuller account
can be found at
The long tale of how the translation then came
to be published by Ariadne Books & how it became an Albatross I put into
the footnote.
=V=
With
Handke’s
The Repetition
EXCERPT
there ensued what I call an
addiction to his work and need to read him constantly. Not that his work had
ever fallen into the
„take it or leave it”
category
or that I had failed to
appreciate its artistry
but it had not become
essential.
Again circumstances played a
role:
I had finally freed myself of
all women & of invariably being in a state of love.
I even had to give away my female bitch who
despite all preventive measures had managed to get herself knocked up by a
wolfish dog in Billie the Kid country
and had whelped 9 puppies: the lord of the
marvelous bucolic St. Monica Mt. loft I had found did not permit dogs on his
flower-growing property. I could finally get to work. The impulse to secede
from New York and be hermetic had hit me during a needed vacation after the
exertion in Bulgaria when I had spotted the so-called cottages;
that is, the mansions, that the
19th century moguls had built on Jekyll Island on the Georgia Gold coast, and I
realized that all I wanted was a single room there, that sufficed, and the
convenient tiny coffee shop at the end of the shrimp dock sticking out into the
Marshes of Glynn
There had even been one more
major love affair, but even then the girl’s parents small cottage with their
refugee hermit scholar was as interesting as the girl, which of course spelled
doom for the affair & nearly taught me the lesson that the final affair
a mariage,
that had taken me to Billie the Kid Country
then drove home with an
entrapment.
In late Spring 1986 I started
to fall under the sway of the Malibu surf,
waves that started out in the South Pacific
and that broke at very slow intervals,
and I was walking the dusty paths
in the chaparall
and living in a shed with
pepper corns trickling and evergreen resin dripping
on the tin roof of my once flower assembly
loft at the end of a dirt road and so I was in the kind of state of mind to
respond to the slow rhythms of
The Repetition
and then wrote a number of
things with even longer periods (se Notes), but I’ve gone on too long already.
I am by no means the only one
to have fallen under The Repetion’s sway
Fellow Handke translators Scott
Abbott & Zarko Radokovic as well provide written evidence
Since I was also completing
something as incompleatable as a psycho-analyis but had a fair idea of my
problematics yet needed a case other than myself I then added Handke’s psyche
to the involvement with his texts.
=VI=
MY YEAR IN
THE NO-MAN’S BAY
EXCERPT
I read five times in a row
three times in German & than twice in English at a particular place in
Seattle that was then called „Lolas” a
Hmong lady’s donut shop on 45th N.E. between Roosevelt & 11th Ave N.E. in
the evening in the company of as No-Man’s crew as you can find in Seattle,
Smerdjakov as a darkly bearded Persian software engineer who had had mental
breakdown and held his bowl of goldfish, the cab driver with only two front
teet, a variety of homeless who could afford a coffee and donut to stay warm at
night as the book kept me warm, who has his own reasons for seeking out the
kind of warmth the book seems to emit, and it wasn’t really anything warming in
the book that I could point to that made me feel that way but its writing, the
way this portrait of a many sided artist writer for whom reading too is an art
is woven together, I even have a few quibles with it, who doesn’t with the kind
of monstrum that Handke once promised never to write!
Not that each and every work draws a similar
response, or that I don’t express disappointment if I find something deficient.
Handke is only a demi-god after all!
But I think it ought to be comprehensible to you
why the Kid from Griffen/ Voelkermarkt in Carinthia, the Griffen Kid, that Balg, whom I first heard and caught
sight off in May 1966 in Princeton University, New Jersey, became a major and
most unexpected event in my life,
and in that respect I feel anything but unlucky
and one if not the only lasting continuity going back 50 years!
&
I can’t imagine how much more destitute I would
have been the past 30 years in this cultural semi-desert
[Mauberly’s “Old Whore” occurs]
without
his work, that and Freud and his disciples
and a few friends and me crows.
=VII=
A GENERAL
ROUND-UP
It is of
course scarcely the case - as with some other Handke afficionados - that I am
like the world’s most loving &mother & say that my darling can do no
wrong, not that he often does serious wrong within his own terms, but Handke,
too, has stretches of genius and occasionally sputters, or strikes me as
flatfooted = see anon
for
specifics!
Then there
is a large variety of Handke’s works – across the board - of prose & plays
& diary condens-acretions
that are
important to me for one or the other reason
or for
technical innovation
or supreme
success but which don’t necessarily warm each and every cockle of my heart.
Of the
Assayings
as I call his five different probing essays –
into fatigue, the successful day, being a fool for mushrooms, and escaping
nauseating fellow students into the shithoue,
the one on the
JUKEBOX
EXCERPT
http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781466806986
is the
most imprtant for me because it goes deepest to his need to isolate himself
within an aesthetic playful sacred & profane environment, and of course
because it is so well done and, charactestically, is anchored in a place, the
Spanish Soria.
I have
already mentioned
DON JUAN
{AS TOLD BY HIMSELF)
also for
the humor of it
and the
way it reveals conceals.
I am
astonished that the Nabokovians have not picked this as gem-worthy of their
champion.
The early
collection of stories
BEGRUESSUNG
DES AUFSICHTRATS
Greeting the Board of Directors
whose
delightfully playful title-story methinks I translated at one point
[but
where?]
ACROSS THE
SIERRA DEL GREDOS
Especially
for its amazing
ascent
decent
ending
EXCERPT
ONE DARK
NIGHT I LEF MY SILENT HOUSE
For its
technical innovation of involving the reader in a protagonist’s dream syntax.
AFTERNOON
OF A WRITER
for an instance of writing in dream syntax & its laconic
brevity, and for a bit of pathetic dellusion!
A gem!
THE HOUR
WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER
for being
the most perfect peformance of Handke’s linguistic command virtuosoty
and as an
absolute genius summation of his early work
&
in
peformance
for
inducing catharsis as does
Ride Across Lake Constance
Both works
occasionally suggest to me that our man is a positivist, too, in the way he
knows and uses language and images.
ABSENCE
For adding
to the reader’s experience of narrative prose the dimension of film & thus
augmenting
the writer’s repertoire
ACROSS
STORM
STILL
http:/www.amazon.com/Storm-Still-German-Peter-Handke/dp/0857421816
And all
the volumes that contain condensacrietons from Handke’s diaries and
which
need to be read in tandem with the contemporaneous prose narratives
if you want to get a fair idea of the writer and his
work
and Handke is certainly worth getting to know in that
fashion
And you
don’t need to live in the same abode and suffer as the
“mommie’s
boy”
turns
as cold as a Salamander!
(vide
Morawian Night)
Or one of
his cussing explosions!
Die Geschichte des Bleistifts/ The History of the Pencil/
&
Am Felsfenster Morgens/ At the Rock Window, Mornings
&
Gestern Unterwegs/ Traveling yesterday
&
& Fantasien der
Wiederholung/Fantasies of Repetition
&
Vor der
Baumschatten Wand/ In Front of the Wall with the Shadow of a Tree
Handke’s texts advance literature in extraordinary
ways & are difficult in the sense of what he does syntactically in that he
demands work from readers unaccustomed to unexpected and multi-leveled ways of
writing in the big books like repetition, absence, no mans bay, del gredos,
one dark night,
and numerous
sections in
morawian night.
in his plays he
is, for my money, Shakespeare’s cousin
and he will take the experiencer’s mind
to unusual and
unaccustomed places.
The only way this dark-analytically experienced reader
can account for his addiction to certain of his texts, such as NO-MAN’S BAY
& THE REPETITION & THE HOUR is that Handke must love writing the way
his mother loved him who served as surrogate for the absent love of her life
who would not marry her - at any event, a healthier response than to the rather
limited array of legit and illegit drugs or numerous beauties whose
acquaintance this summer-nights dream creature made over the years, which is
why his work - subsequent to translating
Walk about the Villages
and as of th
experience of
The Repetition
in the 80S
became
addictive, and I can’t imagine what I would have done without.
This list does not include a number of titles not
available in English to date
DIE KUKUCKE VON VELICA HOCA
(The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca)
I stand by my
comments @-
and ctd., astonished that this utterly brilliant piece
of reporting that is utterly superior to anything anyone does in this country
has not been translated, but blame, first of all, his incompetent U.S
publisher.
The VELICA HOCA text is also extremely interesting
within the context of a MORAVIAN NIGHT discussion, because MORAVIAN has one
brilliant section of a bus trip where the driver keeps re-iterating the song
“Apache” in the angriest most furious manner, and if he didn’t have to drive
you’d expect him to go beserk and run amok at what has transpired in the
Kosovo! – It is my guess that Handke, during one of his own bus trips to the
Kosovo, witnessed Serbians on their way to a cemetery of their ancestors in
what is now Kosovo. It is one of those perfect joints in Handke’s work,
stretches of which fit together in jigsaw fashion that gave me the idea that
something along that line would be feasible for all his work, thus creating one
of the more amazing self-portraits.
KALI/ the Saltworks
Der Grosse Fall/ The Major Case???
Great Falls??
And I also fail to list some of the ones I have
translated
which may not be all that important
within the oeuvre
INNERWORLD OF THE OUTEWRODL OF THE INNNERWORLD
&
NONSENSE & HAPPINESS
QUIBBLES
SUBDAY
BLUES
is an odd
throwback to the formalist, wordless procedures which rang so true in
MY FOOT MY
TUTOR
But as I
read SUBDAY BLUES it quickly becomes tiresomely repetitive - although since I
have not experienced a performance I cannot tell whether tiresomeness has a
performative function!
SUBDAY
BLUES has not been translated into English but it played extremely well under
Klaus Peymann at the Ensemble and many other languages.
It
certainly is one of the great excercise pieces for an actor.
THE ART OF
ASKING
I tried to
get the two major psycho-analytic outfits in Seattle to put on at least a
reading for its members, for them to be confronted with a different approach; no
such luck in these parochial quarters,
however,
meanwhile, the play is not as present to me as most of the others or Handke’s
books – for reasons that are beyond me, unless the perverse little joker in my
brain has decided to throw a block, as he can any time his perversity so
decides. ART OF ASKING IS THE FAMOUS PLAY that became embroiled in France being
upset at Handke appearing at the Milosevec funeral
See also:
&
CHILD
STORY
If you
happen to know Handke and his first daughter, as I did, you too will find Child Story seriously lacking in numerous dimensions. It might even
infuriate you and make you cuss the author as a miserable dad! Who
meanwhile has expressed his regret
[I have
this via the mutual prattle-mouth Erich Wolfgang Skwara)
and
spoiled the 2nd daughter in recompense as we see in the wonderful
LUCY IN
DEM WALD MIT DEN DINGSBUMS
which I
keep being amazed is not in English as a Y.A. or younger fairy tale!
It is
incredibly easy to come down on the 30 year old Hsndke dad like the proverbial “ton
of bricks” - the book itself records and object to how several women object to
his fatherly ways. It’s lacking in awareness and dimension, e.g. – the girl
doesn’t have a mother, well que pasa? Etc. and off we are into a far more
complicated oeuvre.
For
example, it would be easy to maintain that by age 30 Handke had pretty much
reprieved both his physical and and stepfather’s delinquencies vis a vis him.
If we are
to believe Moravian Night
Handke had
fathered an illegitimate child while writing The Hornets on the Adriatic
Corfula. In Morawian Night the former girlfriend has turned fiendish
crone in her old age and pursue him Erynje fashion as do other female figures.
We wonder what happened to the child - it appears that the author if he knew of
his girlfriends pregnancy was not as concerned as his actual physical father
was with his mother Maria Sivec’s pregnacy – vide Sorrow Beyond Dreams and
as we also find out from Malte Herwig’s Handke biography where this fellow
Schoenherr was truly concerned about his illegitimate offspring.
At age 30,
the violence-prone Handke might easily have killed or permanently injured his
three year old daughter when rising water in the basement of his dwelling in
combination with a screaming child made him lose his temper. His famous beating
of Marie Colbin was scarcely the first time he was engaged violently with a
woman, and I can imagine Moreau, who had
to contend with all these French sadists, having at least held her own during
on of their fights!
It’s
always good to know the women an author has slept with to get down to the nitty
gritty, and so one finds out that the first daughter, Amina Handke, was exposed
to the primal scene at a young age as Handke was repeatedly if we are to
believe what we read in Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Thus Sorrow, too,
is not among my favorites, because if you read Herwig you find out that Handke
lied a bit sooner than he expressed the wish to at the end. There was no
graduation trip with the real father who allegedly expressed the fear that he and
his son might be taken for a gay couple. The lie only manifests Handke’s all to
justified homophobia.
ON
DURATION
Though it
was a great pleasure to look over Scott Abbott’s fine translation and tighten a
few screws I find the long poem flatfooted – lacking in ambiguity - as if
anyone might not want for those good things to last! –
I devoted
quite a bit of time recently to looking very carefully at the 2015/6 play
THE
INNOCENTS
My
detailed work there is a good example of my differentiated approach, where I
find some matters extraordinary and others lacking, yet cannot tell - because I
did not see the production - to what degree Klaus Peymann,the director of its
premiere, made it an evidently successful theater evening.
The play
PREPARATIONS
FOR IMMORTALTY
deserves
an equally differentiated evaluation, and might get it if it is ever
translated. It has one of Handke’s most superb openings,like the
DA DA DA
DA
of thee
Fifth Symphony,
but then a
Novalike figure
(the Nova
from the end of Walk about the Villages)
appears
and matters become problematic for me, yet no end of positive qualities.
As noted:
in one respect and during one particular incident, I find/found the author a
bit too German - he seems to lack the capacity for the supernal laugh, although
I suspect we might be able to laugh the matter off at this point? though the
wench is still alive.
The writing
in dream syntax in one dark night, the ability to have the reader
experience text as film, absence, and sporadically in sierra del
gredos, the effect of the being inducing syntax of the repetition,
how marvelous reading no mans bay made me feel that I read it five times
in a row, the end of del gredos - I am not the only person who thinks
that that ascent and descent, those one hundred pages are the greatest ending
experiencially that anyone has ever written.
And the
catharsis inducing plays like lake constance, the hour.
Gosh,
at least I lived in the age of Handke
and not just of a disgrace like Donald Trump!
The Nobel
Prize will be that much poorer if it is not awarded to Handkde.
NOTES
THEY ARE
DYING OUT DYING OUT
I was
pretty well versed in New Left material, had translated and published Michael
Schneider’s Neurosis and Civilization, which
was a kind of compendium of the large variety of matters on the dear hearts of
the New Left – and so it was of course highly amusing to see these wishes
reduced to slogans that might be fitted to cartoon characters AND appear in the
mouths of business folk, one reason I always felt the play ought to have kids
as actors!
There are
other dimensions to DYING aside its derisive treatment of left slogans, and
those are the notion of a tycoon businessman with aethetic pretensisons, a not
that unusual phenomenon in Germany. Quitt and his side kick Hans, much like
Brecht’s Puntilll and servant Matti, have intereting and deep aesthetic
concerns which were alo Handke’s at the time and which he aired in this manner
and which grew out of his origianl defiant essay and stance “I am an inhabitant
of the ivory tower” in defiance of the
convention of being on imaginary baricades. Thus to think of DYING as a vehicle
for capitalism critique is to shoot far short of the conundrum it poses.
As to Left
politics: my heart was really Old Left Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknech but
I started to realize fairly early on that the New Left, as the newest coming of
the 19th century Russian Social Revolutionaries, were an avant-garde
without any kind of back-up, especially in Germany. The police the workers the
army were not behind these middle class kids whose critique was spot-on in many
ways.
Latin
America was obviously a very differet kettle of fish,
Aad that
is where I longed to be who, however, did not suffer either heat or amoeabas
for longer than a few days without seriously succumbing.
In North
America the Vietnam Vets returning in a revolutionary mood seemed promising.
All it took to take the wind out of the sails of the middle class revos though
was the end of the draft.
Domage.
Carl Weber
and I, with which Brechtian director whom I had first seen in at the
Ensemble in Becher’s STALINSCHLACHT in 1957 and was now
happily working, tried to introduce some song & dance into DYING OUT via my
then friend Jerry Leiber & his delightful partner Michael Stoller, but
after a raft of wonderful lox & bagel Sunday brunches at Leiber’s Patchen
Place Mews
(prior
owners e.e. cummings and my friend michael lebeck)
Leiber
copped out – all we really needed was a few more songs, Leiber & Stoller
had
wonderful left-overs from their unproduced Brechtian musical The International Wrestling Match.
Typical of
Leiber whose specialty during the last 35 unproductive years of his life was to
jerk other artists off & then drop out while going around saying that he
was working with Handke, whom he met once through me in Paris
[where Handke had pronounced the famous line
“I don’t
do Singspiel” -
and
practically puked at the sight of Leiber’s mutiply hideous wife,
Barbara
Rose!]
I at the
time did not have the confidence I have now in being able to write lyrics to
songs.
Domage.
And a nice Gussow Review
May he
rest in theatrical heaven
WALK ABOUT
THE VILLAGES
The WATV “albtross” is so many feathered that I am making it into a piece in its own
right. As mentioned above, it came as a godsend at time that I was
transitioning out of the more activist role as a publisher into a writing
research translating analytic life that I have led since the mid-80s. First of all,
my nemesis, the “ass-licking stilletto- twerp children’s book editor” Michael
DiCapua had most improbably become editor in jefe at F & SG where no end of
fine people spent a year or with the swine Roger Straus before they called it
quits. And so they turned it down, but Roger Straus had made a promise to do it
when I alerted him in 1981 that the work was under way – after all, FSG had
done two collections of my Handke translations and various other trranslations
– Hesse, Nelly Sachs - so I persisted, and it seemed to bother Handke, whom I
was keeping partially informed, and I suspect I ought to have given him a
complete lay of the land and he would have been a lot less mystified about what
was transpiring between me and FS&G, which also involved Straus having
tricked and cheated me out of ¾ out of my royalties
See:
– which, as of the decade from the early 70 to
early 80 amounted to several hundred thousand dollars, quite enough to keep
Urizen Books going, to mention just one consequence of that kind of
dastardliness. The once owner of Noonday Books had even warned me about Straus
who had cheated him, too, in the sale of his company, so I can only plead
guilty to being a chump & schmock in these matters in thinking that someone
who has made millions from the books I brought him would not screw me. At the
time of the contention about WATC
I was
intent on catching Straus openly in a lie = and I did, and it made no
difference!
Then PAJ
(Performing Arts Journal), who had done work for me at Urizen, took the play, I
won the first of two suits against the former Urizen Books partner
& I cut out to a new wife in Billie the
Kid country in the Winter of 1985. Upon my return to New York a year and a half
later to close up my loft and move to my idyll in the St. Monicas PAJ welched
on their contract. I was in no mood to take this kindly and wrote them the kind
of drop-dead letter to smash your toes I could write with ease at that point
with as much foulness I had endured, copy to Handke in Salzburg -where he was
in wahtever sate of nind he was in - who wrote back that “he did not want his
name associated with this kind of letter” and if I continued to persist in
writing the like that “would be the end of our friendship.”
You can’t
imagine how glad I was to come on Handke’s threat to Freddie Kolleritsch in
Malte Herwig’s biography that if Manuskripte
ran another critical piece on Handke they would never get another conribution
from him. Of course, my darling pasha
was a threatener, too, that was about all that had been missing until then,
he’d show you his baby but if you had out-played him at Tarok! How childish!
Moreover how unaware or schizophrenic that we couldn’t possibly be personal friends as of what he had done in
the mid-70s! The man was daft! And so I wrote back, “aren’t we lucky y regarding friendship” with a reminder of
what had transpired, but as a joke – also to the good fortune of my not taking
Libgart from him during the 1971 visit to NY -
so in fact
he could have laughed the threat off, and we could have been the kind of best
friends that we might otherwise have easily become. Meanwhile, I understand only too well the
kind pathetic state that Libgart Schwarz’s leaving him had left him in, and so
it didn’t seem that what he had done was designed, as it was in many other
cases - as you can read in Herwig’s book & as Wim Wenders told me here in
Seattle that Handke throughout his life
has made it a point to injure thosee closest to him – i.e. but if a specifically designed gratuitous
sadistic injury it certainly was an injury that testified to to a level of
unawareness, from A to Z
Wenders
for whom Handke played the role of the older brother, too! I did not ask for
specifics, perhaps I ought to have. But this is not a police dosssier!
At any
event, there I was with WATV a piece of really good work & it took about a
decade before it then came out with Ariadne Books, for $ 500!, who then did not
send out galleys or review copies, morons, self-defeating cheapskates of the
worst kind.
Meanwhile
Handke had turned to Ralph Mannheim to produce another translation in addition
to ‘the best translation he had ever seen’, incurring wrath from me. Handke
might read Pound’s Pisan Cantos
occurrs to me.
WATV
quickly became my heart test and the degree of failure does not bode well for the world, the woman in question merely
reacted to the line
“the hefty
taxes”
and the
thought flitted through my mind that perhaps Handke had been right in treating
the person I had designated my “great fondness”
- as
compared to
“great
passion”
“sexiest”
“best in
and out of bed”
etc -
as
entirely dispensable.
I may have
some literary talent
but lack
it in evaluating human beings,
especially pretty women
I am or
used to be so stupid and even made it a point to overlook real physical
ugliness, ideologically as it were
-
as
compared to the wonderful beautifully ugly! –
-
the brute Roger Straus, the hideous Barbara
Rose, the total creep Joachim Neugroeschel –
-
By chance Handke had seen them all and voiced
how ugly he found them physically – draw your own moral.
THE
REPETITION
Thus
inspired I delivered myself of a quite long piece on Handke and “Being” which
the NYRB “nearly took” so then friend R. Silvers wrote, for 2nd
choice Partisan who had just taken a long excerpt from my translation of Walk About the Villages it was twice as
long as their compliment allowed, ancien
ami Gus Blaisdell was then going to issue it in enlarged form as a chapbook
with his Living Batch Books in
Albuquerque, but somehow never got around to it prior to an early heart attack
demise, and though Gus was my safebox for various things I was writing as I was
moving around – the Chihuaha desert, the Western U.S. and then the Baja - the
piece was not found among my others. Since the piece was written prior to
electronic record keeping I myself lost my only copy to a major storm in
Seattle, but there may be a copy at Suhrkamp. Jim Krusoe then of St. Monica
Review who had much liked the piece and then a fairly superficial outline
sketch that I wrote to envision to myself what a book on all of Handke’s work –
late 80s – might be like did not locate any material either.
The
long piece I wrote on the Wenders/ Handke film Wings of Desire for the St. Monica Review was very much within the mode of the original “being” piece; that
is, its sentences did not end until the next Malibu surf wave hit! Jim took the
trouble to tamp down the wave intervals to half their normal size, although he
and I then realized he might have spared himself the trouble for the reaction
it received from most, though not quite all, readers for challenging their
“natural” interior grammar!
NOTES
ON NOTES
Subsequent
to one of these unhappy making visits to the Montmorency basement apartment,
Handke mentioned that he had exposed himself to the 16 year old Austrian space
cadet who had been there at my visit and during which the idea flitted through
my head that Handke and I might both fuck her right then. Hande said she had
blushed – I am not sure what he expected. What would have been odd if she had
not blushed and remained entirely different. However, the incident then alerted
me to the exhibitionistic quality of Handke’s work Your mother commit’s suicide
– in no time you publish a book about the event and her, it made me feel a
touch queasy. What is to be said for Handke’s artistic exhibitionism, as
compared to its sociallly reprehensible aspect, is that his ability as an
artist of course shapes, transmutes, makes into something attractive. Handke’s
sexual exhibitionism strikes me has a pathetic and pleading quality in addition
to its overt aggressive component.
During the
Moneschberg visit I realized that during the appr. 10 years that I knew his
domiciles
our man had worked himself from living in a
dank news-paper filled apartment in the Meineke (not apparently the Uhland
Strasse) in Berlin (a familiar area to me where we met in 1969 to discuss my
KASPAR translation and where baby Amina was shown to me), [2] via the
intriguing basement apartment on the 77 Rue Montmorency Paris in the Les Marais
& to
what struck the prejudiced me, [who disliked these buildings that have embedded
field stones wrapped around the ground floor walls, as you can find a quite a
few both in France and Germany as, say, you drive through the Mosel valley)
as a typical Gruenderzeit castelet
in
Clamart, Paris where the Lefthanded Woman
was filmed, and the book provides a fine description of how Paris looks
from that perspective. Again it was an area I was somewhat familiar with
because war correspondent author Wilfred Burchett lived in the neighboring
Meudon.
Now, in
1080,our man was living with the “big animals”- as the Salzburgers called Moenchsberg residents – as king of the hill.
A yuppie of sorts I suppose. I myself was definitely and would always be a
declasse with little interest in living on high, though not in depoosing as I
found out that evening, though for reasons that a Hirsch or a male Mulie might
well understand I realized looking back at my entirely unusual behavior.
It turned
out Handke can be impatient, I was a train late and there he was already
walking towards me after I had checked into my Hotel Mirabelle and was walking
to get up on the hill – I noticed the annoyance and of course ought to have
called and said that I had missed the agreed upon train. The second comment was
that he was not surprised at my staying at the fancy Mirabelle – which struck
me as wrong since the only reason I was staying there was because it had a big
swimming pool, those were the days I swam fiendishly downtown New York and at
all the hotels during that trip that was funded by ICA. Urizen Books was poor
and so was I and I stayed at pension or with friends at Book Fair time. He was
proejcting I realized.
So as to
engage on the subject that fillled me like air pressure does a tire to near
bursting I mentioned that I had shown the first page of LANGSAME HEIMKEHR to
the deskman when I had noticed him reading a popular Schmoeker as certain kinds of bestsellers used to be called in
German...
I
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