THE
NY TIMES & PETER HANDKE:
A
FIFTY YEAR HORROR STORY -
ANNOTATED.
Dear
Mr Sulzberger, dear Mr. Baquet, dear Ms. Mattoon (Editor of the Arts
Section of the New York Times), the Public Editor:
I
herewith demonstrate to you & your colleagues & the world at
large, the truly abysmal Peter Handke reception in your pages since
the name Peter Handke first appeared in your pages appr. 50 years
ago.
There
is the singular instance of adequate reception of his work in the
theater, by the late
MEL
GUSSOW.
There
is a single truly adequate - reprintable - review of a single title,
plus a few near adequacies,
and
the most horrendous treatment of his most serious later work &
neglect of significant events such as Handke's receipt of the
Ibsen
Prize.
Not
a single review by a peer,
as
a matter of fact there has only been a single peer review of his work
in the U.S. in these fifty years,
it
is William Gass's review of
MY
YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY
Steve
Wasserman commissioned it for the L.A. Times Book Review:
See
link at discussion of
NO-MAN'S
BAY
below.
SHAME,
ESPECIALLY ON THE BOOK REVIEW!
==============
Handke's
name might be expected to appear first at the Gruppe 47
Princeton Meeting in Spring 1966
but
no,
the
- I guess - “Bolean” search term Handke first brings up no end of
“handkerchief buyers” !!!!
who
visit the great city and are memorialized in the business pages.
Then
there appears a
“Georg
Handke,”
disgraced
member of the East German Socialist Unity Government,
who
might be related to Peter Handke's MONSTROUS stepfather Bruno – the
name “handke” has little to do with “HAND” but is the mash-up
of a Polish last name...
we
are in the region about which
Guenter Grass
observed that
if
you are Polish it's good to have a German name, and a Polish last
name
if
you are German...
or...
a mashup!
Ah,
but here it is: first mention of Peter Handke in the NY Times
Friend
Josef Bauke of the Columbia German Department
Then
a slew of mere mentions
leonhardt
marc
slonim
and
to my own surprise I come upon myself who failed to remember that I
plugged Handke's second novel when I wrote up the Frankfurt Bookfair
michael
roloff
marc
slonim
irving
wardle
john
simon
harold
brainin
francois
bondy
father
of luc
who
will direct many fine Handke performances
AND
THEN THE FIRST REVIEW
-it is a first
rate one - of the first performance of Handke plays in English
by
mel
gussow
Unfortunately
it is mostly BUT NOT ENTIRELY downhill from thereon. DREADFUL THE
PAST DECADE it got a lot worse under Ms. Mattoon's editorship.
Gussow
has read the plays,
has
a fine take on them, is right about the utterly untalented director
Schulz's direction....
Then
a few notices about the upcoming performance of
Ride
Across Lake Constance
and
Clive Barnes goes missing with his review
And
the Barnes miss is a major lacuna. Here's a man who's been watching
Boulevard Theater all his life and doesn't realize he's just watched
the ultimate inversion persiflage of
Blvd
theater, better than anything Noel Coward did along that line,
doesn't see the affinity to Ionesco, knows nothing about the then
contemporary
HAPPENING
AESTHETIC,
remains
unaffected
by
the syntactical legerdemain and thus misses out on the catharsis that
the play produces, as good as that of a good hour with the best
analyst. A true release!
A
MAJOR LOSS TO THE THEATER AND TO THE CULTURE! BARNES AS DEAD AS THE
CULTURE AS MOST THEATER GOERS.
At
least he wasn't bored or get on a high horse like the audience that
was bereft without it's strap the story to hang their minds on.
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/06/ride-across-lake-constance.html
Next
real review to appear
-aside
roundups that mention Handke -
is
my once oldest friend frank conroy's review of my translation of
GOALIE'S
ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK
Conroy,
then, in 1972 was my oldest friend, I'd known him since fall 1954 &
I shared my translation of GOALIE with him a few years prior.
Meanwhile my friend couldn't handle the success of STOPTIME, his
first published book, and is holed up in Nantucket and has sudden
need to do a bit of hustling, this review being one example.
If
still in NY I'd have informed the lazy bones that Goalie was
Handke's third novel, that Handke was chiefly a prose writer, but a
poet as well, and Conroy if he'd gone to grad-school – we are 14
years out of college! - would have known that authors can be many
sided, especially continental ones, and he would not have had to
bullshit his way through the long opening of the piece, nice
bullshitting as bullshitting goes, at least he picked up on Handke's
theatricality, if not his hysterical side, but he misses what the
opening sentences do to the mind that reads them,
inducing
a state of paranoid schizophrenia
(Handke
nominated a study of linguistic usage by paranoid schizophrenics as
book of the year),
and
makes the text out to be pure narrative phenomenology. Later in life
Conroy will boast that upon entering Haverford he'd already read
everything. I gave him to his hearts delight the collected Wallace
Steven poems for a wedding present, and Conroy took to the one great
critic who is on the side of artists, Walter Benjamin, udderwise
conroy remains an innocent to that field. And still became a
wonderful writer.
Frank's
piece, though it could do without the long intro, and is devoid of
mention of the linguistic ingenuity at the heart of the novel, and
other matters, is one artist recognizing another and it is
unfortunate that he and Handke never met, for by the time I gave my
little Handke party in Spring 1971 Frank was living in Nantucket. Two
high-end autists with great artistic talent. Handke if he knows the
book would love Conroy's OF TIME & TIDE.
Domage.
It
is also unfortunate that Frank's editor at the Book Review either
did not know what's what or was too lax in cutting the bullshitting.
=====
Then
richard locke has his go at GOALIE and he's better read than Frank,
but is all involved in Lit Talk.
but
it's an interesting piece.
The
unfortunate Clive Barnes now redeems himself with his go at
KASPAR
-
easy
work if you can get it!
Even
Walter Kerr
likes
KASPAR
After
all the work I'd done on the translation and working with herbert
berghof and e.g. marshal & doing re-writes for Peter Brook I was
in the Far East for the Premiere & didn't see the Kerr review
until now. I'm impressed by the kicks Kerr gets out of the play.
Next
review is JOHN ROCKWELL'S of
SHORT
LETTER LONG FAREWELL
Rockwell
is the kind of critic who needs (needed) to take a puppy to bed and
not a book, he will really stick his foot into it the only other time
he has a go at a Handke work.
Next
is MICHAEL WOOD
on
SORROW
BEYOND DREAMS
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E0CE7DE113FE136A05754C2A9629C946490D6CF
And
Clive Barnes has a go at the dramatized version of
SORROW
easy
work, socially redeeming stuff,
pulls
all the right heart strings.
WALTER
KERR
likes
SORROW as much as Barnes
Eventually
we find out that Ms. Sivec/ Handke
killed
herself at the prospect of the return of her monstrous husband from a
TB sanatorium:
The
Sivec/ Handke clan seem never to have heard of separation or divorce!
Deepest
darkest rural Austria!
The
hard-working - since early childhood - genius son turns out to be -
although autistically hypersensitive & seeing wave lengths we can
only dream of -
a
social oaf as a young man, not all that surprising,
in
retrospect.
Next
in 1977
John
Leonard
A
MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E01E7DA143BE036A05757C2A9609C946690D6CF
hates
it!
Is
too well read for his own good and thus fails to respond to the
suicide-inducing text, also misses the ACTUAL moment of true feeling.
That
is all that counts.
There's
a big back story to this book, but you cannot judge a book by its
back-story.
Handke
can be said to be in part responsible for all the lit crit talk about
his work with all the allusions he makes, but when he is wounded
literature is his safety net!
LEONARD
MICHAELS
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9900E1D9103BE43ABC4950DFB166838C669EDE
whose
early work made me recommend him to Suhrkamp
is
not that much better on
MOMENT
OF TRUE FEELINGS
MEL
GUSSOW
once
again on
SELF-ACCUSATION
The
formidable ANATOLE BROYARD,
whose
WHAT THE CYSTOSCOPE SAID
is
well remembered,
on
THE
LEFT-HANDED WOMAN
is
as blank as Barnes,
fails
to describe the book,
would
like it to be a different book, and must have been a fan of
NY
TIMES MODERN LOVE section
where
everything between the turtle doves ends up making psychological
sense.
One
major point here is that the
LEFT-HANDED
WOMAN'S
decision
is beyond psychology
(though
no doubt some shrink could have been found to convict her of being a
latent depressive).
Once
again there is a big back story to the novella, which again is of
extra-literary interest.
Now
ernst pawel on the handke phenomenon
comes
out clearly in favor of
LEFT-HANDED
WOMAN
that
was published in its entirety by The New Yorker
Mel
Gussow
reviews
the Yale Rep
production
of
THEY
ARE DYING OUT
and
is very kind but
misses
its very Austrian farcicality, no Nestroy, Raimund, or Goldoni or
Shakespeare for that matter.
VINCENT
CANBY
on
the Wenders/ Handke film
THE
WRONG MOVE
and
on
LEFT-HANDED
WOMAN
WALTER
GOODMAN
on
THE
WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
AND
NOW
RICHARD
LOCKE ON
WEIGHT
somewhat
redeems himself.
NEXT
IS
michiku
kukatani's
REVIEW
OF
“ACROSS”
(The
Chinese of Pain/ the Water Torture)
which
reminds me why I can't ever abide more than a paragraph
of
her cramped mind,
whereas
Lawrence
Graver
writes
the one and only republishable book review in your pages in these
fifty years.
THE
NEW YORK TIMES
never
reviewed
Handke's
THE ABSENCE, neither the book nor the film.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2012/02/absence-die-abweseneit.html
a
book reading which can be experienced like as a film -
talking
about legerdemain!
Nor
is
the
compendium of three works that in American is called
A
SLOW HOMCOMING
or
any part thereof reviewed in the Times pages -
my
guess is a review was killed? At that point it had been 7 years after
THE PUBLICATION OF LEFT-HANDED WOMAN
when
Handke was hot in every sense and that the miserable Roger Straus
finally put out another Handke. What if he'd put out the title novel,
short as it is, the New Yorker would certainly have run its
phenomenal Alaska section.
Nor
did the NY TIMES review my best translation
WALK
ABOUT THE VILLAGES
but
in this instance because the chintzy publisher
ARIADNE
PRESS
does
not send out review copies,
not
even to Publisher's Weekly or Library Journal
IMAGINE
THAT!
Nor
my translation of
INNERWORLD
OF THE OUTERWORLD OF THE INNERWORLD -
There
must have been a poet about who could have had a lot of fun with
that;
then
friend Fred Seidel was
much
intrigued when I showed the work to him!
Donald
Barthelme was going to run
a
large selection in a magazine
of
his that never saw the
light
of day.
Nor
my translation of
NONSENSE
& HAPPINES
or
of Seagull Books recent publication
of
Handke's novel/drama
STORM
STILL
or
take note of Handke's drama reply to Beckett's
KRAPP'S
LAST TAPE
or
of PAJ JOURNAL'S
publication
of the great
VOAYAGE
BY DUGOUT
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/06/voyage-by-dugout-play-that-came-out-of.html
JANET
MASLIN
ON
WENDERS/
HANDKES
WINGS
OF DESIRE
I
disagree - but chacun sa gout!
THE
REPETITION
is
Handke's REMEMBRANCE OF TIMES PAST
it
retells from that perspective the story of a high school grad going
to search out his beloved Slovenian fruit-growing uncle's origin in
Ljubljana, he walks he takes the railroad, sleeps curled up around
the toilet bowl in a railroad station. REPETITION is marked by a
profound slow walking rhythm.
It
is a cult book.
https://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/repetitions-and-vampires-a-reasonable-dictionary/
THE
REPETION
made
a huge impression on me
in
1986 when I finally was close to being and could appreciate the way
the book breathed, its rhythm.
THE
REPETITION
is
reviewed
by
David Pryce Jones
a
professional anti-communist & anti-Nazi and all around ignorant
asshole who
wants
the kid to inveigh against Austria's belated failure to acknowledge
its enthusiastic complicity with Nazism and inveigh against Tito
photos in Slovenia.
and
is entirely unaware how Handke dealt with the Waldheim affair, nor of
course that Handke, who writes very intimate prose, already treated,
in his preferred ambiguous manner, the theme of persistent Nazism in
ACROSS.
See
the Guardian review instead.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/repetition.html
How
the editor of the book review allowed this piece of garbage to appear
in its pages is beyond me.
THE
AFTERNOON OF A WRITER
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/28/books/books-of-the-times-author-rises-briefly-from-his-typewriter.html
is
reviewed by herbert mitgang who, I gather, was regarded as a jerk by
his fellows at the NY Times
and
LINDA SIMON too
has
a go at
AFTERNOON
and
neither of these reviews
knows
how to DESCRIBE what they allegedly read nor summarize the happening
but infer that the writer must be a reprehensible person.
What
does this “projection screen”
(psychoanalysis
can be said to be nothing but an unfolding of one's projections)
of
a book actually
allow
a reviewer to say?
A
reviewer might notice that
a
section of it is written in dream images – where the writer is hurt
by the gossip in Salzburg's fat alleys and it thrown like a woman hit
and run victim to the side of the road. Writers can become notorious,
simply because the bored middle class snoops have nothing better to
do than gossip.
(Next
in line hereabouts is a piece on why the city named after Chief
Sealth is so entirely unconducive to creativity.)
What
writer has not a “former ex-friend?” - the where and whyfores of
that are not detailed here. What writer doesn't have a friend whom he
meets at a pub? What writer doesn't feel both low and then address
the world from on high as he goes to sleep? But how many of them can
condense the matter into such a beautiful projection screen?
As
to what kind of person he great writer is when he doesn't have his
safety pencil in hand: To put it in a nutshell: in some ways the most
marvelous person I have ever encountered, but there's
“the
devil in Ms. Jones”
and
AFTERNOON contains
one
instance
- that mention about the ex former friend –
- that, if I were to open up, would devastate that devil, but it has no bearing on the nature or quality of the text.
JOHN
ROCKWELL
reviews
HOUR
-the
summa of all of Handke's early theater work -
not
that Rockwell would know. produces a catharsis just
as
LAKE CONSTANCE does.
It
is one of the great modern texts, others being Heiner Mueller's
QUARTET & HAMLET MACHINE.
“Mr.
Handke's text can be read as a series of highly literary stage
directions. A town square is the main "character," through
which promenade 31 human actors playing
some
200 roles, as well as a village band. Despite earnest symbolic
intentions, the whole thing seemed more amusing and stilted than
profound. It was adeptly realized, however, and was greeted
rapturously by a full house of Peymann supporters.
“
And
here is Alan Riding's reportage
on
HOUR
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/26/theater/the-drama-before-language-intervenes.html
Birkets
goes off base on the THREE ESSAYS
but
not by much
and
fails to realize that Handke is as interested in the PLACES where he
sets his work as in the ostensible themes.
He
misses that JUKE BOXES were an
escape
from family during
Handke's
youth,
later
Handke will write the essay
ON
THE SHIT HOUSE
whence
he escaped his fellow students at the Tanzenberg religious boarding
school, because they nauseated him: Handke has a nausea problem
because he has too many nerves! EXCESS is the source of nausea. As a
kid the juke box provided an escape from the family.
Margot
Jefferson
is
far worse than Birkets
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/07/books/books-of-the-times-in-a-story-of-inwardness-the-hero-is-always-the-self.html
YUGOSLAVIA
INTRUDES
and
STEPHEN KINZER
provides
a pretty good version of what's called
an
“objective account” of
the
inception of a decade(s) long
controversy,
and properly takes no sides.
Now
we come to a true horror:
after
several hundred years of great European aestheticians writing
marvelously in the major European languages there comes
that
sorry excuse for a critic,
Lee
Siegel
(I
sort of see him deriving from Perth Amboy)
interjects
himself between
a
great text & the reader
Lee
Siegel may snark to his heart's delight, however the editor of
The
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
has
a responsibility to its readers and to the book under review that
prohibits
anything of the kind
especially
in this instance where
NO-MAN'S
BAY
comes
with very considerable European track record of a serious reception.
With NO-MAN'S BAY
-
if not already with
THE
REPETITION -
Handke
enters the ranks of major European writers, Gottfried Keller,
Eichendorf, Stifter Goethe, Flaubert.
Is
the
NEW
YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
so
parochial as to ignore the context, Lee Siegel's editor so lazy as to
fail to double check his review?
A
shame a great shame was here committed
Lee
Siegel is as lucky as David Price Jones & a few others that we
didn't meet in the Chihuahua desert in the late 80s when I carried
side arms and slew his likes to feed the vultures looking for traces
of Ambrose Bierce!
Here
see
WILLIAM
GASS
and
here is my take on the book
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/my-year-in-no-mans-bay-niemandsbuch-t.html
Now
come reports of the Comedie Francaise
dropping
the ART OF ASKING because of Handke's appearance at the Milosevic
funeral...See
http://www.swans.com/library/art12/ga209.html
for
a fine account of this.
The
Heinrich Heine prize controversy is along the same line.
A
nice intervew with Deborah Solomon in the Magazine
We
come to Neil Gordon's idiotic non-response to
CROSSING
THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS
What
I mentioned previously about bullshitter Lee Siegel applies doubly to
Gordon.
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2007/08/ny-times-murders-handke-once-again.html
It
appears old friend Conroy, teaching writing at Iowa, told the
idiot to head to the East Coast!
Many
people feel that the last 100 page of SIERRA DEL GREDOES
is
the greatest ending ever written, this still fan of the Molly Bloom
section of Ulysses would have to agree that it's at least a tie
between Handke & Joyce.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-long-piece-on-crossing-sierra-del.html
News
of the Austrian State buying a part of the Handke archive,
but
not of the German archive, buying the other half.
Handke
confesses to Mueller that
he's
become a capitalist... and a generous angel to writers and an enclave
in the Kosovo he is.
What
is called “a revival” of
OFFENDING
THE AUDIENCE
which,
actually, had never been done
officially
in New York, but by me with my little troupe & at the HB Studio.
A
London performance of HOUR.
Joel
Agee
reviews
DON
JUAN
and
misses a few beats along the way.
James
Ostreicher reviews
Philip
Glass Opera based
on
Handke's
TRACES
OF THE LOST
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/arts/music/in-austria-the-city-of-linzs-bid-to-get-on-cultural-map.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/arts/music/philip-glasss-spuren-der-verirrten-has-debut-in-linz.html
NO
MENTION OF THE MUEHLHEIM PRIZE
in
2013
the
biggest prize in German theater
No
mention of the Ibsen Prize in 2014
the
Nobel prize for theatrical
achievement,
not under your
watch,
Ms. Mattoon
that
is aclutter with no end of junk.
Not
that the NY Times
is
exclusively responsible for the by and large catastrophic Handke
reception in the United States
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/07/catastrophic-handke-reception-in-united.html
There
is the ganging up on Handke for his different take on the
disintegration of the 2nd Yugoslave Federation
every
one wants him to say the same thing they are saying!
For
those who are interested here is a link to no end of material on the
matter:
http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/lead-page-periodically-updated_10.html
I
spent at least one year during the past 20 researching every aspect
of that matter.
There's
Mr. Wilson's
AMERICAN
SCHOLAR
berating
Handke for being influenced by Robbe-Grillet during his early phase
and the writer isn't even aware of the one title – DER HAUSIERER-
where Handke can be said to have found aspects useful of the
Nouveau Roman – more interesting might have been to demonstrate
– if that can be done – how Handke has absorbed influences –
starting with the modernist inventions of the Wiener Gruppe to the
Surrealists and made them his own, fused them into his activist
classical style
There's
Robert Silver's
NEW
YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Bob
Silver en espcial
might
have know better
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html
since
he initially published some valuable takes by Michael Wood &
Frank Kermode on the early Handke which ought to have alerted him
that J.L. Marcus was … what? All wet when he pretended to be able
to evaluate the work? No end of harm came from this review to which
Silvers refused to run a reply.
Even
now
20
years after the inception of the Handke/ Serbia controversy
there
are ignorant assholes like Leland Delaruntaye
who
have nothing better to do than call Handke an asshole
in
the London Review of Books
http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2014/05/durantayes-infamy.html
As
I mentioned previously, country bupmkin literary genius Handke in his
early days came across, socially, as an arrogant jerk. He's also a
self-admitted schizophrenic, a “mama's boy” and as “cold as a
salamander” when he works & you make the mistake of moving in
with him – yes, in some matters he definitely splits. However, not
when it comes to his home turf, Yugoslavia.
What
in God's name overcame such a majority of U.S. innelectuals to
make life easy for their conscience in the 90s and, like Roger Cohen
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/22/magazine/slobo-was-here.html
make
Serbia & Milosevics exclusively responsible not only for such a
complex event as the disintegration of the 2nd Federation
but Serbia for the crimes committed by each and every nationalistic
tribe & some independent operators? How about also blaming those
who wage economic warfare!
Is
it just that U.S. imperialism and the desire to interfere in every
part of the world
-
what other country interferes everywhere & like the NY Times
editorial pages, has advice to spare for governments everywhere?
is
endemic not just to the obvious imperialists but now infests the
so-called thinkers – pret a porter innelectuals who of
course don't think at all but gang up like McCarthyites & witch
hunters: instead of say, repairing the damage the United States has
done indigenously and abroad? Oh God forbid that a great Balkan
Expert like Salman Rushdie would do anything of the kind, or his ilk.
I happen to continue to love Susan Sontag too much for some of her
essay work not to be able to forgive her. Not the rest of these
humanity hyenas – oh how the milk of human kindness has soured in
the past 75 years since it became propagandistically
instrumentalized.
But
if you want to go back to the very start of Handke publication in
this country, it is I who bear responsibility for allowing myself to
be cherry picked by a big crook like Roger Straus – who would have
known that he was skating on the edge of bankruptcy all those years
but for Boris Kachka's F.S.G. study HOTHOUSE -
and,
thus, bring Handke to the wrong publisher (with Susan Sontag's
assistance),
and
I would not have if I had been enthused when Aaron Asher, then the
editor in chief at Viking, showed me a set of galleys of the attack
on the Warren Report when I had asked Viking for a job.
There
it is, that is
“the maggot in the meat.”
“the maggot in the meat.”
At
least I ought to have been enthusiastic about the money that such a
book would generate.
The
situation is the following:
The
year is 1966, I am now married and it is calming, but I don't just
want to just translate and scout -
here
the link to who I am at that point in my literary life:
and
there are some
German
authors I very much want to see published: Nelly Sachs, Hans Erich
Nossack, Christa Wolf. I've already placed several – Peter Weiss &
Peter Bichsel with Seymour Lawrence at Atlantic Monthly Press for
whom I scouted a year in Germany. I am the Suhrkamp scout in the USA.
Meanwhile I've translated three Hesse novels &
Edgar Hilsenrath's NIGHT, a Musil novella,
Edgar Hilsenrath's NIGHT, a Musil novella,
I
have a contract with Viking for the biography of a conspirator
against Hitler – the perfect subject for the child of 20th
of July survivors & a grandfather who might have poisoned Hitler
over lunch instead of making fun of him & surviving four
different concentration camps. I have a darling editor in Alan
Williams. I befriend Aaron as editor for friend Conroy's STOP TIME.
I
myself have started to scratch away at a book, SCREEN MEMORIES, whose
last draft I am only completing now, and Aaron finds the material
fascinating – but I am glad I waited it out for the needed
psychoanalysis. And I think Viking might be the right place for
someone who wants a niche for books translated from the German, for
me, personally, it is a way of not losing the better part my origins.
Already
in 1960 in Alaska I could read in the New York Times of troops
training in Guatemala for what would become known as the “Bay of
Pigs.”
After
the war criminal - neither
whose
charisma nor fascist refrain “do for your country...” did much
for me,
nor
any of the Kennedies - especially Bobby of the House Unamerican
Committee: yes,
after
the War Criminal President
bungles
the Bay of Pigs
he
was, as far as I was concerned,
a
walking dead man: CIA, the Mob, Castro... and it turns out to have
been just a lone wolf.
I
was on a balcony at Frank Conroy's at the upper West Side when the
news of the infamy reached me, I was at Frank's place in Brooklyn
Heights, with Wilfred Sheed, when news of the assassination reached
us. I was shocked, but not all that surprised, and so an attack on
the Warren report was not going to get my juices flowing. But my lack
of interest certainly manifested a lack of the requisite commercial
instinct – which I possessed in other instances. I was sure, I told
Roger Straus, when we signed the ten book Hesse contract that he
would make millions. I was developing a keen sense that that luxury
known as trade publishing was founded on money.
My
relationship with Farrar, Straus & their eventual disastrous
mispublishing of Handke:
1:
Straus' interruption of the publication of Handke work for seven
years in the 80s
2:
Their turning down what Handke judged at the time to be the best
translation he ever saw, mine of
WALK
ABOUT THE VILLAGES
and
all further plays despite KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS
then
being in its tenth printing
&
the second volume
RIDE
ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE & OTHER PLAYS
doing
very well,
Steve
Wasserman, I gathered from an e-mail exchange of a few years past,
who was running the F.S.G. subsidiary Hill & Wang where the plays
had been shoved,
bears
some responsibility for that huge misjudgment.
3:
The current, now conglomerate - Holzbrink - owned F.S.G., current
failure to publish a single Handke title the past five years, turning
down great work like
the
novel KALI (The Saltworks)
THE
CUCKOOS OF VELICA HOCA (I don't know of a single writer in English
who can do an intimate reportage of a place of that kind)
of
the novel/play STORM STILL
FSG
making the major mistake of allowing the wonderful but entirely
overtaxed translator
Krishna
Winston as their advisor in the matter,
who
has been unable to complete
MORAVIAN
NIGHTS
since
its publication seven years ago in Germany -
can
be perused in the requisite dirty ratstail manner in greater detail
via this link.
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/04/summa-farrar-straus-roloff.html
It
is not that long ago that Handke couldn't buy but a rare halfway
intelligent review in Krautland. Currently, a kind of diametrical
opposite holds true: his work is besieged by uncritical acclaim by
the likes of idiots like Siegrid Loeffler or Lothar Struck (who also
blogs under the name Gregor Keuschnig, thus assuming the name of a
Handke surrogate in several Handke novels) & who might know
better since at he was my German editor for
DEM
HANDKE AUF DIE SCHLICHE
http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm
which
itself needs revising, also in light of
Malte
Herwig's in some respects devastating revelations in his
MEISTER DER DÄMMERUNG"
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/full-length-review-of-herwigs-handke.html
==================
Immediately
below you will find the link to material related to the first English
language premiere of a Peter Handke play
in
20 + years -
THE
BEAUTTIFUL DAYS IN ARANJUEZ
in
the hope that the NY TIMES and its reviewers might not miss the
opportunity and get the reception all wrong – I gladly send Scott
Abbott's & my text
production
of the Zejlko Dukic
directed
THE
BEAUTTIFUL DAYS IN ARANJUEZ as translated
by
Michael Roloff
with
Scott Abbot.
as
it has so often disastrously over the past fifty years.
I
am pessimistic that you have anyone on staff who can do justice to
ARANJUEZ & most of the other later Handke plays. Mr. Brantly,
that fan of Wendy Wasserstein, would certainly not seem not to be.
==============
I
have two suggestions for improvement: a kind of ombuds-person who
double-checks the kind of reviews that I found so objectionable, the
Price-Jones, the Siegel, the Neil Gordon, the Barnes - that is, of
books by major publishers that arrive at the review with a pedigree.
And:
the NEW YORK TIMES needs
at
least one full-time European cultural reporter & at least one for
the rest of the world, it will be worth it for the INTERNATIONAL
EDITION,
plus
listings.
Very
truly yours,
Michael
Roloff
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