davy crockett's hat
by
Douglas Messerli
Marjorie
Perloff The Vienna Paradox (New York: New Directions, 2004).
At
dinner one night at Marjorie Perloff’s house—an event with just a handful of
couples as opposed to her usually larger affairs—the conversation turned to the
subject of what those around the table, all quite renowned in our fields, had
done before embarking upon our current careers. I can’t recall large parts of
this friendly dinner conversation—which I believe included the artists Susan
Rankaitis and Robert Flick, Marjorie’s daughter Nancy, a curator at the Getty
Museum, and her husband Rob, scholars Renée Riese and Judd Hubert, and Howard
and me—but I do remember reminding Marjorie that she had once told me that
early in her career she had been so desperate for a job that she had applied at
small colleges such as Beaver College (now called Arcadia University). Knowing
of Marjorie’s erudition, her brilliant writing and teaching abilities, and gift
of language(s), the idea of her teaching in that self-advertised pastoral place
of peace and quiet in the Philadelphia suburbs was unthinkable for everyone in
the room.
Marjorie
laughed, admitting that as a young housewife she’d had numerous jobs, even
producing German titles for American films. “You can’t imagine how difficult it
is to translate the humor of Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz’s The Long, Long
Trailer into German. How do you say, as Lucy does, “turn left right here, which
leads Desi to swerve right.” “I also worked on Davy Crockett,” Marjorie
admitted, “I still have a coonskin cap!” We broke into delighted laughter,
while she went to find it in a nearby closet.
The
very thought that this great woman of academic renown had once worked on the
very movies that I had attended as a child with my entire family was a
revelation. As a family unit we shared perhaps only four movies (the other two
being White Christmas and The Ten Commandments), and the idea that Marjorie had
in any way had been connected to the other two films seemed almost miraculous;
I remember feeling at the time that it may have been the only thing in our
backgrounds, outside of the classroom camaraderie of teacher and student, that
connected us!
Soon
after, the conversation turned to Marjorie’s childhood. We all knew that she
had been born in Austria, the daughter of highly educated parents, and that she
had escaped with her family via train on the night of March 13, 1938, the day
the Anschluss (Austria’s political annexation by Germany) took effect. “My
parents simply could not believe that the Austrian government could possibly
submit to the Germans,” she reported. When asked to describe that shattering
event, Marjorie demurred. “I can hardly remember anything. I was just a child
at the time. I can only recall my mother telling my brother and me to be very
quiet.”
The
publication of her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, accordingly, was more than just
an event of interest for those of us close to this remarkable woman; it seemed
a sort of personal answer to our dinner time questions.
That
book’s reproduction of the first two chapters of her childhood travel journal,
“Die Areise” (“The ‘A’ Journey”) poignantly reveal the mixed feelings of a six
year-old girl experiencing the excitement of events, but perhaps not
recognizing their intense danger and significance; she translates:
“On
the Train”
On
the train, we went to sleep right away. But my cousins, as is
typical of them,
complained they didn’t sleep all night. In Innsbruck,
we had to get up and
go to the police station where they unpacked
all our luggage and my poor
Mommy had to repack everything.
There was such a mob and we had to
wait so long that Mommy
said she would unpack a book and I sat down on
our hatbox and read.
When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where
we had
ham rolls that tasted very good. And as I was sitting in this
restaurant,
I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a
book.
Well, I hadn’t experienced much yet but, just wait, there will be more!
Perloff
compares that charmingly innocent view of the family’s circumstance with a
letter from her mother sent two days later to her sister in London, in which
the family’s terror is quite clearly elucidated: the intense planning and
packing up of family possessions, the sleepless night of March 12th, the
“incessant shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!,” the sound of bombers flying overhead and
vehicles rumbling through the streets, the hurried goodbyes, the tears. The
same events of the young daughter’s travel journal are far more dramatically
detailed in her mother’s recounting:
So
we finished packing and left in the evening: my father-in-law,
Stella, Otto,
Hedy and Greta, and Aunt Gerti. Those who didn’t
have the same last
name had to pretend not to know one another.
This applied to the children
as well: they were not allowed to speak
and in fact didn’t speak. We
traveled comfortably second-class as
far as Innsbruck. The children slept.
In Innsbruck, there was passport
control: for Jews, the order was,“Get
off the train with your
luggage.” Aunt Gerti was allowed to continue. Evidently,
they took
her for Aryan although no one asked. We were taken by
the S.A.
to the police office, across from the railway station. There, we
were
held in a narrow corridor, heavily guarded. One after another,
we were
called into a room where our passports were examined,
our money confiscated
(since the rules had been changed overnight).
They took 850 marks
and the equivalent in schillings. We didn’t care
the slightest. Our
thought was only: will they let us travel further?
Will we be arrested? Then
all of our luggage was unpacked piece by
piece. Finally, we were allowed
to leave. …Back on the train, we
passed one military convoy after
another going the other way.
At
10 in the evening, we arrived [in Zürich].
…Here
we are deciding what to do next.
This
letter alone might have been a scenario for a film.
But
Perloff’s profound memoir is more than another story of escape from Nazi
control. For Marjorie is less interested in how her family escaped, than she is
in why they and others like them had waited for the very last moment to leave
their beloved home; how their seeming assimilation as Jews into the
anti-Semitic Austrian culture so completely misled these brilliant individuals;
and, just as important, how these assimilated Austrians readily adapted
themselves to their new American situations.
Gabriele
Mintz was born to Ilse Schüller Mintz and Maximilian Mintz in 1931. Her early
childhood took place in the comfort of the Ninth District of Vienna near the
University and Votifkirche (the neo-Gothic cathedral built in the mid-19th
century on the sight of the attempted murder of the young kaiser Franz Joseph),
the neighborhood she herself describes as “Austrian upper-middle-class.” Their
apartment on Hörlgasse contained a high-ceilinged nursery painted white, heated
by a large porcelain stove; a dining room and adjacent salon with
floor-to-ceiling bookcases; and a maid.
Gabriele’s
father, Maximilian was a lawyer with a passion for poetry and art, which he
shared with a circle of friends known as the Geistkreis, which included noted
economists Friedrich Hayek (the group’s founder and a major influence on
American Libertarianism), Gottfried von Haberler, Oscar Morgenstern, and Fritz
Machlup, legal scholar Herbert Fürth (also a partner in Maximilian and his
father’s law firm), art historians Otto Benesch and Johannes Wile, musicologist
Emanuel Winernitz, political philosopher Erich Voegelin (with whom the father
continued to correspond from 1938 to the late 1950s), the phenomenologists
Felix Kaufmann (also a member of the famed “Vienna Circle”) and Alfred Schütz,
the historian Friedrich Engel-Jansi, and the mathematician Karl Menger (former
tutor to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg and, later, founder of the Austrian
School of Economics). The group, in Perloff’s words, devoted “evenings to the
theater, opera, concerts, and their own areas of reading.” But the group’s
influence—with its interweaving memberships with other such Vienna groups: the
earlier “Menger circle,” the first “Austrian school,” and the “Vienna
Circle”—made it influential to 20th century thinking.
It
must have been difficult for Gabriele’s mother, Ilse, to accept the role of
silent hostess, serving coffee and cake before discreetly leaving the room at
the Geistkreis meetings in Hörlgasse 6. For she, like her husband, was a “proud
intellectual,” with a doctorate—a degree also attained by her two sisters—in
economics. Some of the reviews of Perloff’s memoir refer to her mother’s role
in her later life in the United States as a “housewife.” But in fact, she took
a second doctorate in economics at Columbia University, later combining
teaching at Columbia with a position, alongside noted economists Martin
Feldstein (later president of that organization and chief economic advisor to
President Reagan) and Milton Friedman (winner of a Nobel Prize) at the National
Bureau of Economic Research. A search of the NBR website still calls up several
essays by Ilse Mintz on such subjects as “Determination in the Quality of
Foreign Bonds,” “American Exports During Business Cycles, 1879-1958,” and
“Cyclical Fluctuations in the Exports of the United States Since 1879.” I
recall Marjorie’s humorous dismay in our early friendship in Washington, D.C.,
when, after discussing Pound, O’Hara, and David Antin, she observed, “Of
course, my mother is distressed that I’m not reading Goethe.”
The
young Gabrielle’s grandfathers were even more illustrious figures in Viennese
culture. Her maternal grandfather, Richard Schüller, born in Brno in what is
now the Czech Republic, traveled to Vienna to study law with Karl Menger, later
serving as the Austrian representative to the League of Nations. In the
Austrian government, he served first in the Department of Commerce and later in
the Foreign Office under chancellor Dollfuss (and the successor upon Dollfuss’s
murder, Kurt Schuschnigg), a position from which he negotiated major trade
agreements and foreign loans for the Austrian government (including a trade
agreement with Mussolini). Schüller escaped Nazi-controlled Austria at the age
of 68 by hiking through the Alpine pass into Italy. Her paternal grandfather,
Alexander Mintz, was an eminent Justitzrat (King’s counsel) who, in his youth,
was a member of the noted literary coterie meeting at the Café Griensteidl that
included Arthur Schnitzer, Hermann Bahr, and Peter Altenberg.
In
short, one could not imagine a family more involved in Austrian cultural life.
How could they be so oblivious to the problems—particularly after Dollfuss’s
murder? Perloff analyzes the problem first within the perspective of her own
family: Richard Schüller was asked by his government superiors to allow himself
to be baptized (he refused “the honor”); his brothers Hugo and Ludwig became
Lutherans, the latter committing suicide in 1931 upon the collapse of his bank;
and a distant cousin, Robert, was a devoted Nazi who after the Anschluss was
sent to his death in Auschwitz. Perloff then considers these issues in the
context of accounts such as that of art historian Ernst Gombrich (colleague of
Perloff’s uncle, Otto Kurz) of the physical assault against Jews in the
university, long before the Anschluss, where it became increasingly common for
Nazis to beat up Jewish students, sometimes defenestrating them so that upon
the sidewalk they might be charged (if they survived) with disturbing the peace
(an incident also described in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento story, “Julia”).
How could they tolerate these assaults and still describe themselves as
Austrians? she wonders, a question reverberating, quite obviously, back upon
her own family’s acceptance of their disintegrating Viennese life.
Ultimately,
she suggests that they saw their assimilation through a cultural lens that did
not include ethnic and racial concerns. Since they shared cultural interests
such as their love of Goethe, Stefan George and others, they perceived
themselves as Austrians without realizing that for their countrymen in general
they remained racially “outsiders.” Their allegiance to the Germanic tradition
blinded them, in a crucial way, to the religious and ethnic differences
embedded in German and Austrian thought.
Gombrich’s
statement that he doesn’t “believe that there is a separate Jewish cultural
tradition” may signify his failure to comprehend the deeply ingrained ideas of
his countrymen, but it simultaneously points to the reason why many Austrian
Jews, including Perloff’s parents, were able to quickly readjust their lives to
their new American experience, were able to reinvent themselves as émigrés.
While recognizing and disdaining the anti-intellectualism of their new home,
Perloff’s parents quickly adapted to their now “lower middle-class” situation.
Her father abandoned law to become an accountant, and despite now having to
cook all meals by herself in their one-bedroom apartment, Marjorie’s mother
still found time (and energy) to return to university studies.
Gabrielle,
moreover, like young immigrants everywhere, adapted to her life at an even
faster rate. Within a month of her arrival in a new country, she switches from
German to English in mid-sentence of an autobiographical entry:
Abe
rim September musten [sic] wir angemeldet werden. Ich und
eben
der Hansi [the son of Professor Felix Kaufmann, of Geitskreis
fame,
and his physician wife, Else] kamen erst in de erste A, mein
Bruder
in die drite [sic] A und meine Cousinen in die vierte B.
But
my Kronstein cousins went to another school. After three days
I
and George [as Hansi is now called!] skipped to 2A.
She
has not only skipped a whole grade in three days, but crossed the language
barrier as well. When Gabriele graduated high school, she changed her name to
Margie, and later Marjorie.
Much
of The Vienna Paradox recounts the education and transformation of its author
from an Austrian-born child to a professor of contemporary poetry—answering
some questions we had begun to ask at that dinner-time conversation years
earlier. She recounts her education at P.S. 7 and at The Fieldston
School—sponsored by the New York Ethical Society—as well as her later graduate
education at Catholic University. She mentions also her early employment at the
Bettmann Archive and her short-lived job as an M-G-M title writer, which
included her work on The Long, Long Trailer and Kiss Me Kate. But Davy Crockett
and his hat has disappeared from the narrative, replaced in her memoir by her
recollection of composing rhymes for Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Song” of Rose
Marie, a job which earned her a “trapper’s hat.” Was my memory wrong? Had my
desire for connections been so strong that I had transformed Nelson Eddy into
Davy Crockett? It hardly matters; as we know, memory is often unreliable, and
the story was the same. Most likely Perloff’s research of the events of her
life had revealed something different from what she herself had recalled that
long-ago night.
Over
time perspective changes. As she relates of her 1955 return to Vienna, the city
“looked like a set for The Third Man,” “I tried to find Hörlgasse 6…but
something got mixed up and [we] took a photograph of the wrong house.” “From my
vantage point in 1955, none of this seemed very real.” Perloff, accordingly,
has little patience with those who perpetually tout the superiority of pre-war
Viennese life over their new American lives in the present. The young Gabrielle
clearly grew up more involved in American popular culture, perhaps, than her
Iowa-bred student—and with the advantage of a cultural heritage that deepens
and enlivens her observations on American literature and art. And in that sense
Perloff is herself a “Vienna paradox.”
I
first met the adult Marjorie in a classroom at the University of Maryland in
1975. I was a Ph.D student in American fiction, and, although I disliked
poetry, I knew that I had better take a course in this mysterious genre before
graduation. Word around the student-teacher bull-pen—as the large, open room
containing over thirty desks was called—was that Perloff was an excellent but
“difficult” teacher, by which I presumed my colleagues meant that she was
“demanding.” Without any background in poetry, I felt it prudent to take
another poetry course before enrolling in Perloff’s. With professor Milne
Holton (who three years later would translate a book of Polish poetry with my
close friend Paul Vangelisti), I studied Robert Lowell and Hart Crane. Lowell
merely reinforced my belief that poetry was simply a chopped-up symbolic
narrative, but, despite the sometimes heavy-handed symbolism of The Bridge, I
was able to write a convincing-enough essay on Crane that it was published by a
Canadian journal [see My Year 2007]. So, I felt, I was now ready for Perloff.
The
moment this enthusiastic woman entered the room on the first day of class, I
was spellbound. Her voice has something in common with the effusive croak of
Jean Arthur’s vocal instrument, a voice I simply cannot resist. She brought
just three poems with her, one by Frank O’Hara, a second by John Wieners (a
poet of whom none of us, I am sure, had ever heard), and a third by Richard
Wilbur.
She
read the first poem, “The Day Lady Died,” and asked for our reactions. We were
slow in responding, gradually coming forward with only a few obvious
observations. Unknown to me, she was completing a critical book at the moment
on O’Hara’s poetry (Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters), and since my classmates
and I seemed unable to say anything original about the work, she brilliantly
demonstrated its charms, elucidating the poem line by line.
I
was flabbergasted. Could a poem be so simple and yet complex, so rich in
association without a symbolic structure to support it? I still remember my
unspoken feelings as she read the poem. The “I did this, I did that” pattern of
this work seemed at first like something out of an amateur writer’s journal;
but gradually, as the references moved from simple acts–getting a shoeshine,
eating a hamburger and malted—to the literature of the day. Then, things began
to shift, the subjects changing from mundane actions in the American landscape
to cultural experiences of significance (the new poets of Ghana [I had
purchased the same volume a few years earlier], Verlaine, Bonnard, Hesiod,
Brendan Behan, Genet’s Les Nègres [the book version of which I had stolen—as I
describe in another essay in this volume—from an Iowa City bookstore]) before
returning to more ordinary versions of things from around the world with the
bottle of Strega purchased in a liquor store and the cartons of Gauloises and
Picayunes bought with the The New York Post. Suddenly, as the narrator/poet
walked into the 5 Spot with Mal Waldron at the keyboard, I recognized that the
“she” who whispered a song— somehow related to these exotic beings and things
(many of whom and which had Black or “outsider” associations)—was even more
exalted by the fact that her voice literally stopped this seemingly endless
catalogue of things and events, as “everyone”—the narrator and presumably the
reader as well—stopped breathing. The current of this seeming narrative had
been suddenly severed, leaving me with an image of her breathlessly stunned
audience, an image, as well, of myself upon hearing the poem.
My
reactions to the second poem, “Long Nook,” can be found in the second issue of
my journal, Sun & Moon: A Quarterly of Literature & Art, published a
year later, written originally for the course:
There
she took her lover to sea
and
laid herself in the sand.
………………………………
He
is fast, was down the dune
with
silk around his waist.
Her
scarf was small.
She
opened her clothes to the moon.
Her
underarms were shaved.
The
wind was a wall between them.
Waves
break over the tide,
hands
tied to her side with silk,
their
mind was lost in the night.
The
green light at Provincetown
became
an emerald on the beach
and
like stars fell on Alabama.
The
poem begins with a direct narrative statement in the past tense, with the vague
“There” hinting at a world beyond time, like a “faraway country” of children’s
tales. However, we are immediately made to question these expectations. The
construction of “to sea,” because there is no article, makes us think of the
infinitive “to see,” which changes the whole tone of the line and urges us to
move to the second line to discover what it is that she wants him “to see.” But
we are not told. The poet simply describes the process of her lying down in the
sand. The word “laid” is wrong here, however, and the object of the verb,
“herself,” makes no sense. Even
as
a sexual pun it is, at first thought, ludicrous. Yet, when we think back to the
previous line we recall that it was she who took her lover to “sea,” and, thus,
we see the connotations of the pun. As the seducer, she encourages her love to
have sexual intercourse by seductively lying down in the sand, a seduction
which is reflected by Wieners’ use here of the l and s sounds (lover, laid;
she, sea, herself, sand); but, in so doing, she is also taking the male role
(as we shall see there are reasons for the stereotyping of roles) and, thus, in
sexual slang, is “laying herself.”
Suddenly,
in the next line, there is a shift. A command is whispered in the present
tense, ostensibly her command: “Go up and undress in the dark.” But, in in its
short, clipped iamb with a labial ending followed by two anapests, we are told
more about the upward movement of the male than about her….”*
This
goes on for three more pages!
My
point in reproducing this passage is to demonstrate that suddenly upon hearing
these poems I discovered what poetry was; and, although my graduate student
eagerness to pin down the meaning of each and every word clearly belabors my
writing, it is equally obvious that I could now talk about poetry in a
meaningful way.
I
can’t recall which poem Marjorie selected by Wilbur. It hardly matters; his
poetry represented a direction different from one in which the course would
proceed. By hour’s end, my life had changed! It was as if a cabinet containing
rows of dusty objects d’art had been opened up, the objects taken out,
inspected, and revealed to be pulsating beings ready to spring to life.
Motivated
as I suddenly had become, I undertook a class report of the theories of Ezra
Pound. I’m still amazed at my youthful vigor: I think I read every prose work
of that poet, including his Selected Letters, learning, in the process, the
concepts behind much of modernist American poetry. I still recall my
frustrations in attempting to describe the Vorticist image—as opposed to what
Pound described as Amygism—outlined in Pound’s Gaudier Brezska: a record of an
interchange between nature and the mind, an instant “when a thing outward and
objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”
“It’s
sort of like when it’s raining,” whined one of my classmates, “and you’re
listening to a certain song, and it makes you think of….”
“No,
no, not at all,” I interrupted. “It’s not an association; it’s more like music,
an abstraction that represents the objective thing.”
“Like
when you feel sad and it rains all over your windshield.”
“No,”
I began again. “It’s not like Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, where the trombones
imitate a donkey. His emotion carries the essence in the mind, where, like a
vortex, it is purged of all ‘save the essential or dominant or dramatic
qualities,’ emerging ‘like the external original,’ but as something new,
something different.”
“Oh,
like when you’re thinking of….”
Marjorie
recalls that I grew angry, but I don’t remember feeling anything other than the
frustration of attempting to explain something to my classmates that perhaps
not even I completely understood.
Soon
after that event, a few individuals in the class began to show their hostility
to Perloff’s choice of the poets we read (Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Pound,
Williams—and other figures who would ultimately become the subjects of her
important critical study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy).
I
had already published three of my classroom papers in academic journals, and I
was, I now painfully recognize, rather cocky. One day, I knocked on Perloff’s
office door, head down in embarrassed determination to apologize about my
peers’ classroom demeanor. I believe she recognized my apology for what it was,
not a representation of my superiority, but simply an expression of my fears
that she might take their obstinate opposition as evidence that she was failing
to communicate. Perhaps it was at that moment that we became something more
than simply teacher and student, that we became friends.
I
took one more course with Marjorie, a study of Yeats and Pound. I was not, I
admit, a model student in this instance. I found Yeats boring. And I felt I had
already learned everything there was to know about Pound. By that time,
moreover, I had begun writing poetry myself, and was editing the first issues
of Sun & Moon. I had other things on my mind.
Both
Marjorie and I were reviewing, during this period, for The Washington Post Book World upon the invitation of the
Pulitzer-prize winning editor, Bill McPherson. And I was reading poets in
little magazines—an interest that grew out of my study of John Wieners—such as
Roof, Big Deal, and United Artists, all of which presented the works of poets
my mentor had not yet read. As I began to develop friendships with Bruce
Andrews, Charles Bernstein and other younger poets, Marjorie and I often had
heated debates—that is, when I could get a few words in between her remarks.
Anyone who has met her will tell you, and Marjorie herself will be the first to
admit it, she is an artful conversationalist, able to listen to someone
speaking while simultaneously expressing her own sentiments. A shy person would
have little success in communicating with Marjorie.
Some
of the poets I found most interesting, she felt were not worth her attention.
But, although she may sometimes be quick to judgment, Perloff is seldom
closed-minded. Gradually, she began to read these poets and developed an
interest in some of their writing, culminating in numerous essays, including
her book-length study, The Dance of the Intellect. She always encouraged my own
writing, moreover, in those days when I was still meekly imitating the methods
of collage I’d discovered in the work of O’Hara and Ashbery.
In
the midst of this developing friendship, Marjorie’s husband Joe, a prominent
cardiologist and author of the most established textbooks on the subject,
became head of that program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Perloff
family moved from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia. Upon finishing my Ph.D., I
was hired in 1979 by Temple University, located in the same city. So while
Marjorie commuted back and forth between Philadelphia and Washington, I
traveled in the opposite direction.
I
recall visiting their Germantown home with Howard during my first year of
teaching. Their daughter, Carey (who today is the director of the American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco) was still in high school and Nancy was
home from Princeton University. A huge dollhouse dominated one of their rooms.
As we sat down to dinner, however, they began a discussion light-miles away
from what one might have heard from teenage girls in any other home. Much of
the work of Derrida had not yet even been translated (Of Grammatology, a work I
had attempted to read without success, had been published in English only five
years before), and postmodernism, let alone “post-structuralism” was not yet a
term readily applied to literature. Carey and Nancy, however, had read
Derrida’s work in French and brilliantly debated his theories over the roast
chicken.
Soon
after, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Marjorie became a professor at
the University of Southern California, and over the next several years our
discussions and debates were continued through the mails and telephone talks.
The Perloffs were immediately delighted by their new surroundings, and Marjorie
joyfully reported on her new cultural experiences, including a performance by
actress Beatrice Manley of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy—in her own bed! Upon my
first visit to Los Angeles for a reading, I stayed in the Perloff’s Almafi
Drive house—alone, since they were traveling. Marjorie’s continued expressions
of love for Los Angeles helped me adapt quickly upon our move to the same city
in 1985. I jocularly admitted to all reports that I was following her around
the country!
I
had, in fact, moved to Los Angeles on account of my companion’s job. But
sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t, after all, an ineffable force behind our
friendship. How else to explain my utter fascination with a large German-language
novel I’d spied in the Fifth Avenue New York shop of Brentano’s by the Austrian
novelist Albert-Paris Gütersloh, Sonne und Mond; several times I asked for that
glass cabinet to be unlocked so I might turn its pages, just to glimpse the
book which, had I had any money, I most certainly would have purchased—despite
the fact I did not read a word of German! Not even my previous pleasure in
reading Robert Musil and Hermann Broch could not have have explained my
obsession. It is no coincidence that my literary and art magazine and
publishing house had taken its name from that lost treasure. What led me one
day, I now wonder, to telephone the Knopf rights editor (the very first year of
my book-publishing activities) and make an offer for the rights to reprint Heimito
von Doderer’s great two-volume opus The Demons, a fiction recounting many of
the events leading up to the Anschluss? Von Doderer’s Every Man a Murderer was
the second book for which I purchased rights, and, when an unknown woman living
in Austria, Vinal Overing Binner, wrote me to report that she translated von
Doderer’s The Merovingians, I readily published that book as well (of which I
think we sold something like 200 copies). Why did I suddenly choose to read
Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, soon after reprinting it as well? Two
Schnitzler novels, Lieutenant Gustl and Bertha Garlan, followed. How did such a
small American press as Sun & Moon come to publish Friederike Mayröcker and
Ingeborg Bachmann (the tale of that acquisition is worthy, some day, of
recounting)? I cannot remember Marjorie suggesting any of these titles to me.
From my youth on I simply have been inexplicably drawn to Austrian literature
and history.
As
Perloff has made clear, however, although she was shaped in many respects by
her Austrian heritage, she is most definitely a product of the USA. And,
although I often describe her as my mentor, my inborn sense of individuality
combined with what The Music Man composer-writer Meredith Willson has described
as “Iowa stubbornness,” has made me a difficult disciple. Fortunately, Marjorie
never sought devotees, and our special friendship has remained. As her poignant
memoir has reminded me, moreover, we have far deeper links than any
frontiersman’s hat.
Los
Angeles, August 23-24, 2006
