One of the best sources you get for 18th century sensational gossip and character portrats are envoy reports. They're an absolute gold mine, I swear. Of course, the envoys also complain a lot, which made me wonder...




Salka Viertel, actress, scriptwriter (for Greta Garbo), saloniere, memoirist and activist was a very interesting woman in her own right, and a great portrayer of other interesting people in her memoirs. Her house was a central meeting point for the German-speaking exiles in the 1940s, which is how I first came across her. Here in this videa, she's discussed (in English) with her biographer Donna Rifkind and two German scholars. In between discussions, you get readings from Rifkind's biography about her and from Salka's own memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers. (If I have one criticism, than that the excerpt Rifkind is reading form her own biography right at the beginning describes something which is one of the great tragicomic set pieces in Salka's own book - the birthday party for Heinrich Mann where both brothers Mann with their speeches drove Salka's cook into despair - , and not only is it hard to improve from Salka' s own description (which has become legendary and gets quoted in every book about exiles in L.A.), but it doesn't say something about Salka herself. So if I was Rifkind, I'd have opened with a different excerpt. But that's me nitpicking, and if you haven't heard the story before, it's funny and sad and moving all on the same time, so no objections there, plus the later discussions are definitely Salka-focused. Also? Both the discussion and the readings are filmed in the Villa Aurora, which is the drop gorgeous mansion in Pacific Palisades where my doctoral thesis subject Lion Feuchtwanger spent his last twenty years in.

This year's Frankfurt Book Fair, so far: sparkling. Which is the thing about Frankfurt. Leipzig is more intimate, more cozy, and arguably the readings are far better organized, both for the authors and the public - but Frankfurt has the glitz and the sheer quantity. There are literaly more new books in one spot than anywhere else in the world, from nations everywhere in the world. It always feels like Gershwin song should be in the air.

This year's feud: is between our two major book clubs, Weltbild and Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann traditionally hosts the first big reception of the book fair on Tuesday night, and this year, Weltbild opened a new outlet in nearby Wiesbaden on the same evening, inviting all the VIPs, with the consequence that they were torn between going to the Bertelsmann reception and going to the Weltbild one. Bertelsmann rallied by snagging Penelope Cruz as a guest at the last second (with the pretext that she as optioned the film rights for the novel "The Indian Princess" - that's the German name anyway - which Bertelsmann publishes), but nonetheless, it was emptier, and now the daggers are out.

Interesting (to me) books: "Pazific Exil"´, for example, which everybody and their dog had asked me about back in Los Angeles, when I hadn't read it yet. Takes place among the exiled writers in the 40s and 50s, the brothers Mann, my guy Feuchtwanger, Brecht, and as a special musical guest star Arnold Schönberg. (Sidenote: in the novel, the author claims Schönberg's son Ronnie doesn't speak German. Said author was like yours truly once a scholar at the Villa Aurora but must have missed out being invited at the Schönbergs, because Ronnie S. so does speak German, too. Complete with Austrian slang.) The sections I read were captivating enough but I can see the point of one reviewer who complaint that all the voices, with the exception of Alma Mahler-Werfel, sound identical, whether they're supposed to be Thomas Mann or Marta Feuchtwanger.

A must: Selected Letters of Ted Hughes, published by Faber & Faber. Not every writer, let alone every poet, writes readable letters, but Hughes did, and he had such a broad spectrum of interests that you get detailed thoughts on anything from Euripides to fishing. Inevitably, the sections which will be read the most will be the ones dealing with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and its aftermath. The Plath-relevant letters are indeed fascinating, both because they're written without the benefit of hindsight and because they make clear what most if not all biographies can't get across, how fascinated and entranced Hughes was by Plath as a poet from the start. (This is not self-evident; he was arguably the more accomplished poet when they met, as this was before Sylvia's poetical break-through.) His descriptions of her in letters to his sister, brother and friends describe her as a poet first, and later when they are already a couple there are always passages about what she's working on. In the few letters to Plath herself which survive, we always get ideas discussed as well as the matters of the day, and books, always books.

(He also defends Sylvia as a poet to others; the last letter in which he does that, written shortly before it would become entirely unnecessary due to her elevation to icon, he writes, regarding a friend's criticism of "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" - both of which were broadcast on radio during Plath's life time but not published in book form yet - as poems rich on autobiographical drama but not on art, and I'm quoting by memory since I had to leave the book at the stand: "You're wrong. There is no poet alive who doesn't wish that he or she had written such poems. Her voice is entirely unique.")

Regarding Sylvia the person, the most interesting quote not already in the biographies is probably in a letter to his sister Olwyn in which he tries to explain Sylvia's defense mechanisms to her - I'll buy the letters and quote directly, because the passage shouldn't be bungled by paraphrasing. Also in a letter to Olwyn, written immediately after Plath's suicide years later, you get the self accusation Plath's biographers have been longing for, along the lines of: "She asked me for help, as she has so often done, I was the only one who could have helped her and I didn't." This immediate reaction to her suicide changed, of course, though you get the impression that for the rest of his life, his opinion on all of the factors which drove her and what his part in them was kept changing since he kept struggling with it. He does argue from the start against what what was for a time a dominating literary opinion, that the poetry written during Plath's last few months - the one which made her immortal, the Ariel poems - was also a contributing factor; on the contrary, he argues that writing those poems was healing for her. What he does see contributing to her final downward spiral was the publication of The Bell Jar followed by critical indifference and the fact the book brought her first suicide attempt back to her full force.

One of the most arresting and surprising descriptions: of a bull fight in Spain during their honeymoon, alluded to in the poem You hated Spain. Because it's basically the anti Hemingway take. Hughes the naturalist wasn't sentimental about animals and had killed his share of fish and rabbits from boyhood onwards, but he saw the bullfight as something entirely without grandeur or fairness, and the description he gives makes its case far better than many an article on the subject.

There is also the awareness of aging in the later letters, when he writes about suddenly realizing that World War I, which for him was something he connected with his own life on a very personal level because his father was a veteran and shell-shocked, was for most people around him now something like the Boer War or the Crimean War, a historical event from the books.

Definitely a volume I'll aquire once the book fair is over, and review more properly then...