the involvement in several of the two dozen non-fiction titles was often more complex & deeper.
The non-fiction titles I translated
or edited affected me at least as profoundly if not more than the novelists
with whose work I became intimately acquainted – Musil, Hesse, Peter Weiss, Uwe
Johnson, Christa Wolf, Hans Erich Nossack, Alexander Kluge, George Bataille,
Michael Brodksy, Franz Innerhofer, Bob Kalich, Marvin Cohen, Erich Wolfgang Skwara & Josef Winkler:
1] DID YOU EVER SEE HITLER by Walter
Kempowski
DID YOU EVER SEE HITLER is the only
book that you need to read to understand why Hitler had followers, why he held
such a sway. I translated the book for
Peter Mayer at Avon Books around 1968 and Helen Wolf did the introduction.
I myself never saw or even heard
Hitler during my German childhood although via grandfather Werner von
Alvensleben
I lived within one degree of
separation of a man whose actions had extraordinary direct and indirect
influence on the lives of my family and therefore on me as I describe in SCREEN
MEMORIES the memoir of my German-American childhood and youth
and who became an object of
fascination: I would have loved to have published Fritz Redlich & Ted
Dorpat’s first rate psychoanalytic studies of this monstrous, wounded, vengeful
war-trigger fascist.
At
Farrar, Straus I only did novels, the Adorno Reader on which I had spent
a year reading & selecting and for which Susan Sontag was going to write
the introduction was shot down by twerp Michael DeCapua after I left & I
did not get a chance to either translate or publish non-fiction until my years
as editor at Continuum Books 1971-74, and I don’t recall placing important
non-fiction when representing Suhrkamp Verlag via the Lantz-Donadio Agency 1969-1971. For my publishing history see: http://www.roloff.mysite.com
Seabury Pres, with its imprints
Crossroads and Continuum refused to publish novels, I think George Lawler, also
influential on the ecumenical Crossroads, was to blame in concert with Werner
Linz publisher of both Seabury Press imprints, Werner Linz, a true shit it
turned out to be who had sold U.S. Herder & Herder to McGraw-Hill from
under his superior Frank Schworer who went on to found Campus Verlag in
Germany. Linz was not one to stand up for his authors… the machinations in
which you then get caught up in unless you do due diligence in a world that was
anything or only rarely gentlemanly if it had ever really been.
I became editor at Herder
McGraw-Hiil upon leaving the futile and financially so deleterious Suhrkamp
representation and did so intending to develop the equivalent of an edition Suhrkamp… that kind of paperback
line that comprised current affairs topics
& historical analytic mixed in with more permanent titles, had been in my blood since my early 60s years
in New York when some people at
Collier-McMillan – Villacanja is one name that I recall - were envisioning
bringing the most demanding books into American drugstores!!! Which
Collier-McMillan eventually did, e.g. most of Freud was done in the most
reasonable paperback editions. It was the wave in publishing that created
Doubleday Anchor, Vintage, Evergreen, Noonday and quite a few other quality
paper lines, a veritable explosion of knowledge furthered by the quest for knowledge
that the post WW II G.I. Bill had created. Publishing for me was always
intended as an enlightening educational effort, not that a few more year in
graduate school, especially a Grand Tour, would not have better equipped me.
The McGraw-Hill effort came to naught
because Harold McGraw and his subsidiary rights person Beverly Loo allowed
their greed to be fooled by a fake biography of Howard Hughes and instead of
committing hari-kari, as any self-respecting Japanese would, they took the million
dollar loss they incurred out on their trade division, including my American edition suhrkamp
dream which then, in minimalist fashion, had a vestigial start at Continuum
Books with Larry Birns The End of Chilean Democracy, Stanley Aronowitz’s
Food, Shelter & the American Dream; Sam Hall Kaplan’s The Dream
Deferred; DelaCasa’s The
Devastation of the Indies; Christian Enzensberger’s Smut (an
investigation of dirt); the two collections of Hans Magnus Enzensberger essays
The Consciousness Industry & Politics and Crime; Paul Sylbert’s Final
Cut; RITUAL, PLAY AND PERFORMANCE by
Richard Schechner;; INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC by T.W. Adorno; THE
INNERWORLD OF THE OUTERWORLD OF THE INNERWORLD by P. Handke;
TRUTH AND METHOD by H.G. Gadamer; THE
BRECHT CHRONICLE by Klaus Volker; DARK SOLILOQUY) SELECTED POEMS by Gertrud
Kolmar; THE DEADLY SIMPLE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY by John Helmer (1973) EDUCATION
FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS by Paolo Freire; DRUGS AND MINORITY OPPRESSION by
John Helmer; and
NEUROSIS AND CIVILIZATION by Michael Schneider
which I not only published but translated to familiarize myself intimately with
this the German New Left’s egalitarian program.
Not the worst start for a kind of combination
of Edition & Bibliothek Suhrkamp! Regarded from that perspective, some
titles were very much of the moment such as End
of Chilean Democracy and Food
Shelter & the American Dream, Drugs & Minority Oppression; others
- Dark Soliloquy, Final Cut, the Dream
Deferred, and Handke’s Innerworld
– were perceived to have a greater duration.
What was fortunate about Continuum Books
was that it had a Frankfurt School base with the Adorno/Horkheimer titles &
a handful of Ernst Bloch volumes. Moreover, the Catholic left I believe had a
home at Crossroad at that time. All very
Episcopalian & euconomical at that time.
I’m leaving out the two-year
representation of the Suhrkamp Verlag via Lantz-Donadio Agency where I don’t
recall placing anything significant that involved the heart and mind as did
e.g., finding a home for the Peter Weiss prose in 1965 where my efforts really
were those of an agent more than editor or translator. Financially deleterious
as those two agenting years proved to be, it was a great reading period that
also allowed analysis of how Suhrkamp Verlag’s various editions developed. Thus
the McGraw event is a kind of tragedy, and it is not all that surprising that
the firm eventually got rid of its trade division altogether. All that under-developed
talent at their various specialty magazines that I was planning to tap and that
was most eager to be tapped; the only truly well-paid years I ever had yet not
one book got published! Lots of NY editors had spent a well-paid year at
McGraw! The absurdity of American corporate life, just as we had once feared it
at Oakwood and Haverford when we discussed what aspect of the world outside our
protective zoos we might want to enter and what to avoid.
THE DEVASTATION OF THE INDIES by Bartholomew
de las Casas with one of those marvelous H.M. Enzensberger essays as an
introduction.
“ The Devastation of the Indies is an
eyewitness account of the first modern genocide, a story of greed, hypocrisy,
and cruelties so grotesque as to rival the worst of our own century. Las Casas
writes of men, women, and children burned alive "thirteen at a time in
memory of Our Redeemer and his twelve apostles." " He describes butcher shops that sold human flesh for dog food
("Give me a quarter of that rascal there, " one customer says,
"until I can kill some more of my own"). Slave ship captains navigate
"without need of compass or charts, " following instead the trail of
floating corpses tossed overboard by the ship before them. Native kings are
promised peace, then slaughtered. Whole families hang themselves in despair.
Once-fertile islands are turned to desert, the wealth of nations plundered,
millions killed outright, whole peoples annihilated. In an introduction,
historian Bill M. Donovan provides a brief biography of Las Casas and reviews
the controversy his work produced among Europeans, whose indignation--and denials--lasted
centuries. But the book itself is short. "Were I t describe all this,
" writes Las Casas of the four decades of suffering he witnessed, "no
amount of time and paper could encompass this task."
THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY by H.M.
Enzensberger
POLITICS AND CRIME by H.M.
Enzensberger
I continue to be amazed that Hans
Magnus Enzensberger’s so intelligent essay work has never found the proper
response in the U.S. It’s too intelligent I suspect. Susan Sontag much
cared for it, but I don’t recall any one else right now. I translated the bulk
of the pieces in these two volumes during my half-year trip halfway around the
world and back prior to starting my new job as editor at Continuum.
Enzensberger was intelligent company and highly educational.
SMUT (An Essay on Filth) by Christian
Enzensberger
is one of the half dozen book I am
most pleased to have helped whelp in this country. A fabulous bibliography
which I a great reader of bibliographies of work that I like consumed in it
entirety. I was in a University of Munich seminar on modernism with Christian I
then recalled when we met in New York, but we had not talked then in fall 1956.
Drugs
& Minority Oppression by John Helmer
I am drawing a complete blank how
I came upon the Helmer? Who suggested this so important book? Was there an
agent? But I published two of his titles.
THE DREAM DEFERRED by Sam Hall
Kaplan was a pleasure to edit in New York with NY Times, later L.A. Times
writer Sam Kaplan who now resides in Malibu where I then spent six productive
years in them thar hills among some very crazy folk?! Sam felt abandoned since
publication of his Dream coincided with my leaving Continuum to start
Urizen Books, and I could not take him with me.
Paul Sylbert FINAL CUT
Having seen both friend Paul’s cut
and then the studios FINAL CUT was a slam dunk for me. Great project to edit
and have Paul design it too. Publisher Linz was not supportive against the
pushback from the Hollywood types.
“Great book about how a Hollywood film can be
made, and then undone by studio interference. Fascinating to read now, 40 years
after it was written, because even though Sylbert's point is that commercialism
trumps art, the book shows that a lot more art got through back then than would
today. Today, Sylbert's film wouldn't even get made.”
TRUTH & METHOD by Georg Gadamer
I only edited the translation, but
what learning experience on the history of interpretation it is to read this
great book paying an editor’s close attention.
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC
by Theodor Adorno is one of those I am closest to and proudest to help
transition into the U.S.
END OF CHILEAN DEMOCRACY by Larry
Birns
is one of those books I picked up
entirely by the chance that Continuum’ Lexington Avenue address was near the
U>N> and that Larry, a U.N. officer for Chile, I think bumped into each
other on the street, I think he had the papers that comprised the book with
him! And it was just what I was looking for! Larry who has been running COHA
for many years http://www.coha.org/ COUNCIL OF HEMISPHERIC
AFFAIRS are still in touch
I became acquainted with Stanley via
Joyce Johnson who was the editor of his McGraw-Hill title False Promises: The Shaping of American
Working Class Consciousness and Food, Shelter was a natural for the time
of the mid-70s I learned a lot from
Stanley and his work. I forget why at Urizen I did not do
a book of his, perhaps he was committed elsewhere. But we stayed in touch, and
the introduction to Fred Jameson proved fruitful.
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF MONEY Bornemann
The title speaks for itself, it is a
collection of essays and played into my interest in psychoanalysis and
eventually I entered this amazing procedure and if I had done so earlier I
would have saved the world!
Tilman Moser’s
Years of Apprenticeship on the Couch
also features in the precedings for
an analysis of my own. Lots of resistance at the time – mid 70s - among
American analysts. I myself now more than ten years ago wrote up my analysis as
A Patient’s Experience of his Analysis.
At Urizen I was also keen on doing a
Self-Psychology Reader – a hot subject a that time - but Robert Sussman-Stewart
, this was his original idea - had
proved unreliable & I had my hands full and could not pursue this interesting project on my own.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL READER by Arato/ Gebhardt
The idea for this reader originated
during my Continuum days & took a while to get out since Gebhardt had a
hard time then writing the headnotes to the pieces that he selected. A big
success as an introduction. Volume II, to cover the Frankfurt School’s second
generation never materialized for lack of editorial resolve.
MOSQUITOES AND ELEPHANTS Wilfred
Burchett
came to us via our Trotskyite
British distributors Pluto Press who would not do it, Burchett – from their p.o.v.
- being a Stalinist, not that they woouldn’t distribute it then. Burchett was
first-of-all a journalist whose political affiliation had allowed him unique
access to the way the Vietcong fought.
There are a few stories associated
with Wilfred’s visit to New York. As I as usual went to my corner all-purpose
newsstand around 4 p.m. one of those days to get my sugar fix in the form of a
Mars bar I saw Wilfred’s pudgy face on the cover of the New York Post with the
headline “Torturer of US POW’s in the US.” I called the White House information
office and was assured that nothing of the kind was true, Wilfred has also
covered the Korean War, as what war had he not covered! The headline was the
making of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian machinations against their fellow
Aussie communist journalist Burchett.
I took Wilfred to Elaine’s to meet
with American journalists who had been in Vietnam – now five years in the past –
and all was well until an infamous Post Reporter showed up with his
photographer. Elaine suggested leaving through the adjacent kitchen, a room
parallel to the restaurant and I made the mistake of doing so with Wilfred and
his darling Bulgarian wife, whereupon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Dunleavy
shoved me so that his photographer could get a shot of “Burchett leaving” or
perhaps it read “escaping through the kitchen” and I called the police and
eventually took Donleavy to court. At that point I had the record of his
violent behavior from his days in the Far East and I read it into the court
record. The judge said he’d give me a conviction of Donleavy on the order of
having left his garbage can uncovered but I would have to bring all the
witnesses from Elaine’s to court three times or I could leave it at having
Donleavy’s record in the court record. As we left together - I had presented
myself per se - Donleavy was accompanied by a NY Post lawyer - Steve asked
whether I didn’t regard myself as fortunate that he had not gouged out my eyes,
as he supposedly had in the Far East. I must say I appreciated his sense of
humor. We had been the first case called that morning of hundreds at the
Leonard Street court. Another Aussie who now works the Far East for the New
York Times then wrote all this up for the Soho Weekly news. Indeed, Donleavy, a
Kiwi rugby star, could have destroyed this Bantam weight in short order.
PIONEERING IN THE URBAN WILDERNESS
bv Jim Stratton
was a title of the kind of which I
did too few, that is, a book related to my immediate neighborhood and the way I
was living. Jim, an ex UPI journalist, did the electricity for my first loft,
which is how the idea for the book originated, and we sent him all over the
country to get a feel for urban pioneering, that kind of conversion as it was
occurring in the mid-70s everywhere. The printing in the book when we finally
got it out was seriously over-inked,
but I decided to accept the job anyway, there was something appropriate about
smudginess to the subject.
END PRODUCT by Sabath & Hall
was a lot of fun to do, Howard
Linzer, who was in charge of sales, took the lead here.
Rudolf Augstein JESUS SON OF MAN
was a lot of fun for the animosity
it generated among the fundamentalists. The book has hundreds of typos courtesy
of its editor Hassan’s boyfriend to whom he farmed out the proofs. And I failed
to double check before it went to the printer!
Quarks : The Stuff of Matter: Harald Fritzsch
Provides an account
for the general reader of what physicists have learned about the atomic
nucleus, protons, neutrinos, and quarks - the basic constituents of all matter.
Was an editing translating job for
my friend Martin Kessler at Basic Books. With all the background reading I
needed to do it got me back to snuff on sub-atomic physics and the
non-sensicals – e.g. charms + anti-charms! – that then entered my dream life
since I did this work while in analysis. Mesons. Bosons. Leptons as leopards!
TELL 38 ROLF HOCHHUT
Consists of the trial transcripts of
Maurice Bavaud a would be Hitler
assassin & translating the book while in analysis proved torturous not only
for its parricidal theme but also because that period in analysis coincided
with the reliving of my torturous childhood with my governess, as well as my
guilt for not having “taken care of” the partner in Urizen who had proved evil,
that is not in time; ambivalences, punishment, fears of being beheaded like
poor Bavaud.
Wolfgang Roth MEMOIR
Es haengt alles von der Beleuchtung ab/
It all depends on the lighting
while in analysis on my walk back
three times a week I would stop by “Rothy’s” apartment and we would go over a
section of his memoir that appears not to have been published. Rothy –
because he was so tiny - was a stutterer, he had started to stutter when a dog
had seized a hotdog he had in his mouth as a kid in Berlin’s Tiergarten section. I think I earned
back a third of the cost of an analytic hour in delightful company with tea
& cookies! We met when he did the set for Carl Weber’s production of Handke’s
KASPAR which I had translated.
During my Urizen days I also edited
a memoir by Margaret Cooke, 100 hours for 10 k which went into the firm.
Interesting work with a woman who from early
on in life had been the prisoner and stunted into fragility by great wealth and
a forbidding father. Editing the Kalich novelfor 40 k meant that outside editing introduced a total
of 50 K into the firm, I also subscribed to half the debt to our printer, the
darling George E. Banta Co, 80 k, but failed to abort partner Schulz from
sluicing his alleged investments through, etc etc.
LOVE LETTER TO JEAN GENET WINKLER I
cover already at the end of:
