It was through a now-lost reference that I first encountered Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s work. I began with three of her books, drawn as much to her as to her writing. I hope her letters find a good translator and publisher.
I’m having a run of Bohemians.
In the Afterword to her Lyric Novella, there’s a passage that strikes me as refreshingly truthful:
“When she is lonely, she writes him a sort of love letter in which she categorically denies any possibility for loving a man: ‘Incidentally, you are so sure of yourself, so conceited in your hyper-criticism, so endlessly alone due to your knowledge. […] For I also believe that you are a bad person. Weak, vain and wicked, like all men, because they do not have the same humility as we women do.’”
Yet it is her travel diaries I prefer; she writes beautifully of landscape and skies. As Wilde said, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
hi anthony, yeah might have been me, but as you know i always shift my blogular content about, and anyway main thing is you enjoy the bookses. from what i can see from the german/swiss side, they’ve been doing a lot in the last years, unearthening her writing and letters and published & edited it really nicely. it seems that seagull follows suit.
and here’s a documentary in case you haven’t already seen it which you may well have…
Schwarzenbach’s overly possessive mother destroyed a lot of material including diaries and Erika Mann’s letters.
Thanks for the documentary. I’ll watch it this evening.
yes, but some could be saved, there is an edition already of the mann-schwarzenbach letters, 262 pages, only needs to be translated.
Thanks for that information. I’m not sure such correspondence is commercially viable, but one can only hope.