Friedrich P. Ott
ARNO SCHMIDT: 1914·1979
There is a limbo for dead writers, denied blissful oblivion
as long as a single work of theirs survives. That, at any rate, was the
vision in an early piece by the German writer Arno Schmidt who
recently made his long-overdue and posthumous debut here.
If
Schmidt was right, he may as well settle in - however unhappily - for
a long stay down there, in that international corner occupied by or
reserved for kindred spirits, such as Joyce, Beckett, Raymond
Queneau, and Thomas Pynchon. For Schmidt's recognition as a
figure of world literature is only beginning.
Arno Schmidt died in 1979, aged sixty-five, the author of a
voluminous and closely interdependent production: captivating and
challenging fiction, refreshingly polemical literary essays, and trans–
lations, especially ofJames Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe.
The two works now available in English are representative of the two
main phases of a career which spanned thirty years:
The Egghead
Republic
(Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980), a diaristic negative utopia
from 1957, and his swan song,
Evening Edged in Gold
(New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), a hybrid, an encyclopedic,
dialogized "scenic fairy-tale farce" from 1975. They will serve to flesh
out the following, necessarily sketchy, portrait of Arno Schmidt in
his significance as a "visual" and an autobiographical artist.
Like all great humorists Schmidt was a pessimist. His world
view, forged under the impact of a deprived childhood, was honed
under the further abrasion of studying Schopenhauer and of personal
experience: Nazi reprisals, the hunger and want of refugee existence
which proved especially wretched and prolonged for the fledgling
writer. This pessimism gives the
oeuvre
its unity. The protagonists
typically are middle-aged or older men, the abandoned offspring of
the "Leviathan" or "Nobodaddy's Children," as Schmidt titled two
trilogies, the latter in deference to William Blake's hostile world
demon. They are isolated men, alienated from the world and, in
another sense, from themselves. They reject as futile metaphysical
