Letter No. 486
[On stationery of the Hotel Madeira Palácio, Funchal, Madeira]
[Funchal]
January 19, 1986
Dear Dr. Unseld,
Before my departure from Austria I had time to cast a glance at your publishing catastrophe; what you have allowed to be printed and published in those more than 3,000 pages is the biggest publishing embarrassment yet known to me.1 To print and bind more than 3,000 pages of such addlebrained proletarian rubbish is an act worthy of inclusion in the book of records--as the world record in stupidity.
I am not talking here about the woman who has given birth to this 3,000 plus-page piece of drivel, but rather about the fact that in personally issuing this load of imbecilic trash my publisher has made it clear that he is literally non compos mentis. The editor of the whole thing is of course a petit-bourgeois Swiss blockhead and the house reader who “supervised” the whole thing is in a manner of speaking a blessed idiot. How has this person come, as it seems to me he has done, to stick to you so firmly and indelibly; how have you come to be so smitten with this patch of glue that you have trodden on? That is not the only question. The most important question now is how is it going to be possible in future to commit a manuscript into the hands of this publisher, who before this incident obviously always appeared to be a publisher of substance? If the whole episode weren’t so embarrassing, one could send this rubbishy Viennese slattern to the Devil and your editorial office quite simply straight to hell, and be done with it. But humor has its limits when it is entangled with anything fundamentally serious. In questions of so-called high art I am not someone you want to joke around with.
The cuff to my ears that you have administered via the publication of these dubious 3,000 pages is having a profound effect.
You could just as easily have made it into the book of records if instead of publishing Ms. Fritz’s drivel you had simply printed a 3,000-square roll of toilet paper and issued it under the Suhrkamp label.
Yours,
Thomas Bernhard
- Marianne Fritz’s novel, Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst, [He Whose Language You Don’t Understand], was published on November 11, 1985 in three volumes totaling 3,389 pages. Concurrently, Suhrkamp issued a book entitled Marianne Fritz, “Was soll man da machen.” Eine Einführung zu dem Roman [“What Is One Supposed to Do.” An Introduction to the Novel] “Dessen Sprache du nicht versteht.” It contained an introduction by Heinz F. Schafroth and letters from the author to the publisher’s reader Otto F. Böhmer.