-and I’m back. It’s been a few months, hasn’t it? Let’s skip the excuse and just get into it, shall we? Welcome to W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List, a show where I attempt to make sense of books that try to prevent you from doing so. Today, I’m going to deviate from my conventional approach a little bit here. Rather than my typical single-novel deep dive format, I’d instead like to offer a brief “primer” on an author whose catalogue of translated texts I’ve recently begun to read my way through.
This is a pre-eminent figure in postwar European literature who doesn’t receive nearly enough attention in the English-speaking world. A writer whose corpus ranges from the stock-standard high modernism, to German Romanticism, and eventually to an experimental prose style that is almost completely unrecognisable to both English and German readers alike.
I don’t know why I’m dragging this tease out any further, his name is right there in the title. Arno Schmidt everyone, thanks for stopping by.
This is not an author I see the online literary discourse dedicating much attention to, and that’s a royal shame if I do say myself. Most of the chatter that surrounds him tends to focus on his l‘enfant terrible notoriety. He’s often regarded as just a provocateur or just an experimentalist, and that’s where the conversation ends. And look, I’m not going to argue either of these points. Flip open any of his books – even the early fiction – and you’ll be immediately confronted with a set of formal techniques unlike anything else you’ve probably read prior to this point. This, combined with the scarcity of his work in print, has led him to be consigned to the margins of “special interest” or “niche literature”. That’s all well and good, but knowing what I know about the online book-loving community’s taste, this is someone who I suspect a lot of readers would come to love, if they just gave the author a chance.
And so my goal for today’s episode, and its atypical structure relative to what I normally deliver on this channel, is to provide an entry point to Arno, and a little bit of guidance to readers who are intimidated by him. I too am a bit notorious in my own way. Small as my audience may be, I’m known for long-winded, digressive deep dives that mostly reward viewers who’ve already read the books I cover. That’s not the approach today. My intent is not to supplement any individual text but rather introduce undecided readers to Schmidt as an author on the whole and make a case for why you should track his work down.
Look - I get it - he’s not the easiest sell. His reputation as an experimentalist and quote-unquote “difficult” author has been something of a notable deterrent when it comes to people investing both their time and their cash into his books. And the cash part isn’t trivial either. Since most of Schmidt’s books are out of print, they often go for hundreds apiece. I don’t blame an undecided reader for not wanting to drop $200 on a copy of the COLLECTED STORIES when they’re not even sure they’ll be able to understand it. If this sounds like you, my hope is that by the end of this episode, I will have given you a degree of confidence, and a framework to approach his work. Moreover, stick around for the last section – there’s a very real possibility of an upcoming influx in the availability of Schmidt’s books.
Alright, Let’s dive in.
Arno Schmidt: A Post-Mortem
I came to Schmidt the way that I suspect most people do. I heard rumors floating around online of this massive, 1500-page folio-sized hardback book written in an orthographically unique sequence of fractured-and-grafted words. This book in question had only a single print run in English. Shortly after, it pretty much disappeared off the face of the Earth and is survived only by the few brave souls who had the foresight to purchase a copy for the meager cost of $70 US when it was first published. Gotta say, there aren’t many points in my life that I look back on and wish I was more online for, but in this case, I can’t help but make an exception. I think we all know which book I’m talking about. On the off chance you don’t, hang in there – I’ll be coming back to it later.
Let’s back up a bit and return to the mind from which that particular Leviathan grew.
Arno Schmidt’s career as a writer is unique contradictory. He was pre-eminently influential on the development of post-war German Modernism, while also widely under-read, especially outside of Germany. I mean for starters, the first piece of extratextual information I read on him when I began putting together this episode was from a blog titled Writers No One Reads. Part of what makes an in-depth study of his work for this channel particularly challenging is the brutal paucity of academic research published on Schmidt (and that’s to say nothing about his broader readership). Even today, he has found very little in the way of a commercial audience, as if often the case of high-concept, experimental writers.
But hey, I work with what I’ve got.
Alright, so what’s worth knowing about Schmidt as we approach his work? Because he wrote in a deeply individualist - almost solipsistic - voice (informed, in part, by his social isolation), I don’t think you can talk about the writing without talking about the writer.
Born in 1914, Schmidt led a fairly unremarkable life until the late ’30s. At the outset of the second world war, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, where he remained in the service of Nazi Germany’s armed forces until ’45 when he fled to West Germany and eventually surrendered to the Brits in Lower Saxony. The personal history isn’t irrelevant here, no matter what Roland Barthe says. Schmidt’s work – particularly his early work which you’ll come to see if you read his COLLECTED NOVELLAS – is intimately informed by his employment under a fascist regime.
I mentioned earlier that Schmidt presents as something of a contradiction, and that sentiment absolutely extends to his political views. He did serve on the front line of the unified War effort in Nazi Germany, despite holding vocal anti-Nazi views. But in saying that, he doesn’t cut neatly into any partisan shape. He was a fierce critic of both East and West Germany. He wasn’t a conservative, a social democrat, or even a Marxist. Most of his attacks – both in his prose and nonfiction – were lobbed at the modern European condition as a whole.
So how do I characterise him? To borrow the subtitle from his early novella ENTHYMESIS: “Wie ich euch hasse” (“How I hate you all”).
Now, I’m cautious of not leaning too heavily into the “cranky German” stereotype, as I don’t want to turn you off of him as a person - or more importantly - as a writer, by painting him in a monochromatic shade of gray. If his fiction is indicative of anything, it’s that in spite of his sweeping misanthropy, he was an incredibly funny and irreverent writer on the whole. He reminds me of the early postmodernists like Gaddis, who has this virtuosic ability to toggle back and forth between cerebral meditations of oppressive existence, and crass blue humor.
Hmmm, I wonder who else is good at that…
But let’s circle back a bit. Schmidt is well-known for retreating from society entirely during the last twenty years of his life. It was here, after the 2nd World War and living in relative isolation in Luneberg Heath and later Bargfeld, that he wrote the bulk of his major works. Critics have tried to infer a political sensibility from this lifestyle choice, but I don’t really give a shit personally. If anything, I’ve taken the John Peter’s viewpoint: he had neither patience nor interest in the cultural establishment and wanted to maintain his artistic integrity without commercial and socialite influence. To put it simply, he just wanted to be left the hell alone so he could do his thing.
There’s a lot more I could delve into his personal life and how it relates to his work, but I think I’m going to leave it at this for the moment and use individual deep-dive episodes to cover this in greater depth.
In the Wake of The Wake
Let’s address the first elephant in the room. Schmidt had an extremely esoteric approach to both orthography and syntax, which I suspect is the reason that people often refer to him as a Wakeian (this is to say, writing in the shadow of Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE). There’s no use denying it, it’s well-documented that Schmidt was an obsessive reader and scholar of Joyce. But is this an apt comparison?
I’ll give this the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s throw up my disclosure flags early here: I haven’t read the WAKE in its entirety cover to cover. The best I can say for myself at this stage is having taken bite-sized chunks of it, but mostly tiptoed around reading critical works instead. If that eliminates any credibility I have to speak on it, fair enough, skip forward to the next section.
To those of you still here, let’s talk Joyce for a few minutes.
As a Wake dilettante, I would combine the insights of a few different scholars in describing the language of the book as “polysemetic idioglossia”. “Polysomy” is the ability of an icon or sign to convey multiple meanings, and “idioglossia” is basically a blanket term to describe purpose-built, idiosyncratic language used by only a small number of people. The intersection between these features is a form of prose in which multiple levels of meaning are encoded, layered under a veneer of seemingly nonsense language (that I assure you, is far from nonsense, that much should be established by now).
I’m being mindful not to dwell too deeply on the WAKE because that is a particular Maelstrom I am very susceptible to getting sucked into and this isn’t a Joyce episode. Suffice it to say, the WAKE is written in a highly stylised parody of English that uses composite words, portmanteaus, neologisms, and so on. Scholars have been arguing for over a hundred years as to what Joyce was trying to achieve with this technique. There’re a few angles one could take here, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on one well-established perspective: the language of the Wake was meant to reflect the operations of the unconscious mind.
We happy with that? Let’s put a pin in Joyce there for the moment.
If Schmidt was using Joyce as a model, there are some notable similarities from which we could infer influence. Arno was heavily invested in exploring the subconscious mind. He was also very liberal in his playful deconstruction and reconstruction of the individual etymonic units of words. These elements are inarguably Joycean. But when I browse through criticism of Schmidt’s work, it seems like every description of his style seems to reference this influence, and I think that suggests a degree of derivativeness which I don’t think is fair. Whether or not you think this is a valid comparison is up to you. Let me punt this one to someone who actually has authority on the subject.
John E Woods said in an interview with the Collidescope that the comparison of ZETTEL’S TRAUM (Schmidt’s legendary magnum opus) with the WAKE isn’t particularly useful. Both texts are concerned with language, and the metacognitive nature of thought, but the Dream isn’t as densely encoded in its use of language. Moreover, the orthography of these texts are wholly unique from one another. The comparison really ends – and these are my words now - at “these are both big, seemingly indecipherable books written in a heavily-modified version of their target language”.
This isn’t the last I’m going to say on the subject, as I have a fair bit of Schmidt content in the pipeline, so let me leave you on this for now. Yes, Arno’s work draws stylistic elements from the WAKE. However, if you’re using this as your sole heuristic through which to approach his entire corpus, a lot of what makes him so unique will get lost by the wayside. Keep an open mind.
What the hell am I looking at?
Alright, let’s talk about this guy’s form and style, as I think this is one of the more outwardly unique characteristics of Schmidt’s writing. If any of you have been lucky enough to flip through his work – particularly his late career pieces, sometimes referred to as his “typoscripts” – you’ve probably been struck by a number of things that look particularly odd on the page. The presentation of text can be extremely alienating at first glance, and I suspect this is the main reason why the overwhelming majority of Schmidt’s books remain unread on their shelves. Fair enough, maybe that’s just speculation. But I happen to know that all four volumes of the Dalkey series sold over a thousand units each, and not a single one of them has even one hundreed logs on Goodreads.
You know what? If you’re guilty of this… I don’t blame you. The first time I cracked open B/MOONDOCKS, I could barely figure out what the hell I was looking at, let alone what was being said. And that’s because Schmidt’s prose – particularly in the later works – is actually the amalgam of several different stylistic techniques operating in parallel. That can be distressing to encounter initially to those who don’t have the context why he presents his language in this way. But I insist, if you take the time to wrap your head around these key features, his work becomes immediately more enjoyable and digestible.
Now before I get into a few of the specific techniques, I will note that there is also a political motivation that heavily informed Schmidt’s style, but I’m going to save that for the next episode in this series. Let’s just keep it to the nuts and bolts for the time being. There are a number of other orthographical elements he uses that I won’t get into here, but I will discuss them all at length eventually. And I’m definitely going to edge my way around the three major Typoscript pieces, as that’s a can of worms that will take a lot more than an introductory episode to unpack. For now, let’s cover the basics.
The first of Schmidt’s idiosyncrasies is his use of pointillation. Flip through any of the first four volumes of his early fiction and you’ll notice that he favours paragraphs with hanging indentation (a lot of these). So much so that his text can initially give a list-like or bullet-point appearance. He referred to this as “rastered” or “pointillated” prose. I can say, after working through around six hundred pages of it continuously, you grow accustomed to it fairly quickly. But that doesn’t answer the question as to why he does this. I’m going to paraphrase his description of this approach:
“[…] In the evening one recalls the past day and has the feeling of an "epic flow" of events; a continuum. There is no such epic flow [..] but a damaged daily mosaic. Rather, the events of our life jump […] It’s a string of pearls of small units of experience […]. From midnight to midnight is not "1 day" at all, but "1440 minutes" (and of these, at most 50 are significant!). This porous structure – also our perception of the present – results in a holey existence -: its reproduction by means of a corresponding literary process was the reason for me to start another series of experiments. The meaning of this "second" form is to replace the formerly popular fiction of the "continuous action" with a prose structure that does justice to the human way of experience; it’s leaner but more trained.”
The outcome of this “pointillated” technique is a fragmented, elliptical flow of narrative information. He rejects continuous progression of action in his stories, and instead opts for a style that “jumps” from thought to thought. It’s up to the reader to fill in the gaps between these individual units of diegesis. Each of these “rasters” or “points” signals a new thought emerging; a mimetic representation of Arno’s view of consciousness (the “string of pearls” as he puts it). Though it may sound like it at times, it’s not quite free indirect discourse (something like ULYSSES, particularly the Stephen Daedalus chapters). He tends to remain locked to a single narrator, often a character who shares a lot of characteristics with himself. In fact, I don’t think I’ve read a single one of his stories so far that doesn’t use first-person narration… but I’ll have to double-check that – don’t quote me. Anyways, just remember, as a Wakeian, reflecting the processes of thought – both conscious and unconscious – was an integral part of Schmidt’s creative ethos.
Schmidt also favored columniation in his text. If you start with his earlier works, you might get away without having seen this style. But in the later years of his career – right around when he wrote B/MOONDOCKS – he started to arrange his text into columns or “TextSträhnen”, a technique he explicitly claimed to have borrowed from FINNEGANS WAKE. He would divide the columns according to either narrative content or theme. In B/MOONDOCKS one column follows the first plotline concerning events in Luneberg Heath in 1959, while the second column details the experience of several characters in 1980 on the Moon. This is one way he used columns: to subdivide his stories by plotlines and narrative. Though it’s worth knowing, that the separation between columnar divisions often blurs, as he would regularly interpolate and interweave the content of these various columns and storylines. Don’t expect a completely clear separation is what I’m saying.
But it’s not just about dividing narrative; he also used it as a thematic tool. His columnar structure reached its stylistic peak in ZETTEL’S TRAUM (The Big Book – we’ll get to that), wherein he separated each block of text according to theme. The main narrative can be found down the center stack of the text block, with extratextual literary quotes and faux-scholarly commentary in the columns flanking each side of it. Like in B/MOONDOCKS, the structure – such as it alleges to exist at all – begins the blur, further lending credence to my belief he applied his own rules arbitrarily. But the guy knew how to have fun on the page. There’s a great scene partway through EVENING EDGED IN GOLD (which I’m reading now) wherein two of the characters are deep in conversation while pacing up and down a country road. To reflect the ping-pong nature of their discussion and their movement, the lefthand pages read top to bottom, and the righthand read bottom to top, as they pace up and down the street. Some people might find this goofy, and I’ll admit, he gets a bit ridiculous at times, but I always have a good time humoring his eccentricities.
Then there’s the odd deployment of typography. Schmidt favoured a grammatical style that - to be perfectly blunt about it - says “fuck it” to the typical rules of punctuation. As far as I can tell, he seems to have thought it clarified the reader’s sense of tone and rhythm, and added a sort of… musicality, particularly to the dialogue. But there’s a little more to it than that. Here’s Schmidt justifying his approach:
“Punctuation. - It can be used as stenografy ! When I write : «She looked around : ?>, the out=come (with an "=", I despise Websterian rules for compound words : it's not an oútcome, but an oút=cóme !) is that the colon becomes the inquiring opened face, the question mark the torsion of the body turned to ask, and the whole of "The Question" retains its validity.”
– Calculations III
If you’re following along here and thinking to yourself ‘That sounds an awful lot like emojis…’ you would be absolutely right. Emojis in the 50’s, wild right? Schmidt had a fascination with antiquity and language as a tool for understanding the mind. This becomes readily apparent when you read his early works, many of which are set in the classical era of Ancient Greece. Using punctuation in this novel sort of way, I see him as basically reviving a logographic system that uses symbols to convey their meaning pictographically. “An inquiring opened face”, yeah? It’s an interesting historical lexical experiment, and it also appears that he felt this acted as a sort of emotional complement to the content of his sentences.
Now personally, I’m still coming to grips with how he systematized this technique for the sake of consistency because it does feel disjointed at times. I initially doubted myself in my early reading of him, wondering if maybe his system (such as it is) was just flying over my head. It seems like the moment I understood the rules, he would change the game in some marginal or obtuse way. I later felt very vindicated (shall we say) when I read this note from Woods on his experience of translating him:
“Schmidt usually had his reasons [for the typography], but sometimes he was careless. Despite his avowals of meticulously orchestrated punctuation, I must admit I often find no real consistency; usage varies from text to text and can even seem out of sync within a given text.”
– COLLECTED NOVELLAS Introduction
Truth be told, I think because Schmidt was almost entirely an autodidact, he mostly went off of feel and instinct a lot of the time, and the system evolved organically without a rigidly prescribed set of instructions. Even only having read a dozen or so of his stories, I see him experimenting with different approaches to language and structure, and a lot of what we see on the page is shrapnel left over from experiments both successful and failed. But his style was his style, and I’m here for it, even if it was messy at times. I will hedge however and suggest that this messiness does become more rigidly organised and functionally relevant when you start running a fine-tooth comb through his “etym theory”.
Dear God… the Etym Theory.
Etym Theory: Unearthing the Subconscious
For my money, this is what Schmidt is most notorious for: The evolution of his language from stylistically unique, to lexically experimental, to batshit insane.
In the late ‘50’s – the mid- to late-stage of his career – Schmidt became fascinated with the functional interrelation between a writer’s dreams and the execution of their written language. This came about as the sort of combined influence of his previous interest in FINNEGANS WAKE and a newly discovered preoccupation in Freud’s INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. It was through a combination of his pictographic symbolism, columnation, and pointillation, and polysemetic word usage that he eventually arrived at his “etym theory”. This would be the bizarre, highly modified version of German (and eventually translated English) that gained him legendary status in the critical community.
The Etym theory proposes that the base morphemes of words called “eytmons” or “etyms” are expressions of unconscious thought and desire. Through the mouthpiece of his narrator in the Big Book (Capital B, Capital B), Schmidt argues that conventional written language that you would read in bog-standard German modernism, is just as heavily influenced by unconscious thought. However, those unconscious drives remain buried in the language; staying “unconscious” if you will. Schmidt’s approach, through the adoption of Freudian symbol interpretation, aims to expose these unconscious drives by making the implicit explicit. This style achieved its expressive peak in his (alleged) masterwork, ZETTEL’S TRAUM. I’m going to leave it there for the time being, because if this series goes where I would like it to, then there’s going to be a lot to unpack with this when we get to that particular book.
This theory is perfectly understandable on its own terms. But as I alluded to earlier, the complexity with Schmidt isn’t because he’s employing one complex technique, but rather combining a number of different features together, which interrelate in frustrating and fascinating ways. To borrow a quip that’s been directed at FINNEGANS WAKE “The use of language becomes the story”. This is why it is nothing short of extraordinary that John E Woods managed to render this man’s work into such readable and poetic English. And speaking of Woods…
John E Woods & Dalkey Archive
I’ve reached a point in my own reading life where I now afford certain translators the same carte blanche I offer certain authors. In the same way I will read anything new from Thomas Pynchon, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, or William T Vollmann, I too will pick up anything translated by Max Lawton, Ottilie Mulzet, and of course John E Woods. Woods was one of the titans of contemporary English translation; the kind of powerhouse other translators aspire to. He sadly passed away this year at the age of 80 in his home in Berlin. What he left behind was a mountain of adapted works from Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Patrick Suskind, and of course, Arno Schmidt.
Woods came to Schmidt by way of a friend. He recalls the encounter in his intro to the NOVELLAS:
“Schmidt represents a revitalization of the German language that is very hard for any translation to reproduce. Back in the early seventies when I was struggling to learn German, a dear and wise friend pressed a book in my hand with a knowing wink – it was Arno Schmidt's Scenes from the Life of a Faun. From the first page, I knew this was a voice speaking in a language I had found nowhere else in Germany.” – Collected Novellas Introduction
It didn’t take long for him to transition from obsessive reader to devoted translator. In 1976, he joined his then-wife Ulrika Dorda on an exchange to U.Mass. and she brought along a copy of EVENING EDGED IN GOLD, one of Schmidt’s legendary typoscript folios. Woods, who was struggling with writing a novel at the time, decided to try his hand at translating this Schmidt book instead. If you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on a copy of EVENING EDGED IN GOLD, you’ll surely find this a touch ironic as this is one of the densest works of German prose ever printed. He later recalled regretting the choice to start with one of the author’s most complex works, as his later experience working on the early fiction helped inform a more refined product by the time he came to the Big Book. But early or late in his career, I believe his professional philosophy remained consistent all throughout:
“The nirvana of what I can do is to capture for an English-speaking reader, let’s hope, most of the aesthetic and intellectual charm, delight and beauty of the original,”
This isn’t the last I have to say on the subject of Woods, but for now, I’ll leave it here: we are, and continue to be, exceedingly privileged to have a mind as sharp as Woods having translated the lion’s share of Schmidt’s work into English. Furthermore, we’re just as lucky that these books found a home willing to put their money behind them.
Chad W Post, the editor-in-chief at Dalkey Archive Press, published a newsletter in early 2021 titled “How Does this Get Read?” on his substack “Mining the Dalkey Archive”. In this piece, he talks in-depth about Dalkey’s history with Schmidt, and how they got from acquiring some of his early pieces to printing and distributing a novel that weighs 12 pounds. It’s an excellent piece, I strongly encourage you to check it out. I’ve linked it below.
In 1994, Dalkey launched a project to bring Schmidt’s work to an anglophone audience, via a four-volume translation campaign entitled “Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964”. The four volumes were released sequentially over a four-year period, until two decades later when something else entirely was released into the world. These volumes include: the COLLECTED NOVELLAS in 1994, NOBODADDY’s CHILDREN in ’95, COLLECTED STORIES in ’96, and TWO NOVELS: THE STONY HEART and B/MOONDOCKS in ’97. These four volumes comprise the main texts which I intend to cover on this channel, as Arno’s work presents itself as something of a new obsession to me. And so here would be the part where I anticipate a question that will undoubtedly be asked when this video comes out:
Bibliographic Survey, and Proposed Starting Points
“Where should I start?”
Now it should already be abundantly clear that this “primer” on Schmidt’s work is limited by the scope of the language in which I read it. Arno wrote entirely in German and has a number of volumes of work that have never been translated into English. I am limited entirely to what has been translated, almost exclusively by John E Woods.
7 novels, 10 novellas, 2 short story collections, several works of criticism, and 1 brain-eating monster that barely resembles a book. He was also a prodigious translator into German himself, which clearly informed the subject matter that would comprise the monster which I referred to earlier. Now, these four main volumes don’t comprise everything from Schmidt available in English. There are also his radio dialogues and his third major typoscript THE SCHOOL FOR ATHEISTS to name a few. Suffice it to say, you’ve got a reasonable body of work to choose from. This further begs the question, where do you start?
Well, you could go the John E Woods route and start with the behemoths; either ZETTEL’S TRAUM or EVENING EDGED IN GOLD. But I’m going to suggest to you that this would be a very bold choice. Not a wrong choice per se, but a risky one. For the reasons I outlined in the previous sections, these novels are both exceedingly hostile to their reader in length, style, and the density of their references and allusions. Normally I’m all in favour of the “hold my beer” approach to these sorts of books; “Reading as an extreme sport” as Chris Via would describe it. But, these two bricks go for (at minimum) $800 these days, and I would truly hate to see someone spend that kind of money on a book like that without having a firm sense of whether or not the author is for them. So, for that reason, I suggest you start earlier in his career, not least of all because you can ease your way into his style in the same way it took him time to ease into it himself.
Let me once again offer you John E Woods as a guide here:
“Where do we start? […] The editors have chosen the "novellas," in Schmidt's hands a most elastic genre, which he tugged and squeezed to suit his fancy. It was his genre of choice in the early years; and for that reason alone, the ten novellas will serve nicely as a door onto his word universe.”
– COLLECTED NOVELLAS Intro
Alright, so you can go with the stylistic and chronological beginning. That’s where I started, and that’s where I would recommend personally. But I can understand if you find an assortment of Novellas to be a lackluster entry point. How about the next volume?
“Nobodaddy's Children may be your first attempt to explore Arno Schmidt's world of literary mind games. Or perhaps you bought volume 1 of the Dalkey Archive edition of his Collected Early Fiction and after reading that assortment of novellas find that, maybe against your better judgment, you're intrigued, even hooked on his quirky prose. Either way, with this early trilogy of novels (and my introduction will primarily be devoted to whether they form a trilogy, and if so in what sense), you are about to encounter something very close to the crux of the Schmidtian matter.”
– NOBODADDY’s CHILDREN Intro
I wouldn’t mistake “crux” for “peak” here, but the point stands firm. By the time he got to NOBODADDY, Schmidt had a fairly good command of what he was doing. But again, we’re talking a trio of novellas here. Maybe you have a hunger for a full-length novel. Well, Volume 4: TWO NOVELS would fit that mold perfectly, though you may find yourself in over your head if you start with B/MOONDOCKS, which has been stated to be the stylistic link between his early work and his old work. If you do go the novel route, THE STONY HEART is still fairly digestible to the uninitiated Schmidt reader so you’d be fine there as well.
Whatever you do choose to go with, the problem remains the same: at the time of this recording, these books are not easy to find in English. I am well aware of this myself, having been through nearly two years’ worth of consistent hunting in order to find the four volumes of the Dalkey Series. This is in part why I considered not going through with this episode and this upcoming series. I don’t want to be the guy who flaunts his rare books on YouTube and goes “na na na na na na, look what I have you don’t”. Nobodaddy likes that guy. However, if you’re patient with your searching, these do come up periodically for an affordable price. My mate Nick over at @eleventhvolume managed to snag Volume 4 for $8 recently (I paid $50 for reference). But the main reason why I’m choosing to carry on with this series, will be highlighted in the last section of this video.
But before I do, let’s address-
The Elephant in the Room
Let’s be real, I know this is what at least a few of you are here for. The brain-eating monster I spoke of earlier? You want the money shot? Well here it is. All 5.9 kilograms of it (yes I weighed it). BOTTOM’S DREAM, which I’ve been referring to by it’s German title ZETTEL’S TRAUM previously in this episode. And Jesus Christ, don’t ask me what I went through to get this. Can you believe this went for a measly $70 USD when it was printed in 2016? Just to make something apparently early here, I am not going to be talking analytically about this book today, not least of all because I haven’t read to it yet. But, I’ve already been speaking with a few other people in the community about tackling this in a collaborative manner, so stick around; We’ll get there.
I don’t know about you, but I personally think this novel is a physical comedy act in and of itself. Let me give you some specs here. It is 28 cm wide, 36 cm tall, and 9 cm thick. The technical name for this is “DIN A3 Format” in which very few books are printed these days.
Want a few more specs. How about word count? Here’s a comparison:
MOBY DICK: 206k words
GRAVITY’S RAINBOW: 325k words
INFINITE JEST: 488k words
WAR & PEACE: 561k words
MIN KAMP: 1M words
Alright, that’s enough literary dick-swinging for the moment. I actually want to use this to talk about the history and the logistics of this book. According to Chad Post, 2500 copies were printed. A little under 2000 of them sold. I’ve heard rumors floating around that a large block of them suffered severe water damage from the elements in a warehouse somewhere which could possibly account for the other 500 on the leger but not in circulation. Who’s to say, I don’t work for Dalkey.
If you’ve spent time on Book Twitter and follow Dalkey Archive or any of their figureheads, you’ve probably seen a few woe-begotten souls pining Will Evans or Chad Post to “please reprint BOTTOM’S DREAM”. I know because I’ve been that insufferable guy on more than one occasion. Will, if you’re watching this, mea culpa. And look, to those of you asking, I get it! If you’re a lover of big challenging books and you see this thing, you instinctively, viscerally want it for yourself. It’s a textual anomaly and an absolutely gorgeous object. But before you start harassing the Publisher like I’ve done in the past, I want you to consider what goes into making this thing.
In that newsletter I mentioned earlier, “How Does This Get Made”, Chad Post discussed the practicalities of producing BOTTOM’S DREAM. While he wasn’t employed by Dalkey at the time it was released, he still has enough industry knowledge to be able to make fairly reasonable assessments.
The estimated cost of materials alone would be $50,000 to print 2500 copies of BOTTOM’S DREAM. Fair enough. Pricey, but doable. Now let’s talk about translator fees. John E Woods was a multi-award-winning legend in his career and was appropriately compensated for his work. For his Thomas Mann translations, he earned $150 US for every thousand words. If we’re talking a million+ word novel like BOTTOM’S DREAM, his fee would be at least $150k. Then we have to consider all the ancillary costs. Design, Proofing, Typesetting, Marketing, Rent, Operations. The absolutely minimum we’re talking about is $200k JUST to get the thing from an ambitious idea into readers’ hands. If Dalkey sold 2000 copies @ $70 a piece, they would’ve grossed around $140k. After all the backends and seller fees added up, Dalkey was estimated to have earned $50k. This is back-of-the-napkin math, guys. We’re talking about a $150,000 loss on this monster. I want you to keep this in mind as we move forward through this series, as Dalkey is doing incredible work and trying their best to balance the financial practicalities and bringing readers what they want.
I want to make something abundantly clear. I don’t work for Dalkey, I’m not formally affiliated with them, I don’t have any pecuniary relationship with them. The most I can say for myself is we have a relationship of mutual admiration. I only cover things on this channel I like, and it just so happens that I pretty consistently enjoy what they publish. So if this sounds like publisher propaganda, you can check that shit at the door. I’m not paid to be here. If someone wants to put money in my pocket for doing this, my DMs are always open. It’s either that or OnlyFans.
The Schmidtassance, /r/Arno_Schmidt, Looking Forward
To close out this video, I want to end with a note of optimism. Yes, it’s no secret that Schmidt’s books are scarce these days, but there are very strong rumblings in the publishing world that there will be a renaissance of Schmidt’s work over the next few years. A Schmidtassance, if you will. And it all starts with, again, Dalkey Archive.
In January of 2021, the Dalkey Archive Twitter (no, not X) account reposted a fabulous tweet from Luis Panini stating:
This was followed shortly by a Press Release from Dalkey regarding what they’re referring to as their “essentials” series:
“…the Essentials series, [is] a collection of vital reissues from the Dalkey Archive backlist. Dalkey will reissue ten titles per season […] As the series expands, the press will give other classic works the versions they deserve (including books by Gertrude Stein and Arno Schmidt in coming seasons).”
THIS right here has me very excited about the future of Arno Schmidt’s readership in English. As it stands, Dalkey has expressed a strong intent to reprint all his major works. I’ve reached out to them this month to see if there are any updates, but they said they have nothing formal to announce yet. Plenty of logistical issues under the hood they need to sort out, which I understand completely.
However, I can see that the reissue of NOBODADDY’S CHILDREN is already available for preorder. The stated publication date at the moment is June 27th, though I did see them tweet out that this has been pushed back slightly. New date pending. Nevertheless, I have plenty of reason to believe that Schmidts work will become more readily available over the next few years – possibly even months.
I also want to make another resource available to anyone who’s watching this. Recently, a mutual Booktwitter user @M1llm1ll (Millington) and I took it upon ourselves to overhaul the ghost town that was the Arno Schmidt subreddit.
I don’t know how many of you watching this are also unfortunate enough to be regular users of Reddit, but if you are, I welcome any of you to join the sub. While it’s still a small community over there, Mill and I are have started compiling a lot of resources in there to help Schmidt readers approach and more importantly enjoy his work. Our wiki includes a fully linked bibliography, supplementary texts, reviews, and criticisms, etc. One of our users /u/Being_Nothingness is also periodically posting their BOTTOM’S DREAM annotations. We’re working on a buying guide for Schmidt as well, until such a time as Dalkey makes the entire series readily available. If that’s of interest to you, drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you.
So, that’s your primer. If this video has convinced any of you to go out a purchase a Schmidt book or two yourself, I consider it a roaring success. I hope you got something out of it, and shoot me a comment below if you have any further questions.
Thanks again to my spectacular editor Nick Brodie, who… through whatever magic he does on his end… managed to turn a pile of messy iPhone clips into a coherent video. He’s pretty damn good at what he does and turns a finished product out quickly. Hit him up if you’re interested in having some editing work done. I’ll drop his socials on screen and in the comments below.
Stay tuned for more work on Arno in the coming months – I’ve got a lot of it planned. That’s it from me for today.
See you later Schmidtheads.
W.A.S.T.E. Only
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