What Some Publishers Will Put Up With

A writer sends a letter to his publisher: “there are times when one suddenly hovers in the air over a dreadful abyss and is being watched by countless people who constantly clap and cheer and make one almost go deaf with their (perfidious) admiration, but not a single one of them stretches out a net into which one can fall—literally in the last moment—without unavoidably becoming a comical, if also pitiable, certainly ridiculous corpse among men.” The writer was Thomas Bernhard, about whom his fellow Austrian, the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, once remarked, “No one can get past this dead giant.” The publisher was Siegfried Unseld, who had secured a place for Bernhard at the prestigious German publishing house Suhrkamp. And the subject was a loan of 3,000 German marks that Unseld had given to Bernhard the month before, in December 1965. “With that 3,000 you stretched a net out for me.”