                           19980917.00

Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 08:19:10 -0400
To: Ernst Meyer 
From: Bill Edwards 
Subject: Re: Die Andere

     Thanks very much for your kind note!  As you had time and
inclination, I would enjoy getting together in Harvard Square for
coffee, and discussing all these things.  I really enjoyed the
scene in which Murphy accosts Doehring as he is crossing Mass.
Ave--I have a friend who is a little like Murphy (in only the
best respects).

     I haven't gotten to the scenes with Heinrich--I look forward
to those.  I am a little sad that Dorothea is alienated--I won't
ask if it's permanent.  As far as *Albert* is concerned, are we
to understand that he is wearing the SS uniform as a way of
atonement?  Is he identifying himself with the body of the
guilty, as Christ did, even though *he* personally is innocent?
Or I have missed the mark here?  Is he simply acknowledging and
atoning for his own guilt?  At the end, he seems to have
sacrificed himself, in effect...

     Please don't worry about the orthography--it's a limitation
of my Newton browser that it won't render umlauts, esp. since
Netscape et. al. do not bat an eyelash at Unicode characters.
Also, other Newton applications handle umlauts without a problem.
Best regards. - Bill Edwards

                         ==============

     I would very much like to talk with you about any aspects of
the book that might interest you. Whether we should get together
in Harvard Square, in my office, or in my home in Belmont, shall
be entirely at your discretion.  I have very few professional
obligation in the next several weeks, but beginning Monday, I do
have workmen coming to Belmont to demolish an existing porch and
to build a foundation for a larger annex to my house, and I
believe, at least initially, I should be there to supervise their
doings.  But in the evenings and on weekends I should have plenty
of time.  My only concern is that you not spend more time reading
the novel, or for that matter, discussing it with me, than is
worth your while.  Of course that is a question I must not even
try to answer.

     Das Siebte Kapitel, the fantasy about the abandoned mining
town Bankhead between Banff and Lake Minnewanka, was originally
an attempt to capture the somber mood of dusk in which the
foibles and frustrations of the day are reconciled and redeemed.
It is an echo of the haunting recitative "Am Abend da es kuehle
ward" from Bachs Matthaeuspassion. Albert, who sings it, appeared
to me from the darkness of my subconscious much as he emerged
from the Canadian forest in the novel.  The name is reminiscent
of Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian musician, philosopher,
theologian and physician, who fled from pre-World War I Europe to
the jungle of French Equatorial Africa.  I tailored the SS
uniform as a monument to Kierkegaard's assertion that the outward
is not the inward.  In this instance, it is the cloak of him who
is despised and rejected of men and who, as did Isaiah's man of
God, takes upon on himself "the sins of the world".

     My novel does not have a happy ending. Dorothea and Doehring
do not live happily every after. But neither is the ending
tragic. Nothing of real value is destroyed. The characters of the
novel are essentially unchanged. As Hofmannsthal liked to say: es
bleibt ein jeder der er ist.  Whether any of my characters is
"purified" by suffering, is an open question, but I am inclined
to doubt it.

Ernst Meyer

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