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Peter Handke. Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story, trans., R. Manheim, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974
ERNEST SCHACHTEL'S presence remains that of a tender poetic man, and a keenly reasoning, observant psychoanalyst, rich with the cultural heritage of the European humanists who fled the rising Hitlerism of the 1930's. For me the qualities of this man are epitomized with rare beauty in his article, On Memory and Childhood Amnesia(1947).1
Written 25 years later, a book, Sorrow Beyond Dreams, recently presented as a play on the New York theater scene, by a young Austrian born in 1942 in the thick of the era of the holocaust, somehow evokes for me Ernst's2 presence, in the kind of experience that could be shared with excitment during an evening with Ernst and Zebbie. I would have said something like this:
Here is a gift to us of an existential experience that captures truth better than many of our professional efforts at "case reports" (nor do many would-be "creative" writers succeed). This book, 70 pages of lean and intense writing, draws one into the nonsentimental struggle with the anguish of a son, 30 years old, making the passage of the mourning process involving his mother's suicide. It is a creative process that would do honor to psychoanalysis.
The book moves on two tracks that meet and separate: the line of her life that culminates in its logic of suicide, and his sympathetic fusion and separation from her in her implacable progression. The son in the book is the actual author who uses his writing for the milling through of the experience, and I associate it with my favorite of Ernst's chapters, because the son-writer will not allow himself