Helluva Book

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 21 · 26 November 1987

From Robert Katz

SIR: Many things arrive here in Tuscany long after they are current elsewhere, but they do find their way, and sometimes, as in the case of Mark Lawson’s uncommon review of my book Love is colder than death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (LRB, 3 September), they can still make your day. Rarely does a critic who has acted in bad faith permit himself to stand so naked, so open, so defenceless to the response of the author whose work and reputation he has sought to defame. Why, there is not a publication in the world, having run the review in question, that would not allow me a generous space merely to respond to the ad hominem charges he has hurled against me from head to toe, but mostly between my legs. I suspect that Lawson is very much like the poet manqué Walter Kranz in Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew, who when he is humiliated and physically beaten discovers that he has enjoyed the pain. So I won’t go as far as to give him that satisfaction. But there is an author’s job here that needs doing.

Let’s start with the bad faith part. The first sentence ought to do it. Here we find him speaking, rather like Dr Goebbels, of my ‘initial meeting’ with Fassbinder, moving it up to only weeks before his death, and reducing me to a pushy ‘investigative hack and would-be screenwriter’. Yet even as he is decking out this impugn-his-credentials opening, he knows from the book, if from no other source, that a. the initial meeting had taken place two years earlier and I had worked with Fassbinder during the writing and filming of the screenplay I had done for him; b. I have written screenplays for a number of major films; and c. at least one of my several books of investigative reporting has earned significant praise. Lawson has every right still to regard me lowly as a writer, but now we all know what kind of writer he is. I offer no comment on being called a ‘jerk’, a ‘wimp’ and a ‘slob’, since I have been all of these things at one time or another: but he won’t get his way with putting his own dirty words in the mind of one of my friends, Juliane Lorenz, and having her think of me as a ‘prick’.

Although further into his ‘review’ I am portrayed as a ‘nonagenarian hick’, at the outset he likens me – again, knowing that none of this is true – to an ‘ascetic … yuppy’. This characterisation is central to his ostensible thesis – the handle on it all meant to impress his friends. ‘A vital element in such a project,’ he writes to them of a genre he alone has detected, ‘is the contrast between subject and biographer.’ I am made to be the ascetic yuppy (‘probably jogging’), struck with awe in having met my antithesis: the ‘fluid-spilling and abuse-fluent wreck’. But Lawson makes it quite clear that he is the one who is enthralled with fluxes and with the extravagant outpouring of abuse. His own abuse of the yuppy-nonagenarian is what his piece of work is made of, and if one takes the trouble to consider the abundant references to images like spitting sausages, beer swilling in a cauldron, variously greased gherkins, spilled beans, relinquished loads, poured wine, as well the metaphor of Fassbinder’s having ‘spewed out movies like fluids … in violent, purgative bursts’, one gets the queasy feeling that down deep, somewhere under that transparent skin he wears to work, Lawson was peculiarly transfixed by Love is colder than death. Add to this the spectacle in print of the critic relishing the same juicy details, to which he brings along his own mayonnaise and baby lotion, and the sensation is heightened. The giveaway is a phrase that has somehow (unintentionally, I’ll bet) slipped in with the flush of effluvia, my ‘remarkable achievement’: the book made him feel sorry for Fassbinder.

Thus his gripe, the hydraulic pump setting his bile sloshing, must surely be that a Better Person didn’t write it (‘he deserves better’); that fate had not called on the Better Person to circle in that marvellous circle and then summon him anew to pen Rainer Werner the right way; no, instead, the magnificent labour fell to one of them – the bone-dry ascetics. And who might this Better Person be? I would not be overly surprised if it were the scatophilic critic himself. But such a biography is by now beyond the reach of the Better Person. Sadly, all too many of the primary sources, the director’s intimates to whom Love is colder than death is so indebted, have since died. Lawson will have to reconcile himself to the sorrowful reality and be content with his effusive criticism of the biography that exists. To help him along, I intend – by virtue of his claim that I possess the patent – to reveal to him ‘the secret of the one striking idea’. I refer to what Lawson calls the ‘new-fashioned hard-on’, which so caught his fancy and caused him first to wonder and later speculate as to what it might be like. The new-fashioned hard-on, Lawson, is a little squirt like you.

Robert Katz
Pieve a Presciano, Italy