Bernard Wolfe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bernard Wolfe (* 28. August 1915 in New Haven , Connecticut ; † 27. October 1985 in Calabasas , California ) was an American writer , mainly science fiction - short stories written, but best known for his work outside the SF- Area is.

Life, work and impact

Bernard Wolfe studied at Yale University and earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1935 . He worked for two years in the merchant navy and at the age of 22 was for a time Leon Trotsky's personal secretary in Mexico . His 1959 novel The Great Prince Died pays homage to Trotsky. Wolfe later became a war correspondent , news editor and freelance writer, publishing stories and articles mainly in the science fiction segment in many leading magazines, such as Galaxy . In 1952 his only science fiction novel Limbo was published , which was also published in German in 1989 under the same title. According to the authors of the Internet platform The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE), this broad and extravagant satire is perhaps the best and most thought-out SF novel that was published in the 1950s, although Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Player Piano" ( dt .: The infernal system ) strike in the same notch. The action is set in a post- Holocaust era after World War III, a war that was triggered and controlled by computers. Two splinter societies have survived: an island dystopia in which bellicose impulses are cauterized by lobotomy and that part of California that has escaped destruction where aggression is now met with autoaggression . It is there that men intentionally cut off their own arms and legs to avoid the risk of war, and replace their lost limbs with cybernetics- based prostheses that are incapable of handling weapons. Limbo is "complex, ironic, inflammatory and full of puns," say the SFE authors. Wolfe processed his knowledge of psychoanalysis and his understanding of the masochistic instinct inherent in modern man in particular . Also JG Ballard gushed over again from this book, maybe so, the authors suggest, because it science fiction the genre - as Ballard himself - so that others, psychologizing, direction added one.

Wolfe was not set in his choice of subject. Among the stories he created afterwards, there is a satirical one in the style of "Slick Fantasy", a fantasy subgenre that only consists of typical, clichéd, trivial fantasy elements ( The Never-Ending Penny ), a story about a dog , who fell victim to napalm in the Vietnam War ( The Bisquit Position ), and in another, he processed findings from sleep research ( The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements ). He was not comfortable with science and regarded pure science fiction literature as its servant.

In addition to SF, he also wrote erotic stories, if not "dirty stories". His autobiography from 1972 is therefore also called Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer .

His most important work goes in a completely different direction: together with the jazz pioneer Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow , he wrote his biography under the title Really the Blues (German: jazz fever ) as early as 1946. The book, which begins like a musician's biography, goes far beyond that. It delves deeper into the matter of black music than all previous treatises put together. The jazz critics Ernest Borneman and Hugues Panassié praised the work of the co- author in a prompt book review , in particular the eloquence, circumspection, unbroken perseverance and tireless strength, because Mezzrow is not an easy character. His fellow writer Henry Miller also expressed his enthusiasm for the work in a letter to Wolfe, which was added as an afterword in later editions , and wanted it to be distributed worldwide.

In the 1960s, Bernard Wolfe was married to the actress Dolores Michaels .

Works in German translation

  • 1956: Jazz fever. Afterword by Henry Miller. Publishing house Die Arche, Zurich.
    • 1986: Jazz fever. With an afterword by Henry Miller (= Ullstein Book 36527, Popular Culture Series ). Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin. ISBN 3-548-36527-2 .
  • 1989: Limbo. Utopian novel. (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1659; = Fantastic Library , Volume 239). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main. ISBN 3-518-38159-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d DP, J [ohn] C [lute]: Wolfe, Bernard. In: sf-encyclopedia.com. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls Graham Sleight, August 12, 2018, accessed August 24, 2018 .
  2. ^ Bertrand M. Patenaude : Trotsky: The betrayed revolutionary. Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-549-07377-3 , p. 149.
  3. ^ Ernest Borneman, Hugues Panassié: Book Review . In: The Record Changer . December 1946, p. 12 ff .
  4. Henry Miller: Dear Bernie Wolfe . In: Jazz fever . 1st edition. Die Arche, Zurich 1956, p. 317-321 .

Web links