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26 FEB/MAR 11 #226BOOK REVIEWSto Felician, which her sister Isolde Moser (theco-executor of her literary estate) introducedthis way: “The following letters by my sister Ingeborgdate from 1945–46. They are unsigned,were never sent, and are addressed to an imaginary‘you’: to ‘Lover, dear,’ ‘My only friend,’ ‘Distantfriend,’ and finally ‘Felician.’” What’s interestingis Moser’s care not to speak of these letters as awork of fiction, but rather as real letters to a fictionaladdressee. No wonder the writer knew that herletters would never arrive at their destination: “I goastray in everything.”Moser goes on to observe that Letters to Felicianshows how Bachmann “strives for, andfinds, a male authority, but one which does notrepudiate the female ego.” But Bachmann’swriting, and what one knows of her life, suggeststhat this address to an authoritative malefigure was something that never succeededas she hoped. “I direct all my energy to youfor nothing,” she wrote to Felician. “This is ourdestiny. Never to reach each other”—like lettersgone astray. Likewise in the long unsent lettershe wrote to Celan in the early fall of 1961, “thisis, once again, not the right time to say a numberof things that are difficult to say; but there isno right time”—for her, the Today in which whatone wants to write can coincide with what theother reads never came to pass.Six years older than Bachmann when they metin 1948, Celan was not yet the renowned poethe would soon be—his “Todesfuge” was publishedthat same year—but he was already a poetwhile she was a 21-year-old philosophy studentonly starting to publish her first poems. Hewas just passing through Vienna. “The surrealistpoet Paul Celan,” Bachmann wrote to hermother, “who is very fascinating, has, splendidlyenough, fallen in love with me, which adds alittle spice to my dreary work. Unfortunately hehas to go to Paris in a month.” His first writingto her was the poem “In Ägypten,” which wouldlater be included in the collection Mohn undGedächtnis in 1952, a poem that plays with thedichotomy between “die Fremde” (the foreign or“strange” woman) and the Jewish ones, Ruth,Miriam, and Noemi—like that between Margareteand Shulamith in “Todesfuge.” Perhaps theJew from Bukovina who’d lost his parents tothe Nazis could not be but ambivalent towarda young Austrian, albeit one who felt her childhoodhad ended the day the Nazis invadedher home town of Klagenfurt; later, her novelswould anatomize what Michel Foucault wouldcall (apropos not of Bachmann but of Deleuzeand Guattari) “the fascism in us all, in our headsand in our everyday behavior”—and above all,as Bachmann herself put it in an interview in1971, “in the relationship between a man anda woman.”It was in Paris, of course, that Celan wouldspend his life, while Bachmann remained in Viennauntil she moved to Rome in 1953; but betweenthese lovers was more than a geographicaldistance. Already in his first surviving letter,from January 1949, Celan is asking Bachmannto “try for a moment to forget that I was silentfor so long and so insistently.” Meetings betweenthe two were sporadic, yet the relationcontinued fitfully until 1952. The two poets metagain at a conference in 1957, by which timeCelan was already married to Gisèle Lestrange;the affair recommenced, more intensely thistime, only to burn out six months later. Yet forseveral years the friendship continued, withoccasional meetings that sometimes also includedGisèle—who’d known of the affair—andMax Frisch, with whom Bachmann began livinglate in 1958. When Celan published Sprachgitterin 1959, the copy he sent her containedtwenty-one handwritten dedications of specificpoems to her, and her copy of the 1955 editionof Mohn und Gedächtnis includes twenty-threesuch dedications of poems dating from the periodof their first affair; the great poet of the Shoah,of mourning, was also, we are reminded, a poetof the most intense eroticism.The letters are half passion and regret, half business.No lover’s quarrel was so tempestuousthat at the same time they couldn’t expresstheir literary comradeship by sharing adviceabout dealing with publishers, reviewers, andthe like. And it was a review rather than lovethat poisoned the friendship beyond healing.When a critique appeared of Sprachgitter thatCelan believed to be motivated by anti-Semitism,neither Bachmann nor Frisch responded as Celanthought they should; it was especially galling