Erich Heller - Life in Letters

Life in Letters

Heller corresponded with a number of thinkers of his day, whose names include (in the chronological order of the date of birth, not necessarily in the order of the respective correspondents’ importance) the following.

• Thomas Mann
• E. M. Forster
• T. S. Eliot –– who is repeatedly taken to task in The Disinherited Mind for what Heller considers to be egregious lapses of literary judgement
• Conrad Aiken
• Moriz Seeler –– whose letters to Heller include some of Moriz Seeler’s rare poetic compositions
• Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright
• C. M. Bowra
• Werner Heisenberg of uncertainty principle fame –– who is quoted approvingly in The Disinherited Mind on the wrongheadedness of modern science
• Rudolf Arnheim
• Lionel Trilling
• Dolf Sternberger, the German political scientist and moral philosopher (1907–1989) –– who had one of his books introduced by Heller
• Victor Lange, the American-based German literary scholar (1908–1996)
• Friedrich Torberg, the Austrian writer –– with whom Heller shared a Bohemian-Jewish background
• Stephen Spender –– whom at one time he persuaded to deliver lectures at Northwestern
• Oskar Seidlin, the Silesian-born Jewish literary scholar
• Hans Egon Holthusen, the German poet and littérateur –– who stands accused in the pages of The Disinherited Mind of that ‘spiritual timidity’ whose ‘coarser symbols are the fig-leaves of the Vatican Museum’
• Noel Annan
• Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the celebrated Polish-born German literary critic

Perhaps his most notable correspondent had been Hannah Arendt.

Many important biographical details shared with him by other writers could only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, find their way into conventional studies and biographies, and remain hidden from public view (such as, for example, Thomas Mann’s verbal confession, made to Heller, concerning the circumstances attending upon the destruction, by his own hand, of his early diaries, or another concerning his reading and re-reading of Xenophon’s Symposium ‘nine times’ before writing his own narrative on love’s vicissitudes, Der Tod in Venedig).

Erich Heller's vivid intellect made him on occasion a principled controversialist, as evidenced by his long-running –– and sometimes acrimonious –– public exchanges with another prominent British Germanist, T. J. Reed, in the weekly pages of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s.