Pippins Tochters Taschentuch

by Rosmarie Waldrop, Ann Cotten (Translator)

Hätten Josef und Frederika Seifert mal besser nicht geheiratet!? Der Ort ist Kitzingen am Main, es sind die späten Zwanziger. Josef ist Kriegsveteran und Lehrer, sehr ins Metaphysische entrückt, Frederika rasend frustrierte Sängerin, rasend frustrierte femme fatale, die, unfähig zu den spirituellen Sublimationen ihres Mannes, bereits wenige Wochen nach der Trauung eine Affäre mit seinem besten Freund beginnt. Ist dieser Seitensprung an allem schuld, was folgen wird?
Das fragt – ein halbes Jahrhundert später – Lucy, die jüngste Tochter, in Briefen an ihre Schwester (oder ist es ihre Halbschwester?). Hätte ihre Mutter nur ein Machtwort sprechen müssen, was die Musik Richard Wagners angeht, damit sich alles ganz anders entwickelt? Und hat der Umstand, dass Frederikas Liebhaber Jude war, Josefs Faszination für den Nationalsozialismus weiter entfacht?
Rosmarie Waldrop hat einen agilen, feinsinnigen und derben Roman geschrieben. Über eine marode Familie im anschwellenden Nationalsozialismus. Über Sehnsüchte, Enttäuschungen und Verrat. Über kleine Ursachen und große Wirkungen. Und über die beharrliche Ambivalenz einer nicht wirklich zu bewältigenden Vergangenheit.

Genres: Fiction, Germany

275 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Rosmarie Waldrop (born August 24, 1935), née Sebald, is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is coeditor and publisher of Burning Deck Press, as well as the author or coauthor (as of 2006) of 17 books of poetry, two novels, and three books of criticism.

Reviews

[Featherbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter is a brilliant novel by a poet and translator and teacher. The introduction by Ben Lerner recounts youngest daughter Lucy Seifert's recap of this story of infidelity in her parents' tempestuous German marriage in the 1930's in letters between their three daughters, two of whom are twins perhaps fathered by Mother Frederika's lover Franz a Jewish musician. With the advent of the Nazi Party "when Hitler was making Germany great again," as Lerner puts it, Josef, the father, fears the twins will be identified as Jews. The book is structured into many sections with headings which "at once make the novel stutter and allow it to go on." The stuttering made for a much more challenging reading experience. I lost my place and took a long time to finish the book, but I was rewarded by the beautiful language, its sensuality, the music references, and amusing bits such as Lucy's musician lover Laff "who dreams of a slim body whenever he doesn't dream of Hollandaise, Bearnaise, Mornay, Veloute, Maltaise, Remoulade. Conflict stays his hand: the immediate pain of foregoing the dollop of cream, the delicate cookie, the delicious liqueur." Singer Frederika's vocal tissue texture is described as "a throaty gouache with a vaginal suggestion of watered silk (and) the Line: sharply rising on strong emotion from trembling tremolos to the jagged heights of an ecephalogram...(its) Edges: rough. Torn, not cut." Much of the story takes place in Kitzingen, the site of the town determined by the hanky dropped from a window of castle Schwanberg by the daughter of Pippin the Short. The book describes how one grievous action can alter a life, Frederika's father denying her music lessons, Josef's punishment for playing with matches as a child, and a scandal revealed in a small Catholic community. There is also a pendulum by which Josef determines who will return from the war and a barometer checked daily.
The book is published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project in a tempting hand-sized paperback. "Dorothy books emerge each October like ringing endorsements of writers you’ve never heard of by a friend whose taste you can absolutely trust." - The Atlantic

[Abby Howell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say this book was amazing. But difficult. And stuttery. And tells a story sideways. And leaves a lot of blank spaces. If you read it, I think the key is to trust the author, though you may not understand everything as she goes along. Trust the narrator she creates, a daughter writing to her sister (or maybe her half-sister) mainly about their parents, but also about themselves. The book is set in a small town in Germany during the rise of Hitler, which provides a backdrop to the intense personal, people who live with each other, but don't really fit together relationships. It's a small book, but took me a long time to read because of how dense it is, but I was truly satisfied at the end.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in the height of summer, beside an unusual amount of lakes. I'm moved to praise the lovely turns of phrase and experimental way that Waldrop takes on "the novel," and story more generally, though the plot itself is rather harrowing. Anyone who enjoys when their novels questions themselves as "novels" might have a good time.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most fundamental conundrums of physics remains the solidity of objects, a quirk of substance, insofar as the apparently solid object is at its material foundation the play of vibrating atoms which cannot and do not properly fuse. The solid thing is not truly solid, even if so close to being so that the illusion conquers us without difficulty, our being primed to accept it; that is part of how we are ourselves organically constituted as creatures (creations at play with(in) creation). We can consider these complimentary factors when we assess a concise aphorism I recently came across in Aldous Huxley: a human individual is not an element, merely a complex chemical compound. How do we hold our worlds together? Binding operations of mind. Primarily. This has been a crucial part of how we assess the matter at least since the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Philosophical discourse would take much longer to get around to suggesting—let alone critically delineating—the ways in which analogous operations occur at the level of the adhesion of self, the binding that allows us to conceive of ourselves (and our biographies) as something like elements rather than dynamic and ongoing molecular events inclined to elude any teleological frame or reductive explanatory methodology. Critical discourse begins to arrive at these stipulations by way of phenomenology and hermeneutics in the early-to-mid 20th century, and they will subsequently become central to the renunciation of the primacy of the subject so crucial to what we might call the post-structuralist moment. In reading Rosmarie Waldrop’s absolutely extraordinary 1987 novel THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER, the first of the two novels the celebrated poet would write, I was to become increasingly aware that I was having issues maintaining my focus, to an extent that was hardly common for me. Not only was my mind wandering more than it normally does when I read, but I would very often have to read clausal sequences repeatedly because something was failing to register, even though the individual clauses were quite simple, even straightforward. What I came to realize was at play here was both simple and exceedingly rare: Rosmarie Waldrop has mobilized a style that insinuates the principal themes such that they become part of the reader’s experience, the voice addressing us, that of Lucy Seifert, our narrator, performing the provisional binding operations that hold a world tenuously together, while at the same time testifying to the failure of these binding operations, all order married to that part of it which is already subject to instantaneous dissolution. The tenuousness of the binding operations is actually already right there in the myriad “section headings,” which, as discussed by Ben Lerner in his Introduction to the 2019 Dorothy edition of the novel, “are often the beginnings of sentences that continue into the section itself,” “continuations of the last sentence of the preceding section,” often both, occasionally not quite either. Himself a poet who has had success as a novelist or writer of autofiction, Lerner makes a point of emphasizing that the approach here is highly unconventional in a novel—he can think of no clear precedent—and almost certainly has to have some basis in Waldrop’s altogether better known work as a poet (and cultivator of poets). Lerner, distilling the business of the “section headings” quite succinctly: “These phrases function both as discreet headings, as titles, and as parts of a larger syntactic unit—or they are momentarily one thing and then the other, staging a grammatical tug of war, a standoff between flow and fragmentation. They name and undermine naming all at once, and in this sense these enjambed headings are Lucy’s (and Waldrop’s) ambivalence about storytelling writ small.” Disillusionment may lead to dissolution, doubtlessly, but ecstasy or activation may tend to do so doubly. Very near the end of THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER, in a fragment inaugurated with the “section heading” “NOW I AM GETTING GARRULOUS,” addressed as is apparently the whole novel to Andrea, the more garrulous of Lucy’s older twin sisters, our narrator allows herself to get a little excited, perhaps even slightly carried away, such that we are afforded the opportunity to apprise a very fine and characteristic bit of whirligig prosody: “Not a proper drama where one incident follows logically, with necessity from the one before. No fugue. At best, theme and variations. Short-winded motives linked by the surging of a minor chord. Conjectures. I throw out threads, and if I were Mozart I could gather in complete ideas.” You would be hard-pressed to find a passage excerpted from any work of fiction that does so fine a job of telling you what kind of work the fiction-making work at hand actually is. This is Rosmarie Waldrop’s work telling you what kind of work it is, which is different from a book telling you what it is about, and we should be able to surmise based on more than merely the mention of Mozart that the ambivalence here is about far more than merely “storytelling,” touching as it unmistakably does upon any field that would hope to elevate its conceits, its precepts, and presumption of mastery (or master narrative) without reconciling with the problems of epistemology that are the condition of all human projects and from which human projects cannot escape. Storytelling and music, surely, or just art in general, but also science, history, ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, each of these fields unthinkable without the thinking that thinks them, the binding operations in which they are bound-up. Lucy and Waldrop are not Mozart because their work is work with the irreconcilables mastery cannot acknowledge, the absence of ground Wile E. Coyote, as would-be master of predation, does not yet know is suddenly beneath him (every binding operation also a grounding one). All this established, we may wish to double back ever so slightly in order to grant special credence to Ben Lerner’s summation by acknowledging that any formulation we may present with respect to our world(s) is a story we tell ourselves, and that there are going to be degrees of legitimacy when it comes to these stories. If THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER is a kind of epistolary novel (to a significant extent informed by the Waldrop’s own backstory), much of this ends up reflecting the intention of Lucy Seifert to challenge her older sister Andrea’s world model, only ever hinting at the possibility of an alternative model insofar as such a model will tend to lose its capacity to adhere as quickly as it insists itself. Andrea’s voice is implicit, her communications not subject to our scrutiny, such that all we have to go on are Lucy’s parries and rejoinders, many of which are unmistakably undertaken as efforts to deflect direct attack. It is more than merely insinuated that Andrea has more sympathy for her twin sister, quiet and unprepossessing Doria, especially as pertains to infidelity. Andrea apparently believes that Lucy has behaved unconscionably with respect to her husband Bob on account of having engaged in an extramarital affair with Laff (Lafayette Pershing), a musician at one point indentured with the Cleveland Orchestra, Andrea evidently believing that Lucy is replicating the cuckolding of their own father Josef by their mother Frederika, who the author accuses Andrea of positioning as “The witch with the white gloves.” Frederika herself had an affair with a musician, Franz Huber, Jewish, onetime First World War flight partner of Josef, the speculation long having been (to occasionally disastrous effect) that Franz was the actual biological father of the two twins (Lucy’s older sisters). Lucy suggests that it is because Andrea does not appear to believe that Doria’s past infidelity properly replicates their mother’s earlier transgression, and because Andrea did not like Doria’s husband Karl, that Andrea is willing to give Doria a pass. Lucy: “I don’t mind that you didn’t mind Doria’s lover. I mind that you won’t grant me the same off-season sunshaft. That you don’t admit that I could love Bob, delight in living with him, and yet need another person, a different smell of socks. But don’t worry: guilt pours in. The twinge of despair which pulls love toward fear, ecstasy toward sweat and nausea, and which deepens into movement as two voices open their inner parts.” Stopping short of presenting an alternative way of reading infidelity—in fact outright confessing to a whole range of contradictory feelings and anxieties—Lucy merely argues that the frame Andrea imposes is not adequate. Rationality is itself not adequate to negotiating the life of the emotions and of the drives (especially libidinal ones). When Lucy writes of having come to be aware that her husband Bob might well have himself embarked upon an extramarital dalliance, communicating how this shocked and hurt her, she makes a case for it not being enough to intellectually comprehend that her reaction is unfair in the context of her own relationship with Laff. “I went upstairs pretending a headache. I knew I had no right to be upset. But pain tears into your body without asking permission.” It is in seeking to affix a truth, to stabilize unstable elements within a single reductive frame, that we will be most likely to do violence against the truth, cutting ourselves off from the creatural dimension, bound up nebulously, open-endedly, multiply. The explanatory reflex cannot help but exclude and repress. “Can I possibly isolate any one particular event as the cause of other particular events? Construct a different family myth out of one little sentence? A myth where evil does not emanate from Mother, the wicked witch and the cold void inside her, but from this little sentence? Father’s ‘Can’t you stop this screeching?’ A Pandora’s box of polar conditions, blizzards and ice-storms, all roads coated with the slippery, treacherous layer so that progress is precarious, accidents frequent, the total of broken limbs still not counted up.” In beginning to set out to suggest that fault is shared between Josef and Frederika, but that the fault cannot be reduced to the sort of binding operation one simple sentence might seek to consecrate, Lucy situates these phenomena alongside aleatory atmospheric events in order to mobilize a crucial parallel. This will happen again and again in THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER. As myself something of a Deleuzean (and Deleuzo-Guattarian), I might put it like this: by using metaphor and destabilizing poetical interventions, Rosmarie Waldrop places the events of individual lives flung contingently into history (and becoming) in the context of weather/atmosphere, biological events (especially sexual reproduction, one key passage looking at the development of the embryo), and renegade cosmological extrapolation (“a brighter galaxy of suns”), such that the condition of being flung into immanence and worldly substance is to be found existing within the context of aleatory morphogenic self-organization, ever binding, ever un-binding. An early line in the book: “But in sex as in meteorology the number of particles in question is so enormous that an exact catalog of their positions and velocities is impossible.” The novel’s title comes from repeated considerations of the origin story of the town of Kitzingen, where Lucy grew up. ��Like King Pippin’s daughter dropping her handkerchief from a window of castle Schwanberg.” Lucy knows nothing else about Pippin’s daughter, not even her given name, though her story is the foundation upon which a physical territory is made to rest. “From this little sentence.” Can a living, dynamic territory be reduced to such an absurdity? Of course not. The older sisters were not born in Kitzingen, but rather in Bayreuth, heart of Bavaria, home of Richard-Wagner-Strasse, where one can find “Wagner’s house with his grave in the garden.” Josef is a staunch Wagnerian, Frederika hates Wagner. It marks the surface manifestation of a latent fissure in the marriage while also connecting the family scandals and family secrets to the mythological foundations of the Nazi regime, a trauma more debilitating than any conceivable number of marital indiscretions. Here too binding operations will come to figure at the surface of Waldrop’s text, directly at the level of syntax. Ben Lerner is right to emphasize the ways in which disparate, atomized elements seeks to bind themselves to larger bodies or forms, this being a matter that Waldrop’s writing enacts again and again in any number of ways. It is also how the Wagnerian Josef is presented as becoming a complicit Nazi adjunct. “He wondered. If one could trust Hitler. Believe in him. What an immense relief, giving yourself up to someone larger, stronger. Being a muscle, a mere fibre of a muscle in a larger body, an atom of a larger force.” Wagner also brings us back to music and the key factor of both Lucy’s and Federika’s infidelities (with Laff and Franz respectively) having been enabled and made to adhere for as long as they were able to by virtue of the nebulous binding force of music. It has to do with resonance, beyond reducible formulations, beyond the mandates of good order, again, like the atmospheric and the molecular and the celestial, aleatory, morphogenic. Here is Lucy’s elegy for her parents’ doomed marriage: “The decay of their marriage was like that of the sound from a piano string. More complicated than a straight line. The first segment always starts at a high level and decays quickly. The prompt sound. The immediate disaster. Followed by a final slow decay, the aftersound, which dragged on for decades.” It can hardly be a matter of “who’s to blame?” I have already confessed to having had to make my way slowly through THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER, and I will qualify that by underscoring the fact that it was progressive, my having found myself slowing down increasingly as I proceeded. All this despite that fact of this not being a novel that is in any traditional sense 'difficult.' Much of this has to do with watching the things being built before your eyes unbuilt at the same time. Yes. But I also believe I became increasingly aware of how much data I had been passing over unbeknownst. If this is a detective story, one daughter excavating a complicated past in presentation to her Balkanized sister, the performance entire something like a poet’s forensics, it is certain that I have myself not been halfway adequate to the cataloguing of evidence, doubtlessly not having recognized a great deal of it as evidence in the first place. This would suggest that repeated visitations to THE HANKY OF PIPPIN’S DAUGHTER might well be sensible, even if the whole point remains that the evidence adds up to an indeterminate and unstable shape, nothing else. Lucy/Waldrop: “Nothing has happened, been resolved, decided.”

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve read in 2023. An epistolary novel that performs the slippages between memory, imagination and history. Set inside a doomed German marriage between world wars. Told by their daughter. Chaotic, carnal, devastating, weary. It’s everything. More people must read this.

[Sam Bakhshalian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lowkey cheeks!
Potential lost. Gimmick regained.

[Quela Font · Rating 5 out of 5]

«El curso de estas frases no parece una historia que crece, avanza y se desarrolla, sino una trayectoria en declive. Las frases rastrean agujeros y grietas, excavan en busca de raíces, auscultan las paredes».

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rare novel in bibliography of poet Rosmarie Waldrop, who has published a long series of collections and began the stellar Burning Deck Press, in Providence. Before that, she began her life in interwar German, an experience channeled here in this story of a daughter, writing to an older sister, as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her parents' relationship, and the parallel rise of Naziism, which they may have been complicit in, not through any deeply-held belief so much as in a passive acceptance of the toxic currents of their time. This has a poet's care for the construction of language, but not the lyricism. There's a pared down sense of attempted utility, even as the ideas that make up these sentences wind and digress until utility is all but lost. These are the troubles of reconstruction -- our narrator, and Rosmarie herself were too young to observe these events with any perspective. The approach must be made instead through hypotheticals and the process of writing. At times, it's an infuriatingly imprecise technique for a time that calls for clarity, but such clarity may come from aspiration at the expense of fidelity. The characters at the heart of this remain incomplete and incompletely understood, reduced to gestures like Pippin's Daughter, who in town legend performed a single act, without even her own name: the release of a square of cloth that initiated a settlement. History, personal and national, retroactively reconstructed, may be but a series of such reductions.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Please stop harping on 'truth,' Andrea. Not for us, not for the little net we cast into the whirl and welter: the past is an imposter. It obeys our expectations. With a bit of seducing, I suppose."

Rosmarie Waldrop is a genius, but we should have known that already from her poetry and her translations. I had no idea she'd written a novel before the Dorothy reprint—by itself a miraculous event, published just after the Waldrops' press, Burning Deck, closed down.

I expected and found the lyricism, expected and found the genius formal play. What I did not expect was the historical and emotional intensity in the plot, set largely in Weimar Germany with the political knife-edges, suspicions, and hatreds that were bred there all under warts-and-all scrutiny. It is probably my own fault that I didn't expect the intensity of the content to match up with my predicted intensity of the form—I sold Waldrop short, but never will again.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated this book's inventive structure and use of language but couldn't quite connect to the narrative until I read Lerner's introduction. Which is there to help, sure, but I should be able to do so without a cheat sheet. That's the only knock.

[Zach Werbalowsky]

This is one of those books that seemed to go over my head. I read it, but didn't take it in although i could tell this was happening from the beginning, the prose were so good I was in a trance the whole time. But i cannot properly give this book a rating, although it is good.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poet’s novel no doubt. Waldrop writes many beautifully constructed (and sometimes confusing) vignettes / scenes to make up a novel following a dysfunctional family in Hitler’s Germany. I picked it up and put it down several times but am happy to have had the experience of reading it.

[Srinaath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Innovative, mesmerizing. I wish Waldrop's initial poetic vigor lasted through the last two parts.

[Mike Barnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this is what an amazing writer can do! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her before.

[Colleen Grablick · Rating 3 out of 5]

the worst possible between…. unbearable actually. i am reading too much about nazis past and present and it’s giving me bad dreams

[Hannah Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

freudian perfection

[TVDKAA · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about the miscommunications of two fundamentally different people, who although so different, marry and wonderingly continue to question why the other partner is unable to fulfil their needs.
This is a story of their daughters trying to piece together why two people so different from the other, married in the first place, while interweaving the story about Pipin The Short’s daughter, and her hanky. A story trying to piece together how the actions of one person can so affect another, set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Told in poetical prose, Waldrop tries to tease out society’s expectations of a married woman, and how those expectations can influence our actions and reactions. Condemnation, blame and hypocrisy are also examined.

[Em · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF - I really don’t understand the glowing reviews, maybe I’m not smart enough to understand it? but this read to me like the most mind numbing jargon, hitting my head against a wall would have been more enjoyable