Bubis

Bubis is a publisher whose influence on Benno von Archimboldi’s literary career persists even when the author himself vanishes. He combines an eye for literary judgment with the material responsibilities of publishing: he cultivates critics, weighs the reception of Archimboldi’s books, and treats the money due to the absent writer as an obligation that continues to accumulate. His sudden death leaves the publishing house in the Baroness’s hands and reaches Archimboldi only at a distance, as news he cannot bring himself to answer.

Publisher and Literary Judgment

At a dinner with the critic Lothar Junge and other guests, Bubis does not remain in the drawing room after the meal. He takes the willing Junge into the larger, carefully tended back garden, where the surrounding forest is closer, and begins by discussing the critic’s writing. Bubis is eager to see it published. He alludes vaguely to an idea he has been considering for months: creating a new imprint, though he does not say what kind of imprint it would be. The conversation ranges across writers Bubis and his colleagues publish and publishing houses in Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin, Zurich, Bern, and Vienna.

Bubis eventually asks Junge what he thinks of Archimboldi. Junge responds cautiously, at first shrugging; Bubis’s question puts the author’s standing before a critic whose writing he hopes to publish. After the visit, Bubis tells the Baroness that Junge does not like Archimboldi’s books. She asks whether that matters. Bubis distinguishes their own position from Archimboldi’s: to the publisher and his wife, the opinion need not matter, but it matters greatly to the writer. The exchange shows Bubis attending not only to a book’s critical reception but to the importance that reception may hold for its author.

Archimboldi’s Disappearance and Bubis’s Support

For a long time after Archimboldi disappears, there is no news of him. His books nevertheless continue to sell: Rivers of Europe goes into a second edition, and soon the same happens with The Leather Mask. Essays on new German fiction mention his name only in passing, with an air of uncertainty, while a few young readers treat his books as cult objects and a caprice of university students. His public reputation remains limited and precarious, even as his work finds readers.

Four years after the disappearance, Bubis receives Inheritance, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages, covered with crossings-out and addenda and accompanied by lengthy, often illegible footnotes. It arrives from Venice with a short letter in which Archimboldi says that he has been working as a gardener. Bubis suspects this may be a joke, since he doubts such work would be easy to find even in an Italian city, let alone Venice. Whatever he makes of the explanation, he answers immediately: he asks what advance Archimboldi wants and for a reliable address to send the money that has accumulated over the preceding four years. Archimboldi replies with an address in Cannaregio and his customary New Year’s pleasantries. Bubis’s prompt response makes the long silence no excuse to withhold the writer’s earnings; his support is practical as well as literary.

Death and Succession

Bubis dies in his Hamburg office while reading a book by a young writer from Dresden, whose work is described as viciously funny and already troubled by censorship in the Democratic Republic. The laughter carries across the publishing house: the publicity chief can hear it in the lobby, the bookkeeper’s office, the copy editors’ office, the meeting room, the reading room, the bathroom, the kitchen and pantry, and even the office of the boss’s wife, farthest away. Then, suddenly, it stops. The staff remember the time as eleven twenty-five in the morning.

When the secretary knocks, no one answers. She waits, afraid of disturbing him, then tries to transfer an urgent call. Still receiving no response, she knocks several times and opens the door. Bubis is slumped amid books artfully scattered across the floor; he is dead, but his face retains a happy expression. The scene sets the vivid reach of his laughter against the abrupt stillness of his death, with the books around him connecting his last moments to the work of reading that has occupied his life.

His body is burned, and his ashes are scattered over the waters of the Alster. The Baroness takes the helm of the publishing house and declares that she has no intention of selling the company. No one speaks of the young Dresden writer’s manuscript. The scene leaves Bubis’s business in the hands of his widow, while the fate of the manuscript is left unreported; the continuity of the firm is asserted, but the particular literary work that filled Bubis’s final reading moment recedes from view.

The News Reaches Archimboldi

After returning to the Continent, Archimboldi is reading a German newspaper on a terrace in Missolonghi when he learns of Bubis’s death. He reads the whole story again, then a third time, and goes for a walk through a town marked by memorials to Byron. The narration turns the walk into a meditation on Thanatos: it is death, rather than the familiar image of Byron strolling through the town, that moves about and observes. Archimboldi’s response unfolds through rereading and walking, not through an immediate act of communication.

He wonders whether he should send the publishing house a card of condolence and even imagines what he would write. Yet he decides that none of it makes sense and sends nothing. The decision closes the account of their connection without undoing it: Bubis had kept track of Archimboldi’s books, sought out a critic’s opinion, and sent the money owed to him despite years without contact; Archimboldi receives the news and privately rehearses a reply, but leaves the exchange unfinished. Bubis’s importance is therefore measured not only by his role in the writer’s career, but by the silence his death produces in the writer who survives him.