ON THE SURFACE, Jeffrey Sammons's account of his many years in Heine studies is a rather sad tale of unheeded warnings and sloppy treatment by publishers. I too can remember a period, quite a long one, when literary scholars were, as he puts it, mesmerized by French fireworks and overlooked far more interesting matters. And his stories of being messed around by publishers ring all too true. Even so, I wonder if Sammons isn't playing with his readers just a little. In presenting himself as the schlemiel of Heine studies, he's a bit like the clown who makes us smile by putting on a lugubrious face.

This drily humorous performance must not let us forget that Jeffrey Sammons is a scholar and critic of the first distinction. I was delighted and honoured to be asked to contribute to his Festschrift, in which I was the only British author. The 500-page book which Yale took three years to publish, Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet, is for my money the single best book on Heine in any language. Despite the loyalty I owe to Siegbert Prawer (whom I knew first as the formidable conductor of graduate seminars, and, in his last years, as a sort of academic grandfather, immensely kind and supportive), I would rank it ahead of Prawer's Heine the Tragic Satirist. It is not only that Sammons deals with Heine's prose as well as his poetry, but in addition Sammons is much more willing to confront difficulties, contradictions, and “tensions” (a favourite word) in Heine 's work, whereas Prawer subscribes much more to an aesthetic of harmony and harmonization.

As for his Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography, of which Sammons says with conscious understatement that he did “a pretty good job,” it has all the qualities that a biography should have and more. Not only is it based on minute knowledge of all the biographical data, as well as Heine's literary oeuvre and the vast body of secondary literature, but one feels that Sammons has scrutinized every item with a fresh eye.