Charles Haldeman

Charles Haldeman (September 27, 1931 – January 19, 1983^[1]) was an American novelist.

Life

Haldeman was born in Pickens, South Carolina, to German immigrant Charles Heuss and Frances McFall. Heuss died in March 1935 while the family was living in Syracuse, New York, and his mother moved them back to Pickens. While attending a hotel management school in Washington, D. C., she met and married Willard W. Haldeman, in 1937. Haldeman adopted the boys, changing their last name to his^[1].

The family moved a number of times as Willard Haldeman took different jobs, and lived in Maryland, New York City, and Sackets Harbor, New York (on which Haldeman later modeled the town in his second novel, The Snowman. Haldeman attended thirteen schools in eleven years^[2]. After high school, he attended Erskine College as a freshman (1948–49) and Antioch College as a sophomore(1949–50)^[3], and the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida^[4].

He was enlisted into the US Navy in 1950 and served until 1954. After his discharge, he worked briefly in New York City, and then traveled to Europe, where he attended the University of Heidelberg between 1955 and 1957. He then moved to Athens, Greece, where he taught high school biology and algebra at the American Community Schools for two years^[3].

In 1959, he moved to Mikonos, and then to Crete, where he bought and restored a Venetian villa on the waterfront in Chania. He lived on Crete until just before his death. He became friends with Charles Henri Ford^[5] and wrote the screenplay for Ford's film, "Johnny Minotaur" (1971)^[6].

Haldeman provided the lyrics for Manos Hatzidakis' title song for the 1962 film, It Happened in Athens. His screenplay for the film Nicholas was accepted by 20th Century Fox, but production was cancelled after the 1967 "Colonels' coup". He also wrote scripts for a number of British, Greek, and Canadian documentaries. From 1972 to 1974, he served as the editor for International History Magazine.^[4]. At the time of his death, he and director Christopher Miles were attempting to sell the rights to a film play, The Cretan Runner, based on George Psychoundakis' memoir of the same name.

He died in Athens, Greece in 1983.

Works

Haldeman's first novel, The Sun's Attendant, was published in England in 1963 and in the US in 1964. Its protagonist, Stefan Brückmann, is a half-German, half-Gypsy boy survives Auschwitz and attends the University of Heidelberg as a young man. He becomes involved with a variety of intellectuals and expatriates and is eventually forced to confront his memories and experiences during the war. It was praised by Lawrence Durrell, who had befriended Haldeman in Greece, and George Steiner, who called it "a profoundly original novel."^[7]

His second novel, The Snowman (1965), described the odd history and relationship of the inhabitants of a fictional small upstate New York town, Joseph's Landing, in the later part of World War Two. Robert Nye wrote of it in a review for The Guardian, "No American novelist since Faulkner strikes me as having a finer awareness of the possibilities of language as an index to the complications of human behaviour."^[4]

Haldeman's third novel, Teagarden's Gang (1971) was an allegorical novel that used a story about Jake Teagarden, a chemist who discovers a quick way to make alcohol and so becomes a powerful mobster in 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago, to comment upon developments in the United States in the late 1960s.^[4]

Bibliography

Novels

• The Sun's Attendant (1963)
• The Snowman (1965)
• Teagarden's Gang (1971)

Poetry

• without graves—no resurrections (1984) (foreword by Peter Levi)

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} "Descendants of William Hallum (tentative)"
2. ^ Biographical sketch on Penguin paperback edition of "The Snowman" (Penguin Book 2545)
3. ^ ^{a b} Contemporary Authors: First revision, Volumes 5-8 (1968), p.498
4. ^ ^{a b c d} The Snowman, by Charles Haldeman on The Neglected Book Page (posted September 2, 2009; accessed August 8, 2010)
5. ^ Dowell, James. "20th Century AD," Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Nov-Dec, 2001
6. ^ "Johnny Minotaur (1971) on IMDB
7. ^ The Sun's Attendant, by Charles Haldeman on The Neglected Book Page (posted December 13, 2009; accessed August 8, 2010)

External links

• Neglectedbooks.com Review of The Sun's Attendant
• Neglectedbooks.com Review of The Snowman

Persondata
Name	Haldeman, Charles
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 27, 1931
Place of birth
Date of death	January 19, 1983
Place of death