Bernhard's demons

What would Thomas Bernhard's desert island reading be like? If his novels were any indication, his library must be heavy on philosophy and white male writers. But his memoirs would provide more definite titles and authors. The epigraphs of his five-part memoirs were selected quotations from Voltaire, Montaigne, Pascal, and Novalis. His grandfather's shelves contained: Works of Goethe (volume 4), Shakespeare's King Lear, the poems of Dauthendey, Christian Wagner, Hölderlin, Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena.

I had read Hamsun's Hunger, Dostoyevsky's Raw Youth, and Goethe's Elective Affinities, and I had made notes on what I had read, a practice my grandfather had observed throughout his life. I tried keeping a diary but immediately gave up. I could have had contacts with all kinds of people at the Vötterl, but I did not want any, being satisfied with the company of my books and with the long expeditions I made into the vast, undiscovered continents of the imagination. Hardly had I woken up and conscientiously taken my temperature in accordance with the rules, as I had done every morning for months, than I turned to my books, my closest and most intimate friends. It was in Grossgmain that I first discovered reading. This was a sudden discovery which proved decisive for my subsequent life. This discovery—that literature can at any moment provide the mathematical solution to life and one's own existence provided that it is put into gear and operated as though it were mathematics, so that in time it becomes a form of higher mathematics and ultimately the supreme mathematical art, which can be called reading only when we have mastered it completely—this discovery was one which I could not have made until my grandfather had died ... Through reading I was able to bridge the gulf which yawned beneath me even here and was thus able to rescue myself from moods which could have led only to destruction. [1]

Literature as mathematics, then as higher mathematics and supreme mathematical art, was reminiscent of Atzabacher's attributed belief in the "high art and the highest art" in Old Masters. Bernhard confessed to reading mainly European writers, mostly from the collection in his grandfather's shelves. The "principal works of Shakespeare and Stifter, of Lenau and Cervantes, though I cannot claim that I understood them in all their rich complexity". Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Montaigne, Pascal, Péguy, and Schopenhauer. (He read a lot of poetry and philosophy, in addition to having later on a life-long daily addiction to reading newspapers.) Verlaine: check. Trakl: check. Baudelaire: check. Dostoyevsky: check.

Dostoyevsky above all else. The young Bernhard was smitten by the Russian's voluptuous specter of self-destruction, particularly in The Demons. It was a watershed for him. And it was a book to emulate. A path-breaker. It was like a medicine to his sickly body.

Never in my whole life have I read a more engrossing and elemental work, and at the time I had never read such a long one. It had the effect of a powerful drug, and for a time I was totally absorbed by it. For some time after my return home I refused to read another book, fearing that I might be plunged headlong into the deepest disappointment. For weeks I refused to read anything at all. The monstrous quality of The Demons had made me strong; it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out. I had felt the impact of a work that was both wild and great, and I emerged from the experience like a hero. Seldom has literature produced such an overwhelming effect on me. ... What I needed I had found in The Demons. I searched the sanatorium library for other such elemental works, but there were none. It would be superfluous to enumerate the authors whose books I opened and immediately shut again, repelled by their cheapness and triviality. Apart from The Demons I had no time for literature, but I felt sure that there must be other books like it. But there was no point in looking for them in the sanatorium library, which was chock-full of tastelessness and banality, of Catholicism and National Socialism. How was I to get hold of other books like The Demons? My only chance was to leave Grafenhof as soon as possible and look for my demons in freedom.

Who could blame the young, tubercular writer if the anarchic-revolutionary tendencies of the Russian novelist offered him the way out? There were many chilling scenes in Bernhard's novels, but his memoirs were scene after scene of perversity and absurdity. He unpacked them all: "the war and its aftermath, my grandfather's sickness and death, my own illness, my mother's illness, my family's despair, the depressing conditions under which they lived, the hopelessness of their existence." Intermittently, he was confined in hospitals, death ward, and sanatorium, waging personal battle against his illness in such graphic and painful ways. I still could not forget the scene wherein a doctor performed a pneumothorax on him.

The patient has to lie on the bed in the doctor's surgery while air is introduced between the diaphragm and the diseased lung by means of a thin tube; in this way the tubercular lung cavity is collapsed so that it can re-seal. I had often witnessed this procedure. It is painful only initially, after which the patient becomes accustomed to it and thinks no more about it. It becomes a routine experience, and although the patient is always afraid beforehand, by the time it is over his fear is proved to have been unfounded. However, it is not invariably unfounded, as I was soon to discover.

"Absurdity", for him, "is the only way forward. it was a way I knew, the only one that led anywhere." His recollections were a conflation of all his lifelong frustrations, all the absurd situations he found himself in.

One day, while this highly respected doctor (he was in fact a professor) was injecting me with air, he went over to the telephone, leaving me on the bed with the tube in my chest, and rang up his cook to give her instructions about his lunch. After a good deal of to-and-fro about chives and butter and whether there should be potatoes or not, the professor brought the debate to an end and deigned to return to his patient on the bed. He injected a further volume of air and then told me to step behind the X-ray screen. This was the only way to discover how the air had been distributed. Hardly had I taken the required position than I was seized with a fit of coughing and passed out. I just heard the professor say, My God, I collapsed the other lung!

Borges postulated that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical [2]. Everything literary is non-fiction, including fiction. This is probably because the reverse is also true. In Bernhard, the reenactment of his younger self's troubled life was truthful only in the sense that it was only ever an approximation: "Truth is always wrong, even if it is one hundred percent truth. Every error is pure truth." This pure dose of contradiction was his literary framework, in novels and autobiography both.

Language is inadequate when it comes to communicating the truth, and the best the writer can offer is an approximation to the truth, a desperate and hence unreliable approximation. Language can only falsify and distort whatever is authentic.

W. G. Sebald borrowed heavily from this aesthetics of falsification. Bernhard's pragmatic and practical outlook in life prepared him to adopt the stance of the skeptic. Not for him Sebald's attempt to recapture the literary equivalent of restitution and atonement. War was not a romantic concept in which to set off one's destiny. He realized that even after the war ended, he never actually escaped from it. War was his state of nature. And so he would not be troubled by any notion of being a casualty of the war, or by the imaginary burden of surviving it. The shadow of war was the shadow lurking in his lung. He considered himself well-trained in skepticism and rebellion, but these were often manifested in complaints and extreme irony. He was prepared for the worst. Armed with memories and demons (books), he happily searched out for more demons: the elemental and monstrous kind. The supreme calculus in mathematical prose. The raging demons that built his personal canon.



Notes:

[1] Quoted passages were from "Breath: A Decision" (Der Atem, 1978) and "In the Cold" (Die Kälte, 1981), by Thomas Bernhard, in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes, translated by David McLintock and Carol Brown Janeway (Vintage International, 2011). Passages in bold are my emphases.

[2] From "A Profession of Literary Faith" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books, 2000).

Bernhard's cause

"An Indication of the Cause" (Die Ursache, 1975) by Thomas Bernhard, in Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, translated by David McLintock, collected in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes (Vintage, 2011)

I found the city increasingly intolerable as a result of hundreds of sad, squalid, appalling, and mortifying experiences, and essentially it has remained intolerable to this day. To pretend otherwise would be untrue, hypocritical, and dishonest, and it is imperative that I should set down this record now and not later—I must set it down now, while I am still capable of fully recreating my experience as a child and an adolescent in Salzburg, of recreating it with all the factualness and scrupulous regard for truth which are necessary if I am to give a true indication of what it was like to be a schoolboy there. I have to seize this moment when it is still possible for me to say what has to be said, to indicate what has to be indicated, and so vindicate, if only partially, the truth as it was then, the true facts and the true reality. For all too soon the time may come when everything that was unpleasant will be unwarrantably mitigated and appear in a pleasanter light; and whatever Salzburg was to me as a schoolboy, it was never a pleasant or tolerable place, and I should not wish to spare it now by falsifying the true picture.

Thomas Bernhard's motive for his autobiography was clear. When his mental faculties were still clear, and his health still permitted it, he wanted to produce an account of his childhood and schooldays in the blighted city of Salzburg. And so, between the years 1975 and 1982, Bernhard produced the five parts of his memoir. His novels, too, are practically the same hate mail to his city of childhood, with its "mindless blend of National Socialism and Catholicism." W. G. Sebald attributed Bernhard's "factualness and scrupulous regard for truth" to the impending knock on the door, as he mentioned in an interview in December 2001, eight days before he himself received the knock.

Thomas Bernhard was in quite a different league because he occupied a position which was absolute. Which had to do with the fact that he was mortally ill since late adolescence and knew that any day the knock could come at the door. And so he took the liberty which other writers shied away from taking. And what he achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others.

Much more so in Gathering Evidence, the novelist was openly testifying using his own voice, or voices—the voice of his childhood and the retrospective voice of the writer—the horrific experiences he endured firsthand before, during, and after the war. While remembering-slash-writing, his current self was trying to recapture the wounded feelings of his former, thirteen-year old self. Yet he would like to differentiate his description of "how I felt at the time" with "the way I think now". The bursting energy of his tale was derived in part from layers of memory soaked in varying densities of perception. He would shift pronouns from "I" to "he" on page 79, then go back to "I" on page 83. David McLintock also noted his use of shifting perspective in the translator's preface: sometimes he views his youth from the standpoint of the present, at others from another intermediate point.

His appeal to "the true facts and the true reality", however, remained guarded. He knew his story was not distorted because they were based on factual evidence, but he could only give an indication of what he remembers.

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history—which is of course part of natural history—and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

From which we can gather that the writer had divested himself of all illusions of an accurate account of history. And from which we sense that his only protection from falsification was to perceive and create a version of history to the best of his memory and to the best of his ability. He simply had to make the attempt. Here we read about his recollection of multiple suicides of school boys his age and the air attacks skirted by Sebald in his lecture in On the Natural History of Destruction. Bernhard's descriptions of the air raids and their aftermath were some of the most brilliant writing he wrote. They could surpass the supreme irony in Heinrich Böll's accounts of air bombing destruction in The Silent Angel.

Bernhard's aesthetics of falsification was similar to Sebald's own, but only to an extent. Sebald was concerned with the truth (moral rightness) embedded in aesthetic form and feeling. The rightness and truthfulness of a narrative could be gleaned from its aesthetic and literary design. Bernhard, for his part, was concerned with the content and the desire (i.e., personal indications) to communicate the truth of that content. Both confessed to subjectivity. Bernhard acknowledged the impossibility of depicting the absolute reality of the past and, hence, its truth. But in refusing to give up and stand aside, in continuing to write what he knew and remember in order to set the record straight according to his own personal convictions, he was after the truth or an indicative version of it.

What is described here is the truth, and yet at the same time it is not the truth, because it cannot be. In all the years we have spent reading, we have never encountered a single truth, even if again and again what we have read has been factual. Again and again it was lies in the form of truth and truth in the form of lies, etc. What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. For a long time reason has forbidden me to tell and write the truth, because that only means telling and writing a lie; but writing is a vital necessity for me, and this is the reason why I write, even if everything I write is bound to be nothing but lies which are conveyed through me as truth. Of course we may demand truth, but if we are honest with ourselves we know that there is no such thing as truth. What is described here is the truth, and at the same time it is not, for the simple reason that truth is only a pious wish on our part. [from "The Cellar: An Escape", italics in the original, bold emphasis mine]

The immediacy and the urgency of Bernhard's account of the war must be set off against what Sebald diagnosed as a collective repression of wartime narratives and against the self-censorship by leading writers of the time who could not summon their energies to give witness. "Time makes its witnesses forget", Bernhard concluded when nobody remembered what happened on a site of destruction after he questioned them years after the bombing of a building on the same site which killed many employees working in it: "rows of bodies covered by sheets, their bare feet visible on the dusty grass behind the iron railings of the so-called Co-op, and ... trucks arriving ... with enormous consignments of coffins ..." Sebald's thesis on forgetting certainly was indebted to Bernhard's anguish against people who deliberately wanted to forget. Whenever Bernhard talked to people and asked them about what they went through during the war, he was met with "extreme annoyance, ignorance, and forgetfulness." He found this offensive to the spirit, this concerted determination to forget. His desire to remember was his "pious wish" to settle his personal account of history.

The cat in the box was simultaneously dead and alive. But someone, the novelist, had to dare to be the first one to open the box. All that matters is the truth-content of the lie.

Bernhard's escape

"The Cellar: An Escape" (Der Keller, 1976) by Thomas Bernhard, in Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, translated by David McLintock, collected in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes (Vintage, 2011)

[The work of a commercial apprentice] does not consist solely of the orderly routine of a grocery store like the cellar-shop in the Scherzhauserfeld Project: first of all unlocking and pushing back the concertina grille, then unlocking the shop door and letting the boss, the employees, and the customers into the shop, in which everything had been made spotless and all the containers topped up the previous evening, often by dint of hours of work put in after closing time—all of it involving the meticulous performance of numerous small tasks requiring conscientious devotion and a methodical, mathematically inclined memory. These jobs and hundreds of others equally important have to be carried out daily. In my day there was in addition the enormous task of dealing with the ration coupons, which required great precision and attention to detail; these had to be cut out whenever a purchase was made and stuck onto a sheet of wrapping paper every evening after the shop closed. Quite apart from continually lugging bags around and filling bottles and grading potatoes and sorting fruit and vegetables and making up bags of coffee and tea and slicing butter and cheese; quite apart from the feats of skill required to pour vinegar and oil and every other possible liquid such as rum and wine and fruit juice into every possible kind of bottle, all with impossibly narrow necks; quite apart from having to be constantly on the look-out for mould and decay, for vermin, for excessive cold and excessive warmth; quite apart from perpetually unloading all kinds of deliveries, sometimes making hundreds of journeys a day from the shop to the storeroom and back, cutting bread and making breadcrumbs, keeping the ham fresh and the eggs cool; quite apart from dusting the shelves daily and rushing to and fro between the refrigerator and the counter, between the potato boxes and the counter and between each of the shelves and the counter; apart from continually washing and drying one's hands and using knives that have to be sharpened every day and forks and spoons that have to be cleaned every day and jars that have to be washed out every day; and apart from cleaning the windows and mopping the floor and waging a continual war against flies and gnats and horseflies and wasps and cobwebs on the walls—quite apart from all this, the most vital requirement was never to slacken in one's attentiveness to the customers, always to be polite and friendly and obliging and to engage them in conversation, constantly keeping oneself in practice, in a word to satisfy them all the time and never, not even for a moment, to let up in one's eagerness to help: on the one hand to meet the wishes of the customers and at the same time never for a moment to neglect the interests of the business. Tidiness and cleanliness were imperative.

When he was 16 years old, Thomas Bernhard applied for a shopkeeper apprenticeship in Scherzhauserfeld Project, a notorious neighborhood of the poor and criminals, to cater to the needs of the "dregs of humanity". It was an about-face from his being a grammar school student. Fed up with the abuse of his schoolteachers and the "deadly institution" that was the educational system of Austria during the Nazi period—a system to blame for the suicide of many sensitive young students in boarding houses, fed up with the "educational trauma" he suffered from his schoolteachers, the teenage Bernhard just up and decided to become a grocer's assistant in one of the bleakest neighborhoods imaginable. But for Bernhard, this was all for the best. He felt he had graduated from "the school of philosophy" introduced to him at a very young age by his grandfather and had now entered "the school of absolute reality" wherein Herr Podlaha, the grocer, was his master and mentor on the practical aspects of life and "the art of human relations". In the cellar store, dealing every day with the demands of the common people, he had become adept at his work as an apprentice, and he had discovered that he had the capacity to become a people person. To his own surprise, he never realized he could adjust well to his job and even go through work with such infectious cheerfulness (cheerful Bernhard?!) and friendliness to customers (in a "most refreshingly extrovert fashion"!). Freedom, independence, and the exercise of free will—these were the things he most valued and the things he had acquired from his experiences in the cellar. His escape from the grammar school, his daily escape from his own impoverished and cramped household, his escape from the larger Salzburg society, from the immediate post-war malaise, an age he characterized as "inimical to the mind and the imagination." He made a dash for it, in a completely "opposite direction" from his school, and he felt exhilarated by this sudden decision. His stay in the cellar was such a formative phase in his life he had devoted a volume (the third of five chronological volumes in translation, the second in terms of publication in original German) of his collected memoirs recounting his work and trials in the cellar-shop. For his apprentice work he still had to attend a technical college once a week. This time he appreciated the instruction given by teachers who were actually local businessmen. As opposed to teachers in grammar school, the new teachers had "total concern with the present" and familiar "with what went on around them in the real world." These people of trade, having fought on the economic front, taught only what was practical, stuff of "immediate utility", in a straightforward, if rough, tone. As evident from the excerpt above, his recollection of the details of his apprenticeship showed how he loved and took pride in his work. This was a great period of learning for him. It was an apprenticeship on life. He had found something to do—a purpose—during the post-war years, "the bitterest time [his family] ever knew". Daily he looked forward to work in the store (limbo). Daily he left the depravity of his poor home (hell). The gaps in his school and home education were being filled by the practical education in the store dealing with the chaotic mass of poor and difficult customers exchanging their ration coupons for merchandise and goods. From his home to the cellar, his salvation was renewed each day he serve the lowly people of Scherzhauserfeld Project, the blot and the stigma of the Salzburg landscape. He did not find it degrading. He belonged to these people of low standing. In their daily transactions, he kept his dignity intact and his customers kept theirs intact. From limbo to hell and back, it was a privilege to find oneself with a purpose, productive, and gaining in self-confidence. To be able to read people and interact with them daily, I do not think there were more valuable lessons from an on-the-job training. He confessed that he owed a life lesson from his exacting boss, Herr Podlaha: "an insight into human possibilities I had never dreamt of, the alternative human possibilities." These alternative possibilities would play in many combinations in his fictional set pieces, would contextualize and foreground his works. Behind the despair, suicide, moroseness, self-destruction, and moping that characterize his literary work, the other possibilities—the will to live, to endure—exists. This singular motive drove him, Bernhard's "will to survive" against the social, economic, and cultural forces of the time. Against fascism and "the rules of the bourgeois social apparatus ... designed to destroy human beings." Bernhard, like his protagonists, was a survivor of war or some grave catastrophe. They found themselves in a story yet to unfold, ripe for more calamities—a story where the epidemic was not yet over, festering in cities overran by zombies. In their apocalyptic flavor, Bernhard's novels are zombie flicks (I can't help myself. I like zombie movies). His characters were plagued by artistic, philosophical, psychological, and medical difficulties, rooted from or symptoms of a defect in human nature: individual cruelty or a collective disregard for feelings and reason. They had to depend on their survival instinct. To ensure his own survival, Bernhard had become a fine observer of people and a lifelong learner of art, commerce, sales, musicology, and singing. Unlike his grandfather, Bernhard was able to expose the whole farce, "smashing all the props and ... annihilating the prop men and all the actors." To ensure his own sanity he created his brand of literature of doom and survival.

Had I not actually been through everything which makes up my present existence, I should probably have invented it all for myself and ended up with the same result.

*

 
The Cellar won for Bernhard the Literary Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce, apparently for "a totally new form of autobiography" but obviously for the prize-giving body's connection to the subject matter. He wrote a short essay on the prize ceremony which was translated in My Prizes: An Accounting. This slim book of essays and speeches was appended to his five-part memoir in the latest Vintage edition. The last two volumes of Gathering Evidence—"Breath: A Decision" and "In the Cold"—were further demonstrations of the novelist's survival skills. They were among his darkest and life-affirming prose works.

Old Masters

Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard, tr. Ewald Osers (The University of Chicago Press, 1992)



"Stifter is no genius, Stifter is a philistine living a cramped life and a musty petit bourgeois and schoolmaster writing in a cramped style, who did not even meet the minimum requirements of the language, let alone was able to produce works of art, Reger said," wrote Thomas Bernhard. "All in all, he said," Bernhard wrote, "Stifter is one of the greatest disappointments of my artistic life. Every third or at least every fourth sentence of Stifter's is wrong, every other or every third metaphor is a failure, and Stifter's mind generally, at least in his literary writings, is a mediocre mind." The creaking complaint almost echoed Prospero's lament, in an inverted sense,"And thence retire me to my Milan," Shakespeare wrote, "where / Every third thought shall be my grave." This last line formed the epigraph of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, a lacerating lengthy monologue on sex and mortality. The same lashing voice, unflagging in intensity, characterized the comic novel Old Masters. But where Prospero consigned himself to resignation, Bernhard's tempest was only starting to brew. It was only the beginning of inspired verbal lashing. He was a cultured dragon spewing fire and brimstone and vituperation at the mediocrity and pettiness of writers and artists in Austria, represented by Adalbert Stifter, Heidegger, and the composer Bruckner.  He breathed fire and scorched everything in the path of his fire-breath.

In a novel of art criticism, raw and extreme, his call was as much for the rejection of anything hopeless and base—like Stifter's "unbearable provincial raised-finger kind of prose"—as for the celebration of excellence, for the "highest art". Even if that kind of art, Bernhard wrote, was a strange mix of utter sublimeness and revulsion.

Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and in ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with downright self-assurance, believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realize what it is, bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realization before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said.

What lent authority to Bernhard's voice, what made his narrators convincing, was not so much his aesthetic pronouncements but his delivery, his style. His characters, Reger and Irrsigler and the narrator Atzbacher, were his stand-ins, refracted through a loop of successive narrative appropriation. This tendency for perfect attribution was demonstrated early on (p. 4):

The art historians only swamp the visitors with their twaddle, says Irrsigler, who has, over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, of Reger's sentences. Irrsigler is Reger's mouthpiece, nearly everything that Irrsigler says has been said by Reger, for over thirty years Irrsigler has been saying what Reger has said. If I [Atzbacher] listen attentively I can hear Reger speak through Irrsigler. If we listen to the guides we only ever hear that art twaddle which gets on our nerves, the unbearable art twaddle of the art historians, says Irrsigler, because Reger says so frequently. All these paintings are magnificent, but not a single one is perfect, Irrsigler says after Reger. People only go to the museum because they have been told that a cultured person must go there, and not out of interest, people are not interested in art, at any rate ninety-nine per cent of humanity has no interest whatever in art, as Irrsigler says, quoting Reger word for word.... Reger hates Reni [the painter], therefore Irrsigler hates Reni too. Irrsigler has achieved a high degree of mastery in appropriating Reger's statements, indeed he now utters them almost perfectly in Reger's characteristic tone. [my underlining]

Irssigler was almost the alter-ego of Reger, and Atzbacher was proving himself to be the alter-ego of both Irrsigler and Reger, their willing mouthpiece. Atzabacher quoted them accurately and perfectly like a journalist. Did Atzbacher serve as the alter-ego of Bernhard too? This supposition was a trap for the reader. Whatever the case, the novelist and his characters were not self-styled aesthetes. They are stylists. Therein lay their authority and believability. It didn't matter whether the reader agreed with his (with Reger's) literary taste or not, with whether Stifter was a dumbass quack or not. What matters was the conviction with which he banged his literary gavel, his emphatic judgement, his didacticism and mad belaboring.

Old Masters was the last published volume of his so-called Trilogy of the Arts (1983-1985), an otherwise arbitrary grouping of successively published books that include The Loser and Woodcutters (or Cutting Timber). In this concluding volume, he at least arrived at the unity of the arts, at a hard-won consilience. And this brought him happiness.

I am a critical artist, he said, I have been a critical artist all my life. Even in childhood I was a critical artist, he said, the circumstances of my childhood made me a critical artist in an entirely natural way. I certainly regard myself as an artist, that is as a critical artist, and as a critical artist I am of course also creative, that is obvious, hence a performing and creative critical artist, he said. What is more, a creative and performing critical artist of The Times, he said. I certainly regard my brief reports for The Times as works of art, and I think that as the author of these works of art I am always in one person and simultaneously a painter and a musician and a writer. That is my greatest delight: to know that as the author of these works of art for The Times I am a painter and a musician and a writer in one, that is my greatest delight. I am not therefore, as the painters are, only a painter, and I am not, as the musicians are, only a musician, and I am not, as the writers are, only a writer, you must understand that I am a painter and a musician and a writer all in one. That is what I perceive to be the greatest happiness, he said, to be an artist in all the arts and yet reside in one of them. It is possible, he said, that the critical artist is the one who practises his own art in all the arts and is aware of it, utterly and totally aware of it. This awareness makes me happy. To that extent I have been happy for over thirty years, he said, even though by nature I am an unhappy person.

So much remains to be said about this relentless comedy, its protagonists and writer, a critical artist of "the times" who panned from one topic to the next. Reger was an extension of Bernhard for they were in sync temperamentally. Bernhard in his collected memoirs Gathering Evidence was as vocal and ceaseless and unforgiving and invigorating as Reger in Old Masters. Reger abhorred the small-minded and the provincial, the "twaddle" of authority (art historians), the "universal anti-intellectual meanness" in Austria, the brutal and corrupt and Catholic Austrian education system, the politics of (compromised) art.

The "old masters" had to be questioned, were not to be easily trusted. They represented a kind of stale idea and "twaddle" that must be interrogated time and again. The critic must not be beholden to old masters.

The old masters, as they have now been called for centuries, only stand up to superficial viewing; if we view them thoroughly they gradually become diminished, and when we have studied them really and truly, and that means as thoroughly as possible for as long as possible, they dissolve, they crumble for us, leaving only a flat taste, in fact most of the time a very bad taste, in our mouths. The greatest and most significant work of art ultimately weighs heavily on our heads, as a huge lump of baseness and lies, rather as an excessively large lump of meat might weigh on our stomachs. We are fascinated by a work of art and ultimately it is ridiculous.

If an artwork survived the scrutiny of truly discerning art critics, then it was safe for now. The artist, wherever in the afterlife, could heave a sigh of relief. The true works of art will withstand re-readings and re-viewings. But no work does, as all great works are fallible. Some texts fall out of taste and fall out of touch to the contemporary art world.

In the disillusionment we experience upon discovering that the greatness of the one we have venerated and loved is no greatness at all and never was such greatness, but only an imagined greatness and is in fact pettiness, and indeed baseness, we experience the merciless pangs of the deceived. We quite simply pay the price, Reger said, for having lent ourselves to blindly accepting an object, moreover for years and decades and possibly for a lifetime, and even to venerating and loving it, without time and again putting it to the test. If only, let us say, thirty or even twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, I had put Stifter to the test I should have saved myself this late disappointment. Altogether we should never say this or that person is the thing, and will then remain the thing for all time, we should again and again put all artists to the test, because we keep developing our art scholarship and our artistic taste, that is unquestionable.

There lay the pragmatism of Bernhard's critical faculties. He recognized the value of ongoing criticism in deciphering the present and future value of art. There was a dynamic stock market of art appreciation. Works depreciate according to how they were defended and how they (helplessly) respond to the changing values and judgements of 2015 or say, 2045 or 2035 or 2030—30 or 20 or 15 years from now.

I'm only a third of the way through this novel and I can't help but write my own twaddle on it. Every third sentence of Old Masters is excruciatingly funny, every fourth is darkly refreshing, and every fifth leads to a trapdoor.

An indication of the cause

W. G. Sebald mutes Thomas Bernhard's suicidal clamour, writes James Wood in The Guardian. Indeed, in contrast to Bernhard's, Sebald's were tempered rants, but rants no less effective for giving voice to the muted anger, desperation, and madness of exiles. In The Emigrants (trans. Michael Hulse), memory seems the only stable nationality of its eponymous characters and its narrator. The narrator particularly weaves his story in an anachronistic voice, closely identifying with his subjects who are all uprooted from their homes. Only in the compass of memory can the peripatetic narrator and his subjects seem to find their moorings. Like Dr. Henry Selwyn in the first section of The Emigrants, the narrator of the second section and his subject (his former teacher Paul Bereyter) are both physically and spiritually displaced, exiled not to some nearby place but much farther, "halfway round the world":

In December 1952 my family moved from the village of W to the small town of S, 19 kilometres away. The journey – during which I [the narrator] gazed out of the cab of Alpenvogel's wine-red furniture van at the endless lines of trees along the roadsides, thickly frosted over and appearing before us out of the lightless morning mist – seemed like a voyage halfway round the world, though it will have lasted an hour at the very most.

...

He was in Poland, Belgium, France, the Balkans, Russia and the Mediterranean, and doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear. The seasons and the years came and went. A Walloon autumn was followed by an unending white winter near Berdichev, spring in the Departement Haute-Saône, summer on the coast of Dalmatia or in Romania, and always, as Paul wrote under this photograph [a photograph of a man was included in the text], one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

Paul Bereyter was increasingly losing his qualities because his race (a quarter Jewish or "only three quarters an Aryan") is an issue to some people around him. As he came face to face with the cruelty of these people, he preferred to live in a dream instead, a form of exile but a bearable one in any case. People like Paul Bereyter chose to forget, an act akin to dying.

Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schöferle, who ran a coffee house in S., informed Paul's mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele, and begged to request her, with respect of course, not to take her afternoon coffee at his house anymore.

With respect of course!!! (Sebald chose to be restrained about it. But telling the same story, Bernhard's characters would have gone on for many pages to register their outrage.)

Paul Bereyter's fallback was the memory of his childhood, although it was already darkened by history. The story of Paul's life was filtered through Lucy Landau, Paul's friend and the one who arranged for his burial after he ended his life. So we hear the story of Paul as he tells it to Mme Landau who tells it to the narrator – a familiar Bernhardian device of narrative attribution where the narrator is at one or several removes from his tale.

Paul once described that wonderful emporium to her in detail, said Mme Landau, when he was in hospital in Berne in 1975, his eyes bandaged after an operation for cataracts. He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him. In his childhood, everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium. coming through the small transom windonws let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells ... [emphases added]

And then Paul, through Mme Landau, went on to enumerate the various smells and the magical contents and the proprietor (Paul's father) and staff of the emporium. The inventory of memory was so precise and detailed it could bring out the murky quality of light as it struck the surface of the emporium. Common objects were recalled with "the greatest clarity". The novelist was here a kind of historian (or proprietor) of memory, the emporium being a representative image of object collection which Sebald used in other forms: like the Antwerp Nocturama and Antikos Bazar in Austerlitz.

Near the end of his life Paul, like Dr. Selwyn, is ready to come to terms with history, to make "endless notes" about it. What eats him so much, more than the systematic abuse the Jews suffered in Gunzenhausen, on Palm Sunday 1934, is the involvement of children in that notorious event.

For this reason, Mme Landau explained, Paul for a long time had only a partial grasp of what had happened in S in 1935 and 1936, and did not care to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. It was only in the last decade of his life, which he largely spent in Yverdon, that reconstructing those events became important to him, indeed vital, said Mme Landau. Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Guzenhausenm ... but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks' supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

I would bet that there really exists such newspaper article. Real news items have a way of finding themselves in Sebald's prose. In The Rings of Saturn, the writer appropriated in the text an article in The Independent about the Balkan war crimes. These articles are part of the "endless notes" and documentary materials that strengthen the historical basis of the story. They are also part of the evidence that Sebald's characters collect in order to make sense of the violent era they lived in. The evidence confirms Paul's suspicion of the capacity of humans for cruelty and violence. Suicide – death, annihilation of memories, termination of possibilities – appears on the horizon as a possible response to "the logic of the whole wretched sequence of events".

He read and read – Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so. He copied out passages into notebooks [two facing photographs of cursive writing accompany this quoted passage] which give a good idea of how much the lives of these particular authors interested him. Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said Mme Landau, handing me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belong to the exiles and not to the people of S. [emphasis added]

"Gathering evidence" is of course the title of Bernhard's five-part childhood memoirs which appeared individually in German from 1975 to 1982 and in English as a collected volume in 1985. The first volume ("An Indication of the Cause") appeared as the second part of Gathering Evidence (trans. David McLintock) and contained this epigraph:
 

Two thousand people every year attempt to put an end to their lives in the

province of Salzburg. A tenth of these suicide attempts are successful. This

means that in Austria, which together with Hungary and Sweden has the

highest suicide rate in the world, Salzburg holds the national record.

SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN, 6 May 1975

Obsession with suicides and the suicidals characterizes the novels of Bernhard. His treatment of the subject, however, is not deadly serious. He can be mordantly funny about it. Whereas Sebald's humor is rare and dry and his treatment of suicide quite proper, Bernhard's is poker-faced hysterical and radical. An excerpt from Gathering Evidence:

Many boys actually did commit suicide at the boarding house in the Schrannengasse, though, curiously enough, none of them did so in the shoe closet, which would have been the ideal place: they all threw themselves out of windows in the dormitory or the lavatories or hanged themselves from the showers in the washroom. They were able to summon up the necessary courage, but he never had the strength, the decisiveness, or firmness of character required for suicide. During the short time he spent there during the Nazi period—between his arrival in autumn 1943 and his departure in autumn 1944—four pupils at the boarding house actually killed themselves by jumping out of windows or hanging themselves (how many others must have done so before and since!), and many others living in the city, having set off for school, were driven by unendurable despair to deviate from their usual route and throw themselves down from one of the hills, usually the Mönchsberg, onto the asphalt of the Müllner Hauptstrasse—the suicide street, as I used to call it. I often saw shattered bodies lying in this street, the bodies of schoolchildren and others, though mainly schoolchildren, lumps of flesh wrapped in bright-coloured clothes appropriate to the time of year. Today, thirty years later, I read reports at regular intervals (though more frequently in spring and autumn) about schoolchildren and others who have committed suicide. Every year there are dozens of such reports, though the real number of suicides runs into hundreds, as I have reason to know. It is probably true that in boarding establishments, especially those with exceedingly sadistic régimes and exceedingly bad climatic conditions, like the one in Schrannengasse, the subject which preoccupies the minds of the pupils is suicide—in other words, a completely unscientific subject, not one of the mass of subjects on the syllabus but one with which they are all intensely concerned. Of course the truth is that suicide and the idea of suicide are pre-eminently scientific subjects, though this is a fact which our hypocritical society cannot comprehend. Living with one's fellow pupils has always meant living with the idea of suicide: the idea of suicide comes first, the subjects of the syllabus second. I was by no means the only pupil who was obliged to spend the greater part of his time contemplating suicide. This was forced on me on the one hand by the brutality, ruthlessness, and utter viciousness that surrounded me, on the other by the extreme sensibility and vulnerability that is inherent in all young people. The time of one's life spent in learning and study is above all a time for thinking about suicide—whoever denies this has forgotten everything. The times I walked through the city thinking only of suicide, of blotting out my existence, wondering where and how I should do it, whether alone or in compact with others! There must have been hundreds of times. But these thoughts and speculations, prompted by everything I experienced in the city, led me back time and again to the prison of the boarding house. Every boy privately harboured the thought of suicide; it was the only thought that was both enduring and potent. Some were immediately destroyed by it, others merely broken, broken for the rest of their lives. The idea of suicide and the phenomenon of suicide were continually debated, but always in silence. And again and again we had a real suicide in our midst. I will not mention their names, most of which I have forgotten anyway; but I saw all of them hanging or lying shattered on the ground, the ultimate proof of the terrible suffering they had endured. I know of a number of burials at the Communal Cemetery and Maxglan Cemetery where boys of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, having been done to death by society, were unceremoniously dumped in the ground, not properly buried, for in this strictly Catholic city suicides were naturally not given a proper burial but simply dumped in a hole and covered with earth in utterly depressing circumstances, which shed a most revealing light on humanity. These two cemeteries are full of evidence to prove my recollections correct. I am thankful to say that these recollections are in no way distorted, but here I must confine myself to giving simply an indication of what I remember.

Despite the marked difference in their temperaments, Sebald and Bernhard both gathered evidence of personal griefs to produce layered and resonant images of horrific events. The images of peoples persecuted beyond belief, those who experienced things "more than any heart or eye can bear" – these images pile up and their cumulative value amounts to experiences fully lived and remembered. Reading the prose works of these writers is an attempt to understand the indications of their causes. Reading as a radical act of gathering evidence itself.




Winstonsdad's Thomas Bernhard Reading Week
1-7 July 2013

My Prizes (Thomas Bernhard)

"My Prizes", translated by Carol Brown Janeway, in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard (Vintage International, 2011)



"Now is the time to stand firm, I thought, demonstrate my intransigence, courage, single-mindedness. I'm not going to go and meet them, I thought, just as (in the deepest sense of the word) they didn't meet me." The attitude--pure Thomas Bernhard--was unmistakable. There was pride, hardheadedness, combativeness. The novelist was about to receive the Grillparzer Prize from the podium but he went unrecognized by the prize administrators. No one at the front door received him and his aunt. So they just went in. The guests of honor had arrived. The musicians were in place. Everyone was seated. But he didn't budge from his seat. "Of course the ceremony didn't begin", Bernhard wrote. The ceremony couldn't begin. Bernhard had stood his ground. He had made up his mind. He would only come in front if the President of the Academy of Sciences would personally fetch him from his seat.

That offending and offensive spirit was what characterized the novelist's recounting of the prize ceremonies he attended in My Prizes: An Accounting (2009), a short volume which also appeared alongside his childhood memoirs (Gathering Evidence). If one deigned to give Bernhard a prize, one must give it on Bernhard's own terms. If one would believe him, he was participating in those nonsense ceremonies only for the prize money. But it was obvious that he also felt pride in receiving them, particularly for prizes honoring his early works (like the ones for his early novels Frost and The Lime Works). In these essays he was, as in his works of fiction, honest and frank, if a bit tactless. He was in his usual fighting form.

Herr Bernhard was receiving the prize for his play A Feast for Boris, said Hunger (the play that had been appallingly badly acted a year before by the Burgtheater company in the Academy Theater), and then, as if to embrace me, he opened his arms wide.... He shook my hand and gave me a so-called award certificate of a tastelessness, like every other award certificate I have ever received, that was beyond comparison.

The usual cantankerous Bernhard was also one who deplored the least sight of his country. It would not be the same Bernhard if the reader was not treated to his anti-nationalist rant.

I didn't like the town. It's cold and repulsive and if I hadn't had [Elisabeth] Borchers and my thoughts of the eight thousand marks [the prize money], I would probably have left again after the first hour. How I hate these medium-sized towns with their famous historical buildings by which their inhabitants allow themselves to be perverted their whole lives long. Churches and narrow alleys in which people vegetate, their minds turning more mindless all the time. Salzburg, Augsburg, Regensburg, Würzburg, I hate them all, because mindlessness has been kept warming over in them for hundreds of years.

Interestingly, the handful of short essays and speeches here would make for a good entry point to the novelist. There were incidents told here that would be exploited further in his fiction. The incident of his buying a decrepit house, for example, was also recounted in Yes. The infamous awarding ceremony in Wittgenstein's Nephew was also told in compact form here.

When Bernhard sat in a jury to award the Bremen Literature Prize (having won the previous one), he had made up his mind to vote for Canetti, only to be overruled by the other jurors.

I wanted to give Canetti the prize for Auto-da-Fé, the brilliant work of his youth which had been reissued a year before this jury met. Several times I said the word Canetti and each time the faces around the long table grimaced in a self-pitying sort of way. Many of the people at the table didn't even know who Canetti was, but among the few who did know about Canetti was one who suddenly said, after I had said Canetti again, but he's also a Jew. Then there was some murmuring, and Canetti landed under the table. I can still hear this phrase but he's also a Jew although I can't remember who at the table said it. But even today I often hear the phrase, it came from some really sinister quarter.

This display of anti-Semitism was unacceptable to Bernhard. What further inflamed him was the manner of the selection of the eventual winner (Hildesheimer). It was just as thoughtless and crude. Hildesheimer was chosen as the compromise winner if only because time was running out and "the smell of evening roast was already seeping through the double doors".

Who Hildesheimer really was, not one of them seemed to know.... The gentlemen stood up and went out into the dining room. The Jew Hildesheimer had won the prize. For me that was the point of the prize. I've never been able to keep quiet about it.

Bernhard couldn't take seriously any prize that was showered on him because the same standard that selected Hildesheimer for a winner could have been used to select him as a winner in the past and could at any time be used to select future winners. That was the pointless point of the prize for him.

But no prizes are an honor, I then said, the honor is perverse, there is no honor in the world. People talk about honor and it's all a dirty trick, just like all talk about any honor, I said. The state showers its working citizens with honors and showers them in reality with perversities and dirty tricks, I said.

But the height of Bernhard's adventure with prizes was his conferment of the Austrian State Prize for Literature, where the Minister walked out on him while he was still in the middle of his acceptance speech, not before hurling some curses his way. Reading the text of the winner's speech one would have an idea why the Minister walked out, and all his people after him:

Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.

Thomas Bernhard won the prestigious state prize and while delivering his speech he was shunned. Those statesmen must have lacked for a sense of humor.



A bibliography of Bernhard's writings can be found here.

The German Literature Month II is hosted by Caroline and Lizzy.