The Loser

by Thomas Bernhard

  Bernhard’s first literary attempts in the 1950s and early 1960s were in lyric poetry, the same genre his grandfather had practiced. Morbid, almost hallucinatory verse modeled after Rilke and Trakl, it lacked the humor and dramatic brilliance of his later work and met with scant critical success; Bernhard himself later rejected it. His literary breakthrough came with the novel Frost (1963), in which his characteristic prose style—a relentless inner monologue unbroken by any paragraph markings, objective description, or external narrative events—is already fully developed. Bernhard never wavered from this monologistic form and even extended it into the theater, using it in the course of the next twenty-six years for an oeuvre that, although not without its weak moments, has few contemporary equals in quality or size: more than twenty novels or collections of stories, an equal number of plays, a five-volume autobiography, and two full-length scripts for movies based on his stories. For this work Bernhard received all the major Austrian and German awards, although he characteristically used these occasions to lash out at Austrian “philistinism” and “art hatred.” His acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 proved so offensive that it drove the Minister of Culture and a good part of the audience from the room.

  The Loser was published in Germany in 1983 and comes at the end of a seven-year period in which Bernhard wrote the five volumes of his autobiography. This sustained examination of the self proved crucial. Whereas the earlier prose works had focused on private stories of madness and human isolation—an unknown painter who destroys his work, a country doctor treating incurably ill patients, an insane count lying alone in his villa—those written after the autobiography project these same scenarios onto the public biographies of people like Wittgenstein, Mendelssohn, or, as in the present case, Glenn Gould. But in each case the public figure serves as a foil for Bernhard himself. Indeed, the novels written after this point—Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Woodcutters, Old Masters, and The Loser—all walk a very thin line between fact and fiction, borrowing so heavily from the details of Bernhard’s real life that he was more than once sued for libel. These later texts are all part of what might be termed Bernhard’s imaginary autobiography—his own life story rewritten according to the lives of his artistic and philosophical doubles.

  Thus Glenn Gould appears in The Loser, at once beguilingly familiar—the “real Glenn Gould,” who gave up public concerts at an early age to concentrate on his recordings—and an artificial literary construct that resembles Bernhard and all his fictional alter egos. There is no evidence that Bernhard ever met Gould, and the two certainly didn’t study together in Salzburg with Horowitz, as the novel claims. Yet there is a detail in Gould’s biography that may well have tickled Bernhard’s imagination into using him as a fictional doppelgänger. During a European tour in 1958, Gould gave a concert in Salzburg, which Bernhard, given his own music studies there, may well have attended. In any case, years later Gould recalled in one of his self-interviews that the drafty Festspielhaus had brought on a bout of tracheitis that forced him to cancel all concerts, withdraw for a month in the Alps, and lead “the most idyllic and isolated existence.” Gould the journalist speaks to Gould the musician thus:

  Since you’re obviously a man addicted to symbols … it would seem to me that the Festspielhaus—the Felsenreitschule—with its Kafka-like setting at the base of a cliff, with the memory of equestrian mobility haunting its past, and located, moreover, in the birthplace of a composer whose works you have frequently criticized … is a place to which a man like yourself, a man in search of martyrdom, should return.

  Here perhaps is the original kernel for Bernhard’s novel: the “Kafka-like setting” of the Festspielhaus, Gould’s respiratory illness and ascetic isolation in the Alps, a “return” to Salzburg, where Bernhard had also studied music so many years ago.…

  True to his habit, however, Bernhard traffics freely with the details of Gould’s biography. The very first page of the novel puts his death at age fifty-one rather than the actual fifty. The Canadian pianist is given a lung disease that he never suffered from; in the novel it becomes his “second art.” Gould is said to have cut off relations with his family and withdrawn to a house in the woods near New York. In reality, after giving up concert life Gould returned to live with his parents in Toronto; his “cage in the woods” was the family cottage on Lake Simcoe. Bernhard’s Gould is completely absorbed by music and, unlike Wertheimer or the narrator, never engages in writing. The real Gould wrote constantly, and according to his official biographer, Otto Friedrich, left behind “sheaves of manuscripts” and an assortment of lined notepads containing “ideas, letters, drafts of interviews, revisions of articles, stock-market holdings, medical symptoms, his own temperature,” and other nonmusical data. Finally, Gould suffered a stroke while sleeping and died in a hospital a few days later. Bernhard uses poetic license to have his Gould die of a stroke at the piano while playing the Goldberg Variations.

  Why these distortions? In part Bernhard adapts Gould’s actual biography to make it fit his own. Bernhard, not the Canadian virtuoso, turned fifty-one the year Gould died; he had the lung disease that, ever since he began writing at the sanatorium in Grafenhof, became his “second art” of fashioning unending sentences; he broke with his family and moved to an isolated house in the country. But Bernhard also distorts the facts of Gould’s life to make him into a monolithic, Zarathustrian Übermensch of artistic will and power. Gould represented not only a pinnacle of musical virtuosity but, more important, an uncompromising artistic personality who refused to sacrifice his original talent to the demands of critics or public. It is not just Gould’s playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It didn’t matter that this example was partly a myth, or that the actual Gould quite cannily orchestrated his public image and record sales. For Bernhard didn’t need Glenn Gould, he needed the “idea of Glenn Gould”— the “thought vehicle” with which he could spin out his own literary variation of Gould playing Bach.

  The narrator in The Loser, who is never identified by name, also resembles Bernhard in several key respects. The brief account he gives of his academic itinerary near the end of the novel corresponds exactly to the novelist’s own study in Vienna and Salzburg, the only difference being that the narrator has a house in Desselbrunn rather than the nearby Ohlsdorf, where Bernhard actually resided. (Incidentally, all the place names in the novel are real and are taken from the region of Upper Austria that Bernhard knew since childhood.) The narrator also admits to a “subjective,” “unjust” tendency in describing his friend Wertheimer which is undoubtedly part of Bernhard’s own troubled conscience: “I would have again mentioned things that were better left unmentioned, things concerning Wertheimer, and with all the injustice and exaggeration that have become my fate, in a word with the subjectivity I myself have always detested but from which I have never been immune.”

  But just as Bernhard projects positive elements of his own artistic identity into the portrait of Gould, so he deliberately caricatures himself in that of the narrator, who, like “the loser,” is a prisoner of Gould’s musical example, abandons his career, and spends his life writing and rewriting his essay About Glenn Gould. Unlike Bernhard, already the author of some forty published novels and plays, the narrator has never published any of his work, still has no idea what philosophy is despite having devoted the better part of his life to it, and, now that his two closest friends are dead, seems headed for an early grave. “Now I’m alone,” he thinks, “since, to tell the truth, I only had two people in my life who gave it any meaning: Glenn and Wertheimer. Now Glenn and Wertheimer are dead and I have to come to terms with this fact.”

  Bernhard thus operates according to a logic of inventive schizophrenia, splitting and doubling himself into a series of alter egos that are locked in a life-and-death struggle. The external narrative is in fact a metaphysical drama of the divided self. But there is also a third doppelgänger, Werth
eimer, “the loser.” Though not directly modeled after any actual person, the narrator’s friend bears traits of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a figure who implicitly and explicitly informs a good deal of Bernhard’s writing since Correction. Like the philosopher, Wertheimer comes from a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, has a close but conflictual relationship with his sister, and writes fragmentary “notes” that in the novel are called Zettel—the title Wittgenstein used to refer to some of his late philosophical aphorisms. But Wertheimer, though undoubtedly brilliant, is an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein: an envious, weak artist who is destroyed by Gould’s superior talent; a sadist who keeps his sister locked up in a quasi-incestuous relationship; and finally a philosophical failure who burns all his notes before committing a spiteful, embarrassing suicide.

  With these three characters in place—all of them drawn subjectively from the lives of Gould, Bernhard, and Wittgenstein—the author of The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But if the form is the same, Bernhard’s genius consists in his ability to vary the main themes and settings for his work, which function as an analogue to his own writing—Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in Correction, the paintings of Goya and Brueghel in Old Masters, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in Woodcutters. Here it is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould, that provides as it were the basso continuo for Bernhard’s own deliberately droning repetitions and variations. With the monologistic, uninterrupted flow of its sentences, the novel conjures up the image of a singer fighting to sustain his breath to the end of an impossibly long, embellished aria. Or, to use the historical reference behind the novel, the image of an insomniac count listening to Goldberg play Bach’s variations over and over again. And everywhere we sense Gould’s dedication to this music, a dedication so fanatical and inhuman that it extinguishes all personal identity: “My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould, he said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous.… To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, he said, I thought, Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach.”

  But the analogy goes further. For it is not just Bach’s music that informs The Loser, but a modernist reading of Baroque music—Bach filtered through the aggressively atonal, mathematical formalism of Schönberg and Webern, whom Bernhard and Gould both admired. This is not the place to detail the considerable similarities between Gould’s musical views and Bernhard’s prose style. Suffice it to say that both artists appreciated the fugal nature of Baroque music, which mixes without dissolving the differences between two, three, and even four distinct voices. Gould’s uncanny ability to sustain the separation between voices in a musical composition bears a striking affinity to Bernhard’s narrative schizophrenia. Not surprisingly, both men were fascinated by the problem of impersonation, quotation, and artistic doublings. They also shared a dislike for individualist art forms (like a Mozart sonata or a Balzac novel) based on progression, climax, and reconciliation. Gould felt that “a sense of discomfort, of unease, could be the sagest of counselors for both artist and audience”; Bernhard enjoyed “shaking people up.” Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. “Art should be given the chance to phase itself out,” Gould maintained in his self-interview, just as the artist himself should have the necessary inner mobility and strength “to opt creatively out of the human situation.” In his acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature, Bernhard offered his public the Baroque wisdom that “everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”

  In the final analysis, what matters is that in the idea of Glenn Gould Bernhard found something he could love and respect unconditionally, a touchstone with which to judge the world around him. “Those are terrible people,” the Jewish professor says to his housekeeper in Heldenplatz, “who don’t like Glenn Gould.… I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.… I also demand that my wife love Glenn Gould, in that respect I’m a fanatic.” To be sure, Gould is the hammer which Bernhard used to unsettle Austria’s complacent image of itself as the most musical nation of Europe, the birthplace of Mozart and Schubert. And the “fanatics” who love Gould as much as the narrator does in The Loser are also ironic figures, emblems of the absurd limits to which people drive themselves in the name of art. But in Gould Bernhard found a balancing force to the vitriolic satire he couldn’t help directing at his fellow Austrians, “with the subjectivity I personally have always detested but from which I have never been immune.” This saves The Loser from being merely an exercise in verbal wit, caricature, and (self-) mockery. Here we have Bach’s music, Gould’s artistic dedication, and finally the narrator’s confession of love and friendship for the two people who meant everything to him and now are gone. Neither Bernhard nor his narrator is prone to sentimentality—but beneath all their ironic laughter, that confession can still be heard.

  MARK M. ANDERSON

  Ernst Aichinger at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York generously provided information for the present remarks; may he and his colleagues be thanked here. M.A.

  From

  THOMAS

  BERNHARD

  Frost

  A NOVEL

  Thomas Bernhard’s debut novel, published in German in 1963, and now in English for the first time. Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.

  Available October 2006, in Kardcover from Knopf

  $25.95 • 1-4000-4066-3

  PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM

  BOOKS BY THOMAS BERNHARD

  CONCRETE

  Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his “really marvelous” house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns our to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7757-1

  CORRECTION

  The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together the puzzle of his breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7760-1

  FROST

  Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. A young man has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically—and secretly—observe and report on his mentor’s reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject’s madness.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5

  GARGOYLES

  One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim, mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue
, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7

  THE LIME WORKS

  For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown off his wife’s head with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works itself—Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7758-8

  THE LOSER

  The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould’s incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7754-0

  WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW