My Prizes: An Accounting

by Thomas Bernhard

  The Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen

  After five blank years, when I wrote Frost in Vienna in twelve months (1962), my future was bleaker than it had ever been. I had sent Frost to a friend, who was an editor at the Insel publishing house, and the manuscript was accepted within three days. But even as it was accepted, I realized that my work was incomplete and could not be published with its current defects. In a boardinghouse in Frankfurt which was on one of the busiest streets near the Eschenheimer Tower and was one of the cheapest I could consider, I revised the entire book, and all the sections in Frost that have a title as a heading, I wrote in that boardinghouse. I got up at five in the morning and sat at the little table in the window and when by midday I had written five or eight or even ten pages, I would take them and run to my editor at Insel to go over with her where these pages had to be slotted into the manuscript. The entire book was transformed during those weeks in Frankfurt, I threw away many pages, probably around a hundred, until it seemed to be acceptable and could go into production. When the galleys came, I was on a trip to Warsaw to visit a girlfriend who was studying at the Academy of Art there. I took a room at the coldest time of year in the so-called Dziekanka, a student residence right near the palace headquarters of the regime, ran around for weeks in the beautiful, exciting, eerie city of Warsaw, and read the galleys. At lunchtime I ate in the so-called Writers’ Club and in the evenings with the actors, where the food was even better. I spent one of the happiest times of my life in Warsaw, I had the galleys in the pocket of my coat, my chief interlocutor was Lec the satirist who wrote his famous aphorisms in his wife’s kitchen notebook and often invited me home and sometimes also bought me a coffee on the Nowy wiat. I was happy with my book, which came out in the spring of sixty-three along with a review by Zuckmayer that ran for pages in Die Zeit. But when the general storm of coverage was over, unusually intense and full of controversy, ranging from the most embarrassing effusions to the most vicious attacks, I was suddenly utterly undone, as if I’d fallen into a pit of terrible despair. I thought I would choke on the error of believing that literature was my hope. I didn’t want anything more to do with literature. It hadn’t brought me happiness, it had trampled me down into that stifling, stinking pit from which there is no escape, or so I believed. I cursed literature and my prostituting myself with her, and went to work on building sites and took a job as a truck driver with the Christophorus Company in the Klosterneuburgerstrasse. For months I made beer deliveries for the famous Gösser brewery. In the course of this I not only learned to drive trucks very well but I also got to know the city of Vienna even better than I’d known it before. I lived with my aunt and earned my living as a truck driver. I didn’t want anything to do with literature anymore, I had put everything I had into literature and literature responded by throwing me into the pit. Literature turned my stomach, I hated all publishers and all publishing houses and all books. It seemed to me that in writing Frost I had fallen victim to an enormous fraud. I was happy to let my leather jacket drop onto the driver’s seat and go thundering through the streets in the old Steyrer truck. Now it was clear how good it had been to learn to drive a truck all those years ago in preparation for a job in Africa I had wanted to take back then, but which, as I know now, very fortunately never came to anything. But naturally even the good fortune of being able to work as a driver for the Gösser brewery also came to an end. Suddenly I hated what I was doing and gave it up from one day to the next and buried myself under the covers in my little closet at my aunt’s. She had understood the state I was in, for one day she invited me to go with her to the mountains for a few months. It would do us both good to discard the sheer grisliness and harmfulness of the big city for some weeks, and give ourselves over to nature. Her goal was Sankt Veit in the Salzburg area, the place near the hospital where I had been a patient for years, twenty-five hundred feet up and an absolutely ideal place for us to recuperate. Early one morning we began our mountain journey from the Westbahnhof, my aunt and I, her all-expenses-paid companion. But I have to say that when the train pulled out of the Westbahnhof I was already cursing the countryside and longing to be back in the city of Vienna. The further the train got from Vienna, the sadder I got, I’m making a mistake, I thought, turning my back on Vienna and going to the countryside with my aunt, but I can no longer correct this mistake. I’m not a country person, I’m a city person, I said to myself, and there was no way back. Naturally I’d never found happiness in the country, the people bored me, I really despised them, nature bored me and I despised nature, I was starting to hate people and nature. I had become gloomy and a brooder, who walked through and around the fields in this direction and that, ran through the woods with my head down, and finally refused all food. Thus it was that my secret opposition to life on the land and in the mountains was leading straight to catastrophe, I was still chained to a truly pitiful caricature of myself and my bottomless existential despair, when the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen came. It was not the prize itself that saved me from my emotional, indeed my existential catastrophe, it was the thought that the prize money of ten thousand marks would enable me to get my life under control, give it a radical new direction, make it possible again. The prize was announced, the amount of the prize was known to me already. I had the chance to do the most sensible thing with the money. It had always been my wish to have a house to myself, and even if not a proper house, at least walls around me within which I can do what I want, permit what I want, lock myself in if I want. So I thought, I’ll use the prize money to get these walls and I made contact with a real estate agent who immediately came to see me in Sankt Veit and proposed various properties to me. Naturally all these properties were too expensive, if I had the prize money in hand, it would only be a fraction of the sale price. But why not? I thought and I agreed with the real estate agent to meet in January in Upper Austria where he lived and had his range of properties to hand, mainly old farmhouses, some of them already partly derelict, all in the price range of between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand schillings. But my price was nothing over seventy thousand. Maybe for seventy thousand I’d be able to find the right set of walls I can lock myself up in, I wasn’t thinking about a house when I thought about a property for myself, I thought about walls and I thought about walls in which I could lock myself up. I went to Upper Austria and my aunt came with me and we visited the real estate agent. The man impressed me, I immediately took a liking to him, he was capable and seemed to have no character flaws. We came out into a landscape where the snow lay more than three feet deep and stamped our way to the real estate agent’s house. He put us into his car and explained by way of a piece of paper where the properties to be visited were situated and what route we should take to get from one property to the next. He had listed about eleven or twelve farms on his paper that were ready to be sold. He slammed the car doors and the tour of inspection had begun. Thick fog already hung over the entire landscape and we saw nothing, we didn’t even see the road along which the real estate agent was driving us to the first property. He himself saw nothing ahead of him but fog, but he knew the road and we put ourselves in his hands. My aunt was as curious as I was, we were both silent, I don’t know what was going on inside her, she didn’t know what was going on inside me, the real estate agent didn’t know what was going on inside us both, he didn’t say a single word, came to a sudden stop and indicated that we were to get out. And I actually saw a huge wall in front of me in the fog, built of great blocks of stone. The real estate agent moved a large gate that had been torn off its hinges and we went into a big farmyard. There was also more than three feet of snow in the farmyard, it looked as if the owners of the property had departed in a rush, leaving everything lying or standing where it was, I thought: the owners have met with some great misfortune. The property had been standing empty for a year, said the real estate agent, and went ahead of us. In every room we stepped into, he said this was a parti
cularly beautiful room and he kept repeating the two words exceptional proportions and it didn’t bother him in the slightest that at every moment he was putting a foot through one of the rotted floors and had to rescue himself from the depths of the rot with a well-executed jump. The real estate agent led the way. I followed behind him and my aunt behind me. We went through the rooms as if we were walking along planks that we needed to cross some dull fetid pond, sometimes I looked around for my aunt, who turned out however to be very agile, more agile than me and the real estate agent. There were eleven or twelve rooms to inspect, all of them in totally dilapidated condition and the smell of hundreds if not thousands, I thought, of desiccated ancient mice and rats filled the air. All the floors were rotted through, completely punky and most of the window frames had been torn out by the wind or the weather. Down in the kitchen, where there was a large rusting enameled stove encrusted in dirt, the water had not been turned off and water was running onto the floor and under the floor and the real estate agent said the owners, who’d left the house a year ago, had forgotten to turn off the tap and he went over to the tap and turned it off. He himself, he said, had never inspected the property before this, we were the first he’d shown it to, he was enchanted by the exceptional proportions. My aunt held a handkerchief in front of her mouth to block the stench that pervaded the property, not only the smell of rot, the stalls were full of enormous heaps of manure which the owners had not cleared away. The real estate agent kept saying exceptional proportions and the more often he asserted this, the clearer it became to me that he was right, in the end it wasn’t him saying the property had exceptional proportions, it was me saying it, and saying it at every moment. I kept working myself up to say exceptional proportions at briefer and briefer intervals until finally I was convinced that the entire property really did have exceptional proportions. From one moment to the next, I had been possessed by the entire property and when we were outside the gate again, to drive to the next one and the real estate agent was now hurrying, for we still had ten or twelve properties ahead of us to be inspected, I said that all these properties no longer interested me, I had already found the property for me; it was this one, for it had truly exceptional proportions, they were ideal for me and I wished to conclude the requisite contract with the real estate agent immediately. From the start of our inspection to this statement of mine, no more than fifteen minutes had passed. My aunt was shocked, she said I mustn’t do anything crazy, she found these walls horrible, naturally, and when we were in the car again, driving back to the real estate agent’s house to set up the contract, she kept saying from behind me that I should think the whole thing over carefully, sleep on it, she said. But my decision was unbudgeable. I had found my walls. I proposed to the real estate agent that I make a down payment of seventy thousand schillings at the end of January, i.e., after the prize ceremony in Bremen, and settle the remainder of the balance in the course of the year. All the same this remainder amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand schillings, and if I had absolutely no idea yet where this money would come from, I had absolutely no worries about it. Think it over, sleep on it, my aunt kept saying while the real estate agent was already drawing up the contract. I liked the real estate agent’s manner, the way he wrote, what he said, his surroundings. I myself behaved as if money played no role, it impressed the real estate agent while his wife was making a delicious egg dish for us in the kitchen. Half an hour after I had seen Nathal, that was the name of my walls, for the first time, and not even seen them clearly, for as I’ve already said they were wrapped in fog, and quite apart from the fact that I had seen absolutely nothing of what surrounded the walls, i.e., the landscape, only made conjectures, I signed the so-called preliminary contract. We ate the egg dish and talked for awhile with the real estate agent and left him. He brought us to the train and we went back to the mountains. During the journey, my aunt didn’t miss a single word in expressing her worst premonitions, and I admit I got the willies, now I was suddenly thinking about what had actually just happened, for I had of course got myself into a nightmare. I spent a series of sleepless nights during which I failed naturally to come to grips with what I had really done and what I’d signed and where I would find the so-called balance of one hundred and fifty thousand schillings. But the day of the prize-giving in Bremen will come and then I’ll have the first seventy-thousand-schilling installment and I’m saved, I thought. My aunt refrained from any comment whatsoever. For the first time in our lives together I had failed to listen to her advice. So I traveled to Bremen, which I didn’t know. Hamburg I knew and loved as I do still today, Bremen I loathed from the very first moment, it’s a petit bourgeois, unbelievably sterile city. A room had been reserved for me in a newly built hotel directly opposite the station, I no longer remember its name. I hid in my hotel room so as not to have to see the city of Bremen, waited for morning and the prize-giving. This prize-giving was to take place in Bremen’s old town hall and that is where it did. My biggest problem was that I had been instructed to give a speech to the audience and I was already in Bremen and didn’t yet have the beginnings of an idea for such a speech, which I’d known about for weeks, and even during the night no idea for such a speech came to me and in the morning I still had none. But now it was getting urgent. During breakfast I remembered that one thing about Bremen is Grimm’s “Bremen Town Musicians,” and I made up a concept with the Bremen Town Musicians as the centerpiece. I finished my tea and ran to my room and sat down on my bed and did a quick draft. I made a second draft and a third. Then I had to admit to myself that my idea had been a bad one and I needed to come up with another. But time was short. In the meantime there had already been phone calls and questions about how long my speech would be. It’s not long, I said into the telephone, not long at all, I said, although I still didn’t have even an idea for such a speech. Half an hour before the start of the ceremony in the town hall I sat down on my bed and wrote the sentence “In the cold, clarity increases,” I thought: now I have an acceptable idea for my speech to the audience. With this as the center, some further sentences developed, and within ten or fifteen minutes I had written at least half a page. When they collected me from the hotel to take me to the town hall, I had just finished my speech. In the cold, clarity increases, I thought as several gentlemen were escorting me to the town hall, I had the feeling they were taking me away to a trial. They had positioned their prisoner in the middle and had advanced from hotel to city to town hall. The town hall was already full, most of all it was full of schoolchildren. This town hall in Bremen is also a famous town hall, but this town hall also depressed me just as all other famous town halls have also depressed me. Here too medals sparkled and the mayoral chains of office glinted. Then I was led ceremoniously into the first row and had to sit next to the mayor. A man stepped up to the podium and talked about me. He spoke very emphatically and it was full of praise, as far as I recall, but I didn’t understand it all. What I was seeing the whole time was my walls in Nathal and what I was thinking was how to pay for these walls. May it all be long-drawn-out enough, I thought, for the money finally to be real liquid cash. When my eulogist had finished and the schoolchildren, or so it seemed, clapped the most enthusiastically of all, I was signaled to go up to the podium. On the podium the prize was then presented to me, and I no longer remember what it looked like, I no longer have it, just as I no longer have any of the other prize documents, they have gotten lost over the years. Now I had the document and the check in my hand and I went to the lectern and read out my notes on the clarity that increases in the cold. Just as the audience was beginning to prepare for my speech, it was already over. That was the shortest speech a Bremen prizewinner has ever given, I thought, and after the ceremony this was confirmed to me. So there I stood and had to shake hands with the mayor again for the photographers. Outside in the corridor my old friend the editor suddenly appeared totally unexpectedly, the one who had accepted Frost within three days, and said, knowing himself to be t
otally alone with me, confidentially so to speak: Please lend me five thousand marks, I need them desperately. Yes of course, I said, without thinking through the consequences, and I said as soon as it’s two o’clock and the banks in Bremen are open again, I’ll go to a bank with you and cash the check and give you the five thousand marks. How often he’s lent me money, I thought, again and again and again and it wasn’t long ago that he rescued me out of one of my fatal financial catastrophes. Immediately after the ceremony there was a lunch in a prominent Bremen restaurant, which I left at two o’clock to go with my friend to the bank and cash the check for Frost. Anyhow, I thought, I’m going to Giessen after Bremen to give a reading in a so-called evangelical educational institute and I’ll be paid two thousand marks. That’ll give me seven thousand marks again. This thought immediately made me happy again. The next day I visited another friend in Bremen who lived there in an attic room and with whom I had a terrific conversation about theater over good tea and a view over the pewter-colored river Weser, most of all we talked about Artaud. Right after this conversation I went back to Vienna. And of course I could no longer expect to move into my newly purchased walls in Nathal. How I eventually got control of it and altered and rebuilt it more or less with my own hands and financed it all over the course of the years doesn’t belong here. But the Bremen prize was the impetus for my walls, without it everything would probably have taken a different turn for me and unfolded in another way. In any case I made a second trip to Bremen in connection with the so-called Bremen Literature Prize and I don’t want to conceal what happened to me on this second trip to Bremen. I was a so-called member of the jury to select the next prizewinner and I had gone to Bremen with my mind already made up that I would vote for Canetti who, I believe, had not until that time received a single literary award. For whatever reason, anyone but Canetti was out of the question for me, I considered any other choice to be risible. There was this long table, I believe, in a Bremen restaurant where the jury was meeting, and sitting at it was a whole row of gentlemen who were the so-called voting jurors, among them the famous Senator Harmsen, with whom I had a very warm relationship. I think they had all named their own candidates, none of whom was Canetti, when it came to my turn and I said, Canetti. 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, even if I don’t know who said it. This phrase nipped any further debate over my proposal to award Canetti the prize right in the bud. I preferred to take no further part in the discussions and just sat silently at the table. But time was passing quickly and although an endless series of appalling names had been proposed in the meantime, all of which I could only associate with prattling dilettantism, no prizewinner had surfaced yet. The gentlemen were looking at the clock and the smell of the evening’s roast was already seeping through the double doors. So the table simply had to come to a decision. To my utter amazement one of the gentlemen, again I no longer remember who, regardless of a vote, suddenly pulled a book by Hildesheimer out of the mound of books on the table, and as he was already getting to his feet to leave the lunch, said in a disconcertingly naïve tone: So let’s take Hildesheimer, let’s take Hildesheimer, and Hildesheimer was the one name that had not been uttered in all the hours of discussion. Now suddenly the name Hildesheimer had been uttered and they all shifted in their chairs and were relieved and agreed about Hildesheimer and within a matter of minutes Hildesheimer was voted the new winner of the Bremen prize. Who Hildesheimer really was, not one of them seemed to know. In a moment the news had been passed to the press that after a more-than-two-hour meeting, Hildesheimer was the new prizewinner. 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.