My Prizes: An Accounting

by Thomas Bernhard

  The Anton Wildgans Prize*

  Anton Wildgans, like Weinhaber, is a Hölderlin of the Vienna suburbs who fits the soul of the people to a T. The prize that is named for him is funded by an industrial association that has its headquarters on the Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna in a magnificent palace of the later nineteenth century. A week before I was to receive the Austrian State Prize, the president of the industrial association, Mayer-Gunthof, long since dead, informed me that the relevant jury had decided to give me this year’s prize, which is to say the prize for 1976. The president ended his letter with the customary formula that he was extremely pleased to be able to share this news with me. At the given moment, I receive the invitation to the ceremony. The prize is endowed with twenty-five thousand schillings. I didn’t give any thought to Wildgans, for I estimated him lower than my writer friends on the jury who, for whatever absurd reason, had hit upon the idea of awarding me the Wildgans Prize for 1976. In Austrian acting schools, it’s customary for the students to have a constant diet of Wildgans and above all they’re already learning a passage from Armut for the entrance exam and they spend their waking minutes reciting Wildgans poems and when it’s a question of holding some highly official state occasion, be it in the Burgtheater or in the so-called Josefstadt or even in some ministry, someone is sure to reach for something by Wildgans. The dilettante’s conception of Austrian poetry finds its ideal in Wildgans, as in Weinhaber, and practices it wherever there is a ceremony to be held, even today. What people admire in Wildgans is not only what they think of as his exceptionally sincere poetic art but, more importantly, the fact that he was once the director of the Burgtheater. What I myself always admired about Wildgans was his trombone-playing son, who was a musician of absolute genius and was among the most promising composers of his generation. But I don’t want to talk about Wildgans here, I want to talk about the prize that bears his name. A few days before the ceremony for the State Prize took place in the Ministry on the Minoritenplatz, the invitation reached me for the prize-giving in the Industrial Association, on a grandiose piece of letterhead printed by the famous firm of Huber & Lerner on the Kohlmarkt, and on which it was announced that Minister Piffl-Perčevič would be the special guest of honor. If, I thought, I want new storm windows to replace the old ones on my house which are almost totally rotted, I have to accept the prize, and so I had decided to take the Wildgans Prize and take myself off to the Löwenhöle Salon on the Schwarzenbergplatz. I mostly thought that one should take money when it’s offered and no one should waste time fussing around over the how and the where, all these reflections are nothing but total hypocrisy and so I ordered the storm windows from my local carpenter, the savings on heating costs will be considerable, I thought. No sensible person says no to twenty-five thousand schillings out of a clear-blue sky, whoever offers money has money and it should be taken from him, I thought. And the Industrial Association should be ashamed of funding a prize for literature with a mere twenty-five-thousand-schilling award, when they could fund it with five million schillings right there without even noticing it, but from their perspective, I thought, they’re valuing literature and literary figures quite accurately and I even was surprised at their estimate of literature and the literary figures who created it. I would have taken twenty-five thousand schillings from anyone, even the first person I met on the street. No one reproaches a beggar on the street for taking money from people without asking where they got the money they’re giving him. And it would have been utterly absurd to ask the Industrial Association, of all bodies, to actually have thoughts about their Yes or No, it would have been laughable. When I add the Industrial Association’s twenty-five thousand to the twenty-five thousand for the State Prize—both shamelessly low amounts for such purposes, I thought, the state should be as embarrassed as the Industrial Association, for they award literary prizes in amounts that would be a poor monthly salary for a middle-ranking municipal employee—that makes fifty thousand and with that I really could do something. The state awards a prize that’s no more than a shoddy pay packet and the Industrial Association does the same and both of them thus reveal themselves to the world, which totally fails to notice how vulgar and perverse this is. The Industrial Association with its millions or rather billions uses the giving of a shoddy prize sum of twenty-five thousand schillings to elevate itself to the lofty status of a truly exceptional Maecenas of Art and Culture and is even praised for this in every newspaper, instead of being denounced for their meanness with no regard for the consequences. But my intention wasn’t to denounce, merely to report. The Wildgans Prize was to be awarded a week after the State Prize. As per the invitation. But after, as I have reported, the State Prize ceremony exploded and the Minister slammed the door to the Audience Chamber in his Ministry with a huge bang and stormed out, the Industrial Association on the Schwarzenbergplatz suddenly lost their guest of honor for their planned Wildgans Prize award ceremony, for the Minister in his role as guest of honor had abruptly informed the Industrial Association that he did not wish to be the guest of honor at a ceremony whose central focus would be a certain Herr Bernhard, he declined and the Industrial Association was left standing. But because the Industrial Association no longer had their chief attraction, namely the Minister, at their disposal, they no longer wanted the writer Bernhard, with whom they had merely tried hypocritically to set themselves up as a Maecenas on a national scale. And what did the Industrial Association do? They canceled the entire ceremony and re-sent the same invitation cards they had had printed by Huber & Lerner on the Kohlmarkt and sent out two weeks before, not as invitations now but as disinvitations. The celebration they had announced two weeks before would not take place and was canceled, it said on what I called the disinvitation cards, still in the same Hispano-Hapsburgian fashion of court announcements from Huber & Lerner, all in black and gold. I was sent this disinvitation minus any further communication about the whys and wherefores, just like the other invitees, and I was sent the prize certificate, also minus comment, in a shabby tube for printed matter that came by regular mail. Luckily they had also sent me, without comment, the twenty-five thousand schillings, a sum which in my view was completely inadequate for this whole tawdry outrage.

  Shortly afterward I met Gerhard Fritsch, a member of the jury and my friend until then, in the Museum Café at the very table where Robert Musil used to sit, and asked him if after this disgusting business with the Industrial Association he was going to protest their behavior and step down from the jury and resign his seat. But Fritsch had no intention either of protesting or of stepping down from the jury. He had three wives and a whole bunch of children with these wives to take care of, he said, and could not indulge himself in any such protest even if it was self-evident to me, or any such self-evident resignation (self-evident to me, that is) from the Wildgans Prize jury. As a father of many children and provider for three female money-pits he felt really sorry for me and asked me to show him consideration in a tone that was repellent. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Not long after this conversation Fritsch hanged himself from the hook on his apartment door, his life, which he’d bungled with no help from anybody, had closed over his head and extinguished him.

  * Anton Wildgans (1881–1932), poet and playwright, author of dramas of earnest social criticism, became the director of the Burgtheater in 1930. A vocal defender of Austria’s independence against the National Socialists’ plan to annex Austria to Germany.

  The Franz Theodor Csokor Prize

  Franz Theodor Csokor was a philosopher and dramatist and the author of a book titled As a Civilian in the War in the Balkans, which I had discovered in my grandfather’s library, and he was for many years the president of the P.E.N. club and a friend of my grandfather’s whom he deeply honored, and for many years he stayed in the tavern on the Wallersee that belonged to relatives of mine and in which I ran around when I was three and four and five and six and even when I was seven and eight, without having the faintest idea w
ho the two gentlemen, Franz Theodor Csokor and Ödön von Horváth, were who were staying below me in the large rooms embellished with their Empire and Biedermeier furniture and a whole series of valuable late-eighteenth-century pieces and magnificent stucco work and their view onto the woods. Csokor and Horváth, the two friends who wrote the majority of their plays and novels in my relatives’ tavern, supposedly played with me on the wooden floors downstairs in the lower taproom and took me on walks to the lake, but I myself can no longer recall this. My grandfather often took walks with Csokor and Horváth, as I know. In my relatives’ tavern was a large room on the second floor where plays were put on all year round and perhaps this was the right atmosphere for the two playwriting friends, I still remember the mountains of brilliantly colored theatrical costumes under the roof and also a piece that was put on in the room in which a naked man tied to a post was whipped, for what reason I don’t know, but I can still see the scene quite clearly, it made a horrible impression on me, it was a political drama. Maybe Csokor and Horváth were inspired by this stage, it’s probable. I only met Csokor one time later on, in Salzburg, what the occasion was I no longer recall, but I do remember that he sat with the novelist George Saiko and me on the terrace of the restaurant in the fortress and talked uninterruptedly about my grandfather, all things that had gone on that were unknown to me. He loved my grandfather, for the way he talked about my grandfather is the way one only talks about someone one loves. Because I myself loved my grandfather like no one else on earth, I was happy to listen. For Saiko, a thoroughly self-important and egocentric type, and then a famous man, these descriptions of Csokor’s were almost unendurable, sometimes he tried to interrupt Csokor, but Csokor wouldn’t allow himself to be interrupted. This man, said Csokor, was once the Director of the Albertina in Vienna, and this information impressed me enormously. After the end of the meal Csokor, who was already an old gentleman at that time was tired but Saiko wasn’t tired and said goodbye to Csokor and said to me that as I was young and therefore naturally not yet tired, I should show the city of Salzburg to him, Herr Saiko, who wasn’t tired either. I had no idea at that moment what catastrophe was ahead of me. Csokor had barely taken his leave before Saiko, who had written the novel The Man in the Reeds, started to explain to me what a novel is. So we walked through the city in the burning heat and Herr Saiko told me nonstop what a novel is. I led him from one little street to the next, from one church to the next, but all he talked about was the novel, he stuffed me full of his theories about the novel, completely obliviously, he had absolutely no idea that his incessant articulation of his theories was already giving me a headache and I hated literary theories more than anything in my life, but most of all I hated so-called theories about the novel, particularly when promulgated by fanatical theorists like Saiko, who started by extinguishing all feeling for the material in the listener by talking at full volume. Herr Saiko talked and talked and talked for four hours about what a novel is and never stopped citing major or minor novelists and sometimes he said he’d misspoken, it wasn’t Joyce who’d said this or that, it was Thomas Mann, not Henry James but Kipling. My admiration that the man had once been the Director of the Albertina shriveled to the barest minimum over the course of this four-hour lecture, yes I suddenly despised this speechifier, I hated him and I kept thinking the whole time how I could get rid of him. But it was five hours, as I remember, before Saiko, having worn himself out, suddenly realized that he had more or less annihilated me with his lecture and said goodbye. I was too tired to catch my breath. I traveled to Venice overnight, as I recall, I woke up there to a beautiful morning and ran to St. Mark’s Square. But who suddenly spread his arms wide when he saw me coming, Herr Saiko! Naturally I wasn’t shocked by this absurdity, but willed myself to accompany Saiko to a restaurant near the Bridge of Sighs to eat cheese and olives and drink red wine. Herr Saiko had now stopped his perorations and was a pure pleasure-lover. He was going to Ancona that evening with his wife, he said, and pointed to a white ship in the background. But I didn’t want to talk about Herr Saiko but about Franz Theodor Csokor whom everyone who knew him had to love. After I returned from Venice I found a letter from Csokor in which he informed me that the P.E.N. club had just elected me a member! Unanimously! By ballot! Now I had a real mess. As with every other association in the world, I had no desire, naturally, to be a member of the P.E.N. club either. How to say this to the lovable old gentleman who wrote the Austrian national play 3 November 1918 without wounding him? I had nothing against the P.E.N. club fundamentally, even today I don’t really know what it is, but on no account did I wish to be a member, I had always hated associations and societies, and of course literary associations most of all. This is the reason I only recently resigned from the so-called Darmstadt Academy which I’d never signed up for and thirty years ago I also resigned from the Socialist Party, which I had actually signed up for not long before, I didn’t and don’t like parties and societies. So I sat down and wrote Csokor that I was conscious of the enormous honor of being elected to the P.E.N. club by ballot, as he’d told me, but that I couldn’t overturn my principle of never becoming a member of another association and it was because of this very principle that I couldn’t even be a member of an association of which he, Csokor, was president. I felt dreadful after mailing the letter. I did not receive an answer. Eventually Csokor died, and then so did Herr Saiko, after he’d received the Big Austrian Prize for Literature four or five weeks before his death and had explained to me (three days before his death) on a streetcar ride from Döbling to the First District that when buying shoes you should never buy them before four in the afternoon because it’s only around four in the afternoon that the foot takes on the correct and proper consistency for shoe-buying. Whenever I’m reminded of Saiko, who, as I mentioned, was the author of The Man in the Reeds, the first thing I think of is his lecture about never buying shoes before four in the afternoon and I have retained something of that lecture even today, and his four-hour lecture on what a novel is comes in second. But I have a real affection for both of these dead men today, whether they wrote the most incredible masterpieces of Austrian literature or not I come back to them, because my encounter with them is intimately connected with the awarding of the Franz Theodor Csokor Prize. When I won the prize which is dedicated to Csokor’s memory, the people who gave me the prize assumed that of course I was a member of the P.E.N. club. When I said no, of course I wasn’t a member of the P.E.N. club and told them my P.E.N. club story, they were very disappointed, for maybe they would never have given it to me as a nonmember. When I received the prize, in the P.E.N. club palace in the First District near the Minoritenkirche, presented by Piero Rismondo, the only one of the critics in Vienna who had time for my plays, I was in the process of being exposed to a particularly savage wave of personal attacks in the Austrian newspapers. Why, I don’t know. At any rate, it was definitely thumbs down. So the award gave me a real boost. Herr Rismondo, that subtle, cultivated man from Trieste, could not know that his words of approval lifted up a man who had been laid flat, that his prize speech was received greatly like music to the ears of someone who’d almost been broken. It was at this time that my Shooting Party and The President and Peter Handke’s A Leap in the Dark were being produced and this, it is thought, caused a deputation of the so-called Cultural Senate of the state, led by their president, the writer Rudolf Henz, to the Minister of Culture in his Ministry, in the form of a resolution demanding that the Minister should kindly intervene with the directors of the Burgtheater to ensure that Bernhard and Handke would no longer be produced, Bernhard and Handke being, as one could read daily in the Vienna papers, bad writers whereas he, Henz, and his fellows in the Cultural Senate were good writers. The scribblers who were all suckling on the bosom of the state were full of themselves! Every newspaper reported this hair-raising event without a single critical comment. This is only one example of the literary mood that prevailed in the country back then against me and Handke. Not for the f
irst time, I wondered around then whether prizes should be accepted or not. After the Julius Campe Prize, the only one I accepted with a sort of leap of joy, I had a constant empty feeling in my stomach whenever there was a question of accepting a prize, and my mind balked every time. But I remained too weak in all the years that prizes came my way to say no. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character. I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money. Today I can no longer do it. Until you’re forty, I think, but after that? That I didn’t accept the prize money of eighteen thousand schillings attached to the Franz Theodor Csokor Prize, but had it donated to the care of prisoners in Stein,* was also no way out. Even actions like this, that have a so-called social aspect, are not free of vanity, self-prettying, and hypocrisy. The question simply no longer presents itself, the only answer is to decline all further honors.