We drove rapidly home by way of Landschach. “Unrewarding cases,” my father said. My sister had already gone to bed. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go for another walk with her and talk with her. It was already eleven o’clock. My father had yet another call to make, on a butcher in Krennhof who had shot himself in the belly with the apparatus used for shooting the animals. He expected to be back before midnight. While he was gone I thought about the utter silence in which we had descended from Hochgobernitz into the gorge and then driven out of the gorge. Tomorrow your father will take you back to Leoben in the early afternoon, I thought. You need not bother to unpack your suitcase. The local constable had been waiting for my father to hear the final word on the dead wife of the innkeeper. Grössl had been arrested, he reported. I did not want to wake my sister. I sat up trying to write a long overdue letter to a friend of my uncle who has a farm near Guttaring in Carinthia. He had invited me there a long time ago. I wanted to write that I would not be coming, could not come. My studies did not allow of any interruption just now, I had written, and then tore up the letter I had begun. In bed I thought: What did the prince say? “Always wanting to change everything has been a constant craving with me, an outrageous desire which leads to the most painful disputes. The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed. With putting everything on a philosophical basis, with making a public display of oneself. The darkness is cold when the head is switched off.” The notebook: “For days,” the prince said, “I have been searching my pockets for my mislaid notebook. This notebook of mine contains some remarkable entries. Underlined! My sickness is underlining important things; there are almost nothing but underlinings in this notebook, and all these underlined sentences begin with the destruction of these sentences.… I have been searching my pockets for days for this notebook, and suddenly I found it downstairs in the kitchen. How has my notebook come to be in the kitchen? I ask myself. For days I have not been in the kitchen and suddenly I find my notebook in the kitchen. A horrible suspicion arises in me. I suspect that my elder sister took the notebook out of my jacket pocket and in the kitchen—I am a person altogether hostile to kitchens—surreptitiously read it through and left it lying there in the kitchen. I go to my elder sister at once and say: The terrible thing is the fact that you left my notebook lying in the kitchen, not that you have absorbed its contents! But I see that my elder sister cannot possibly have left the notebook lying in the kitchen, and go at once to my younger sister. I tell her straight to her face that it is a dastardly thing to read my notebooks, to take them out of my pockets and read them. I am afraid you have read all my notebooks, I say, but this is the first one you have left lying in the kitchen. Until now I have lived in the delusion that none of you is familiar with the contents of my notebooks, that you know nothing at all about what is in these notebooks. I force my younger sister into the office, because it seems monstrous to me that she of all persons has read this notebook. I recall immediately that in the notebook I have constantly made derogatory comments on my two sisters, but especially on the younger one. I have lived in the delusion, I say, that what I have written in my notebooks, written for decades, is completely unknown. And now I find that I am keeping my notebooks in public, I am keeping my notebooks publicly. But then I suddenly perceive that my younger sister does not even have an inkling of the existence of my notebooks, and I at once tell myself, of course such a superficial person as my sister has not the slightest inkling of the existence of my notebooks, of course, and I say: None of you care about anything concerning me! I say: Some day you will make the most frightful discoveries in these notebooks, you will make expeditions into your atrociousness. Just because I keep silent about everything in my daily association with you, I need not keep silent about anything in my notebooks! All my ruthlessness bursts upon you in my notebooks. Upon you, upon your sister, upon my daughters, upon my son, upon everybody! Then, when I am dead, I shall cast a pall over you for a long while through my notebooks, I say, and you will think back on my presence with horror, on your brother and father! In the notebooks, I say, you have actually taken form, horrible form. Well, I say, if you did not leave the notebook lying in the kitchen, who did leave it lying in the kitchen? And I go out of the office and look for my elder daughter. It occurs to me that she alone is capable of taking my notebook out of my pocket and leaving it lying in the kitchen. I go through the whole house looking for my elder daughter. First I go through the lower rooms, then the upper rooms, but I do not find my elder daughter. Probably she is hiding, I think, because she has heard about the fuss over the notebook. I call, I walk in silence, then again calling, alternatively calling and silent, through the entire house. Finally it occurs to me that she might be in the pavilion. I go into the pavilion and find her on the sofa, reading a novel. I say at once: Where is my notebook? Yes, I say, I found my notebook in the kitchen. This outrageous human race, now it has actually laid impious hands on my notebooks, I say. Probably you have been laying impious hands on my notebooks for years, I say. Possibly, I say, you have laid impious hands on all my notebooks. And probably, I say, what you have read into all my notebooks has made you turn against me with horrible cruelty. I hope, I say, that the upshot will be that you get out of Hochgobernitz, move out, move down to join your kind! But suddenly,” the prince said, “I realized that my elder daughter too could in no way be connected with the notebook. Then my younger daughter, I think. But nobody knows where she is. I want to know where she is! I shout. They say she has gone to the city. To the city! I say. I go about the lower rooms thinking that when night falls I shall take all the pictures hanging there down from the walls, all of them. And all the pictures in the upper rooms also, I say. And I will hang others. More frightful ones. Slowly, I calm down,” the prince said, “and then I hear my sisters whispering all at once. I must destroy this whispering, I think, and I go and chase them away. No matter which of you took my notebook from my pocket and left it lying in the kitchen, I say, you must all suffer for it, all together. Partners in crime, I think, the women are partners in crime. I have, I think, very expensive destroyers of my own person here in Hochgobernitz. And while I am ordering them to do a job that has to be done,” the prince said, “a disgusting household job, it occurs to me that I myself left the notebook lying in the kitchen, that, sleepless as always, I went into the kitchen in the middle of the night to drink something refreshing.
“I could not fall asleep, and began writing,” the prince said. “I wrote, A son studies his father and studies only how to destroy his father. And the women have always known how.… As a matter of habit,” the prince said, “I still go to the office, with the punctuality which in the course of my life has so deformed me that I no longer recognize myself. Farming, forestry, I think. Incompetent. I don’t have the strength to go out of the office, to leave the office once and for all, although there is no point in my being in the office. I think: Why am I staying in the office if not for purposes of farming and forestry? This thought stimulates the most sensitive parts of my brain and I take a variety of files from the shelves in order to calm myself. This procedure, my going to the office and not knowing what to do in the office, is now being repeated daily. I no longer have any relationship to the entire contents of the office,” the prince said. “My son,” he said, “will come back from England and destroy Hochgobernitz. The long paper comes to my mind, that draft of his. In London, it seems to me, he has entangled himself in a philosophy from which he cannot emerge other than totally deranged. Hochgobernitz will be possible for him only as a crazy Hochgobernitz. I feel that. Incidentally, my son knows nothing about farming and forestry. What my son feels to be nature is not nature. He will possibly try to sell Hochgobernitz as a whole. But there will be no takers, and so he will break it up. After my death I see Hochgobernitz as stricken with terror. Then my son will come and dissolve the tension in madness. He is my son; everything will be at his mercy. Fatal times will come then, especially for my sisters, but also for my daughters, times of utter h
elplessness. But probably all these creatures deserve ruthlessness more than pity. My son always regards nature as a form of literature; all his letters confirm that. My son despises me, you know, Doctor. There is no truth in his letters. His handwriting changed completely in the course of a single year. I support my son in studies repulsive to me, and he is destroying me. We, my son and I, could never have a conversation with each other. In England he has become accustomed to such short sentences, a way of talking that is painful, killing. I have raised him to be my destroyer, I think. And this man dares to write me in his last letter that I am a dilettante, that I failed to shape my life into an art. But he, as his letter proves, is shaping his life into an art, he writes. Whenever I ought to have drawn him closer to myself, he writes, I have pushed him away of my own accord. But all education is always utterly wrong,” the prince said. “My son’s actions have always been opposed to me. The one and only thing we have in common is our fondness for the newspapers. Oh yes,” the prince said, “would you mind getting me a copy of the Times of September seventh and bringing it the next time you come up …?”
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
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THOMAS BERNHARD
Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.
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.
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