Correction

by Thomas Bernhard

  his amazement every time Roithamer made a remark on musical scholarship and art, and the chances are that Roithamer went to England also to research Purcell’s and Handel’s art of composition, since he’d loved Purcell and Handel and studied them even before he went to England, he had even written a short paper, a so-called comparative study entitled Handel and Purcell, but it is lost, one of many gems Roithamer wrote in his mid-twenties which are lost, probably because he was really unaware of their value and because he was the kind of man who in any case did not appreciate his own written works of art once they were finished, no matter how successfully, and paid no further attention to them, like that essay of his on Anton von Webern which I also remember, which had outlined a quite original theory of music, also lost like the paper on Handel and Purcell mentioned earlier, his studies of Hauer’s and Schönberg’s theories would keep him immured in his turret room in Altensam for weeks at a time, and everyone around him was always amazed at how he had managed to master the art of playing the piano, which had been indispensable to his studies, since the music lessons he and his siblings took in Altensam, from a former professor of the Schottengymnasium in Vienna, the capital’s foremost humanistic school, who had left Vienna because of a serious lung disease and had come to Altensam with the help of a friend of Roithamer’s father, where he also gave lessons in Latin to children and adolescents, his music lessons were nothing beyond the usual, since Roithamer’s parents, and the professor as well, did not attach the greatest importance, in the education of the Roithamer children, to the so-called aesthetic subjects such as music, but rather to mathematics and foreign languages, but Roithamer had always been different, and while his siblings shone in foreign languages, even in the ancient, the so-called dead languages, all of which simply did not interest him, he was the keenest of music students who from the first regarded the indifferent teaching of the Viennese professor, who continued to be sick in Altensam but without infecting the Altensamers with his disease, as basically instruction in the most important, to him, of all the arts, music as a means to making greater strides in the natural sciences which the growing boy had already fastened upon, for even at the age of eleven or twelve Roithamer had instinctively perceived that music and the knowledge of music was a necessary condition for his ability to enter into the natural sciences, and so he had even then seized upon every opportunity to improve his knowledge of music and, with only that basic instruction in musical theory and practice and in piano playing, he had achieved a mastery of his subject all on his own, and had not only retained that mastery all his life but had even managed to expand and intensify it. Listening to music had always meant the same to him as studying music, so listening to music was for him not only a way of raising his spirits but, by the way he combined hearing and studying the music, he became plunged in thought. While others listen to music and, when they hear, they feel, it was possible for Roithamer to hear music and to feel and to think and to study his science. His chief musical interest had been, on the one hand, Purcell and Handel and Mozart and Bruckner, and on the other hand, the newer and newest music such as Hauer, Webern, Schönberg and their successors. The opening bars of the Webern string quartets which he’d hand-copied on the back of a bill, he’d tacked on the wall above his desk in Hoeller’s garret. He loved this opening, it had always meant much to him.

  The books that mattered the most to him don’t take long to list, I knew them from his constantly reiterated remarks in which he established a connection with these books, they were always basically the same: Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch, and, because he thought that he recognized himself in them, the writings of Wittgenstein, a native of the same region as Roithamer and always a keen observer of Roithamer’s regional landscape, they were always just the same few books of philosophy and poetry which, with his name inscribed on the flyleaf, he always carried about with him no matter where he had been staying or working, so few that he had always been able to slip them into his traveling bag and take them along, they always had to be within reach. Here in Hoeller’s garret they had been left, after his death, where he himself had placed them, on the shelf above his desk, so now they belonged there forever, in this place that had been Roithamer’s actual study, his idea- and thought-chamber, where in his lifetime no one but myself and Hoeller had ever been permitted to set foot, Roithamer had made sure, in a secret understanding with Hoeller, that no one but himself ever set foot in this room, and in Roithamer’s absence only Hoeller, not even me, no one except for Hoeller, who had to enter the garret if only to air it out regularly, but under strict orders to change nothing in the garret, to leave everything as Roithamer had seen fit to leave it, and always in the best possible order, everything in Hoeller’s garret had its own fixed place, closely corresponding to Roithamer’s character, his peculiarities, and clearly explicable out of his own special view of the world, Roithamer would instantly have noticed the slightest change in Hoeller’s garret the moment he set foot in it after his return from England, or from South Tyrol, where he had often gone directly from England to visit a close friend, a musicologist who was also, as Roithamer always emphasized, a theoretical mathematician at the University of Trent who, when he was not teaching at Trent, had lived and worked on an isolated family estate, over a thousand meters above sea level, near Rovereto, where for many years he had devoted himself entirely to his work, so Roithamer said, having made himself the object of his extremely interesting investigations, or when Roithamer returned from Carinthia, another occasional refuge of his, because he had a beloved cousin there, the daughter of a Klagenfurt lumber merchant, he liked to spend a day or two with her every two or three years, but most times Roithamer came straight back from England to Hoeller’s garret, it would have been unthinkable to let anything be changed in Hoeller’s garret during Roithamer’s absence, Hoeller had always made absolutely certain that nothing was ever changed in Hoeller’s garret and he insured himself against such changes by simply never letting anyone set foot in Hoeller’s garret in Roithamer’s absence, Roithamer had offered Hoeller a regularly payable rental for the use of his garret, but Hoeller had firmly refused to accept anything of the kind, he considered it an honor that Roithamer could use this garret, otherwise completely unused and used by no one, for his own purposes, it was enough for Hoeller that the garret would be used, lived in, by Roithamer, a man known for many years before he ever moved into Hoeller’s garret to be quite extraordinary, a man of rare worth who was superior to at least all known men and, as Hoeller said, a brilliant phenomenon, it was enough for him, Hoeller, that this extraordinary and invaluable man, Hoeller said, this brilliant man, with regard to whom one could safely assume that he would come to be known even more widely as the extraordinary and rare and brilliant man he was, would be using Hoeller’s vacant garret, which otherwise was likely to decay quickly from lack of use, for his scientific purposes, and besides, he, Hoeller, considered it only natural to put this garret at the disposal of a friend, a childhood friend, a school friend, a friend of his youth, for that friend’s scientific and artistic pursuits which he, Hoeller, did not pretend to understand, but which he certainly admired as the continual manifestations of Roithamer’s extraordinariness; as Roithamer always waved away his friend Hoeller’s expressions of admiration, in fact he always was quick to rebuff his admiring friend whenever this friend showed his admiration too explicitly for the sensitive Roithamer’s comfort, he always did all he could to get Hoeller to understand that he, Roithamer, did not deserve admiration of any kind, although he did lay claim, like any man doing his job, to respect, an attitude of mutual respect was the most helpful attitude between friends, the most suitable and appropriate to them and especially to their friendship, people were always admiring where they should simply respect something or someone, the trouble with admiration was, it ought to be nothing but respect for the other person, something of which most people were incapable, apparently respecting the other person was the hardest stance to mai
ntain between individuals, most people are simply incapable of respecting others, but respecting others is most important, people prefer admiring to respecting even though they only irritate the other person with their admiration and destroy with their admiration what is valuable in the other person instead of preserving it by duly respecting it, but that man Hoeller was virtually addicted to admiring Roithamer, and as time went on Roithamer tired of fending off Hoeller’s admiration by rebuffing it. But perhaps Hoeller’s admiration for Roithamer had been nothing more than just his respect, they esteemed each other, in fact, as I know, they held each other in the highest esteem, each in his own way and in accordance with his own capacities. In opening the chest of drawers, which simply does not match the rest of the Hoeller furnishings, it’s a rare eighteenth-century period piece of nutwood, with three drawers, simple ornamentation, so I suppose that it was brought over from Altensam to Hoeller’s garret at Roithamer’s request and perhaps even from among his own personal possessions, it could be one of Roithamer’s favorite pieces, I thought, the aroma also, when I opened the top drawer to put in my toilet articles, this exceptionally well-made chest, not veneered but carpentered out of the whole, evenly grained nutwood, instantly reminded me of Altensam, Altensam where I had gone so often, even in earliest childhood, with my grandfather, who had been a friend of old Roithamer’s, and afterward by myself, almost every day, I must say that when I was at home I was always and constantly drawn to Altensam, that unfailingly mysterious and vast, inexhaustible Altensam with its innumerable, infinitely ancient walls, its hundreds of rooms with their thousands upon thousands of furnishings and pictures that are bound to attract, even to fascinate a young man, especially a child, raised in diametrically opposite, rather restricted circumstances, not to mention the people of Altensam, the most mysterious people in the world to the child I was; in opening that drawer—the chest, I suddenly thought, undoubtedly came from that vast collection of furniture in Altensam—I discovered the yellow paper rose Roithamer won that time at the shooting gallery, the story is as follows: on Roithamer’s twenty-third birthday which he had decided, on an impulse in his rooms at Cambridge, to spend with me in Altensam, and which we actually did spend together in Altensam, after a journey made adventurous by vast inundations of the Dutch coast, from Altensam Roithamer and I went to the annual music festival in Stocket, in early May, we spent the whole evening of his birthday and the night until dawn at this open-air music festival, eating and drinking without restraint, both of us in a mood to let go completely, to go wild, because we’d spent the previous four or five months totally immersed in our studies, he, Roithamer, in his scientific research and I in my mathematical studies, both of us quite consciously and completely isolated within the scientific world of Cambridge. As may be expected this music festival was just the thing to bring us release from our scientific obsession, and we’d instantly and most eagerly seized upon this chance to relax completely at this music festival, to take our minds completely off the subjects of our intellectual obsessiveness upon which we had naturally been concentrating to a really dangerous degree. In itself that music festival was nothing special, these music festivals in our country are all alike, performing a most useful function especially for all those people who are chained to their labors, year in and year out, so naturally everybody comes flocking to the two or three music festivals per year, with their actual and their so-called amusements and distractions, these affairs are called music festivals because unlike the usual so-called country fairs they feature a band, an enormous attraction to the populace, that’s all it is, but the organizers know that they can draw a much larger crowd by calling it a music festival rather than a country fair, so it has become the custom to call these events music festivals even if they are nothing more than country fairs, everybody attends these music festivals which usually begin early on Saturday night and end late on Sunday morning. In Altensam, where nobody had remembered even Roithamer’s birthday and none of Roithamer’s siblings were home, we soon turned the possibility of going to the music festival into an actuality, after dressing suitably for the occasion. We immediately got into the swing of it, drinking several glasses of beer and schnapps in quick succession, we quickly got ourselves into the necessary high spirits for such an occasion, both of us naturally meeting lots of familiar faces of schoolmates and their sisters and wives, with whom we soon got involved in all sorts of conversations, but these conversations mostly consisted of our, Roithamer and me, having to explain why we had gone off to England and what we were doing there and what had become of us in England, and why we hadn’t stayed at home and made something of ourselves here, at home, as they had. At first these conversations, consisting basically of questions addressed to us both, had not bothered us and we readily answered all these questions put to us, such as whether we were now English, no longer Austrians, whether we were living in London or if not, where, whether we had become scientists, known experts, whether we were thinking of returning home and most of all, again and again, how much we were making, in Austrian schillings not in English pounds, it was evidently too much trouble for them to convert English pounds into Austrian schillings, and was it true that it was always raining in England and that everything was always shrouded in fog there, had we ever seen the Queen, had we met her personally, had we ever spoken with her, the questions came at us in an endless stream and a constantly growing number of people had so questioned us and we had to keep on answering more and more, they kept asking and we kept answering questions until we could no longer stand it and finally made our way through these hundreds of people, drunk as they’d been for some time, to a shooting gallery. Both of us were astonished at finding ourselves, suddenly, standing in front of a shooting gallery, since neither I nor Roithamer had ever been to a shooting gallery for any reason whatsoever, we had apparently never in our lives had any business at a shooting gallery, in contrast to Roithamer’s brothers, who did not merely claim to be but actually were excellent proven marksmen who had of course always taken part in all the shooting matches and hunting shoots, and had on display in their rooms hundreds upon hundreds of trophies attesting to their prowess, they were known and respected far and wide as brilliant marksmen, in fact as fanatical hunters and great shots, in contrast to me and my friend Roithamer, who not only couldn’t shoot and had never indulged in any illusions about being able to shoot, and who basically despised hunting and everything related to hunting, in fact, deep down, we hated it, I know that Roithamer hated it as I did, he understood hunting but he hated it, he had often talked to me about his brothers’