Correction

by Thomas Bernhard

  How could a man who never fired a shot in his life, suddenly, at a music festival, pick off twenty-four paper roses with twenty-four shots? And then hand twenty-three of these paper roses over, in passing, to an unknown girl, or an unknown young woman, keeping only one yellow rose for himself. And then keep this one yellow paper rose for so many years, taking it along wherever he goes, apparently unable to live without it ever again. By taking the paper rose out of the drawer I’d calmed myself down. I sat down with the paper rose in my hand on the old chair and held the paper rose up to the light. We mustn’t let ourselves go so far as to suspect something remarkable, something mysterious, or significant, in everything and behind everything, this is a yellow paper rose, the yellow paper rose, to be precise, which Roithamer shot down at the music festival in Stocket that one time, together with twenty-three others in different colors, that’s all. Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought. We may see only what we do see which is nothing else but that which we see. Again I watched Hoeller from my window in Hoeller’s garret, as he sewed together the huge black bird which he had stuffed to bursting. Suddenly I saw, perhaps my eyes had become adjusted to the lighting down there in Hoeller’s workshop, or else the lighting had suddenly changed, anyway I saw several such huge birds, the back of Hoeller’s workshop was filled with such birds, not all of these great, indeed huge birds were equally large, not all of them were black, but these were absolutely no local birds, probably, I thought, these are birds from the collection of some bird fancier, one of those rich bird freaks who can afford to travel to America, to South America or to India, in order to shoot such huge birds and add them to his collection. A huge bird collection, I kept thinking, a huge bird collection, and I slapped my forehead as I thought again and again, a huge bird collection, a huge bird collection! Roithamer had always spoken at length about Hoeller’s work, his procedures in preserving, stuffing andsoforth all kinds of animals, every possible kind of fowl, Roithamer had always profited, so he himself said, from watching Hoeller at work, seeing how those dead creatures were dissected and stuffed and sewed up. For Roithamer, I now thought, these products of nature, stuffed and turned into artifacts, always provided an occasion for various reflections on nature and art and art and nature, to him they were almost the most mysterious products of art because they were only just barely works of art andsoforth, mysterious by virtue of the fact that they had been made into artifacts here in the midst of a natural world still abounding with hundreds and thousands of creatures still purely natural andsoforth, that they had been turned into artifacts by Hoeller, products of nature turned by Hoeller’s hands into products of art here in nature’s own bosom andsoforth. Hoeller turns nature’s products into art products and these artificial creatures seem always more mysterious than the purely natural creatures they once were.

  Hoeller’s work of turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures had often served Roithamer as a basis for ideas on art vs. nature, and all these ideas, which Roithamer naturally always linked immediately with everything else, everything other than these ideas, that is, were all coming back to me now. However, I was no longer up to formulating a definition. But I did muse about how it could be possible for so many generations, at least four or five forebears of Hoeller can be documented, to give their lives to the stuffing and preservation of animals and to keep on for centuries, consciously or unconsciously, turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures. This meditation lasted an hour. Pacing the floor in Hoeller’s garret I thought that I need only approach Roithamer’s legacy, approach it to begin with, if I tackle Roithamer’s papers now it is in order to sift them and then possibly edit them, which I have no right to do, neither the right nor the necessary ruthlessness, for editing involves a certain ruthlessness toward the subject, but I can never muster the requisite ruthlessness in the face of Roithamer’s legacy. For me to bring together all these bits and pieces, perhaps to put them in the right relation to each other so as to make a whole out of all these bits and pieces of his thought, something to be published, was out of the question, for I’d had to consider, from my first contact with Roithamer’s papers, that they consist for the most part of mere fragments which he had intended to combine into a whole himself, after completing or perfecting (Roithamer), finishing (Hoeller) the Cone, first he had devoted all his powers to the completion of the Cone, once I have completed the Cone (Roithamer), once he had finished the Cone (Hoeller), he would immediately set to work with all the intensity of which he was capable and after the completion of the Cone with a fresh, even more intensive intensity, with a fresh afflatus, as Roithamer said just a few months ago in England, to work on completing (Roithamer) or finishing (Hoeller) his writing, for all these years, Roithamer said, while I was busy with the Cone, I’ve been able to put together only fragments of my scientific writings, and such mere fragments by themselves aren’t enough, such fragments must be combined into a whole when, and only when, I’ve got my head in shape for it, when my head’s really set up for it, you understand, Roithamer said to me. So what we have here are in fact hundreds, or thousands, of fragments which Roithamer left to me, but which I shall not edit, because I have no right to edit them, anyway no one has a right, no matter who is editing what, he never has a right to do it, even though everywhere in the whole world socalled unfinished works, the labors of heads which suddenly could not continue their undertakings for whatever reasons, though mostly because of sickness or despair or self-criticism, Roithamer said, because they had rejected their ideas and simply abandoned everything they had thought all their lives, and then other people come along and proceed to edit such fragments, shreds of ideas that have been abandoned and left lying around, thinking they must edit and publish them, no matter where, publicize them, all these publications are criminal acts every single time, perhaps the greatest crime there is, because what’s involved is a product of an intellect, or many such intellectual products that have been abandoned, lying around, for some sufficient reason, by their begetter, pacing the floor heatedly in Hoeller’s garret I said to myself what I had already thought many times, thought it already at the hospital, I shall never edit Roithamer’s legacy, I shall not commit this editorial crime, I shall never be a so-called editor, the most detestable kind of criminal there is, I shall put Roithamer’s papers in order, sift them, then possibly pass them on to his publisher, only because he has expressed an interest and not only to Roithamer but also to me, he expressed his interest in a letter to me at the hospital, though he did so in a way that has greatly aroused my suspicions, I shall let this publisher, have a look at Roithamer’s legacy, I thought, pacing the floor and possibly disturbing the Hoellers in their bedroom as I did so, I didn’t really believe that the Hoellers, I mean the mother and her children, were actually asleep anyway, I simply couldn’t imagine that they could sleep, everything was against it, even the sudden change in the atmosphere and wind direction militated against it, suddenly I’d understood the real reason for my sleeplessness and still growing unrest, it was a change in the weather this evening which was making everyone terribly restless and which is probably also the reason that Hoeller stayed up and took refuge in his workshop, a quick glance down at the workshop window was enough to ascertain that Hoeller was still busying himself with that huge black gigantic bird, there was no sign whatsoever that he would stop now or shortly, not even in a foreseeable time would Hoeller stop his work on that bird, I thought, and right away it struck me that here at the Aurach gorge they’re exposed, always, to these sudden, these lightning changes of weather, in many cases lethal changes of weather, that people are driven to the very edge of their existence by these abrupt turns in the weather and can work their way out of this despair, this total desperation, only by some form of activity, like Hoeller busying himself with that
bird, like Hoeller’s wife who sat down at her sewing machine again after supper and who is probably not in bed yet, I thought, but still at her sewing, though not at the sewing machine, she’s probably sitting at the little table in her room and sewing by hand, or mending, or knitting, whichever, she has to get through this night that has brought such a change in the weather somehow, they all have to get through this night somehow, all of them, all of them, everything, I thought and while I was thinking this and again walking to the door and then again back to the window I was feeling a little easier in my mind, because thinking about other people like this always brings a little relief. I would sort and sift Roithamer’s legacy, I now concentrated on these two concepts of sorting and sifting and said it aloud several times, sort and sift, and then, again several times more, sort and sift, but I will not edit it. I won’t change a line, I won’t move a comma, I shall sort and sift it, I just kept saying sort and sift over and over again and in saying sort and sift out loud I gradually succeeded in calming myself after all, I felt myself calming down while I was saying sort and sift, which is why I repeated it so often and then again, sort and sift, I said to myself, but no editing, absolutely none. As to Roithamer’s major work, the paper entitled “About Altensam and Everything Connected with Altensam, with Special Attention to the Cone,” which after all contains everything Roithamer ever thought in the most concentrated form and in his most characteristic style, as I perceived at once when it first came into my hands at the hospital, and which is more publishable than anything else he ever wrote, I shall pass it on to his publisher untouched, just as I found it, the first eight-hundred-page draft, and the second three-hundred-page revision of this first draft, and the third version, boiled down to only eighty pages, of the second version, all three of these versions of Roithamer’s handwritten manuscript, for all three versions belong together, each deriving from the previous one, they compose a whole, an integral whole of over a thousand pages in which everything is equally significant so that even the most minor deletion would reduce it all to nothing, and now I thought, again pacing the floor of Hoeller’s garret, that Roithamer, after completing the first version after many years of working on it and then being of two minds about it and then substituting a second version for this first version and then being of two minds about the second version and writing a third version, each a revision of the previous version about which he could not help being of two minds, and when he finally, just before his death, already on his way from London to Altensam, in fact, had started on the train revising even his final eighty-page version, correcting it and taking it apart and thereby, as he believed, starting to destroy it and by proceeding to shorten even that latest shortest version, as he believed, to arrive at an even shorter one, imagine! boiling down the material contained in over eight hundred pages of manuscript to a mere twenty or thirty pages, as I know he did, anyway this whole piece of work, to which he always referred as his major, his most important work or brainchild, though he would later find fault with it and destroy it, as he believed, yet it was precisely through this process of always overturning every earlier conclusion throughout the whole work and correcting it and ultimately, as he believed, totally destroying it on his journey to his sister’s funeral, when he had passed beyond London, through Dover, Brussels, etcetera, as I can see by his corrections, that it was nevertheless by this process of boiling down a work of over eight hundred pages to one of only four hundred pages and then a mere one hundred fifty pages and then no more than eighty pages and then finally one of not even twenty pages and in fact, ultimately leaving absolutely nothing of the entire work behind, that all of it together came into being, all this taken together is the complete work, I said to myself, as I stood looking down at Hoeller’s workshop, watching Hoeller and thinking at the same time that I had dragged this whole thing in my knapsack from the hospital into Hoeller’s garret, this so-called major work of Roithamer’s together with the rest of Roithamer’s legacy, in the knapsack my mother brought to me at the hospital and how grotesque it is that I dragged Roithamer’s legacy out of the hospital in this knapsack, of all things, which ordinarily contains only our family’s provisions when we move up to the mountains, only such things as woollen socks and sausages, goose fat and foot warmers, earmuffs and shoelaces, sugar and bread, all scrambled together, to think that I dragged Roithamer’s legacy into Hoeller’s garret in this mountain climber’s backpack, of all things, and I have to say dragged it, because it’s a matter of thousands of pages, however, as I know, it’s a case of hundreds of thousands of fragments, interrelated ones on the one hand, but completely unrelated ones on the other hand, and then again, standing by the window and considering whether to go sit down on the old chair or not, I thought: I won’t edit these fragments, I absolutely will not edit this legacy, I shall sort it or at least try to put this huge heap of writings into some kind of order, but I shall edit nothing, the mere word edit or edition was always enough to nauseate me. On my arrival here I actually put only Roithamer’s so-called major work, the manuscript on Altensam and everything connected with Altensam with special attention to the Cone, into the desk drawer, while the rest of the papers were still in the knapsack, because I was uncertain how to get them all out of the knapsack without mixing them up even more, I had extracted the so-called major work and put it in the drawer and put the knapsack on the sofa beside the desk, there on the sofa it was still, the knapsack which, as I now saw, was stained with dried rabbit blood, probably my father’s doing, and I was now considering whether to unpack the knapsack, to remove its contents carefully, all those hundreds of thousands of pages, and put them all away in the desk, whether this might not be the right occasion, while I was in this well-nigh alarming condition, totally undecided and in a steadily increasing state of tension over the actual abrupt change in the weather, to remove the contents of the knapsack from the knapsack, little by little, with great care and using my head and keeping my hands as steady as possible, so as not to turn what seemed to me to be the great disorder of those papers into an even greater disorder, this dilemma, whether to unpack the knapsack or not, drove me to the edge of despair, I kept changing my mind, now I’d think I’ll unpack the knapsack, then again, I won’t unpack the knapsack, finally I walked over to the knapsack and grabbed the knapsack and emptied its contents on the sofa, I had suddenly grabbed the knapsack and turned it over and dumped its contents on the sofa. This was not the time to do it, I said to myself, and took a step backward, and then another step and then still another step and watched from the window, with my back to the window, that is, how some of the pages slid down from the top of that heap of papers, which was still in motion as I watched it from the window, where there were still some air spaces left in the heap of papers, these air spaces caved in and more papers slid to the floor. I clapped my hand to my mouth to hold back an outcry and I turned around as if in fear of being seen in this horrible, this farcically horrible situation. But in fact, and of course, nobody had seen me. Hoeller had that huge black bird on his lap and was sewing it up. I went over to the sofa and grabbed handful after handful of the Roithamer legacy and crammed the desk drawers full of it. Again and again I grabbed a handful of papers and crammed it into a drawer, until the last sheet of paper was inside, in the end I had to use my knee to force the drawer shut which, being the last drawer, I had crammed full to bursting. Then I grabbed the knapsack and threw it on top of the wardrobe. With my back to the window I now said to myself that I had done a terrible thing. But what matters, I thought, is that those remains are now out of sight, that I don’t have to see those papers anymore. But of course the fact that the papers were now inside the desk and no longer inside the knapsack hadn’t in the least changed the situation in which I now found myself, it was an atrocious situation. If anything, my conscience was hurting even worse because in unpacking the knapsack, by abruptly turning the knapsack over on the sofa, I had probably, I thought, mixed the papers up even more hopelessly than before. And since Roith
amer’s papers are hardly ever dated or numbered or anything, as I know for a fact, there was no hope at all that I could ever put them in order again, even to try to put them in order would drive me crazy, I thought, over and over, putting them in order would drive me crazy, so there I stood and said over and over that such a hopeless effort to put them in order would actually drive me crazy, and I kept thinking what a mess I’d made, I know what a mess I’ve made even if nobody else knows what a mess I’ve made. I sat down on the old chair by the door, in a state of exhaustion, of total exhaustion, it was suddenly clear to me what a hopeless fix I was in, I had apparently in a moment of total confusion lost my mind altogether and grabbed the knapsack and dumped its contents on the sofa and got all the papers so thoroughly mixed up they could never be straightened out again.