by Tim Parks
Yet the actors often felt he was quite wrong and that the plays worked better with a lively, realistic delivery, a position to which Beckett himself eventually began to come round. The fact is that the flesh-and-blood presence of the actors on stage creates for the spectators a sense of reality and identification which the absurd plots and dialogues then undermine, so that the tension behind all of Beckett’s work between affirmation and denial is dramatised for us in the contrast between the believable actor and the inexplicable, disorienting world he inhabits. At the same time, the conventions of the theatre which trap us respectfully together in an intimate space for a pre-established time make it far more likely that the sceptical will follow a major Beckett work from start to finish and have time to be enchanted by the rhythms of his writing. If few get through The Unnameable or How It Is, almost everybody can watch Godot to the final curtain.
But most importantly of all, the theatre allows both silence and physical movement to come to the fore, in a way they cannot on the page. A blank space between paragraphs simply does not deliver the anxiety of a hiatus in a stage dialogue. Only in the theatre, as the audience waits in collective apprehension for the conversational ball – between Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov – to start rolling again, could Beckett’s sense of the truth as being that something, or nothing, beyond speech come across with great immediacy. Likewise the actors’ interminable and pointless movement back and forth across the stage is a more immediate statement than the words of a page-bound narrator telling us of his aimless daily wanderings. When we watch the plays, the impotence of language to explain the characters’ experience is compellingly evident. Conversation serves above all to pass the time, which of course ‘would have passed in any case’.29
Exploding, with his multiple internal voices, the old fiction of individual identity, Beckett created one of the most identifiable and individual literary voices of the twentieth century. Shunning enquiries into his life, he lived to see it given a well-defined shape in the public mind, raised to the status of myth almost: the mother obsession, the attachment to Joyce, the service in the French Resistance, the years of determined toil on the trilogy, the sudden celebrity after Godot, the Nobel Prize, and, finally, the years when everyone who was anyone wanted to be able to say they had spent an evening in a Parisian café drinking with ‘Sam’ – the ‘Sammists’ as one old friend ironically dubbed these late arrivals.
Beckett rarely denied himself to them. For the truth that emerges from the biographies, and again now from Beckett Remembering and Atik’s very lively How It Was, is that although everybody liked to see him as a solitary and even saintly man, ‘a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labour’,30 as Emil Cioran put it, Beckett in fact loved company, particularly drinking company, and far from living alone spent most of his adult life with his partner and finally wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Her voice is conspicuous for its absence in Beckett Remembering, indeed she is hardly mentioned at all, as if there were some collective denial on the part of Beckett worshippers that their unworldly hero might have had a conjugal life at all. But in a breach of the general discretion, charming because unique, we hear this from the theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert:
I think a lot of [Sam’s relationship] with Suzanne … was gratitude and loyalty and I think that he felt remorse for the fact that he had so many friends whom he got drunk with. She didn’t drink. And he had after all endless other women. And when people say to me he was a saint I say: ‘Oh no he wasn’t a saint at all. And thank God he wasn’t.’31
How interesting that God is invoked even here where sanctity is denied. Beckett would have appreciated one more demonstration of meaningless linguistic inertia. Still, it is cheering to think that during all those trips to direct his own plays, urging the actors to avoid all colour, Beckett was in fact – in another of the contradictions that make his work so real – actually seeking to add a little colour to his own life. Certainly, Jocelyn Herbert seems very sure of what she is talking about; and those three words of hers, ‘after all endless’, have a decidedly Beckettian ring to them.
fn1 Emil Cioran’s sketch of Beckett in the book Anathemas and Admirations remains the most fascinating short memoir on the author.
fn2 Beckett’s French translation of Murphy gives the ‘mew’ in West Brompton as ‘l’impasse de l’Enfant Jésus’, introducing a Christian frame of reference into the city grid. In his illuminating book Beckett’s Dying Words, the critic Christopher Ricks has pointed out that ‘mew’ rather than the more correct ‘mews’ is in fact an archaic word for ‘cage’.
Genius of Bad News
* * *
[Thomas Bernhard]
THE MANY NOVELS and plays of Thomas Bernhard, at his death in 1989 Austria’s most prominent and controversial writer, achieve their full impact and are properly understood only within the context, or confines, of the author’s native culture and language. Such is the persuasive argument of Gitta Honegger’s biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian. But where does this assessment leave those of us whose grasp of Austrian history is shaky at best, those who, though we have read Bernhard in various languages, are unable to tackle the original German? Is our sense of his importance to us the fruit of a misunderstanding?
To warn us of her unorthodox, largely non-chronological approach, Honegger opens with a typically provocative remark from Bernhard himself: ‘I hate books and articles that begin with a date of birth. Altogether, I hate books and articles that adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure.’1
Explaining that her work is as much a cultural history of post-war Austria as a biography of Bernhard, Honneger goes on: ‘The process of [Bernhard’s] self-invention reveals more about him and the world he lived in … than a chronological account of his life and work could do.’2
Such an attitude is no doubt in line with Bernhard’s own tendency to introduce us in medias res to a mind in turmoil where events past and present, real or apocryphal, flash by in rapid succession without apparent order or hierarchy, where the voice speaking is so aware of its own performance as to raise doubts about its candour. Yet notoriously every story does have its chronology and every life, between cradle and grave, its trajectory. To understand the significance of any ‘self-invention’ one must have a grip on the inescapable facts on which self feeds and from which invention diverges. The same is true of a nation. How are we to understand modern Austria’s mendaciously sanitised image of itself without an account of its Nazi past? One of the pleasures of Bernhard’s novels, after all, is the slow reconstruction of the sequence of events that underlies the present state of mind, and with that the exposure of the process of self-invention. Each book, and play, is, to a very great extent, a life. Ah yes, we say to ourselves towards the end of The Lime Works, so those were the circumstances in which, forty years before, Konrad married. Now I understand.
To be tastelessly chronological, then, perhaps the first thing we need to know about Bernhard is that his last name was an accident and something that would estrange the author from his family rather than unite him to it. In 1903, while still married to one Karl Bernhard, Thomas’s grandmother, Anna, ran off with the struggling writer Johannes Freumbichler, by whom she was pregnant, later giving birth to a daughter, Herta, who, despite her natural father, was registered Herta Bernhard. In 1931, working as a maid in Holland, Herta gave birth to an illegitimate child, Thomas. The father denied paternity, disappeared and committed suicide before the law could catch up with him. In 1936 Herta married and became Frau Fabjan, bearing her husband first a son in 1938, then a daughter in 1940. Thomas was now the only member of the family with the name Bernhard. His stepfather refused to adopt the boy and allow him to become a Fabjan. In The Lime Works we hear of the central character Konrad that
he suffered because his sister and his brother Francis were only one year apart in age … while he, years older th
an they … was separated from them by the difference in age between them and him, a separateness that hurt him to the roots of his being … the misfortune of being six years older than his sister, seven years older than his brother Francis … led to his life of chronic isolation … All during his childhood he worried about losing touch with his siblings and his family in general because of their continuing instinctive rejection of him.3
Whether or not this is autobiography, it is typical of Bernhard’s habit of spinning out possible and invariably unhappy accounts of his own early life. Shifted back and forth between his grandparents’ family and his mother’s, between Austria and Bavaria, Thomas clearly had every chance to feel separate, isolated, rejected and displaced. One piece of information we find only in the chronology at the back of Honegger’s book is that in 1941, soon after the birth of his half-sister and completion of the Fabjan family nucleus, Thomas was sent away to an institution for ‘difficult children’ in Thuringia. Later there would be a Catholic home for boys in Salzburg (during the Allied bombing).
In the autobiographical works he wrote in his forties, Bernhard makes it clear that the centre of the family, and the key emotional attachment for himself, was his grandfather. Dreamer, anarchist and bisexual, Johannes Freumbichler spent his whole life trying and failing to become a great writer. Unable or unwilling to hold down a job, moving frequently in search of a situation congenial to his writing, he depended economically on his wife and daughter, both of whom seemed willing to sacrifice their lives to his doomed ambition.
From his grandfather, Bernhard learned the nobility of artistic endeavour, but also the coercive and destructive nature of the artist’s powerful influence on those around him. Indeed, his later objection to ‘books and articles that begin with a date of birth’ can probably be best understood in the light of his relationship with his grandfather; for as, in his early twenties, the charismatic Thomas began to exercise the powers of seduction that would overcome rejection by his family, or gain him a surrogate family, or earn him an honoured place in the larger family of Austrian society, he must have been aware that he was imitating his grandfather, borrowing a behaviour pattern that had begun well before his own conception. And he would also have been aware that Freumbichler himself was locked into a destructive relationship with past Austrian culture and romantic notions of artistic greatness, a relationship that both won him a devoted family and devastated its members. This awareness never prevented Bernhard from exercising that charisma and seeking devotion and greatness. But likewise he would never forget to expose the dark side of artistic ambitions. Almost all his writings offer us a monomaniac, achievement-obsessed central character. Whether he is an epitome of intellectual perfection, as the Wittgenstein figure in Corrections, or a paralysed failure, as Konrad in The Lime Works, he is always a catastrophe for those around him, and ultimately for himself.
Seeking redemption through art, grandfather Freumbichler wanted the same for his children and grandchildren. Daughter Herta was to become a ballerina. Thomas, having abandoned school at sixteen to work as an apprentice in a grocer’s shop, took up private singing lessons. The family was living in Salzburg now. But hardly had he begun to dream of being an opera singer than he was overwhelmed by another experience that was to prove absolutely formative. In 1949, aged eighteen, he was hospitalised for pleurisy and then diagnosed with tuberculosis. In line with his conviction that every institution that admitted him, family, college or hospital, was secretly hostile and likely to destroy him, Bernhard believed that he actually caught tuberculosis at the Grossgmain sanatorium. There followed a series of hospitalisations that lasted some two years and saw the young man at death’s door for long periods. During this time both his grandfather and his mother died. Bernhard learned of his mother’s death from a newspaper announcement. In the autobiographical memoir Breath: A Decision, Bernhard describes his spell in intensive care thus:
All the patients were on drips of some sort, and from the distance the tubes looked like strings, I had the constant impression that the patients lying in their beds were marionettes on strings … in most cases these strings … were their only remaining link to life.4
Typical of Bernhard is the combination of feeling absolutely abandoned to one’s self, yet at the same time absolutely dependent on the community, the institution, which remains, despite, or because of, the life-giving drips, absolutely sinister. It is not merely a question here of suffering the irritating presence of others – ‘the purgatory of loneliness and the hell of togetherness’ as he refers to it elsewhere – but rather that one’s being is determined from outside. You are a marionette. Some years hence the lonely boy would be writing for the theatre, pulling all the strings himself, the actors obliged to imitate his voice. Unless that voice was his grandfather’s, or Beckett’s for that matter, or any of the endless other voices any author is obliged to imitate. Bernhard never forgot this. In the short story ‘The Voice Imitator’, the one voice the famous impressionist is unable to imitate is his own.
After a period of deep depression following his mother’s death, Bernhard at last ‘entertained the supreme ambition to return to full health.’ He began to break hospital rules and visit a nearby village each evening and ultimately left the institution without an official discharge.5 Though Bernhard does not mention the fact in his autobiography, this step was only made possible with outside support. On his evening excursions he had met Hede Stavianicek. Twice widowed, wealthy heiress of a famous brand of chocolates, thirty-six years older than Bernhard, Frau Stavianicek became the writer’s protectress, mentor and perhaps even lover. She believed in his genius, was prepared to finance him when necessary and able and willing to introduce him to influential figures in Vienna. It was with her support that in January 1951, frail, acne-scarred but determined, a twenty-year-old Bernhard plunged into the fray of Austrian society.
The question now was: how would Bernhard’s very particular and powerful private experience mesh with the very particular and ambiguous situation in Salzburg and Vienna in the early 1950s? After having been close to death himself and bereaved of the most important members of his family, Bernhard was looking for a new home, a new identity in Frau Stavianicek’s sophisticated world. After the disgraceful years of Nazism, the Austrian middle classes were casting about for a new respectability. Bernhard studied them. How could these two needs profitably come together?
From 1951 to 1955 the young man worked as a cultural journalist and court reporter for a Salzburg newspaper, taking in a wide range of modern theatre and collecting endless accounts of troubled lives. He published some poems and short stories, one under the pseudonym Thomas Fabjan, the name that had always been denied him. Then in 1954 came the first piece of writing to bear his distinctive voice: a vitriolic attack on the Salzburg Theatre. It was scathing, over the top, almost hysterical. It won him his first libel case. But oddly it didn’t exclude him from the society he attacked, as his grandfather, working quietly away on his novels, had always been excluded. Rather, the papers began to talk about him. There would always be in Bernhard’s plays and novels a journalistic element of scandalous topical attack aimed at recognisable and influential figures. So Bernhard would push his way into his Austrian home as a thorn in the flesh. A society wrestling with guilt cannot easily dismiss its accusers, indeed, a certain virtue may accrue to giving them space.
Speaking of the moment he left hospital, Bernhard remarked: ‘I was no longer capable of starting work with a firm … I was revolted by any work, any job. I was appalled and horrified by the thought of working, of being employed by someone, just to be able to survive.’6 Throughout Bernhard’s fiction, the minor and sometimes even the major characters are identified only by their occupation: the miller, the woodcutter, the miner, the stoneworker, the doctor. It is a reminder that they are marionettes, that society is a chorus of complicit roles orchestrated by tradition and necessity. ‘I never wanted an occupation’,7 Bernhard wrote, ‘but to become myself.’
/> So it was unlikely that he would remain a salaried journalist for long. From 1955 to 1957, supported by Hede Stavianicek, he studied acting and directing at Salzburg’s Mozarteum. Trying different parts, he found he was most successful at the cantankerous old man. He began to mingle with the Viennese avant-garde. Good at forming intimacies that never quite became stable relationships, he started to spend his summers in the bohemian community of Tonhoff, summer mountain residence of rich musicians and patrons Gerhard Lampersberg and his wife Maja. Both Lampersbergs fell in love with him. They weren’t alone. Bernhard flirted, left and right, with men and women, put on his first three plays in the Tonhoff barn, then escaped to Frau Stavianicek when things got tense. By now he was calling her ‘Auntie’, as ill-defined a relationship as ever one could wish. It is intriguing that his ferocious attack on the Lampersbergs many years later in the novel Woodcutters accused them above all of cosy complicity with the establishment they pretended to oppose. Sued, as so often, for libel, Bernhard gave aggressive interviews in which he claimed that the entire bohemian community was state-subsidised, whereas he alone had always been independent. ‘Only if you’re really independent can you write really well … I always lived from my own initiative, never was subsidised, no one gave a damn about me, to this day. I am against all subsidies, all patronage …’8