A normal novel is at pains to differentiate among its characters, by making them talk, about themselves and about each other, in distinct, individuated ways. He does the police in different voices, and so on. In Bernhard, though, there is a convergence of voices: everyone speaks the same way and says the same sorts of things. It’s one reason why we take these things, these views so seriously and attribute them so readily to the author: they are not relativized, there is no argument, no opposition. In a sense, the views are all we have. They are novels of impassioned generalization. Not only are Reger and his opinions everyone’s special subject, including, of course, Reger’s own; not only does Reger sound just like Atzbacher’s recollection of him and Irrsigler’s appropriations of him, but such minor characters as there are resemble him too! A well-accessorized “Englishman from Wales” who one day sits down on Reger’s settee in the Bordone Room, wearing “high-quality Scottish clothes” and—as we are given to understand—Reger’s make of aftershave, soliloquizes and exaggerates just like Reger, who is further put to the trouble of explaining to him: “Thousands of old masters are stolen in England every day, the Englishman said. Reger said, there are hundreds of organized gangs in England who specialize in the theft of old masters, especially of Italians, who are particularly popular in England.” Looks like Reger, smells like Reger, talks like Reger, impresses and dresses like Reger (“everything I wear comes from the Hebrides”)—it must be a duck. Reger, incidentally, “had repeatedly made Irrsigler presents of clothes he no longer wears, truly top-quality treasures from the most superb tweed material”; but then you could say he kits out everyone in the book with his style and opinions anyway. Everyone wears, so to speak, the Reger tartan. Even the woman Reger rather bizarrely came to marry—Irrsigler steered her to that same Bordone Room settee—is valued by him principally on the basis of the time and indoctrination he has put into her: a sort of advanced Eliza Doolittle.
All this goes to show just how different Thomas Bernhard’s novels are from the usual run of novels. They are sculptures of opinion rather than contraptions assembled from character interactions. Each book is a curved, seamless rant. (I like to think they could be made more negotiable for the reader by the inclusion, not of paragraphs, which is a barbarous idea, but, as in a nonfiction book, of running subject headings, which would include things like: children’s education, the Catholic church, the Austrian state, Heidegger, Mahler, the sentimental regard for the working classes, and so on and so forth.) There are in fact no moving parts. The figures pool their wisdom—or their fury—rather than take issue with one another. And by the same token, speech and thought are heavily mannered or stylized, by imputation authorial, almost abstract in their rhythms. Take the diatribe from Reger:
The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art, and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers.
The passage loops like a villanelle, from “the art historians are the real wreckers of art” to “the art historians who are really art wreckers.” In between, there are various other technical-seeming shifts: “twaddle” as verb, then noun, “art” as object, then as subject, “art historians” in a general proposition, and then as individually experienced, “driven out” to “chased out.” Absolute terms abound: “the real,” “killed,” “all art,” “for good,” “the vilest,” “only.” Figures are strictly obvious: driving flocks, trade, with a whip. And the one hated term comes up eleven times: art historians. The passage displays energy, persistence, modest variety: it’s like someone blowing up a rubber balloon with a pump, and, when he does it properly, bursting it. Bernhard continues:
Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.
The first ending was a trick ending, the passage doesn’t really end—the balloon doesn’t really die—until “that is the truth” (which is a recurring phrase in the book). Bernhard has added another loop: this attack happens to be a figure eight. The dread term “art historian” comes up another seven times, and a different set of shifts are negotiated, or played out; here it’s from “listen” to “see, and it’s about organizing a contamination of the singular from the plural (those “thousands, indeed tens of thousands”), so that the argument goes from “one” to “many” to “each.” It’s as though—and this seems quite a tenable point of view to me—Bernhard’s real loathing and real fear is of anything in the plural. “People are not interested in art, at any rate ninety-nine per cent of humanity has no interest whatever in art, as Irrsigler says, quoting Reger word for word”: numbers and statistics are never good news in Bernhard. I agree the style and the approach seem to be somewhere at the comic end of things, but I’m not sure it’s comedy. Certainly, one thing it isn’t is British character comedy, as in comic turns or Perrier Awards. Bernhard hasn’t dished up these people for us to laugh at them and find them foolish; they’re not silly-billies, and it’s not Rowan Atkinson. It may happen to work—in England—as comedy, or to suggest comedy—to us—because it’s broad or pitiless or unsubtle, but what if it was just broad and pitiless and unsubtle? Something is being clobbered so hard that we—quite possibly mistakenly, and out of the goodness of our hearts—laugh. We’re nervous, we don’t think anyone could say it and mean it. He means it, all right. Still, there is something relished and performed in this writing. Listen to how many different ways I can come up with to say this, it seems to be saying. See how many times I perpetrate the discourtesy—the maniacal drivenness—of refusing to find alternative forms (as for “art historian” here, or “twaddle”) until the words are left jangling and droning in your head; see, conversely, how many fierce synonyms I can string together—“wreck,” “ruin”, “kill”, “shrivel”—and always mean the same vague thing.
The “art historian” passage happened to be figure eight, but there are all sorts of other forms. Here is a statement closely backed up by three substatements in verbal and rhetorical parallel:
The Austrians are positively congenital coverers-up of crimes, Reger said, the Austrians will cover up any crime, even the vilest, because they are, as I have said, congenital opportunist cringers. For decades our ministers have committed ghastly crimes, yet these opportunist cringers cover up for them. For decades these ministers have committed murderous frauds, yet these cringers cover up for them. For decades these unscrupulous Austrian ministers have lied to the Austrians and cheated them and yet these cringers cover up for them.
This swelling repetition, Wodehouse’s Hollywood mogul backed up by his three yessers and three nodders—“our ministers”—“these ministers”—“these unscrupulous Austrian ministers”—“yet”—“yet”—“and yet”—still manages to accommodate the thrillingly excessive “murderous frauds.” Then there is the connecting, the braiding of ideas or phenomena, which enables both to be sent to their deaths together:
Nature is now enjoying a boom, Reger said yesterday, that is why Stifter is now enjoying
a boom. Anything to do with nature is now very much in vogue, Reger said yesterday, that is why Stifter is now greatly, or more than greatly, in vogue. The forest is now greatly in vogue, mountain streams are now greatly in vogue. Stifter bores everybody to death yet in some fatal manner is now greatly in vogue, Reger said.
A lot of Bernhard must be logistical, how to pace, how to rank, how to hide. When to deepen the attack, when and how to move on. When to use a concrete detail—often malign in its pathos (a green coat, a Glasgow aunt)—and when like Marvell to roll all his sourness into one ball and come up with something like: “all these writers write totally brainless and sham-philosophical and sham-homeland epigone rubbish” or “the whole Prater reeks of beer and crime and we encounter in it nothing but the brutality and the brazen feeble-mindedness of vulgar snotty Viennesedom”—instances of what I would call Bernhard’s more rubbery sentences, full of spluttering and vocabulary and rather unstructured aggression.
Bernhard may not be funny, but he is—what I’ve quoted hasn’t been misleading—clean. That’s another way he differs from comedy. There are no four-letter words. Even when the subject is lavatories, he’s not lavatorical: “The Viennese, and the Austrians generally, have no lavatory culture, nowhere in the world would you find such filthy and smelly lavatories, Reger said.” Bernhard accepts the difficulty and the diligence of continuing to come up with terms—generalizing terms like “lavatory culture” or particular terms like “Mozart’s music is also full of petticoat and frilly undies kitsch.” He makes moral-aesthetic judgments: “abysmally hideous,” “charlatanist nonsense,” “utterly rotten and demoniacal state,” “Heidegger had a common face,” “anything else by Mahler I reject.” He goes on judging. If he were to relent and say, “bunch of fucking crap,” that would be an abdication. That would be letting us off the hook. That, for the lifelong invalid, would be dying.
GÜNTER GRASS
Bertolt Brecht has a famous poem from 1933, “O Germany, Pale Mother!” (Helma Sanders-Brahms later used the words as the title for a film.) The poem has an epigraph: “Let others talk about their shame, I will talk about mine.” Grass has done the opposite: he has carefully incubated his particular shame for sixty years, all the while encouraging others to talk about theirs. Now, possibly threatened by its imminent disclosure—the relevant documents surfaced in Grass’s Stasi file—or in a bid to keep some sort of “authorial” control over it, he has published it, and impertinently required readers to pay for it, the only significant revelation in a long and miserably bad book. This lifelong silence, and, more yet, the manner of his breaking it, have hurt Grass’s reputation in ways from which it will never recover, and which, depressingly, he seems not even to have understood.
It transpires that the seventeen-year-old Grass—who had never previously admitted to being anything worse than a “Flakhelfer,” a conscripted civilian ack-ack gunner—volunteered and briefly served with the elite unit called the Waffen-SS. When this was made public, the whole of Germany ground to a halt. Grass tried to limit the damage with a long exclusive interview (and homemade al fresco lunch thrown in) with representatives of the leading conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in a series of public events, and has generally gone on as though nothing has happened; but this is something that will not get better or go away. The postwar “conscience of Germany” now has to suffer his name to appear disfigured with the double lightnings of the SS.
Peeling the Onion covers the years from 1939 to 1959, when The Tin Drum was published; it is an autobiography of Grass’s youth. I didn’t read it during the kerfuffle of 2006, but coming to it now, in both the inadequate original and in Michael Henry Heim’s always spirited English translation, things seem, if anything, even worse. There is a kind of plainspoken and rueful candor that is apparently entirely outside Grass’s gift; perhaps it can only be done by Anglo-Saxon writers. One thinks of the noble line of Edmund Gosse, J. R. Ackerley, or Laurie Lee, or more recent accounts of such “difficult” lives as Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies or Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. This is what Grass, by equipment either a rococo fabulist or else a polemicist, cannot do: stand at the end of a life and—however crooked—tell it straight. There are important categories, such as “the poetry of fact,” but also even “the truth of fact,” that are inimical to him (they are no good to a polemicist or a fabulist). The oddest, most dismaying thing about Peeling the Onion is that Grass should ever have attempted anything of the sort, so unwinning, unresonant, unstylish, and unconvincing is the result. (And that too makes one think this was not a voluntary exercise.)
The revelation of the SS membership comes too late in the book (not unnaturally, one turns the pages, impatient for it to come—pp. 109 to 111), and then, when it is gone, one feels too winded—literally, too punched—to carry on through the rest of it. (I actually put it down for two weeks, unwilling to continue.) It is both too heavily trailed and too much put off, too perfunctory and too dilatory, too defensive and too aggressive. They are two pages of failed writing that should be put in a textbook and quarried for their multiple instances of bad faith.
The whole episode is announced by a break in style, an end to Grassian gabbiness and a new, manly brusqueness: “Nothing about the journey there.” Then the Waffen-SS makes its first appearance, not as a principal, in the nominative, but in the genitive, “a drill ground of the Waffen-SS,” just as “I” appears not as “I” but as “the recruit with my name” (a habitual and awful periphrastic tic throughout the book). There is callous hard-bitten military jargon (“a pocket like Demyansk forced open”) followed by a dismaying, and dismayingly rare, statement of fact: “I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” There is a disquisition on the historical von Frundsberg, a sixteenth-century mercenary, who gave Grass’s unit its name: “Someone who stood for freedom, liberation.” There is a bizarre note on the international composition of the Waffen-SS (to the boy who knew, apparently, next to nothing of what he was letting himself in for?) that makes it sound like the League of Nations: “It included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch and Flemish, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers.” And then the Fazit, sounding rather more self-justificatory than it needed to: “So there were plenty of excuses.” And the last, pat sentence: “I will have to live with it for the rest of my life”—though one should note, that, here, of all places, the German uses an impersonal construction!
As a plea, an account, a confession, this is so bad as to be easily counterproductive. Still, aside from the gravity of its content, it is really no worse than what comes before and after: the endless invocations of the onion, memory (though also of the amber, memory); the strings of rhetorical questions, sometimes as much as half a page of them, one after another; the tedious speculative reading lists of books read (or not read) at a certain time; the intercalation of irrelevant and largely flippant episodes; the cross-references to Grass’s work in fiction; the places and persons revisited, years later, in greater comfort, by Grass and his wife; the indifferent use of consequence and inconsequence to match the “now I remember, now I forget” tenue of the book; the underlying but sharply unmistakable whiff of self-congratulation attending the whole thing.
“Even in formation I was a loner, though I took care not to stand out,” Grass writes: “I was a schemer whose mind was forever elsewhere.” Bland and pat and dreamy enough, you might think, but in German it is, again, a little worse. Grass’s terms are not the near synonyms “loner” and “schemer,” but the near opposites “Einzelgänger” and “Mitläufer,” the one who walks alone and the one who runs with others. The horrible suspicion arises that Grass’s deepest project here is the destruction of meaning. Not so much “peeling the onion” as “applying the whitewash.”
STEFAN ZWEIG
Romain Rolland, one of Stefan Zweig’s many illustrious friends (he seems not to have had any others), expressed surprise that he could be a writer and not like cats: “Un p
oète qui n’aime pas les chats!” It’s only one of an unending series of things—as if the man didn’t have a shadow—that strike one as being “not quite right” about this popular-again popularizer, like the Kitschmeister Gustav Klimt glitteringly and preposterously back in fashion, and neither of them any better than they were the first time round.
Polygrapher Zweig (“twig”), dubbed “Erwerbszweig” (something like branch of the economy or branch of industry) in catty, envious Vienna: this anxious success and oh-so-modest failure; best-selling and most-translated German-language author before World War II, and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (where Joseph Roth—who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig—was both, to the max); neither pacifist much less activist but passivist; professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and Mozart manuscripts and busy Balzac proofs and contemporaries out the wazoo, plus four thousand manuscript collection catalogs; who logged his phone calls and logged his letters and logged his books, and, who knows, probably logged his logs; this cosmopolitan loner and blue-riband refugee, so “hysterically discreet” he got married by proxy and to a man; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, “spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s impending entry into the war to Brazil. He even fled Rio for a Brazilian mountain resort. From there there was no more running”; who left a suicide note that, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined—actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note—one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide); someone whose books I briefly thought I wouldn’t mind reading, before, while setting down the umpteenth of them amid groans (it was the novella Confusion)—adding the stipulation to myself: yes, but only if they’d been written by someone else.
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