by Tim Parks
Honegger is no doubt right to suggest that the hyperbole and hypocrisy of Bernhard’s position – for he had received many awards and was generously patronised – was an indication of his anxiety about his own inevitable involvement in Austrian culture. ‘The past of the Habsburg Empire is what forms us’ he said in another interview around the same time. ‘In my case it is perhaps more visible than in others. It manifests itself in a kind of love-hate for Austria that’s the key to everything I write.’9
By now an uneasy pattern of behaviour was all too evident: insecure, Bernhard craved intimacy and recognition. Yet his real admiration went for total independence, which, alas, he feared was impossible. He became a master of the on-off friendship, the unconsummated love affair. He would make friends with a married couple, insinuate himself into their family, monopolise the wife, then withdraw. The casualty list of those confused by his behaviour grew rapidly. Intense, yet distant, even with ‘Auntie’ he would switch back and forth from the intimate du to the formal Sie. But at least, he justified himself, he wouldn’t make the mistake of marrying and destroying wife and children as his grandfather had. The genetic buck would stop with Thomas.
After his break with the Tonhoff community, Bernhard travelled widely, but as soon as he had financial success (with his first major play), he bought a farmhouse and began to reinvent himself as an Austrian country gentleman. Then he thought he really ought to sell it and distance himself. Then he decided to keep it after all. Remorselessly castigating the Establishment, he eagerly sought the company of the aristocracy. A picture of the emperor Franz Joseph was hung upon the wall.
But there is nothing like the permanent dilemma for creating great art. Honegger is excellent at showing how Bernhard’s personal contradictions connected with the peculiarly Austrian genre of the Heimatroman and the very special role of the theatre in a suffocatingly tight-knit Austrian society. With the nation reduced, after the First War, to a fragment of its imperial, Austro-Hungarian glory, there had been a deliberate attempt to build up a national identity around narrative depictions of vigorous and morally commendable Austrian peasant life (the so-called Heimatroman). During the Nazi period, such literature had taken on a decidedly blood-and-soil flavour which afterward was repackaged, in many cases by the same writers, as a healthy, optimistic nativism, all too appealing to the Green Party and the tourist industry.
Johannes Freumbichler had enjoyed his only success, in 1937, with the unorthodox Heimatroman, Philomena Ellenhub, a book that ran against conventional Catholic morality by offering a sympathetic account of the vicissitudes of an independent, unmarried mother. Grandson Thomas went far further. His first novel, Frost (1963), presents a ferociously dystopian view of rural life. The narrator, a young medical student, has been instructed by a senior doctor to go to a remote mountain village to observe the doctor’s brother, a painter, who has secluded himself in the place for many years in a state of near insanity. ‘He lives, as they say, in his head. But he’s terminally confused. Haunted by vice, shame, awe, reproach … my brother is a walker, a man in fear. And a misanthrope.’10
The student records the painter’s ravings which combine a deep inner anguish with an obsessive loathing for the shameless sensuality of the landlady of the inn where both he and the student live and the violent drunken men who revolve around her and her two daughters: ‘The primitive is everywhere … Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by its nature … they live for sex, like most people, like all people … All of them live a sex life, and not a life.’11
As the book progresses, we begin to fear for the sanity of the medical student as he is both seduced and overwhelmed by the intensity and negativity of the painter’s vision. In particular he loses all confidence in his chosen profession. ‘Helper of mankind, I thought. Helping and mankind, the distance between those two terms. I can’t imagine myself ever helping anyone … I don’t understand anything.’12
Amras (1964), Bernhard’s second long work of prose, actually manages to step up the intensity, reconstructing the history of a family induced to attempt collective suicide by the rapacious ugliness of the surrounding rural society. Again the despair of the intellectual narrator, one of the sons who survives the attempt, feeds misanthropically on the utter spiritual emptiness of the ordinary world, but in such an exaggerated fashion that the reader is uncertain how to respond.
Gargoyles (1964), the third and by far the most accomplished of Bernhard’s subversions of the Heimatroman, once again picks up the theme of medical science’s inadequacy when confronted with extremes of intellectual despair on the one hand and blind appetite on the other. In this case the narrator, a young engineering student, accompanies his doctor father on a round of visits to sick patients in the dark woods, deep gorges and rocky mountains of the south-eastern province of Styria. The morning begins with a failed attempt to save an innkeeper’s wife, victim of a mindless drunken assault, and proceeds from catastrophe to catastrophe as it penetrates an ever gloomier countryside. The doctor’s denunciation of a dull and brutal provincial society could not be more radical or convincing:
Crimes in the city are nothing in comparison with crimes in the country. The innkeeper, he added, is your typical violent man, your born delinquent. Everything in him and about him is violent and criminal. At every moment and in every situation he is the merest cattle trader, it’s his job and he never transcends it. ‘And if he is now weeping and desperate,’ my father said, ‘he’s weeping because he’s lost a valuable beast. For an innkeeper his wife is never anything more than a valuable beast.’13
But it is characteristic of Bernhard that he doesn’t stop there. Soon enough the doctor doing the denouncing is himself implicated in the general failure. His cures are always inadequate. He is unable to communicate with his son. He seems resigned to the idea that his daughter will eventually commit suicide. We discover that his wife too suffered from depression and neurosis which may well have been at the root of her illness and early death. The doctor, the intellectual, seems quite unable to improve the world.
Indeed, where there is intelligent life in Gargoyles it tends to isolate itself. Bloch, the doctor’s only friend, is a successful estate agent, who keeps his intense intellectual life entirely separate from his commercial activities. More extreme, the (unnamed) writer/industrialist lives in complete segregation in a destructive, incestuous relationship with his sister. The doctor’s final visit is reserved for the most brilliant and isolated character of them all: Prince Sarau, hereditary landowner of vast areas of gloomy forest, lives in the gothic castle of Hochgobernitz perched high above the doomed landscape we have crossed. A dying monomaniac who at once fears and fantasises the extinction of his family and everything it represents, the prince launches into a hundred-page monologue which entirely shifts the equilibrium of the book and marks a crucial turning point in Bernhard’s career, as doctor, son and reader are spellbound by the obsessive and self-destructive power of the prince’s delivery:
‘If we succeed in becoming aware of the problematic nature of our existence we believe we have philosophical minds. We are constantly irritated by everything we touch, with the result that everything irritates us all the time. Those parts of our lives that are out of harmony with nature are particularly irritating. When the weather is bad (when visibility is poor!) we are warmly advised not to climb above a certain altitude, never mind the highest peaks. What’s more we feel weary,’ said the prince, ‘when philosophical speculation has wearied us. Obviously we all defend ourselves saying: I’ve got nothing to do with that lot! and we have every right to do so. I too, in fact, am always saying that I have nothing to do with them, that I don’t belong to anything or anyone. All the same, by pure chance, here we are together. We soon grow weary if we don’t resort to lying. It’s in the earth that foundations are laid, in the deepest substratum, we feel that without needing to think, and then fear besets us. Do we ask too much of others?’ asked the prince. ‘No,’ he answered himse
lf, ‘I think not. I meet someone and think: what are you thinking? Can I, I wonder, walk a while with you inside your brain? The answer is: no! We can’t walk a while together in the one brain. We force ourselves not to see our personal abyss. Yet all our lives long we do nothing but look down, at our physical and psychic abyss, without ever really seeing it. Our illnesses systematically destroy our lives, like handwriting that gets worse and worse until it destroys itself.’ The prince said: ‘Each of us argues interminably with himself saying: the “me” I’m talking to doesn’t exist. Every concept implies in itself an infinite number of other concepts …’14
As ever in Bernhard, the more isolated a character, the more chaotic the mind, and the more the world dissolves into a stream of words that might be either revelatory or meaningless.
In his next novel, The Lime Works, published in 1970, the characters who might normally be expected to appear in a Heimatroman are reduced to the few local people – the ex-works manager, a public safety inspector, the two managers of nearby estates – who give accounts of the life and ideas of the main character, Konrad, who, disgusted with the world and society, has withdrawn with his crippled wife to the absolute silence and segregation of the abandoned lime works where he hopes to write the definitive account of the faculty of hearing and, by implication perhaps, of the nature of communication.
Konrad’s humiliation is total. Not only, in his perfectionism, is he unable to write so much of a word of his book, not only does he find isolation as detrimental as company, but when at the end he murders his wife and hides from the police in the cesspit, he becomes himself just another statistic in the country’s long list of brutal domestic crimes. The ultimate defeat is that any valuable ideas he may have had are now passed on and modified, and indeed only exist, in the minds of the sort of people he despised and who, more conventional and more cautious than he, happily consume, along with the reader, his fascinating story. Inescapably, he is part of the local mental ecology. He was never separate at all. With wonderful irony, the various accounts of his downfall are gathered by an insurance agent struggling to sell life insurance policies in the local village inns. Konrad will serve as a cautionary tale.
Writing with immense power and the blackest of wit, Bernhard thus denies writing any power to alter the society it remorselessly criticises. On the contrary, the artist is implicated in the general freak show. Given that the wider Western world of today still likes to imagine creative authorship as a respectable branch of progressive liberal politics, such a negative vision was hardly the passport to international popularity. And indeed Bernhard has never achieved that. There remains, however, particularly for those of us who come to him through his novels rather than his plays, and that means most of his admirers outside the German-speaking world, the mystery of his success and notoriety on the Austrian and German stage, which was, after all, the source of his income. Herself trained in the theatre, Honegger is at her best here, and at her most confident in declaring Bernhard only partially comprehensible if read apart from his national setting.
Like so many of his characters, Bernhard loved to be alone, segregating himself behind the tall hedges surrounding his farmhouse, rapidly becoming part of local folklore, a misanthrope whose imagined malignant powers could be used to threaten a naughty village child. But he also loved, from time to time, to be the centre of attention. And since the theatre, as Honegger amply shows, has always played a central role in Austrian society – in particular the Burgtheater in the old imperial palace and the Salzburg Festival, Mecca of Austrian high culture, what better place for Bernhard to show himself? In one play, a character, who is herself an actress, remarks: ‘I’m not really an actress at all/I just wanted to be among people/that was the reason … I didn’t want to isolate myself.’15
Borrowing from Beckett, Strindberg and other immediate predecessors, Bernhard’s plays distinguish themselves for the virulence of their monologues attacking the middle-class Establishment. But who were in the audiences at the Salzburg Festival and the Burgtheater if not the middle-class Establishment? In the play Am Ziel (which might be translated Arrived) the nameless lead character, who is simply designated The Writer, remarks of his successful play:
I can’t understand
why they applauded
we are talking about a play
that exposes every one of them
and in the meanest way
admittedly with humor
but nasty humor
if not with malice
true malice
And all of a sudden they applaud.16
The staging of a Bernhard play thus demonstrates two apparently contradictory truths: the power of the artist to get people to accept absolutely anything; and simultaneously the impotence of the artist to change anything at all. The same people come back, once again applaud savage criticism of themselves, but never change (‘the Burgtheater’, he wrote, ‘could become a national mental institution for those who have proved themselves incurable.’)17 Honegger is fascinating when she describes how Bernhard used his casting to reinforce this idea of embattled stasis. Actors with a Nazi past would be cast in the role of Nazis, or even better in the role of a Jew whose rhetoric and neurosis is indistinguishable from a Nazi’s. An actress from one play would be given a role that in some way was a comment on her previous part. Elements in each play might refer to controversies created by earlier plays. In short, the collective memory of the local audience was essential. People were constantly reminded that all was as it always had been.
In this regard a productive misunderstanding between Bernhard and the man who directed most of his plays galvanised the author’s theatre career from beginning to end. Enfant terrible Claus Peymann came from the extreme left of the German political spectrum, openly sympathised with the terrorist Red Army Faction and insisted that the theatre was ‘a place of opposition – in certain times to the point of subversion’.18 When Bernhard wrote a play like Eve of Retirement which features an ageing ex-SS officer, now a respectable judge, who puts on his old uniform and sleeps with his devoted sister once a year to celebrate Himmler’s birthday, while the younger and crippled socialist sister is dressed up as a concentration-camp victim, Peymann no doubt saw this as grist for his political mill. Convinced of the positive value of shocking the audience, he did everything to create an atmosphere of scandal around Bernhard’s work. This suited Bernhard, for whom scandal was the only way he could enjoy himself in public, since it combined intense attention with supposedly independent action.
Politically, however, the playwright was far more complex than his faithful director. Of Eve of Retirement Honegger astutely remarks: ‘the outrage … was not the suggestion that the majority of Germans are incurable Nazis but the implication that fascism is just another symptom of an innate obsessiveness that also drives scholars, scientists and artists.’19 To which we might add that without such obsessiveness, life for Bernhard was unimaginable.
What is it then we are applauding when we enthuse over a writer who doubtless would have included each and every one of us in his scathing criticisms? The excellent Honegger with her sometimes jargon-bound academic prose and her research grant, as she properly acknowledges, from the Austrian Ministry of Culture and Education, would not have been exempt. Nor the writer of this review with his shamelessly biographical approach. In Gargoyles, the narrator’s father speaks of a painting that is at once absolutely ugly and at the same time absolutely beautiful. Then he explains: ‘It’s beautiful because it’s true.’20 The picture, we are told, shows two naked men standing back to back, but with their heads rotated, so that they are also face to face. It is a grotesque contradiction of isolation and intimacy.
As we read, in Bernhard’s coercively rhythmic prose, of the dangers of being possessed by the rhythms of another’s mind, as we put down one novel whose monomaniac narrator dreamt of being the last of his dynasty only to pick up another and find ourselves confronted with the man’s spiritual successor, as we smil
e over those interminable superlatives that always suggest that even the supreme effort will not be enough, as we embark on huge sentences, never-ending paragraphs, that remind us that experience is seamless and that if we want to say one thing we must be prepared to say everything, which is of course impossible, in short, as we read and reread Thomas Bernhard we have the intense impression of being able to savour, briefly held together in the decidedly artificial space of these performances, a true picture of the grotesque contradictions that drive our lives. The world described is ugly, the reflections leave no space for optimism, but the mechanism invented for delivering the bad news is never less than exhilarating.
Writing more often than not about writer’s block, Bernhard became one of the most prolific authors of his generation, producing seventeen full-length plays, a dozen novels, five works of autobiography. Insisting that all was parody and quotation, he created one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century. Awareness, in the last decade of his life, that he was terminally ill with lung and heart disease seemed only to accelerate his output. Denying the possibility of perfection, lamenting the false promise of genius, his own work got better and better. His last novels – Concrete, The Loser, Woodcutters, Extinction, Old Masters – are his finest.
In 1984 Hede Stavianicek died. Always discreet, never sharing the limelight, she had been his lifelong companion, his Lebensmensch as he put it. Bernhard was there at the end to care for her. ‘Suddenly I gave my tears free rein’ says the author’s stand-in in the novel he wrote immediately afterwards. ‘I wept and wept and wept and wept.’21 It is perhaps the only moment of cathartic release in all Bernhard’s work. Five years later, having always declared that we are no better than marionettes, Bernhard nevertheless made the gesture of severing the fatal strings himself, taking a lethal overdose shortly before an inevitable death. And in a last, mad bid for independence from his native country, his will, revised two days before his death, prohibited all publications or productions of his work in Austria until the end of his copyright.