The Loser

AFTERWORD

During his lifetime Thomas Bernhard’s texts provoked more than the ordinary share of scandals. But perhaps the most enduring scandal will turn out to be his very last text, his will: “Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself.” Bernhard had taken care not to reveal the contents of this will before he died; in fact, he even stipulated that news of his death not be announced until he was buried. This parting slap in the face of his native country thus came not only as a surprise; it came from the hand of a dead man, whose laughter rang out from the grave.

To be sure, it was absurd laughter that had something of a bad and willfully unpatriotic joke. But then so did most of Bernhard’s literary works. In his last play, Heldenplatz, one of the members of a Jewish family that has recently returned to Vienna characterizes the country as a pigsty with only “black” (i.e., fascist) and “red” (socialist) pigs living there:

In this most horrendous of states

you have only a choice

between black pigs and red pigs

an unbearable stench from the Royal Palace

and Ballhaus Square and Parliament

spreads over this completely disgusting and

decrepit country

(shouts)

This tiny state is a gigantic dunghill

“The whole thing was an absurd idea/to come back to Vienna,” the same character concludes in the very last lines of the play. “But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.”

Not to hear the laughter behind these last texts of Bernhard’s would be a mistake, for it would mean reading him literally, hence missing the dimension of irony, exaggeration, and pose that characterized all his writings and public statements to the very last. That Bernhard maintained this dimension even where it supposedly doesn’t belong, that quite literal and serious legal battles are being fought over the interpretation of his will, only points to his characteristic unwillingness to compromise what he saw as his fundamental task and pleasure as a writer: to denounce, scandalize, and just plain get on people’s nerves. “To shake people up, that’s my real pleasure,” he once admitted. This Bernhard undoubtedly managed to do for most of his life, and to judge from the court battles over his literary estate, he may well be doing it for some time to come.

Not that a serious dose of unassuaged anger wasn’t part of Bernhard’s vitriolic gestures. But by the same logic that made him refuse the world’s distinction between fact and fiction, between legal seriousness and poetic license, so Bernhard always maintained that this animosity was in fact an expression of his deep and abiding love for Austria. He once told a journalist, lowering his eyes and laughing quietly to himself, that he had signed the guestbook in a friend’s house as “die Güte selbst”—goodness in person. “Everybody was very surprised.” But Bernhard meant it, just as he meant it when he claimed that his anti-Austrian, lugubrious, death-obsessed narratives (“automatically black” in George Steiner’s phrase) sprang from his sense of humor, of the absurd, even from his “positive” view of life. Hence his refusal to paint Utopian or idealistic portraits: “An idealistic literary work can produce disgust in the reader. Whoever sees through the author’s intention and recognizes that in reality things are completely different will fall back into negativity.” Bernhard’s “negative” books, which make no attempt to prettify or soften reality, should produce the opposite reaction — cathartic or “tragic” laughter.

Bernhard loved as well as hated his native country, was tied to it by the chains of a passionate ambivalence, which is the true wellspring of all his work. Once a court reporter for the left-wing paper Demokratisches Volksblatt, Bernhard remained a “Zeitungsfresser” all his life, a person who “devoured” newspapers, local as well as national, gleaning from them his daily ration of outrage, humor, and absurdity. I remember sitting next to him in his favorite café in Vienna, the Bräunerhof, listening to a steady stream of polemical and witty commentary on each little story or fact, watching him return again and again to the newspaper table in search of more reading material. A master at provoking scandals, he relished reading about himself. But he also enjoyed the news about everyday life in small rural towns — land disputes, court trials, stories of adultery, murder, or suicide — which gave him the ideas for much of his work. And for this reason it is doubtful whether he could ever have lived and worked abroad. Most of Austria’s major postwar writers — Canetti, Celan, Bachmann, Handke — have preferred self-imposed exile to residence in their native country. Bernhard, ostensibly the most anti-Austrian of them all, is one of the few who never left.

But whereas Bernhard both loved and hated Austria, most Austrians simply hated Bernhard and would readily have done without his muck-raking attacks. The scandal provoked by Heldenplatz in the fall of 1988 is a case in point. Shortly before the opening, in November, newspapers leaked a few quotes from the play, which, like the above passage, were not exactly measured political assessments of Austria and its inhabitants. Without knowing anything about the play, in what context these passages appeared, or what irony Bernhard might have given them, journalists and politicians felt called upon to protest the use of taxpayers’ money for staging such an unpatriotic work in the Burgtheater, Austria’s national theater. Kurt Waldheim characterized the play as “an insult to the nation.” Popular outrage took to the streets. Normally well-behaved citizens scrawled obscene messages in public places against the ungrateful author, and one elderly lady attacked Bernhard with her umbrella as he was getting on the bus.

Of course there was a deeper reason for Austrians to be upset, as they would learn when the play finally opened. Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) had been commissioned and written that year to “commemorate” the fifty-year anniversary of Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. The play begins with the suicide of an eminent Jewish professor who fled Austria in 1938 and lived in exile in England before returning to present-day Vienna. Despairing of the still virulent anti-Semitism he encounters there, he throws himself from the window of his apartment overlooking Heroes’ Square, which not coincidentally is the square where thousands of cheering Austrians greeted Hitler in 1938 and which, also not coincidentally, is adjacent to the offices of Austria’s major politicians and the very Burgtheater where the play is performed. Bernhard’s sense of dramatic irony and historical context is superbly evident in the play, especially in the final scene, when the professor’s aged mother hears recorded chants of “Sieg Heil!” that emerge from the wings (and as if from outside the theater). She is hallucinating, since no one else on stage pays any attention to the chants. But the audience hears them, and as we look about we realize that some of the elderly, elegant spectators must have been on Heroes’ Square in 1938 shouting those very words. The voice Bernhard confronts his audience with is its own, the recorded voice of Austria’s buried political unconscious.

I tell these stories because most English-speaking readers will not be aware of the political dimension of Bernhard’s writing and its reception in Austria. But I also tell them because the scandals in Bernhard’s life were inseparable from his work, inseparable because both life and work were meant as a form of satire that would pass judgment on Austria even while laughing at its most egregious examples of political waywardness, provincialism, and human cruelty. In this respect Bernhard continues a long tradition of Austrian satire, from Johann Nestroy to Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and the experimental poet Ernst Jandl. For The Loser is first of all a satire of Austria. It is no accident that the narrator should meet Glenn Gould at the “Judge’s Peak” on Monk’s Mountain overlooking Salzburg. Nor that the three protagonists should rent a house that once belonged to a Nazi sculptor whose marble monstrosities still decorate the premises. Remnants of Austria’s past live on, and Bernhard was the self-appointed judge who would pass sentence.

Thomas Bernhard was born on 10 February 1931 in a cloister in Heerlen, a small town in Holland near the German and Belgian borders, where his unmarried mother had fled to avoid the scandal that an illegitimate birth would have caused in the Austrian provinces. His father, a peasant whom he never knew except through his mother’s bitter reminiscences, died sometime during the war, probably as a Nazi soldier. As a child, he lived with his mother’s parents in Vienna and the village of Seekirchen, in impoverished circumstances. By his own account these years were lonely ones, and he felt misunderstood and excluded even within his family. The one exception was his mother’s father, the poet and philosopher Johannes Freumbichler, who loved this awkward, strong-willed child and became his mentor. Bernhard later noted that it was his grandfather who instilled in him a fierce intellectual independence, warning him, for instance, not to take school seriously or to believe his teachers.

In 1943 Bernhard was sent to a boarding school in Salzburg, the provincial city that, with Vienna, would eventually form one of the two poles of his love-hate relationship to Austria. He attended the Johanneum Gymnasium briefly, took music lessons, and was considering a career as an opera singer. But his disgust with the school’s Catholic piety (which he claimed had merely supplanted the National Socialist piety he witnessed there during the war) led him to abandon his studies and apprentice himself to a grocer outside Salzburg. Lugging heavy sacks of potatoes in a damp cellar brought on a lung illness that almost killed him (at one point he received last rites) and kept him in and out of hospitals for several years. It is in this period, as a kind of therapy, that he began writing: “With death staring me in the face at the sanatorium in Grafenhof I first began to write. And that’s perhaps how I cured myself.” In 1951 he moved to Vienna to study at the Musik-Akademie, returning to Salzburg the following year, where he enrolled at the Mozarteum and studied music and theater arts; he graduated in 1956 with a thesis on Artaud and Brecht. Apart from several lengthy visits to Poland and a year in London working for the Austrian Cultural Institute, and extended vacations in Mediterranean countries, he lived in Austria on his earnings as a writer, alternating between a small apartment in Vienna and a farmhouse in Ohlsdorf (Upper Austria), not far from Salzburg. He died alone in this farmhouse on 12 February 1989, two days after his fifty-eighth birthday.

Bernhard’s first literary attempts in the 1950s and early 1960s were in lyric poetry, the same genre his grandfather had practiced. Morbid, almost hallucinatory verse modeled after Rilke and Trakl, it lacked the humor and dramatic brilliance of his later work and met with scant critical success; Bernhard himself later rejected it. His literary breakthrough came with the novel Frost (1963), in which his characteristic prose style — a relentless inner monologue unbroken by any paragraph markings, objective description, or external narrative events — is already fully developed. Bernhard never wavered from this monologistic form and even extended it into the theater, using it in the course of the next twenty-six years for an oeuvre that, although not without its weak moments, has few contemporary equals in quality or size: more than twenty novels or collections of stories, an equal number of plays, a five-volume autobiography, and two full-length scripts for movies based on his stories. For this work Bernhard received all the major Austrian and German awards, although he characteristically used these occasions to lash out at Austrian “philistinism” and “art hatred.” His acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 proved so offensive that it drove the Minister of Culture and a good part of the audience from the room.

The Loser was published in Germany in 1983 and comes at the end of a seven-year period in which Bernhard wrote the five volumes of his autobiography. This sustained examination of the self proved crucial. Whereas the earlier prose works had focused on private stories of madness and human isolation — an unknown painter who destroys his work, a country doctor treating incurably ill patients, an insane count lying alone in his villa — those written after the autobiography project these same scenarios onto the public biographies of people like Wittgenstein, Mendelssohn, or, as in the present case, Glenn Gould. But in each case the public figure serves as a foil for Bernhard himself. Indeed, the novels written after this point—Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Woodcutters, Old Masters, and The Loser—all walk a very thin line between fact and fiction, borrowing so heavily from the details of Bernhard’s real life that he was more than once sued for libel. These later texts are all part of what might be termed Bernhard’s imaginary autobiography — his own life story rewritten according to the lives of his artistic and philosophical doubles.

Thus Glenn Gould appears in The Loser, at once beguilingly familiar — the “real Glenn Gould,” who gave up public concerts at an early age to concentrate on his recordings — and an artificial literary construct that resembles Bernhard and all his fictional alter egos. There is no evidence that Bernhard ever met Gould, and the two certainly didn’t study together in Salzburg with Horowitz, as the novel claims. Yet there is a detail in Gould’s biography that may well have tickled Bernhard’s imagination into using him as a fictional doppelgänger. During a European tour in 1958, Gould gave a concert in Salzburg, which Bernhard, given his own music studies there, may well have attended. In any case, years later Gould recalled in one of his self-interviews that the drafty Festspielhaus had brought on a bout of tracheitis that forced him to cancel all concerts, withdraw for a month in the Alps, and lead “the most idyllic and isolated existence.” Gould the journalist speaks to Gould the musician thus:

Since you’re obviously a man addicted to symbols … it would seem to me that the Festspielhaus — the Felsenreitschule — with its Kafka-like setting at the base of a cliff, with the memory of equestrian mobility haunting its past, and located, moreover, in the birthplace of a composer whose works you have frequently criticized … is a place to which a man like yourself, a man in search of martyrdom, should return.

Here perhaps is the original kernel for Bernhard’s novel: the “Kafka-like setting” of the Festspielhaus, Gould’s respiratory illness and ascetic isolation in the Alps, a “return” to Salzburg, where Bernhard had also studied music so many years ago.…

True to his habit, however, Bernhard traffics freely with the details of Gould’s biography. The very first page of the novel puts his death at age fifty-one rather than the actual fifty. The Canadian pianist is given a lung disease that he never suffered from; in the novel it becomes his “second art.” Gould is said to have cut off relations with his family and withdrawn to a house in the woods near New York. In reality, after giving up concert life Gould returned to live with his parents in Toronto; his “cage in the woods” was the family cottage on Lake Simcoe. Bernhard’s Gould is completely absorbed by music and, unlike Wertheimer or the narrator, never engages in writing. The real Gould wrote constantly, and according to his official biographer, Otto Friedrich, left behind “sheaves of manuscripts” and an assortment of lined notepads containing “ideas, letters, drafts of interviews, revisions of articles, stock-market holdings, medical symptoms, his own temperature,” and other nonmusical data. Finally, Gould suffered a stroke while sleeping and died in a hospital a few days later. Bernhard uses poetic license to have his Gould die of a stroke at the piano while playing the Goldberg Variations.

Why these distortions? In part Bernhard adapts Gould’s actual biography to make it fit his own. Bernhard, not the Canadian virtuoso, turned fifty-one the year Gould died; he had the lung disease that, ever since he began writing at the sanatorium in Grafenhof, became his “second art” of fashioning unending sentences; he broke with his family and moved to an isolated house in the country. But Bernhard also distorts the facts of Gould’s life to make him into a monolithic, Zarathustrian Übermensch of artistic will and power. Gould represented not only a pinnacle of musical virtuosity but, more important, an uncompromising artistic personality who refused to sacrifice his original talent to the demands of critics or public. It is not just Gould’s playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It didn’t matter that this example was partly a myth, or that the actual Gould quite cannily orchestrated his public image and record sales. For Bernhard didn’t need Glenn Gould, he needed the “idea of Glenn Gould”— the “thought vehicle” with which he could spin out his own literary variation of Gould playing Bach.

The narrator in The Loser, who is never identified by name, also resembles Bernhard in several key respects. The brief account he gives of his academic itinerary near the end of the novel corresponds exactly to the novelist’s own study in Vienna and Salzburg, the only difference being that the narrator has a house in Desselbrunn rather than the nearby Ohlsdorf, where Bernhard actually resided. (Incidentally, all the place names in the novel are real and are taken from the region of Upper Austria that Bernhard knew since childhood.) The narrator also admits to a “subjective,” “unjust” tendency in describing his friend Wertheimer which is undoubtedly part of Bernhard’s own troubled conscience: “I would have again mentioned things that were better left unmentioned, things concerning Wertheimer, and with all the injustice and exaggeration that have become my fate, in a word with the subjectivity I myself have always detested but from which I have never been immune.”

But just as Bernhard projects positive elements of his own artistic identity into the portrait of Gould, so he deliberately caricatures himself in that of the narrator, who, like “the loser,” is a prisoner of Gould’s musical example, abandons his career, and spends his life writing and rewriting his essay About Glenn Gould. Unlike Bernhard, already the author of some forty published novels and plays, the narrator has never published any of his work, still has no idea what philosophy is despite having devoted the better part of his life to it, and, now that his two closest friends are dead, seems headed for an early grave. “Now I’m alone,” he thinks, “since, to tell the truth, I only had two people in my life who gave it any meaning: Glenn and Wertheimer. Now Glenn and Wertheimer are dead and I have to come to terms with this fact.”

Bernhard thus operates according to a logic of inventive schizophrenia, splitting and doubling himself into a series of alter egos that are locked in a life-and-death struggle. The external narrative is in fact a metaphysical drama of the divided self. But there is also a third doppelgänger, Wertheimer, “the loser.” Though not directly modeled after any actual person, the narrator’s friend bears traits of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a figure who implicitly and explicitly informs a good deal of Bernhard’s writing since Correction. Like the philosopher, Wertheimer comes from a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, has a close but conflictual relationship with his sister, and writes fragmentary “notes” that in the novel are called Zettel—the title Wittgenstein used to refer to some of his late philosophical aphorisms. But Wertheimer, though undoubtedly brilliant, is an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein: an envious, weak artist who is destroyed by Gould’s superior talent; a sadist who keeps his sister locked up in a quasi-incestuous relationship; and finally a philosophical failure who burns all his notes before committing a spiteful, embarrassing suicide.

With these three characters in place — all of them drawn subjectively from the lives of Gould, Bernhard, and Wittgenstein — the author of The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But if the form is the same, Bernhard’s genius consists in his ability to vary the main themes and settings for his work, which function as an analogue to his own writing — Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in Correction, the paintings of Goya and Brueghel in Old Masters, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in Woodcutters. Here it is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould, that provides as it were the basso continuo for Bernhard’s own deliberately droning repetitions and variations. With the monologistic, uninterrupted flow of its sentences, the novel conjures up the image of a singer fighting to sustain his breath to the end of an impossibly long, embellished aria. Or, to use the historical reference behind the novel, the image of an insomniac count listening to Goldberg play Bach’s variations over and over again. And everywhere we sense Gould’s dedication to this music, a dedication so fanatical and inhuman that it extinguishes all personal identity: “My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould, he said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous.… To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, he said, I thought, Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach.”

But the analogy goes further. For it is not just Bach’s music that informs The Loser, but a modernist reading of Baroque music — Bach filtered through the aggressively atonal, mathematical formalism of Schönberg and Webern, whom Bernhard and Gould both admired. This is not the place to detail the considerable similarities between Gould’s musical views and Bernhard’s prose style. Suffice it to say that both artists appreciated the fugal nature of Baroque music, which mixes without dissolving the differences between two, three, and even four distinct voices. Gould’s uncanny ability to sustain the separation between voices in a musical composition bears a striking affinity to Bernhard’s narrative schizophrenia. Not surprisingly, both men were fascinated by the problem of impersonation, quotation, and artistic doublings. They also shared a dislike for individualist art forms (like a Mozart sonata or a Balzac novel) based on progression, climax, and reconciliation. Gould felt that “a sense of discomfort, of unease, could be the sagest of counselors for both artist and audience”; Bernhard enjoyed “shaking people up.” Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. “Art should be given the chance to phase itself out,” Gould maintained in his self-interview, just as the artist himself should have the necessary inner mobility and strength “to opt creatively out of the human situation.” In his acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature, Bernhard offered his public the Baroque wisdom that “everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”

In the final analysis, what matters is that in the idea of Glenn Gould Bernhard found something he could love and respect unconditionally, a touchstone with which to judge the world around him. “Those are terrible people,” the Jewish professor says to his housekeeper in Heldenplatz, “who don’t like Glenn Gould.… I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.… I also demand that my wife love Glenn Gould, in that respect I’m a fanatic.” To be sure, Gould is the hammer which Bernhard used to unsettle Austria’s complacent image of itself as the most musical nation of Europe, the birthplace of Mozart and Schubert. And the “fanatics” who love Gould as much as the narrator does in The Loser are also ironic figures, emblems of the absurd limits to which people drive themselves in the name of art. But in Gould Bernhard found a balancing force to the vitriolic satire he couldn’t help directing at his fellow Austrians, “with the subjectivity I personally have always detested but from which I have never been immune.” This saves The Loser from being merely an exercise in verbal wit, caricature, and (self-) mockery. Here we have Bach’s music, Gould’s artistic dedication, and finally the narrator’s confession of love and friendship for the two people who meant everything to him and now are gone. Neither Bernhard nor his narrator is prone to sentimentality — but beneath all their ironic laughter, that confession can still be heard.

MARK M. ANDERSON

Ernst Aichinger at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York generously provided information for the present remarks; may he and his colleagues be thanked here. M.A.