Dead Man Walking

Thomas Bernhard is one of the indispensable writers of the 20th century. That he is little known in America is cause for sadness at what has been missed. Yet we must steel ourselves against going down the usual path of castigating the reading habits of the public, which, perhaps instinctively, knows that reading a book by Bernhard is a painful and frightening experience. He provides an overwhelming sense of intellectual and emotional exhilaration unmatched by any contemporary American author.

“Tragedy, that’s what life is, a tragedy that can’t be stopped, featuring a few ridiculous characters,” wrote Bernhard at 28 in his first book, “On the Mountain,” unpublished until the year of his death in 1989 at 58. In English, there is a refreshing absence of intimidating scholarly criticism (the kind that makes it difficult to enjoy a book on its own) on Bernhard’s work.

Bernhard did not mellow, develop or grow as one might expect writers to do. In his 1974 play, “The Hunting Party,” a character says in a typical Bernhard stance:

As soon as we look at a person

very clearly

we see

that he is dead

one existence after the other

and what we hear

is something already dead

what we are told

what we are taught

what we must practice and study

at all times

seen this way we must say

there comes a dead man

whenever we see a person

walking in front of us

As soon as we know

we know

that we are dead

But of course we love

our ways of dying

we make notes about them

we publish them

We trust death

This person I think

and everything is dead

thus we are afraid

to meet this person or another

since we can see then

we are dead.

Bernhard was an Austrian writer. Such a simple factual statement would twirl the corpse of Bernhard in the grave because, upon his death, having published more than 45 volumes of plays, fiction, poetry and memoir, he left a will forbidding the republication of his books, the staging of his plays and even the mere public reading from any of his works within the borders of Austria. And this was not because he had been neglected during his lifetime. Far from it. He had received every literary prize that the German-speaking world awards; his books had been well published; his plays staged by every major theater in Europe; and his death was front-page news all over Europe.

Bernhard did not want the Austrian authorities to sanitize his honed and hard-earned disgust with the besotted, self-satisfied neo-Nazi world of much of contemporary Austria. He was sure they would turn his work into another jewel in the crown of an Austrian culture that had been able to convince the world, as the old saw has it, that Beethoven was Viennese and that Hitler was German.

A reader can begin anywhere in the work of Bernhard and immediately hear the darkly exhilarating voice so accurately described by Nietzsche in his notebooks: “No one talks to me other than myself, and my voice comes to me as the voice of a dying man. With you, beloved voice, with you, the last vaporous remembrance of all human happiness.”

The actual experience of opening a Bernhard book is presciently described by Bernhard himself (what a pleasure awaits if you have never read a Bernhard book): “One has to imagine the pages in my book as completely dark: the word lights up, this is how it becomes distinct and overly distinct. . . . If one opens my books . . , one should imagine being in a theater opening the curtain, with the first page the title appears, total darkness--slowly words emerge from the background, from the dark, gradually they transform into processes, external and internal ones, which manifest themselves all the more clearly precisely because of their artificiality.”

And what a wonderful literary season this is, because it sees the publication of an earlier Bernhard text, “The Voice Imitator” (first published in Germany in 1978), which is composed of 101 stories, some no more than three sentences long and others, at the very most, a page in length. The stories owe much in form and voice to the typical short newspaper story of incident. As delineated on the cover, the book contains 18 suicides, six painful deaths, one memory lapse, four disappearances, 20 surprises, three character attacks, five early deaths, 26 murders, 13 instances of lunacy, four cover-ups and two cases of libel.

A short story is a piece of prose in which something happens and is elaborated upon. It has often been said that the problem with short stories is that they are never short enough. Well, Bernhard has removed all of the elaboration to allow these tender morsels of despair and disgust to shine: “Last week in Linz 180 people died who had the flu that is currently raging in Linz, but they died not from the flu but as a result of a prescription that was misunderstood by a newly appointed pharmacist. The pharmacist will probably be charged with reckless homicide, possibly, according to the paper, even before Christmas.”

No commentary is needed for such a story, beyond noting the economy in the telling and the wonderfully ironic tracing of our powerless response to accidental death, again exemplified in another story: “Last week we witnessed the spectacle of five cows running one after the other, into the express train in which we had to return to Vienna and of seeing them cut all to pieces. After the track had been cleared by the train crew and even by the driver, who came along with a pickax, the train proceeded after a delay of about forty minutes. Looking out of the window I caught sight of the milkmaid as she ran screaming toward a farmyard in the dusk.”

But before approaching these odd and brilliant gems in “The Voice Imitator,” the reader might begin with “Correction,” a novel in which a man is sorting the papers of a friend who has committed suicide. The novel takes the frustrating inability to understand an abstract problem and makes it into the most compelling, sensuous experience possible. “Correction” details the exact moment in a life when no matter how hard you try to understand a problem, there is no way you will succeed, given the limitations of your intellect. It eventually focuses on that brief, rare moment of self-honesty: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong) acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth. . . . But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying.”

Or the reader could throw his or her reading life into Bernhard’s last published novel, “Extinction.” Murau, an Austrian, lives in Rome, where he is a writer and tutor to a young man, Gambetti. He receives a telegram from his sisters informing him that his parents and older brother have been killed in a car crash. For the first half of the book, he thinks about going home to the funeral at Wolfsegg, the family estate, in Upper Austria, and in the second half, he is there for the funeral and to assume the estate.

The voice of Murau focuses upon the scene of his birth, the awfulness that is Austria, a country that has been “cheated of everything and had all its sense knocked out of it by Catholicism, National Socialism and pseudo-socialism. . . . [W]henever one comes back to Austria, one feels dirty.”

Murau is classical in his loathing for his family, for Austria, for the German mind; classical in his austerity, in the regularity of his hatred--taking inspiration, one could say, from his favorite composer, Haydn--he never sinks into the romantic chaos of carping personal complaint or into the atomized mush of the modern mind, which values, for instance, the photograph. “To take a photograph of a person is to mock him,” he says, “and by the same token all who take photographs, even if they do it professionally and achieve the greatest artistry, are nothing but mockers of humanity.”

Murau continues with a biting example: “Just think of the photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I can no longer visualize Einstein without his tongue sticking out, Gambetti, I said, I can’t think of Einstein without seeing his tongue, that cunning malignant tongue, stuck out at the whole world, indeed the whole universe.” Of course, it must be remembered that Bernhard is also a dramatist, whose 13 major plays have been performed all over Europe (and, scandously, all but unperformed in America), and one can imagine “Extinction” being read onstage by a great actor: as if one could imagine an impeccable Cary Grant suddenly given the ability to recite the great soliloquies of Shakespeare.

And Bernhard, through Murau, clearly establishes his ambition and the context in which the reader is to judge his work by setting out to demolish first Goethe and then to note: “Thomas Mann produced thoroughly lower-middle-class works, I told Gambetti, addressed to lower-middle-class readers who fall upon them with gusto. For at least a hundred years we’ve had nothing but what I would call binder literature, lower-middle-class-bureaucratic writing, and the masters of this literature are Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, to say nothing of the others. The one exception is of course Kafka, who actually was a bureaucrat, was the only one who produced not bureaucratic literature but great literature.”

The mind, through the voice of Murau in “Extinction,” is about as far from the American experience as one can imagine--experience which celebrates an optimism so ingrained in the American character that the lowest, most debased derelict on the road is prepared to talk about how things are bound to get better--”come the millennium, Gambetti, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking, and the process of stultification inaugurated by the photograph and universalized by motion pictures will have reached its apogee. It will scarcely be possible to exist in a world dominated by brainlessness, I said, and we’d do well to kill ourselves before this process of stultification has engulfed the whole world. To this extent, it’s only logical, Gambetti, that by the millennium those who exist by thinking and through thinking should have already killed themselves. The only advice I can offer to any thinking person is to kill yourself before the millennium, Gambetti--that’s my genuine conviction, I had said, as I now recalled standing by the open grave.”

All of Bernhard’s novels involve the creation of a character who begins to talk. We are spared the alluring mechanistic plot involving the usual parade of incident that stuffs the traditional novel, and by centering “Extinction” so completely on Murau, Bernhard performs one great sleight of hand: He endows Murau with the force of autobiographical pain, rant and authority. From what is known of Bernhard’s life, the outward circumstances of Murau’s life bear little upon Bernhard’s actual life, which he revealed, to some extent, in “Gathering Evidence.”

“Gathering Evidence,” composed of five short volumes originally published separately over a seven-year period, is one of the most powerful autobiographies of the 20th century. Unique in combining an unnerving objective attitude with a lyrical intensity to the excruciating detail of his childhood, the resulting story of horror is overwhelming in its impact.

Bernhard was born in 1931 in Holland, where his unwed mother had fled to escape the disapproval of Austrian society. Because of the poverty and misery of their life there, they were forced to return to Austria, where Bernhard became an object of his mother’s love and loathing as he was a constant reminder of her mistake. Bernhard was saved from despair only by the supportive presence of an anarchist grandfather, who passed along to Bernhard his scathing disgust for the society into which both of them had been born. Escaping school as a teenager, Bernhard went to work in a grocery and discovered his talent for music. He was encouraged by a music teacher who exemplified in his manner of instruction what has become the hallmark of Bernhard’s work: precision and relentlessness.

Because of the conditions in the shop, Bernhard contracted tuberculosis and began yearlong tours of various sanitariums and hospitals, which he survived and which gave to him a clinical detachment, “These terminally sick patients, these stinking, putrefying human beings who were little more than skeletons, lay in their beds smoking cigarettes. The mixture of putrefaction and cigarette smoke produces an abominable stench. They’re smoking now, I thought, but in a day or two they’ll be gone--wheeled out and dumped in the ground. Watching the sisters of the order of St. Vincent undressing patients who had just died, washing them and then replacing their clothes as though it were the most normal activity in the world, I reflected on the degree of insensitivity one would have to attain to in order to do such work, or alternatively, the degree of self-abnegation or self-sacrifice. I did not have the courage to admire these heroic women--I was too afraid. When a life has come to an end, the people left behind pick up the jacket and trousers and dirty underclothes and walk away with them over their arms. It was always the same picture, but it never ceased to fascinate me. I was at once repelled and attracted by it.”

And out of these experiences with the dead and dying came a fascination with how newspapers mirrored the routine of human life and death (and later he would spend time as a reporter for a small socialist paper in Salzburg, for which he wrote stories on every conceivable subject): “I also rediscovered an urge to read the newspapers, and though I at once found myself repelled by them, this did not prevent me from reading them daily: even at that time I had developed an addiction (a lifelong addiction, as it turned out) to the mechanical routine of getting hold of newspapers and reading them--only to be unfailingly repelled by them.”

But if these three books are high points of Bernhard’s career, they are joined by shorter works of equal merit. Another, “The Loser,” might, for instance, have been easily mentioned (based loosely on the life of Glenn Gould), or “Wittgenstein’s Nephew” (a record of Bernhard’s friendship with the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein).

Finally, what is unique about Bernhard, unlike Beckett (with whom he is often compared), is that Bernhard is talkative; he does not fall into the slapstick of silence that Beckett often uses. There is a passage in “Gathering Evidence” in which Bernhard has lunch with a rediscovered acquaintance with whom he worked in the grocery and who now operates a pneumatic drill:

“We exchanged any number of memories. Then, when we had ended our conversation, he said So long and Nothing matters, just as if I had said it to myself. What characterizes me today is my indifference, aware as I am that there are no differences in value among the things that have been or are now or will be in the future. There is no scale of value--that is all done with. Human beings are as they are and cannot be changed, any more than the objects they have made in the past or make now or will make in the future. Nature knows no scale of values. It knows only human beings, with all their weaknesses, all their physical and spiritual dirt, every day that dawns. It is a matter of indifference whether one of them despairs as he stands over his pneumatic drill or another as he sits at his typewriter. Only theories can cripple us--that is obvious--all the philosophies and systems of thought which block the way to clarity with their unusable insights. We have been through almost everything and what is still to come will bring us no surprises because every eventuality has been taken into account.”

And Bernhard surely would note: We can still continue to talk and observe, as he does in “The Voice Imitator”: “Near the Coptic quarter in Cairo we noticed whole rows of streets in whose four- and five-story houses thousands of chickens and goats and even pigs are kept. We tried to imagine what the noise would be if those houses were to burn down.”

****

THE VOICE IMITATOR. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by Kenneth J. Northcott . University of Chicago Press: 116 pp., $17.95

ON THE MOUNTAIN. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by Russell Stockman . Marlboro Press: 128 pp., $10.95

CORRECTION. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins . University of Chicago Press: 282 pp., $15.95

EXTINCTION. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by David McLintock . University of Chicago Press: 336 pp., $14.95

GATHERING EVIDENCE. By Thomas Bernhard . Vintage: 352 pp., [out of print]

THE LOSER. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by Jack Dawson . University of Chicago Press: 200 pp., $13.95

WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW: A Friendship. By Thomas Bernhard . Translated from the German by David McLintock . University of Chicago Press: 108 pp., $9.95