Where Have You Been? (36 page)

It's a personal thing, but also an Austrian thing. In
The Man Without Qualities
, Musil says, “The man of genius is duty-bound to attack.” Perhaps it's the sweetness and pleasingness of the rest of the culture that means that anything honest or anything good will always be critical. Anyway, Bernhard has always had his superior ranters spitting pessimism and disaffection, leaving, as Germans say, “not a good hair” on anything or anyone. They are said to be based, in life, on Bernhard's grandfather, the totally obscure Austrian writer Johannes Freumbichler who, as the English say, “took him in hand,” and to whose memory and example he remained devoted. The role of the baobab in St.-Exupéry is played by the grandfather in Bernhard.
Gathering Evidence
, Bernhard's five-part autobiographical memoir, begins with the eight-year-old Bernhard borrowing his “guardian's” (a nervous word for the man who later became his stepfather) bicycle, which is several sizes too big for him, and making a doomed attempt to ride it up hill and down dale to his grandfather's house in another town. It seems probable to me that the re-valuation of all values (Nietzsche) required to make one a writer took place very early in Bernhard's life, when he decided that Freumbichler was not a talentless wastrel who made life miserable for everyone around him (which seems on the face of it a view with much to commend it) but a misunderstood genius whose every word was worth recording; and by the same token that the world was not mostly a dim and well-meaning sort of place, higgledy-piggledy and inefficient but broadly correct and, in any case, hopelessly set in its ways, but a sinister and perverted conspiracy that produced only deformed individuals and institutions and that should be opposed and exposed every step of the way, ideally by a grand, insouciant, terrifying, and old soliloquist (and the greatest of these, somehow, is old: master is good, but old is better, in age only is our salvation, and Bernhard, alas for himself, did not live to be old). If the whole world, all received opinion, all authority, all ease and rewards are in one pannier, one's duty is to jump into the other without even looking, Jeanne Moreau–style. The unwritten motto of Bernhard, in life and work, is
contra mundum
. In other books, this Freumbichler figure takes on the world or its Austrian microcosm by himself in arias of virtuosic hatred, here it is more the braiding of Reger's dominant voice with the alert, repertorial voice of Atzbacher, and the copying voice of Irrsigler, who has, “over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, of Reger's sentences,” in a sort of lopsided barbershop trio. One that sings, as it were, only the black notes.

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.