The Loser (17 page)

against himself
for days, even weeks. A fact that had to strike me as totally incomprehensible, since for decades Wertheimer didn’t want to have anything to do with these conservatory colleagues, never wanted to hear anything about them and even in his sleep he wouldn’t have had the idea of inviting them one fine day to Traich, which apparently he now had done, and between this absurd invitation and his suicide there must be a relationship, I thought. Those people ruined a lot of things in Traich, said Franz. Wertheimer had been
exuberant
with them, which by the way Franz had also noticed, he became a totally different person in their company during those days and weeks. Franz also said that the people had spent more than two weeks in Traich and let Wertheimer provide for them, he actually
said provide
, just as the innkeeper had said in relation to these people from Vienna. After this whole crowd, which hadn’t kept quiet a single night, got roaring drunk every night, finally went away, Wertheimer got into bed and didn’t get up for two days and nights, said Franz, who in the meantime had cleaned up the dirt from these city people, in general brought the entire house back into a
decent human condition
, in order to spare Herr Wertheimer the sight of Traich’s devastation when he got up, said Franz. What he, Franz, particularly noticed, that is that Wertheimer had had a piano delivered from Salzburg in order to play it, certainly should have some meaning for me. A day before the people from Vienna arrived he had
ordered
a piano for himself in Salzburg and had had it brought to Traich and played it, at first only for himself, then, when the whole company was assembled, for this company, Wertheimer played Bach for them, Franz said, Handel and Bach, which he hadn’t done for more than ten years. Wertheimer, said Franz, played Bach on the piano without stopping until finally the company couldn’t take it anymore and left the house. The company was barely back in the house before he would start playing Bach again until they went out. Perhaps he wanted to drive them all crazy with his piano playing, said Franz, for no sooner had they stepped inside than he would start playing Bach and Handel for them, playing until they ran away, outside, and when they came back they had to put up with his piano playing again. It went on this way for over two weeks, said Franz, who soon had to think his master had lost his mind. He thought that the guests wouldn’t put up with it for long, that Wertheimer always played the piano for them without stopping, but even so they had stayed two weeks,
more than two weeks
, without exception, he, Franz, suspected, since he saw that Wertheimer actually drove his guests crazy with his piano playing, that Wertheimer bribed his guests, gave them money so they would stay in Traich, for without such a bribe, that is without
money in return
, said Franz, they surely never would have stayed more than two weeks to let themselves be driven crazy by Wertheimer’s piano playing, and I thought that Franz was probably correct in assuming that Wertheimer had given these people money, actually bribed them, even though perhaps not with money but with something else, so that they stayed two weeks, indeed
more
than two weeks. For he surely wanted them to stay more than two weeks, I thought, otherwise they wouldn’t have stayed more than two weeks, I know Wertheimer too well not to think him capable of that kind of blackmail. Always only Bach and Handel, said Franz, without stopping,
until he blacked out
. Finally Wertheimer had a
king’s meal
, as Franz put it, brought up to the large dining room for all these people and told them that they all had to be gone the next morning, he, Franz, had heard with his own ears how Wertheimer said he no longer wanted to see their faces the next morning. He actually had taxis from Attnang-Puchheim ordered for every one of them for the next morning and indeed for four o’clock in the morning and they all drove off in these taxis, leaving the house in a catastrophic state. He, Franz, began cleaning up the mess immediately and without delay, he couldn’t have known, as he said, that his employer would stay in bed for two days and two nights, but that had been a good thing, for Wertheimer had needed the rest and he undoubtedly would have had a stroke, so Franz, if he’d seen what a state those people had left his house in, they shamelessly
destroyed
some of the furniture, said Franz, overturned chairs and even tables before leaving Traich and shattered a few mirrors and a few glass doors, probably out of arrogance, said Franz, out of anger at having been exploited by Wertheimer, I thought. A piano actually stood where no piano had stood for a decade, now there’s a piano, as I saw after going up to the second floor with Franz. I was interested in Wertheimer’s notes, I had said to Franz while still downstairs in the kitchen, without hesitating Franz then led me up to the second floor. The piano was
an Ehrbar
and worth nothing. And it was, as I noticed right away, totally out of tune, an amateur’s instrument through and through, I thought. I wasn’t able to keep myself from sitting down at the piano but then I shut the cover immediately. I was interested in the notes, the slips of paper Wertheimer had written, I said to Franz, whether he could tell me where these notes were. He didn’t know what notes I meant, said Franz, only then reporting the fact that Wertheimer, on the day he had ordered a piano for himself
at the Mozarteum
, that is one day before that crowd of people came to Traich who more or less devastated Traich, had burned entire stacks of paper in the so-called downstairs stove, that is the stove in the dining room. He, Franz, had helped his master with this task, for the stacks of notes were so large and heavy that Wertheimer hadn’t been able to drag them downstairs alone. He had taken out hundreds and thousands of notes from all his drawers and closets and with his, Franz’s, help had dragged them down to the dining room to burn the notes, solely for the purpose of burning the notes he’d had Franz light the dining room stove at five in the morning that day, said Franz. When the notes were all burned,
all that writing
, as Franz expressed himself, he, Wertheimer, called up Salzburg and ordered the piano and Franz distinctly recalled that during this telephone call his master kept insisting that they send
a completely worthless, a horribly untuned grand piano
to Traich.
A completely worthless instrument, a horribly untuned instrument
, Wertheimer is supposed to have repeated over and over on the phone, said Franz. A few hours later four people delivered the piano to Traich and put it in the former music room, said Franz, and Wertheimer gave the men who had put the piano in the music room
a huge tip
, if he wasn’t mistaken, and he wasn’t mistaken, he said,
two thousand schillings
. The deliverymen weren’t out the door, said Franz, before Wertheimer sat down at the piano and began playing. It was awful, said Franz. He, Franz, had thought his master had lost his mind. But he, Franz, hadn’t wanted to believe in Wertheimer’s insanity and hadn’t taken the nonetheless curious behavior of Wertheimer, his master, seriously. If I had any interest in the matter, Franz said to me, he would describe to me the days and weeks that then took place in Traich. I asked Franz to leave me alone in Wertheimer’s room for a while and put on Glenn’s
Goldberg Variations
, which I had seen lying on Wertheimer’s record player, which was still open.

AFTERWORD

One might just be happy a few times a year
in this city, walking across the Kohlmarkt
or the Graben, strolling down
the Singerstrasse in the spring air

Thomas Bernhard
, Heldenplatz

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.