Most people who see themselves as unassailable–detached, complete, a whole world in their heads–just look lonely to others. It’s a familiar pose of city life, where the looming human spectacle allows isolation to pass for aloofness; alienation, a tonier, more artistic version of the same thing, is an old favorite with writers who presume to be observers of that spectacle by trade. But they’re mostly shams too. You no more expect to meet a truly unassailable mind on the printed page than you do at a dinner party, so when it actually happens the shock of the experience is likewise immediate and bracing, if not altogether pleasant. That’s pretty much what it feels like to read Thomas Bernhard–Austrian, lung patient, unyielding foe of Nazis and Catholics.
The first thing you’ll notice is an unbroken wall of words. Save for a single division in the middle of the book, there are no chapters, breaks, or pauses of any kind. There are no paragraphs. There is only one sentence after another from beginning to end. All of Bernhard’s books are like this: if there is no rest for me, he seems to be saying, there will be none for you. It is daunting to look at, but once you begin to read you see that this peculiar style, which in any other hands would be a cheap and mediocre trick, is essential to Bernhard.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It will be obvious that what we have here isn’t just a tale about some degenerate family: Wolfsegg is Austria, and the Muraus are the corrupt inhabitants of a corrupted state. Bernhard’s allegories are always transparent. This is a book that aims straight at the one great taboo of central European politics and propriety, and if its author had no reason to be coy, he had no need to exaggerate either. It may sound grotesque when Murau says that Nazis “are the people my countrymen regard as heroes, not just as yesterday’s heroes, as is frequently maintained, but to an even greater extent as today’s heroes”; but to judge by the career of Kurt Waldheim, Murau is stating the simple truth.
They’re all different renderings of the same man: a misanthrope consumed with philosophy, eccentric if not deranged, who gets lost in some huge creative project that eventually destroys him. One secludes himself and his invalid wife in an abandoned lime works so he can finally get down to writing his definitive study, The Sense of Hearing. He’s got all nine sections of this treatise mapped out in his head, but for 20 years he’s been “constantly missing the right moment for capturing it all on paper.” He never writes a word, and ends up blowing his wife’s head off with the Mannlicher carbine she keeps strapped to the back of her wheelchair. Another spends years working on the perfect house for his sister, a cone set down in the precise geographical center of the Kobernausser forest. He believes the cone is exactly suited to her needs, but the minute he presents it to her she’s overtaken by a terminal disease. While she’s dying he continues to correct a manuscript he’s written about the cone, and to correct the resulting corrections, until he makes “the ultimate correction” at the end of a rope. A third is a concert pianist who gave up his career after meeting Glenn Gould when they were both students. The transcendent genius of the Canadian gradually destroyed his own ability to play, so instead he devotes himself to philosophy, which he doesn’t understand, and to his Essay on Glenn, which he can’t seem to finish. He doesn’t commit suicide, but a friend of his–another failed piano player whom Gould nicknamed “the Loser”–hangs himself.
Each man also carried his convictions into the grave. Socrates refused to outrage himself by saying the simple words that would have gotten him off, preferring to needle his judges and so be condemned. When Bernhard died, he left a will that forbids the reprinting, recitation, or performance of his published work within the boundaries of Austria–“however this state identifies itself”–for the length of his copyright, 70 years; it also bars any study of his manuscripts in that country for all time. (One exception is his last play, Heldenplatz, which was commissioned to mark the 50-year anniversary of Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Its title refers to the place where hundreds of thousands of Viennese screamed “Sieg Heil!” as Hitler goose-stepped into their city in March of 1938. The play debuted at the Burgtheater, the citadel of Austrian dramatic arts, just three months before Bernhard’s death, and it continued to run afterward in the midst of a huge uproar. Kurt Waldheim, then two years into his term as president, called it a “crude insult to the Austrian people.”)
