My Prizes: An Accounting (3 page)

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Authors: Thomas Bernhard

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BOOK: My Prizes: An Accounting
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The Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen

After five blank years, when I wrote
Frost
in Vienna in twelve months (1962), my future was bleaker than it had ever been. I had sent
Frost
to a friend, who was an editor at the Insel publishing house, and the manuscript was accepted within three days. But even as it was accepted, I realized that my work was incomplete and could not be published with its current defects. In a boardinghouse in Frankfurt which was on one of the busiest streets near the Eschenheimer Tower and was one of the cheapest I could consider, I revised the entire book, and all the sections in
Frost
that have a title as a heading, I wrote in that boardinghouse. I got up at five in the morning and sat at the little table in the window and when by
midday I had written five or eight or even ten pages, I would take them and run to my editor at Insel to go over with her where these pages had to be slotted into the manuscript. The entire book was transformed during those weeks in Frankfurt, I threw away many pages, probably around a hundred, until it seemed to be acceptable and could go into production. When the galleys came, I was on a trip to Warsaw to visit a girlfriend who was studying at the Academy of Art there. I took a room at the coldest time of year in the so-called Dziekanka, a student residence right near the palace headquarters of the regime, ran around for weeks in the beautiful, exciting, eerie city of Warsaw, and read the galleys. At lunchtime I ate in the so-called Writers’ Club and in the evenings with the actors, where the food was even better. I spent one of the happiest times of my life in Warsaw, I had the galleys in the pocket of my coat, my chief interlocutor was Lec the satirist who wrote his famous aphorisms in his wife’s kitchen notebook and often invited me home and sometimes also bought me a coffee on the Nowy Âwiat. I was happy with my book, which came out in the spring of sixty-three along with a review by Zuckmayer that ran for pages in
Die Zeit
. But when the general storm of coverage was over, unusually
intense and full of controversy, ranging from the most embarrassing effusions to the most vicious attacks, I was suddenly utterly undone, as if I’d fallen into a pit of terrible despair. I thought I would choke on the error of believing that literature was my hope. I didn’t want anything more to do with literature. It hadn’t brought me happiness, it had trampled me down into that stifling, stinking pit from which there is no escape, or so I believed. I cursed literature and my prostituting myself with her, and went to work on building sites and took a job as a truck driver with the Christophorus Company in the Klosterneuburgerstrasse. For months I made beer deliveries for the famous Gösser brewery. In the course of this I not only learned to drive trucks very well but I also got to know the city of Vienna even better than I’d known it before. I lived with my aunt and earned my living as a truck driver. I didn’t want anything to do with literature anymore, I had put everything I had into literature and literature responded by throwing me into the pit. Literature turned my stomach, I hated all publishers and all publishing houses and all books. It seemed to me that in writing
Frost
I had fallen victim to an enormous fraud. I was happy to let my leather jacket drop onto the driver’s seat and go thundering
through the streets in the old Steyrer truck. Now it was clear how good it had been to learn to drive a truck all those years ago in preparation for a job in Africa I had wanted to take back then, but which, as I know now, very fortunately never came to anything. But naturally even the good fortune of being able to work as a driver for the Gösser brewery also came to an end. Suddenly I hated what I was doing and gave it up from one day to the next and buried myself under the covers in my little closet at my aunt’s. She had understood the state I was in, for one day she invited me to go with her to the mountains for a few months. It would do us both good to discard the sheer grisliness and harmfulness of the big city for some weeks, and give ourselves over to nature. Her goal was Sankt Veit in the Salzburg area, the place near the hospital where I had been a patient for years, twenty-five hundred feet up and an absolutely ideal place for us to recuperate. Early one morning we began our mountain journey from the Westbahnhof, my aunt and I, her all-expenses-paid companion. But I have to say that when the train pulled out of the Westbahnhof I was already cursing the countryside and longing to be back in the city of Vienna. The further the train got from Vienna, the sadder I got, I’m making a mistake, I
thought, turning my back on Vienna and going to the countryside with my aunt, but I can no longer correct this mistake. I’m not a country person, I’m a city person, I said to myself, and there was no way back. Naturally I’d never found happiness in the country, the people bored me, I really despised them, nature bored me and I despised nature, I was starting to hate people and nature. I had become gloomy and a brooder, who walked through and around the fields in this direction and that, ran through the woods with my head down, and finally refused all food. Thus it was that my secret opposition to life on the land and in the mountains was leading straight to catastrophe, I was still chained to a truly pitiful caricature of myself and my bottomless existential despair, when the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen came. It was not the prize itself that saved me from my emotional, indeed my existential catastrophe, it was the thought that the prize money of ten thousand marks would enable me to get my life under control, give it a radical new direction, make it possible again. The prize was announced, the amount of the prize was known to me already. I had the chance to do the most sensible thing with the money. It had always been my wish to have a house to myself, and even if
not a proper house, at least walls around me within which I can do what I want, permit what I want, lock myself in if I want. So I thought, I’ll use the prize money to get these walls and I made contact with a real estate agent who immediately came to see me in Sankt Veit and proposed various properties to me. Naturally all these properties were too expensive, if I had the prize money in hand, it would only be a fraction of the sale price. But why not? I thought and I agreed with the real estate agent to meet in January in Upper Austria where he lived and had his range of properties to hand, mainly old farmhouses, some of them already partly derelict, all in the price range of between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand schillings. But my price was nothing over seventy thousand. Maybe for seventy thousand I’d be able to find the right set of walls I can lock myself up in, I wasn’t thinking about a house when I thought about a property for myself, I thought about walls and I thought about walls in which I could lock myself up. I went to Upper Austria and my aunt came with me and we visited the real estate agent. The man impressed me, I immediately took a liking to him, he was capable and seemed to have no character flaws. We came out into a landscape where the snow lay more than
three feet deep and stamped our way to the real estate agent’s house. He put us into his car and explained by way of a piece of paper where the properties to be visited were situated and what route we should take to get from one property to the next. He had listed about eleven or twelve farms on his paper that were ready to be sold. He slammed the car doors and the tour of inspection had begun. Thick fog already hung over the entire landscape and we saw nothing, we didn’t even see the road along which the real estate agent was driving us to the first property. He himself saw nothing ahead of him but fog, but he knew the road and we put ourselves in his hands. My aunt was as curious as I was, we were both silent, I don’t know what was going on inside her, she didn’t know what was going on inside me, the real estate agent didn’t know what was going on inside us both, he didn’t say a single word, came to a sudden stop and indicated that we were to get out. And I actually saw a huge wall in front of me in the fog, built of great blocks of stone. The real estate agent moved a large gate that had been torn off its hinges and we went into a big farmyard. There was also more than three feet of snow in the farmyard, it looked as if the owners of the property had departed in a rush, leaving everything lying
or standing where it was, I thought: the owners have met with some great misfortune. The property had been standing empty for a year, said the real estate agent, and went ahead of us. In every room we stepped into, he said this was a particularly beautiful room and he kept repeating the two words
exceptional proportions
and it didn’t bother him in the slightest that at every moment he was putting a foot through one of the rotted floors and had to rescue himself from the depths of the rot with a well-executed jump. The real estate agent led the way. I followed behind him and my aunt behind me. We went through the rooms as if we were walking along planks that we needed to cross some dull fetid pond, sometimes I looked around for my aunt, who turned out however to be very agile, more agile than me and the real estate agent. There were eleven or twelve rooms to inspect, all of them in totally dilapidated condition and the smell of hundreds if not thousands, I thought, of desiccated ancient mice and rats filled the air. All the floors were rotted through, completely punky and most of the window frames had been torn out by the wind or the weather. Down in the kitchen, where there was a large rusting enameled stove encrusted in dirt, the water had not been turned off and water was running onto the
floor and under the floor and the real estate agent said the owners, who’d left the house a year ago, had forgotten to turn off the tap and he went over to the tap and turned it off. He himself, he said, had never inspected the property before this, we were the first he’d shown it to, he was enchanted by the exceptional proportions. My aunt held a handkerchief in front of her mouth to block the stench that pervaded the property, not only the smell of rot, the stalls were full of enormous heaps of manure which the owners had not cleared away. The real estate agent kept saying
exceptional proportions
and the more often he asserted this, the clearer it became to me that he was right, in the end it wasn’t
him
saying the property had exceptional proportions, it was
me
saying it, and saying it at every moment. I kept working myself up to say
exceptional proportions
at briefer and briefer intervals until finally I was convinced that the entire property really did have
exceptional proportions
. From one moment to the next, I had been possessed by the entire property and when we were outside the gate again, to drive to the next one and the real estate agent was now hurrying, for we still had ten or twelve properties ahead of us to be inspected, I said that all these properties no longer interested me, I had already found the property for
me; it was this one, for it had truly
exceptional proportions
, they were ideal for me and I wished to conclude the requisite contract with the real estate agent immediately. From the start of our inspection to this statement of mine, no more than fifteen minutes had passed. My aunt was shocked, she said I mustn’t do anything crazy, she found these walls horrible, naturally, and when we were in the car again, driving back to the real estate agent’s house to set up the contract, she kept saying from behind me that I should think the whole thing over carefully,
sleep on it
, she said. But my decision was unbudgeable. I had found my walls. I proposed to the real estate agent that I make a down payment of seventy thousand schillings at the end of January, i.e., after the prize ceremony in Bremen, and settle the remainder of the balance in the course of the year. All the same this remainder amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand schillings, and if I had absolutely no idea yet where this money would come from, I had absolutely no worries about it.
Think it over, sleep on it
, my aunt kept saying while the real estate agent was already drawing up the contract. I liked the real estate agent’s manner, the way he wrote, what he said, his surroundings. I myself behaved as if money played no role, it
impressed the real estate agent while his wife was making a delicious egg dish for us in the kitchen. Half an hour after I had seen Nathal, that was the name of my walls, for the first time, and not even seen them clearly, for as I’ve already said they were wrapped in fog, and quite apart from the fact that I had seen absolutely nothing of what surrounded the walls, i.e., the landscape, only made conjectures, I signed the so-called preliminary contract. We ate the egg dish and talked for awhile with the real estate agent and left him. He brought us to the train and we went back to the mountains. During the journey, my aunt didn’t miss a single word in expressing her worst premonitions, and I admit I got the willies, now I was suddenly thinking about what had actually just happened, for I had of course got myself into a nightmare. I spent a series of sleepless nights during which I failed naturally to come to grips with what I had really done and what I’d signed and where I would find the so-called balance of one hundred and fifty thousand schillings. But the day of the prize-giving in Bremen will come and then I’ll have the first seventy-thousand-schilling installment and I’m saved, I thought. My aunt refrained from any comment whatsoever. For the first time in our lives together I had failed to listen to her advice. So I traveled
to Bremen, which I didn’t know. Hamburg I knew and loved as I do still today, Bremen I loathed from the very first moment, it’s a petit bourgeois, unbelievably sterile city. A room had been reserved for me in a newly built hotel directly opposite the station, I no longer remember its name. I hid in my hotel room so as not to have to see the city of Bremen, waited for morning and the prize-giving. This prize-giving was to take place in Bremen’s old town hall and that is where it did. My biggest problem was that I had been instructed to give a speech to the audience and I was already in Bremen and didn’t yet have the beginnings of an idea for such a speech, which I’d known about for weeks, and even during the night no idea for such a speech came to me and in the morning I still had none. But now it was getting urgent. During breakfast I remembered that one thing about Bremen is Grimm’s “Bremen Town Musicians,” and I made up a concept with the Bremen Town Musicians as the centerpiece. I finished my tea and ran to my room and sat down on my bed and did a quick draft. I made a second draft and a third. Then I had to admit to myself that my idea had been a bad one and I needed to come up with another. But time was short. In the meantime there had already been phone calls and questions about

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