My Prizes: An Accounting (7 page)

Shortly afterward I met Gerhard Fritsch, a member of the jury and my friend until then, in the Museum
Café at the very table where Robert Musil used to sit, and asked him if after this disgusting business with the Industrial Association he was going to protest their behavior and step down from the jury and resign his seat. But Fritsch had no intention either of protesting or of stepping down from the jury. He had three wives and a whole bunch of children with these wives to take care of, he said, and could not indulge himself in any such protest even if it was self-evident to me, or any such self-evident resignation (self-evident to me, that is) from the Wildgans Prize jury. As a father of many children and provider for three female money-pits he felt really sorry for me and asked me to show him consideration in a tone that was repellent. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Not long after this conversation Fritsch hanged himself from the hook on his apartment door, his life, which he’d bungled with no help from anybody, had closed over his head and extinguished him.

Franz Theodor Csokor was a philosopher and dramatist and the author of a book titled
As a Civilian in the War in the Balkans
, which I had discovered in my grandfather’s library, and he was for many years the president of the P.E.N. club and a friend of my grandfather’s whom he deeply honored, and for many years he stayed in the tavern on the Wallersee that belonged to relatives of mine and in which I ran around when I was three and four and five and six and even when I was seven and eight, without having the faintest idea who the two gentlemen, Franz Theodor Csokor and Ödön von Horváth, were who were staying below me in the large rooms embellished with their Empire and Biedermeier furniture
and a whole series of valuable late-eighteenth-century pieces and magnificent stucco work and their view onto the woods. Csokor and Horváth, the two friends who wrote the majority of their plays and novels in my relatives’ tavern, supposedly played with me on the wooden floors downstairs in the lower taproom and took me on walks to the lake, but I myself can no longer recall this. My grandfather often took walks with Csokor and Horváth, as I know. In my relatives’ tavern was a large room on the second floor where plays were put on all year round and perhaps this was the right atmosphere for the two playwriting friends, I still remember the mountains of brilliantly colored theatrical costumes under the roof and also a piece that was put on in the room in which a naked man tied to a post was whipped, for what reason I don’t know, but I can still see the scene quite clearly, it made a horrible impression on me, it was a political drama. Maybe Csokor and Horváth were inspired by this stage, it’s probable. I only met Csokor one time later on, in Salzburg, what the occasion was I no longer recall, but I do remember that he sat with the novelist George Saiko and me on the terrace of the restaurant in the fortress and talked uninterruptedly about my grandfather, all things that had gone on that were
unknown to me. He loved my grandfather, for the way he talked about my grandfather is the way one only talks about someone one loves. Because I myself loved my grandfather like no one else on earth, I was happy to listen. For Saiko, a thoroughly self-important and egocentric type, and then a famous man, these descriptions of Csokor’s were almost unendurable, sometimes he tried to interrupt Csokor, but Csokor wouldn’t allow himself to be interrupted.
This man
, said Csokor,
was once the Director of the Albertina in Vienna
, and this information impressed me enormously. After the end of the meal Csokor, who was already an old gentleman at that time was tired but Saiko wasn’t tired and said goodbye to Csokor and said to me that as I was young and therefore naturally not yet tired, I should show the city of Salzburg to him, Herr Saiko, who wasn’t tired either. I had no idea at that moment what catastrophe was ahead of me. Csokor had barely taken his leave before Saiko, who had written the novel
The Man in the Reeds
, started to explain to me what a novel is. So we walked through the city in the burning heat and Herr Saiko told me nonstop what a novel is. I led him from one little street to the next, from one church to the next, but all he talked about was the novel, he stuffed me full of his theories
about the novel, completely obliviously, he had absolutely no idea that his incessant articulation of his theories was already giving me a headache and I hated literary theories more than anything in my life, but most of all I hated so-called theories about the novel, particularly when promulgated by fanatical theorists like Saiko, who started by extinguishing all feeling for the material in the listener by talking at full volume. Herr Saiko talked and talked and talked for four hours about what a novel is and never stopped citing major or minor novelists and sometimes he said he’d misspoken, it wasn’t Joyce who’d said this or that, it was Thomas Mann, not Henry James but Kipling. My admiration that the man had once been the Director of the Albertina shriveled to the barest minimum over the course of this four-hour lecture, yes I suddenly despised this speechifier, I hated him and I kept thinking the whole time how I could get rid of him. But it was five hours, as I remember, before Saiko, having worn himself out, suddenly realized that he had more or less annihilated me with his lecture and said goodbye. I was too tired to catch my breath. I traveled to Venice overnight, as I recall, I woke up there to a beautiful morning and ran to St. Mark’s Square. But who suddenly spread his arms wide when he saw
me coming, Herr Saiko! Naturally I wasn’t shocked by this absurdity, but willed myself to accompany Saiko to a restaurant near the Bridge of Sighs to eat cheese and olives and drink red wine. Herr Saiko had now stopped his perorations and was a pure pleasure-lover. He was going to Ancona that evening with his wife, he said, and pointed to a white ship in the background. But I didn’t want to talk about Herr Saiko but about Franz Theodor Csokor whom everyone who knew him had to love. After I returned from Venice I found a letter from Csokor in which he informed me that the P.E.N. club had just elected me a member! Unanimously! By ballot! Now I had a real mess. As with every other association in the world, I had no desire, naturally, to be a member of the P.E.N. club either. How to say this to the lovable old gentleman who wrote the Austrian national play
3 November 1918
without wounding him? I had nothing against the P.E.N. club fundamentally, even today I don’t really know what it is, but on no account did I wish to be a member, I had always hated associations and societies, and of course literary associations most of all. This is the reason I only recently resigned from the so-called Darmstadt Academy which I’d never signed up for and thirty years ago I also resigned from the Socialist Party,
which I had actually signed up for not long before, I didn’t and don’t like parties and societies. So I sat down and wrote Csokor that I was conscious of the enormous honor of being elected to the P.E.N. club by ballot, as he’d told me, but that I couldn’t overturn my principle of never becoming a member of another association and it was because of this very principle that I couldn’t even be a member of an association of which he, Csokor, was president. I felt dreadful after mailing the letter. I did not receive an answer. Eventually Csokor died, and then so did Herr Saiko, after he’d received the Big Austrian Prize for Literature four or five weeks before his death and had explained to me (three days before his death) on a streetcar ride from Döbling to the First District that when buying shoes you should never buy them before four in the afternoon because it’s only around four in the afternoon that the foot takes on the correct and proper consistency for shoe-buying. Whenever I’m reminded of Saiko, who, as I mentioned, was the author of
The Man in the Reeds
, the first thing I think of is his lecture about never buying shoes before four in the afternoon and I have retained something of that lecture even today, and his four-hour lecture on what a novel is comes in second. But I have a real affection for both of these
dead men today, whether they wrote the most incredible masterpieces of Austrian literature or not I come back to them, because my encounter with them is intimately connected with the awarding of the Franz Theodor Csokor Prize. When I won the prize which is dedicated to Csokor’s memory, the people who gave me the prize assumed that of course I was a member of the P.E.N. club. When I said no, of course I wasn’t a member of the P.E.N. club and told them my P.E.N. club story, they were very disappointed, for maybe they would never have given it to me as a nonmember. When I received the prize, in the P.E.N. club palace in the First District near the Minoritenkirche, presented by Piero Rismondo, the only one of the critics in Vienna who had time for my plays, I was in the process of being exposed to a particularly savage wave of personal attacks in the Austrian newspapers. Why, I don’t know. At any rate, it was definitely thumbs down. So the award gave me a real boost. Herr Rismondo, that subtle, cultivated man from Trieste, could not know that his words of approval lifted up a man who had been laid flat, that his prize speech was received greatly like music to the ears of someone who’d almost been broken. It was at this time that my
Shooting Party
and
The President
and Peter
Handke’s
A Leap in the Dark
were being produced and this, it is thought, caused a deputation of the so-called Cultural Senate of the state, led by their president, the writer Rudolf Henz, to the Minister of Culture in his Ministry, in the form of a resolution demanding that the Minister should kindly intervene with the directors of the Burgtheater to ensure that Bernhard and Handke would no longer be produced, Bernhard and Handke being, as one could read daily in the Vienna papers, bad writers whereas he, Henz, and his fellows in the Cultural Senate were good writers. The scribblers who were all suckling on the bosom of the state were full of themselves! Every newspaper reported this hair-raising event without a single critical comment. This is only one example of the literary mood that prevailed in the country back then against me and Handke. Not for the first time, I wondered around then whether prizes should be accepted or not. After the Julius Campe Prize, the only one I accepted with a sort of leap of joy, I had a constant empty feeling in my stomach whenever there was a question of accepting a prize, and my mind balked every time. But I remained too weak in all the years that prizes came my way to say no. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character. I despised the people who
were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money. Today I can no longer do it. Until you’re forty, I think, but after that? That I didn’t accept the prize money of eighteen thousand schillings attached to the Franz Theodor Csokor Prize, but had it donated to the care of prisoners in Stein,
^*
was also no way out. Even actions like this, that have a so-called social aspect, are not free of vanity, self-prettying, and hypocrisy. The question simply no longer presents itself, the only answer is to decline all further honors.

The literary prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce was the last prize I received, together with Okopenko and Ilse Eichinger, for the book
The Cellar
in which I describe my time as an apprentice salesman in the Scherzhauserfeld estate on the edge of Salzburg, and from the beginning I associated this prize not with my activities as a writer but with my activities as an apprentice salesman and during the ceremony, which had no connection whatever to the city of Salzburg but which took place nonetheless in the old Schloss Klessheim on the Saalach, the only thing spoken of by the gentlemen of the Federal Chamber of Commerce who had given me the prize was Bernhard the apprentice salesman and
never Bernhard the writer. I felt tremendously well among the worthy gentlemen of the merchant class and the whole time I spent with these gentlemen I had the impression I didn’t belong to literature, I belonged with the merchants. In singling me out and inviting me to the Schloss Klessheim they brought back vividly a time when I was an apprentice that had served me well my whole life, supplying the population of Scherzhauserfeld with groceries under the care of my master Karl Podhala. Walking up and down in front of the Schloss before the ceremony, the autumnal mood in the park was extremely conducive to my reconstruction of my life as an apprentice, I was once again the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old in a gray work coat pouring vinegar and oil into the narrowest of necks of bottles from a height of almost two feet without a funnel, like a virtuoso, something that nobody in the shop could imitate. I carried the hundred-and-seventy-five-pound and two-hundred-and-twenty-pound sacks from the storeroom into the shop in the cellar and at midday on Saturdays I knelt on the floor to wash it while my boss did the day’s accounts. I opened the concertina barrier in the morning and closed it at night and in between it was my constant wish to serve the people of
Scherzhauserfeld and my master. A few weeks ago when I went into one of the hundreds of branches of Austria’s largest chain of shoe shops, in one of the neighboring villages, there hanging on the wall were the rules for the conduct of apprentices I’d formulated in
The Cellar
. The management had copied these rules from my book and had them printed up for their apprentices by the hundred. I stood in the shop, where I’d wanted to buy myself some gym shoes, and read my own rules on the walls and for the first time in my literary career I had the feeling that I was a useful writer. I read my rules several times without letting on who I was, and then I bought the pair of gym shoes I wanted and went out of the shop and felt the deepest satisfaction.
The Cellar
describes my about-turn in the Reichenhallerstrasse, the moment one morning when instead of going to high school I went to the employment office to look for a place as an apprentice, and what followed. Now in the park of Klessheim I had the time and the peace before the prize-giving ceremony to yield to the melancholy that had overtaken me here in this park and I gave myself over to it happily. First alone, then with friends, I walked along the familiar walls, these were the walls, I thought, I’d slipped along at the end of the war, to cross the
heavily guarded, forbidden border in the twilight. That was thirty-five years ago. Hitler had wanted to create a residence for himself in this Schloss. But where is Hitler? In this Schloss Presidents Nixon and Ford spent the night more than once, as did the Queen of England. Now the Schloss was home to the Federal Chamber of Commerce’s hotel school, which is world famous. And the students at this hotel school had cooked an absolutely magnificent meal for all the participants in the ceremony, the prizewinners and everyone else, and laid a beautiful table. The prize-giving took place in the hall, opened by a quartet or a quintet. Merchants are economical with words and the President of the Federal Chamber of Commerce had accordingly kept himself brief. All three prizewinners were treated, one after the other, to a eulogy by a university professor, in which the attempt was made to base the awarding of the prize. I had, according to mine, found a totally new form of autobiography. When the checks were handed over, mine was for fifty thousand schillings. The group of musicians brought the morning celebrations to an end. As was appropriate in such a setting, everyone took their places at a table decorated with little handwritten place cards. And now, to my surprise, I was sitting right next to the President of
the Salzburg Chamber of Commerce, Haidenthaller, who told me once I’d sat down that it was he who had tested me at my oral apprentice salesman’s exam. He could remember the event of more than thirty years ago exactly. Yes, I said, I remember too. President Haidenthaller had a soft voice and I liked his way of speaking. My aunt was seated opposite me and my Salzburg publisher on my left. While my neighbor on my right, President Haidenthaller, fell silent once for a long moment, my publisher whispered into my ear that Haidenthaller was terminally ill, and had only another two weeks to live, cancer, my publisher whispered into my ear. When Herr Haidenthaller turned back toward me, there was naturally a new dimension to the conversation. Now I was much more careful with the distinguished gentleman who came, as I knew, from one of the oldest families in Salzburg, a dynasty of mill owners, and it turned out later that he was even related to me. He had read
The Cellar
, he said, nothing else. He had asked me about several sorts of Chinese tea in my apprentice salesman’s exam and I had given the correct answers. That question was always the hardest, he said. The event was as relaxed as could be, it’s the way merchants are. Today the apprentices didn’t need to be able to specify so many kinds of tea at
their exam, nor so many kinds of coffee, around a hundred kinds of tea and around a hundred kinds of coffee, a hundred kinds of tea and coffee all different in their look and smell, the trickiest question in the exam, said President Haidenthaller. Naturally all through the rest of the conversation with him I was thinking about what my publisher had said to me, about the imminent and inevitable death of my table companion. The whole time I was thinking what I might say to my former examiner in the apprentice salesman’s exam to make this lunch as enjoyable for him as possible. We exchanged some experiences we’d had in our common hometown of Salzburg, named a whole series of names we both knew, laughed a few times, and I noticed my table companion even guffawed once. Did he know he was about to die? Or was the whole thing a nasty rumor? Conversation with someone you know is about to die is not the easiest. Deep down I was glad when the table was cleared and all the participants said their good-byes. The prize-giving had begun so beautifully and ended so sadly. In the days following the ceremony in Klessheim I went daily to my coffeehouse in Gmunden to read the papers, and first of all always the column that contains the death announcements. Two weeks had already gone by
and the name Haidenthaller had not appeared in print, neither in the deaths column nor on the obituaries page. But on the fifteenth or sixteenth day Haidenthaller’s name was in the paper, in large letters and bordered in black. My publisher had only been off by one or two days, he hadn’t been spreading a rumor. I sat in the coffeehouse and observed the seagulls in front of the window as they greedily pecked the old retired women’s chunks of bread out of the stormy waters of the lake and screeched off and suddenly I heard everything again that Herr Haidenthaller had said to me at the table in Klessheim, with the greatest reticence and distinction that he owed to his position and his ancient family. Without the Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce I would not have seen Herr Haidenthaller again and I wouldn’t know as much today as I know about my own forebears as I did after my meeting with him, he knew my people well.