Wonderful essay on visiting the house of Thomas Bernard by Jonathan D Taylor.
I’m going to paste in huge chunks from it right now.
Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968
Take good care, Gambetti, not to visit the places associated with writers, poets and philosophers, because if you do you won’t understand them at all.
—Thomas Bernhard, Extinction
Real intellect does not know admiration.… People enter every church and every museum as though with a rucksack full of admiration, and for that reason they always have that revolting stooping way of walking which they all have in churches and museums, he said. I have never yet seen a person enter a church or a museum entirely normally, and the most distasteful thing is to watch those people in Knossos or in Agrigento, when they have arrived at the destination of their admiration journey, because the journeys these people take are nothing but admiration journeys.
—TB Old Masters
I write only of interior landscapes, and the majority of people don’t see those: they see almost nothing that is “inside.” Because they always think that if something is internal, it’s obscure, and therefore they don’t see anything. I think I’ve never described a landscape in a book. I treat only concepts, by which I mean talking always of mountains or a city or roads, but how these appear—no, I have never described a landscape.
—Interview, 1981
Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are communicated. The aspiration for truth, like every other aspiration, is the quickest way to arrive at falsehoods and falsifications with regard to any state of affairs. And to write about a period of one’s life, no matter how remote or how recent, no matter how long or how short, means accumulating hundreds and thousands and millions of falsehoods and falsifications, all of which are familiar to the writer describing the period as truths and nothing but truths.
—The Cellar: An Escape
Right from the beginning I isolated myself far too much in Nathal and not only did nothing to counter this isolation but actually promoted it, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of utter despair.… On the other hand, after a few days in Vienna I have to flee to Nathal to avoid suffocating in the loathsome Viennese air.… Every other week I flee from Nathal to Vienna and then from Vienna to Nathal, with the result that I have become a restless character who is driven back and forth between Vienna and Nathal in order to survive.
—Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Bernhard himself was not a drinker, his brother explained, but placed the best brands of sherry and vermouth in every room. He hated hunting and hunters. Yet an armoire at the top of a landing is stocked on one side with sherries and vermouths, and on the other with a hunter’s wardrobe, numerous identical dark green sweaters, jackets, and trousers. In case of a World War III, Dr. Fabjan said. Not to mention Bernhard’s prodigious supply of shoes. Thomas’s shoe tic, his brother said. Bernhard hung a rifle from the curtain rod of his bedroom. Of course this was—nur Schmuck, just decoration, his brother made clear. He was afraid of this instrument!
Every sitting or living or sleeping room has a record player. The 1981 CBS Masterworks recording of the Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould sits predictably, but thrillingly, on top of a couple of other LPs in a sitting room. It is virtually a staging of the end of The Loser, in which Bernhard endowed a fictional version of the misanthropic pianist with his own autobiographical traits: 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.
—-Taylor
Bernhard, who mocked the visiting of places associated with writers as well as admiration journeys to museums and churches, had done nothing less than design a museum for admirers like us to visit, in the same way that he devoted his life singlemindedly to writing even though the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense. Bernhard’s house is part and parcel of his literary legacy: a seriously satirical stance that eludes the initial urge to peg him as a misanthrope, a pessimist, or a nihilist.
—–Taylor
The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself. Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit a so-called literary coffeehouse under any circumstances whatever. However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or another, even though everything within me rebels against the idea.—Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Of Bernhard’s commandingly assertive diatribes against existence, the only real content is their existence as liberating acts of self-cancellation and exaggeration. Bernhard’s own project was to rehearse not only every possible Bernhard thought but also every possible Bernhard counterthought, acknowledging that we are mistaken if we believe we are in possession of the truth, just as we are mistaken if we believe we are in error. Bernhard’s preoccupation with death and suicide and the absolute meaninglessness of existence—it is the energy generated by his fervent determination to overcome them that makes Bernhard’s literature the most life-affirming literature of all.
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We must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we’re living in our own world, not in some previous world…
—Correction
And so for my work—everyone has his needs—it is supremely important to be in a country whose language I do not understand, because I always have the sensation that people are saying only pleasant things and speaking only of important, philosophical things. Whereas when you’re at home and understand the language, you feel that people are saying only absolute nonsense, no? Thus the nonsense, in Spanish, becomes philosophical for me.
—Interview, 1981
Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968
