bobgarlitz

Bernhard’s five-part memoir–Gathering Evidence—is one of the most intense books I have ever read.  Having read four or five of his novels now and a few good books about him and his work, done my homework, I finally have “gotten” how to get into him and how to hear his voice.   This memoir is not literally a memoir but it is more so that than his plays (not available in English) or his novels.  He tells about his life growing up and most of it, apparently, is true, with some embellishments and contradictions, slightly differing versions of some people and events.  And he warns us directly about all of this throughout, emphasizing every so often how impossible the truth is to tell, how misleading even dishonest all talking is, all writing.  How everything fails, everything oppresses, nothing matters.

I found myself remembering the great speech Edmund makes in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.  Edmund says at one point that we must be drunken with wine, women and song,  but always drunken.  An old motif for sure, but Bernhard does it, turning his dark bitterness into a harrowing music, beautiful, terrible, sad, and as disturbing and memorable as any music can be.

He did survive by the time he turned twenty the great sufferings of war, death, illness, medical mistreatment, isolation, every sort of loss.   The timing of certain events added to the horrors of their sheer occurrence.  His grandfather, whom he was closest to, died while Bernhard was learning that he had himself contracted tuberculosis, and then his mother tells him she has cancer and dies shortly thereafter at the age of forty-six.  He never knew his father and longed to find out more about him.  The one woman who could tell him these things was killed in a freak auto accident just days before they were to meet.  These kinds of things—all through the book.  It makes you feel terrible, horrified, appalled, at what happens, at what people do, at how impossible it is to comprehend things.  The experience of reading Bernhard is like no other and impossible to convey.

And yet the voice which Bernhard created with which to tell these things never sounds like the voice of the victim that came to the fore in so many other books about terrible lives in the second half of the twentieth century.  No wisp of victimology, of maudlin emotion.  Bernhard despairs, condemns, rages, excoriates, describes, tells and he repeats and re-states, he finds ways to darken the music of the telling so that sentimentality gets wrung out and dry wit, cold humor, bare radiance and the rhythms of pure song hold us in its grip.