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The portable genius of Thomas Bernhard

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No moving parts | Michael Hofmann

The portable genius of Thomas Bernhard

生平[編輯]

托馬斯·伯恩哈德故居, Christiaan Tonnis 拍攝的視頻，2006

作品[編輯]

翻譯成英文的著作[編輯]

長篇小說[編輯]

• Frost (1963), translated by Michael Hofmann (2006)
• Gargoyles (Verstörung, 1967), translated by Richard and Clara Winston (1970)
• The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk, 1970), translated by Sophie Wilkins (1973)
• Correction (Korrektur, 1975), translated by Sophie Wilkins (1979)
• Yes (Ja, 1978), translated by Ewald Osers (1991)
• The Cheap-Eaters (Die Billigesser, 1980), translated by Ewald Osers (1990)
• Concrete (Beton, 1982), translated by David McLintock (1984)
• Wittgenstein's Nephew (Wittgensteins Neffe, 1982), translated by David McLintock (1988)

• The Loser (Der Untergeher, 1983), translated by Jack Dawson (1991)
• Woodcutters (Holzfällen: Eine Erregung, 1984), translated by Ewald Osers (1985) and as Woodcutters, by David McLintock (1988)
• Old Masters: A Comedy (Alte Meister. Komödie, 1985), translated by Ewald Osers (1989)

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Thomas Bernhard: Trilogy of the Arts

• Extinction (Auslöschung, 1986), translated by David McLintock (1995)
• On the Mountain (In der Höhe, written 1959, published 1989), translated by Russell Stockman (1991)

中篇小說[編輯]

• Amras (1964)
• Playing Watten (Watten, 1964)
• Walking (Gehen, 1971)
  • Collected as Three Novellas (2003), translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott

No moving parts

The portable genius of Thomas Bernhard

By Michael Hofmann

Thomas Bernhard, c.1957

January 18, 2019
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Thomas Bernhard first beheld the darkness of the world in 1931 as Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard in a place called Heerlen in Holland. His pregnant, unmarried mother, Herta Bernhard, a domestic from the Salzburg area, had run away there out of fear of disgrace, and fear of her father. (Social control and concomitant hypocrisies were – I believe, still are – exceptionally strong in Austria. Herta’s parents were themselves unmarried.) She found a school for midwifery where she could be delivered for free. It was the 1930s and she was poor; they were all terribly poor, the Depression having hit provincial Austria no less hard than it hit anywhere else. (Only one child is wearing shoes in an early class photograph of Bernhard, and it’s not Bernhard.) Almost immediately, she went back to work locally, and her infant son spent his first few months being looked after offshore, by a woman on a fishing vessel. He liked the mythic, extraterritorial, quarantined sound of that later: the bleak bard of the landlocked Alpine republic whose early months were spent rocked on the ocean wave by a stranger. The name “Bernhard” was no less fantastic than the birth: it belonged to his grandmother’s first husband, long divorced (itself a scandal) and with no role in Herta’s parentage, much less that of young Nicolaas. All, or almost all, was compound irrelation. The world wobbled and was not what it said on the packet. It wanted righting – or should that be writing. To that end, it first needed to be destroyed, for which Bernhard, with a bad word for everything, anti-church, anti-state, anti-literature, anti-everything, happily volunteered. What he really wanted to do was slam the door so hard that it would never open again. He was never recognized by (and indeed never saw) his father, the carpenter Alois Zuckerstätter, who married another woman, became a Nazi and an alcoholic and, according to some sources, killed himself in 1940.

The major figure in Bernhard’s early life was his maternal grandfather, Johannes Freumbichler – the one Herta had been so afraid of – regional writer, epic failure, curmudgeon and adored domestic tyrant. (In Concrete, Bernhard’s novel of 1982, Freumbichler contributes the rear view of himself, writing, and the horse blanket and leather belt to the protagonist, Rudolf’s, efforts.) He took to the boy, once the boy was returned to Austria, and went around with him. “The grandfathers are our teachers”, wrote Bernhard, generalizing, as he so often did, from a particular case: his own. Freumbichler is the original behind both Bernhard’s own subsequent character – independent, outspoken, rhetorical, aggressive, mocking – and the head- and room- and evening-filling confrontational figures in so many of his books and plays. It has been said that Bernhard made his own successful career to assuage and compensate for Freumbichler’s failure. To appease his grandfather’s tatterdemalion memory and come up to the requisite grandeur, Bernhard styled himself as a squirearchical character, rarely out of the papers with trenchant quotes and headline-catching confrontations, an almost predictably unpredictable terror. He offered contempt for new money, for contemporary politics, for modern life (all of which may be found in Concrete). While professing to hate most aspects of Austria, he fell hard for its nattiness. Affecting soigné country clothes and a pleasant smirk across his remarkably clownlike features, he was the most photographed unphotographed writer, the most interviewed recluse, the most courted and best-paid enfant terrible. He bought up and restored old properties and stuffed them with old furniture and old paintings and old ways. He kept a portrait of Joseph II in his pseudo ancestors’ gallery. “The Habsburg past”, he wrote, “marks us all. It may be more evident with me than with others. It’s there in my love-hate of Austria, which in the end is the key to everything I write.” To stretch a point, Freumbichler may be seen as a sort of analogue to the last Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, and Bernhard as a sort of secret royalist. A revanchist nihilist, could one imagine such a thing.

Just as foundational, though, as Bernhard’s grandfather was the question of his own ill health. I looked up the “sarcoidosis” with which Concrete begins. (In the original, it is “morbus boeck” and anything called morbus commands one’s respect.) In Pschyrembel’s German medical dictionary it has, for the layman, a difficult and terrifying column-length entry. It seems to be an irreversible and incurable autoimmune condition affecting the lungs but also other organs, including the skin, the glands, the bronchia and the heart. Thomas Bernhard was indeed a sufferer from it. (He wasn’t a writer much given to making things up.) His half-brother and personal physician Peter Fabjan confirms it was what finally killed him a few days after his fifty-eighth birthday. During his last dozen years, it was unusual for him to be without pain for a day. Such things as personal appearances and – as is suggested in Concrete – whereabouts had to be rationed and carefully, nay strategically, considered. The typically ambivalent hymn in Concrete to chemistry and the miracle workers on the shores of Lake Geneva is full of feeling: the feeling of gratitude where one would rather have got by without gratitude. “I myself”, writes Rudolf, the Viennese musicologist at the heart of Concrete, veering in the direction of absurd overstatement as he so often does, and standing quivering on the brink, “owe everything to chemicals – to put it briefly – and have done for the last thirty years.”

The wonder of it is that Bernhard lasted long enough even to have such a chronic disease, and such a virulently productive career. At the age of seventeen, he followed his grandfather into hospital. He had pleurisy, and was expected to die. Freumbichler did die; his daughter, Bernhard’s mother, followed him with cancer, the following year. Bernhard himself was given the last rites and pushed out into the unheated death ward. He had other plans. He contracted tuberculosis and recovered, though the later sarcoidosis seems to have been a legacy of the TB. He was left thinking – pardonably – that, having no father and apparently none of the standard-issue internal organs, he was both deathless and doomed. (When he did eventually die, it was on the anniversary of his grandfather’s death.) Those two years of teenage illness, incapacity and introversion changed his life. With a sort of Bernhardesque logic, they were the making of him. (They are described in the part called “Breath” in the autobiographical Gathering Evidence.) “I don’t know which came first”, he writes in Concrete, “my illness or my sudden distaste for society. I don’t know whether the distaste was there first and gave rise to the illness, or whether the illness was there first and gave rise to the distaste for this particular society, for social gatherings of this kind and for society in general”. Like the painter Frida Kahlo, he lived the intense and prolific life of the semi-invalid. For a time Bernhard didn’t know what he would do. Music drew him – he had, apparently, an attractive bass voice – and acting drew him. Three thousand pages of poetry still lie in his archive. “There”, a later editor, Raimund Fellinger, wrote, “Bernhard reveals himself on every one of them as a pathos-drunken dilettante.” Once he found his way into prose and, later, drama (respectively with Frost, in 1963, and A Celebration for Boris in 1970), there was no turning back. The torrential, unparagraphed speech bespeaks the difficulty of breathing. A paragraph or pause for breath would be a waste of what little time he had. He brought out books at the rate of two or three or more a year. Latterly, drama suited his needs and limitations best – the focus provided by a time and a space, the potential for éclat, the platform for him to attack and unsettle an audience and a press, not the diffuseness and, relatively speaking, the low kilotonnage of book publication. To the fury of his German publishers, Suhrkamp, he also retained an Austrian publisher, Residenz – it was part of his self-assertion and primacy, his unwillingness to be owned – who recently brought out his “collected works” in twenty-two volumes. All this in less than three decades, eaten out of by illness, numerous – largely contrived, but still distracting – publicity scandals, openings, closings, confrontations, arguments and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, foreign travel. He was often in Spain, often in Yugoslavia, but ranged as far abroad as Iran and New York.

Beton (Concrete) is accounted Bernhard’s fifth novel. It was published in 1982, fully seven years after its predecessor, Correction; years, however, that saw the publication of the autobiography in five parts referred to earlier and the composition of other important short prose, and no fewer than seven plays; years, moreover, that made him acquainted with the conditions of his illness. Known to readers as “the Spanish one” or “the Majorcan one”, Concrete shows Bernhard at his most syntactically untrammelled – once the first sentence is gone, it is actually pretty uncomplicated – and perhaps true to life. Other novels are more tightly wound or more diligently attack-minded – “sculptures of opinion”, as I termed them. In form, with Rudolf’s sudden decision to leave (surely not one that many readers will have anticipated) and the shocking, seemingly improvised entry into the book three-quarters of the way through of Anna Härdtl’s story – again, true – it is like an oyster that finds its grit unexpectedly and late on. There, too, it finds the eponymous “concrete”, the hate object that gives the book its poetic focus – with ten references in the last ten pages. For the most part, though, it is content to shadow the daily and seasonal rhythms and conditions of Bernhard’s home life. The early rising, the paucity of contacts, the illness, the obsessive desire to work, the swings of mind and morale. Rudolf (a name in the family, borne by an actual uncle and great-uncle) is here given a shadowy, conventional family (with a pesky business-minded sister playing the major role of antagonist-cum-ally). The string of Rudolf’s failed writings on composers and philosophers is of course a sort of caricature of Bernhard’s own oeuvre, where music and philosophy are often on offer as a field of endeavour, but overall it is a book that takes one deeply into a persiflage of the author’s life with many features transcribed directly.

Having myself grown up with Bernhard – my father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, had all his books and read them till half of them had been dropped in the bath, and the rest were falling out of their bindings – it’s difficult for me to put myself in the position of someone reading him for the first time. From the 1980s, I remember meeting an English publisher set on paragraphing him; at that point, in an optimistic industry, it must still have been thought possible to grind him up small. Above all, to an English reader, he probably seems weirdly un-accoutred, almost empty. Whatever it is, it’s not about exposition. “An Alpine Beckett” is a recurring description. None of your character-and-plot malarkey. Probably nothing exists that would prepare one for Bernhard’s machined vehemence, though once you’ve read one, you perhaps start to crave the bitter taste and the savage not-quite humour. I reviewed one – it was Old Masters – and described it as having “no moving parts”. Ingeborg Bachmann evokes a not dissimilar-sounding piece in which two men walk up and down, talking about a play they have no intention of seeing. That’s all. There’s not much more than that here: the man, the would-be writer, the vexatious sister gone, intending to embark on his piece on Mendelssohn, and then – spoiler alert – not managing to. That’s because the life of the book is somewhere else, in the numerous quirks and tics that make Bernhard so imitable (the italics, the repetitions with variations, the suddenly extrapolated though indefensible and basically outrageous plurals, the little slicks of Roget’s words [“the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness”, “expelled, expunged and extinguished”], the sudden leaps into excess or specificity [“Peru”!]), the mannered musicality of the prose, the brittle back-and-forth of argument, the unexpected ferocity-paired-with-woodenness of some of the verbs and adjectives (a world that is “choking on its billions”, “porters have become extinct”, “in the course of time I have liquidated myself”; “leprous”, “diabolical”, “your murderous impetuosity”), the way that a word or object – “natural” and “naturally” or the “I shall be leaving a country” sequence, or dogs or universities or newspapers – is riffed on for a page or two and then quietly, inconclusively dropped. The pedantic association between a place – even as much or as little as the “iron chair in the hall” or “one of those ancient white-painted wicker chairs” – and the thought engendered in the place seems also to be a typical feature of Bernhard. The speaker betrays a little tendency, which becomes inflamed into an opinion, then a judgement, which immediately becomes torrential and overwhelming, and ultimately – here anyway, in Concrete – has to be walked back. It goes: force, dither, reverse; force, dither, reverse. The zigzags of thought are reminiscent of Kafka, only without Kafka’s propensity to endlessness, his gentleness, his humour. In Bernhard, where they are driven with more energy, they tend instead to form whorls (“We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one”). At their most worried at and stuck, these moments of stalling are like crusts or scabs, furiously clawed at, and unappeasable. Kafka is the writer of the continuing possible, Bernhard of the continuing-impossible.

Peiskam, the setting for most of the book, corresponds closely to the great late-medieval Vierkanthof or quadrangular farmhouse that Bernhard owned in Nathal in Upper Austria. This was not passed down through his family but rather bought with a loan from his publisher taken out in 1965, and restored to neo-medieval glory in the years after. Bernhard’s houses were his other great relict after his books; there were three of them, and something in him was drawn to the idea of having them pulled down when he died, much as he sometimes thought one copy of each book, for himself, was enough, and he would like to take that to the grave. In the end it happened differently, and the twenty-two-volume collected works stand not least as a tribute to the generosity of the much put-upon Austrian state that, ironically, in spite of all, helped to fund the enterprise just as Nathal and the other houses stand as monuments to Bernhard’s taste: plain, functional, austere, solidly rustic, timelessly old, and breathtakingly beautiful, a cross between a castle and a cloister. Someone described the kitchen that no one cooked in, the living room that no one lived in, the bedroom where Bernhard did occasionally sleep, and the smallest room in the house, the book room that contained very few books (and not even those were read by Bernhard). But that gives a good sense of the ambience of Concrete: the different rooms, each containing one piece of perfect furniture. (Bernhard even designed some of his own chairs, bookshelves and lamps.) In the end, the place is a retreat, a perfectly adapted and indestructible and deeply inward sanctuary. Isn’t it striking how much Rudolf (literally, repeatedly) communes with his walls in the early pages (“I pressed both palms against the cold wall of the hall, a well-tried method for overcoming this kind of agitation, and I actually did calm down”), how difficult he finds it to leave: “At such times I feel a specially keen affection for all the rooms, all the furniture, and I walk all round the house, putting my hand lovingly on the individual pieces of furniture. Then I sit in my armchair in the bedroom and wonder whether it’s worthwhile going away”. This to me is Kafka again, the unspecified creature at the centre – in every sense – of the late and unfinished tale called “The Burrow”, a thing locked up in its structure, which is its defence and consolation and field of endeavour, but also its vulnerability, and in the end perhaps also its illness. (Kafka wrote it in 1923, as he was dying of TB.)

Concrete is an account of breaking out, a kind of anti-Antaeus. It doesn’t happen in either of the ways one might expect – Rudolf’s book about Mendelssohn isn’t written, and health doesn’t seem to impinge, although the open ending leaves Rudolf poised to begin or die – but in the blandest way: physically, geographically. He manages, improbably, to leave the shelter of his four walls. The thinking about the sister seems to lead Rudolf to pay a call on the neighbour (“the old man at Niederkreut”), and ultimately to his own impetuous, half- bungled flight south (in a fur coat!) to Palma. It seems to be the story of a reabsorption into human society, the bitter adversarial solitude gradually making way not for the proposed intellectual work, but for some human participation and fellowship. Anna Härdtl’s story of her husband’s death – again, it recalls Kafka to me, Theresa’s story of her mother’s death on the building site as told, also late on, to Karl in Amerika – restores Rudolf to some sense of compassion, for which, ironically, he pays with his long, deathlike sleep and ambiguous awakening. Härdtl, in turn, seems to have been foreshadowed by the neighbour’s wilful decision to leave his fortune to a stranger whose name is chosen out of a phone book: Sarah Slother, of Knightsbridge. They are sisters in a winged and unexpected fate.

The German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote that if Bernhard hadn’t been taken back to Austria in infancy, he might have grown up and written his screeds against the Netherlands, and in Dutch, which is a lovely thought: instead of Mozart and Bruno Kreisky, we could have had tirades against Queen Juliana and Frans Hals. There is something uncannily portable or adaptable about Bernhard’s genius. A sort of internal combustion engine based on repetition, rhetoric, unremittingness, fuelled on scandal and outrage, at a pitch where you don’t know if it’s wildness or control or somehow both; he’s got everywhere. “All those years we asked ourselves what the new might look like when it appeared”, wrote Ingeborg Bachmann of her contemporary. “Well, here it is.” Translated into forty-five languages. Novels and plays both. Huge in France. Big in Spain and in Latin America. Not much of the international writing worth reading in the last twenty years has been done outside Bernhard’s shadow. Jelinek, Houellebecq, Castellanos Moya, Krasznahorkai, Kertész. Sebald. Knausgaard. Reviewing Bernhard’s last scandalizing play, Heldenplatz, the (East) German playwright and poet Heiner Müller wrote: “Austria without Thomas Bernhard would appear in no West German paper. He’s practically an advertisement for it. There is no better promotion for Austria than Thomas Bernhard. Austria would not exist without Thomas Bernhard”. So where, I want to know, is England’s Bernhard? The bard for its unmanaged or mismanaged decline. The child at its nude parade. The excoriator of its moral-aesthetic sloppiness. I crave an English Bernhard. In Concrete one may read: “Now, about fifteen minutes after my attack of breathlessness, I was suddenly walking light-footedly along the Molo and indulging in my old habit of counting the masts of the sailing boats and yachts that were anchored there in their thousands. Most of them belonged to English people wanting to sell. On almost every other boat there was a For Sale notice. England has abdicated at last, I said to myself”. England is crying out for its Bernhard. To count it, if nothing else.

Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete has been re-issued by Faber, with an afterword by Michael Hofmann.

劇本[編輯]

• The Force of Habit (1974)
• Immanuel Kant (1978); a comedy, no known translation to English, first performed on 15 April 1978, directed by Claus Peymann at the Staatstheater Stuttgart.
• The President and Eve of Retirement (1982): Originally published as Der Präsident (1975) and Vor dem Ruhestand. Eine Komödie von deutscher Seele (1979), translated by Gitta Honegger.
• Destination (1981), originally titled Am Ziel.
• Histrionics: Three Plays (1990): Collects A Party for Boris (Ein Fest für Boris, 1968), Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984) and Histrionics (Der Theatermacher, 1984), translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott.^[7]
• Heldenplatz (1988)
• Over All the Mountain Tops (2004): Originally published as Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (1981), translated by Michael Mitchell.
• The World-fixer (2005)

其他作品[編輯]

• Gathering Evidence (1985, memoir): Collects Die Ursache (1975), Der Keller (1976), Der Atem (1978), Die Kälte (1981) and Ein Kind (1982), translated by David McLintock.
• The Voice Imitator (1997, stories): Originally published as Der Stimmenimitator (1978), translated by Kenneth J. Northcott.^[8]
• In Hora Mortis / Under the Iron of the Moon (2006, poetry): Collects In Hora Mortis (1958) and Unter dem Eisen des Mondes (1958), translated by James Reidel.
• My Prizes (2010, stories): Originally published as Meine Preise (2009), translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
• Prose (Seagull Books London Ltd, United Kingdom, 2010, short stories); originally published in Germany, 1967.
• Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale (2011, illustrated story)
• On Earth and in Hell: Early Poems (2015) translated by Peter Waugh^[9]

貝尼托·胡亞雷斯
墨西哥總統
任期 1858年1月15日－1872年7月18日
前任	米格爾·米拉蒙
個人資料
出生	1806年3月21日  新西班牙瓦哈卡州聖帕勃羅桂拉陶
逝世	1872年7月18日（66歲）  墨西哥墨西哥城
國籍	墨西哥
政黨	墨西哥自由黨
簽名

生平[編輯]

擔任總統[編輯]

相關條目[編輯]

維基共享資源中相關的多媒體資源：貝尼托·胡亞雷斯

• 胡亞雷斯大道
• 胡亞雷斯站（墨西哥城地鐵）