Thomas Bernhard - The Loser

hated this family artistic center but loved the Steinway, which I had blackmailed my father into having delivered from Paris under the most frightful circumstances. I had to enroll in the Mozarteum to show them, I didn’t have the faintest idea about music and playing the piano had never exactly been one of my passions, but I used it as a means to an end against my parents and my entire family, I exploited it against them and I began to master it against them, better from day to day, with increasing virtuosity from year to year. I enrolled in the Mozarteum against them, I thought in the inn. Our Ehrbar stood in the so-called music room and was the artistic center where they showed off on Saturday afternoons. They avoided the Steinway, people stayed away, the Steinway put an end to the Ehrbar epoch. From the day I played the Steinway the artistic center in my parents’ house was kaput. The Steinway, I thought while standing in the inn and looking about, was aimed against my family. I enrolled in the Mozarteum to take my revenge on them, for no other reason, to punish them for their crimes against me. Now they had an artist for a son, an abominable species from their point of view. And I misused the Mozarteum against them, put all its means into play against them. Had I taken over their brickyards and played their old Ehrbar all my life they would have been satisfied, but I cut myself off from them by setting up the Steinway in the music room, which cost a fortune and did indeed have to be delivered from Paris to our house. At first I had insisted on the Steinway, then, as was only proper for the Steinway, on the Mozarteum. I brooked, as I must now say, no opposition. I had decided to become an artist overnight and demanded everything. I caught them unawares, I thought as I looked around in the inn. The Steinway was my barricade against them, against their world, against family and world cretinism. I was not a born piano virtuoso, as Glenn was, perhaps even Wertheimer, although I can’t claim that with absolute certainty, but I quite simply forced myself to become one, talked and played myself into it, I must say, with absolute ruthlessness in their regard. With the Steinway I could suddenly appear on stage against them. I made myself into an artist out of desperation, into the most obvious sort available, a piano virtuoso, if possible into a world-class piano virtuoso, the hated Ehrbar in our music room had given me the idea and I developed this idea as a weapon against them, exploiting it to the highest and absolutely highest degree of perfection against them. Glenn’s case was no different, nor was Wertheimer’s, who had studied art and therefore music only to insult his father, as I know, I thought in the inn. The fact that I’m studying the piano is a catastrophe for my father, Wertheimer said to me. Glenn said it even more radically: they hate me and my piano. I say Bach and they’re ready to throw up, said Glenn. He was already world famous and his parents still hadn’t changed their point of view. But whereas he stayed true to his principles and in the last and final analysis was able, if only two or three years before his death, to convince them of his genius, Wertheimer and I proved our parents right by failing to become virtuosos, failing indeed very quickly, in the most shameful manner , as I often was privileged to hear my father say. But my failure to become a piano virtuoso never bothered me, unlike Wertheimer, who suffered right to the end of his life for having given up, given himself over to the human sciences, which until the end he could never define, just as even today I still don’t know what philosophy, what philosophical matters generally, might be. Glenn is the victor, we are the failures, I thought in the inn. Glenn put an end to his existence at the only true moment, I thought. And he didn’t finish it off himself, that is by his own hand, as did Wertheimer, who had no other choice, who had to hang himself, I thought. Just as one could predict Glenn’s end well in advance, so one could predict Wertheimer’s end long in advance, I thought. Glenn is said to have suffered a fatal stroke in the middle of the Goldberg Variations. Wertheimer couldn’t take Glenn’s death. After Glenn’s death he was ashamed to still be alive, to have outlived the genius so to speak, that fact martyred him his entire last year, as I know. Two days after reading in the newspaper that Glenn had died we received telegrams from Glenn’s father announcing his son’s death. The second he sat down at the piano he sank into himself, I thought, he looked like an animal then, on closer inspection like a cripple, on even closer inspection like the sharp-witted, beautiful man that he was. He, Glenn, had learned German from his maternal grandmother, which he spoke fluently, as I’ve already indicated. With his pronunciation he put our German and Austrian fellow students to shame, since they spoke a completely barbaric German and speak this completely barbaric German all their lives because they have no sense for their own language. But how can an artist have no feeling for his native language? Glenn often asked. Year in, year out he wore the same kind of pants, if not the same pants, his step was light, or as my father would have said, noble. He loved things with sharp contours, detested approximation. One of his favorite words was self-discipline , he said it over and over, even in class with Horowitz, as I remember. He loved best to run out on the street shortly after midnight, or at least out of the house, I’d already noticed that in Leopoldskron. We must always fill our lungs with a good dose of fresh air, he said, otherwise we won’t go forward, we’ll be paralyzed in our efforts to reach the highest. He was the most ruthless person toward himself. He never allowed himself to be imprecise. He spoke only after thinking his way through a problem. He abhorred people who said things that hadn’t been thought through, thus he abhorred almost all mankind. And more than twenty years ago he finally withdrew from this abhorred mankind. He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public. He didn’t need them. He bought himself a house in the woods and settled into this house and went about perfecting himself. He and Bach lived in this house in America until his death. He was a fanatic about order. Everything in his house was order. When I first walked through the door with Wertheimer, I had to think of his concept of self-discipline . After we were inside he didn’t ask us, for example, if we were thirsty but sat down at his Steinway and played for us those passages from the Goldberg Variations that he had played in Leopoldskron the day before his departure for Canada. His technique was as perfect as it was then. At that moment I realized that no one else in the world could play like that. He sank into himself and started in. Started low and played upwards, so to speak, not like all the others, who played from the top down. That was his secret. For years I tormented myself with the question whether it was right to visit him in America. A pitiful question. At first Wertheimer didn’t want to, I finally talked him into it. Wertheimer’s sister was against her brother visiting the world-famous Glenn Gould, whom she considered dangerous for him. Wertheimer finally prevailed over his sister and came with me to America and to Glenn. Over and over I kept telling myself, this is our last chance to see Glenn. I actually was expecting his death and I had absolutely wanted to see him again, hear him play, I thought as I stood in the inn and inhaled the inn’s fetid aroma, which was all too familiar. I knew Wankham. I always stayed in this inn when I was in Wankham, when I visited Wertheimer, since I couldn’t stay with Wertheimer, he couldn’t tolerate overnight guests. I looked for the innkeeper, but everything was still. Wertheimer hated having guests stay overnight, abhorred them. Guests in general, of any kind, he received them and paid them compliments, they were barely in the door before they were out again, not that he would have complimented me out the door, I knew him too well for that, but after a few hours he preferred me to disappear rather than stay and spend the night. I’ve never spent the night at his house, it never would have occurred to me, I thought, keeping a sharp lookout for the innkeeper. Glenn was a big-city person, like me incidentally, like Wertheimer, at bottom we loved everything about big cities and hated the country, which however we exploited to the hilt (as we did the city, incidentally, in its own way). Wertheimer and Glenn had finally moved to the country because of their sick lungs, Wertheimer more reluctantly than Glenn, Glenn on principle, since he finally could no longer put up with people in general, Wertheimer because of his continuous coughing fits in the city and because his internist told him he had no chance of surviving in the big city. For over two decades Wertheimer found refuge with his sister at the Kohlmarkt, in one of the biggest and most luxurious apartments in Vienna. But finally his sister married a so-called industrialist from Switzerland and moved in with her husband in Zizers bei Chur. Of all places Switzerland and of all people a chemical-plant owner, as Wertheimer expressed it to me. A horrendous match. She left me in the lurch, blubbered Wertheimer over and over. In his suddenly empty apartment he appeared paralyzed, after his sister moved out he would sit for days in a chair without moving, then start running from room to room like the proverbial chicken, back and forth, until he finally holed himself up in his father’s hunting lodge in Traich. After his parents’ death he nonetheless lived with his sister and tyrannized this sister for twenty years, as I know, for years he kept her from having any contact with men and with society in general, umbrellaed her off so to speak, chained her to herself. But she broke loose and ditched him along with the old, rickety furniture they had inherited together. How could she do this to me, he said to me, I thought. I’ve done everything for her, sacrificed myself for her, and now she’s left me behind, just ditched me, runs after this nouveau-riche character in Switzerland, Wertheimer said, I thought in the inn. In Chur of all places, that ghastly region where the Catholic church literally stinks to high heaven. Zizers, what a godawful name for a town! he exploded, asking me if I’d ever been in Zizers, and I recalled having passed through Zizers several times on my way to St. Moritz, I thought. Provincial cretins, cloisters and chemical plants, nothing else, he said. He worked himself up several times to the claim that he had given up his piano virtuosity for love of his sister,Читать дальше