Thomas Bernhard: My Prizes: An Accounting

I received the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 and I must say right away that it was a question of the so-called Small State Prize, which a writer receives only for a particular piece of work and for which he has to nominate himself, by submitting one of his works to the relevant Ministry of Culture and Art, and which I received at an age in which under normal circumstances one no longer receives it at all, namely in my case the late thirties, because it has become customary to award this prize to twenty-year-olds already, which is quite right — so it was a matter of the so-called Small State Prize and not the so-called Large State Prize, which is given for a so-called life’s work. No one was more surprised than I was that I’d been awarded the Small State Prize, for I hadn’t submitted a single one of my works, I would never had done that, I had no idea that my brother, as he later admitted to me, had handed in Frost at the great entrance to the Ministry of Art and Culture on the Minoritenplatz on the last day submissions were being accepted. I was the opposite of delighted with the news that I was getting the prize, a mass of young people had received this prize before me and, in my eyes, had fully devalued it. But I didn’t want to be a spoiler and I also took the prize because I would receive it thirty years to the day after my grandfather received it in 1937. This point was what made me tell the Ministry I would accept the prize with the greatest pleasure. In reality I had a queasy stomach at the idea that as an almost forty-year-old I would have to accept a prize which should be offered to twenty-year-olds, and in particular I had a very strained relationship with my country, as I do today to an even greater degree, and my most strained relationship of all was with our Ministry of Culture and Art, which I despised from close and firsthand knowledge, the first place in my contempt being held by the then-incumbent Minister. In my youth I had been in this Ministry more than once to procure a so-called Foreign Travel Grant, this was in my twenties, for I wanted to travel around a great deal almost all the time and I had no money for it, and the Ministry had given me such a grant two or three times, I know for sure I have them to thank for two trips to Italy. But every time I came out of the Ministry I cursed its officials and the way the Ministry dealt with people like me, and I also had learned to hate it for many other reasons I don’t want to broadcast here. I found the officials there self-important and dull-witted, and they didn’t know what I was talking about when I talked with them and they had the worst imaginable taste in any and all fields of our art and culture. In short, now I had to come to grips with the fact that one day in the new year I had to collect the State Prize for Frost which my brother for whatever absurd reason had handed in at the porter’s lodge on the Minoritenplatz. I felt it a humiliation that they were now throwing the so-called Small State Prize at my head, but I didn’t want to make a scene and my brother had succeeded in convincing me that the right thing to do was to accept the prize without protest. So now I had to go to this very Ministry and allow these very people to hang a prize on me when I heartily despised both them and it. I had sworn never again to set foot in the Ministry in which only dull-wittedness and hypocrisy reigned, but now I was in this straitjacket my brother had stuck me in. Several newspapers had played up the announcement that I was getting the prize as if it were the Big Prize while it was the to-me-humiliating Small Prize. I choked on this fact and went around for weeks with this choking in my throat. But I didn’t want to expose myself by refusing it, for then everyone would have accused me again of being arrogant and megalomaniacal, and incapable of real self-judgment. But much as the thought of having to go to the Ministry and collect the Small Prize made me choke, I kept being saved by the fact that even the Small Prize carried a sum of money, twenty-five thousand schillings back then, that, being in debt way over my head, I urgently needed. It was these debts my brother was thinking of when he allowed himself the outrageous liberty of handing in my Frost at the porter’s lodge of the Ministry. So, I admit, because of the prize amount of twenty-five thousand schillings, I came to terms with the prize, with all the horrible, repellent things that necessarily came with the prize, I still despised the prize only as long as I didn’t think about the twenty-five thousand schillings, if I thought about the twenty-five thousand schillings, I bowed to my fate. The whole time I thought about having or not having the twenty-five thousand schillings, and moreover my brother was right when he said I should just go and collect the prize without any fuss and refrain from making any comments. Secretly I was thinking that the jury was indulging itself in sheer effrontery in giving me the Small Prize when of course the only thing I felt absolutely prepared to accept, should the question arise, and it had already been raised, was the Big Prize and not the Small, that it must be giving my enemies on this jury a fiendish pleasure to knock me from my pedestal by throwing the Small Prize at my head. Did they, I thought, really think I personally would have competed for the Small Prize and offered myself up with open eyes and in full awareness to their aesthetic dilettantism? It was possible they thought I had handed over Frost at the porter’s lodge of the Ministry myself. That is probably the case, that’s how they were and they were incapable of thinking otherwise. The people who spoke to me about the prize all assumed I had naturally been awarded the Big Prize and each time I was faced with the embarrassment of saying to them that the one in question was the Small Prize which every scribbling asshole had won already. And each time I had to explain to people the difference between the Small Prize and the Big Prize, and when I did, I had the impression they simply didn’t understand me anymore. The Big Prize, I kept repeating, was for a so-called life’s work and one gets it closer to old age and it’s awarded by the so-called Cultural Senate which is made up of all those who have previously won this Big State Prize and there wasn’t just the Big State Prize for Literature but also for the so-called Fine Arts and for Music, et cetera. When people asked me who had already won this so-called Big State Prize, I always said, All Assholes, and when they asked me the names of these assholes I listed a whole row of assholes for them and they’d never heard of any of them, the only person who knew of them was me. So this Cultural Senate, they said, is made up of nothing but assholes because you say that everyone in the Cultural Senate is an asshole. Yes, I said, the Cultural Senate is full of assholes, what’s more they’re Catholic and National Socialist assholes plus the occasional Jew for window-dressing. I was repelled by these questions and these answers. And these assholes, people said, elect new assholes to their Senate every year when they give them the Big State Prize. Yes, I said, every year new assholes are selected for the Senate that calls itself a Cultural Senate and is an indestructible evil and a perverse absurdity in our country. It’s a collection of the biggest washouts and bastards, I always said. And so what is the Small State Prize? they asked and I replied the Small State Prize is a so-called Nurturing of Talent and so many people have already won it you can no longer count them, and now I’m one of them, I said, for I’ve been given the Small State Prize as a punishment. Punishment for what? they asked and I couldn’t give them an answer. The Small State Prize, I said, is a dirty trick if you’re over thirty and as I’m almost forty it’s a huge dirty trick. But I said I’d sworn to come to terms with this huge dirty trick and I had no thoughts of declining this huge dirty trick. I’m not willing to give up twenty-five thousand schillings, I said, I’m greedy for money, I have no character, I’m a bastard too. People didn’t give up, they drilled down. They knew exactly where to drill to drive me crazy. They met me in the morning and congratulated me on my prize and said it really was high time for me to get the State Prize for Literature, and then made a pregnant pause. I then had to explain that my prize was the Small State Prize, a dirty trick not an honor. But no prizes are an honor, I then said, the honor is perverse, there is no honor in the world. People talk about honor and it’s all a dirty trick, just like all talk about any honor, I said. The state showers its working citizens with honors and showers them in reality with perversities and dirty tricks, I said. My aunt always had the highest opinion of our state and of states in general, her husband had been a senior state official, and she behaved as if I’d received an honor when the news was published in the papers that I was to receive the State Prize. So I had to explain to her too that this was the Small Prize and not the Big Prize and once again I tried to explain the exact differences between the two prizes and at the end of my explanation I said neither the Small nor the Big State Prize was worth anything, both prizes were a dirty trick and it was a low thing to accept either one of them, but I was sufficiently lacking in character to accept the prize because what I wanted was the twenty-five thousand schillings. My aunt was disappointed in me, until then she had had too high expectations of me. I shouldn’t accept the prize, she said, if what I thought was what I said. Yes, I said, I think what I’m saying and I’m going to accept the prize all the same. I’m taking the money, because people should take every penny from the state which throws not just millions but billions out the window on a yearly basis for absolutely nothing at all, every citizen has a right to it and I’m not a fool. We had a worthless government that used every means to play to the gallery and hold on to power even when the state was going to the dogs, of course I would take twenty-five thousand schillings from a state like this. Base or not, lacking character or not, I said. My aunt accused me of inconsistency. She was not to be persuaded of my point of view. I don’t believe, I said, that I’m lacking character if I take the prize amount from people I bottomlessly loathe and despise, quite the opposite. To compensate for the humiliation of being given the Small State Prize I should be able to take a trip, so many countries even in Europe were still unknown to me, the twenty-five thousand schillings would give me the opportunity to go to Spain, for example, where I’d never been. If I don’t take the money for myself and use it to pay for a trip, I said, it will be thrown to some useless person in revenge, who causes nothing but damage with his creations and poisons the air. The closer the day of the prize-giving came, the more almost unbearably sleepless nights I had. What possibly had really been dreamed up by idiots as an honor, to me, the more I thought about it, was a despicable act, a beheading would be putting it too strongly but even today I feel the best description of it is a despicable act. All the twenty-year-old and twenty-two-year-old and twenty-five-year-old fashionably dressed writers of radio plays I met on the street were winners of the State Prize. They behaved as if I had just been consecrated by them. It rankled. Moreover their perspective was right. My Frost had not received a single positive review anywhere in Austria, on the contrary, it was given a takedown in every single Austrian newspaper as soon as it appeared, not in the appropriate places, the way I’d imagined, but at the bottom, be it left or right, where worthlessness and contempt have made their home forever. I was angry, my anger had the absolute limitlessness born of lack of self-control, but in the end I kept asking myself if all these people might not be right. Perhaps I really wasn’t worth any more than the value they put on me! I forbade myself to go on brooding about it. Time is pitiless. It was then too. The morning of the prize-giving had arrived. On this occasion too I was supposed to give a speech, but I’m no speaker and I can’t give any speech whatever, I’ve never given a speech because I’m incapable of giving one. But I had to give a speech, it’s a tradition that the writer, who receives this prize at the same time as a painter and a composer et cetera, gives a speech that was characterized in the Ministry’s invitation as a speech of thanks. But as always, when I was supposed to give a speech, no speech came to me, in this instance too I had spent weeks thinking about what I would say, what my speech would be, but I had reached no result. What was there to say on such an occasion except the words Thank you! which still stick in the throat of the person who has to say them and sit in his stomach for a very long time. I found no theme for a speech. I wondered if perhaps I should go into the world situation, which, as always, was bad enough. Or the underdeveloped countries? Or the neglect of health care? Or the terrible state of our schoolchildren’s teeth? Should I say something about the state per se, or art per se or about culture in any way at all? Should I even say anything about me? I found it all repellent and queasy-making. Finally I sat down with my aunt at the breakfast table and said, I can’t give a speech, I have no idea what to say in a speech. I haven’t thought of a theme, I haven’t thought of anything. Maybe after breakfast, said my aunt, and I thought yes, maybe after breakfast and I ate breakfast and ate breakfast but still nothing came to me. Now I had my suit for best occasions on, the anthracite-colored single-breasted one, and I’d tied my tie and was struggling to swallow the last mouthfuls of breakfast and still I didn’t have even the trace of an idea for a speech, suddenly I had absolutely nothing in my head except a feeling of fear, I was afraid of what was ahead of me, if I couldn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, I feared something perverse, something unlawful, something unjust, something utterly embarrassing. My aunt was all ready to go, once again she looked very elegant and I admired her. If only I’d declined, and now didn’t have to go to the Ministry, I said. And then, at the peak of my despair, I sat down at the table in the window of my tiny room and typed a few sentences on my machine. Again it was no speech, as they were requiring of me, again it was only a few sentences that I had in my head. Only a few sentences, I said to my aunt, and I was embarrassed to read her these newly minted sentences. I also wouldn’t have had time to, for we had to leave, we caught a taxi on the corner of the Obkirchergasse and the Grinzinger Allee and drove into the city. This journey was the journey to the scaffold. The prize ceremony was taking place in the so-called Audience Chamber of the Culture and Art and Education Ministry. When we arrived, all the so-called honored guests were already there. Only the Minister was still missing, Herr Piffl-Perčevič, a former Secretary of the Provincial Agricultural Department in Steiermark with a walrus moustache, who had been summoned straight from his position in Steiermark to become Minister of the Ministry of Culture, Art, and Education. By his friend in the party, who’d just become Chancellor. I had always loathed this Piffl-Perčevič, for he was incapable of uttering a sentence correctly and it may be that he understood something about Steiermarkian calves and cows and Upper Steiermarkian pigs and Lower Steiermarkian hotbeds, but he understood absolutely nothing about art and culture although he talked about art and culture everywhere nonstop. But that’s something else. The Minister with his walrus moustache came into the Audience Chamber and the prize ceremony could begin. The Minister had taken his seat in the first row where the prize candidates were sitting, five or six of them excluding me. This prize ceremony also began with a piece of music, it was a piece for strings and the Minister listened to it with his head tilted to the left. The musicians weren’t in good shape and they stumbled in a lot of places, but on such occasions there’s no expectation ever of accurate playing. It pained me that the musicians stumbled over all the best passages in the piece. Finally the piece came to an end and the Minister was handed a piece of paper by his secretary with what was probably a text the secretary had written, whereupon the Minister stood up and went to the lectern and gave a speech. I no longer remember the content of the speech, it introduced all the prizewinners, some of their biographical details were read out and some of their works were named. Naturally I couldn’t know if what the Minister had read out about my co-winners was correct, what he said about me was almost all wrong and crude and manufactured out of thin air. He mentioned, for example, that I had written a novel that takes place on an island in the South Seas, which in that moment when the Minister shared this information was absolute news to me. Everything the Minister said was wrong, and evidently his secretary had confused me with someone else, but it didn’t make me more upset, because I’m used to politicians always talking nonsense on such occasions and things that have been conjured out of midair at best, why should it be any different with Herr Piffl-Perčevič. But what did wound me deeply was the announcement by the Minister that I, and I can still hear every word in my ear, was a foreigner born in Holland , but who had already been living among us for some time (i.e., among the Austrians, of whom Minister Piffl-Perčevič did not consider me one). I was amazed at my calm as I listened to the Minister. One shouldn’t hold their provinces against provincials, but when they appear in public with Herr Piffl-Perčevič’s unrivaled arrogance, one should try not to let it slide. Now I had the opportunity and I didn’t let it slide. A literally indescribable arrogance had displayed itself on the dull-witted, totally insensible, and unmusical face of the Cultural Minister as he proclaimed to the audience who I was. But probably even in this case nobody but my friends had any idea that the Minister was scattering nothing but dull-witted falsifications about me around the room. He felt nothing, he read out his secretary’s brainless inanities in his natural monotone, one false statement after the other, one vulgarity after the next. Did I need this? I asked myself while the Minister was speaking if it wouldn’t have been better not to come. But this question no longer made any real sense. I sat there and couldn’t defend myself, I couldn’t just jump up and say to the Minister’s face that what he was saying was all nonsense and lies. I was tied to my chair by invisible cords, condemned to immobility. This is the punishment, I thought, now you have your reckoning. Now you’ve made yourself one of them, the people sitting in this hall listening with their hypocritical ears to his Holiness the Minister. Now you belong to them, now you’re one of the pack that’s always driven you mad and you’ve avoided having anything to do with your whole life. You’re sitting there in your dark suit taking blow after blow, one brazen lie after another. And you don’t move, you don’t jump up and box the Minister’s ear. I told myself to stay calm, I kept saying to myself, calm, calm, calm , I said it over and over again until the Minister was done with his arrogant outrages. He would have deserved having his ears boxed, but what he got was tumultuous applause. The sheep were applauding the God that fed them, the Minister sat down amid the deafening clapping, and now it was my turn to stand up and go to the lectern. I was still shaking with rage. But I hadn’t lost my self-control. I took the piece of paper with my text out of my jacket pocket and read it out, possibly in a trembling voice, it could be. My legs were shaking too, not surprisingly. But I hadn’t got to the end of my text before the audience became restive, I had no idea why, for my text was being spoken quietly by me and the theme was a philosophical one, profound even, I felt, and I had uttered the word State several times. I thought, it’s a very calm text, one I can use here to get myself up out of the dirt without causing a ruckus because almost no one will understand it, all about death and its conquering power and the absurdity of all things human, about man’s incapacity and man’s mortality and the nullity of all states. I hadn’t even finished my text when the Minister leapt to his feet, bright red in the face, ran at me, and hurled some incomprehensible curse word at my head. He stood before me in wild agitation and threatened me, yes, he came at me with his hand raised. He took two or three steps, then an abrupt about-turn, and he left the hall. He rushed to the glass door of the Audience Chamber without any of his attendants and slammed it with a loud bang. This all took place in a matter of seconds. Hardly had the Minister single-handedly and above all furiously hurled the door of his Audience Chamber shut behind him than there was chaos in the hall. That is, first, after the Minister had slammed the door, there was a moment when embarrassed silence reigned. Then the chaos broke out. I myself had no idea what had happened. I had had to allow one humiliation after another to be heaped on me and then I had read out what I thought was my harmless text whereupon the Minister had gotten angry and left the hall in a rage and now his vassals were coming for me. The entire mob in the hall, all people who were dependent on the Minister, who had grants or pensions and above all the so-called Cultural Senate, which probably attends every prize ceremony, all of them rushed after the Minister out of the hall and down the broad flight of stairs. But all these people rushing away after the Minister didn’t rush away after the Minister without first giving me a dirty look, as I was apparently the cause of this embarrassing scene and the sudden wrecking of this ceremony. They cast their dirty looks at me and rushed after the Minister and many of them didn’t stop at dirty looks, they also waved their fists at me, most of all, if I remember correctly, the President of the Cultural Senate, Herr Rudolf Henz, a man then between seventy and eighty, he rushed at me and waved his fist and then chased after the Minister with the others. What have I done? I asked myself, suddenly left standing with my aunt and two or three friends. I wasn’t conscious of having done anything wrong. The Minister hadn’t understood my sentences and because I had used the word State not in a subservient way but in a highly critical context, he had leapt to his feet and attacked me and had run out of the Audience Chamber and down the broad staircase. And everyone else, with the meager exceptions already mentioned, had rushed off after him. I can still hear the way the Minister slammed the door to the Audience Chamber shut, I have never heard anyone bang a door that loudly. So there I stood and didn’t know what to say. My friends, three or four, not more, and my aunt had moved over to me and had no answer either. The whole group turned toward the buffet that was still flanked by two waiters provided by the Sacher or the Bristol, gaping with shock, and wondered what was going to be done with the totally untouched spread. It’ll go to an old age home, I thought. The Minister cold-shouldered you, not vice versa, said one of my friends. It was well said. He cold-shouldered everyone, I said. The Minister slammed the door to the Audience Chamber so hard, I thought, the panes must have given way. But when I investigated the door to the Audience Chamber, it turned out that not one pane was broken. It had only sounded as if the panes in the door to the Audience Chamber had broken. The newspapers next day wrote about a scandal that the writer Bernhard had provoked. A Viennese newspaper, which called itself the Viennese Monday , wrote on the front page that I was a bug that needed to be exterminated.