Wittgenstein's Nephew (12 page)

artistic indigence and their opportunistic toadying to the audience, betraying me and making my play ridiculous when they should have been passionately committed to bringing it safely into the world. Leaving the gallery, I ran to the cloakroom, where the woman in charge said,
You don't like it either, sir, right?
Furious with myself for perversely allowing my play to be produced at the Burgtheater and for signing such a foolish contract, I ran down the staircase and out of the theater. I could not have stayed a moment longer. I remember running from the theater as if I were running away from an institution that had destroyed not only my play but my whole mental capacity. I ran round the whole of the Ring and into the inner city, and was naturally unable to calm myself down by running backward and forward like this in my fury. Afterward I met several friends who had attended the performance. They all averred that it had been
a great success
(these were their very words) and that at the end there had been
tremendous applause
. They were lying. I have always had an infallible instinct, and I knew that it could only have been a disaster.
A great success, tremendous applause
, they went on saying, even after we had taken our places at the restaurant. I could have slapped their faces for their mendacity. They even went so far as to praise the actors—the most stupid and untalented actors ever, who had played the gravediggers to my
Hunting Party
. The only one who told me the truth was my friend Paul. He called the whole performance a total misunderstanding, an utter disaster, a typical example of Viennese cultural insolence, a classic instance of the viciousness of the Burgtheater toward an author and his play.
You too have become a victim of the
imbecility and intrigues and underhand dealings that go on at the Burgtheater
, he said.
It doesn't surprise me. Let it be a lesson to you
. We naturally despise people who lie to us and respect those who tell us the truth. It therefore went without saying that I respected Paul. The dying draw in their heads and want nothing to do with the living, with those who have no thought of dying. Paul had completely withdrawn from the world. He was no longer to be seen, though people occasionally asked after him. Our mutual friends asked me what Paul was doing, and I asked them. Like them, I no longer had the courage to visit him in his apartment. Sitting alone at the Bräunerhof, beneath his apartment, as I had done for some time, drinking my coffee next to his empty place and looking out into the Stallburggasse, I suddenly hated the Bräunerhof, not only because Paul was not there but because I was still going there, without him. I reflected that in my whole life I had possibly never had a better friend than the one who was compelled to lie in bed, probably in a pitiful condition, in the apartment above me, and whom I no longer visited because I was afraid of a
direct
confrontation with death. I constantly repressed this thought and finally expelled it from my mind. I confined myself to searching through my notes, some of which, as I now see, go back more than twelve years, for those passages that related to Paul, trying to visualize him as the man I wanted to remember, the
living man, not the dead
. But I now realized that these notes, which I had made in Nathal and Vienna, in Rome and Lisbon, in Zurich and Venice, were the record of a man's dying. I had met Paul, as I now see, precisely at the time when he was obviously beginning to die, and,
as these notes testify, I had
traced
his dying over a period of more than twelve years. And I had used Paul's dying for my own advantage, exploiting it for all I was worth. It seems to me that I was basically nothing but the twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend's dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival. It is not farfetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible. Most of the notes I made about Paul relate to music and crime, to the Hermann Pavilion and the Ludwig Pavilion and the intense relations between the two, to the Wilhelminenberg, our hill of destiny, and to the doctors and patients who peopled it in 1967. However, he also had some remarkable things to say about politics, about wealth and poverty, all on the basis of his own experience, the experience of one of the most sensitive men I have known. He despised the society of today, which resolutely denies its own history and which consequently, as he once put it, has
neither a past nor a future
and has succumbed to the mindlessness of
atomic science
. He castigated our
corrupt government
and our
megalomaniac parliament
, as well as the vanity that had gone to the heads of artists, especially the so-called
performing
artists. He called the government, parliament, and the whole nation into question, as well as the creative and the so-called interpretative arts, just as he constantly called himself into question. He both loved and hated nature, just as he loved and hated art, and he loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness. As a rich man he saw through the rich, and as a poor man he saw through the poor; as a
sick man he saw through the sick, and as a healthy man he saw through the healthy; and, finally, as a madman he saw through the mad. One last time, shortly before his death, he made himself the central figure of his own legend, the groundwork of which had been laid decades before by himself and his friends. Armed with a loaded revolver, he went into Köchert's the jewelers, whose premises in the Neuer Markt had once been his parents' house and which were owned (and still are) by his cousin Gottfried. Standing in the doorway, he is reported to have threatened to shoot his cousin on the spot unless he handed over
a certain pearl
. His cousin, who was standing behind a showcase, is reported to have put up his hands in mortal terror, whereupon my friend said,
The pearl from your crown!
It was all a joke. It was to be Paul's last. The jeweler failed to understand the joke, but he realized instantly that his cousin Paul was once again
not responsible for his actions
, as they say, and ought to be in an institution. It is reported that he managed to grapple with the madman and call the police, who took Paul away to Steinhof.
Two hundred friends will come to my funeral and you must make a speech at the graveside
, Paul once told me. But I know that only eight or nine people attended his funeral. I was in Crete at the time, writing a play, which I destroyed as soon as it was finished. I learned later that he died just a few days after the
assault
on his cousin, though curiously not, as I at first believed, in Steinhof—his
real
home, as he called it—but in a hospital in Linz. He lies, as they say, in the Central Cemetery in Vienna. To this day I have not visited his grave.

FROST

A young man has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically—and secretly—observe and report on his mentor's reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject's apparent madness.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5

GARGOYLES

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim, mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7

THE LOSER

The Loser
centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph,
The Loser
is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7754-0

FORTHCOMING IN SPRING 2010
Correction
, 978-1-4000-7760-1
The Lime Works
, 978-1-4000-7758-8

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