when i made that list a couple of posts back of what i’d been reading while i wasn’t writing anything i left a few books off because i wasn’t thinking very hard about it. one of those books was thomas bernhard’s frost. and now for a confession.
the first time i read bernhard i had one of those mindblowing experiences that most writers can probably point to where you know you’ve found the thing you want to do with your life and the writer seems to be speaking to you directly in your rhythms. it’s almost like you’re writing the thing yourself as you read it. the book was the loser, and i think i liked it even more because it was maybe the first book i didn’t learn about from northern exposure (that guy chris had all sorts of suggestions — kafka, dostoevsky, jung), roseanne (when darlene got disaffected she worked in a bookshop and read vonnegut) (oh darlene, you were the ally sheedy of the early nineties), or my dad (see my post about camus a while back). i’m pretty sure i learned about it from an issue of details that i picked up on vacation because it had david duchovny on the cover (did you know that he wrote his thesis on beckett at princeton?) (also he was on the x files). i was in eleventh grade and no one else knew about him (or wanted to know about him). also i couldn’t find any of his other books because the book selection in albany, new york wasn’t so great and they hadn’t invented jeff bezos yet.
i got to keep bernhard to myself until halfway through college when i took brad morrow’s contemporary innovative fiction course. morrow is one of those guys who i don’t think gets the credit he deserves. he’s an excellent editor (conjunctions) and an accomplished novelist and he knows pretty much everything about contemporary lit. he turned me on to cormac mccarthy and can xue and a handful of others through the syllabus, and then gave us a list suggesting further readings at the end of the semester that i’m pretty sure was the first time i’d seen the names donald barthelme, barry hannah, and padgett powell. he also taught bernhard’s short novel wittgenstein’s nephew, which i liked even better than the loser.
finally i got to study with mary caponegro for one semester at syracuse, before she got poached by my other alma mater, bard (where she and morrow still teach), and in her course on le mot juste we read bernhard’s yes!. and i did not like it that much. but that wasn’t the worst part of it.
portrait of me, as a boy reading bernhard, by edvard munch
when i read yes! i was practically a grown up, and i noticed that the characters were pathetic. obviously there’s nothing wrong with pathetic characters (i write them all the time) (there is something wrong with that one brand of pathetic character i keep mentioning but never elaborating on, though — the lovable loser), but, reading the loser and wittgenstein’s nephew, i hadn’t noticed it, and when i did notice it reading yes!, i started to suspect that bernhard didn’t know it. that was 2001. i didn’t read bernhard again until last month and i wish i hadn’t.
frost is not good. the characters are pathetic and bernhard doesn’t know it, or worse, he thinks it’s awesome.
here is the premise: a med student is sent to a village in an alpine wasteland to observe the mentor’s brother, a failed artist who’s taken up being a “madman.” i put madman in quotes because bernhard’s depiction is about as convincing a portrait of a twentieth century madman as dan brown’s depictions of a “harvard symbologist.” when i add that the med student gets drawn into the madman’s madness, it isn’t just the premise but a summary of the whole thing. over the course of 341 pages. here is a sample, chosen at random:
“Just as their are hulks of ships on the banks of great rivers, so there are poison deposits on the banks of my arteries and veins. Death can only mean the cessation of all my pains. Death means being rid of all my pains, and most of all, myself.” There were no more issues to be settled between himself and his death. “The arrangement I have come to with my death is mutually advantageous.”
the technique of inserting the narrator’s commentary into the madman’s monologues would be interesting if the former illuminated the latter, but look, it doesn’t, and it’s pretty much redundant, and most of the 341 pages read exactly like the above four sentences. which is to say, the book is pure bile.
you could argue that there’s nothing wrong with that, but what would be the point?
okay, here is a parable that my mom used to tell me:
apparently when my mother was a girl, her mother — my grandmother — was a big complainer, of the you-kids-are-ungrateful-and-you-make-the-house-a-pigsty-etc variety, and so one christmas when they were very young, my mother and her brother bought her the gift of a bag of dirt, which they dumped on the floor. they gave her the gift of something to complain about.
in the same way, bernhard seems to love complaining, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of it, ie, someone should have dumped a bag of dirt on his floor, but instead he dumped a bag on mine. compare this to beckett, who, though his insistence on life’s absurdity often becomes oppressive (in fact, almost always after of the first trilogy), usually manages to create comedy by self-consciously embracing the paradox between despair and the desire to go on despite (or because of?) it.
now i’m nervous about going back to the loser and wittgenstein’s nephew. or moving on, to some of his other mature work. (in bernhard’s defense, frost was his first novel.) i will one day, and i think at least the ones i loved will hold up. but i’m ready to accept that i was wrong, that i was just being young and angsty. what the hell is everyone else’s excuse?