A Translation of "Holzfällen / Wien 1984" (Thomas Bernhard Interviewed by Krista Fleischmann)

The occasion of this interview was the publication of the book Woodcutters, not its confiscation. On August 28, 1984, under authority of a court order, all publicly available copies of this book were confiscated by the police. The order ensued from a civil lawsuit initiated by the composer Gerhard Lampersberg, who believed that he had been depicted in the book.  On the day of the interview, Bernhard was of the opinion that no judge in Austria would dare let a book be confiscated.  But he did inform me that proceedings  of some sort were afoot against him.  All along the way to the Hotel Sacher, where this interview took place, Bernhard kept stopping and refusing to move.  He was, he said, in terrible shape, and had hardly slept a wink or inhaled a breath of air the night before.  And as a postscript, he added, “You’re going to have your work cut out for you today with me!”

 

Vienna

FLEISCHMANN: The blurb of your latest book mentions “its first-person narrator, in whom the combination of fiction and autobiographical fact is more pronounced than ever before.”  What is the relationship there?  What is real?  What is invented?

BERNHARD: Well, everything is invented, and everything is also real.  That’s the nature of the mixture.  And the person who perceives himself as real will find himself in it, and he will also perceive even what’s invented as real.

FLEISCHMANN: The novel deals with the culture industry of our time; writers of both sexes figure in it.  Are these merely fictional characters, or are they people you have encountered in real life?

BERNHARD: Quite obviously these are people whom I’ve known very well, whom I actually still know very well; to this extent none of them is fictional.

FLEISCHMANN: Is this piece of prose also a piece of account-settling with your own past?

BERNHARD: A piece of my life; indeed, a decisive piece.  At some point you want to—what’s the word?—capture decisive segments, with your pen, that’s really what it is.  That’s how it’s produced.  The fifties.  Now we’re in the eighties, thirty years later, so you can pull all your old friends into [this space] between the covers of a book, and you hold them captive [there], take a picture of them; you deliver it up, the publisher publishes it, and there it is.

FLEISCHMANN:  And what happens now if these friends recognize themselves in this book?

BERNHARD: Well, of course they can’t help recognizing themselves, even though all their names have been changed.  The uninitiated reader won’t know who has been targeted; the target will know with a hundred-percent certainty who it is when he feels himself being hit.            

FLEISCHMANN: In this book you write that Austrian intellectual life has gone to wrack and ruin.  Vienna is an institute for the annihilation of genius, its newspapers are the worst in the world, the Burgtheater is abominable, its administration is even more abominable.  Are these turns of phrase you employ for the sake of, as it were, honing your artistic technique, or [are they] your actual opinion[s]?

BERNHARD: All these opinions arise spontaneously, and so they certainly don’t have anything to do with any sort of artistic technique that can ever be discovered. 

FLEISCHMANN: But isn’t that a rather presumptuous attitude on your part?

BERNHARD: I don’t think so; I think the attitude I have taken is an entirely natural one.  If you live here and walk around our cities, if you’re acquainted with the people here, you’re just bound to produce the kind of stuff that’s in that book.

FLEISCHMANN: So is this book just an assault on Austria and its cultural history?

BERNHARD: No, no, no.  The book is just a collection of notes with which I’m trying to capture what happened back then and the way things are now.  I’m not assaulting anybody at all.  If anybody feels he has been hit by it, that’s his problem, of course, or the problem of an entire country or culture, or, for all I know, any and every cabinet minister or group of powerful people or private citizens that have been discomfited by it.

FLEISCHMANN: And why do you assault people?      

BERNHARD: My whole point is that I don’t assault; that I just write.  After all, this isn’t an assault; it’s a written book, not an assaulting book.  I write with a typewriter, not with a gun.

FLEISCHMANN: Yes, but you certainly do fire away with it.

BERNHARD: That’s a problem only for the people who happen to read it, and who happen to perceive every word, words in general, as bullets.

FLEISCHMANN: But some of these readers will be, for instance, writers who are literary celebrities from the fifties.

BERNHARD: Whether they are celebrities or not is debatable; there are, I believe, 40,000 writers in Austria; I very much doubt (laughs) that we have 40,000 celebrities.

FLEISCHMANN: Are you denigrating art and literary history as a matter of principle, or simply because you have extremely high expectations of art?

BERNHARD: Well, I’m not denigrating anything; it obviously denigrates itself as it pursues its inevitable course, which, whether we’re talking about culture or politics, always runs downhill; it’s like a pebble or a snowball, the snowball of stupidity.  No matter how small it is when it starts out up there, it arrives down here giant-sized and destroys the entire city of Vienna.  Perhaps it’s bigger than Vienna.

FLEISCHMANN: In this book you don’t pull your punches for anybody or anything.

BERNHARD: That’s just bound to happen as a matter of course, maybe as a byproduct of the verbal explosion.

FLEISCHMANN: And your own attitude?

BERNHARD: That’s also in there, isn’t it[?]  Of course I can’t delineate it for you now.  It’s the attitude of the writer as he’s writing, when he makes a snowball, which is quite tiny, and then he throws it.  Naturally he knows where he’s thrown it, and that it is bound to get bigger.

FLEISCHMANN: Well, then, surely it’s a bit presumptuous of you to say that the snowball is so tiny [in the first place].

BERNHARD: Anybody who writes basically can’t help being presumptuous, because if he isn’t, he can’t produce anything.  An ass-kisser, or a person who lets other people tell him what to think, is simply incapable of writing anything but a pathetic excuse for a book.

FLEISCHMANN: To what extent are these characters, or figures, described in this book individuals whom you encountered in the past, and to what extent are they examples of people in certain situations, or people with a certain mentality?

BERNHARD: They are classic examples of a classic situation in Austria, [the situation] of people who write, make music, dance, produce culture. 

FLEISCHMANN:  Woodcutters—the book is subtitled “An Excitation.”

BERNHARD: Yes, because the style of the book is somewhat excited; its very subject, musically speaking, can’t be written about in a peaceful key, and has to be written about in an excited key.  You can’t write about this stuff in complete calm, as you do in conventional prose; instead, you sit down and straightway you’re excited by the very idea itself, and when you actually start writing, you’re still excited by the style.  The book is written in an excited style.

FLEISCHMANN:  And would you say the excitement increases the closer one gets to the conclusion? 

BERNHARD: An excitation is something that keeps increasing until the very end.  And so the book naturally ends in a state of total excitation by the city of Vienna, in embraces and annihilation all at one go, in a hug-like chokehold on Vienna, and [in my saying] Vienna, you are the best and at the same time the most horrible of all cities, as I daresay anybody else would about his home town.

FLEISCHMANN: So [the excitation emerges] out of [these] antitheses?

BERNHARD: Well, yes; those are the basis of a person’s existence; and of course a book exists only as a consequence of antitheses.  If a book, even a book that’s not an excitation, is one-sided, then it’s simply worthless.

FLEISCHMAN: Was it the period you [were writing] about that excited you so much?  Or was it something else that got you so riled up?

BERNHARD: [It was] my memory [of it].  Thirty years after the fact it’s certainly not the period [itself] that excites you, but the memory [of it], which you make present to yourself, and then you notice that it’s all basically [composed of a bunch of] more or less open wounds; you squirt a bit of poison into them, and the whole thing catches fire, and then an excited style materializes.  And then, you know, certain people cross your path and when you see them, they, you know, drive you crazy, and then you introduce them into just this genre of book, namely an excitation.

FLEISCHMANN: But surely with distance one ought to be able to write about the past more composedly.

BERNHARD: That’s the big cliché about contemplating the past, and it’s obviously totally false.  Old people can write books like that when they’re sitting paralyzed in their armchairs, but it’s not my mode, not yet; maybe the day after tomorrow I’ll still be excited; whenever I write anything, even something peaceful, I’m still basically excited.  In any case, excitation is a pleasant condition; when your blood is sluggish, excitation gets it moving, pulsing; it keeps you alive, and consequently keeps the stream of books flowing.  Without excitation there’s absolutely nothing; you might as well stay in bed.  Now for you, Miss Fleischmann  (laughs), being in bed  is of course only a way of passing the time when you’re excited—right?—and being in a book is every bit as much a pastime.  Writing a book is after all a kind of sexual act, but one that happens at a more leisurely pace than the literal act, which one engaged in when one was younger; it is, to be sure, much more pleasant to write a book than to go to bed with somebody.

FLEISCHMANN: Do you regard writing as a substitute for sexual fulfillment?

BERNHARD: “Sexual fulfillment” is just a catch-phrase, like, for example, “self-development.”  It’s unadulterated bullshit.  But of course I’ve already said what writing is.  I’d just be repeating myself if I said any more about it.

FLEISCHMANN: In this book Vienna is an institute for the annihilation of spirit; what does Vienna mean in your opinion?

BERNHARD: Well, as I’ve stated in the book, Vienna is essentially an art-mill, or the biggest art-mill in the world, into which everybody leaps of their own free will, and the current miller is the chancellor, who is in charge there, the cabinet ministers are the miller’s helpers, and all the singers, actors, stage-directors, fling themselves into the mill, and down below the flour comes out.  But this process can only be kept going for so long before the flour for some reason comes out all moldy and smelly.

FLEISCHMANN: And why do you think that it’s specifically in Vienna that artists are so [thoroughly] destroyed?

BERNHARD: Well, because here in Vienna is where the most spiteful people in the world are to be found; on the other hand you have this mill, the greatest [possible source of] amusement.  Is it not after all amusing to watch people, geniuses and people of good character, flinging themselves into it up at the top, and coming out all deformed down below?  Don’t you find it amusing?

FLEISCHMANN: When you write about people, do you often find yourself wondering whether you’re actually hurting these people as a consequence of writing about them?

BERNHARD: As a consequence of writing about people I portray them without—I have no intention of hurting anybody; who, after all, really wants to hurt anybody?  You know, you describe the way things were, you put your memories down on paper; and if anybody happens to be hurt as a result, that’s none of my business.  For me it’s a literary procedure, a so-called artistic procedure.

FLEISCHMANN: But are you trying by means of this artistic procedure…

BERNHARD: I have no intention of hurting anybody; if somebody happens to feel hurt, I can’t do anything about that; it’s just like with psychosomatic illnesses.  If somebody imagines he has cancer and lives with this imaginary disease for thirty years, there’s nothing I can do to stop him.

FLEISCHMANN: But are you not also more or less concerned to give a complete picture of things?

BERNHARD: Why, of course I am.  That is the duty of a writer, as you know.

FLEISCHMANN: And in so doing don’t you ever think that somebody else might be hit, or, as it were, mortally wounded [by it]?

BERNHARD: Of course, because I take a worse hit from it than anybody else does.  That’s why I get upset when these pipsqueaks say they feel wounded by it.  Besides, I don’t know anything about that.  I wasn’t present when these people read the book.  Even though I’m an inquisitive fellow and would have been glad to be there when they were reading it.  That could be the subject of a kind of monograph, one could write a book about some reader who reads my book, and about the way it makes him behave.  But I can’t be everywhere where these people are sitting around and possibly reading this book.

FLEISCHMANN: Do you actually find these people interesting?

BERNHARD: Not really.  I’m hardly even aware of them anymore.  Thirty years ago for me they were people with whom I’d been in contact.  Now I never see them at all.  But I can still picture them to myself as readers.

FLEISCHMANN: Do you have many mental pictures of your readers?

BERNHARD: I picture them all, but if you have eyes you don’t really need to picture things to yourself much, because you see everything, right?, you can pretty well do without the gift of picturing things to yourself.  Everything is plain to see; you don’t need to picture anything.  It all meets you halfway on the street.  (laughs)

FLEISCHMANN: In this new book of yours you once again as it were deliver a verdict of guilty on the Burgtheater.  Once again in your opinion the Burgtheater is one of the worst…

BERNARD: I am certainly no jury, and I’m certainly no judge either, and so I can’t declare anybody guilty.  Nor is there any such thing as a Judgment Day.  The Burgtheater will outlast everything; it is a colossus.  Once again, in this case a division of the art-mill, the, you know, theater division of the Viennese art-mill, will pulverize everything.  The good people are either struck down, or they kill themselves, they shoot themselves, hang themselves, or they are killed, shot, exiled, hanged, right[?]  Even the suicide doesn’t tie the noose he hangs himself with; rather, the director [of the play] ties the noose for the actor he wants to get rid of, or can’t put up with any longer, or what have you.  Or the cabinet minister ties the noose for the general manager of the Burgtheater, because he wants to have nothing more to do with him.

FLEISCHMANN: Isn’t this outlook of yours quite far-fetched?

BERNHARD: This institute for annihilation is the most near-fetched thing I know of.  What’s far-fetched about it?  We’re sitting smack-dab in the heart of the mill at this very moment, so in what sense can it possibly be far-fetched?  Just consider your own situation, why don’t you?  You’re sitting here smack-dab in the heart of the mill; you entered it of your own free will; nobody’s twisting your arm.

FLEISCHMANN: And what about you?

BERNHARD: I’m also sitting in it, in a subdivision of it, but I always manage to leap out again before I’m crushed.

FLEISCHMANN: So then in your view you have a right to get out, whereas other people have no such right.

BERNHARD: In my view everybody has the right to do everything.  Everybody can do whatever he wants; I have no wish to stop anybody from doing so; nobody lets himself be stopped, likewise nobody is capable of stopping anybody else.  Everybody can say, write, do, whatever he wants; it’s a completely free world.

FLEISCHMANN: Are you conscious of your books’ becoming more radical in style?  Is this intentional?

BERNHARD: That is a natural consequence of sticking with something for a long time; it naturally becomes more robust and it ought to keep getting better, and as far as writing prose goes, you start to get better at the age of 40, and if you survive to 70 you’re probably even better at that age than you were at 40.  Right now I’m still only 52, so if I live another eighteen years, if you survive to 70, you can’t help being even better.

FLEISCHMANN: Does getting better also mean getting more malicious?    

BERNHARD: Everybody keeps getting more malicious, of course.  Children are malicious, the most malicious people of all.  They say an old person reverts to being a child, and thus he reclaims the maliciousness of his childhood, and adds to it the maliciousness of old age, which to be sure is mankind’s most charming quality.  Old people minus their maliciousness are insufferable, just like children without their maliciousness.  A well-behaved child deserves to have its neck wrung, just like a well-behaved old person.  In point of fact, the most beloved human quality in the world is maliciousness, but only, of course, when it affects other people; nobody can deny that.

FLEISCHMANN: And what about you personally?  Are you yourself already affected by this maliciousness of old age?

BERNHARD: I am slowly aging into maliciousness.  That is also one of the charms of my books: the fact that they keep getting more malicious.  Hopefully I can survive through a few more phases [of life].  There are even more important phases that are worth describing, and that I intend to describe.

FLEISCHMANN: For example?

BERNHARD: Because I’m inquisitive and malicious and a trapper at bottom, I can only try to become as old as possible and as malicious as possible, for the sake of writing as well as possible.  But that presents no especial difficulties, because when you’ve been working away at something for 30 years, you’ll keep getting better all the sooner.  It’s like in the case of a piano-player—not of violinists, because their arms get weaker—but to be sure a writer’s brain for the most part doesn’t weaken.

FLEISCHMANN: You said you were a trapper; who is it that you want to trap?

BERNHARD: Well, [it’s] like [with] children.  Children want to trap everybody, right?  To the extent that I feel the same way, I have remained a child; and so you set traps, and stupid people stumble into them and it sets off a terrible hue and cry [if you will/if you want it to].  Or do you know people (laughs) who don’t enjoy perpetrating this kind of prank if they can get away with it?

FLEISCHMANN: But isn’t this all at the slight expense of other people?

BERNHARD: It’s always at the expense of other people. You yourself are living at the expense of other people, just like me, and everything that you do, you do at the expense of somebody else, whether it’s malicious in intent or otherwise.

FLEISCHMANN: But doesn’t this give you a guilty conscience?

BERNHARD: Anybody who says otherwise [than what I’ve just said] is a hypocrite and a liar, and nobody need ever harbor a guilty conscience anywhere on this earth, which is so abysmally abominable that the [very notion of] a guilty conscience is pure nonsense.

FLEISCHMANN: But that’s a ridiculously sweeping judgment.

BERNHARD: Anybody who says he has a guilty conscience is nothing but a hypocrite.  In any case, all judgments are sweeping, if you will; if you utter a sentence, you’re making a sweeping judgment; all judgments are sweeping; do you really think you can say anything without picking up a broom?

FLEISCHMANN: But you don’t see the world as being entirely abominable.

BERNHARD: Of course not, because it isn’t entirely abominable.  Children are also beautiful; childhood is the essence of beauty, but also full of maliciousness; that’s the counterpoise [to its beauty].  I’m truly happy to be alive; I can hardly think of a person who enjoys life more than I do, or who’s fuller of maliciousness, of the desire to trap others, of abominableness; who every single day rejoices in the fact that he’s still alive, and desires nothing more of the day to come than to coexist with it and to live while it lasts.  But if people ignore that and hide under the cloak of hypocrisy and abominableness, that’s their business.

FLEISCHMANN: And what about you?  Are you not also wearing the cloak of hypocrisy and abominableness?

BERNHARD: Everybody needs a cloak to avoid freezing to death in the winter, and the world is a kind of winter.

FLEISCHMANN: Isn’t there a real danger, as you annihilate everything in your books, that people will stop taking you seriously?

BERNHARD: Well, obviously there’s no such danger, because nobody on this earth is actually capable of annihilating everything, nor is there anybody who actually wants to annihilate everything, because if he did he’d have to annihilate himself, but inevitably if you describe anything there’s a great deal of annihilation in the description.  But the idea of annihilating everything is nonsense; I’ve never done that.  I’m constantly running into people who are great and also into people who are something other than great.  And as everybody knows from his own experience, there are just as many abominable people as there are great people.  All right, then: so say there are only a few great people, still there are plenty of sufferable people; that still leaves the 80 percent of them that are insufferable.  And insofar as a writer is required to be a describer of authentic states of affairs, he has to write, you know, what he sees.

FLEISCHMANN: But you find much [of what you see] loathsome and disgusting.

BERNHARD: Just as you yourself must find practically everything loathsome and disgusting when you get up in the morning.  Nevertheless, you get dressed, you go on the air, you do your job, and that’s that.  And I do the same, and, you know, that’s what I describe.  And every milkmaid will tell you, if she’s honest, that her boss is abominable, that the roads are insufferable, that the weather is abominable, that she wants more money than she has, that nothing bothers her, [will Sie], and yet it does bother her that the clothes she has on aren’t pretty enough; moreover, if her hair is disheveled, she’ll wish it were neatly done; if it’s neatly done, maybe she’ll wish it were disheveled.  It’s more loathsome than anything else.  I’m interested in writing, in seeing that it gets done, that it doesn’t go to waste, and that I get paid.  Period.  I am totally indifferent to what people subsequently read into it, or don’t read into it.

FLEISCHMANN: Does making money play a big part [in it]?

BERNHARD: A big part.  What’s more, I was trained as a businessman.  I’d have to be insane to—everybody enjoys [making money].  Or do you enjoy not having money, and giving it away as soon as you have it?

FLEISCHMANN: Once again your latest play is going to premiere in Bochum and not at the Burgtheater.  [Might] this [not] change when Claus Peymann becomes the general manager of the Burgtheater[?]  They say the two of you are more or less a duo.

BERNHARD: In Vienna they say we’re a duo, yes.  Well, in the first place he’s not coming here until two years from now; who knows what things will be like in two years.  There are so many dead people who are still on the payroll that it’s pretty much pointless to think about it.  In two years the mill will have crushed so many people into flour that there’s no telling what it’ll all come to.  The Burgtheater is a wonderful theater from an architectural point of view, but everything surrounding it is horrible.  So, you know, Peymann will come to Vienna, and then we’ll see what he does.  He is one crazy fellow, so why shouldn’t he manage to do something?  [Let him come here] at just the right age, with the best ideas, in perfect health, and with a brain in his head, and then we’ll see what happens.  If he’s left alone, but of course he’ll make sure he’s left alone; he’s strong enough to see to that.  How any of this will affect me I haven’t a clue.  Naturally I’m always writing plays, and he has so far produced every one of them; the rest of that lot I have no use for.  See, I’m always reading that Bernhard is never performed.  Right, because I don’t allow my plays to be performed; and people think it’s because the general managers of the theaters don’t want to produce them.  Just today I read yet again, “Bernhard is unfashionable; nobody puts on his plays.”  “Right, because I always say no,” but the newspapers are completely unaware of that.

FLEISCHMANN: Time and again you have written roles for [specific] actors.

BERNHARD: Well, I write only for actors; I’ve never written for the public, and that’s exactly what gets actors interested in the plays.  The public have never taken any interest in my plays, but actors [have].  And then the actors become interested in me, and when they subsequently turn to the audience, the audience embraces the plays.  But I believe I am the only author who has pretty much never paid any heed to the audience and has written only for actors and solely for specific actors.  And for the most part only for one theater, so that it’s only there that my plays are produced.  On the few occasions when I’ve caved in and let it be “in Düsseldorf” or “in Cologne,” it’s been a catastrophe, and I’m not going to do that again, there’s simply no need for it.  I want to see one good performance and that’s that.

FLEISCHMANN: Can you imagine yourself writing for the Burgtheater’s repertory company someday?

BERNHARD: Of course I have absolutely no idea who is going to be in the Burgtheater’s repertory company in two years; there’s absolutely no stability there.  In the meantime some of the actors you see there now will have killed themselves, and who knows which of them those will be.  Up on the roof there, they’re always flying the black flag, so you really can’t make any plans involving that house.  So you can’t help wondering, as you’re making your plans and mulling over names, well, who are they going to be flying the black flag for then[?]  It’s pointless.

FLEISCHMANN:  You don’t make any plans?

BERNHARD: For the most part I don’t.  My plans come into existence spontaneously.  The world makes your plans for you.

FLEISCHMANN: In this new book, Woodcutters, you write that you admire the acting of Käthe Gold and Paula Wesely.  Have you often thought, “I’d like to write a play starring Käthe Gold or Paula Wesely?”

BERNHARD: Sure I have, but they have always been at the Burgtheater, and I’ve never written for the Burgthetheater; that’s always been out of the question.  And quite apart from that, you see, I have absolutely no idea whether they would be willing to appear in anything written by me.  I mean, just imagine the scenario: I write a play, and then [Miss/Mrs.] Wesely says, “For heaven’s sake, [it’s by] the Abominable Bernhard.”  To be sure, I admire her, but of course I have no idea whether she likes and fancies me.  And it’s the same with [Miss/Mrs.] Gold.  Those two are the only authentic actresses, the only ones who have been first-rate all their lives, right on through to the present.  And these magnificent flowers manage to keep their bloom even amid the wasteland and desert that is the Burgtheater.  The Burgtheater after all is a kind of [Sahara], where everything is parched, desiccated, kaput; and then, ambling around this lifeless desert, you get this pair of perpetually youthful women.

FLEISCHMANN: Why is the Burgtheater like a desert?

BERNHARD: You’ll have to ask the Burgtheater that question.  I don’t know why the Gobi desert is a desert either.

FLEISCHMANN: OK, but you have actually analyzed this subject and thought about it a fair number of times.  You certainly have your own thoughts about…

BERNHARD: You go there, you drive there, you book a kind of safari to the Burgtheater and you go there and there are no animals there; nothing’s growing; nothing’s growling or buzzing; [there are] no poisonous snakes; nothing at all; [it’s] completely empty.  Then you come back out and say, “Well, then, if it’s nothing but a desert, then I really don’t need to go there.”  It’s lifeless and empty.  Only every so often you hear [some old jackals howling], but none of these jackals comes on stage anymore.

FLEISCHMANN: What’s the reason for this?  You have formed some thoughts on this as well; you have been familiar with the business of the theater for years.

BERNHARD: When I see something in a finished state, I have no need to form any further thoughts on it.  The people who would be obligated to form thoughts on it are the ones who have actually lived in that desert and managed to survive there for a relatively long time.  I certainly have no thoughts to form, I refuse to form them.  I attend the performance of a play as a visitor, and when I see a desert instead of actors, I have no need to do thinking about it; I am simply a bewildered observer of wasteland and emptiness.

FLEISCHMANN: And what about the Salzburg Festival?  Next year they’re producing one of your plays!

BERNHARD: Yes, if it’s actually produced; of course it’s impossible to know if it will be produced.  And of course a year is quite a long time.  Well anyway, Salzburg is just as much of a desert.  Of course there are several deserts in the world; so, you know, there’s one in Vienna, and Salzburg, too, will soon be a perennial desert.  It’s been a savannah for decades now, and pretty soon it’s probably going to decline precipitously from savannah to desert.

FLEISCHMANN: In what respect?

BERNHARD: Rivers, to be sure, also decline precipitously, and ponds as well.

FLEISCHMANN: Why, in your opinion, is the Salzburg Festival about to decline precipitously?

BERNHARD: Because it’s thoroughly contaminated with toxic chemicals, toxically theatrical chemicals.           

FLEISHMANN: Was it any less contaminated in the old days?

BERNHARD: I don’t know whether it was less contaminated in the old days, but it certainly was more interesting and livelier.  There was still something natural about it, and today that’s all gone.

FLEISCHMANN: Do you actually take an interest in what is being staged at the Burgtheater and at the Salzburg Festival?  Do you have any sort of stake in that?

BERNHARD: I know what’s being performed there and who’s performing there, but of course I never go there.  And if I know who’s performing there, I have a rough idea of what’s coming out of it.  Of course I no longer have any need to travel there; of course I haven’t been there in decades.

FLEISCHMANN: You were trained as an actor.  Has this had any influence on the way you write?

BERNHARD: Probably.  Everything you learn has a huge influence on everything you do.  Of course I was also trained as a businessman; that’s also always played an important role.  I was also trained as a gardener and as a truck-driver, and in both cases I also learned a lot about human beings.  So you come the proverbial full circle and subsequently write a few relatively decent books.  I’m basically not a writer and have never thought of myself as one.

FLEISCHMANN: But rather as…?

BERNHARD: I have always been a real human being at bottom.  The sort of literary writing that [writers] envisage, compose, or whatever, has precious little to do with reality and is actually totally worthless.  You can plainly see that when you open any of their books.  They consist almost completely of worthless rubbish written by people who are sitting in some government-subsidized apartment, collecting a pension, and there their little domestic problems arise, and then they have filing-cabinets, and then they you know make their books, they sew them together like seamstresses.

FLEISCHMANN: How do you make your books?

BERNHARD: I have always been a free man; I have no pension and I write my books in a completely natural manner, in accordance with the way I live, which is guaranteed to be different from that of all these people.  Only a person who is actually independent can actually write well.  If you’re dependent on anybody or anything whatsoever, people will smell it in every sentence.  Your dependency will hobble every sentence you write.  And so there are whole sentences that are hobbled, whole pages that are hobbled, whole books that are hobbled, because people are simple dependents: [dependents on] a wife, a family, three children, ex-spouses, a government, a company, an insurance policy, the boss.  No matter what they write, it always reeks of dependency, and for that reason it’s [always] lousy, hobbled, hamstrung.

FLEISCHMANN: But of course many writers are living below the poverty level; shouldn’t you at least cut them a bit of…?

BERNHARD: […]That’s their own damn fault; I tell you I have always shifted for myself; I’ve never received a subsidy; nobody has ever gone out of their way on my account, from the beginning to the present.  I am against all subsidies, against all pensions, and artists should never receive a penny for free from anybody.  That would be the ideal scenario; then maybe something worthwhile would be produced.  All the doors that artists are trying to pass through should be shut and bolted.  Instead of being given even the smallest handout, they should be kicked out on to the street.  That is never going to happen [here], and that’s why our art is lousy and our literature is lousy.  [These artists] only have to worm their way into any old nook or cranny of some newspaper or governmental department; they start out as geniuses and wind up in Room 463 with its shelf-fuls of paperwork, because they’re cosseted from cradle to grave.  Well, it goes without saying that you can’t write a decent book once you’re in a place like that.

FLEISCHMANN: In other words, there should essentially be no support?

BERNHARD: None whatsoever, as far as the arts go!  The arts must support themselves.  Not even great institutions ought to be subsidized.  They ought to operate at the behest of a commercial principle: “Devour or starve.”  The reason our cultural life is so kaput is that it’s all being propped up.  Such a huge garbage dump can hardly be produced by anybody who’s not being supported from behind by a subsidy, and thereby ruined.

FLEISCHMANN: What about the official state theaters, the Burgtheater for example?

BERNHARD: At bottom they should all be simply gotten rid of.  What we need is a commercial theater scene, then we’ll get, you know, small, self-supporting opera productions, and things will get back to being natural.  You can sum the rule up in one sentence: If it’s subsidized or government-funded, get rid of it.  I would never give a young artist ten schillings, or even one schilling.  He’s got to get out there on his own, and either he will make it or he won’t.  That’s what I did, after all.  But Austria is a subsidizing state, and so of course everything is subsidized, every moron is glutted and bandaged with subsidies, and has his eyes and ears stuffed with government money, so that people cease to see, cease to hear, and finally cease to exist.

FLEISCHMANN: Isn’t it exactly the same in other countries?

BERNHARD: I don’t think so.  Here it’s immeasurably excessive.  And if it exists in other countries, then it’s only a tiny fraction of what it is here.  A writer who can depend only upon himself for support, who has to work, is also a writer who will actually accomplish something.  But if he knows in advance, “Well, I really don’t have to do anything, because my pension from the Ministry, or some other kind of allowance, is already on its way,” then the whole situation is simply hopeless.  Then they all just sit there at their spinning-wheels and wait for their allocation from the ministry, and weave.

                                                                                           

FLEISCHMANN: But a large portion of the expenditures [on the arts] are basically expenses on personnel.  It would at present be a great hardship if people in that sector were, for example, fired.

BERNHARD: Well, some people will have to be fired; some people will also have to come [back] to life; the stages of our major theaters are frequented by actual corpses, there are literally thousands of people [there] who at bottom are chickenfeed and who are simply tolerated.  The theaters must support themselves, [especially] the state theaters.  The very word [“state theater”] is nonsensical.  A theater belongs in a specific building, whose rent and everything else has to be collected on the spot.  As it happens, I’ve got one of those buzzwords [for it]—all buzzwords are, of course, abominable—but, anyway, the word in question, “downsizing,” would in this case actually be appropriate.  Every single one of them deserves to be downsized, right down to the point where they’re invisible.  And if the actors put on good theater, then people will go into the theaters, and then they will manage to support themselves.

FLEISCHMANN: And what if one of these theaters then says, “Thomas Bernhard is demanding too high a percentage of the takings; we’ve got to cut his share back”?

BERNHARD: I am a businessman and I’ll demand, you know, what my product is worth.  It’s like my great-grandfather used to say: “I’m selling butter for this price; if you don’t want my butter and think it’s too expensive, then get the hell out of here.”  And because I hardly ever allow my plays to be performed and even then just once, I’m a relatively low-cost investment.  But for that one time I intend to get as much as I think I deserve for the time I’ve spent working on the play.  I’ve never made a fuss as a matter of principle or been a chiseller over what’s due to me [“as an artist”], because that’s all official [claptrap], and I’ve always detested the herd instinct, even [when it comes to getting paid].  Anybody who produces something has a sense of what it’s worth, and you can have it for that price, which I intend to have.  If the price isn’t right, too bad!  That’s the best system there is.  It’s the only one I’ve ever known.  

THE END

Source: Thomas Bernhard--Eine Begegnung.  Gespräche mit Krista Fleischmann (Vienna: Edition S, 1991).

Translation unauthorized but ©2011 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "Haimatochare" by E. T. A. Hoffmann

(For a PDF version of this translation, go to The Worldview Annex). 

Preface

The following letters, which provide particulars regarding the unfortunate fate of two naturalists, were conveyed to me by my friend A. v. C, immediately upon his return from the remarkable voyage in which he circumnavigated the globe one-and-a-half times.  They seem eminently worthy of public notice.  It is lamentable, indeed horrifying, to acknowledge how often a seemingly harmless occurrence can rend asunder the straitest bonds of the most intimate friendship and work baleful mischief where one believed oneself entitled to expect the highest good and the greatest profit.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

1

To the Right Honorable _____, Brigadier General in His Majesty's Army and Governor of New South Wales

Your honor will have chanced to hear that my friend Mr Brougthon in his capacity as a naturalist is participating in the expedition that is about to set out for Oahu.  For the longest time it has been my most ardent desire to visit Oahu once again, as the brevity of my last sojourn did not permit me to raise my multitude of extremely remarkable natural-historical observations quite to the level of determinate results.  The intensity of this desire has been lately redoubled by the fact that we, Mr Brougthon and I, being mutually conjoined by that straitest of all chains, a common object of research, have been accustomed for quite some time to make our observations together, and, in virtue of our instantaneous collaboration on these observations, to walk hand in hand.  I beseech your honor to vouchsafe me your approval to accompany my friend on the expedition to Oahu.

Ever-respectfully, &c.

 J. Menzies

P. S.  I shall add to those of my friend my own petitions and expressions of desire that your honor should deign to allow him to go with me to Oahu.  Only in his company, only if he shares in my endeavors with accustomed affection, shall I be capable of achieving what is expected of me.

A. Brougthon

2

The Governor's Reply

It is with sincere pleasure, my dear sirs, that I perceive that science has made the two of you such intimate friends with each other that out of this united endeavor, out of this noble bond, only the most copious and splendid results may be expected to eventuate.   On these grounds, albeit that the Discovery already has a complete crew and space aboard her is scarce, I nevertheless intend to permit Mr Menzies to join the expedition to Oahu, and accordingly at this very instant I am imparting the requisite orders to Captain Bligh.

(signed)

The Governor

3

J. Menzies to E. Johnstone in London

Aboard the Discovery.  July 2, 18**

You are right, my dear friend: when I last wrote to you I was indeed suffering from more than a touch of the spleen.  I was bored in the extreme by life at Port Jackson; with grievous longing I kept thinking back on my majestic paradise, on delightful Oahu, which I forsook for the first time not so very long ago.  My friend Brougthon, a learned man and a good-natured one to boot, was the only person capable of cheering me up and receiving scientific knowledge, but he too longed to get away from Port Jackson, which afforded such meager nutriment to our hunger for research.  I was hardly pulling your leg when I wrote to you that a first-rate sailing vessel had been promised to Teimotu, the King of Oahu, and that this ship was to be built and fitted out at Port Jackson.   The ship was built and made ready; Captain Bligh received orders to convey her to Oahu and to tarry there for a little while towards the end of strengthening our ties of friendship with Teimotu.  My heart was fairly throbbing with my joyous conviction that I would without fail be aboard throughout; but then, like a bolt out of the blue, came the Governor's decision to send Brougthon instead.  As the vessel consigned to the expedition to Oahu, the Discovery, is a medium-sized ship equipped to accommodate only the crew needed to sail her, I nursed but faint hopes of prevailing upon the authorities to grant me my wish to accompany Broughton.   This noble individual, who is devoted to me with every fiber of his heart and soul, seconded my expression of this wish so forcefully that the Governor consented to its fulfillment.  From the superscription of this letter you will have correctly gathered that the two of us, Brougthon and I, have already set out on our voyage. 

Oh what a majestic life is in store for me!  My breast fairly swells with hope and ardent yearning when I think of how on each and every day—nay, at each and every hour—nature will give me the freedom of her abundant treasury, so that I may lay claim to some as-yet undiscovered jewel, that I may call some never-before-seen wonder my own.

I can picture you smiling ironically at my enthusiasm; I can hear you saying, "Of course, he will come back carrying a brand-new Swammerdam [microscope] in his satchel, but if I should ask him about the proclivities, customs, fashions—in short, the various modes of life—of these foreign peoples that he has seen; if I should express a desire to glean from him but such few precious details as cannot be found in any existing travelers' accounts of the region, and can be communicated only by word of mouth, he will thereupon exhibit to me a pair of cloaks and a pair of coral necklaces and otherwise be pretty much incapable of telling me anything else.  In the midst of his mites, his beetles, his butterflies, he entirely forgets about human beings!"


I know that you think it odd that research-wise I am inclined to the order of insects; and in point of fact, I can rejoin nothing in my defense except by averring that the Almighty has so deeply implanted this inclination in my innermost self, that my very ego has been unable to avoid assuming its exact shape.  But you cannot accuse me of neglecting or forgetting my friends on account of this inclination that [admittedly] seems very weird to you.  I shall never manage to discover anyone to equal that old Dutch senior lieutenant who—but by way of forestalling your inevitable comparison of this old fellow to me, I shall recount to you in full his remarkable history, which has just now popped into my head.  When it came to insects, the old senior lieutenant (I made his acquaintance in Königsberg) was perhaps the most zealous, the most indefatigable, naturalist that had ever lived.  The rest of the world in its entirety left him cold, and whenever he happened to find himself alone in the company of other humans, he was most risibly and insufferably possessed by the idée fixe that at he was on the verge of dropping dead of bread poisoning.  I am hardly pulling your leg: the German equivalent of our white bread is known as Semmel.  He used to bake himself a loaf of this stuff every morning and bring it with him to whichever tavern he had been invited to for breakfast, and once there he could not for the life of him be prevailed upon to partake of any bread but his own.  By way of clinching the actuality of his insane parsimony I need only say that he—bear in mind that he was quite a hale and hearty fellow for his age—would make his way along the streets one gingerly step at a time, with his arms stretched out as far as he could keep them from his torso, lest his uniform should suffer the loss of its pristine veneer courtesy of the frictional wear-and-tear of everyday walking.  But I digress!   The old man had not a single relative in the entire world apart from a younger brother who lived in Amsterdam.  The two brothers had not seen each other in thirty years, when the Amsterdam one, impelled by an [insatiable] longing to see his brother at least one more time, set out for Königsberg.   He crossed the threshold of his brother’s lodging.  The older man was sitting with his head bowed over a table and meditatively peering through a magnifying glass at a tiny black dot on a piece of white paper.  His brother emitted a loud cry of joy; he was on the point of throwing himself into the older man’s arms; the latter, however, shied him away with a wave of his hand without taking his eyes off the dot, and peremptorily uttered the reiterative command of “Sh-,” “Sh-,” “Sh-,” “Shush!”  “My dear brother,” cried the citizen of Amsterdam, “what are you about?  It’s me: your brother George, who hasn’t seen you in thirty years, and who has  traveled all the way from Amsterdam to see you one more time this side of the grave!”  But the other man remained motionless and whispered, “Sh-,” “Sh-,” “Shh: the animalcule is dying.”  Only now did the citizen of Amsterdam notice that the black dot was a tiny grub twisting and writhing in its death agonies.  The citizen of Amsterdam paid condign obeisance to his brother’s passion and sat down beside him without saying another word.  But after a full hour had elapsed, an hour during which the older man could not be bothered to oblige his brother with so much as a glance in his direction, the younger man leapt up, dashed out of the room while uttering a coarse oath in Dutch, sat down [on the spot/in the hallway {to catch his breath}], and returned to Amsterdam without having aroused the faintest trace of awareness of any part of the entire episode in the older man!  Now just ask yourself the following question, Edward: if you were suddenly to step into my cabin here and to find me deeply immersed in the contemplation of some remarkable insect, would I keep looking at the insect without moving a muscle, or would I [leave off my bug-gazing] and throw myself into your arms?


For all that, on the evidence of this tale you may well perceive that the order of insects is the most wonderful, mysterious order in the whole of nature.  If it has fallen to my friend Broughton’s lot to preoccupy himself with the world[s] of plants and full-fledged animals, I have complementarily settled into the homeland of the curious and often uninvestigated creatures that constitute the bridge or link between the other two realms.   But soft!  Lest I fatigue you, I shall leave off here [after] simply recording, to the end of thoroughly appeasing your poetic soul and thoroughly making peace with myself, that a certain German poet of  true genius has termed insects in their supremely beautiful, bedizened, parti-colored effulgence liberated flowers.  Just savor that lovely image for a while!

And in any case, why am I trying to justify my proclivities at such length?  Did I not after all find it necessary to convince [even] myself that it was a commonplace impetus to research that was impelling me irresistibly to Oahu; that the prevailing source of this impulsion was not rather a curious intimation of some unheard-of occurrence that I was destined to encounter?  Yes, Edward!  At this very moment this intimation is taking hold of me with such violence that I am incapable of writing any further.  You will regard me as a foolish dreamer, but this is the simple truth; I can plainly see in my soul of souls that either the greatest happiness or ineluctable perdition awaits me in Oahu!

Your ever-faithful &c.

4

Menzies to Johnstone again

Honolulu, Oahu: 12 December 18**

No!  I am no dreamer, but there are intimations—intimations that do not deceive!—Edward—I am the happiest man under the sun!  I have been placed at the very apex of life.  But how ever am I to relate all this to you, such that you will [palpably] feel my ecstasy, my ineffable delight?  I wish to compose myself; I shall try to do so, however incapable I may be of calmly describing to you everything the way it actually happened.      

Not far from Honolulu, the seat of King Teimotu’s court, at which he has received us most cordially, lies a quite charming woodland.  Thither I repaired yesterday as soon as the sun began setting.  I had intended, if possible, to catch a very rare butterfly (the name of the species would not interest you), which commenced its erratic but vaguely circular flight pattern after sundown.  The atmosphere was sultry, suffused with the voluptuous perfume of aromatic herbs.  As I entered the woods, I felt a curiously sweet sense of dread, a mysterious shudder that thrilled through my entire body, that dissolved into sighs of [passionate] longing.  The nocturnal bird that I had set out in search of sprang up right in front of me, but my arms were dangling flaccidly, impotently on either side; as if transfixed by a cataleptic fit, I was unable to budge from the spot where I was standing, unable to pursue the nocturnal bird, which was soaring forth into the forest.  Then I found myself being pulled as if by invisible hands into a thicket, which, amid the [ambient] rustle and bustle, spoke tender words of love to me.   Oh, good heavens!  On the parti-colored carpet of the wings of a dove lay the prettiest, sweetest, loveliest island-dweller that I had ever seen.   No!  Only the external contours of the winsome creature suggested that she was indigenous to Oahu.  Everything else—color, deportment, appearance—was different.  For sheer enraptured terror, I could scarcely breathe.  Warily I approached the tiny creature.  She seemed to be sleeping—I grabbed her; I carried her out of the woods with me; the most splendid jewel on the island was mine!  I named her Haimatochare, pasted together a lovely little bedchamber for her out of gold[leaf] paper, [and] prepared a bed for her out of the very shimmering, parti-colored dove-feathers on which I had discovered her!  She seems to understand me, to surmise what she means to me!   Forgive me, Edward, I am taking my leave of you—I must see what my lovely being, my Haimatochare is up to—I am opening her little bedchamber.  She is lying there on her bed; she is toying with its parti-colored little feathers.  Oh Haimatochare!  Farewell Edward!

Your ever-faithful &c.

5

Brougthon to the Governor of New South Wales

Honolulu, 20 December 18**

Captain Bligh has furnished you with a report of our prosperous voyage, and has assuredly not neglected to mention the cordial manner in which our friend Teimotu received us.  Teimotu is delighted with your honor’s munificent gift and has repeatedly, time and again, begged us to regard every portion of Oahu that might prove valuable or useful to us as our own indefeasible property.  The gold-embroidered cloak that your honor entrusted to me as a gift for Queen Kahumanu has made a profound impression on her Majesty, to the extent that she has lost her erstwhile unabashed good cheer and fallen prey to all manner of fantastical reveries.  Early each morning she walks to the deepest, most secluded thicket in the forest and, all the while flinging the cloak over her shoulders this way and that, practices certain mimetic performances that she exhibits to the assembled court in the evenings.  Moreover, she has fallen into a state of queer inconsolability that has been the occasion of no small amount of sorrow on the part of the worthy Teimotu!  Nonetheless, I have succeeded quite often in cheering up the woebegone queen with a breakfast of grilled fish, which she devours with gusto, whereupon she gulps down a hefty glass of gin, which palliates her wistful anguish to a remarkable degree. It is curious that Kahumanu trails our Menzies with every step he takes, and, thinking that nobody is observing them, clasps him in her arms and calls him by the sweetest names.  I am almost of a mind to suppose that she is secretly in love with him.

Moreover, I am very sorry to have to inform your honor that Menzies, of whom I cherished the highest hopes, is hindering more than furthering me in my researches.  He seems none too inclined to reciprocate Kahumanu’s love for him; on the contrary, he is in the grip of a separate foolish, nay outrageous, passion, which has seduced him into playing a very spiteful trick on me, a trick which, should Menzies not recover from his blindness, could disunite the two of us for ever.  I [am] even [beginning to] regret that I ever begged your honor’s permission for him to participate in the expedition to Oahu.  But how could I have imagined that a man whom I had regarded as a trusty friend for so many years would change so suddenly in such a queerly delusional fashion?  I shall take the liberty of keeping your Excellency apprised in minute and circumstantial detail of the progress of this episode that has proved so deeply mortifying to me, and, should Menzies not make amends for the injury he has done me, of beseeching your honor’s protection from a man who has the effrontery to greet the disinterested embrace of friendship with naked hostility.  Ever-respectfully, &c.

6

Menzies to Brougthon

No!  I can stand it no longer!  You avoid me, you cast at me looks in which I can read [nothing but] ire and contempt; you speak of perfidy, of betrayal, in such a way that I needs must assume that it is I who am the betrayer.  And [so] I am rummaging in vain through the entire kingdom of possibilities in search of an explanation for this [curious] comportment [of yours] towards your ever-faithful friend.  What did I do to you?  What did I venture upon that offended you?  Surely it is only a misunderstanding that is allowing you to doubt my love, my loyalty, for so much as an instant.  I beg you, Brougthon, to clear up this unfortunate mystery, to be mine again as you once were.

Davis, who will deliver this letter to you, is under instructions to request your immediate reply.  My impatience is tormenting me to the utmost limits of endurance.

7

Brougthon to Menzies

Are you still asking me how you have insulted me?  To be sure, such ingenuousness is most becoming in a man who has committed an utterly disgraceful outrage against friendship, or, to put it in constitutional terms, against a fellow-subject’s basic civil rights!  Do you insist on refusing to understand me?  Why then I shall shout my accusation at you so that all the world will hear it and recoil in horror from your monstrous misdeed—in sooth I shall!  And thus I shout into your ear the name that expresses in full the enormity of your outrage: Heimatochare! Yes!  You have christened her whom you have abducted from me Haimatochare: she whom you openly keep hidden away, she who was mine, she whom to be sure in my sweet pride I myself intended to christen for the benefit of the eternally perduring annals of natural history!  Do you insist on refusing to understand me?  Why then I shall shout my accusation at you so that all the world will hear it and recoil in horror from your monstrous misdeed—in sooth I shall!  And thus I shout into your ear the name that expresses in full the enormity of your outrage: Heimatochare! Yes!  You have christened her whom you have abducted from me Haimatochare: she whom you for all the world keep hidden away, she who was mine, she whom to be sure in my sweet pride I myself intended to christen for the benefit of the eternally perduring annals of natural history!  But no!  I am not yet ready to give your virtue up for lost; I yet retain the hope that your faithful heart will vanquish the unfortunate passion that has so precipitately swept you away in its reeling embrace.  Menzies!  Restore Heimatochare to me, and I shall clasp your hand as that of my eternally faithful friend, I shall press you to my bosom as the eternal sibling of my heart!  Then in my mind will remain nary a trace of the wound that you have dealt me in succumbing to this lapse of judgment.  Yes: I retain the fond hope of being able to term the abduction of Haimatochare neither a betrayal, nor an outrage, but merely a lapse of judgment.  Restore Heimatochare to me!    

8

Menzies to Brougthon

My friend!  What manner of queer delusion has you in its clutches?  I am supposed to have abducted Haimatochare from you?  Heimatochare, who, like all of her sex, [will have] nothing whatsoever to do with you—Haimotochare, whom I openly, in the open air of nature discovered sleeping on the fairest of tapestries, I who first regarded her with loving eyes, who first gave her a name and a place of her own!   To be frank, since you say that I have betrayed you, I must upbraid you for your insanity, in that out of sheer delusive and base jealously, you dare lay claim to what has become mine and will remain so for evermore.  Haimatochare is mine, and I shall christen her mine in those annals into which you would bluster and swagger your way by flaunting another man’s property.  I shall never part with my beloved Haimatochare; I [would] gladly [give up] everything, indeed my very life, which can assume a semblance of purpose only under her auspices, for Haimotachare!

9

Brougthon to Menzies

Shameless thief!  Am I supposed to have nothing to do with Haimatochare?  Was she at liberty when you discovered her?  Liar!  Was not the carpet on which Haimatochare was slumbering my property; are you not consequently obliged to acknowledge that Haimatochare belongs to me, to me alone?  Restore Heimatochare to me, or I shall publish your outrage to the world.  It is not I, but you—you alone—who are deluded by base jealousy.  You have plans of flaunting stolen property, but you shan’t get away with it.  Restore Haimatochare to me or I shall denounce you as a craven scoundrel!    

10

Menzies to Brougthon

Go denounce yourself as a scoundrel three times over!  Only together with my life will I relinquish Haimatochare!

11

Brougthon to Menzies

Only together with your life will you relinquish Heimatochare, you scoundrel?  Very well then: let the possession of Haimatochare be determined by force of arms at six o’clock tomorrow evening, in the patch of clear ground opposite Honolulu, near the volcano.  I hope you have pistols ready to hand.  

12

Menzies to Brougthon

I shall appear at the appointed place at the appointed time.  Haimatochare herself shall witness the struggle for her possession.

13

Captain Bligh to the Governor of New South Wales

Honolulu on Oahu, 26 December 18**

It is my sad duty to give your honor a report of the terrible incident that has robbed us of two men of the most sterling merit.  For the longest time I had noticed that Messers Menzies and Brougthon, who had formerly been united in the straitest bonds of the most intimate friendship, who together had formerly always appeared to constitute one heart, one soul that was impervious to any effort to divide it, had fallen out with each other; and yet I was unable to descry the faintest suspicion of a cause for this mutual estrangement.  In the end, they scrupulously avoided each other’s company and communicated with each other by means of letters, which our helmsman Davis was obliged to carry in both directions.  Davis told me that each of them upon receiving one of these letters would invariably fly into the most violent passion, and that in the end Brougthon’s outbursts were especially ardent and ireful.  Yesterday evening Davis observed Brougthon loading his pistols and leaving Honolulu in great haste.  He was not immediately able to locate me.  At the very moment when he was finally sharing with me his suspicion that Menzies and Brougthon were quite possibly engaged in a duel, I happened to be heading out, along with Lieutenant Collnet and our ship’s surgeon Mr Whidby, to visit the patch of clear ground opposite Honolulu, near the volcano.  Whereupon it struck me that if we really were dealing with a duel here, that patch of ground was the ideal spot for it.  My hunch was not mistaken.  Even before we reached the spot, we heard a shot and immediately thereafter [a] second one.  We discovered Menzies and Brougthon stretched out on the ground in pools of their own blood, the latter having been shot in the head, the former in the chest, and neither of them evincing the faintest stirrings of life.  They had been standing barely ten paces apart from each other, and between them lay the unfortunate object that, as I learned from Menzies’s papers, had ignited Brougthon’s hatred and jealousy.  In a tiny box taped together with gold paper I discovered beneath [a carpet of] lustrous feathers a tiny, curiously shaped, beautifully colored insect, which Davis, with his knowledge of natural history, was inclined to identify as a pygmy louse, albeit one that especially in point of coloration and the quite curious shape of its abdomen and feet differed considerably from all animalcules of that genus that had hitherto been discovered.  On the box was written the name Haimatochare. 

Menzies had noticed this curious, heretofore completely unknown, animalcule on the back of a beautiful dove that Brougthon had shot down, and intended, in the character of its discoverer, to introduce it to the natural-historical community under the name that he had devised for it: Haimatochare; Brougthon, on the other hand, maintained that he was the discoverer of the insect, as it had been resting on the body of the bird that he had shot down, and [he] intended to adopt Haimatochare as his own.  Whence originated the fateful quarrel that ended in the deaths of these two men of superior parts and virtue.

Preliminarily, I shall remark that Mr Menzies regarded the animalcule as an entirely new species and placed it midway between pediculus pubescens, thorace trapeziodeo, abdomine ovali, posterius emarginato ab latere undulato etc. habitans in homine, Hottentottis, Groenlandisque escam dilectam praebens [pubic louse, trapezoidal thorax, oval abdomen with wavy border towards the back and away from the sides {?} etc. lives in/on man, a source of food for Hottentots and Eskimoes, who regard it as a delicacy] and nirmus crassicornis, capite ovato oblongo, scutello thorace majore, abdomine lineari lanceolato, habitans in anate, ansere et boschade [thick-horned nirmus {?}, oblong ovato {?} head, fairly large shield-shaped abdomen with plated border, lives in/on ducks, geese, and teal]. 

From these hints of Mr Menzies's your honor will have deigned to grasp what a singular being this animalcule is, and I shall be bold enough to assert, although I am certainly not a proper natural scientist, that this insect, when observed closely under a magnifying glass, betrays an attractiveness attributable especially to its glossy eyes, to its beautifully parti-colored carapace, and to a certain alluring effortlessness of motion otherwise unnoted in such animalcules. 

I await your honor’s orders directing me either to send the calamitous animalcule in a secure package to the [British] Museum, or to drown it in the ocean depths for its having occasioned the death of two excellent human beings.  Pending your honor’s momentous decision, Davis will be keeping Haimatochare in his cotton cap.  I have placed the maintenance of her life, of her well-being, in his charge.  With all due assurances to your honor of etc.   

14

The Governor’s Reply

Port Jackson, 1 May 18**

I am pained, my dear captain!, to the very depths of my heart by your report of the unfortunate deaths of our two valiant naturalists.  Is it possible for a human being to be so exercised by his zeal for science as to lose sight of his minimal duties as a friend, nay, as a fellow subject?  I hope that Messrs Menzies and Broughthon have been interred in the most decorous fashion.  As to Haimatochare: you are hereby ordered to drown her in the depths of the ocean to the accompaniment of a full military salute in honor of the unfortunate naturalists.

Yours ever, etc.

15

Captain Bligh to the Governor of New South Wales

Aboard the Discovery, October 5, 18**

Your honor’s orders regarding Haimatochare have been executed.  At six o’clock p.m. sharp yesterday, in the presence of our funereally-uniformed crew, along with King Teimotu and Queen Kahumanu, who had boarded in the company of several grandees of their kingdom, Haimatochare was removed by Lieutenant Collnet from the cotton cap of Mr Davis and placed in the gold-taped box that once had been her dwelling and now was destined to be her tomb; after which this box was affixed to a large stone and, to the accompaniment of three salutes from our cannon, flung into the ocean by myself.  Hereupon Queen Kahumanu launched into a song, in which the assembled Ouahuans joined and which was as awful-sounding as the lofty dignity of the occasion required.  Hereupon the cannon were fired three more times, and beef and rum were distributed amongst the crew.  Teimotu and Kahumanu, along with the rest of the Ouahuans, were served grog and other refreshments.  The worthy queen is still utterly incapable of coming to terms with the death of her beloved Menzies.  In honor of the memory of her lover, she has impaled her posterior on a large shark’s tooth and is still suffering keenly from the wound.

I must also mention that Davis, the loyal custodian of Haimatochare, gave a very moving speech in which, after synoptically recounting Haimotachare’s career, he held forth on the transience of all things terrestrial.  The hardest-hearted of our bluejackets could not hold back their tears, such that Davis was in turn impelled to leave off speaking every now and then to let out a staccato yelp of appropriate grief, and the Oahuans began to howl in a most horrific manner, which enhanced the solemnity and dignity of the event not a little. 

Please accept, your honor, my particular etc.

THE END     

Translation ©2011 by Douglas Robertson