A Translation of "Eine katholische Existenz" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

A Catholic Existence

In the end, everything comes to naught; everything ends in the cemetery.  There you can do whatever you like.  Death carries everybody home, and then everything is over.  Of course, most people let death carry them away by the time they’re seventeen, eighteen.  Nowadays young people throw themselves into the arms of death especially early; by the ages of twelve and fourteen they’re already dead.  Then there are isolated fighters, who just keep fighting death until they’re eighty or ninety, and then they’re dead too, but all the same they’ve lived a pretty long life.  And because life is beautiful and a lark, they’ve had a long lark.  People who have died young have had a short one, and they really deserve to be pitied.  Because they never properly got to know life.  With all its horrors.

My mother constantly, all her life, suffered from something I have never suffered from in mine—really terrible headaches.  Of course she didn’t get very old, but never mind that.  And I always used to fetch her pills, her anti-headache pills, really strong ones.  And one day I went in and I said, “The pills for my mom.”  And he handed them over to me so nicely out of the jar, well, and then I swallowed them.  I don’t know, thirty pills at one go.  That was what saved me, because it was too much, and so it all came right back up.  I still remember quite clearly that I spent a week in bed and did nothing but throw up, even though I hadn’t had anything in my stomach in a whole week.  It’s really unpleasant.  You feel as though your stomach is being ripped out.

Of course children are always possessed by the Devil.  Any child that’s not frail and ill and gentle and paying attention to everything is obviously going to be told, “You’re possessed by the Devil.”  Because of course they annoy their parents and are actually always superior to them.  Of course a child still has an unspoiled, healthy intelligence.  Doesn’t he?  Parents can sense this, and so they basically hate their children.  And as a result they hate themselves, because they’re responsible for the children’s existence.

I don’t think I’m wide of the mark here; I think that almost every child quite often thinks of killing himself, that almost all of them try it as well, but then they don’t do it or it doesn’t succeed.  That’s really quite a strong impulse when you’re a child.  It comes like a wave, between the ages of seven and eight, then it ebbs away, then you get a bit more robust, I think, then there comes another sensitive phase between eighteen and twenty-four, and anybody who gets over that hurdle makes it to, say, fifty and gets married and marches into normal life with his head held high and his heart steadily beating.  Then beginning at fifty people start to get reflective again.  By then their marriages have fallen apart, their children have turned into monsters, and ingratitude is their reward from the world.

All my life, at every moment of it, I’ve been planning to kill myself.  But since I haven’t managed to do it, life must be more valuable to me than anything else.  So I’m really not sure.  Of course my illness isn’t like multiple sclerosis, something that goes away completely and then comes back.  It’s not something you get over, I think.  It’s very hard to say.  But perhaps I’ll put myself to shame and make it to eighty.  I just don’t know.  It’s not something that’s up to me.  There’s obviously no point in sitting in the coach and flogging the horse when it’s been a corpse for ages.  In my life everything’s always winding down.   

I have adhesions on my lungs, from earlier on, probably; I had pneumonia at one point.  I think they somehow must have started back then.  Because of course I have an ailment that’s permanent there, a dilation of the heart that’s incurable.  And then you can live on for another quarter of an hour or for three more years, or even being around seven years from now is a possibility.  According to the doctors, I really should have been dead a long time ago.  Anyway, death is—so I’m not worried at all; the whole thing is all the same to me.  I actually don’t understand the fear of death because dying is as normal as having lunch.  Sometimes I’m afraid of people, such as they are, but it’s impossible to be afraid of death.  What is it if you can never feel it?  Then I’m just going quit life–I guarantee it.  I’m firmly determined not to linger on as a puny invalid.  Of course that’s a choice that’s open to everyone; anybody can kill himself anytime.  The only question is how.  But an existence in which I can’t do as I like anymore will be hard-going in any case, but after all, I would never do that.  Then once you’re down below, no matter how you got there, there are of course all those charitable abominations that find the kingdom of heaven somewhere, but otherwise nothing.  Started by everybody from the Knights of Malta to whoever; it’s all revolting.

I think people should think more about themselves.  Then at least you’ve got the right feel for things.  Because I don’t need any naturopaths either.   Since I know myself, what I do; I know that I take mild things, expectorants, and there’s nothing more to do than that.  Once you’ve woken up to the fact that you’re basically rusting, right?  It’s like when you’re scouring the barrel of a gun; obviously tending to your throat isn’t any different.  Of course it’s not at all a bad idea to add some bland, oily stuff to your diet, along with honey and milk, to take in some clean air; then it goes away.  But not completely or for good, right?, there’s the rub.

I have actually written about headaches, about terrible headaches, because I’ve always been interested in them, and my grandfather had insanely terrible headaches, and so did my mother, basically everybody in my family.  But I don’t know what it’s like to have a headache.  Except the one you get after being drunk.  I do get a backache when the weather’s changing, and I can sense it in my head.  One way or another you’re at the mercy of the weather.  It’s obviously not a big mystery when something is hurting you.  You’ve only got to look up and you’re sure of it.  But it’s never attacked me in the head, not really.  It attacks me from behind and inside, and it stabs me.  Well, obviously you can’t escape it, and it’s naturally also a stimulus, but if you can’t get to sleep for months on end, not for a single night, and you start to feel lucky if you sleep three hours straight without anything playing up, then the stimulus is naturally blunted quite a bit.

Earlier today I spent some time with my brother; he’s an internist, thank God, because that lets me spare myself all that ghastly drivel involved in visiting doctors’ offices, but he is always marveling at all the things I still manage to do.  Of course he thinks that somebody in my condition should have been lying in bed for years and doing God knows what.  Of course if I’d done that I’d be no longer with you, probably.  But I’m certainly in relatively good shape, and I’d rather do too much than too little anyway; otherwise I’d obviously be finished.

In Lisbon I had a urethral blockage, which lasted three days, OK?, and then there was suddenly blood and pus as well.  I told my brother about it by phone, and he said “check into a hospital right away,” and it was high time to do that.  If you wait a day too long with that—my grandfather died of the same thing.  But I still flew back on my own with the catheter in.  And it turned out not to be too late, it was early enough, and it cleared up.

My mother was bedridden with cancer for two years, and then she died; she was already like a skeleton, and my aunt, who of course you’ve seen, was also bedridden for a year, and I nursed her, more or less.  Intellectually she was a hundred-percent lucid up to a day before her death, but ghastly to look at, nothing but skin and bones.  I know what that means, that a so-called normal death is quite ghastly.  But these people, even when they can’t put up any kind of a fight anymore, keep hanging on to life, which is so stupid that you can’t even talk about it.  So death and life; it’s really quite normal, normal and completely natural.  It’s stupid only when you see somebody else who’s like that and who’s on her way there; that’s horrifying.  Besides, you’re deteriorating and you just can’t do certain things anymore.  I simply can’t walk up a single flight of stairs in a building anymore, just like people stop being able to swim, overnight, or run long distances.  And I think I would even go so far as to say that anybody who isn’t dead yet or hasn’t killed himself yet is happy after a fashion.  Even if he’s unhappy.  Otherwise of course he would have done away with himself.  The moment when that prevails, the weariness prevails, when it’s so strong that you want to kill yourself—then you can of course make up your own mind whether to be happy or unhappy, fortunate or unfortunate.  It’s simply not true that it descends on you from heaven.  Or that people can talk you into it.  Everybody has got his own life in his hands, in the final analysis.  I think this has naturally gone really far, but I could say without further ado: if a person is blind, for him it could be the greatest piece of good fortune—even if he would have to endure incredible pain, even if he’ll be half-starved—to be able to see just one more time.  So at a moment like that he’s already fortunate.  And it’s highly fortunate for you that I don’t bludgeon you to death with my hoe right now.  Right now I obviously really could kill you.  For example.  But perhaps that would be highly fortunate for you; it’s obviously impossible to say.  Or for me.  So the first thing murderers feel, as soon as they become conscious of what they’ve done, two minutes afterwards, is shock.  After about two minutes they rush outside and scream, “Aw, Ah done keelt’im!”  And that’s probably exactly what I would do.  I really don’t think I’d just calmly drive away in the Mercedes, with the windows rolled down, and say, “I have killed a certain person.”  I don’t think I’d do that.  So I really would rush outside, with my shirt unbuttoned, my fly unzipped; somehow you get the feeling that “Less will happen to me because I’m already being a bit cunning.”  So I might think along those lines, sure.

You really do enjoy a slice of good fortune, of happiness, every day.  Happiness, I think, is doled out just like unhappiness; everybody gets his share.  And even a guy with one leg is still happy, because he’s still got one leg.  And a guy who’s just got his torso left, and can keep on living, is happy.  It’s that way right up until the end.  Probably that’s what happiness is.  And the idea that you’re supposed to be happier than you already are is probably sheer hubris and unfeasible.  But naturally I’m no village priest.  I’m obviously not protesting anything.

I’m satisfied with everything, completely.

Probably because I’m so self-satisfied and so happy about everything.1  In the truest sense of the word.  I am thoroughly happy, from head to toe, from my left hand to my right, and this is like a cross.  And that’s what’s so beautiful about it.2  A Catholic existence.  I wish everybody could have religion and all that, because it’s wonderful.  It’s all like creamed soup.

Because you can’t do anything.  You get a name, Thomas Bernhard, and you have it all your life.  And if you go and take a walk the woods one day and somebody snaps a picture of you, then for eighty years you’ll be doing nothing but walking in the woods.  There’s not a thing you can do to stop it.

Naturally if some reporter is sitting in a bar and hears that you’ve said, “Beef is no good,” then he’ll always maintain, “This is the man who can’t stand beef.”  Meanwhile maybe from that point onwards you’re eating nothing but beef.

Anybody who’s been branded an “ox” is an ox all the way to the slaughtering block.  So everybody knows that in the spring he eats grass, then foggage.  It’s the same in the case of a writer.  He’s been branded a “writer.”  Hence, the farmer who sells him at the slaughtering block is the publisher, who sells him at the book market.  Everybody knows what the writer does.  Just as a cow devours grass, a writer devours thoughts, assimilates them.  Whether they’re always the same ones or different ones is none of his business.  It’s a higher sort of intuition.  Perhaps it’s also partly owing to my having received extreme unction when I was in hospital at the age of eighteen.  After that I was in a sanatorium and bedridden for months in the mountains.  Always the same mountain in front of me.  I couldn’t move, and out of that boredom and that solitude with that mountain, for months and months—then you’re either going to go mad or you start to write.  And there I got over my aversion to books and writing and the pencil by writing.  And that is certainly the root of all evil.  But everything helps you further along, and you can make a living from anything, and so you make a career of producing nonsense.  Life consists of a concatenation of nonsense, a bit of sense, but almost exclusively nonsense.  No matter who it is.  Even if they’re now great and important, supposedly great and important people—it’s all pitiful and leads to nothing but the end.

Then at home you can put your little books on shelves, and then you can look at them.  And despite that you keep grinding the mill.  Just as you get used to having a cup of coffee every morning, or a cup of tea—tea is even more sensible—it’s that way with writing.  Because you get addicted.  It’s even a kind of narcotic.

If you enjoy being alive as I do, you simply can’t help living with a kind of constant feeling of love-hate towards everything.3  It’s a kind of tightrope walk.  Of course to surrender directly would spell death.  If you enjoy being alive, you obviously don’t want to be dead.  Everybody enjoys being alive, even somebody who’s killed himself, but after that it’s no longer possible for him.  Because it’s never possible to undo anything.

You’re just tossed to and fro.  That’s the best incentive and impetus to live that you can have. If you only love, you’re doomed.  If you only hate, you’re just as doomed.  Nothing can survive without eroticism.  Not even the insects; they need it too.  Unless you’ve got a completely primitive idea of what’s erotic.  That’s out of the question, because I’ve always taken care to get the better of primitivism.  I have no need of either a sister or a mistress. You’ve got all that inside yourself; sometimes you can even exploit it, if you’re in the mood. People always think that whatever isn’t directly stated is absent, which is nonsense, of course.  An eighty-year-old man who’s bedridden somewhere and hasn’t enjoyed this kind of love in fifty years—he’s also got his sexual life in there.  In fact, his is a much wilder form of sexual existence than the primitive kind.  I’d rather watch a dog doing it and keep my strength.

Sexuality plays a huge role for everybody, just as everybody plays a role in it.  Everybody’s got to play that role, of course, because everybody’s got it.  There’s no such thing as a non-sexual human being.  Even if you were to cut off somebody’s breasts, dick, and everything else, he’d still be totally dependent on sexuality afterwards.  To be sure, then he’d be dead and a total sacrificial victim of total sexuality.

THE END

1. Cf. Hofmann’s “last conversation” with Bernhard, a traditional question-and-answer interview: “HOFMANN: You’re content with everything. / BERNHARD: I’m satisfied with everything.  Completely. / HOFMANN: So why do you write? / BERNHARD: Probably because I’m so self-satisfied and so happy about everything” (p. 138 of Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard).

2. “I am thoroughly happy...beautiful about it.” This passage appears in Siegfried Unseld’s obituary for Bernhard, as quoted in n.1 to Letter No. 524 of the Bernhard-Unseld Correspondence.

3. “If you enjoy...towards everything.”  Another passage that appears in Unseld’s obituary.

4. “Nothing can survive...and keep my strength.”  A passage that appears verbatim in Werner Wögerbauer's 1986 interview of Bernhard.  For more on this see the footnote to my translation of the first monologue in Hofmann’s collection.

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 53-63.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "Flucht zum Menschen" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

A Flight into the Arms of Humanity

I had tuberculosis and pimples all over my face, and I was emaciated and pale, and the whole thing began because there was an unveiling ceremony for a memorial plaque for my grandfather in Henndorf.  I still remember that.  There was this unveiling and then there was a lunch or something like that with my relatives in the tavern, with newspapers and reporters and whoever standing around and with flags and rifle-shots.  My grandmother was sitting next to me, and so was Kaut, and she said, “Good Lord, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my grandson, he’s a good-for-nothing and going nowhere, and so perhaps he could write.”  And Kaut said, “Send him to me on Monday.”  OK, and then on Monday I went to see him at the Demokratisches Volksblatt in Salzburg.  Then he said, in fact I think he even addressed me as “Du,” it really strikes me as quite comical; he said, “Hop to it, kiddo!”  There was a refugee camp in the—Rosittenkasern it was called, so it was a barracks; I was supposed to go there and write something about it.  Anyway, so I went there and then typed something up.  I lived in Aiglhof.  Next morning it was in the newspaper, heavily trimmed of course, naturally, and I was really proud.  Then I thought to myself, wow, you bring it in in the afternoon, and the next morning it’s already in there.  That’s an uplifting feeling.  And at the time there was a guy who covered the courtrooms who fell ill, to my good fortune.  And then nobody was covering them; this was a small newspaper with nothing.  So then I started going to the courtrooms, on an interim basis; then the guy stayed ill for ever and ended up never showing up again.  I have no idea who he could have been, and I just kept doing that for two years.

At bottom I wanted—because back then I was always changing my mind—I wanted to open a shop, meaning a grocery store or something like that.  I had already asked a junk dealer for shelves and drawers and whatnot; I had made up my mind that I was going to sell something.  What that would be I had no idea; small household items or things like that.  It had always been a desire of mine and a dream of my youth, because in Henndorf, at my Aunt Rosa’s, they had had a general store with sugar-loaves and whatnot.  Because I had spent time there as a child.  The whole shop was half the size of this room here.  Plus a second room, a bedroom; there actually wasn’t anything else.  As a child I had often spent every day there for months on end, and later on I started spending the night there.  I always hated it, but in compensation I was at least allowed to sell things there, behind the counter.  And so I put up with being around this old, hideously senescent aunt, in her horrible bed.  I didn’t get a wink of sleep—all the windows were shut tight as a duck’s bum; it was a dank, musty hellhole—the entire night.  But I certainly garnered an experience from that cornershop trauma.  But because it happened to occur along with the writing, well then, I know I used to get thirty schillings per contribution, and it made no difference whether it was three pages or three lines.  So it was a fixed fee.  Then I always made sure I had three contributions in each number, even, say, “The Pregnant Widow.”  Then I would go to the district court and ask, “What the hell’s going on today?”  They had legal documents that I would transcribe on the fly.  So I earned quite a bit relatively speaking, almost 90 schillings a day, which was a huge sum of money back then.  By the end of the month I was sitting pretty there.  And then I thought to myself, you know, this is really a more favorable situation than the other one.  I had plenty of job-satisfaction, and I could read my own hokum over breakfast.  At the time I really didn’t quite believe it was hokum.

One day I came into the office, and Kaut said to me, “This is never going to last the way it is now; now we’ve got to join the party, so I’m talking about our becoming a socialist newspaper, which means becoming nothing, because there’s no such thing.”  Then he immediately took me by the hand, like an uncle.  The party office was only five addresses farther down the street, and the future mayor was there.  [Heinrich] Salfenauer was the party secretary then; he was a short, weedy, rachitic homunculus, basically offensiveness personified, a caricature of a nonentity, utterly average and preposterous.  I thought to myself, “It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to me; I’ll go ahead and join the party now.”  And the members’ badges for a half-year membership had already been prepared, and we signed on right then and there, and that was the end of the story.  I went home and I said to myself afterwards, “What exactly is it that you’ve just done?”  It was a spur-of-the-moment, brainless act, and so it sort of gave me a nasty feeling.  Then letters to “Comrade Bernhard” started arriving, and then I said to myself, “Oh boy, somehow or other this has really got to stop.”  And I am absolutely sure that the very next day or the day after that I took my party membership book, I wrote a letter to Peyerl, who was the governor of Salzburg at the time; he was a Red as well, and he also lived in the Aiglhof: “To the Chairman of the Party in Salzburg.”  I wrote that on a certified mail envelope and then I wrote, “I really don’t think much of socialism and whatnot, and I herewith enclose this book, which was a load of drivel,” and the rest was history.  After that I couldn’t be open with Kaut anymore, and then naturally my whole ninety schillings a day were gone.  It was all over.  After that I was out of touch for I think ten, fifteen years.  That was it.

Then I immediately rang up the Salzburger Nachrichten and said, “Could I do something for you?” and so forth; I always just used to rush into things, and back then the editor-in-chief was [Ilse] Leitenberger, who has been at Die Presse for decades now.  Somehow by then I was already beginning to get the picture.  She said, “Ah, he starts out pretending to be a Socialist.”  Over the telephone, right away, incredible as it seems.  I thought, “You can get stuffed,” and I hung up.  I’m still totally certain it was in the telephone booth in the Rainerstrasse; such a devastating rejection.  And then I just stood there.  Then Becker got me something at the radio station; they had a news magazine show; I think it was called Radio Austria; so a kind of preview of certain upcoming programs, the kind of thing that’s everywhere now; it involved writing something about them beforehand.  I chose programs about science.  Instead of going to the library and looking things up, I always just made up everything myself, and wrote, “…as Heidegger has already said…”  I made it up myself, these turgid sentences that didn’t say zip or anything else, but they sounded grand.  I had to submit five short paragraphs every week, and then I got three hundred schillings a month, and I was able to live on that for years, that lasted years, until I got the sack, because I kept missing the deadlines.  The backlog was piling up to my neck, and so I kept putting it off, and then it was too late.  I foundered.  By then of course I had enrolled at the Mozarteum, and at the same time I was coming up with these little things in the newspaper.  That was everything, I think.

And then there’s another thing I still remember: that at the time I got a merit scholarship.  At the Mozarteum they were announced publicly in a list, specifically on the bulletin board.  The scholarships were for 50,000 schillings, an enormous sum of money back then.  Back then old Paumgartner was still alive, and the president of the Mozarteum.  By then I had already written some poems, privately.  My poems were already being published when I was still in the seminar.  The book had also come out by then as well.  (Auf der Erde und in der Hölle [On Earth and in Hell], Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg,  1957).  And I can still remember thinking, a merit scholarship, how wonderful; for that you’ve got to get dressed up, because the 50,000 schillings were handed over by the president himself in white envelopes in his office, on the ground floor.  And so Thomas Bernhard, I said to myself, wearing just a pair of trousers and a pullover; I had never owned a coat up until then.  Well and then he hands them out, and then he runs out of envelopes, and I’m just standing there.  Then he says, “So, what the hell do you want?”  I say, “Well, now, what do you mean?  I’m on the list, after all.”  Ah, that was a mistake.  Awfully shabby of him, wasn’t it?  And he didn’t even manage to crack a joke, and he wasn’t at all nice about it either.  And I was left standing there like a drenched [poodle]…I tell you, these people are incredibly coarse.  They call themselves connoisseurs of culture, they’ll conduct an evening concert at the drop of a hat, and they beat the living tar out of you there.  I went home, and I was knackered.  I tell you, these stories, it’s only just becoming clear to me.  Such remarkable things that these people couldn’t have cared less about.  Back then I lived on nothing but goulash soup for years on end, and because of that I had raging acne and I looked horrible.  Goulash soup and a black bread-roll, that was my actual daily diet, and in the morning I would usually guzzle a couple of liters of tea, and at night I didn’t go home.

I had known Becker, the director general of the ORF, from earlier on, and I was always striking little deals with them.  Once when All Saints’ Day was coming up, he said to me, “We’re about to make a program about the cemeteries of Salzburg,” and for that I wrote “From Grave of Honor to Grave of Honor.”  I listened to it enthusiastically afterwards, when an actor read it, possibly from a theater, in Salzburg.  That was certainly a pinnacle.  Or “Poet’s Corner,” or whatever it was called, a quarter of an hour.  Ernst Schönwiese was still there then, so some fine poems got read.  In the intervals there was some piano music.  At home I was bashful; I sat down in a tavern where nobody knew me, and I asked, “May I please hear the radio broadcast?”  And so I solemnly listened to it.  Well, all right.  And I thought, “Now you’re officially the Great Poet.”  And I went up to Otto Müller with the manuscript, it was all very simple from then on; I never met with any resistance at all.  Well, after all, that was quite a momentous thing.  I was through with the Mozarteum by then.  I took this exam and wrote some stories; I was finished, and once I got my diploma, I swore that I’d never have anything more to do with that again, because I had no interest in it.  I basically enrolled at the Mozarteum just to avoid becoming isolated and going completely to the dogs, plus I was simply forced to be around people my own age.  It was a total flight into the arms of humanity.

What else could I have done?  For one thing I was ill.  When you’ve got a lung disease, you obviously can’t go to work for a business, so that already rules out a couple of things.  At the Mozarteum I never said anything about it; in fact, nobody ever asked me about it.  In a school you can cough up a storm whenever you want; it’s as simple as that.  But when you’re going to work at a grocer’s or at a hardware store or someplace like that, you’ve got to present a clean bill of health; otherwise they won’t hire you.

Well, I’d already written some novels, really long ones, three hundred pages long, really insufferable things, right?  One of them was called Peter Goes to Town, and I was already at page 300, and he was still stuck at the train station.  So I just stopped working on it; the whole concept was wrong.  He hadn’t even once taken a seat in a streetcar, and there were already 150 pages.  So zero points for economy.  From that point on, good Lord, when was that anyway? By then I was at least 25 years old; so then the book came out, and I had begun writing earlier, when I was sixteen, seventeen.  For almost ten years there was nothing, but then I was writing without putting too much thought into it.  But then I got the feeling when I was finished [with Frost] that this was it, something that nobody had really done before and that nobody would imitate either.  And when Frost came out it was of course snubbed by everybody around here anyway.  I still remember that everybody, all those people who are still writing in the same half-cocked, slapdash kind of way, wrote “This is a trial run, but we don’t want to hear another word about him, about that boy there in Salzburg.”  It’s no skin off my nose; of course anybody can write what he likes.  Encouraging it certainly wasn’t.  If it hadn’t been for a couple of reviews that were printed abroad, reviews that were drivel in themselves but got hyped in a big way, the book might have vanished without a trace.  The whole thing was effectively written into a void.  I was going through a phase then when I was living in Vienna with my aunt.  I was working at building sites and digging ditches, and I also drove trucks.  I made a phone call; there was one of those “St. Christopher’s” offices there then.  So you go there, you get a leather waistcoat—I actually already had one then—and then you start driving.  I worked for a company called Kemeter for months.  They’re actually still in operation today.  With the same blue cars.  I really liked driving anyway.  I am of course a passionate motorist, always have been, and I actually like trucks even more, and I’m actually very sorry that all that’s so long over and done with.  Somehow it did something for me.  But I had already finished writing Frost by then.  Wieland Schmied was a very good friend of mine, and back then he was a reader at Insel Publications.  They sold three thousand copies, I think.  That basically had no effect whatsoever.  And later on the boss there at Insel said to Schmied, “So he’s talked our ears off; we’ve got to accept it.  But of course the whole thing isn’t all that good, as you yourself told me way back when.”  And other jokey things like that.  And somehow the book came out and there were reviews.  But apart from their existence, they didn’t really cheer me up much, because each one of them contradicted the others, and in the end, just because I was a halfway intelligent person, I managed to figure out what sorts of intellectual products I was dealing with.  Because basically there’s nothing of substance to them, and long reviews never contain a single sentence that has any real personal meaning for the reviewer, that gives you the feeling that he’s read the book with genuine interest.  It’s obviously all conceived in a businesslike way; he takes care of his business and he’s done.  For him the whole thing is a crude, alimentary, breadwinning business.  And then you sit there with the reviews and the book, and you never get the faintest clue what kind of book it is, whether it’s anything like this or that and so forth.  Then I went back to driving trucks, but there was something unwholesome about it.  It was an unwholesome situation.

If the book hadn’t been accepted, I probably would have gone to Ghana, but in the meantime, after I’d gotten my visa and everything else, this American in Accra who had set the whole thing up, an official working half for the UN and half for Catholic Charities, suddenly died of a stroke.  In my life, death has always had excellent timing.

THE END

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard.  Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 42-52.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "In einem Kloster für gefallene Mädchen" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

In a Convent for Fallen Girls

My mother was in a village here, and when she noticed that I was on the way, she went to Holland.  Back then it was common for Austrian girls to work as housemaids in Holland, and she, this friend of hers, was already there, and she told her that she should come to Holland because of course she was being sort of ostracized; in a village like that it is of course bad form to have an illegitimate child on the way, growing in your belly.  And this was in Heerlen.  In one of those convents that have a wing set aside for fallen girls.  And so they let her stay there until the child had been born.  Back then it was probably quite a small town; now it’s an enormous place.  I liked it quite a lot, those houses; they’re tearing up the place so that the curtains can hang straight and the houses can stand level too.  I was probably there for just a couple of weeks.  Then my mother went to work as a housemaid somewhere in Holland, specifically in Rotterdam.  Because this friend of hers had fixed her up with something and she handed me over to a fish-cutter or somebody of that sort in the harbor.  Because this was a family that took in children, and they had lots of hammocks, and whenever a mother came by she would drop off her child, so that was that.  For about a year.  And then she moved with me to Vienna.  But the landscape of those nether-lands down there is very beautiful.   I’ve been in Heerlen a couple of times since thanks to these people who owned a chateau there; they were the noble Stolberg family, one of whom was the Count Stolberg Goethe knew…they had this chateau, actually it was a proper castle, it was a marvelously beautiful house, an old house with a kitchen with lots of tiles, and the floors of the rooms were sunken quite deep; during the war they had stored grain, old beds and chests of drawers, and then they had to rent out the place and sell it.  The N.A.T.O. chief, Kielmansegg, was there; he used to reside in that castle.  It’s perhaps fifteen kilometers from Aaachen; I don’t think it’s very far from it.  But wondrously beautiful.  And the countess had an old black car, and we drove to the church at Aachen with her daughters, and I went along with them.  And at the border she, “the cou-u-u-ntess,” doffed her hat, then we went into the cathedral and drove back.  That was quite a couple of weeks.

It was thanks to one of the daughters that I was there then.  And then the whole thing came to an abrupt end.

It wasn’t a simple matter being an illegitimate child back then.  Naturally times were difficult all during the war.  My mother’s husband, who was a little hairdresser’s assistant, didn’t pull in any wages, as you can well imagine.   He lived more off of tips.  Cutting people’s hair in a white coat in a small town isn’t exactly a job with bright prospects.  Naturally my grandparents didn’t have anything either.  When I was living with my grandfather, who was a writer, there was a really huge library, and being around those books constantly, every single day, did nothing but horrify me.

My grandmother worked as a babysitter in the countryside, meaning for farmers, and we lived off of her earnings from that.  And you know how stingy farmers are and the kind of money you make babysitting for stingy farmers—so it didn’t amount to much.  In spite of that, it was a beautiful childhood, even a stable one.  I really didn’t want for anything.  I had one pair of shoes, which I wore only in the winter; in the summer, through November, I went barefoot, which never made for any problems.  Once a year the children would get a—it was called a Ruderleiberl—it was a kind of T-shirt, with stripes; that was enough for the whole year.  And you ran around dressed like that and drank warm milk straight from the cow.

My grandmother of course was just knocked about as well; she was the daughter of a livestock dealer, specifically of a bled-livestock dealer; of course pigs are killed by bleeding and cows by slaughtering.  Hence slaughtered livestock and bled livestock.  They lived in Salzburg where the lift for the “Mönchsberg” is, in the house right next to it.  Their son was Bernhard the master-tailor; he made uniforms.  He clothed all the army officers.  First he clothed the SS and then the American generals later on.  He was in Klessheim, and when the outfit fitted well, the general invited him to Castle Klessheim, for dinner.  And then it was terrifying for him, the sweetened American meat, and as the general was looking the other way, he picked up something, a cutlet or something like that—he was always telling this story—and stuck it in his trouser pocket, and in his terror he ruined his trousers.  He’s not alive anymore; otherwise he would still be clothing Chinamen.  One time he made me a suit and completely screwed it up, when I was fifteen years old or something like that, my only custom-tailored suit in my entire life; it was unwearable, it didn’t fit right at all.  Naturally he had it made by an apprentice, because he thought, after all, this is my nephew, so we don’t need to put any work into it, and then I still clearly remember that I threw the suit in his face; of course he even wanted me to pay for it.  When I saw the way it looked in the mirror, I threw the whole suit in his face, and with that my relationship with my uncle Bernhard was history.  Then back at home for a long time after that they would talk about what a horrible thing I had done.  Naturally they thought I should have accepted the suit and worn it; and then even years later they were still asking what he could have done with the suit.  Of course he couldn’t have sold it to anybody, and he, the posh tailor, had taken a huge financial hit because of me.  But he came to a horrible end.  All posh people have to die of a horrible case of bowel cancer and therefore come to a horrible end.

It was certainly wonderful, but while you’re living through it, it’s decidedly execrable.  I don’t think that’s at all auspicious.  It’s my opinion that life has definite and intrinsic drawbacks.  Because when you’re young it’s execrable, and you’re being attacked everywhere you go, and you never get a firm grip on things, and once you’ve got one, your hand gets chopped off right away.  When you get older you still haven’t gotten anything out of it, because you see through everything even more clearly and on top of that you’re getting old.  None of it is particularly pleasant.  There may be some intellectual pleasure to be derived from such things, sure.  I certainly believe that.  And also occasionally from fresh air, but the air is seldom fresh.   And I’m certainly no nature lover, and I really don’t have any pastimes either.  When you grow up in a completely normal way—right?—with all the usual childhood larks and stuff, and then people tell you all your life that you’re a charlatan, and that it’s utterly impossible for this boy who does nothing but crack jokes to get shirty about some lousy dinner his grandmother cooked—that dogs you all the way to your grave.  

THE END

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 36-41.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "Bis einem Hören und Sehen vergeht" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

Until Your Eyes and Ears Fail You

I can go for weeks without writing anything at all.  Months.  Years.  Then all of a sudden something’s there again.  Then I look into my drawer, into my little treasure chest.  I really don’t do anything else; I open up a little safe, and once again there’s a manuscript inside.  Somehow something coalesces once again.  As long as people are just merrily scampering all over the place, they’re not even interesting to write about.  Why should you write?  Because there’s something not right about the people you write about.  It makes absolutely no difference whether you believe you’re writing something about them that’s authentically true or if you think it’s completely erroneous.  It’s just your view of them when you’re in the mood you’re in when you’re writing.  This view might be completely different a half an hour later.  Then on top of that someone else, a reader, will come along later and see it completely differently in his own right.  So what sorts of people are these, these characters who scamper all over the place?  They really have nothing whatsoever to do with reality.  That’s why all of them always feel falsified.  Thomas Mann and other such people have of course always written about people who still exist.  These people have always complained because they’ve had nothing in common with the characters in the books.  They write about people who are still alive, and I write about these encounters which are thirty years old or even older, which don’t impinge on me at all anymore.  It’s the same as if I were stumbling across some random rock.  Or a calf in a stable.  That really doesn’t impinge on me either.  Of course I don’t know what the truth is either; I myself really don’t know it at all.  Above all it’s a thing that is; the way it is and the way you describe it are of course two different things.  Even if you feel the urge or the mania to write a hundred percent truth now, you won’t succeed, because to do that you’d have to be able to slap reality down on to paper, which is impossible.  But the moment you set to work with your stylistic resources and language, it’s something different and in any case a falsification, but at the same time perhaps an approximation.  Probably the will to truth is the only thing you can put to use, probably, but the truth…A description is anything but the actual fact, so it’s of no use at all, no matter what turn you give to it.  Or even with facts it goes awry.  If I say, “Three people met their deaths,” it’s different, as if death itself could be published, but that’s impossible.  And after reading a newspaper article, every reader has seen and assimilated a different truth.  For any given thing there are as many truths as there are people who have experienced it.  Assuming that they even desire the truth.  But truth is drivel in any case.  I obviously see myself differently than you see me, and you see yourself differently than I see you, and everything keeps crisscrossing, so even while something’s still happening it’s already been displaced, displaced, and it’s something quite different.  Every time somebody writes something, it’s a new truth.

One fine day I sit down and write a prose text, and next I write something different.  You catch the scent of something, and then you simply get in the mood for it, and then you’re stuck being in the mood for it.  I certainly never have any kind of overall scheme, like Heimito von Doderer.  He made proper drafts of his books; he designed his books like an architect, at a draftsman’s table and using multiple colors: the positive chapters he designated the green ones and the negative ones—when they still hardly had anything in them—the red ones.  He called one of his books The Diamonds.  But I never managed to find a single diamond in it.

You want to produce something good; you take pleasure in what you produce, like a pianist.  He starts playing; at first he just practices playing three notes, then he can play twenty, and then eventually he can play all of them, and he keeps perfecting this as long as he lives.  And what other people do with notes I do with words.  To a turn.  Nothing else really interests me at all.  That’s the alluring thing about every kind of art.  Art is really only ever about playing better and better on the instrument that you’ve chosen.  That’s the fun of it, and you won’t let anybody take it away from you or talk you out of it, and when somebody is a world-class piano player, you can clear the entire room in which he’s sitting at his piano, you can fill it with dust and bombard him with bucketfuls of water, and he’s still just going to keep sitting there and playing.  And if the house collapses over him, he’ll keep playing, and it’s the same way with writing.

I’m basically a musical person.  And the act of writing prose is always bound up with musicality.  One person breathes through his belly—singers of course breathe exclusively through their bellies, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sing—another person has got to, you know, transfer his respiration up to his brain.  It’s the same process.  Of course you’ve got lots of lungs inside you, probably a couple of million of them.  Even now.  Until they collapse.  Because blisters pop, and the air sacs are blisters, so they collapse.  When you step out into the street, all that stuff goes to work for you.  You don’t need to do anything whatsoever; you don’t need to do anything but open your eyes, open your ears, and walk.  You don’t need to do any more reflecting.  Then when you get back home, all that stuff will find its way into whatever you write—provided that you make yourself autonomous or are autonomous to begin with.  If you’re tensed up and stupid or try to strive for something, nothing will ever come of it.  If you’re living in life, you don’t need to add anything to it; all that stuff comes into it on its own, and it will precipitate into whatever you do.  You can’t learn this.  You can learn to sing if you have a voice.  That’s a basic prerequisite, right?  A person who is congenitally hoarse and is stuck for life with his hoarseness can hardly become an opera singer.  That’s just a universal given.  Without a piano you can’t play the piano.  Or if you only have a violin and try to play the piano with it, that obviously won’t work either.   And if you don’t switch to trying to play the violin, you’ll just end up playing nothing at all.  Everybody must assimilate and reject as much of everything as possible.  Most people make the mistake of sticking with one caste and class, and they fraternize exclusively with butchers, because they’re butchers, or exclusively with bricklayers because they’re bricklayers, or day laborers because they’re day laborers, or counts because they’re counts…I’m my own man, so I don’t need anybody else.  Because nobody can teach me anything or say anything to me, I don’t need to go see anybody.  Because human beings are intrinsically hypocritical and eccentric, I don’t need a writer.

And I have no idea how anybody becomes what he is.  You can’t get away with asking an athlete how he manages to jump six meters eighty centimeters; if you do, he won’t be able to jump afterwards.  Nobody knows how he jumps, how he manages to pull that off.  Franz Klammer suddenly started thinking about how he took off, and now he can’t do it anymore.  You can’t get away with asking a dancer how he dances; you can’t get away with yelling at a sleepwalker.  It’s the same thing.  I think it’s like Claudel, who went into the cathedral in Rotterdam and was standing in front of a pillar, and suddenly he described how the pillar sprouted wings and then Jesus rose up before him.  So in my opinion it’s really cheesy and it’s really stupid.  But it impresses people.  When a stone pillar sprouts wings, it’s somehow not only plausible but actually completely clear.  And then, after walking into the cathedral in leather shoes, he walked out of it in silk shoes.  That was also his birth as a great poet: Paul Claudel.  You don’t need to strive for anything in the world, because something will, you know, bump into you.  A striver is truly an atrocious thing.  The world has an undertow, of course.  It carries you along with it; you don’t need to strive.  If you strive, you become a total striver, a brownnoser.

Whenever you’re writing you need something around that enables you to write.  Whether it’s solitude, a tree or a dung-heap or a human being, anything you’re fixated on.  In the final analysis it’s almost always on yourself.  Everything else is hokum.  Of course a dog also seeks out a tree or the wall of a house when he pisses.  When you write it’s like when you pass water.  You seek out some such thing, and most of the time you piss on yourself, because that’s the thing that’s nearest to hand.

I've never given any thought to form; that has always emerged on its own, from the way I am and write.  Of course one has mentors and narratives.  But I think that before Frost at bottom there had never really been anything in that vein.  It was the first time anybody had written in that vein.  Literature after the war had of course been oriented towards all the famous literature that had come out of America and England and France.  Back then, apart from Nazi poets, quote-unquote “Nazi poets,” everybody, even the most well-known writers, wrote nothing but novels that were set in Oklahoma or in New York.  Nobody had yet hit upon the idea of describing where they lived and where they’d grown up and things they actually knew something about.  The main character in the novels of those days was always somebody called Joe or Miss Temple or Plempl or Plampl, and because of that the literature that was written in the first fifteen years after the war ended up being a complete pile of shit.  Because it was worthless, because it stuck to being nothing but a blind, cheap, apish imitation of the Americans.  After the Americans became famous and were published in huge print runs, the writers over here believed that they should write like them so that they could drive around in a Cadillac.  But they just sullied our literature and never got to own a Cadillac either.  So it was completely pointless.

I did some stuff along those lines, but not with Joe and Miss Temple; instead I exploited certain local phenomena and genres that I had read about, along with some things from the French surrealists.  I was enthusiastic about Julien Gracq and such people, who were famous back then; of course nobody knows anything about them anymore today because they’ve completely vanished.  After that I didn’t write anything at all for years and I thought to myself that I should forget all that stuff and throw it away and that it was basically nothing.  Either it works out and you sit down at your desk and write the way you just are and what you know and what you can.  Once I started doing it that way it was authentic.  And the poems were basically nothing as well, because they were ultimately just a spastic attempt at thrusting myself into the limelight.  The stuff that came out of this attempt just wasn’t poetry, and so you end up disconnecting yourself from everything you’ve learned from reading.  You’ve simply got to allow yourself to vanish through a kind of trap door, but of course not everybody has the strength to do that, because it means keeping quiet for years at a stretch.  For five years I wrote practically nothing, because I’d realized this is bollocks, it’s nothing.  In a word: even though I had previously been convinced it was the most exalted and greatest thing ever, suddenly a light came on, and I told myself this is utter rubbish.  So all told a hundred poems, and at bottom it’s nothing.

I really was quite anxious after the first book.  Well, in any case, you get that every now and then, this feeling; it keeps coming back periodically.  It’s nothing new.  Then you tell yourself there’s absolutely no reason for it, but then it keeps coming back.  What else would I do?  I’ve basically got nothing else.  It’s basically been constantly shrinking for decades.  Because you’ve really got nothing but that and you just keep stirring the porridge…Most of the time there are way too many insights and ideas.  Then you’re powerless.  Most of the time, of course, you can only start to write again when you’re totally spent.  Of course I’d always really like to be writing ten books at once.  But I can’t.  Of course you can’t have ten themes and then—you’re on the verge of killing yourself.  Until another one occurs to you.  But it’s always the same process.  Of course in the final analysis it’s always interesting.  Of course you can get ideas anytime.  Of course they come to you spontaneously.  Whether they’re potent or not.  Because the inside has always got to be covered by the outside, and above all, you’re obviously always standing there naked, and you’re constantly trying to put your clothes on with everything you write.  But it never works out; the more you try to get dressed and put your clothes on and keep warm and wrap yourself up, the more naked you’re left standing.  But on the other hand it’s also a thrill to expose yourself and just run naked down the street.  Because after all, what else are you doing when you have your books published?

I’m not thinking, in fact my mind’s a complete blank, when I write; I’m not reminiscing about any books, not even about any that I’ve read; there’s really nothing there at all.  I really don’t devote any energy at all to literature.  I read all that stuff fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago; I don’t remember a thing about Stifter’s works.  Of course everything you write has ramifications.  You can ask me about my own stuff; there are lots of sentences I remember verbatim; well, at any rate, I can remember that I wrote them; I remember that quite clearly.  But most of them…I don’t even remember the basic gist of my books at all anymore, because I’m not in the slightest bit interested in them anymore.  And so, sure, I have a rough idea, but I don’t often know for sure; is it in The Lime Works or in Gargoyles where the woman is paralyzed?  So it’s like that.  I just really don’t get attached to the stuff.  Because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to write anything new.  I of course want to leave myself free of entanglements.  All that stuff gets thrown overboard, like ballast from a balloon.  You cast away bags of sand, which are your books, and then you can climb higher.   And so with every book you throw out on to the ground you really should climb higher.  It’s quite a lovely image!   But when you’re throwing the bags away off the left side and think you’re climbing higher, you crash into a rocky reef on the other side and it tears the whole thing to pieces.  Or you have a wife, who when your back is turned cuts the rope as you’re soaring blissfully into the sky.

A stupid writer, a stupid painter, is always looking for subjects; to find those all he needs to do is live his life.  He tries to stay the same forever, but he also tries never to write the same thing twice.  And that is really what it all comes down to, if it comes down to anything at all. But if from the beginning you travel around with your writing like a trouser-salesman and also live off of it, you just end up doing something along those lines.  A typical writer, a typical German writer, thinks like that.  He even says all that as well.   He says that he lives like that and writes, and so on.  I’ve never felt like a writer in that sense; I have in fact always wanted just to write, but it was only later on that by chance that turned into being a writer.  That’s by no means terribly essential, because other people make you into one from the outset.  There’s no writer’s academy later on…a place where you would get a little piece of paper where it’d be stated that effective today Mr. Soandso is a licensed writer.  Just like a pianist or an actor; they can carry all that home on their license.  When I’m writing, I write everywhere, it makes absolutely no difference where.  I can write at a tavern, I can write in a block of flats, I can write in Paris in the middle of traffic, it makes absolutely no difference.  If I’ve gotten that far, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  The question is only ever whether I’ve gotten that far.  I actually can’t get started in a place that’s peaceful and where nothing is going on, because I can’t get into the groove.  To begin with I need stimuli and some kind of chaotic incident or something like that.  Chaos is a great pacifier.  For me anyway.  And in the newspaper everything is obviously chaotic.  But it’s very taxing, because you’ve got to rework all that.  To begin with you’ve got translate it into something imaginary.  In today’s newspaper it says that a boy was walking his dog—have you read it?—on a leash.  Then he tried to climb some hill somewhere; unfortunately the leash got pulled over his head, the dog probably ran three paces ahead, and the boy was strangled.  Right, so you imagine something afterwards.  But when you describe something, it’s rubbish, because of course it’s nothing special.  You’ve got to rework it or come up with something to add to it.  The strangled boy in relation to Troilus and Cressida; that might have worked.           
   

The main thing is for it to sound good.  That pulls the reader along from the very beginning, the way a dog pulls along a lead.  It’s of course always important to pull it all together, to compress it, to be able to throw it away.  And being able to separate yourself, radically, from your own stuff, so that you can see that this needs to be thrown out.  The more you cut out the better it actually gets.  If I now write, for example, something about somebody who goes on a sea voyage because it’s his life’s goal, and something doesn’t fit into the overall project…so it has to be the sea, but then the sea often gives you a block that lasts for months, and on top of that it would be so simple to rework it.  A completely logical thing to do, which you haven’t thought of doing, because perhaps you haven’t wanted to do it until now.  And then it works out, the project does.  You think.  And then an actor comes along, or whatever, and we do that, and then yet again it becomes something completely different.

Of course after every project I fall to pieces.  After the last play, because it was just such a project, I lay in bed for three weeks in a kind of boardinghouse and I was completely knackered.  But of course it’ll come to a natural end, so you don’t need to be worried at all.  I already think my stuff has been written in a way that’s never going to become dated.  At one point the themes are ahead of their time and at another point they’re behind the times, you know that of course.  For decades people don’t read any Hamsun at all, and then he makes a comeback.  That happens with everybody.  But it’s certainly, without a doubt, deliberately being written in such a way that people will still be able to read it even in a hundred years.  Because the style is such that it basically can’t become dated.  You learn that from your personal experience: that for a while you devour caviar and probably that comes to an end after three weeks, a sudden end, and then you eat blood sausage.  For years.  But of course caviar always makes a comeback, even if for just a short time.

But somehow, somewhere, the adventure comes to a close.  Now you look for subterfuges and write, say, plays or, say, construct a prose work that bores people, because they say: “I think that’s way too silly, a three-page sentence.”  And that’s actually the appeal of the thing, that it makes people go, “Ugh!”  And you also find it appealing that you’ve done something that people reject and that gets their hackles up.

Perhaps it’s comparable to a child giving his grandmother a fright every morning and also getting his jollies from it.  Perhaps it’s a substitute for that, because of course that’s not possible anymore.  When I was a child, there was a curtain, in front of a little broom cupboard, and I would stand inside it with my hand raised, and when my grandmother had just walked past I would let my hand fall out.  She was scared to death, every time!  But this wasn’t every day.  Once I got the feeling that “Now she’s forgotten the whole thing; now I can do it again,” it always worked.  And now I can’t do that anymore, because there’s no grandmother here anymore, but I still do things exactly like that.  Or say somebody says, “Come pay us a visit; read something to us,” and I say no.  Then I have the time of my life.  To be sure, I also think to myself, “Good Lord, you’re stupid; you’ve lost the money, the lot,” but perhaps then the fun is even greater.

Basically that’s the way it is, and so such things happen.  Otherwise of course everything would be horrible.  If I humored everyone all the time, it would obviously be terrible.  And so you have to construct something for yourself on your own; obviously nothing is coming in from outside.  There’s no war, and there’s nothing else; we’re not living in some border zone, where something is going on.  And those stories about nukes are all tedious, because they end in nothing.  And so you should wander off somewhere, with a satchel.  You’ve got to construct Afghanistan and things like that, substitutes for them, yourself…when you get antagonistic the way I do, something interesting comes into being.  Somehow after doing that you’re surrounded by elements of tension again.

Of course an illness is always a great blessing as well.  Every illness that you’ve beaten makes for a terrific story, because nobody can tip anything remotely like it into your cup.  But you can’t count on it, because at some point things are going to take a nasty turn.  That doesn’t make any difference anyway, though, because of course by then you won’t be around anymore, and you won’t be able to notice it.

Of course it wasn’t all that long ago that they still spelt literature with two tees… litteratus!

My life is of course altogether clear-cut; I do my work; everything that impedes this work falls by the wayside, and whatever facilitates this work I am in favor of.  It’s just that simple, now and forever.

I haven’t been fated to do anything impossible; what I intend to write hasn’t been decided by fate.  I don’t feel the least bit ashamed or anything like that; obviously I can’t feel that way anymore.  If you stop working, you’ve got to go outside and set fire to something or other.  At first you do this as if you’re walking in your sleep, and afterwards you yourself wonder how it ended up going the way it did.

But I’d still like to do or see something different; I don’t mean something new, because of course there’s hardly anything new left; but of course it’s a pleasure to look at everything everywhere, until your eyes and ears fail you.  Maybe you don’t want to keep living through all these periods that you keep living through and want to kill yourself; probably everybody’s felt that way, of course…but in spite of all the hardships, probably everything is actually getting more and more interesting and also more beautiful.

THE END

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 20-35.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson