A Translation of "Das Theater als Sumpfverein" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

The Theater as a Social Cesspool

Humankind is completely rotten in and of itself.   So you can’t get the better of anybody, I think.  Everything that you get to know at all well becomes unappetizing and unpleasant if you spend any amount of time on it.  If you look at all closely at it, it becomes unendurable.  I just know what definitely isn’t bad, and the work of the famous actors was bad.

I can remember : I used to go to rehearsals all the time, when I was a boy, at the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg.  Werner Krauss played Caesar there.  Of course the very sound of it is funny, isn’t it?, Werner Krauss playing Caesar?  It’s simply moronic.  I mean it’s simply as grotesque as you can get!  And Ewald Balser as Brutus, right?  When Krauss was a genuinely great actor and Balser a nonentity!  He really was a nonentity; he had nothing but a sonorous voice, completely hollow, and his brain was like his stomach, so stupid.  And I can still remember that Josef Gielen, who was directing at the time, had to explain everything to him, and then I thought, wow, and they’re so famous!  How can somebody be so stupid and so famous!  You’ve literally got to explain the meaning of every single sentence to them completely, and then you’ve got to tell them, look, you’ve got to think about what he just said, and now you’ve got to react to it in this way—they just don’t get it.  The more famous they are, the stupider they are.  At the dress rehearsal the whole play was a wreck. The soldiers didn’t enter from stage right, but from stage left, and then total chaos ensued. They lost their nerves at the dress rehearsal, and the premiere was basically a non-starter. But at the Felsenreitschule and in that whole star-studded sky, people obviously don’t see anything having to do with art; you can do what you like there as long as the scaffolding looks nice, and you can say any old thing.  What they say is always the same; it’s just got to be said as sonorously and distinctly and bombastically as possible.  With that you can fill up three hours.  And I still remember that during the curtain call, Werner Krauss took his bow in a trench coat and with a briefcase in his hand, because a taxi was already waiting outside to take him to the airport, because he had a film shoot in Hamburg to get to that night.  Then I thought, look, that’s the great world of the theater.  This was in the fifties.

But music is always beautiful.  Opera is beautiful, because of course it makes no difference what they sing or say or if they’re stupid.  If the voices are beautiful and everybody comes in at the right time and the music is good then not much can go wrong.  But you can’t convey intelligence from the stage because there’s none to be conveyed.  It’s simply abominable.

Of course at the moment the Salzburgers hate me; they obviously must loathe me like the plague.  Of course it’s quite amusing.  But where there’s nothing a director can’t direct anything.  Of course I don’t care about anything but a good performance, a reckless one, and then done, full stop.  I obviously can’t have anything to do with that whole kit and caboodle that’s still put on there.  Or with the truculence of those people there, the stagehands and the rest, who are super-tightly organized there and just throw everything together like bricklayers.  You obviously can’t stage a play properly there.  It’s got absolutely nothing to do with the theater; it’s obviously a social cesspool, but it’s not a theater.

It’s like everywhere in Austria, when you go inside and open up everything.  Then you get the feeling, as soon as you step outside, that everything is basically falling to pieces behind the scenes yet again.  Then yet again somebody rings you up and the like; it makes no sense. You can’t even hold people to their word with contracts on anything.  They always find loopholes and lawyers and stories; I’ve got no interest in that.  I don’t mess around with any of that at all anymore.  Either it’ll be done the way I think it should be—even then it won’t turn out the way you think—or not at all.  In Salzburg of course it was all the same; of course it was always just a pack of lies and cheats in the final analysis.    

Of course I’m not in touch with actors at all; I have no interest at all in that.  There’s nothing more horrible than an actor, when you sit down with one afterwards; of course I never do that.  I did commit that awful blunder exactly one time, though; when you do that every one of them shines an interrogation lamp on you and you have to tell every one of them that he was the best one; of course it’s incredibly loutish.

Of course they’ve chosen their vocation.  I’ve chosen mine as well, deliberately.  But in their case there’s really no excuse or whatever.  It’s a tough business, full stop.  Either you’re up to the job or you aren’t; of course that’s the only criterion there is; of course there aren’t any others.  It’s got nothing to do with sentimentality or phoniness.  I really can’t imagine doing anything at all with any Austrian actors.  They can’t even talk.

I got a look at this funeral in Vienna; I was passing by in a streetcar as that Hörbiger affair was taking place.  Then I saw these stage-prop obelisks for the burial.  Then I thought, “I’ll get out now and take a look.”  Then I was standing there like a journalist in my light-colored coat, staring greedily at this pseudo-necropolis, and I listened in and looked at them all; they all looked so horrible.  Because of the way they were all roaming around at a trot, completely dilapidated, gone to seed, rickety, knackered, mendacious, from the ninety-five year olds all the way down to the kids, but they were all striding around together, because that’s the kind of thing you’ve got to do.   Actors get appendicitis and die.  Letters don’t die; that’s the advantage of prose!

I don’t earn any money from the prose works anyway.  Then you can accept all the young writers, who all earn much more.  Because there’s nothing to them and they vault over two thousand copies, like with beginners, nothing at all beyond that.  It’s still the same way today; there’s nothing to be gained from it; the publisher covers his costs, but just barely, because he doesn’t do anything extra, and I don’t force him to, because it’s really all the same to me.  If I make any money, it’s off the plays, or whatever you want to call them.  I don’t know whether they’re really plays; it really makes no difference anyway; they’re something for the theater, and that’s that.  And it’s really just something I get a kick out of, and that a certain actor gets a kick out of.  And that’s the main thing: if nobody gets a kick out of it, if they never stage it, then I don’t need to worry about it anymore.  The moment nobody’s getting a kick out of it, nobody will stage it.  It’s really quite simple and clear-cut.  Nobody is being forced to perform something somewhere or to read anything; these people are all doing it of their own free will.  But I can easily put a stop to it, if I get the feeling that this free will is really an end in itself or that it’s giving me a bad name or spoiling my mood.

Of course it would be completely unproductive to have the books acted out onstage.  Can you really picture a country doctor coming on to the stage over and over again, with his son and his little doctor’s bag?  Within a quarter of an hour, or if a really great actor was involved, a half an hour, the curtain would fall.  Of course I’m of the opinion that you can even make a theatrical event out of a pile of shit.  The curtain rises, and there’s a big pile of turds there, and more and more flies keep flying in, and then the curtain falls.  So I mean, when you come right down to it—that kind of thing really happens in the theater; of course it always has done.  Whether when the curtain rises a pile of cow manure or Hermann Bahr is lying there, it pretty much makes no difference.  If it’s well done.  You can’t argue with it if it is.

Of course you can make people prepared for anything.  You can fill a theater with certain people who have been fortified by newspapers and so forth.  When they’ve been told for months or years that some big event is on its way, you can actually infect the public.  You can treat the theater in general exactly in the same way as a general hospital.  Infect the general public and then you’ll catch the audience and you’ll catch the critics as well.  Then any old thing can be acted out for three hours, and they’ll think it’s grand.  And of course it might actually be grand, because absolutely nobody’s said that it isn’t.  I actually even think that it might be magnificent for a great actor just to sit on stage for three hours and shake his foot or whatever.

I think actors genuinely vie for parts in my plays.  So the general managers of the theaters basically dislike my stuff, because they don’t make much money off of it, and it doesn’t attract much interest from the public, but it still gives actors something to do.  Sure, I know that at the Burgtheater there are actors who don’t care to perform in these things because they find them too difficult, and on top of that and in the background there’s no guarantee of success at the outset.  Actors are like that.  Of course they want to serve up delicious first-rate food, like at the Zauner, and they want to be sure of the price they’re going to get.  And that it says in advance on the menu how much they’re going to get for what they do.  In the case of my plays, they serve up stuff, and they really get nothing in return.

The Burgtheater is like this: I can remember that the first of my plays at the Burgtheater, which was The Hunting Party, I was expecting Paula Wessely to star in it, along with Bruno Ganz, and it had in fact been written for them.  And Ganz even gave up certain things, plays at the Schaubühne, just so we could do it there, and then at the Burgtheater the actors all stood up and went to the management as a delegation, I don’t know how many of them there were, and said he can’t come here to the Burgtheater, if he does we’ll make a stink or whatever, and Paula Wessely made it contingent on that, she said, well if he isn’t in the play I won’t be in it either, and I had such a stupid contract that I couldn’t get out of it anymore without ruining myself completely, and then it ended up being done I must say truly wretchedly, with Joachim Bissmeier.  So that’s the Burgtheater for you.  It’s like that everywhere in Austria.

With normal actors you can’t get anything done; they give you at most six weeks, and in six weeks you can’t rehearse something like that.  It worked when Minetti was the star, because he wouldn’t let anything interfere with his work; he did it completely for himself, and Dorn just stood by him and Minetti worked it all out.  In cases like that it works.  To a certain extent.  Minetti just has an incredible amount of experience, decades of it, and he’s taken part quite deliberately.  And so not just like some timeserving bureaucrat of an actor, but with the utmost refinement, the utmost abominableness.  With him you can have a really pleasant chat.  Because he’s so forthright, and that’s kept him in good form.  He comes across as genuinely young, but with the added bonus of all that experience he has.  He often reacts like a twenty-two- year-old, whereas these other people, if they’re thirty-five, are already worn-out and nothing but marionettes of the theatrical world.  They let themselves be juggled and have got nothing of their own left.

But at the same time he’s had operations and has got actual nails in his bones; it’s all chrome-plated and screwed in.  And considering that he’s now nearly eighty and acts there all evening four times a week.  Then he flies to Bochum, has a lie-down for an hour, then he acts again and is on the stage for hours, for the whole evening.  Then he goes out on the town until two in the morning, and then he says he’d like to show up yet again for breakfast.  And most people are older than dirt at sixty; they don’t get involved in anything new, they have their single-family house somewhere and make everything center on that, as their theater career keeps rolling along, so everything centers on their little vegetable garden and the beloved little walk they take every day.

I have good luck with Peymann.  You really mustn’t hire any bad actors.  If you do that things go pear-shaped.  And whenever I compromised the thing ended up dead in the water.

It was my own fault, because I must have seen that myself, and I certainly did see it, but I lost my nerve.  And once you lose your nerve, it’s all over.  And you take all the blame for it, obviously; it logically all falls on to your shoulders.

There are so few intelligent actors; in Vienna you can’t find a single one.  Of course I know an actor doesn’t actually have to be intellectually brilliant or highly cultured, but then again he’s got to have a quality like—I don’t know, like what Käthe Gold or somebody like that’s got.  Peymann himself is surrounded by total idiots; he’s got to deal with politicians, because if didn’t he’d have to pack his bags and leave town tomorrow.  But that’s all truly abominable.  He’s got to have dinner with wastes of space who’ll do anything to trip you up, and he’s surrounded by total deadweights, by total assholes who hang on to him like lead and do nothing but lay on great dollops of schmaltz.  But all that stuff in Vienna is just horrible.  It’s no skin off my nose, really, in the final analysis, as long as he’s in charge of the production.  I really like Peymann, full stop, period.  As a person.

They say nobody goes to see them, that they’re boring.  But of course that’s completely untrue.  Because more people go to see my plays than to the plays of any other living author.  But it’s completely untrue, the received opinion.  When I think of the fact that I’ve already sold out the Schiller Theater ninety times, can you believe that?  A one-man play with a little girl.  I told him he could do whatever he wanted with it.  I never thought that he would play the role at all, ninety times; it defies imagination.  But then Mr. Blaha says, “This is an author everybody walks out on, because he’s so boring.”  I can’t think of anything else that people find so entertaining.  But that doesn’t mean anything, the fact that it’s good enough for me.  Collaborating with these people is the main thing.

But as for the prose, what can you do with it?  You can hand it in and say, “I’d like it to look this way.”  I design the covers of my books myself as well.  I do everything myself, because of course if I didn’t everything would turn out awful.  Because only if you make it simple will it look good and also be effective.  If you leave it up to graphic designers, who’ll go berserk with it, then of course it’ll be unsightly, repulsive, and ghastly.  I completely put the kibosh on all that.  Graphic designers don’t have any say in my stuff anymore, because they believe that you’ve got to put a picture of a shoe on the book because somebody takes a walk in it.  Which of course is horribly crude.

And theater in itself has always fascinated me, ever since I was a child.  It’s certainly nothing new; it’s something I just play with.  You write a play, which is for them [i.e., I believe, “these people” above (DR)] and for the public, and then they perform it, if it gets produced.  Theater is a difficult, characterless business.  Of course no play has ever had character as its starting point, or morality either.  They’re total swines or total pipsqueaks.  And under certain circumstances, they can produce something grand or something atrocious.  And what’s more, the productions are never all that great.  I was at the playhouse recently, and it was more atrocious, more ghastly, than any performance I had ever seen in my life! Unmotivated, brainless, and the actors even reacted appropriately, as they were sitting there and taking everything at face value.  It was as good as nothing.  Because the actors were impossible.  That’s the way they’re still acting it now, after a full year.  So I march into the theater and write it all off and then march straight back out.  Of course that’s got nothing to do with my idea of theater.  It works for a run of at most ten, twelve performances.  Up to that point it’s rising to its peak, but then of course it just sags back into nothing.  Then ideally you should take hold of them again, flog them all, and start all over again at the beginning and tell them all how atrocious they are.  If you let it keep going, it’ll turn into something so ghastly that you can’t and won’t have anything more to do with it.  It’s like making butter in a dairy.

I’m no great fan of stage directions, which are obviously the ruin of any play.  The dialogue itself should direct the actor’s performance.  And writers who use them are invariably the worst ones.  The more stage directions there are, the less elbow room there is for the actors and the director.  The text should be so compelling that everything that it’s about comes directly out of it, and if the text isn’t strong enough, then stage directions are absolutely useless, like in Hochhuth or people like that, where the thing is five-quarters stage directions, and a quarter of them are impossible, with lame dialogue, meaning that it’s unintellectual, unemotional, unpoetic—basically everything beginning with “un.”  In Shakespeare there are no stage directions.  Aside from “Scene: a palace or a throne room,” “exit” or “enter” “left” or “right,” there aren’t any.  Everything emerges directly from the dialogue.  That’s the way it really should be.  Which means, of course, that you see everything; you obviously don’t have to spell it all out everywhere.  But actors are so loutish and stupid that you actually have to tell them everything, unless they’re absolutely outstanding.  But fame is no defense against stupidity.  At the age of seventeen, eighteen, I would attend rehearsals where I would bury my face in my hands and think, “What is this, a world-famous man, and the director still has to tell him, ‘When your partner says this, you’ve got to think this.’”  And that’s how they work on plays.  It’s really insupportable.  And with names that made you fall on to your backside with admiration when you were a child.  And these people aren’t even worth rapping on the knuckles with a wooden spoon.  But it’s like that all the time and everywhere.

Apart from making me money the theater allows me to maintain my friendships, or people, my relations with other people.  Because in the theater you’re forced to get together with other people whether you like it or not.  You get together with a set designer and you talk and chat with him about the way the set should look, and then you run into an actor, and then you see, aha, I last saw him three years ago; now he’s three years older and you are as well, now he’s got a better sense of humor or a worse one, now he’s limping on the left side or isn’t; that’s all quite thrilling.  And then one of them falls ill and another one dies and a third one doesn’t want to do it anymore; it’s all very upsetting.

The possibilities you have with an actor like that [i.e., I believe, Minetti, Ganz, and Gold (DR)] are of course really much greater, but the thing itself on the other hand is quite lame, the actual realized performance is always lame.  On the one hand it’s often better than I was expecting but often also different.  So again it’s unsatisfying.

THE END

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 79-92.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "Ein Älterer Mann Namens August," a Short Story by Thomas Bernhard

An Oldish Man Named August

This happened back in the days when the convulsions of life still had the power to upset me. The war, the loss of people and landscapes dear to me, still gnawed at my heart.  It was necessary to find a way out of the tenebrous ravines of a half-opened youth, an exit from the gloom, to make a pilgrimage to that patch of light that shone through the remaining interstices of the labyrinth and into its embittered interior.

“Travel,” people had said to me: “you must travel!  There is mystery is to be found in a change of place, in moving forward, in the rolling of wheels, in the rocking of a jam-packed railway carriage…”—and so I packed my little trunk and before I knew it the door of our ancient house was slamming shut behind me.

It was like a last farewell that segued into another on the streets leading to the train station.  I said farewell to the rooftops, to the trees, to the shops of diligent small-town merchants who understood how to place their flesh-toned paper dolls at the most eye-catching angle, who ate roast on Sundays, and who, when the sun was shining, made pilgrimages to the countryside near the mountains so that they could sit on the grass with their newspaper.  I wanted to save every part of this night’s phenomena that could still be saved, and I sucked in the walls, which were full of humid odors, the fragrance of the ripening crocus in the city park, which was carrying me away with it, and I shifted myself into the wild terror of my forsaken childhood, in which foreign apples had been plucked from foreign trees, and which was so full of adventures, between evening and morning, with conquests and discoveries, of first stirrings of the fear of death and awakening love, that it wrested tears from my eyes.

I had boarded the train hastily.  The door clicked shut; the long car set itself in motion; the lights outside were devoured by the gloomy hills; the rooftops sank into gentle depressions; unflaggingly, ever more forcefully, the train sucked itself into the distance; soon it was racing along the lakeshore, and finally it bored with undreamt-of celerity into the inexhaustible west.

My compartment was already occupied by four people.  I had my trunk placed in the netted holding rack and seated myself in the only available spot remaining, a corner spot that afforded a view of the dimly lit passageway.

I was tired.  The preceding day had made me sleepy.  In spite of everything I began, like most people, to study the faces of my fellow-passengers, to analyze them, to arrange them into clearly defined life-groups.

Across from me sat a fat woman.  Her hands were plotting a downward trajectory via her lap, on which a starkly printed newspaper-page lay.  She might have been the wife of a washing-machine salesman, hence a woman of property.  Her face was broad and aqueous; her hands pudgily glistened.  Immediately beside me a gentleman in a stylish business suit was snoozing; he was young, athletic, with brawny, well-toned shoulders.  On his knees lay the remains of a cigarette.  From time to time his face twitched—he was caught in the middle of the gearbox of existence.  But immediately next to the window a girl, a young woman, was sitting.  Her hair was blonde and undone and cascaded like a fragment of a stream on to her supple shoulders.  She had glanced at me upon my entry into the compartment.  Now she was laying out the individual segments of an orange in a row on a page from a newspaper.  She coated the fruit-segments in sugar and popped them one after another into her rubicund mouth.  All the while she was apparently hearkening to the monotonous onslaught of the wheels, to the ever-receding flow of the rails.

She was still quite young.  The holding compartment over her head was chock full of boxes and suitcases.  I hid my face in my coat so as to be able feast my eyes on this feminine form at leisure.  Her supple hands plucked at her dress, pulled something out from under the newspaper-page, trailed their fingers along the steamed-over window pane, and finally settled on her beautifully developed bosom for a longish interval.

Suddenly the young woman looked up.  She leaned over and shook a person whom I had so far not noticed and who had fallen asleep at the opposite corner of the window.

“August,” the young woman said; she repeated the name a couple of times and then smiled.

“What is it, my child?”

“Father, you’ve got to eat now,” said the young woman.

“Yes,” the oldish man rejoined.

“Really, it’s been ages since we left the station.  You’ve got to eat something, August--”

Some movement came into the invisible corner.  The young woman unwrapped some bread, shoved the orange-segments on to the table-tray, placed an apple beside them, and said, “August, please eat!”

The oldish man bent forward.  He was gray at the temples; he had a nose like the beak of a prehistoric bird; his hands darted upwards like talons, snatched at a piece of fruit, and then sank.  This action was repeated a few times, until the young woman said, “We’ve come a good long way already.”

For a moment all was calm.

“Where are we?” asked the oldish man.

“Past Munich,” said the young woman.

“Past Munich…”

The two of them hearkened to the roaring din of the train.

“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” said the young woman.  She bent forward to adjust something on her father’s coat.

“A good child,” he sighed.

“I’m so glad we managed to catch the train,” she said.  “We might just as easily have failed to catch it.  We must gain time.  The train stations are ice cold at night now.  So we’re safe.  Do you remember the girl at the station in Vienna?”

“Yes—”

“Anyway, I had seen her once before.”

“Do you think so?”

“Definitely, August!”

The older man picked up an apple.

“In children like that I always see myself,” she said.  “Everything is in them.  I don’t know how to put it, but everything is contained in them.  Do you know that, Father?”

The young woman picked up some of the orange-segments.

“You should eat heartily,” she stated.  “You need to.  It won’t be simple.  Once we’re up north, in Bremerhaven, we’ll have gotten a good chunk out of the way.   I am very happy, and yet I would rather travel by day.  You can’t see anything.  A few lights—you can see nothing but lights.  They will be waiting for us up north…”

“It is better to travel at night,” said the oldish man.  “Everything is easier.  You should sleep, my child; you are tired.”

“I am not tired.  I am never tired when I’m traveling.  You know full well that when we traveled to Italy I wasn’t tired either.  On the train I can never sleep, since I always prefer talking—and eating,” she laughed.

“Thinking the hours away and sleeping,” her father said.  “Sleeping through a couple of hundred kilometers is a highly worthwhile activity, my child.  Sleeping, dreaming, continuing to exist…By the time we’re in Bermerhaven, your eyes will have long since ceased taking in any sights…”

The young woman shut her eyes.

“How quickly everything happens,” she said.  “A year ago we didn’t know anything at all yet.  I only met Eduard a year ago.  You went into the hospital…But you look good now.  You haven’t looked so good in such a long time…A man like you, August, who ’s still got something to show…”

“Yes,” said the oldish man equably.

“The doctor said you would outlast everybody.  They have good hospitals over there, good doctors.  Eduard will start earning money right away.  Me too—and as for you and mother, the two of you can rest.  There’s no chance at all of anything going awry.  The factories over there pay really well.   Hasn’t Eduard signed the contract?  It’s all set down in writing there.  We’ll all be able to make ends meet, it says…Won’t you have something to drink, August?”

“Sure,” he said.

The young woman handed him the thermos.

“Good,” he said, “this will warm me up.”

Softly the young woman said, “When we get to Bremerhaven, we’ll drink something hot right away…”

“You are so good, Herta,” whispered the oldish man.  He leaned quite far back.

“Eduard has already received a week’s advance pay.  And then we’re all set to find a place to live right away.  After all, we’ve got a sound contract.  It’s a sure thing all around.  And Montreal is a lovely city.  Eduard’s got pictures of it.  Can you imagine it—everybody’s got their own car.  We’ll soon have our own car too…”    

“Yes,” said her father.

“Here we couldn’t even have gotten a house.  And even if we had, we wouldn’t have managed to get a car...Do you hear me, August?”

Her father said, “Yes, I hear you, my child.”

Meanwhile my gaze had alighted on the others.  The fat woman across from me had shifted her position several times, but her newspaper had still not fallen to the floor.  The young athlete remained quiescent.  On his left wrist gleamed two watches.  His white cuffs were an element of his affluence and starkly contrasted with the numerous pieces of luggage belonging to the young woman, who with her father, with her whole family, was traveling to Canada…As we passed through a fairly large station, the compartment shook violently—but those of us who were asleep did not wake up.

“They’ll be delighted if you come,” said the young woman.  “Eduard hasn’t seen you in a long time.  I’m glad I picked you up from the hospital myself.  Had you been expecting me?”    

“Yes,” said the oldish man.

“I can’t believe we’re going to Canada...”

The oldish man said nothing further.

“Had you ever given any thought to the fact that we were going to be emigrating?”

“No, never.”

“It must be quite far away, Canada—”

“It is far away, my child.”

“I won’t get seasick.  On a big ship you don’t get seasick.  It’s going to be just a matter of a very few days—and then we’ll be in Canada.”

The young girl had refulgent eyes.

“You should finish off the food,” she said, “we have plenty more in the bag.”

Her father reached for one of the loaves of bread.

“It’s from our baker’s, August; funny, isn’t it?  We really should have taken the paper bag with us as well.  I brought along lots of things that will remind me of Vienna…”

She arranged her hair.

“In Canada I will need new dresses,” she stated.  “But the clothes over there won’t be unfashionable either.  They have such lovely, colorful fabrics…”

“You are in fine fettle,” said her father.

The young woman pushed the orange segments over to him.

“You should eat some fruit,” she said.  “The doctor told me that nothing but fruit could make you totally healthy.  Everybody who has trouble with their lungs should eat fruit and consume lots of fat.”

The train accelerated.

The man’s hands emerged into the light.

“Take as many of them as you like,” she said.

He nodded.

By now I was dead tired—I had boarded a long-distance train that traveled non-stop for a hundred kilometers at a stretch.  My bones ached, as though my body were actually mutating.

“Canada must be a great country,” said the young woman. “I’ll manage to love it.”

“Perhaps, my child—”

“Vienna is already a long way behind us.  Maybe we’ll go back there someday.  When we’re rich, we’ll take a trip back there.  Then we’ll go into the poorhouse and hand out nice things…”

The old man heaved a deep sigh.

“Vienna has changed a great deal too,” he said.

“I’m actually scared about being on the great ocean.  Don’t ships still sink nowadays?” The young woman had to keep talking.  “But it’s safer than taking a plane.  Mother will see; she has still never lived by the sea.  The sea is a great experience, isn’t it, August?  It’s wide. We’ll cope with it.  We have already coped with so many things here…Today nothing is impossible anymore, is it, Father?  Over there, on the far side of the sea, is a better life...Father!”  The young girl leapt to her feet.  “You are really quite pale,” she said.

The others didn’t believe it, but I knew that the oldish man was dead.  By now I have seen lots of people die.  The oldish man had died peacefully.  The others couldn’t comprehend it at all, but I thought that he had even died beautifully.

At the next station he was carried out.  Everything takes its course.  I assisted the young woman, helped her carry her boxes and suitcases out on to the station platform.  She was now quite helpless—but some people came up and cleared away everything for her.  The station was deserted, and quite a long way from Bremerhaven.  A couple of drunks could be heard howling in the station’s restaurant.  Pieces of paper drifted across the asphalt...

It was already dawn when the train began moving.

The oldish man vanished in the darkness, and for some time afterwards I could still hear the young woman sobbing.

“August,” she kept saying, “August, this simply can’t have happened!”

Human beings are alone.

I had taken the dead man’s seat.  The uneaten orange-segments had been left on the table-tray.  The fat woman and the athlete had left the compartment.  I was alone.

The next morning I was standing on a piece of Altona.  It was made of stone.  And then, later, I beheld Hamburg, the city, the harbor, and the sea, unfathomable and infinite behind the layer of fog—and somewhere out there, I thought, must lie Canada: the land of lumberjacks, canned food-factories, and a better life…

THE END

Source: Thomas Bernhard, Werke 14, herausgegeben von [Works, Vol. 14, edited by] Hans Höller, Martin Huber und Manfred Mittermayer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 503-510.  Originally published in Tages-Post [Linz], August 14, 1954.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of "Der Veleger verlegt ja alles" (Thomas Bernhard silently interviewed by Kurt Hoffmann)

Of Course a Publisher Misplaces Everything

When you’ve written a book, you give it to your publisher, and he’s got a business.  Of course a publisher really hasn’t got a clue about art or literature, about anything having to do with the mind at all, and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it either.  He plies his trade under the pretext that he wants to do something for the mind.  But if he can’t make five schillings off of the mind, he won’t do anything for it.

A publisher is always just a single person who has business on his mind whenever he shows up.  He comes in here with his briefcase, opens it, and skulks until you give him the manuscript.  He’s got to promise himself something; otherwise he wouldn’t do it, because he’s certainly no benefactor.  And once the manuscript has vanished into the briefcase, he’s quite keen on vanishing himself, because of course he’s got what he wanted, and in the final analysis he really couldn’t care less about the person who made it.

What is this thing, a publisher [Verleger]?  I could of course by the same token ask, “What is a publisher?”  It’s unequivocally clear what a bedside rug [Bettvorleger] is.  But “a bedside rug without bed next to it” makes for a very problematic answer.  Or when somebody misplaces [verlegt] something; of course he’s scatterbrained if he misplaces something and then can’t find it ever again.  That’s obviously the real definition of a publisher.

So then, a publisher: he misplaces things and manuscripts that he’s accepted, and then he can’t find them ever again.  Either because he doesn’t want to anymore or because he’s scatterbrained, they’re no longer anywhere to be found.  He misplaces things.  For ever.  I only know publishers who are misplacers.  However high and mighty they are they’ve certainly never been high and mighty enough not to be the kinds of publishers who misplace things.  And after these things are misplaced they’re either in tatters or irretrievable.

I’ve never had any difficulties getting anything published.  Way back when I met Moissl, who was a reader for Müller, and of course at the time Müller was the best publisher, and I said, all right, sure, Trakl is all fine and well, but forty years have passed since then; I mean, I’m living in the here and now, and this simply has got to see the light of day.  So he took a look at it and said, well now, we’ll see, and we sat down and picked out some poems, and then, about three months later, they were simply published.  It never presented any difficulties.

As far as publishing enough to live on goes, it’s been maybe fifteen years since that sorted itself out for good.  Of course that came at the end of a hard slog of debts and work, and then, you know, my aunt, whenever it got to the point of things being repossessed, would pay whatever the bill happened to be.  Actually it wasn’t quite that simple.  And now I’m successful, even financially speaking.  Now I don’t have any financial difficulties; after all, I’m not particularly pernickety and I live on my own, so it works.  But of course for a long time it was a hammer-and-tongs existence for me, because of course people are asinine; of course, for the past twenty-two years practically all my books have been published in America.

In Spain practically everything has, in Italy almost everything, in France, I really couldn’t ask for anything more; I’ve really never gotten any negative press—sure, it’s totally asinine, just like it is here, but in a completely different kind of pretentious vein. Here I can read about Extinction; over the review there’s this headline: “Poor Wretch,” and then twenty lines of that; it’s really stupid, it puts paid to itself, and in the Salzburger Nachrichten, as I’ve seen, “A Wannabe,” there’s something to that effect in there; these are just things that you really can’t say anything about.  I mean, because their whole way of thinking is pure irony and stupidity.  Of course, the people who understand a thing or two see things completely differently.  And I know that I’m grossly downplaying it when I say that it doesn’t hurt me, but of course if you lay it on any thicker then nobody will ever believe you again.  But it’ll all be put to rights later on, someday, because of course by then it’ll all have been ploughed into the ground; then people will be able to look it all up.  What was going on back then will all be described in a relatively temperate prose style.  I’m obviously not an author just for Austria or three Podunk towns.  That obviously doesn’t interest me at all.   

In other countries, in the so-called Romance and Slavic world, people are altogether more interested in literature; it has a completely different status than it has for us.  Literature here isn’t valued at all.  Here music is valued, acting is valued; really nothing else is valued at all. It’s always been that way.  A translation is a different book.  It no longer has anything whatsoever to do with the original.  It’s a book by the person who translated it.  Of course I write in German.  They’re mailed, the books are mailed, to my house, and they either get a laugh or they don’t.  If they’ve got hideous covers then you just get cross and you leaf through them once and then you’re done with them.  Quite apart from the weird and completely different title, they’ve got nothing in common with your own books.  No, it’s obviously impossible to translate anything.  A piece of music you can play anywhere in the world if you follow the notes.  But a book should be read, or in my case, played, in German everywhere.  On an orchestra.

It’s certainly a real corker, like fifty toilets, but on the other hand I couldn’t care less about it, because I’m surrounded by very pleasant people, because, for example, my siblings aren’t interested in the slightest.   They really have no idea whatsoever of what one of my plays or novels is like.  It’s all the same to them.  Ideal people to be around.  I mean, I obviously refuse to present myself as anything, either as a great man or as a hack.  

Of course I’ve said more when people have read the books, but of course people don’t read the books.  Everything I’ve written about over the past twenty-five years in all my books has come to pass.  Every book I’ve written is chock-full of resolutions.

THE END

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, pp. 74-78.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2016 by Douglas Robertson