BEAUTIFULLY DEPRESSING | February 18th 2008

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Thomas Bernhard is often accused of writing novels that feel like cruel jokes. So dark, so difficult, and so misunderstood, writes Jessica Ferri. With his absurd sense of humour, Bernhard was a keen observer of a very human beauty ...

I was inducted into the Thomas Bernhard cult almost exactly a year ago, when a co-worker handed me a copy of "The Loser" while we were standing outside of our building on a rainy day. My first foray into Bernhard's dark wood was the story of two friends who study piano at a music conservatory in Vienna. Unfortunately for them, one of their classmates happens to be Glenn Gould. The narrator's friend, Wertheimer, unable to accept his own mediocrity in comparison with Gould's virtuosity, commits suicide.

"The Loser" is a tight and perfect novel, a marathon of memories that masterfully parrots a musical fugue. But at my first reading, I gathered none of its brilliance. In fact, the book struck me as extremely difficult and almost inane. Because of Bernhard's notorious run-on sentences, I felt that I had read the book too quickly. I decided I needed to go back and read it more carefully. And what I found that second time has changed the way I read.         

Bernhard quickly became an obsession for me. I barrelled through two more of his novels, "Old Masters", and "Frost". I spoke endlessly and passionately about Bernhard to anyone who would listen. Had there been a Thomas Bernhard for President button, I gladly would have worn it on my lapel. But reading Bernhard isn't exactly easy, and promoting his books even less so--their plots and premises are, by and large, depressing and hopeless. 

Reading Bernhard feels like the children's superstition of holding one's breath in a car while passing a cemetery. He allows his reader no time to breathe, driving home the moments of intense disappointment and disgust, and etching particular phrases or words into the reader's memory. For instance, from "The Loser":

Wertheimer and I proved our parents right by failing to become virtuosos, failing indeed very quickly, in the most shameful manner, as I often was privileged to hear my father say.

And from "Old Masters":

What depresses me so excessively is the fact that such a receptive person as my wife was should die with all that enormous knowledge which I conveyed to her, that she should have taken that enormous knowledge unto death with her, that is the worst enormity, an enormity far worse than the fact that she is dead, he said.

The italics are an interpretation of Bernhard's editors--these phrases were underlined several times in his hand-written manuscripts, so much so that the paper was ravaged and torn by his pen.

So many of these purple patches read as one complete manic thought. It becomes easy to imagine Bernhard writing under the influence of some megalomaniacal fugue state with calloused fingers, without pausing to sleep or eat. The unavoidable fear of death always feels close at hand.

So, what, you may ask, is so appealing about all of this?

I don't know why Bernhard's themes suddenly became so attractive to me, but I think it had to do with the fact that I came across his work just as I was adjusting to living in a big city for the first time in my life. I'm from a not-so-small suburban town in Georgia, and I went to college in Indiana. Now I live in Brooklyn, and my 30-minute-plus daily commute into Manhattan on a very crowded train had yet to become a habit. I was not accustomed to so many people pushing and pressing me, rambling past me in the street, shouting crazy, inappropriate things in my face. There were good days and there were bad days. I often felt suffocated. 

I was also shocked by the profound superficiality of status-conscious New York. Suddenly the way I dressed and spoke mattered. The books I had read, the periodicals I subscribed to--all were indications of my worth as a person. I found myself developing a profound dislike for certain people, especially those who had little trouble buying what was considered fashionable or brilliant. And then Thomas Bernhard entered my life.

Bernhard offered me a language for these nascent, creeping feelings of misanthropy and also relief from them, with his melodrama and humour. I can't think of a writer who better captures the intensity and ridiculousness of big-city living. Bernhard's books are the only ones I want to open on the subway. He managed to capture the most beautiful aspects of life using the most wretched, miserable situations and characters. Such glimmers of humanity are similar to those brief moments of serenity that can be found on a crowded subway station, if one looks closely enough.

For mainly political reasons, Bernhard's literary reputation continues to be largely maligned in his home country of Austria. (Many of his late novels and plays take his compatriots to task for all sorts of hypocrisy, particularly for failing to recognise their country's Nazi past.) However, he has lately become the wünderkind of the English-speaking literary elite, with Vintage publishing handsome new editions of his novels "Gargoyles", "The Loser", and most recently "Frost", his first, in paperback. This recent turn to Bernhard seems to confirm the old adage of "death then celebrity"--he died in 1989, most likely by an assisted suicide.

Bernhard's star is on the rise, but it has yet to reach super-nova status. One can imagine him sitting at the table with Dostoyevsky, Camus, Broch, and Sebald, quietly drinking his beer and waiting his turn to speak. While there have been a few gestures towards literary canonisation--a piece in the New Yorker, a reading series or a review here and there--most critics seem to dismiss Bernhard's work as diverting suicidal diatribes. Yet his affection for life should be obvious, given the sharp wit of his narrators and their endearingly absurd observations. 

In an ironic Bernhardian flourish, the man who said that writing saved his life (when he was diagnosed with a terminal lung ailment at 19) then turned around and banned Austria from performing any of his plays or reissuing his work. I think we are meant to read this restriction in his will as a final flip of the proverbial bird to the literary establishment of Austria--for those writers and journalists and academics who did not come to Bernhard's aid when his work was attacked by the government and various critics. Some may view this as further confirmation of Bernhard's reputation as a social irritant. But I see it as his last joke. 

The English translations of his work and their growing readership, will surely solidify Bernhard's legacy as one of the most important authors of the 20th century. Until then, you will find me on the subway, re-reading "The Loser" for the fourth time. If you are in need of a copy, I will gladly lend you mine.

(Jessica Ferri works at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is the author of the blog Dilettantsia)