My Prizes: An Accounting (5 page)

least write down my name on a piece of paper, for otherwise no one would know who was involved if I did actually bleed to death. And of course I also didn’t want to dirty the man’s car with my blood and I tried to keep directing the blood flow just onto me and between my knees. Soon I’m going to lose consciousness, I thought, and then that will be that. Once at the hospital, I was immediately put flat on a gurney by a nurse and taken away. In a washroom the nurse shaved half my skull. Then I immediately found myself in an operating room and I was in luck, for the surgeon spoke German and promptly asked me all the relevant questions in German—vomiting or no vomiting, et cetera. Then they gave me an anesthetic, only a so-called local anesthetic, and worked on me and sewed my head back together again. What I had thought was an enormous wound was only a laceration, after two days I was allowed to go back to Eugenia. Before, I had already been able to see my wreck at the police station right near the hospital. And to my amazement the police had been able to sketch an exact reconstruction of the accident. The Yugoslavian was one hundred percent responsible, and this was also stated in the report. The person who had kept screaming
Idiota!
as he ran away was his wife, who
to her misfortune was a nurse at the hospital and, as I learned later, was instantly fired from her job in the nursing service because instead of helping me she had run away with her husband. I was sorry about this, but there was nothing I could do about it. My Herald was a lump of metal, I walked around it several times and I thought about how I’d only driven it for seven hundred and fifty miles. A shame. With a white turban around my head and my aunt and all her considerable luggage I set off on the journey home to Vienna. Not at all depressed, because finally I had by some miracle escaped with my life, but still very disappointed over the end to my automobile happiness. At the Heller car dealership they put me in touch with a Nobel-class lawyer who lived in the Heinrichshof. He would pursue the case with his renowned thoroughness, the lawyer said, while the people whom I told about my accident thought I’d never see so much as a cent from Yugoslavia, it was well known that they never paid a thing in such cases, even when the other party was one hundred percent guilty. I got angry that I’d taken on this, so it seemed to me, very expensive lawyer, I was furious over my own stupidity. Now I’ve not only lost my Herald, but I’m also paying the lawyer, who was set up like a prince in three or four
enormous rooms with a direct view of the Opera. I’m really stupid, I told myself, a completely unrealistic person.
Amras
was typeset and I walked around the city of Vienna rather despondently. Nothing gave me pleasure, I missed my Herald, and I suddenly had a feeling again that I’d reached the end. Unlucky people never escape their bad luck, I said to myself, meaning me. It was unjust, but understandable. Every few days or weeks a letter from the lawyer fluttered in, in which he told me, always in the same words, that he was pursuing my case with the greatest diligence. Every time such a letter arrived, I went wild. But I no longer had the courage to go and see the lawyer and tell him he should give up the case, I was afraid of the enormous costs. In the Wertheimstein Park and the Zögernitz Casino I read the galleys of
Amras
. The book works, it’s romantic, something born of a young man who’d been reading Novalis for months. After
Frost
I’d thought I could never write anything again, but then, by the sea, I’d sat down and
Amras
was there. It was always the sea that saved me, I only needed to go to the sea and I was saved. One morning another of those letters from the lawyer fluttered in and I was ready to tear it up. The content of the letter was different. Come to my office, the lawyer wrote to
me, I have been able to settle your case with the fullest satisfaction. The Yugoslavian insurance people had actually agreed to all my lawyer’s demands, without any restrictions whatever, it should be noted. Not only was my car replaced, but I also received damages. And a so-called compensation amount for my clothing that was unbelievably large. The lawyer had not admitted I was wearing nothing but cheap trousers, a shirt, and sandals, he’d stated I was in an expensive suit and most costly underwear. I left the lawyer’s office in the highest order of happiness, naturally. I bought myself a new Herald and drove it very frequently to Yugoslavia, which had shown itself to be so correct and indeed so very generous to me in my misfortune. I’ve written all this, because, as you can see, it’s all tied up with the dividing into thirds of the Julius Campe Prize. In the most self-evident way.

I received the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 and I must say right away that it was a question of the so-called Small State Prize, which a writer receives only for a particular piece of work and for which he has to nominate himself, by submitting one of his works to the relevant Ministry of Culture and Art, and which I received at an age in which under normal circumstances one no longer receives it at all, namely in my case the late thirties, because it has become customary to award this prize to twenty-year-olds already, which is quite right—so it was a matter of the so-called Small State Prize and not the so-called Large State Prize, which is given for a so-called life’s work. No one was more surprised
than I was that I’d been awarded the Small State Prize, for I hadn’t submitted a single one of my works, I would never had done that, I had no idea that my brother, as he later admitted to me, had handed in
Frost
at the great entrance to the Ministry of Art and Culture on the Minoritenplatz on the last day submissions were being accepted. I was the opposite of delighted with the news that I was getting the prize, a mass of young people had received this prize before me and, in my eyes, had fully devalued it. But I didn’t want to be a spoiler and I also took the prize because I would receive it thirty years to the day after my grandfather received it in 1937. This point was what made me tell the Ministry I would accept the prize with the greatest pleasure. In reality I had a queasy stomach at the idea that as an almost forty-year-old I would have to accept a prize which should be offered to twenty-year-olds, and in particular I had a very strained relationship with my country, as I do today to an even greater degree, and my most strained relationship of all was with our Ministry of Culture and Art, which I despised from close and firsthand knowledge, the first place in my contempt being held by the then-incumbent Minister. In my youth I had been in this Ministry more than once to procure a so-called Foreign Travel
Grant, this was in my twenties, for I wanted to travel around a great deal almost all the time and I had no money for it, and the Ministry had given me such a grant two or three times, I know for sure I have them to thank for two trips to Italy. But every time I came out of the Ministry I cursed its officials and the way the Ministry dealt with people like me, and I also had learned to hate it for many other reasons I don’t want to broadcast here. I found the officials there self-important and dull-witted, and they didn’t know what I was talking about when I talked with them and they had the worst imaginable taste in any and all fields of our art and culture. In short, now I had to come to grips with the fact that one day in the new year I had to collect the State Prize for
Frost
which my brother for whatever absurd reason had handed in at the porter’s lodge on the Minoritenplatz. I felt it a humiliation that they were now throwing the so-called Small State Prize at my head, but I didn’t want to make a scene and my brother had succeeded in convincing me that the right thing to do was to accept the prize without protest. So now I had to go to this very Ministry and allow these very people to hang a prize on me when I heartily despised both them and it. I had sworn never again to set foot in the Ministry in which only
dull-wittedness and hypocrisy reigned, but now I was in this straitjacket my brother had stuck me in. Several newspapers had played up the announcement that I was getting the prize as if it were the Big Prize while it was the to-me-humiliating Small Prize. I choked on this fact and went around for weeks with this choking in my throat. But I didn’t want to expose myself by refusing it, for then everyone would have accused me again of being arrogant and megalomaniacal, and incapable of real self-judgment. But much as the thought of having to go to the Ministry and collect the Small Prize made me choke, I kept being saved by the fact that even the Small Prize carried a sum of money, twenty-five thousand schillings back then, that, being in debt way over my head, I urgently needed. It was these debts my brother was thinking of when he allowed himself the outrageous liberty of handing in my
Frost
at the porter’s lodge of the Ministry. So, I admit, because of the prize amount of twenty-five thousand schillings, I came to terms with the prize, with all the horrible, repellent things that necessarily came with the prize, I still despised the prize only as long as I didn’t think about the twenty-five thousand schillings, if I thought about the twenty-five thousand schillings, I bowed to my fate. The whole
time I thought about having or not having the twenty-five thousand schillings, and moreover my brother was right when he said I should just go and collect the prize without any fuss and refrain from making any comments. Secretly I was thinking that the jury was indulging itself in sheer effrontery in giving me the Small Prize when of course the only thing I felt absolutely prepared to accept, should the question arise, and it had already been raised, was the Big Prize and not the Small, that it must be giving my enemies on this jury a fiendish pleasure to knock me from my pedestal by throwing the Small Prize at my head. Did they, I thought, really think
I
personally would have competed for the Small Prize and offered myself up with open eyes and in full awareness to their aesthetic dilettantism? It was possible they thought I had handed over
Frost
at the porter’s lodge of the Ministry myself. That is probably the case, that’s how they were and they were incapable of thinking otherwise. The people who spoke to me about the prize all assumed I had naturally been awarded the Big Prize and each time I was faced with the embarrassment of saying to them that the one in question was the Small Prize which every scribbling asshole had won already. And each time I had to explain to people the difference
between the Small Prize and the Big Prize, and when I did, I had the impression they simply didn’t understand me anymore. The Big Prize, I kept repeating, was for a so-called life’s work and one gets it closer to old age and it’s awarded by the so-called Cultural Senate which is made up of all those who have previously won this Big State Prize and there wasn’t just the Big State Prize for Literature but also for the so-called Fine Arts and for Music, et cetera. When people asked me who had already won this so-called Big State Prize, I always said, All Assholes, and when they asked me the names of these assholes I listed a whole row of assholes for them and they’d never heard of any of them, the only person who knew of them was me. So this Cultural Senate, they said, is made up of nothing but assholes because you say that everyone in the Cultural Senate is an asshole. Yes, I said, the Cultural Senate is full of assholes, what’s more they’re Catholic and National Socialist assholes plus the occasional Jew for window-dressing. I was repelled by these questions and these answers. And these assholes, people said, elect new assholes to their Senate every year when they give them the Big State Prize. Yes, I said, every year new assholes are selected for the Senate that calls itself a Cultural Senate and is an indestructible evil and
a perverse absurdity in our country. It’s a collection of the biggest washouts and bastards, I always said. And so what is the Small State Prize? they asked and I replied the Small State Prize is a so-called Nurturing of Talent and so many people have already won it you can no longer count them, and now I’m one of them, I said, for I’ve been given the Small State Prize as a punishment. Punishment for what? they asked and I couldn’t give them an answer. The Small State Prize, I said, is a dirty trick if you’re over thirty and as I’m almost forty it’s a huge dirty trick. But I said I’d sworn to come to terms with this huge dirty trick and I had no thoughts of declining this huge dirty trick. I’m not willing to give up twenty-five thousand schillings, I said, I’m greedy for money, I have no character, I’m a bastard too. People didn’t give up, they drilled down. They knew exactly where to drill to drive me crazy. They met me in the morning and congratulated me on my prize and said it really was high time for me to get the State Prize for Literature, and then made a pregnant pause. I then had to explain that my prize was the Small State Prize, a dirty trick not an honor. But no prizes are an honor, I then said, the honor is perverse, there is no honor in the world. People talk about honor and it’s all a dirty trick, just like all talk about any honor, I said.
The state showers its working citizens with honors and showers them in reality with perversities and dirty tricks, I said. My aunt always had the highest opinion of our state and of states in general, her husband had been a senior state official, and she behaved as if I’d received an honor when the news was published in the papers that I was to receive the State Prize. So I had to explain to her too that this was the Small Prize and not the Big Prize and once again I tried to explain the exact differences between the two prizes and at the end of my explanation I said neither the Small nor the Big State Prize was worth anything, both prizes were a dirty trick and it was a low thing to accept either one of them, but I was sufficiently lacking in character to accept the prize because what I wanted was the twenty-five thousand schillings. My aunt was disappointed in me, until then she had had too high expectations of me. I shouldn’t accept the prize, she said, if what I thought was what I said. Yes, I said, I think what I’m saying and I’m going to accept the prize all the same. I’m taking the money, because people should take every penny from the state which throws not just millions but billions out the window on a yearly basis for absolutely nothing at all, every citizen has a right to it and I’m not a fool.
We had a worthless government that used every means to play to the gallery and hold on to power even when the state was going to the dogs, of course I would take twenty-five thousand schillings from a state like this. Base or not, lacking character or not, I said. My aunt accused me of inconsistency. She was not to be persuaded of my point of view. I don’t believe, I said, that I’m lacking character if I take the prize amount from people I bottomlessly loathe and despise, quite the opposite. To compensate for the humiliation of being given the Small State Prize I should be able to take a trip, so many countries even in Europe were still unknown to me, the twenty-five thousand schillings would give me the opportunity to go to Spain, for example, where I’d never been. If I don’t take the money for myself and use it to pay for a trip, I said, it will be thrown to some useless person in revenge, who causes nothing but damage with his creations and poisons the air. The closer the day of the prize-giving came, the more almost unbearably sleepless nights I had. What possibly had really been dreamed up by idiots as an honor, to me, the more I thought about it, was a despicable act, a beheading would be putting it too strongly but even today I feel the best description of it is a despicable act. All the twenty-year-old and twenty-two-year-old
and twenty-five-year-old fashionably dressed writers of radio plays I met on the street were winners of the State Prize. They behaved as if I had just been consecrated by them. It rankled. Moreover their perspective was right. My
Frost
had not received a single positive review anywhere in Austria, on the contrary, it was given a takedown in every single Austrian newspaper as soon as it appeared, not in the appropriate places, the way I’d imagined, but at the bottom, be it left or right, where worthlessness and contempt have made their home forever. I was angry, my anger had the absolute limitlessness born of lack of self-control, but in the end I kept asking myself if all these people might not be right. Perhaps I really wasn’t worth any more than the value they put on me! I forbade myself to go on brooding about it. Time is pitiless. It was then too. The morning of the prize-giving had arrived. On this occasion too I was supposed to give a speech, but I’m no speaker and I can’t give any speech whatever, I’ve never given a speech because I’m incapable of giving one. But I had to give a speech, it’s a tradition that the writer, who receives this prize at the same time as a painter and a composer et cetera, gives a speech that was characterized in the Ministry’s invitation as a speech of thanks. But as
always, when I was supposed to give a speech, no speech came to me, in this instance too I had spent weeks thinking about what I would say, what my speech would be, but I had reached no result. What was there to say on such an occasion except the words
Thank you!
which still stick in the throat of the person who has to say them and sit in his stomach for a very long time. I found no theme for a speech. I wondered if perhaps I should go into the world situation, which, as always, was bad enough. Or the underdeveloped countries? Or the neglect of health care? Or the terrible state of our schoolchildren’s teeth? Should I say something about the state per se, or art per se or about culture in any way at all? Should I even say anything about me? I found it all repellent and queasy-making. Finally I sat down with my aunt at the breakfast table and said, I can’t give a speech, I have no idea what to say in a speech. I haven’t thought of a theme, I haven’t thought of anything. Maybe after breakfast, said my aunt, and I thought yes, maybe after breakfast and I ate breakfast and ate breakfast but still nothing came to me. Now I had my suit for best occasions on, the anthracite-colored single-breasted one, and I’d tied my tie and was struggling to swallow the last mouthfuls of breakfast and still I didn’t have even
the trace of an idea for a speech, suddenly I had absolutely nothing in my head except a feeling of fear, I was afraid of what was ahead of me, if I couldn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, I feared something perverse, something unlawful, something unjust, something utterly embarrassing. My aunt was all ready to go, once again she looked very elegant and I admired her. If only I’d declined, and now didn’t have to go to the Ministry, I said. And then, at the peak of my despair, I sat down at the table in the window of my tiny room and typed a few sentences on my machine. Again it was no speech, as they were requiring of me, again it was only a few sentences that I had in my head. Only a few sentences, I said to my aunt, and I was embarrassed to read her these newly minted sentences. I also wouldn’t have had time to, for we had to leave, we caught a taxi on the corner of the Obkirchergasse and the Grinzinger Allee and drove into the city. This journey was the journey to the scaffold. The prize ceremony was taking place in the so-called Audience Chamber of the Culture and Art and Education Ministry. When we arrived, all the so-called honored guests were already there. Only the Minister was still missing, Herr Piffl-Perčevič, a former Secretary of the Provincial Agricultural Department