Odd Jobs (113 page)

Bernhard’s description of his closeted violin sessions reminds one of his rhapsodically free-form writing, as it developed in his monologuist novels and his autobiographical excursions: “He plays with the utmost virtuosity, if not with the utmost precision, and as he plays he is totally
absorbed in the idea of suicide.… According to Steiner [his teacher] his playing was, on the one hand, highly musical, and on the other … totally undisciplined when it came to observing the rules.” This frenetic musical activity as a substitute for suicide evolved along with other kinds of activity: Bernhard became an unbeatable school runner, and at the age of fifteen, he quit school and apprenticed himself to a grocery store in the toughest section of Salzburg, the Scherzhauserfeld Project. “Most of my real qualities, the positive features of my character, came to the surface again … after being buried and stifled for years by the odious educational methods to which I had been subjected.… Right from the start I did not just wish to be useful—I really was useful, and my usefulness was noted.” Here, laboring in a cellar store among outcasts, he felt perversely useful, free, and happy. But the strains of the job—inhaling flour dust, lifting heavy sacks—eventually broke his health. Unloading a truckload of potatoes in a snowstorm, he caught a case of influenza that became severe pleurisy. In 1949, not quite eighteen years old, he was consigned to a hospital death ward, and at one point was given last rites. He then spent over a year in two different sanitoriums, with laboriously treated lung disease. To compound his misfortunes during this time, his grandfather and mother both died. Yet he recovered enough to attend the Mozarteum Conservatory in Salzburg, to study music and theatre arts, to serve as a court reporter for the left-wing
Demokratisches Volksblatt
, and to compose, before he eventually succumbed to his debilities, over thirty works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as his remarkable autobiography, the record of a furious will persevering amid the most abysmal isolation. Though his typical hero is an intellectual trapped in mental paralysis, he himself wrote with energy, daring, and a shrewd sense of the sensational.

Publishers love to call books novels.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
has been labelled as one by Knopf, but really it is an undisguised memoir. Exactly one hundred pages long, it wanderingly describes, without much of the heat of
Gathering Evidence
, Bernhard’s friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the famous philosopher’s nephew and a mentally unbalanced dandy once conspicuous around Vienna. Like
Correction
(whose fictional Roithamer, with his aristocratic background and English residence, is plainly patterned on the philosopher), it concerns a verbose and fascinated narrator’s entwinement with a Wittgenstein. The entwinement in the memoir is based upon a shared fondness for opera and music, for Schopenhauer and Novalis and Pascal and Velásquez and Goya, for sitting
in the Sacher coffeehouse caustically observing the other customers, for sweeping castigations and “cosmopolitan fooleries.” Bernhard and Paul Wittgenstein also shared, we are told, “the counting disease”—a compulsion to count windows and doors from a vantage like that of a moving streetcar—and a habit of stepping on paving stones not randomly but according to “a carefully thought-out system.” They both suffered from the “disease” of “always travelling, simply in order to get away from one place and go to another [without] finding happiness on arrival.” To their more serious diseases Bernhard gives a romantic coloring of willed rebellion:

Similarly, the narrator of
Correction
deems himself “probably somewhat more of a survivor than Roithamer, for I always seem to find a way out, while Roithamer could no longer find a way out.”

As Paul became madder, Bernhard distanced himself; the reminiscence undergoes a rueful turn: “Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months of his life, and for this I cannot forgive myself.” Remembering Paul’s grotesque, emaciated, deathly appearance in his last days leads the author to some perversely complacent self-condemnation: “Watching him, I felt ashamed. I felt it shameful that I was not yet finished, as my friend already was. I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person.” Paul had predicted to Bernhard, “
Two hundred friends will come to my funeral and you must make a speech at the graveside
.” In fact, only eight or nine attended the funeral, and his friend Thomas Bernhard stayed in Crete, writing a play which, he tells us, “I destroyed as soon as it was finished.” He additionally confides, “To this day I have not visited his grave.”

The memoir, which takes Paul’s mortuary prediction as its epigraph,
has been delivered instead of the graveside speech. It offers no moral save the one that, as Bernhard stated on another occasion, man is a wretched creature and death a certainty. Its most vivid episodes reveal the author engaged in some display of reflexive irascibility; relatively little of poor, elegant, underemployed Paul shows through the domineering personality of the bad-tempered prose, which as it runs along blasts the “unbearable” German press, the “unspeakably perfidious thespians” who performed one of Bernhard’s plays, literary coffeehouses whose “foul atmosphere [is] irritating to the nerves and deadening to the mind,” psychiatrists, who are “the real demons of our age,” and, at some length, the “gross self-degradation” of fashionably moving to the country and smoke-curing pork and growing your own vegetables. Bernhard’s curmudgeonliness here comes close to being as droll a shtik as W. C. Fields’s; his ferocious misanthropy, capable of generating nightmares in the fiction, almost sinks to the lovable.

Martin Walser (not to be confused with the Swiss novelist, feuilletonist, Kafka precursor, and mental patient, Robert Walser [1878–1956]) is described, among the jacket quotes on his novel
No Man’s Land
, as “the closest thing the West Germans have to John Updike.” Really?
No Man’s Land
seemed to this naturally expectant reader a joyless, terse, efficient small novel that manages an unforced flowering toward the end, in the inevitably theatrical milieu of a courtroom. Until then, the novel conscientiously occupies the heavily trafficked gray area between the two Germanys, wherein spying, conflicted loyalties, and domestic discontent are local industries. We have been there before, with John Le Carré and other jaded singers of the Cold War blues, and Walser’s intellectualized spy story, infused with generous quotations from Schiller’s poetry and Schumann’s lieder, doesn’t, for all its earnestness and compassion, quite shake the feeling of a slumming expedition. A lot of the details seem to enter the narrative backwards, with their symbolic import foremost, and the action is so telescoped as to rebuke rather than satisfy our appetite for suspense.

The hero, Wolf Zeiger, is an East German would-be pianist who gave his piano teacher a concussion and, before heading west in the wake of this gaffe, was enlisted by the Ministry of State Security for six weeks’ training in spy school at Potsdam-Eiche. He is not too unhappily married to Dorle, who works at the West German Foreign Ministry. She doesn’t have access to the NATO protocols, so Wolf sleeps with the
secretary who does, Sylvia Wellershoff. Sylvia—“not fat, but fleshy. She had a bit too much of everything. Her mouth always hung open, as if the lips were too heavy”—is as giving erotically as she is intelligence-wise. Meanwhile, Dorle, approaching forty, wants a baby; and her superior at the office, smarmy Dr. Meissner, is casting a fond eye her way; and the Hungarian mathematician who lives in the apartment below has deduced, from the way Wolf plays Schumann only one hand at a time, that he is a spy; and Wolf is cooling on the idea of returning east at the end of his perfidious career.

If this exposition of the plot seems hasty, so is the book’s: all the elements, including opaque bits of the West’s high-tech electronics and metallurgy and some plausible quick portraits of spymasters from the Communist side, are in place, but packed too tight to move. The novel seems neither a parody of a thriller, like Robbe-Grillet’s
Les Gommes
or Queneau’s
We Always Treat Women Too Well
, nor the real, grim-lipped thing. Perhaps one difficulty, for an American reader, is that Wolf’s justification to himself for treason against the West German state is the selfless aim of eroding the boundary between the two Germanys and thus helping to heal “this unhappily divided country.” The cause of reuniting the pieces of Hitler’s Reich, however dear to the German
Volksgeist
, is not one to touch heartstrings universally. Our President’s
^§
rhetorical call to tear down the Berlin Wall is one thing, and the living memory of
Deutschland über Alles
another. In the absence of a motivation easier to empathize with, Wolf’s fretful ambivalence seems scarcely to deserve such portentous pondering as “To what extent may one’s thoughts contradict one’s actions? How much irreconcilability can one bear within oneself?” His self-scorn—in the actual unsparing style, I believe, of contemporary younger Germans—is so withering as to leave the reader small space where sympathy can grab hold: “Now he felt that he was perceiving himself with a kind of disapproval of which he couldn’t get enough.”

However, a number of scenes where geopolitical unease is translated into intimate behavior—a vacation that Dorle and Wolf take to the South of France, and certain hotel moments between Sylvia and Wolf—leap free of the plot’s mechanism, and in the book’s last third the terse,
elliptic manner pays off in a rapid, no-fuss denouement, brimming with surprises, including, if I read it right, the sly revelation that Dorle is pregnant but not by Wolf. Only the last pages, in which the Zeigers’ suspended but not destroyed marriage is presented as a metaphor for the temporarily divided German condition, does Mr. Walser’s fondness for larger issues again crowd out the characters’ vital tendencies. The novel is studied to a fault, and even a minor, contemptuously casual offering of Thomas Bernhard’s like
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
seems to come closer to literature, to breathe the air of freedom that permits epiphany. Bernhard is stingy with images and generous with repetitions, but once in a while he dives deep into the appearance of things. While he and Paul Wittgenstein are patients in different pavilions of the same hospital, he tries to walk to see him, runs out of breath, and sits on a seat outside and watches the squirrels:

The mind-quickening atomatism of this odd “multitude of white dots” is approached by Walser’s low-affect prose here and there: Wolf feels peculiarly at ease on buses, where “everyone … lacked something. Perhaps they all lacked the same thing”; he and Dorle together feel happy and free on a desolate stretch of French beach at the mouth of the Rhône, beyond an industrial sump, with fishermen tending their rods and the mistral driving “the sand in sharp jets against every unprotected particle of skin.” Back home, as Wolf’s bus crosses the Rhine, “it gave him a good feeling to see the Rhine churning along there so powerfully, as if it were being paid by the ton for mass transportation of water.” In such unexpected feelings and details, life breaks through; we feel in touch with real people, whose dilemmas are only a part of their substance, and with real sensations, whose significance is not imposed but arises automatically.

A L
ATE
F
RIENDSHIP:
The Letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer
, translated from the German by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 72 pp. Eerdmans, 1983.

Zuckmayer, a German dramatist and the author of, among other film scripts, that for
The Blue Angel
, in the spring of 1967 received, amid much mail apropos of his recently published memoirs, a fan letter from the great Swiss theologian. “Much more than you,” Barth wrote disarmingly, “I am a child of the nineteenth century; and the modern world of letters, the theatre, the cinema and—how shall I put it—noble Bohemianism, has certainly affected me but never grasped or touched me closely.” As disarmingly, Zuckmayer wrote back, “I am one of those for whom God is
not
dead and Christianity, when properly experienced and lived, is still the message of salvation.” A remarkably lively and affectionate correspondence ensued between the two elderly and ailing men until Barth, by ten years the older, died in late 1968. Zuckmayer, a Catholic, received mildly admonitory lectures on the dangers of “worshiping God in the bark of a tree,” on the low intelligence of King Frederick William IV, and even on how to write a play, but proclaimed in a subsequent essay on this “late friendship” that he had “found once again what all of us most need if we are to know ourselves: a father figure.” He also wrote: “Never has any person in our day, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein, so convinced me by his mere existence that faith in God is rational.” Zuckmayer died in 1979, making possible the publication of this slim but affecting record of a meeting of minds. Both men’s letters show, as Zuckmayer said of Barth, “the intellectual vitality of one who is aging but by no means finished with himself.”