falling trees
by Douglas Messerlli
Thomas Bernhard Holzfällen, translated from the German by David McLintock as Woodcutters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1987)
In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen,
moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is
not just an US phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s
narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria.
And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and
disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for
great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together
in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the hosts, the detested Auersbergers, have
described as “an artistic dinner.” For Bernhard’s Viennese counterparts, some
of whom recognized themselves in his satiric attacks, the presentation of their
failures, however, was not at all “fun,” one going so far to sue the author and
preventing his book from sale.
There is certainly no question that Bernhard, bearing a close
relationship to the narrator, presents a devastating portrait of his fellow
artists—writers, musicians, tapestry weavers, dancers, actors, and just plain
hangers-on. The drubbing they receive and the recounting of the narrator’s
intimate relationships with many of these figures is almost maniacal as he
recounts over and over how he came to know each figure, what role they played
in his life, and how they ultimately came to be the truly “hated” figures he
regurgitates up before us. Bernhard’s book, in short, is precisely as its title
suggests—at least in the German—a wood-cutting exercise, Holzfällen suggesting in the original not just the noun
“woodcutters,” but the verbal construction of a critical denunciation.
Bernhard’s narrator, having himself suffered an emotional breakdown and,
consequently, spending a period in a mental hospital, has a great deal in
common with the author, and the major event of the day of the “artistic dinner”
is a graveside ceremony for the narrator’s friend, Joana, upon her having
committed suicide at her childhood home in Kilb, is similar in some ways to
Bernhard’s own reported suicide in Upper Austria only five years after
publishing this fiction. The reader, accordingly, recognizes the narrator’s
attacks as highly personal and, at times, nearly hysterical, as the character
admits that for years he has gone out of his way to steer clear of his old
friends from the 1950s and early 1960s upon his return to Vienna from years
abroad. But even if the narrator did not admit to these personal
vendettas—which, in fact, lay at the heart of this fiction—the reader would be
forced to recognize the subjectivity of the narrator simply by the grammatical
structures and intense repetition of his sentences. Each attack on his hosts
and their guests, particularly the Austrian Virginia Woolf, Jeannie Billroth,
and the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein (in my mind, two
diametrically opposed figures), Anna Schreker, is repeated over and again in
detail, with each foray the narrator adding a bit of new information, that we
soon recognize the separated figure sitting, as he tells us dozens and dozens
of times in the narrative, in a wing-tip chair, is clearly obsessed with these
beings.
As well he might be, given the fact that as a young man he was pulled
into artistic and sexual relationships with nearly all the central players,
including his hostess—a woman from a wealthy bourgeois family who uses her
money to help buy her and her husband’s way into the cultural scene—he, a
composer “in the Webern tradition”—along with the Austrian Virginia Woolf, the
Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein, and the talentless Joana who spent
her life transforming her tapestry-maker husband into a world-renown artist who
bolts to Mexico just as he reaches the pinnacle of his profession.
While the narrator may seem utterly ruthless in his attacks, quite
viciously recounting the demise of each of these figures, now unable to even
tolerate them for their abandonment of whatever they might have had of any
talent, he somewhat redeems himself by being as brutally honest about himself,
admitting how they each helped mold him into the artist he is today while also
attempting, in a Tennessee Williams-like metaphor, to emotionally and
spiritually “devour” him, equating it to the way all of Austrian culture grinds
down its most talented young artists. The Auersbergers have used him sexually
to “help save their marriage,” Jeannie has taken him in as a kind of devotee of
her artistic endeavors, Joana has created a relationship with him to help her
develop her failed career as a dancer/actress. In order to survive, he
proclaims, he has had to abandon them, while they have vilified him to all
their acquaintances for that very abandonment, Joana perhaps even through her
death expressing her sorrow in her loss of her once dear friend. So while the
narrator may seem to be selfishly satisfied with his tale of his friend’s
immense failings, he is equally brutal about his own hypocrisies, and praises
the talents they once possessed—including Herr Auersberger’s musical abilities,
his wife’s singing talents, and even Jeannie’s early devotion to literature
before she sold out to the State officials who award stipends and literary
prizes, one of which the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein has just been
recipient.
At the center of the “artistic dinner” is a third-rate actor playing
Eckdal in the Burgtheater’s production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck., who, when he finally arrives well after midnight,
shifts the narrative to a comic realization of just the boorish “artistic”
conversations against which the narrator has been railing. Most of his
commentaries are ridiculous statements of the difficulty of the actor’s life,
criticizing nearly everyone—directors, writers, fellow actors and the theater
itself, while exalting his own innumerable talents. When Jeannie Billbroth
attempts to turn the conversation upon herself, however, at first vaguely, but,
as the actor himself puts it, later “tastelessly” posing provocative questions,
the actor turns from performing as a simple ham, endlessly recounting tales he
has told dozens of times, to a kind of outraged philosopher, lambasting “the
Austrian Virginia Woolf” for rude impertinence, lashing out against her obvious
attempts to put down anything of value. In short, he voices just the criticisms
that the narrator has privately held yet, hypocritically, failed to publicly
express. For the aging actor, his desires are for a kind of return to
nature—what anyone who has read Austrian fiction realizes is at the very center
of that country’s romantic ties to a kind of peasant simplicity—a world of “the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a
woodcutter,” perhaps Bernhard’s ironic condemnation of the culture’s (as
well as the narrator’s) own self-destructive desires.
Indeed, Bernhard’s narrator, ultimately, does not come off much better
than the devouring dead folk of his memories, as he waits until everyone has
left, kissing the forehead of his hostess, and murmuring wishes that he might
have heard her sing, while promising another visit—all of his actions and words
representing more hypocritical mendacity. Or perhaps they do represent a kind
of truth, as he goes racing down the stairs like he were still in his 20s,
running away from his current home toward the city, determined to write down
everything he has just suffered “at
once…now—at once, at once, before it’s too late,” while at the same time
admitting that as much as he hates these people and Vienna, he, just like the
Burgtheater actor, loves them and the city:
This is my city and
always will be my city, these are my people and
Always will be my
people….,
an admission that almost
instructively contradicts his deep hatred of all he has just recounted to us.
In this sense, finally, Bernhard’s Woodcutters
is not just a critical attack; while it is that, it is also an intense
dialogue with the narrator’s self over his and his society’s failures, a public
airing of his and his compatriot’s laundry, so to speak. And so the fiction is
transformed into a kind of loving portrait of a failed world, the world which, in
the end, all artists are forced to encounter, endure, and write about: never an
easy task.
New York City,
May 4, 2012
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (May 2012).
