My Prizes

Con la singular prosa que le caracterizaba, no exenta de pesimismo y obsesión, y también humor, así como del descreimiento tanto en el género humano como en el Estado (austríaco), Thomas Bernhard nos ofrece su particular mirada sobre los premios literarios que recibió, asociados la mayoría a una suma económica que ciertamente le hacía más gracia que el susodicho premio. El libro se completa con algunos de sus discursos a la hora de recoger los premios.

This collection of short pieces about getting literary awards is another posthumous publication dug up from Suhrkamp's apparently inexhaustible Bernhard-mine: the corrected typescript was found among Bernhard's papers, but we can have our doubts as to whether he really intended to publish it in this form (especially since he had already used several of the anecdotes in slightly different form elsewhere, e.g. in Wittgensteins Neffe). Various things in the text give a hint that it must have been written in the seventies, not the eighties (e.g. the way he consistently refers to his life-companion Hedwig Stavianicek with the courtesy title of "aunt"). But the editors have done their work discreetly and well, and the result does make a show more pretty convincing book.

The tone is surprisingly mild, almost benign: Bernhard exposes the ignorance, vanity and dullwittedness (yes, you guessed it: we have Stumpfsinnigkeit) of the bodies awarding the prizes not by his usual direct attacks but indirectly, by making fun of his own naivety, shyness, poverty and greed for large cheques. Most of the anecdotes here are from relatively early in Bernhard's career, in what was evidently an exhilarating wave of publicity following the publication of his first novel Frost in 1963. He cunningly focusses our attention on the cash value of the awards by going on for page after page about what he did with the money (surely a deliberate send-up of the form of a child's thank-you letter to a generous godparent). And he lets us see how neither the dignitaries presenting the prizes nor their speechwriters have any real idea who he is, and frequently reduces the sessions themselves to farce.

One of my favourite moments is the point, at one ceremony, where Bernhard finds himself sitting next to Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg turns round and asks him why writers always seem to have such a negative view of the world. Bernhard is rendered speechless...

Typically, the only award he is really proud to have received is a prize presented by the Federal Chamber of Commerce for his depiction of the dignified and useful profession of grocer in Der Keller. By a happy accident, the man sitting next to him at the dinner turns out to be the Salzburg official who, some thirty years earlier, had conducted Bernhard's exam to qualify as a journeyman grocery assistant. That puts all the literary academies in their place.

We get a taste of the real 100% Bernhard negativity (and some marvellously condensed examples of the Bernhard style) in the three acceptance speeches annexed at the end of the collection. You begin to understand why the Austrian Minister for Culture (recently elevated, as Bernhard cattily reminds us, from being Agriculture Secretary in the state of Styria) stormed out of the room, shaking his fist at Bernhard. It must be hard to know how to take it when a writer tells you in public that your country is a waste of space. show less

One thing is clear after reading My Prizes (if it weren't already clear long before)... and that is that literary prizes do not serve the ones they are 'honoring'. In the first story here, Bernhard shows up with his aunt and for some reason nobody receives them or tells them where to sit. So they just amble in like all the other audience members, and sit in the very middle of the theater. Even though he is the supposed reason for the ceremony. And soon the officials are running around like madmen trying to find this 'Bernhard'. But while reading this account, I thought that it would serve both parties (Bernhard AND the audience AND the prize givers) much better if they had just hired someone to pretend to be Bernhard. Afterall, nobody show more at such ceremonies would know the difference. They probably have never read a word Bernhard has ever written. The whole award is an excuse to appear cultured and generous. Meanwhile, in my scheme of things, Bernhard would not have to buy a new suit, nor would he have to show up and try to give an awkwardly pessimistic speech about the degenerative state of human affairs. Instead, an actor would walk briskly up on stage and deliver a shining speech on how Austria is the beacon of the cultural world, etc. etc. Everyone would be happy. As long as Bernhard still gets his check, of course.

Whoever offers money has money and it should be taken from him, I thought.

This is such a funny book, and such a funny idea for a book. Coincidentally, I read this book right after reading Felisberto Hernández's excellent book [b:Lands of Memory|454293|Lands of Memory|Felisberto Hernández|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1174919491s/454293.jpg|442880]. In the foreword of that book, Esther Allen talks about an idea Felisberto had:

Someone has had the idea of changing the Nobel Prize so as to give the writer who wins it 'a more authentic happiness,' and prevent the fame and money currently attendant upon it from disrupting his life and work. The new idea consists of not revealing the identity of the winner even to the winner himself, but using the prize money to assemble a group of people--psychologists, for the most part--who instead would secretly study and promote the writer and his work for the duration of his life. The conferral of the prize would be publically announced only after the winner's death.

I think Bernhard would have liked that idea. Except for the lack of cold hard cash, that is... show less

Thomas Bernhard was a writer who fashioned his own truth, while at the same time also claiming that there is no such thing as truth. He elaborates on this seeming paradox in his memoir Gathering Evidence:

Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are communicated. The aspiration for truth, like every other aspiration, is the quickest way to arrive at falsehoods and falsifications with regard to any state of affairs. And to write about a period of one’s life, no matter how remote or how recent, no matter how long or how short, means accumulating hundreds and thousands and millions of falsehoods and falsifications, all of which are familiar to the writer show more describing the period as truths and nothing but truths.

In a way this book is also a memoir, although how much of it is really true, if one believes in truth, can never be known. As when reading anything else written or said by Thomas Bernhard, it's best to suspend all traditional notions of truth, of what is real or exaggerated, and simply enjoy what he has to say in his unique tone of affable acerbity.

Bernhard is sitting squarely in his element here, recounting the absurd circumstances in which he was awarded various literary awards throughout his writing career (mostly in the early stages, for he eventually swears off of award acceptance altogether). In these essays, glowing with his trademark aplomb, he gleefully eviscerates various public officials and cultural institutions as his initial affronts at being misquoted, misattributed, and misgendered eventually fade into a steady, yet still often prickly, resignation. He realizes that to get the money, he must endure the associated shameful and/or potentially enraging proceedings. For it's all about the money. He needs the money and he wants the money. He initially uses some prize money to put a down payment on a decrepit farmhouse in Upper Austria, the first house he looks at (and not even that closely), not knowing how he'll come up with the balance of the sale price. Later on, the monetary award from another prize represents the welcome possibility of new storm windows, which will, after all, provide a good return on investment in the form of savings on heating costs in winter. Yet another prize funds the purchase of a new English sports car, which leads to a regrettable tragedy that is, however, ultimately vindicated after much personal grief. It is hard to say, in fact, which was more interesting to read: how a prize was awarded or how Bernhard describes spending the associated monetary award.

By reducing all of these awards to their base economic value, Bernhard neatly skewers the pompous purveyors of so-called "art" and "culture" who in their ceremonial introductions routinely (and unknowingly) malign the nature and titles of his works, reassign his gender, and generally behave in an odious manner of haughty disrespect. It is abundantly clear that Bernhard is enjoying himself immensely as he relates the blundering errors of these officials, exposing the farcical nature of the award ceremonies, ultimately stripping away the intended prestige and reshaping the value of the prizes themselves into one of a much more practical nature, namely, that of fixing up his falling-down farmhouse.

Bernhard's personality comes through strongly in this book, possibly even more so than in Gathering Evidence. Part of this could be due to the difference in subject matter, for the nature of this book allows for his humor to shine brighter. It could also perhaps be a result of the difference in chronological distance between the events and their recounting. In Gathering Evidence, Bernhard writes of his childhood from the vantage point of an adult, which can both alter perspective and create a tonal distance as the recollecting observer looks back from a point far in the future. In contrast, he is writing in this book of events in more recent memory, ones that occurred after he became an adult and a published writer (though, according to him, these recollections would be no less riddled with falsehoods). His authorial voice here is confident and self-assured, almost in a relaxed way not found in Gathering Evidence, while his tone also seems warmer here than in the memoir.

Following the essays on each individual prize, the book concludes with the transcripts of Bernhard's acceptance speeches, of which he only alludes to within the essays themselves. This is a perfect way to end the book, for the reader is finally able to grasp the full context of what at least one official had so viscerally reacted to in Bernhard's speeches. The bold, uncompromising nature of these speeches is striking, underlining the strong will of this man who refused to accept the status quo, to prostrate himself before the would-be commodifiers of culture; a writer who discerned and accepted the limitations of language while still wielding it to cut new and twisted paths; a person who, in his own words, "listened to everything and conformed with nothing." show less

Read this while staying indoors, Greece is infernal, even by the water. But this particular little Bernhard work is breezy to read at 70 pages and a very focused narrative for what is ultimately a memoir. It's kind of funny. He wants to say no to every prize because, as his narrators always say, the state is debased, corrupt, insipid, stupid, in cahoots with the church, sanctimonious and incapable of judging anything. But what makes this funny? Well, he needs the money, realises it's better to have it than not and make even absurd decisions like buy a white stag sports car with one and a derelict farmhouse draped in fog on the spot with only the means for a downpayment. So life's OK.

In one case, he so loathes the prize he is given in show more Austria that he singles out the state the issued it as a bunch of idiots causing the minister to flee the building with his entourage in train, emptying the whole event in minutes leaving him alone on the stage with only his loving aunt, a few friends, the catering staff and all the food that no one will eat. Seething, the Minister hadn't even had a proper brief and call all the facts about Bernhard wrong in his introduction. But he has further just cause to say what he wants. At his first prize ceremony, the pompous idiots who arranged it didnt even have an itinerary for him on arrival. As the honoured guest no one noticed him, no one told him where to sit, what to do on arrival, provide an assistant on the night, so he waited in the middle of the audience, not by the stage where the two empty seats where and waited while the ceremony got under way and finally someone noticed during speeches by eminent people that the author for whom the prize was to be awarded was nowhere and much murmuring later, someone spotted him in the audience and tried embarrassingly to get him down to the podium. Now who would believe the state was anything but a bunch of bumbling boobies as Dr Smith used to say in Lost in Space.

But, it's quite fun, and rarely reaches the vitriolic states of a Bernhard narrator. And he has such a lovely relationship with his elderly aunt (his parents died when he was young) that it is endearing as are his friendships which pop up as fun times here and there after ceremonies. Worth a read, a curiosity.

And, he loves getting prizes in Germany because he loves cities like Hamburg because he gets treated well, fed well, good intelligent press. In Austria he wonders if his grants are given out like vendettas and no one covers his work in the press. show less

An honest author - took the prizes for the money and said what he thought. Brilliant. Why is nobody else honest?

I speak high praise for this fine work by Thomas Bernhard. My review can be found here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/_1qsqsuzy8itx3/hub/Safe-Behind-the-Lines