Book review: My Prizes - An Accounting

I had the kind of pang you get when a writer you admire confesses their admiration for another writer you admire, a vicarious sense of victory mingled with the slight annoyance that Bernhard’s work wasn’t my secret anymore.

Bernhard was born in 1931 in the Netherlands, an illegitimate child who never met his father. He would spend most of his life in Austria. His maternal grandfather, Johannes Freumbichler, was the most important early influence on his life, particularly as he was a noted author.

The other major factor in his development was the years spent in a sanatorium for tuberculosis: the resulting damage to his lungs meant Bernhard was never able to fulfil his ambition to be a singer. He turned to journalism and then literature and drama, leaving behind an astonishing body of work. By turns scabrous, elegiac, savage, disgusted and supercilious, Bernhard is one of the most forensic writers at dissecting moral failure, his own as much as the welter of mediocrity and mendacity he saw around him. Over the course of his career he won many of the most prestigious literary awards – the subject of this stiletto-sharp little volume.

My Prizes: An Accounting has been published by the rather wonderful Notting Hill Editions. The books are beautiful objects, in terms of design and typography; and are neat enough to fit into a jacket pocket (and, to my immense delight, can be read in their entirety on the X95 bus from Heriot to the Scotsman offices).

Their list is pleasingly eclectic: in the first tranche of titles they included Roland Barthes and John Berger; the second series includes the volume under consideration alongside Adam Mars-Jones on Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring, Osip Mandelstam’s travelogue to Armenia and Wayne Koestenbaum’s meditation on humiliation (a very Bernhardian topic). Non-fiction publishing is suffering the brunt of the industry’s current woes, and essay-writing is even less regarded; so one’s thanks to Notting Hill Editions are duly extended.

Bernhard had a problem with prizes: in short, he hated them, but he always wanted the money. He was criticised as a Nestbeschmutzer – a bird that soils its own nest – by the Austrian cultural establishment, and he gloried in the description. To be awarded a prize by intellectual non-entities and second-rate authors was to Bernhard worse than his (numerous) bad reviews. This book collects together his thoughts on nine prizes he received, as well as his inflammatory acceptance speeches for three of them, and his resignation letter to the Darmstadt Academy for Language and Poetry.

It doesn’t include perhaps Bernhard’s most notorious piece of literary invective against Austria: his will. He stipulated that his works were never to be staged or published in Austria – calling it his “posthumous literary emigration” – and went to great lengths to specify that even if Austria were to be invaded and was no longer a nation-state, the terms of his will would apply to its former borders.

My Prizes is not a book to win a new reader over to the peculiar pleasure of Bernhard. Penguin recently republished Old Masters, his masterpiece about not going gentle into that good night; and there are paperbacks of Extinction and the glorious The Loser (about two music students who react very differently to the genius of their fellow-pianist Glenn Gould). Were I to recommend a single book, it would have to be his non-fiction book Wittgenstein’s Nephew, about his relationship with Paul Wittgenstein. In it, Bernhard flays hypocrisy and the violence that underlies genteel society; wrestles with madness and depression, and, at one point lets us know again what he thinks of literary prizes: “a prize is invariably only awarded by incompetent people who want to piss on your head and who do copiously piss on your head if you accept their prize”.

What makes Bernhard morally significant is that in all the anger, derision and fury he pours on Austrian society, he reserves an equal measure to pour on himself. He is fully aware of his own hypocrisy and his own shortcomings. There’s a lovely scene in Wittgenstein’s Nephew where Paul bursts into tears at a child begging in the street. Bernhard is equally aghast, but he starts weeping only when he realises that the child has conned them both. That clarity of vision typifies his satire: he is as much a victim of the poisonous society as he is a part of it.

In My Prizes we get some of his most mordant and bilious speeches. In particular, the speech on the occasion of the awarding of the Austrian State Prize – over which he has had his usual kittens, especially because it’s a prize that went, usually, to younger writers for a single book; not a lifetime achievement award – he begins by saying “Honoured Minister, honoured guests …” and then unleashes everything: “there is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death”. The “honoured minister” storms off, nearly breaking a door in his hasty retreat.

Only Bernhard achieves parity with Samuel Beckett: in another speech he writes: “The problem is always to get work done while thinking that work will never get done and nothing will ever get done.” Thanks to the introduction by Frances Wilson, the reader will know that the “aunt” who accompanies Bernhard to all these events was actually his lover, Hedwig Stavianicek, 37 years his senior. The relationship is almost unbearably touching.

Bernhard, in retrospect, was on to something: his sometimes hysterical furies never quite alighted on the right wrongness, but he knew something was there. Austria’s deNazification was markedly less swift than Germany’s (despite it being Hitler’s birthplace). Bernhard did not live to see the fiasco surrounding Jack Unterweger – a prisoner who supposedly “reformed” through creative writing, was the darling of the Austrian literati, and on his release in 1990 went on to murder at least ten women. He did not live to see the revelations about Josef Fritzl and his reign of domestic torture and incest.

There is a profound sense in which Bernhard had already diagnosed that such events were to come. Very few writers today possess his ethical brilliance, his satirical integrity and his utter, odd humanity.

• My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard, Notting Hill Editions, 112pp, £12