by John Updike
Tadeusz Konwicki is a Polish writer and film director, born in 1926, who has gone from being an officially approved Socialist Realist to being a dissident whose fiction can be published only in the underground magazine Zapis and in the West. A previous novel, The Polish Complex, appeared here last year; A Minor Apocalypse extends its predecessor’s jaunty, picaresque manner deeper into desperation. In both novels, Konwicki’s heroes have his name and personal history, as if the times are too ramshackle and weary for the conventional concoction of an alter ego. “Weariness and powerlessness were overcoming me. My life was repeating itself and I was repeating myself.… My art, like my life, could be sliced like a sausage.”
In this novel Konwicki awakes with a hangover, though he has not been drinking, and is visited by two fellow writers, Hubert and Rysio, who tell him he has been chosen to set himself on fire at eight o’clock that evening, in front of the Party Central Committee building, as a protest. Our hero’s friends explain to him that since he is a prominent but not indispensable writer, and long obsessed by death anyway, he is a natural candidate; in truth he does not reject their proposal out of hand but mulls it over during a long day of wandering, during which he allows himself to be equipped with a can of gasoline and Swedish matches (Swedish because Polish matches tend not to ignite). Warsaw is collapsing around him—bridges fall, electricity fails, slabs of sandstone fly from the Palace of Culture in the wind—and the city is in the grip of an immense drunken celebration of what on various pages is identified as the fortieth, fiftieth, thirty-fifth, and sixtieth anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic, which dates from 1952. Not only the calendar but the weather is unsteady; the day begins as one of “autumn’s hopeless days” but enjoys some summery intervals and ends in snow. Konwicki visits old friends, an uproarious restaurant called Paradyz, and a Polish film called Transfusion, which is advertised on the marquee as a Russian film called The Radiant Future. During his perambulations he has various companions, of whom the most constant are Pikush, a many-colored dog, and Tadzio Skorko, an ardent Konwicki fan and aspiring poet who also seems to work for the secret police. Konwicki is repeatedly stopped by different varieties of police and is tortured by one set of them. He makes love to a red-haired Russian beauty, Nadezhda, and attends a kind of witches’ congress of the fifteen women whose lover he has been at various times of his life. He engages in a great many excited conversations, with representatives of both the establishment and the opposition; but, so long has the unhappy Polish situation been marinating, it is hard to tell one from the other, and no marked conflict exists, just a tangle of wry and futile palaver.
Like such other anarchic spirits as Flann O’Brien and Céline, Konwicki has a lovely light way of writing, that never clogs chaotic flow with self-pity and bestows upon the direst pages sentences of casual felicity. He is especially good with women, to whom all sorts of delicate fragrances cling. Here is Nadezhda, being seduced:
She smelled like water that had been warmed by the sun, and she also had the sharp, enticing aroma of birch leaves … We could hear the desperate pounding of each other’s hearts and the polyphonic cry of the birds, like some rising reminder.… She had closed her eyes so tightly the lids had turned white. Sharp, predatory teeth gleamed in the heathery pinkness of her mouth.
Konwicki is effortlessly witty, and dizzies the Western reader with the convolutions of the vitiated Polish situation as it drowns in its ironies. A Marxist philosopher explains to the author that Communism has saved Poland from being absorbed by a vital, enterprising Russia: “You should pray every day and thank your gods that the Russians have been rendered inert by that idiotic doctrine, depraved by that ghastly life, exhausted by that moronic economic system.” A Party official, Comrade Kobialka, who sacrifices his career by undressing at a televised Party celebration appears no less absurd than the televised embrace of the two all-powerful secretaries: “two fat men were kissing each other on the mouth.” The peculiar demeaningness of television has crept into Poland; all political gestures are aimed toward it, while it turns every event into a trivial flickering. Misery becomes trite, and happiness is absurd, whether it is Kobialka’s happiness as he is hauled in a padded straitjacket to the security of the state insane asylum or that of the lusty retired minister, now a painter of nudes, as he rushes off to the outer regions where “you can still find girls who’ll put out for good old Polish zlotys” (as opposed to the Warsaw whores, who demand hard currency). Even interrogation by torture is farcical; the police inject Konwicki with a drug that makes him so sensitive he can be agonized by the flick of a fingertip and the battering of a paper ball. At his ordeal’s end, he thinks, “Some sort of confused play was over.”
That Communist governments are atrocious is familiar news; less familiar is Konwicki’s repeated point that dissidence has something weary, corrupt, and pointless about it. By now in Poland, evidently, the motions of opposition, like those of governing, are a kind of sleepwalking. A race has grown up of “dissidents with lifetime appointments. The regime has grown accustomed to them and they’ve grown accustomed to the regime.” Konwicki notices of his young fellow conspirators that “They were all small, thin, shaggy. But it was in them alone that any resistance to the authorities had smoldered. Over the years, the authorities had grown ugly, too, but in a different way—they had turned into fat, growing sideways; they had become womanish.”
No Americans are seen in this long Warsaw day—a blend of Blooms-day and, the reader is often reminded, the Stations of the Cross—but a “senior journalist with the Associated Press” telephones toward evening, saying, “I wanted to ask what was going on in Warsaw today.” Konwicki tells him, “Nothing too interesting. The usual holiday commotion.” The answer is accepted. The West in general, far from being seen as a superior system to that decaying in Poland, is involved in the same en-tropic deterioration. Kobialka claims, “The West … started running away when we started chasing them, and then they slowed down when we eased up. They’re exhausted, too. They’re straddling the fence, too.” As of 1979, from the Polish slant, we are neither innocent nor dynamic. In regard to the captive plight of Eastern Europe the free world has proved helpless; capitalism has become not Poland’s savior but her creditor. In Paradyz, “the disabled veterans’ cooperative band was playing a medley of American tunes but, to disguise them, was playing them backward so they wouldn’t have to pay any royalties in hard currency.” Poland can only afford to import black humor. Instinctively Konwicki assumes the tone of absurdist fiction, that tone which says, “This happens, that happens, don’t expect me to make much of it, because life is meaningless; don’t expect me to work you, gentle reader, up into much of a tizzy of caring, either.” When, at the very end of A Minor Apocalypse, we are expected to care, the rhetoric embarrasses us, so effectively has our responsiveness been lowered by the deflationary slapstick of Konwicki’s hopeless world.
Studies in Post-Hitlerian Self-Condemnation in Austria and West Germany
WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW, by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock. 100 pp. Knopf, 1989.
NO MAN’S LAND, by Martin Walser, translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz. 160 pp. Holt, 1989.
Somewhere, I have seen Hitler’s hold upon the German people explained by the fact that he addressed his audience in very much the shrill way in which a German husband speaks to his wife. The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard, by the time of his death last February, at the age of fifty-eight, had collected the chief literary prizes the German-speaking world offers, and his great critical and even (with his widely produced plays) popular success in that world perhaps derives from a similar trait: he was, in his writing, always on the verge of a shriek, and in the Germanic psyche shrieking constitutes proof of caring. One of the lines of Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz, characterizes Austria as “a nation of 6.5 million idiots living in a country that is rotting away, falling apart, run by the political parties in an unholy alliance
with the Catholic Church.” In his novel Correction, the narrator spills a little of his spare bile on “a time such as ours when … every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products.” And in his latest work to appear in English, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, we find the following admonishment: “Let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity.”
Bernhard, with his tyrannical repetitiousness and unpredictably placed italic emphases—like the blows of an impulsive fist—was a maestro of the music of the diatribe, its churning, its hammering, its omnivorous momentum, a music such that any note not of dispraise seems a discord and a momentary weakening of the artist’s strength. Even his typographical signature—a resolute lack of paragraphing, an unrelieved march of unindented lines—shows hostility, toward the reader and also toward the printer, for whom every alteration involves a vast displacement of type. An irascible fury runs so consistently through Bernhard’s fiction that one is tempted to think it an involuntary trait, demonstrated in the author’s behavior as well as in his prose. One certainly suspects there is another side to his story of the official contretemps that occurred when he accepted the State Prize for Literature in an audience chamber of the Ministry in Vienna. First, by way of tribute, according to Wittgenstein’s Nephew, he listened to “utter nonsense” and factually erroneous “idiocies” read out by a minister with “stupidity … written all over his face.” Then he responded:
Just before the ceremony, in great haste and with the greatest reluctance, I had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty. After I had delivered my speech, which lasted altogether no more than three minutes, the minister, who had understood nothing of what I had said, indignantly jumped up from his seat and shook his fist in my face. Snorting with rage, he called me a curr in front of the whole assembly and then left the chamber, slamming the glass door behind him with such force that it shattered into a thousand fragments.… And then the strangest thing happened: the whole assembly, whom I can describe only as an opportunistic rabble, rushed after the minister, though not without shouting curses and brandishing their fists at me as they went.
Bernhard’s acceptance, later, of the coveted Grillparzer Prize, bestowed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, went no more smoothly. No one met the prospective honoree either outside or inside the hall. Bernhard decided to follow the crowd in, and took a seat, with his entourage, in the middle of the auditorium. “The Vienna Philharmonic was nervously tuning up, and the president of the Academy of Sciences, a man by the name of Hunger, was running excitedly to and fro on the dais, while only I and my friends knew what was holding up the ceremony.” When Bernhard was at last found and asked, by an Academy member, to come to his reserved seat up front, the author balked: “I did not obey, because the request was made in a rather disagreeable and arrogant tone, and with such a sickening assurance of victory that, to preserve my self-respect, I had to refuse to accompany him toward the dais.” He yielded only when President Hunger himself descended from the dais and escorted him. Writers less honored than Bernhard can take comfort from his hard-won perception that “to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it.” Prizes “do nothing to enhance one’s standing, as I had believed before I received my first prize, but actually lower it, in the most embarrassing fashion.”
Thomas Bernhard’s embarrassments in life began early. He was illegitimate, born in 1931 in a Dutch convent that sheltered unwed mothers until their accouchement. His first year he spent mostly in a hammock suspended from the ceiling of a trawler lying in Rotterdam Harbor, while his mother worked as a domestic to pay for his foster care in this floating establishment. In his autobiography—from 1975 to 1982 he composed five short autobiographical works collected in English as Gathering Evidence (translated by David McLintock; Knopf, 1985)—he wrote of her weekly visits, “I am told that I cried miserably every time and that while I was on the trawler my face was covered with ugly boils, since there was an incredible stench and impenetrable fumes where the hammocks were hung.” His mother, named Herta, was the daughter of the little-published Austrian writer Johannes Freumbichler; his father, Alois Zuckerstätter, was a peasant’s son and a carpenter from Henndorf, in Austria, where Herta had been living with her aunt. Bernhard never met his father, who died, violently and mysteriously, in 1943. In 1945 he persuaded his paternal grandfather to impart a little information about Alois (“He spoke of my father as though he had been an animal”) and to give him a photograph of the man: “It was so like me that I had a fright.” Young Thomas took it home to his mother, who snatched it out of his hand and threw it in the stove. It was her unkind custom to send the child to the town hall to collect the five marks which the state paid monthly to illegitimate children, telling him, “This’ll show you how much you’re worth!”
After a year on the trawler, Gathering Evidence explains, Bernhard was taken by his mother to live with her parents in Vienna. Her mother was the offspring of a prosperous Salzburg family who had disgraced herself by leaving, at the age of twenty-one, her husband and three children to run off with Freumbichler to Basel; the couple lived together for forty years before marrying. In 1934 the “poor, fly-by-night family” moved to the rural village of Seerkirchen, near Salzburg, and there Herta met and married a hairdresser’s assistant named Emil Fabjan. They eventually had a boy and a girl, in addition to Thomas. Unable to find work in Austria, Fabjan moved across the Bavarian border to the town of Traunstein, while the grandparents lived in nearby Ettendorf. Freumbichler, whom his grandson “loved more than anyone else in the world,” was well born (in Henndorf) and a great “enlightener” but also, according to Bernhard’s account, “an individualist, unsuited to living in a community, and therefore unfit for any employment.” A one-time theological seminarian turned anarchist, he earned virtually nothing through his writings; he “lived off his wife and daughter, who believed in him unreservedly, and in the end he lived off his son-in-law as well.”
His grandson, too, proved ill-suited to communal life; after a promising first year in school at the age of five, he became a hopeless student, a truant, and a bed-wetter. He found grammar school “a condition of continuous torment,” was even more unhappy at a home for maladjusted children in Saalfeld, and detested most of all the National Socialist Home for Boys in Salzburg, where he spent a year, from 1943 to 1944, in an atmosphere of mingled Catholicism and Nazism so hateful that a number of the boys committed suicide and Bernhard contemplated it fondly every day, during his sessions of violin practice in a shoe closet. His autobiography rates this interval as “the darkest and altogether the most agonizing I have known,” and its misery was varied but not lightened by the ferocious air raids to which Salzburg by now was subject. School became a shambles, and the thirteen-year-old boy had ample opportunity to sit in the rubble and “contemplate the spectacle of human despair, indignity, and annihilation.” After the war, he returned to the school in its new guise as the Johanneum Gymnasium, now run by priests, and found it no improvement over the Nazi version: “Swallowing and gulping down the body of Christ every day … was essentially no different from rendering daily homage to Adolf Hitler.” He detested school, bourgeois Salzburg, and most everything else that surrounded him: “My child
hood and youth were difficult in every way.”
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.
