There is an Irish rock band, based mainly out of Dublin, called The Frames. The Frames were once a ‘cult’ band, today they’re widely popular, known through all of Ireland, performing in the U.S. and in Europe. Glen Hansard, their lead singer, worked in a bicycle shop for a little while, but the name came . . . my back garden was so full of frames, my house became known as The Frames house, much to my mother’s distaste, she hated it. But my garden was full of frames, old bikes, I would make up bikes for my friends out of all the old bikes. So it sort of became known if anybody found a bike up on the hill on the way home they would throw it in my garden, a graveyard for old bikes.
Thomas Bernhard’s A Child was the last installment of his autobiography to be published, although chronologically the period it covers should be first. The narrator is Thomas Bernhard at the age of eight, and Thomas Bernhard recollecting (one might say re-imagining) his experiences— when he was a boy, one morning setting off illicitly on his guardian’s bicycle. As in the other volumes, there are two narrators (maybe three), two Thomas Bernhards, though in truth there’s only one; the second (maybe third) is constructed out of pronouns—out of verbs, implications, shifts in tense.
Virginia Woolf once defined a frame as a rule designed to bring order to our perceptions. She seemed to find in music such an order, particularly in the late Beethoven compositions she preferred, his string quartets. She listened to them quite often, especially the Op. 130 in B major with its original final movement, the Grosse Fuge Op. 133, in 1939 and 1940, on an old Algraphone she and Leonard purchased some time in 1925. She was writing The Waves. The number of characters or voices in the novel, like the number of movements in the quartet, is six.
In his unfinished book on Beethoven, Theodor Adorno sets out to reconstruct how I heard Beethoven as a child. I can clearly remember the magic emanating from a score which named the instruments, showing exactly what was played by each. Flute, clarinet, oboe—they promised no less than colourful railway tickets or names of places. If I am entirely honest, it was this magic far more than the wish to know music as such that induced me to learn how to transpose and read scores while still a child, and which really made a musician of me. So strong was this magic that I can still feel it today when I read the Pastoral, in which, probably, it first manifested itself to me. Not, however, when it is played—and that is no doubt an argument against musical performance as such.
The organ was a great influence, confides Glenn Gould, not only on my later taste in repertoire, but I think also on the physical manner in which I tried to play the piano. Early in his teens certain aspects of organ playing—the physical aspects—had made a great impression on me. I learned that when you played Bach, the only way to establish a phrase, a subject, a motive of any kind, was not to do as one would with Chopin—you know, try to make a crescendo in the middle of the thing—but to establish it by rhythmic gasps, breaths. One had to have an entirely different approach, something that was based, really, on the tips of the fingers being responsible for the whole action, something that could almost produce the wonderful whistling gasp of the old organs. So that expression, consequently, was accomplished with practically none of the slurrings and over-fadings, not to speak of pedalings, with which Bach is so often played on the piano. And I really feel that this is entirely due to the fact that, at an early age, I was playing the organ.
The caesuras, the sudden discontinuities that more than anything characterize the very late Beethoven, are those moments of breaking away; the work is silent at the instant when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward. Not until then does the next fragment attach itself, transfixed by the spell of subjectivity breaking loose and conjoined for better or worse with whatever preceded it; for the mystery is between them, and it cannot be invoked otherwise than in the figure they create together. This sheds light on the nonsensical fact that the very late Beethoven is called both subjective and objective. Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which—alone—it glows into life.
Thomas Bernhard never wanted to write an autobiographical work, being averse to anything autobiographical. The fact is that at a certain moment in my life I conceived a curiosity about my childhood. I said to myself I haven’t much longer to live, so why not record my life down to the age of nineteen? Not as it really was—there’s no such thing as objectivity—but as I see it today.
Four paces long by two paces wide; the window opening onto the Seine and onto the forest through foliage rent apart by light.
Red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap.
I must have been two: according to family records, we stayed at Majorenhof in the summers of 1900 and 1901.
Once when I was very small he lifted me onto this, and I sat there and he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts.
I was forced into examining his leavings and middens like an archeologist sifting for ostracizing potshards.
I can remember toys of some kind lying on the floor and highlights made by the sun at the bottom of the nursery wall.
At two or three or four he claims to have been molested by nannies.
Peasant women, pigeon English, stir the pot to bring the rabbit up to a nice steady boil, sit around the kitchen peeling scraps, letting them drop between their meaty—blue, like spidery ropes, webs—legs, splayed, their raw-encumbered ankles roped—looped with veins, into a bucket, laughing, stooped.
He began to repeat with one hand on the piano certain combinations of sound that made an impression on him.
Alone, sitting in a room—a small room, no longer streaming—in: the light—failing, he will not stir, he will not—move. The words he reads in simple repetition, and the images—the rabbit has a birthday, it’s arranged, it’s a surprise, the silly carrot candles—blow them out! extinguished—one more time.
He is five when his brother takes him to an anatomical museum in Liverpool (on Paradise Street, inevitably) where he sees bleach-pale plaster casts depicting the ravages of venereal disease.
While six he suffers a fall down a single flight of stairs—he tumbles, sits, looks out—behind the alter, pleasantly arranged; there’s soon to be a wedding child—move, go on, get over here—quickly . . . quickly, out of the way boy: pretty flowers, two small bells behind a pew, the lengths of pale blue ribbon bird-emblazoned (yellow-green), the aisles arranged without discrimination: either side it seems will do exactly—just the same: the groom or bride’s—leaving him with a jagged scar on his knee, a wound he will later say he received when his ship was caught in a Tong war along the Chinese coast.
At seven, he complains of being bullied by the other Cub Scouts.
But cold baths made men—made Englishmen—stiffened the sinews, restrung the nerves. As did tennis, rugger, swimming, shooting, golf, church, long strenuous walks.
And he became good at them.
Whereas, before Karrer went mad, I used to go walking with Oehler only on Wednesday, now I go walking—now that Karrer has gone mad—with Oehler on Monday as well.
Away at the Caldicote School, he is struck in the eye playing ball.
Because Karrer used to go walking with me on Monday, you go walking with me on Monday as well, now that Karrer no longer goes walking with me on Monday, says Oehler, after Karrer had gone mad and had immediately gone into Steinhof.
The injury is neglected and an infection sets in which leaves him partially blind for four years. Or so he chooses to believe.
And without hesitation I said to Oehler, good, let’s go walking on Monday as well.
Still he is teased about the size of his member.
He also imagines that his mother, unable to bear the sight of her half-sighted boy, refuses to let him come home on vacations, and that everyone has left him alone.
But still, he would sit down at the piano and perform.
And his mother watched him smiling, improved his chords, and showed him how certain tones would be necessary to carry one chord over into another.
Certainly I have a vision of her now, as she came up the path by the lawn at St. Ives; slight, shapely—she held herself very straight.
A density not normally forthcoming, so it seemed, an interweaving of abstract and concrete, symbol and object, fact, plain fact, and dream, each nourishing on each, each, in turn, nourished; if not yet passion, what might lead to passion, if not yet fluency, at least the flow.
And his ear confirmed what she told him.
The Art of the Fugue was not to be performed, according to Bach’s own notations, on any instrument in particular.
Bridges over rivers made of glass and sky-blue paper.
Years ago I made a little film about my mother’s face.
Signals. Glowing lights.
This matter was considered—reconsidered—left open.
Galloping along the track to catch the train.
I made it with an 8mm camera and a special lens.
Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; multiple voices, woven, unwoven; human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments; always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space.
In my mind I cross the Sunday-quiet Storgatan and go into the parsonage.
Matronly flounces, starched, heaving, greasy, solicitous, eyes above children bumping heard.
It smells of scouring powder and holiness, just as it did fifty years before.
Smiling minutes after—only taunt.
Even had Bach been in fact satisfied with the organs and harpsichords of the epoch, with its thin choruses and orchestras, this would in no way prove their adequacy for the intrinsic value of his music.
Light as my loves’ thought, the sounds of light stay in.
And if someone were to ask me once again of the circumstances of my birth, I think I should answer finally that I was born somewhere in the middle of my first book.
Her usual smile.
A branch of lilac or bird-cherry.
She asked me to keep them for her.
Today, as I lean over photographs of my childhood to study my mother’s face through a magnifying glass—her soft oval face, gentle sensual mouth, her warm unaffected gaze below dark shapely eyebrows, thick center-parted hair, her strong small hands.
My first memory is of her lap; the scratch of some beads on her dress comes back to me as I pressed my cheek against it.
But it’s the branch that I can remember clearly.
And let us not forget that the absence of idiomatic keyboard writing (the fugue mimics choral style) is a direct result of structural density.
Sitting on the bus the other boys would not abide—the seams of every sentence had to show, the stitchings green—by how my tongue would wrap itself around the words—syllable by syllable, stress by heavy stress—with ease, as if they came that way, bound like beads through luted dimpled wires straight as air—sifting, lit, obscure—to then reveal themselves if only just to me—draped like silk, the worms about to finish, to surround me on my seat—protecting, isolating, warding off.
With great narrative prose, interpretation easily takes on the coloration of a foreign word.
It is interesting, though, that in working there obtrudes from the material, out of the material, various implications for the form that I long expected, but that now indeed astonish me.
The syntax sounding foreign as the words familiar.
I have had this kind of experience since my childhood, when old Dreibus, a neighbor who lived on my street, attacked me in a rage as I was conversing harmlessly with a comrade in a streetcar on my way to school.
And he looked around the spacious room.
Tendrils at the foot of all the pictures.
Gaslight burning as I left.
‘I could not teach myself to see,’ he quotes, a kind of scratch mock-stutter on the page, ‘without, at the same time, teaching myself how to write, for the words, and the observations they comprise, coalesce.’
Maybe because he wasn’t trying to cater to an instrument in any way, there’s a sense that there isn’t a wasted note, there isn’t an artificial or superficial note.
And everything I’ve written since—this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame—is an exploration of an image.
Everything is material to the material, everything grows out of the original subject, out of the original six notes which started it all.
At the age of eight I rode my first few yards on a bicycle in the street below our apartment in the Taubenmarkt in Traunstein.
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