My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page B

around the city of Vienna rather despondently. Nothing gave me pleasure, I missed my Herald, and I suddenly had a feeling again that I’d reached the end. Unlucky people never escape their bad luck, I said to myself, meaning me. It was unjust, but understandable. Every few days or weeks a letter from the lawyer fluttered in, in which he told me, always in the same words, that he was pursuing my case with the greatest diligence. Every time such a letter arrived, I went wild. But I no longer had the courage to go and see the lawyer and tell him he should give up the case, I was afraid of the enormous costs. In the Wertheimstein Park and the Zögernitz Casino I read the galleys of
Amras
. The book works, it’s romantic, something born of a young man who’d been reading Novalis for months. After
Frost
I’d thought I could never write anything again, but then, by the sea, I’d sat down and
Amras
was there. It was always the sea that saved me, I only needed to go to the sea and I was saved. One morning another of those letters from the lawyer fluttered in and I was ready to tear it up. The content of the letter was different. Come to my office, the lawyer wrote tome, I have been able to settle your case with the fullest satisfaction. The Yugoslavian insurance people had actually agreed to all my lawyer’s demands, without any restrictions whatever, it should be noted. Not only was my car replaced, but I also received damages. And a so-called compensation amount for my clothing that was unbelievably large. The lawyer had not admitted I was wearing nothing but cheap trousers, a shirt, and sandals, he’d stated I was in an expensive suit and most costly underwear. I left the lawyer’s office in the highest order of happiness, naturally. I bought myself a new Herald and drove it very frequently to Yugoslavia, which had shown itself to be so correct and indeed so very generous to me in my misfortune. I’ve written all this, because, as you can see, it’s all tied up with the dividing into thirds of the Julius Campe Prize. In the most self-evident way.

The Austrian State Prize for Literature
    I received the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 and I must say right away that it was a question of the so-called Small State Prize, which a writer receives only for a particular piece of work and for which he has to nominate himself, by submitting one of his works to the relevant Ministry of Culture and Art, and which I received at an age in which under normal circumstances one no longer receives it at all, namely in my case the late thirties, because it has become customary to award this prize to twenty-year-olds already, which is quite right—so it was a matter of the so-called Small State Prize and not the so-called Large State Prize, which is given for a so-called life’s work. No one was more surprisedthan I was that I’d been awarded the Small State Prize, for I hadn’t submitted a single one of my works, I would never had done that, I had no idea that my brother, as he later admitted to me, had handed in
Frost
at the great entrance to the Ministry of Art and Culture on the Minoritenplatz on the last day submissions were being accepted. I was the opposite of delighted with the news that I was getting the prize, a mass of young people had received this prize before me and, in my eyes, had fully devalued it. But I didn’t want to be a spoiler and I also took the prize because I would receive it thirty years to the day after my grandfather received it in 1937. This point was what made me tell the Ministry I would accept the prize with the greatest pleasure. In reality I had a queasy stomach at the idea that as an almost forty-year-old I would have to accept a prize which should be offered to twenty-year-olds, and in particular I had a very strained relationship with my country, as I do today to an even greater degree, and my most strained relationship of all was with our Ministry of Culture and Art, which I despised