The European way to die

Bernhard and Guibert, plus Genzken

This review originally appeared as print exclusive in The Whitney Review of New Writing, edited and published by Whitney Mallett. She’s releasing the Review’s second issue at Pioneer Works’s Press Play this weekend in Brooklyn. You’ll also be able to purchase it online or at one of her brick-and-mortar stockists.

Neither Thomas Bernhard nor Hervé Guibert got to be old men. Bernhard died at 58 of a longtime lung ailment in 1989; two years later Guibert botched a Digatilin overdose and died of it and HIV/AIDS complications at 36. Age is but a number though, and Guibert’s last non-posthumous publication, My Manservant and Me (French edition 1991), and the second-to-last novel Bernhard wrote, Old Masters: A Comedy (German-language 1985), both spotlight deep-pocketed and mean-spirited seniors.

Guibert’s book entered English last year with a translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman for Nightboat, and although Ewald Osers translated Old Masters for Phoenix in 1989, Carl Skoggard, whose new interpretation came out from Publication Studio Hudson, also in 2022, says that edition was “reliable…[and] reliably dull.” Not true of his version, which as with Zuckerman’s Guibert, is shot through with drain-circling consciousness and paranoid dark comedy.

This paranoia is hardly unjustified. In each book, the narrator is an author writing behind his subject’s back — Guibert’s unnamed looking toward his nameless kept youth and Bernhard’s Atzbacher studying the dwindling Reger. While Manservant’s diarist, the author’s would-be 80 in 2036, can’t quit facelifts, wrote for television, and even listens (“without understanding”) to his adolescent servant’s rap music, Bernhard’s dilettantish “old master” Reger, an aging Jewish music critic, can’t quit looking at Tintoretto’s Man with a White Beard. Yet while the characters’ professed dispositions to their own flagging and farting conditions might be distinct, their class backgrounds are not, and they share a fascination for the servitude surrounding them, with its “La Coupole waiters tucking tea towels into [their] pants’ low-slung, tight-cinched waist” (Guibert) or the near-prophetic ability for the museum attendant Irrsigler to bring Reger a glass of water before the man even professes thirst (Bernhard). 

Critiques of their respective polite societies link both books; Guibert had become the sympathetic face of AIDS for bourgeois France, and he began to act, per Shiv Kotecha’s foreword, “as if bent on disarming and satisfying the tumescent sympathies of a liberal French middle class,” and Bernhard never tired of lobbing insults at his countrymen. Conversely, some accuse Guibert of having sanitized the face of AIDS and Baudrillard saw Bernhard’s novels as Teutonic middle-brow circle-jerking — apropos our era of Oscar-less Tár.

Guibert’s protagonist can’t tie his own Nikes, but even when his houseboy is stealing the dying man’s morphine to shoot up his tongue, it’s hard to have sympathy for the misanthrope, at least so long as we suspend knowledge of the duo’s partial role as AIDS allegory. After all, some like getting pissed on by racially ambiguous adolescents — and indeed, like Guibert’s old man, whatever his original intent, pay handsomely for it! Reger takes Issregler each year to an ostensibly generous lunch at the Ambassador, for chewy beef and staid atmospherics neither of them seem to enjoy, but Reger can’t go to the attendant’s neighborhood without feeling “polluted from head to toe.”  

Bernhard, who was always writing about the sick and the suicidal, would appear in Guibert’s own meditations on mortality. The Austrian was “a much better writer than I,” Guibert self-deprecated in his autofiction novel To the friend who did not save my life (1990). Ill in Rome, Guibert’s eponymous stand-in retroactively notes that as he’d been contemplating extending his life with AZT, the early HIV medication, Bernhard had eleven days remaining: “poor Guibert” who “pulled out all the stops to make myself the equal of this modern master, I, poor little Guibert, ex-master of the world who found himself bested by both Thomas Bernhard and AIDS.”

Modern masters, ex-masters, manservants’ masters… “The Old Masters…withstand only superficial contemplation,” expounds 80-year-old Reger staring down his favored Renaissance painting. “[I]f we contemplate them in depth they gradually dwindle and ultimately, when we’ve really and truly examined them… they disintegrate.” Art saves no one and no thing from the slow suicide that is living. “Ultimately it’s still ridiculous anyway.”

~Bonus content ;)

Want more on the (living) Continental establishment? Check out my recent review of Isa Genzken’s retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.