Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence

The most interesting character in Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence is hands down the grandfather. (Or perhaps I am irresistibly attracted to failures and losers of all kinds.) According to Bernhard, his grandfather was a total failure as a philosopher/writer from the point of view of the world (though there is some mention of a publication and royalties). He would get up at 3:00 a.m. to closet himself in his room to write, and everyone in the household was trained to walk on tiptoes and converse in whispers to not disturb the great man at his great work. He would take long walks on which Bernhard would accompany him and receive the real education of his life. Bernhard considered his grandfather his first real teacher (another would be an artist manqué grocer) and the person he loved the most, something he repeats throughout the book. The grandfather who was an anarchist by nature, who sought out conflict and chaos. The grandfather’s favorite mode of discourse seems to have been the diatribe – against teachers, schools, the petite bourgeosie, Catholicism, religion in general, and later against National Socialism or the Nazis. When you consider that Bernhard’s novels are essentially drawnout dramatized rants (not to devalue them in anyway!), and against those very same targets, it becomes evident that Bernhard has made profitable use of his patrimony. Indeed, it is hard to know where the grandfather ends and the grandson begins. This grandfather indulged himself in pursuing his totally unsuccessful career as a writer/thinker living off the labor of womenfolk, his wife and daughter (and later his son-in-law), who held a series of menial jobs to support the great man.

In spite of his excoriation of teachers and schools, paradoxically – even Bernhard seems to have been baffled by this – the grandfather sends him away first to a boarding school in Salzburg, then when the family relocates to Salzburg, to a gymnasium where the progeny of the local social climbing petit bourgeois send their boys. Both are run by Nazi sadists and numbskulls and it is only when one day Bernhard has had enough and does an abrupt turn in the “opposite direction” that he is saved.