Bernhard’s first literary attempts in the 1950s and early 1960s were in lyric poetry, the same genre his grandfather had practiced. Morbid, almost hallucinatory verse modeled after Rilke and Trakl, it lacked the humor and dramatic brilliance of his later work and met with scant critical success; Bernhard himself later rejected it. His literary breakthrough came with the novel Frost (1963), in which his characteristic prose style — a relentless inner monologue unbroken by any paragraph markings, objective description, or external narrative events — is already fully developed. Bernhard never wavered from this monologistic form and even extended it into the theater, using it in the course of the next twenty-six years for an oeuvre that, although not without its weak moments, has few contemporary equals in quality or size: more than twenty novels or collections of stories, an equal number of plays, a five-volume autobiography, and two full-length scripts for movies based on his stories. For this work Bernhard received all the major Austrian and German awards, although he characteristically used these occasions to lash out at Austrian “philistinism” and “art hatred.” His acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 proved so offensive that it drove the Minister of Culture and a good part of the audience from the room.
The Loser was published in Germany in 1983 and comes at the end of a seven-year period in which Bernhard wrote the five volumes of his autobiography. This sustained examination of the self proved crucial. Whereas the earlier prose works had focused on private stories of madness and human isolation — an unknown painter who destroys his work, a country doctor treating incurably ill patients, an insane count lying alone in his villa — those written after the autobiography project these same scenarios onto the public biographies of people like Wittgenstein, Mendelssohn, or, as in the present case, Glenn Gould. But in each case the public figure serves as a foil for Bernhard himself. Indeed, the novels written after this point—Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Woodcutters, Old Masters, and The Loser—all walk a very thin line between fact and fiction, borrowing so heavily from the details of Bernhard’s real life that he was more than once sued for libel. These later texts are all part of what might be termed Bernhard’s imaginary autobiography — his own life story rewritten according to the lives of his artistic and philosophical doubles.
Thus Glenn Gould appears in The Loser, at once beguilingly familiar — the “real Glenn Gould,” who gave up public concerts at an early age to concentrate on his recordings — and an artificial literary construct that resembles Bernhard and all his fictional alter egos. There is no evidence that Bernhard ever met Gould, and the two certainly didn’t study together in Salzburg with Horowitz, as the novel claims. Yet there is a detail in Gould’s biography that may well have tickled Bernhard’s imagination into using him as a fictional doppelgänger. During a European tour in 1958, Gould gave a concert in Salzburg, which Bernhard, given his own music studies there, may well have attended. In any case, years later Gould recalled in one of his self-interviews that the drafty Festspielhaus had brought on a bout of tracheitis that forced him to cancel all concerts, withdraw for a month in the Alps, and lead “the most idyllic and isolated existence.” Gould the journalist speaks to Gould the musician thus:
Since you’re obviously a man addicted to symbols … it would seem to me that the Festspielhaus — the Felsenreitschule — with its Kafka-like setting at the base of a cliff, with the memory of equestrian mobility haunting its past, and located, moreover, in the birthplace of a composer whose works you have frequently criticized … is a place to which a man like yourself, a man in search of martyrdom, should return.
Here perhaps is the original kernel for Bernhard’s noveclass="underline" the “Kafka-like setting” of the Festspielhaus, Gould’s respiratory illness and ascetic isolation in the Alps, a “return” to Salzburg, where Bernhard had also studied music so many years ago.…
True to his habit, however, Bernhard traffics freely with the details of Gould’s biography. The very first page of the novel puts his death at age fifty-one rather than the actual fifty. The Canadian pianist is given a lung disease that he never suffered from; in the novel it becomes his “second art.” Gould is said to have cut off relations with his family and withdrawn to a house in the woods near New York. In reality, after giving up concert life Gould returned to live with his parents in Toronto; his “cage in the woods” was the family cottage on Lake Simcoe. Bernhard’s Gould is completely absorbed by music and, unlike Wertheimer or the narrator, never engages in writing. The real Gould wrote constantly, and according to his official biographer, Otto Friedrich, left behind “sheaves of manuscripts” and an assortment of lined notepads containing “ideas, letters, drafts of interviews, revisions of articles, stock-market holdings, medical symptoms, his own temperature,” and other nonmusical data. Finally, Gould suffered a stroke while sleeping and died in a hospital a few days later. Bernhard uses poetic license to have his Gould die of a stroke at the piano while playing the Goldberg Variations.
Why these distortions? In part Bernhard adapts Gould’s actual biography to make it fit his own. Bernhard, not the Canadian virtuoso, turned fifty-one the year Gould died; he had the lung disease that, ever since he began writing at the sanatorium in Grafenhof, became his “second art” of fashioning unending sentences; he broke with his family and moved to an isolated house in the country. But Bernhard also distorts the facts of Gould’s life to make him into a monolithic, Zarathustrian Übermensch of artistic will and power. Gould represented not only a pinnacle of musical virtuosity but, more important, an uncompromising artistic personality who refused to sacrifice his original talent to the demands of critics or public. It is not just Gould’s playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It didn’t matter that this example was partly a myth, or that the actual Gould quite cannily orchestrated his public image and record sales. For Bernhard didn’t need Glenn Gould, he needed the “idea of Glenn Gould”— the “thought vehicle” with which he could spin out his own literary variation of Gould playing Bach.