Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard Page A

of the Academy of Sciences. Finally the president of the Academy came down and accompanied me toward the dais. No sooner had I sat down next to the minister than my friend Paul, unable to contain himself any longer, burst into a peal of laughter that shook the whole room and continued until the Philharmonic began to play. A few speeches were made about Grillparzer and a few words said about me. Altogether the talking went on for an hour; as is customary on such occasions, there was far too much talking, and naturally it was all nonsense. The minister slept through the speeches, snoring audibly, and woke up only when the Philharmonic struck up again. When the ceremony was over, as many people as possible crowded round the minister and President Hunger. No one took any further notice of me. Before my friends and I left the assembly room, I heard the minister cry out:
Where’s the budding poet?
By this time I had had enough and left the Academy of Sciences as fast as I could. No money
and
being pissed on—that was intolerable. I ran out into the street, more or less dragging my friends after me, and I can still hear Paul saying to me as we left:
You’ve let yourself be abused! These people have pissed on you!
It’s true, I thought, they really have pissed on you. They’ve pissedon you again, as always. But you allowed yourself to be pissed on, I thought, and, what’s more, in the Viennese Academy of Sciences. Before going to the Sacher with my friends to digest this whole perverse prize-giving procedure over a boiled fillet of beef, I went back to the outfitter’s in the Kohlmarkt where I had bought my new suit before the ceremony. I told them that it was too tight and I wanted a new one. I said this with such insolent emphasis that the staff did not demur, but at once set about finding me a new suit. I took one or two off the rack and tried them on, finally choosing the most comfortable. I paid a small additional sum and kept the suit on. When I was back in the street, it struck me that before long somebody else would be running around in Vienna in the suit I had worn for the conferment of the Grillparzer Prize at the Academy of Sciences. The thought amused me. I had equally clear evidence of Paul’s strength of character on another occasion, when I received the State Prize for Literature (long before the Grillparzer Prize). This ended in what the newspapers called a
scandal
. The encomium delivered by the minister in the audience chamber of the ministry was utter nonsense, because he merely read out from a sheet of paper what had been written down for him by one of his officials charged with literary affairs. He said, for instance, that I had written a novel about the
south seas
, which of course I had not. And although I have been an Austrian all my life, the minister stated that I was Dutch. He also stated that I
specialized in adventure novels
, though this was news to me. More than once during his encomium he said that I was a foreigner,
a visitor to Austria
. By this stage I was no longer annoyedby the idiocies he read out. I knew that this imbecile from Styria could not be blamed, because before becoming a minister he had been secretary to the Chamber of Agriculture in Graz, with special responsibility for stock breeding. Stupidity was written all over his face, as it is over the faces of all ministers without exception. It was distasteful, but not annoying, and I was able to endure his speech without difficulty. It then fell to me to say a few words, by way of thanks for the prize, as it were. Just before the ceremony, in great haste and with the greatest reluctance, I had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty. After I had delivered my speech, which lasted altogether no more than three minutes, the minister, who had understood nothing of what I had said, indignantly jumped