While Bernhard’s early poems demonstrate promising development (and a few are spectacular in their own right), they vary in quality. That begins to change with In Hora Mortis, which explores both a fear of and a yearning for mortality. The poems are more sophisticated than Bernhard’s early works; they use repetition in a less schematic, and therefore more powerful, way. The collection is interspersed with leitmotiv-like cries of “O Lord, “come help,” “answer me,” “hear me.” These interjections show the speaker pleading his case directly to God, and have the ring of Baptist or Pentecostal worship (Bernhard was allergic to Catholicism). They lend his premonitions of death a dark vigor, a propulsion that shows that the end is near, and coming closer all the time:
O Lord
who informs me of when
I must die
and where
and how
and destroys with the angel’s flight
O send Lord
the grain
how You have sown it
Reidel’s translation is accurate and effective here, conveying both the Biblical quality and the emotional directness of the lines. Directness is a strength of In Hora Mortis overall, though at times the collection comes very close to kitsch: “I am so alone / O Lord / and no one partakes of my suffering.” But if Bernhard was probing these boundaries in his poetry, in his novels, he never settles for the vice of modern German prose writers: literature as pseudo-philosophy, its meaning hidden in endless cascades of prepositions, nouns, and verbs. Melodramatic moments are small slips in the development of Bernhard’s trademark icy clarity.
In contrast to the desperate seriousness of In Hora Mortis, the eighteen-page poem “The Insane The Inmates” displays Bernhard’s sense of twisted comedy. It opens with nonsensical pseudo-philosophical epigraphs. We then get descriptions of people in the asylum, tagged by a distinguishing characteristic, in short, repetitive rhyming stanzas reminiscent of children’s songs. Then come laments in the first person: “A clasped head, the maniac milk of my teats! / Officer I am a man of such talent!” Is this Bernhard speaking from the same perverse streak that will appear later in his collection of very short stories, The Voice Imitator? In one of those stories, “Insanity,” a mailman burns every letter that he suspects will bring bad news. The post office has him committed, and the asylum puts him to work delivering mail for the other inmates. Though Bernhard’s insight—that a thin and porous border exists between sanity and insanity—is nothing particularly new, as a great writer, he finds an unforgettable way of illustrating that basic truth, bending language to his outrageous and nimble sense of fun.
Jeffrey Brown is the editor of VAN Magazine. His work has also appeared in Slate, INTO, and Electric Literature. He lives in Berlin with his husband.
