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editor would pop up in a variety of Austrian and German newspapers.
Over the years, he answered only a few of my letters, but whenever we
met he would comment when he hadn't heard from me in a while. "I
thought you were dead," he once said jokingly, which sounded strange
to me, coming from a man for whom death always had been such a
concrete reality. When he wrote, he was either on the run from Austria
somewhere in the Mediterranean or just returning, and his letters read as
if spoken by someone up on his feet, running breathlessly, with his
thoughts and emotions running ahead of him. He finally had a telephone
installed and advised me in a letter that dialing his number would con–
nect me directly to the center of hell. There are three exclamation points
in the first paragraph of that letter, which echoes his narrator's restless
obsession with the deadly inhospitality of the same Austrian landscape in
the novel
Concrete.
There, in the midst of winter, he suddenly latches
onto the thought of leaving his country house for Palma:
I shall be leaving a country in which the church practices hypocrisy
and in which socialism , having come to power, practices exploita–
tion, and in which art says whatever is acceptable to these two. I shall
be leaving a country in which a people educated to stupidity allows
its ears to be stopped by the church and its mouth by the state, and in
which everything I hold sacred has for centuries ended up in the slop
pails of the rulers. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair,
I shall only be going away from a country in which I no longer have
any place and in which I have never found happiness. If I go away, I
shall be going away from a country in which the towns stink and the
inhabitants of the towns have become coarsened. [ shall be going
away from a country in which the language has become vulgar and
for the most part deranged. I shall be going away from a country, I
told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which the only model of be–
havior is set by the so-called wild animals . I shall be going away
from a country in which the darkest night prevails at noonday , and in
which virtually the only people in power are blustering illiterates. If I
go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, [ shall be leaving the
disgusting, depressing, and unconscionably filthy public lavatory of
Europe.
The passage which begins with the damnation of the church is
driven by urgent incantations in the insistent repetitions of a church
litany, a mad prayer from "the center of hell." By contrast, his last pub–
lished text was a letter to the editor of a small rural paper, the
Salzkam–
mergutzeitung,
dated January 12, 1989. In it, he protests the planned dis–
continuation of the local trolley of Gmunden:
