At Home

At Home, by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as found in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home." The bathroom provides the occasion for the history of hygiene, the bedroom for an account of sex, death, and sleep, the kitchen for a discussion of nutrition and the spice trade, and so on, showing how each has figured in the evolution of private life. From architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the telephone to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets - and the brilliant, creative, and often eccentric talents behind them - Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world ends up in our houses, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

This is a no-brainer. Either you like Bill Bryson, and you like At Home, or you hate Bill Bryson, and you hate At Home. Or you feel tepid about both, whatever. All your myriad complicated feelings about Bryson's other work will hold equally true here, there is no great departure of style or character from his usual. Lucky for me, I happen to like his style and character.

Bryson takes on a bit more to chew this time around - more or less European and American history from maybe the 17th to the 19th century, with a bit of older events tossed in. It's an interesting read, for sure. Bryson covers just about every topic at least once (there's a handy index in the back which runs from actuarial tables to Yellow Fever - although come to think of it, those two topics may have something in common) skipping around in each chapter to discuss things not dreamed of when presented with the heading "The Study". For example: bats. Or using the Nursery as an opportunity to talk about workhouses.

For all it's compelling and fascinating, Bryson does like to go off on tangents, and often will mention a person in passing, only to reintroduce them fifty pages later, on a side tangent for a completely different topic. It can get a little frustrating at times, the sheer amount of information which Bryson pours out makes it well nigh impossible to retain individual names and events, especially when one (me) reads the books in chaptered segments instead of in one glorious swoop. Because the information is ordered -loosely- by room, instead of chronologically, it can get hard to figure out just what happened when. Did people have telephones and lawnmowers at the same time, or were they mowing and creating landscapes before they could call their neighbors to tell them about it? Was Coade stone popular when Thomas Jefferson began his never-ending quest to build Monticello, and did he use it in his plans? Did Darwin leave with gas lights and come back to kerosene, or vice versa or was it completely different? It's all in there, but it's so mixed up in stoves and wells and Phylloxera and smog and iron and locusts and the tendency of the British peerage to marry American heiresses that I did not, let's be honest, retain much of anything at all.

But for all it's faults, it's still a very entertaining read, and no matter how long the index is, or how many important-sounding names it contains, I would call At Home light reading. Bryson is a master at the art of the anecdote, the light quip. Every page has a bit to smile at:

While showing off his [$519,750 bottle of Chateau Margaux wine] at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway. [The Garden - p.279]


At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 types of flatware for the table. Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does. [The Dining Room - p.187]

During [Benjamin Franklin's] years in London, he developed the custom of taking "air baths," basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can't have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbors something to talk about. [The Bathroom - p.350]

Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice [of razing villages for a better view] in a long, sentimental poem, "The Deserted Village," inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned. [The Garden - p.259]

It's all very amusing - I just wish I could remember it better.

My Prizes: An Accounting

Meine Preise [My Prizes], by Thomas Bernhard

A gathering of brilliant and viciously funny recollections from one of the twentieth century’s most famous literary enfants terribles.

Written in 1980 but published here for the first time, these texts tell the story of the various farces that developed around the literary prizes Thomas Bernhard received in his lifetime. Whether it was the Bremen Literature Prize, the Grillparzer Prize, or the Austrian State Prize, his participation in the acceptance ceremony—always less than gracious, it must be said—resulted in scandal (only at the awarding of the prize from Austria’s Federal Chamber of Commerce did Bernhard feel at home: he received that one, he said, in recognition of the great example he set for shopkeeping apprentices). And the remuneration connected with the prizes presented him with opportunities for adventure—of the new-house and luxury-car variety.

Here is a portrait of the writer as a prizewinner: laconic, sardonic, and shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself. A revelatory work of dazzling comedy, the pinnacle of Bernhardian art.

If I could, I would write a love ode to this short collection. It is a series of personal remembrances of prizes which Thomas Bernhard collected over the years for his plays and novels. Prizes which, he reminds us again and again, he would be loathe to accept were it not for the prize money attached. Nevertheless, I can only be thankful he did deign to attend, because without it, I would not have been able to read the marvelous My Prizes.

Bernhard is acerbic, rude, and sarcastic, but also endearingly susceptible to supposed insults about his commitment to Austria, his adopted homeland, with which he has a complicated love-hate relationship. During his acceptance of the Austrian State Prize for Literature (which he prefaces by relating his extreme embarrassment to have won, given that it is only the Small State Prize, which is usually given out to young new up-and-comers, not older established writers, and that he only "came to terms with the prize" because of the twenty-five thousand schillings attached to it) the minister, perhaps unwisely, upsets him by calling him a foreigner born in Holland, though living amongst the Austrians for some time. However factually accurate it may have been, the provocation it offers Bernhard is amply repaid as he gives what has to be one of the rudest acceptance speeches in history. Bernhard describes it thusly:

[T]he theme was a philosophical one, profound even, I felt, and I had uttered the word State several times. I thought, it's a very calm text, one I can use here to get myself up out of the dirt without causing a ruckus because almost no one will understand it, all about death and its conquering power and the absurdity of all things human, about man's incapacity and man's mortality and the nullity of all states.

At this point in My Prizes, the reader knows to take Bernhard's description of his actions as calm and reasonable with a grain of salt. Luckily and hilariously, the actual speech given is reprinted in the back of the book. To be sure, Bernhard's speech does mention the State a couple of times, and it does talk about death and man's incapacity and the nullity of government. It also says:

Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need
....

We're Austrian, we're apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.

We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful, brought down by all the imaginative powers of an amalgam of philosophical, economic, and machine-driven monotony.

Before ending with:

In my name and in the name of those here who have also been selected by this jury, I thank you.

If only the state minister had stuck around to hear that last part! Graciousness itself, amirite? After causing a near-riot and clearing the auditorium, Bernhard is completely satisfied, as it means the next prize committee thinks twice about hosting a ceremony and instead just asks him to pick up the check at his convenience, which is probably best for all the parties concerned.

Bernhard writes with panache, and often the prizes and ceremonies are merely an aside to whatever more random topic Bernhard wants to discuss - buying and returning a suit:

Whoever buys the suit I have just returned, I thought, has no idea that it's been with me at the awarding of the Grillparzer Prize of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. It was an absurd thought, and at this absurd thought I took heart. I spent a most enjoyable day with my aunt and we kept laughing over the people at Sir Anthony, who had let me exchange my suit without objections, even though I had worn it to the awarding of the Grillparzer Prize in the Academy of Sciences. That they were so obliging is something about the people in Sir Anthony in the Kohlmarkt that I shall never forget.

getting a luxury car (which he insists on buying right now, from the showroom, even though he has no idea how to drive it out of the store), his time staying in the Lung Disease Hospital attached to the Steinhof Insane Asylum (which "had seven rooms of either two or three patients, all of which patients died during the time I was there, with the exception of a theology student and me. I have to mention this because it is quite simply essential for what follows." N.B.: It isn't.), or getting ambushed by an acquaintance who will not. stop. talking ("Whenever I'm reminded of Saiko, who, as I mentioned, was the author of The Man in the Reeds, the first thing I think of is his lecture about never buying shoes before four in the afternoon and I have retained something of that lecture even today, and his four-hour lecture on what a novel is comes in second.").

My Prizes is vastly entertaining, and it's written with a sly knowledge of the author's own ridiculous behavior. Bernhard is fully realized within the pages, and he displays his foibles and eccentricities with sublime indifference of your good opinion. The reader is quickly charmed by his sardonic outlook on life and the vast machine that is prize- giving.

Bernhard is a character, and I wish only that he had been more recognized during life, that we might have more accounts of his unparalleled talent for accepting prizes.