intellectual conversation. She doubtless thought that an actor from the Burgtheater would be just the right partner for an intellectual conversation, but she was wrong. An intellectual conversation was the last thing the actor wanted that evening: he had not even been willing to talk about ordinary topics of supposedly intellectual interest or even to discuss matters that might be thought germane to his profession. Jeannie had repeatedly tried to lure him out of his reserve, as it were; she did not know that he had no reserve — nor could he have, I reflected, since he was after all an actor from the Burgtheater, one of the many half-wits engaged to perform there, who remain within their narrow intellectual confines, their generally mindless confines, and reach a venerable old age on the national stage. Even this actor’s face betrays no sign of anything that might be called remotely intellectual, I told myself, but Jeannie failed to see this. Even so, there was a certain tactlessness in inviting an actor to talk about the theater or the acting profession, in other words about his livelihood: nobody likes doing this, nobody finds it acceptable or tolerable to have to give his views on what he is obliged to live with, namely his profession — what some might call his vocation. She herself has always refused to talk about writing, and so have I, for naturally, as a writer I hate nothing so much as having to discuss writing. I’ve always refused to do so, and in this way I’ve offended a great many people, though their tactlessness has always merited whatever offense I’ve given, I thought. I find nothing so repugnant as talking about writing, and I find it supremely repugnant to talk about my own. Yet Jeannie imagined that she could talk to the actor about acting at the Burgtheater, I thought. Sitting next to her was Anna Schreker, a high school teacher whom I have also known as long as I have known the Auersbergers and whom I have always seen in their company, though only in the Gentzgasse, never at Maria Zaal, and always with her male companion, who is also a writer. She still has the same revolting sibilant pronunciation she had thirty years ago, I thought. People have always maintained that Anna Schreker the high school teacher is the Austrian Gertrude Stein or the Austrian Marianne Moore, whereas she has only ever been the Austrian Schreker, a local Viennese writer of megalomaniac pretensions. I now recalled that she too had started writing in the fifties, following more or less the same path as Jeannie Billroth, the path that leads from youthful promise to state patronage — starting off as a derivative literary virgin and ending up as a derivative literary matron — the path of mediocrity, it seems to me, not of genius. Just as Jeannie progressed from her Virginia Woolf fixation to her Virginia Woolf posture, so Schreker progressed from her Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein fixation to her Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein posture. At an early stage both Jeannie and Schreker, together with Schreker’s companion, made a radical break with their early intentions, their early literary visions and passions, and applied themselves instead to the loathsome art of exploiting literature as a means of ingratiating themselves with the state; all three applied themselves with the same abhorrent zeal to the cultivation of various city councillors, ministers, and other officials concerned with cultural affairs, so that as far as I was concerned they suddenly died overnight in the early sixties of their innate feebleness of character and became precisely the kind of sickening, revolting figures they had always accused others of being and spoken of with such supreme contempt. It seems to me that in endeavoring to ingratiate themselves with the state, Schreker and Jeannie betrayed not only themselves, but literature as a whole. This is what I thought at the time, when I suddenly became aware of their ambitions, and what I still think today; I shall never forgive them for what they did, and I am not sure which of the two is the more contemptible. Suddenly, in the early sixties, both Jeannie Billroth and Anna Schreker, in their appallingly opportunistic fashion, positively crawled into the very filth they had always found so loathsome and been so loud in condemning in the fifties. In the fifties, when I was twenty, they had described the state to me in terms which still hold good today, namely as an institution that brings unmitigated disaster on our benighted nation, yet in the early sixties they seem to have had no compunction in capitulating to this selfsame state and making common cause with it. As I see it, Schreker and Billroth sold out unreservedly to this egregious state in the early sixties, and so from then on I wanted nothing more to do with them, and especially with Jeannie. Schreker I had always regarded as a peripheral phenomenon, though she and Jeannie always struck me as being moral and spiritual siblings. While Jeannie always had her Virginia Woolf madness and hence suffered from a kind of Viennese Virginia Woolf disease, Schreker always had the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein madness and suffered from the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein disease. At the beginning of the sixties both of them quite suddenly turned their literary madnesses and their literary diseases, which in the fifties had no doubt been quite genuine madnesses and quite genuine diseases, into a pose, a purpose-built literary pose, a multipurpose literary pose, in order to make themselves attractive to openhanded politicians, thus unscrupulously killing off whatever literature they had inside them for the sake of a venal existence as recipients of state patronage. For I can only describe this pair as devious beneficiaries of state handouts, who in recent years have never missed an opportunity of showing themselves compliant to the perversely openhanded state they once despised, and who in the last fifteen years have been seen wherever something was up for grabs, as they say, never failing to take their places at official state functions or civic festivities. Wherever the politicians who run the nation’s cultural affairs with such outrageous insolence turn up with their well-filled money bags, these two may be seen dancing attendance. Thus over recent years Jeannie Billroth and Anna Schreker, the two literary, artistic and cultural ladies of my youth, on whom I had for years been prepared to betmy bottom dollar, as they say, have come to earn my detestation — Jeannie naturally more so than Schreker, since I never had such close contacts (or conflicts!) with her as I did with Jeannie. It became clear to me at the beginning of the sixties that these two writers, whom I had looked up to in the fifties as the two great female authors of my youth, were merely a couple of petit bourgeois women intent upon dressing up their mendacious inanities in literary guise. And there they were sitting opposite me, the two female monsters of Austrian literature side by side, each as repellent as the other in her inflated literary pretensions. There sit the Marianne Moore, the Gertrude Stein and the Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought, and yet they are nothing but devious, ambitious little state protégées, who have betrayed literature — and art in general — for the sake of a few ludicrous prizes and a guaranteed pension, kowtowing to the state and its cultural riffraff, churning out their derivative kitsch for the vilest of motives and spending their time going up and down the stairs of the ministries that dole out subventions. How Schreker used to inveigh — indeed vituperate — against the so-called ArtSenate! Yet a year ago she let this same Art Senate single her out for the award of the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature. It’s nauseating, I thought, to have to watch Schreker and Billroth suddenly falling upon the neck of the former President of the so-called ArtSenate, now its Honorary President, the very person they execrated for decades and pronounced so dreadful and dangerous, simply because they covet the