The Afternoon of a Writer

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by Peter Handke




  The Afternoon of a Writer

  ALSO BY PETER HANDKE

  Kaspar and Other Plays

  The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

  Short Letter, Long Farewell

  A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

  The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

  A Moment of True Feeling

  The Left-Handed Woman

  The Weight of the World

  Slow Homecoming

  Across

  Repetition

  Peter Handke

  THE AFTERNOON

  OF A WRITER

  Translated by Ralph Manheim

  Farrar Straus Giroux

  New York

  Translation copyright© 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux:, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in German under the title Nachmittag eines

  Schriftstellers, copyright© I 987 by Residenz Verlag, Salzburg und Wien

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Cynthia Krupat

  First edition, 1989

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Handke, Peter.

  [Nachmittag eines Schrijhtellers. English]

  The afternoon of a writer / Peter Handke;

  translated by Ralph Manheim.-Ist ed.

  Translation of Nachmittag eines Schrijhtellers.

  I. Title.

  for F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Afternoon of a Writer

  EVER SINCE the time when he lived for almost a year with the thought that he had lost contact with language, every sentence he managed to write, and which in addition left him feeling that it might be possible to go on, had been an event. Every word, not spoken but written, that led to others, filled his lungs with air and renewed his tie with the world. A successful notation of this kind began the day for him; after that, or at least so he thought, nothing could happen to him until the following morning.

  But perhaps this fear of coming to a standstill, of not being able to go on, of having to break off for­ ever, had been with him all his life, in connection not only with writing but with all his other undertakings: loving, studying, participating—everything, in short, that called for perseverance. Perhaps his professional problem was a parable of his existence, for it clearly exemplified his situation. In other words, not "I as writer" but "the writer as I." And indeed it was only since the period when he feared that he had strayed beyond the frontiers of language and would never find his way home and the ensuing period of having to begin again day after day and with no assurance of success that he, whose guiding thought for more than half a lifetime had been the thought of writing, had seriously regarded himself as a writer—a word which up until then he had used only ironically or sheepishly.

  And now, thanks to a few lines that had clarified a state of affairs to his satisfaction and given it new life, he had the impression that the day had gone well, and stood up from his desk with the feeling that it was all right for the day to be over. He didn't know what time it was. In his mind, it was only a moment ago that the midday bells of the chapel of the old people's home at the foot of the little hill had suddenly started tinkling as though someone had died, yet hours must have passed since then, for the light in the room was now an afternoon light. He took the shimmer of sunlight on the carpet as a sign that his work had measured out the right amount of time. He raised both arms and bowed to the sheet of paper in his typewriter. At the same time he told himself, as he had so often, that he must not lose himself in his work the next day, but on the contrary use it to open up his senses: instead of taking his mind off his work, the shadow of a bird darting across the wall should accompany and clar­ify his writing, and so should the barking of a dog, the whining of a chain saw, the grinding of trucks shifting gears, the constant hammering, the inces­sant whistle blowing and shouts of command from the schoolyards and drill grounds down in the plain. And then it occurred to him, as it had for a number of days, that in his last hour at his desk the only sounds to have reached him from the city were police and ambulance sirens and that he had not once, as he had earlier in the day, looked up from his paper and turned toward the window to concentrate on the sight of a tree trunk in the garden, or the cat eyeing him from the outer window ledge, or the planes in the sky, landing from left to right and taking off from right to left. At first he was unable to focus on anything in the distance and saw even the pattern of the carpet as a blur; in his ears he heard a buzzing as though his typewriter were an electric one­—which was not the case.

  The writer's workroom—his "den"—was on the second floor. Bemused, carrying his empty teacup, he went downstairs and saw by the kitchen clock that the day was almost over. It was early December and the edges of various objects glowed as they do at the onset at twilight. At the same time, the airy space outside and the interior of the curtainless house seemed joined in an undivided brightness. No snow had yet fallen that year. But that morning the birds had cheeped in a certain way—in a mon­otone suggestive of speech—that heralded snow. Standing in the light, which little by little restored his senses, the writer felt impelled to go out. On those days when he did not leave the house until it was beginning to get dark, he felt that he had missed something. Strange that someone in his profession had always felt most at home out of doors.

  In the entrance, he bent down and picked up the mail which the postman had pushed through the slot in the door. The one thing in the thick pile that he wanted to read was a picture postcard. There were advertising circulars, political fliers, free samples, and invitations to art galleries or so-called town meetings—but more than half the pile consisted of the familiar gray envelopes, all addressed in the hand of the same unknown individual, who for more than ten years had been sending him almost daily at least a dozen such letters from some remote for­eign country. Long ago the writer, for no other rea­son than because at first glance he had mistaken the stranger's handwriting for his own, had replied briefly to the first letter. Since then, the sender had taken the tone of a childhood friend or of an old garden-fence neighbor. The envelopes always con­tained fragmentary messages, as a rule no more than one sentence, about the stranger's family life, his wife and children, such as "Today a registered letter from my wife," or "She has forbidden me to see them." Puzzling remarks such as "Better to die than to buy a plane ticket against my will," or "She can't deny that I weeded the garden yesterday"; or mere outcries on the order of "I wish I could finally be happy," or "I, too, am entitled to a new life"—as if the addressee had known the sender's whole story for ages. In the first years the writer had carefully read every one of the incoherent sentences and even each of the disjointed words. But as time went on, these scraps of paper had begun to depress him, especially on the not unusual days when they were his only mail. On those days he wished his corre­spondent could see the fury with which he clamped the lid of the garbage pail down on the stack of unopened envelopes. From time to time, when an infrequent sense of duty led him to open one of the envelopes, he was almost comforted to see that the news appeared to be always the same. True, the letters were cries for help, entreaties, but even if no one heard them, they seemed capable of going on for a lifetime. And this, apart from laziness, was why the writer did not have the letters returned to sender—as he often felt tempted to do at the sight of the daily rectangular airmail letters, unaccom­panied by so much as a sign of life from anyone else. This time he relegated the whole pile to the wastepaper basket, as he had yesterday, depositing each envelope separately, as if that were a sort of acknowledgment. The picture postcard—fr
om a one-time friend now in America, who was wander­ing about that continent in a state of confusion—he slipped into his coat pocket to read when he went out.

  He showered, changed his clothes, and put on shoes of a type equally well adapted to sidewalks, escalators, and rough country. He let the cat into the house and set out dishes of meat and milk. The cold seemed to have accumulated in the cat's fur, and the writer thought he detected a suggestion of snow crystals on the tips of its hairs. But the body underneath warmed his hands, which had grown cold with the hours of writing.

  Eager though he was to go out, he hesitated as usual. He opened the doors to all the rooms on the ground floor, letting the light from different direc­tions fuse. The house seemed uninhabited. He had the impression that, dissatisfied with being only worked in and slept in, it would have liked to be lived in as well. Of that the writer had probably been incapable from the start, as of any family life. He found window seats, dining tables, and pianos up­setting; stereo loudspeakers, chessboards and flower vases, even organized bookshelves repelled him— his books tended to pile up on the floor and win­dowsills. It was only at night, sitting somewhere in the dark, looking out into the rooms, which to his taste were sufficiently illuminated by the city lights and their reflection in the sky, that he almost had a sense of being at home. At last he had no need to ponder and plan, but just sat there quietly in the silence, at the most remembering; these were the hours when he was happiest to be in the house, and he always prolonged them until, imperceptibly, his musings merged into equally peaceful dreams. In the daytime, however, especially just after work, he soon found the silence oppressive. Then the splash­ing of the dishwasher in the kitchen or the hum of the dryer in the bathroom—if possible, both at once—came as a relief. Before even getting up from his desk, he needed the sounds of the outside world. Once, after months of writing in an almost sound­ proof room in a high-rise building, close to the sky as it were, he had moved, in order to go on working, to a street-level room on a noisy traffic artery, and later, in the present house, though the construction noises next door had disturbed him at first, he had soon got used to hearing the din of the jackhammers and bulldozers every morning, very much as in the beginning he had played rock music to ease himself into work. From time to time, he would take his eyes off his paper, look out at the workers, and try to establish a harmony between what he was doing and their unhurried one-thing-after-another. He often needed a confrontation of this kind, which nature—the trees, the grass, the Virginia creeper twined around his window—could not in the long run provide. Be that as it may, a fly in the room disturbed him a lot, more than a pile driver outside.

  On his way to the garden gate, the writer suddenly turned around. He rushed into the house and up to his study and substituted one word for another. It was only then that he smelled the sweat in the room and saw the mist on the windowpanes.

  ALL AT ONCE, he was in less of a hurry. All at once, because of this one word, the whole empty house seemed warm and hospitable. On the threshold he turned back toward the desk, which for a moment struck him as a place of righteousness or of becoming righteous: "That is definitely how it should be!" Down below, he installed himself in the entrance—which was glassed in on the garden side—sewed on some buttons, and cleaned several pairs of summer shoes. While engaged in this activity, he thought of the great poet who was said to look "noble even when cutting his fingernails," and doubted whether anyone could say that of him. Out in the garden, a bird slipped Tom Thumb-like into the conical yew tree and didn't come out again. The droning of the single-engine planes overhead reminded him of Alaska, and the whistle of the trains looping around the city also came from a distant land rich in water. For a moment, the rumbling of wheels in a switchyard on the horizon was clearly audible; at the exact same moment, a dog scratched itself at the foot of the stairs and the fridge hummed in the pantry. For the second time that day, the writer watered the plants in the entrance, which, in conjunction with the glass wall, gave it the look of a greenhouse, fed the cat again, and finally, polished all the door handles. He felt an urge to write a letter, no matter to whom, but not here in the house—later, somewhere in town.

  Once—during the time when he thought he was losing contact with language—he had vowed never again to lock a door behind him. This occurred to him while he was double locking the door, as he did every day when leaving the house. To make up for his lapse, he resolved, he would leave the door unlocked when he came home that night; had he not, even without such an undertaking, found the door not only unlocked but wide open some mornings?

  On the clay of the garden path he walked in his own footprints, the consequence of his daily pacing, often for hours, before starting to work. Now they were frozen; a dense interlocking pattern was stamped into the ground the whole length of the garden, as though an army had come marching in, prepared for hand-to-hand combat, or as though a special police unit had come to arrest a dangerous public enemy. The writer recalled a comic film in which the hero plods back and forth outside a building for so long that his plodding carves out a ditch from which only his hat emerges.

  Despite the wintry weather, there were still flowers here and there. Precisely because they were small and scattered, the catchfly, daisies, buttercups, and dead nettles enlivened the undulating landscape. A few bird-pecked apples were left in the crown of the one tree; their flesh was no doubt frozen glass-hard. The last leaves, weighed down by hoarfrost, fell to the ground one by one, almost vertically, with a crackling sound. The hazel catkins were colorless and seemed doubled-up with the cold. The bellflower by the picket fence was a frosty blue.

  Next to the garden there was a small park which, as often happened at the end of the working day, looked to the writer like a primeval forest, rich in underbrush and creepers. Once he turned around to face the house, with the feeling that he had stepped out of a shadow. The sky was light gray, crisscrossed by long bands of a darker gray which left an impression of spaciousness and height. There was no wind, but the air was so cold that he felt it grazing his forehead and throat. At a fork in the road, he stopped. Which way should he go? In town there would be Christmas crowds; on the outskirts he would be alone. Ordinarily, in times of idleness, he would stroll into town. But when concentrating on his work, he usually went to the outskirts—out into the wilderness; thus far, he had adhered to this rule. But did he actually have any rules? Weren't the few that he had tried to impose on himself constantly giving way to something else—a mood, an accident, a sudden inspiration—that seemed to indicate the better choice? True, his life had been oriented for almost twenty years toward his literary goal; but reliable ways and means were still unknown to him. Everything about him was still as temporary as it had been in the child, as later in the schoolboy, and still later in the novice writer. Temporarily he was living, the same novice as before, in this unremarkable European city, although, so it seemed to him, he had begun to age here; he had returned, but only for the time being, from abroad to his own country, prepared to pick up and leave again at any moment and, as he saw it, even his life as a writer, close as it came to his dream, was also "for the time being"—the definitive had always repelled him. "All is flux," "You cannot step twice into the same river," or, in the original wording of the famous maxim: "You may step into the same river, but other and still other waters will flow past you." Through the years he had repeated Heraclitus' words to himself over and over again, very much as believers recite the "Our Father."

  The writer stopped at the crossroads longer than usual. Perhaps because his profession did not impose a hard-and-fast schedule, he seemed to need an idea to carry him through the most trifling daily movements; the idea that came to him now was to combine the periphery with the center by crossing the inner city on his way to the outskirts. Hadn't he, while still at his desk, felt the need to be among people? And hadn't he time and again neglected his vow to cross the river at least once a day and explore newer districts of the city? Now that he ha
d a plan, he was glad to be on the move.

  It was quite a while before he saw anyone on his way downhill through the wooded park. Alone with nature after so many hours in his room, he felt free, buoyed by a childlike feeling. At last he had stopped mulling over the morning's sentences. Ignoring the bright-colored bird chart and the instructive BEECH and MAPLE signs on the corresponding tree trunks, he had eyes only for the light smoothness of the one tree and the roughness of the other. At the sight of a dozen sparrows sitting motionless, puffed up against the cold, in a stunted oak tree that had not yet lost all its leaves, he found himself believing in the legend of the saint who had preached to these little birds; and indeed the sparrows, without stirring from the spot, jerked their heads as though in anticipation of his first word. Whereupon he said something or other and the birds in the tree listened.

  The road was yellow with fallen larch needles. Though ankle-deep at some bends in the road, they were piled so loosely that they dispersed under his footsteps, and the resulting streaks on the asphalt suggested meanders. As the silence around him deepened during his last hours in the house, he had been overwhelmed by the thought that the world outside had ceased to exist and that he in his room was the sole survivor. Consequently, he was vastly relieved to see a real, healthy-looking human being, a street sweeper who, having finished his day's work, stepped out of his toolshed in his street clothes, elaborately wiping his thick glasses with an enormous handkerchief. As they wished each other a good evening, it occurred to the writer that these were the first words he had exchanged that day; thus far, he had only listened in silence to the early-morning news, talked to the cat, and, seated at his desk, spoken a line or two aloud. As a result, he now had to clear his throat to prepare his voice for the customary man-to-man tone. Even if the nearsighted street sweeper couldn't quite see him, how comforting, after supposing that the world had come to an end, to encounter these two living, energetic eyes. He had the feeling that only the colors of those eyes could understand him, just as, reflected in their eyes, he was able to understand the faces of the passersby—who were becoming more and more frequent as he approached the city.

 

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