Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh 

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

 The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.  

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.  

Plot  

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.  

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.  

Chance and Passivity 

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:  

“Help,” a voice says.  

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word. 

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two. 

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop. 

“Hey!” he shouts. 

Which seems to be enough. 

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.  

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.  

The World Attained 

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?  

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually has develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit: 

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day. 

Now it’s forty. 

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again. 

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.  

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment: 

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes I’m okay.” 

“You need to look after yourself.” 

“I know.” 

“You mustn’t let yourself go.” 

“I know,” Helen says. 

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.  

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.  

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.  

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter. 

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement. 

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.  

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense. 

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last. 

Conclusion  

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.  

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty

In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you I am compromised and perhaps, on this occasion, cannot discharge my reviewing duties as honourably as I normally would. Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful, delectable, novel, The Line of Beauty, concerns the life of a young man during the peak years of Thatcherite Britain. A period some ten years before I was even born, but one that chances of fate and birth mean I struggle to be wholly indifferent towards. I was not born a miner’s son, no. Quite the opposite – my grandfather was a very significant Conservative MP. I am tainted, I suppose, by this. By his ghostly shadow – he died when I was very small – and his books upon the wall, even as I write this now. Whether in action or reaction, this fact is a big annoying reality, one I try to avoid in life, yet ever fail to.

I know that readers here are scattered across the earth. It can be hard to understand the strength of the feelings that Margaret Thatcher earned for herself. When she died – which I do remember – it was startling to me to see so many people cursing the “witch” who now was gone. Yet many loved her, more quietly perhaps, and she repeatedly won large majorities in parliament. Whether one views her as an industry-destroying monster who robbed thousands of their jobs in the mines, or a hero for the aspiring who opened the way to middle-class property-ownership and general prosperity, her policies and personal values touched everyone in the United Kingdom, for better or worse. After a period of relative stagnation, Thatcher brought something new. The “Big Bang”, a sudden and large amount of financial deregulation in 1983, could describe the whole period – it was an explosion of change, with individuals free left to figure out the consequences and opportunities for themselves. Those who could, anyway.

Into this world steps the hero of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest. Young, fresh out of Oxford but not particularly rich or privileged, he embodies the upward social mobility of the times. A friendship of sorts with one Toby Fedden at Oxford gives him the chance to live with Toby’s family in London while he pursues further studies in Henry James and his style. The Feddens are a family with no need for social mobility. Gerald, the father, is a newly-minted MP in 1983, while his wife Rachel brings old money and further status to his affairs. Besides Toby, there’s also a daughter, Catherine, whose depressions are carefully hidden from the outside world.

Nick lives with the Feddens for the full four year period covered by The Line of Beauty, even as he finishes studies and begins work with another Oxonian friend, the Lebanese Wani Ouradi. The Ouradis, who have made their massive fortune in grocery stores, are another side of a changing Britain. The father is made a lord, the son is sent to Harrow. While the father may be spoken of, behind his back, in terms of racism and dismissal, the same cannot be said for the son. Wani, through his integration into the boarding school system, has already become more British – in a way – than Nick could ever hope to be.

Nick’s relationship with Wani continues his upward social climb by providing the financial support needed to solidify – at least, for a time – the social benefits conferred by his friendship with the Feddens. Wani’s wealth is so great that at one point he gives Nick five thousand pounds just so Nick stops asking him to pay him for smaller things. By the end of the novel, Wani has given Nick plenty more. The reason for such generosity is not merely that they are friends or that Wani is rich, but rather that Wani and Nick are sexual partners. For, complicating the linear progression of the novel, from rags to riches, namelessness to front-page news, is the simple fact that Nick is gay. 

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults in the UK, but a law of the land is not a law of the mind, and Nick’s sexuality exists in an ambiguous field – tolerated, rather than quite accepted, by the novel’s characters. “They’re absolutely fine with it”, Nick says to his first boyfriend of the Feddens’ knowledge of his sexuality, then adds to himself – “as long as it’s never mentioned.” The tension is light enough that we may not notice it at first. Nick’s sexual self-discovery – for he was eventually “out” in Oxford, but remained a virgin nevertheless – seems to be linked with his other advances, all these positive things happening at once to him. In the first section of the novel, “The Love-Chord”, Nick’s romance with a young Black council worker is full of excitement and affection, as he’s initiated into the world of gay sex.  

When we jump to 1986 for the novel’s main section, this innocent discovery and pleasure at the world is already gone. Leo, the council worker, has vanished – we do not learn why until much later – to be replaced by Wani. Suddenly, Nick is addicted to cocaine – the one drug whose identity is so tightly bound to money and (apparent) worldly success, and which he does together with Wani. The sex, loving with Leo, has become somewhat sordid. Wani is a risk-taker who enjoys picking people up for threesomes and is addicted to pornography. It’s hard not to read this, within the novel, as a kind of decay. Just as the sexual and physical pleasures reach their peaks, the moral content of Nick’s life is emptying out. He is no longer studying, the relationship with Wani is totally secret, and he seems utterly directionless even as his money and status grow.

Through Gerald Fedden, Hollinghurst develops the idea of contrast further. Gerald is driven to grow his own power through his politics and his money through business. He is on the up. Yet his love for the prime minister – who is a constant background presence in the novel but is never named – is a point of tension when the man has a wife to give his attention to. For their silver wedding anniversary, Gerald and Rachel have a party where Thatcher attends, and we see quite clearly how he struggles to balance his desire to impress both women. Nick later discovers that Gerald’s family man appearance is at least in part an act, when he finds him and his secretary in a compromising position behind the scenes at a campaign event. 

The difference between illusion and reality is one of the clearest thematic oppositions of the novel. As in our own world, people live within one of their own imagining. Gerald has an admirer on his street called Geoffrey, who is convinced of Gerald’s merits until the crisis of the novel’s final section forces him to understand otherwise. The Ouradis believe, or wish to, that their son is not gay, and pay a young lady to pretend to be his girlfriend, and then fiancée, to maintain the illusion. The drugs consumed by the wealthy characters are also tools for the creation of another picture of reality, as the text shows by drawing repeated attention to the performance of Nick and Wani socially before and after they have visited the bathroom for a quick hit of cocaine. Being trapped within illusions is not, either, the sole prerogative of the rich. Leo brings Nick home to meet his mother, who staunchly refuses to believe that her son could be gay or that Nick could be anything other than a mere friend.

Illusions can remain solid, or become fragile and break. Rather than the sudden collapses at the novel’s end, the more interesting illusions are those that are slowly undermined as the novel progresses. We follow Nick throughout The Line of Beauty. It is his novel, his consciousness that we watch, his prejudices we live. His relationship with Leo, the council worker, is interesting in this regard for revealing the negative impacts upon the people he works with of Thatcher’s policies. Nick, however, chooses to ignore them, just as the Feddens choose to ignore the negative reputation of Gerald’s business partner until he has already been fleeced by him, and as the Conservative party chooses to ignore the Ouradis’ class and ethnic background while they can accept significant donations from them. We have a sense that while things are good, boundaries and identities can shift and be safely blurred. Unfortunately, as in life, the music soon stops.

The moral decay of the upper classes, drugs and sex and power in all their attraction and distraction and destruction – these are time-honoured things. Indeed, coinciding with my reading of The Line of Beauty I also plunged into the show Succession, about the succession crisis for the aging patriarch of a large US media conglomerate. Excellent also, the merging of themes in both works (illusion, drugs, lies) did make me uneasy as to why one might choose the novel over the show, besides the period colour of the Thatcher years and the prominence of gay sex in the book. Even the period of Succession’s filming (starting in 2018) has coincided with particularly poor moral performance of the United States, at least when viewed from across the pond, as the Thatcher years may be viewed today.

The answer has to be Hollinghurst’s language, and the filtering effect of Nick’s consciousness. Language is important here – Nick aims to become an expert on Henry James’s use of the stuff, after all. All of those classic tropes of fiction written in the shadow of class consciousness are here. Of Rachel Fedden we hear how Nick “loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement.” When we read the dialogue of the novel we must be willing, as we might with a novel of the 19th century, to read the language as a dance of concealment and revelation, as when Catherine Fedden has a breakdown which must be suppressed by the language of the guests at a dinner: “an emotional young lady” says one, “a very emotional young lady” says another – empty phrases preferable to acknowledging an unpleasant fact.

The language of something like Succession is masterful, but in that case it is a mastery of swearing and comic insults rather than subtlety. One might be tempted to say this is a difference of temperament between American and British national characters, but it’s fairer, I think, to note the differences of the media. In television we have too much to work with – acting, backgrounds, music, action – so that language can be lost or become of secondary importance. The limitations of prose also serve to focus attention upon what it can do well, and the deliberateness of each choice of word and phrase. Prose also goes at our own pace, whereas television is propelled onwards unless we reach for the pause button – for this reason too, it seems to ask for a holistic appraisal, rather than close reading. Or close watching, I suppose.

Prose also allows for the theme of illusion to work better than it perhaps would in film or television. Nick’s illusions become our illusions, his evasions become our small opportunities to see what he refuses to notice. We see the Thatcherite years both as a bounteous becoming in the first part, then as a desperate attempt to enjoy things in the second part, before finally witnessing their collapse in the third part. Yet at the same time we can see the direction of travel, even as Nick avoids it: the presence of AIDs long before it is named, the prejudices against gays and foreigners that are neatly ignored so long as the money flows, the sense that not everyone is benefitting from the Conservative government.

This might just be so much guff from me, as usual. Especially as it only took two years from publication before there was a television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. Clearly the prose could live just as easily as spoken words, after all! It’s a good novel, well-made and well-written. To a certain extent, as an assassination of Britain’s ruling elite, it reminded me of the Patrick Melrose novels. But where Edward St Aubyn’s novels each take place over a continuous time period (with one exception), The Line of Beauty is more comfortable varying its scenes. This, to me, makes it seem technically more accomplished. I also amassed a staggering number of new words in the back of my copy, so clearly Hollinghurst has done a good job eating the dictionary.

I think what makes the novel worth reading is the way it manages to portray a very historically contested period without seeming overly partisan. Naturally, the rich are rude, prejudiced toffs, but that’s hardly news – indeed, I don’t think they would find that surprising either. They, (we?), would probably laugh at the accusation. Rather than focusing on either the suffering caused by Thatcher’s policies, or solely on the glamour, the novel shows it as a time of possibilities, good and bad. “I was lucky. And then I was… careful” – so speaks Nick of how he avoided contracting HIV. Just the same can be said of his experience of 1983-1987. Luck means that he comes out of the final pages rich in spite of his relatively lowly origins, with valuable knowledge gained at a painful price, but not one too hard to bear.

Yet we know that it could have been otherwise, that things are fragile. This is a valuable lesson, in our own turbulent times, as well.

The Writer’s Vision – Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer

Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer (Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers) is my fourth work by the controversial Austrian Nobel laureate and the second which I have succeeded in squeezing a blog post out of, after his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. I certainly don’t return to Handke because I enjoy reading him. Rather, I keep giving in to the aura of importance created by his prizes and his praises, in particular the curious assertion by native speakers, one I am unable to verify although I am reading in the original German, that Handke was one of a few writers who rescued the German language from the degradation that Nazism forced upon it. What I can say, and what was obvious at once with The Goalie’s Anxiety, is that Handke created what felt like a new way of writing about subjective experience, about consciousness, that was neither free indirect discourse nor the full interiority of the first person, stream-of-consciousness.

In The Goalie’s Anxiety Handke used this approach to question and probe the state of mind of a chance murderer as he increasingly lost touch with the world. In Afternoon of a Writer, by contrast, Handke represents the state of mind of a writer, who can stand in for perhaps any artist, as they go about their day. The morning’s work of creating is over, and now is time for the living. But living, for an artist, (all of this post must be silently caveated by saying this applies to some, not all creatives), is not the same as it is for the rest of us. For an artist, their subjectivity is changed, their living is charged and crackling with the absorption of material and impressions. Handke, particularly through his language, shows the full intensity of this subjectivity in his short novel as his writer goes for a walk.

It is on this language that I want to focus today, because language is the centre of this work, and observing its effects is the main source of excitement as we read. But there is also a space for judgement too. As we observe the writer and his consciousness it is impossible to avoid judging him, just as he judges his own self and relationship with the world. But to get to that judgement one must first make it through the language and what it does.

Plot

A writer finishes his writing for the day and goes for a walk. (Welcome to the world of Peter Handke.)

Clarity and Details

Perhaps it is best to begin with a paragraph, from when the writer enters his garden:

Despite the winter it still flowered, here and there, in his surroundings. It was precisely from their littleness and isolation that the campions, the daisies, the buttercups and the dead-nettles brought life to the carefully dug landscape. The buttercups, shining like enamel, for a moment even deceived him into believing he saw some sunshine. In the crown of an apple tree, eaten up by birds, there still hung a few fruits, their flesh likely frozen to glass. The last few leaves, heavy with hoar frost, fell, one after the other, almost vertically, with a crackle. The catkins were colourless, as if lamed by the cold. On the picket fence and next to the house door there was even a bluebell, frost blue.

Trotz des Winters blühte es noch hier und da in dem Umkreis. Gerade in ihrer Kleinheit und Vereinzelung belebten die Lichtnelken, die Gänseblümchen, die Hahnenfüße und die Taubnessellippen das starr gerippte Gelände. Die emailleglänzenden Hahnenfußkelche täuschten für Augenblicke sogar einen Sonneschein vor. In der Krone des einen Apfelbaums, von Vögeln angefressen, hingen noch einige Früchte, das Fleisch wohl glasig gefroren. Die letzten Blätter, beschwert vom Reif, stürzten eins dem andern zu Boden, fast senkrecht, mit einem Krachen. Die Haselkätzchen waren farblos, wie gekrümmt von der Kälte. Am Palisadenzaun und neben der Haustür stand je eine Glockenblume, frostblau.

Once, when I was at school, an English teacher I much admired made us do a test. We had to identify, from pictures, about twenty different common plants in our surroundings – I mean things like oaks, elms, birches. I think the high score was about seven. Today I would be no better, but I have always found it funny that I can name more plants or birds or fish in German or Russian than I could ever identify with my own eyes. The knowledge of the natural world that is needed to give specificity to our impressions is increasingly absent among us, but not with Handke’s writer, who pins down each of the flowers’ names. There’s also a richness to them that the English cannot quite convey, though my own attempt could be improved. Daisies are literally “little geese flowers”, buttercups are “hen feet”, nettles echo the word “Taube”, for a dove, while catkins at least manage to carry over the association to English. In short, the flowers are not static, but by Handke’s choice, perhaps, are each associated with living animals, giving them still further liveliness. We can almost see the writer (and his author) noticing this and smiling to himself.

The leaves falling – how clear this is, how precise, how mechanically, the writer notices them! First – that there are not many leaves left, then, the hoarfrost, then the order of falling, then the way they fall, and finally the sound. In short, he captures the whole thing, a series of impressions forming a whole. Then we end with a single word in German, “frostblau”. It sounds like a breath on a wintry afternoon with its open vowel ending. Its purpose again is to show the artistic vision focusing in. A bluebell’s colour is obvious, known, in its name. But the writer must be clearer than that, must note to himself exactly what the right word is – and that is precisely why that word is there, the follow up that caps the impression. It confirms that he knows how to look.

We can notice another characteristic element of Handke’s style – the relative absence of images that are not the things present. In a story, a writer has to decide whether to see what is there, or what is not. And here Handke has the writer seeing what is before him, yet with just a hint of looking beyond. The glassy apples are an example – it’s like the beginning of an image, the first thought before its elaboration. The German is also softer than my rendering. “Frozen glassily” is softer than “frozen to glass” or even “like glass” because it keeps the wordcount low and lets us pass by, barely registering it. Instead, we notice the image, the apple itself. It’s about prioritisation, framing.

This is a section of Afternoon of a Writer from before the man begins his walk. It hangs on the page, surrounded by white space. It is a noticing, a thing of beauty to me, a word person. It is not merely the background to some other impression or emotion, or that concealed boast of botanical erudition that I remember feeling while reading someone like A.S. Byatt – here, this noticing is all there is. What is normally the background has become the foreground, even if one day, perhaps in the writer’s work, it will need to move back into the background once again. We are simply made to see.

Imagine

The novel is so rich with details, with noticings, that it is almost a shame to move on. Besides noticing, besides detail after detail, about light, about eyes, about landscape, we also see another aspect of the artistic vision, when the man imagines, rather than merely seeing. The autobahn suddenly causes him to feel, for a moment, “a vibration in his arms, as if he were sitting with the driver in the cabin” of a truck. He then sees a stationary train, and seems, instantaneously, to create characters from afar. He imagines how “a child’s hand searched for the hand of an adult.” He sees the waiter, the dishwasher, each with their actions and their distinct being. And all of this from just a “Fernbild[]” – a distant image. 

We learn very little about the writer’s work in Afternoon of a Writer, but one of the few things we learn is that it is set in the summer. At another moment, looking at some birds, his mind shifts from the detail into the imagination, and then into the work. We observe this process again, directly, in the text:

“Motionlessly sat the tiny birds up in the branches, just like the crows in the crown of the next tree along, and the even the gulls, otherwise so unruly, sat motionless upon the railings of the bridge. It was as if snow were falling upon them all, even though there were no flakes in sight. And just here, at this living image with the rain of wings, hardly noticeable, the gaps of the beaks as they opened, with the eyes like little dots, there arose before the observer that summer landscape where the story played out which he was writing at that moment.”

The first sentence gives us the real, with the second we begin to see the artistic mind look beyond the real, and with the third we arrive at the destination – the image of the story, entirely different from what he is seeing. In this way we see the process of creation yet again.

To be a successfully writer, Handke might argue here, we play many different roles. Hence the use of that word “Beobachter” (observer) instead of the “Schriftsteller” (writer) of the novel’s title.  At another point he is the “Beschatter”, or shadower. One thing that I have just noticed as I write this is these two examples contain the passive “be” prefix in German. Compared to the activity of writer, they suggest a much more receptive role. This is appropriate. If the novel begins with the man having finished his writing, for the rest of it he is primarily receiving, experiencing. At one point he grows anxious while reading the newspaper because he feels it is stopping him from thinking. Instead, he wants perhaps to be that transparent eyeball which Emerson described in his essay “Nature”. He takes things in and reflects while we watch.

Hence the use of questions in the novel. They are not the fake questions of a stream of consciousness, but the questions we can imagine the artist asking themselves as they reflect: “Wasn’t it curious that it was only during the hours of writing that his living space could lose its boundaries in this way?” It’s a note to self we are privileged to see, but nothing more. It may have a future use, but we will not be present to see it.

Judgement

The one role that the writer does not give himself directly in the text is “mad”, but it is not so far away from his experience for him to be entirely safe from it. For just as the writer experiences the world with the aim of gathering material, of making it “beschreiblich” (describable), we can also see him facing other consequences of that particular tuning. Early on, and in a beautiful (in the original) phrase about his hopes for his writing, he thinks “the shadows of a bird twitching over the wall should, instead of distracting him, accompany the text and make it transparent.” The word “accompany” is the one to focus on. For we soon notice that the writer has no family except a cat, and no real social life to speak of. He believes, indeed, that he cannot truly connect with others anymore. Stopping in a pub, the people he meets are reduced to their artistic use – “turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures and cadences.”

In short, we could say he has made himself stunted, stranded. He can create, we must assume, and he can absorb from the world far more than most of us can. Yet for all that richness, what poverty! To gain every shade of green he has eliminated all red from his world. He refuses to go onto his own balcony except to do the washing because the impression of the view is too overwhelming. When he goes for a walk he feels no “joy” until he has placed his movements within a plan. Handke is not a writer for judgements, but it is probably telling that the novel ends with the word “Schauder” – awe. “He wondered at himself, near to a long-forgotten awe.” Such a word redeems him, even if it does not do so to us. Just as with earlier use of the word “entrücken” (translate), in the biblical sense of going from earth or hell to heaven, we have a sense that we ought not judge him. His life is different, higher, even if it seems strange to us. He, himself, appears happy – he is at work.

Certainly, I can sit here in judgement, but I am jealous really. I mentioned a few posts ago that I wanted to start carrying around a notebook precisely for such noticings – I need to learn to experience the world around me in the way the writer does here. While I may not wish for myself the isolation this writer has, (at least on a full time basis), there’s no denying that this novel portrays a way of life that is far closer to what is necessary for the kind of art I might want to make than the way of life I currently lead. And what is hardest to avoid is the sheer clarity of Handke’s work as it describes that way of life. We spend the novel standing next to the writer as he perceives. We observe his observations. We see exactly what he sees, how he processes his material and reflects upon it, even the questions he asks. In short, and probably far better than any guidebook, Afternoon of a Writer is a guide to precisely that – being a writer, being in the world and finding in it what you need to create.

I would like to be more critical, but I can’t. I don’t enjoy reading Handke. Yet each time I return I learn something I seriously think no other writer would be able to teach me. Some of it can only be done in German, of course. His use of separable verbs (especially the word “fort” for a continuing indicated only at the end of the sentence) to freeze an image for an extended moment of observation, or his long adjectival phrases which maintain the connection between a thing and its surroundings thanks to forgoing commas in a way that is difficult in English, for example. But the rest – the details, the details, all of the wonderful details – we can take away, whoever we are, whatever language we write in. I don’t want to read more, but I know I must. He surely is one of the greats.