Peter Handke - Repetition

How, over the years, I searched for places in which to read books! I would sit behind the milk stand at the roadside, on the bench by the distant wayside shrine, on a spit of land above the sluice in the Drava, at my feet the dammed-up river, so smooth that the water below me resembled the sky overhead … Once I climbed Rinken Hill; shortly before the top, in a fern-overgrown clearing with a single pine tree in the middle, I found the place that every reader must have dreamed of: close to the tree a patch of the soft grass locally known as lady-hair, a bed of natural cushions, no bed of vice but a throne of the spirit, which, I was confident, would blow upon me from a book named Fear and Trembling. But I didn’t get beyond the first page or, rather, the first sentence of it. My eyes were not opened to the sentences that followed until one afternoon in the school corridor, where I was sitting with other students who were doing their homework. And, along with the words, I took in the details of my surroundings, the grain of the wooden bench, the part in the hair of the boy in front of me, the lamp at the end of the corridor, and then at last I heard the wind in the pine tree, which had suddenly died down as I opened the book in the clearing. That place, all places, however pleasing, however inviting to the reader, disappeared as soon as I tried to settle into them; made illiterate by my father’s grumbling, I crept away. To this day, I have known no settled reading place but that chest, long ago chopped up for firewood, on the balcony of my father’s house. While looking for reading places, I learned only one thing; namely, that I could not withdraw into solitude, and especially not with a book.

And so, after the usual wanderings, I tried the station waiting room in its ring of chestnut trees, the graveyard, beside a tombstone with a falling airplane scratched into it, the stone bridge over the outlet of the lake. In the end, I studied my brother’s copybook in my room at the inn with the grouse, dark, in the corner of one eye, and in the other, bright, the washstand with its bowl and pitcher. Before me, the tip of a spruce guided my gaze to a neighboring house with roof tiles running from left to right like the lines in the copybook.

Of course, I had looked at the book any number of times before that, but had been unable to make sense of it, because the classes in the agricultural school were conducted in Slovenian. What had interested me were the drawings, and above all the handwriting. It was clear and even; the long, narrow letters leaned slightly to the left and, as I leafed through the book, gave the impression of steadily falling, endless rain. As there were no curlicues or loops, no shortcuts or sloppiness, and never an unconnected letter, standing alone in the middle of a word, there had been no need to resort to block letters. Yet this script differed from the picturesque calligraphy of a nineteenth-century document by its smoothness, which also characterized the drawings that went with it. In looking at this writing, I had the impression that it did more than record something, that it moved hand in hand with its subject, each lined-up letter carrying its image, unerringly, toward a goal. And here in the Bohinj, it seemed to me that my brother’s handwriting was right for this new country; the handwriting of a settler, of a man about to start on a journey, whose writing is an intrinsic part of this starting-out and not the mere record of a continued action.

In one of his letters he observes that a handwriting expert would find that “all our [the family‘s] scribblings have something in common.” I have always seen pride and presumption in that sentence. His handwriting had never been childlike; even in his earliest school copybook, he had written like someone who takes a responsible part in an action, a leader, a discoverer.

Actually, the whole family was famous, even outside the village, for its, to quote the roadmender and sign painter, “masterful” handwriting (“The Kobals don’t write just with their hands,” he said, holding out his arm in a grandiose gesture), which, partly because there was no recognized “master” in the whole region, brought us the reputation of being a noble, self-confident family; and this we showed by writing as we did — not “like painting,” not “like printing,” but precisely with the unmistakable “Kobal gesture.” As I’ve said, my mother was much in demand as a letter writer and was regarded almost as an official. If I questioned one of our neighbors about my brother, he would usually, after telling a few anecdotes, talk about Gregor Kobal and his orchard, “as carefully, generously, and inventively laid out as his handwriting” (so the roadmender). Even my sister awoke from her confusion and sat very straight, a picture of authority, when she signed “Ursula Kobal” on the receipt for her early pension.

The only exceptions were the oldest and the youngest members of the family, my father and I. The one had too heavy, the other too uneven a hand. It was obvious that my father had had no proper schooling; in writing as in reading, he seemed to spell out the words. To the long letters my mother wrote me at the seminary, he added at the most one word, signature and greeting in one: “Father.” For a while, after he was pensioned, he didn’t know what to do with himself. I thought it might be a good idea to give him a copybook and encourage him to write the story of his life; for, when he tried to talk about it, he would falter time and again. Often after a long silence he would make a start, begin with a deep-voiced “And then …”—and finally break off, saying: “It can’t be told. It’s got to be written.” But a few months later, when I looked at the copybook, I found not a single word, though he had had a whole winter’s time, but only numbers, my brother’s APO number, my laundry-mark number, our house number, and all our birth dates, gouged into the paper like cuneiform. (It was only with his carpenter’s pencil that he could make light lines; before you knew it, he could draw a complete diagram on the wood he was going to work with.)

As for me, I often changed my handwriting; in the middle of a word my letters would get bigger, I’d push them back, then forward again. I’d begin every paragraph with the utmost care and then — as one can tell now by looking at the writing — start racing in my impatience to finish it. The worst of it was that I didn’t really regard my handwriting as my own; today it has become regular, but it still strikes me as artificial, as an imitation; unlike my brother, I have never had a handwriting of my own, my present style was copied from him; the moment I stop concentrating, it loses its affected regularity and degenerates into a formless scribble that I myself am unable to read, a picture of harassed helplessness in place of the grandiose family gesture. It took the typewriter to teach me to write properly. Before that, the only writing that suited me was in the air, without any instrument, using my forefinger for a pencil. I couldn’t see what I was writing, the movement of my finger sufficed and that was what gave me the feeling that I had a personal handwriting with a rhythm of its own. And besides, when I wrote in the air, I could be slow, pause, break off. But otherwise, convulsively clutching the foreign instrument, the mere sound of which threw me off, bent over the paper instead of sitting erect, I rushed from line to line, not knowing what I was doing, giving off sour, unproductive sweat, incapable of raising my head, with no eyes for my surroundings. It was only when I concentrated on my subject that my writing looked at all natural to me; then script and content seemed to take shape side by side.

And where, when writing, could I concentrate on my subject? In the dark, for one thing. There, stroke by stroke, pencil and fingers grew together and a writer’s hand developed, beautifully heavy and deliberate, no idle scribble but a recording. Then, when I looked in the light at what I had written, I saw my thought framed in a script that seemed to combine my brother’s fine inventive hand and my father’s halting, self-educated one.