Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

When I got to the clearing the following day at noon, having groped my way there step by step, gasping as if I had been short of breath for a long time, and told my patron about it, he responded that I had just had an ordinary tantrum, the kind that made one’s appetite return with fresh vigor. And yet I was sure that I had been in a state close to a new kind of madness, as yet not described in the literature: an interminable raving, wall-to-wall disaster, and at the same time, in distinction to the megalomaniac figures in history or drama, lacking any variation, completely monotonous — the peculiarly modern feature of such insanity being the fact that it was so boring.

My one-day insanity in the suburb now lies almost two decades behind me, and it has never recurred. And nevertheless, in contrast to other guises in which I once appeared, in my memory this one has not become a stranger — the one in which I went around and around in a circle, my hot head in my correspondingly colder hands, to be jolted out of it only by a series of violent actions, and yet far too weak to so much as lift a finger. This is one I I will never put in quotation marks.

Something had to happen. Something had to be done. What I was experiencing in my idleness cried out for that. I decided to take the plunge and write a long story. Was this really the only way I could accomplish something?

I sent Valentin, my son, to my childless sister in her small town in Carinthia and prepared for my work by crisscrossing Europe.

Among other things I made use of my friends, who at the time were pretty much the same ones as now; for a long time I have not added anyone to the list.

I remained without a permanent residence and accompanied the architect on one of his observation excursions, in the course of which he now and then earned some money as a carpenter, or even just as a day laborer.

With the singer I went over my first song lyrics, which he wanted to try to make singable (the phrases were too short for him, or, I am no longer sure which, too long; the song did not suit him).

With my priest I parsed the epistles of the Apostle Paul, who according to his own words was a difficult writer, his clauses more complex than those of the Greek Thucydides and even the Roman Livy, and in contrast to the two historians, he did not even have anything to narrate, only something to preach, and that had never been my thing, had it?

I stayed away from my woman friend, as indeed from every woman.

From the reader, who could often go for days on nothing but air, I received his “Survival Catalogue”: showing how I had to make my way alone, at war with the world.

And with my painter I went out drawing in his various regions, but spent more time sitting in his studios, especially during his protracted periods of getting ready to work, also during his periods of distracting himself, very thoroughly, by dint of shining his shoes, sweeping the floor, trimming his toenails, carving a walking stick, until suddenly he would pick up a brush and start painting, undeterred by chain saws, jackhammers, and bluebottle flies.

Likewise I conditioned myself physically, convinced that to design the New World I also had to be armed in this way.

In the European countries that were still Communist at the time, there were already Western-type fitness courses, on which you could have seen me running and jumping with the best of them. I, who as a child had never got beyond clinging to the broad back of a draft horse, now even tried to learn to ride, but appeared to myself so odd up there that I felt as though I should dismount for every pedestrian, and at least, if one came toward me on the path, always greeted him first (the same thing happens to me now with horseback riders here in the forest). And for the first time since the Gobi Desert I drove a car, across the summery tundra, and after a few days skidded off the crushed-rock track into a swamp, my head striking the windshield, which cracked in the shape of a star, while I merely bled a bit on my forehead, yet immediately had a thick furry covering over the blood from the mosquitoes. And while hiking in a ravine on the karst I looked for a shortcut, went in the wrong direction, and could get out only by climbing, increasingly enjoying the necessity of keeping my wits about me, and since then I have not actually taken up mountain climbing, but when I am out walking immediately feel myself becoming completely alert in unanticipated tight spots where, in order to get to safety, I have to rely for the moment entirely on my sense of touch, my body vitally connected from my toes to my fingertips as in no other situation.

When I swam upstream in the bright, clear upper reaches of the Alpine rivers, occasionally poked by the cartilaginous mouths of fish, the mountains and the sky moved in very close and seemed, together with the waters, which streamed, like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Tigris and Euphrates, “from Paradise,” elemental and epic as they could hardly be in a dream. Once summer snowflakes swirled around the swimmer. Once perpendicular arrows of hail plunged into the river next to him, making fountains spurt sky-high (the former in the Inn River in the Engadine, the latter in the Tagliamento near Tolmezzo). In the Val Rosandra, surrounded by the limestone mountains of Trieste, I stood and stood under the waterfall there and let the stream of water, not great in volume but falling all the harder, drum my brain clear. Back there soon!

And one late afternoon beyond Tamsweg, when I was making my way uphill on skis, in my exhaustion I saw the white of the snowdrifts as that brilliant reflection in which Faust tells us we capture the world, and over my shoulder, the Austrian town far below in the dusky valley, with its oversettled outskirts, seemed to have levitated to my eye level, and both of these sights were not hallucinations.

And most of all perhaps, and everywhere, I practiced for my epic outdoors in the night, pitch-dark if possible, unknown, confining, through which I moved as if nothing were wrong.

And finally I had my teeth taken care of, had new heels put on my trusty shoes, had my hair cut to a stubble, celebrated at a little farewell party with my friends in Rinkolach, and in the fall withdrew to the place I had long ago chosen for my work, the Spanish (Catalonian) enclave of Llivia in the highlands of the eastern French Pyrenees.

Itook a room in what at that time was still the only hotel there.

My room was the highest in a large new building on the edge of the settlement, which had called itself a city since the seventeenth-century Treaty of the Pyrenees, and was both more and less. Against my better judgment, I had once again chosen a view, without streets and houses, a view of the open highland countryside, with the meadows and trees along the Río Segre, and beyond them the desertlike faded reddish-brown badland cliffs of Santa Leocadia, and beyond that, as if in another world, the jagged Sierra del Cadi as the vanishing point.

Not until I was there did I buy myself a typewriter, for which I had to leave the enclave again and go over the border to Puigcerda, the only real city in the Cerdagne or Cerdanya: a machine with the Spanish arrangement of keys, on which, since some letters were not in the accustomed place, I constantly made typing errors. The foreign accents also disrupted my rhythm, likewise the upside-down Spanish exclamation points and question marks.

What did not merely trip me up but threw me off track, after the very first sentence, which I had written down, reaching in all directions, with the stored-up elan of the past months, was something else entirely. I should never ever have been allowed to know the first sentence of my epic project in advance and carry it around with me for so long. This sentence made a continuation, of whatever kind, impossible.