You took the child in me in your arms
but none of his fears.
They waited a little off
knowing you wouldn't hold on forever.
It would have been nice
to have kept them waiting a little longer.
You had just as much of a claim on me
as they did.
6 August 1989
Life’s all about distraction or so it has often seemed to me, not wanting to face the reality you find yourself in. One of the most distracting things—although not a thing in itself—is novelty. We love new things, new phones, new clothes, new TV shows. Mostly they disappoint but there’s always the chance they might not. Distraction’s a means of forgetting, an inefficient one because forgetting is far harder than it seems but it does provide temporary respite and if we can arrange for some other distraction to time it so that you can transition from one to the other as seamlessly as possible you can create the illusion that whatever it is you’d like to forget—your wife, your job, the fact the car’s overdue a service—is no longer a problem that needs to be attended to. B. was a definite distraction and it took a long time for the novelty to wear off. It did and even in August 1989 I could see the writing on the wall but there was still time left.
When we talk about addiction we generally think of substance abuse first of all, drugs or drink, but experiences can be addictive. Writing poetry is most definitely habit-forming. There’s a high that comes with it. Christ knows what chemicals our brain releases (bet you a pound to a penny it’s dopamine) but something pleasurable happens to be when I’m writing a poem, a physical reward. It doesn’t happen so much with prose but then there’s a purity and an immediacy to poetry; it’s just different. I may fiddle with a poem for weeks after it’s been drafted but by that time I’m one step removed; I’m no longer writing a poem, I’m editing one and that involves a different skill set.
Not everything distracts me. Actually very few things do and it’s amazing how much I’m oblivious to. There’re a couple of ornaments hanging from the curtain rail behind me—a moon and a star—and I remember asking Carrie a wee while back how long they’d been there. Months! I think of (for want of a better word) inspiration in terms of sympathetic resonance which Wikipedia defines as “a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. The classic example is demonstrated with two similar tuning-forks of which one is mounted on a wooden box. If the other one is struck and then placed on the box, then muted, the un-struck mounted fork will be heard.” When I was around B. she touched me without touching me and the poems just kept appearing. Decorative moons and stars it seems do nothing for me.
Now everything is less:
less room for manoeuvre:
less desire to move:
less possibilities.
And that bothers me less.
The pain remains
but I just have to wait
and there is less to that now.
Here I can sense an end.
Now: for the first time.
6 August 1989
This is a little Beckettian piece. I have a few dotted about here and there. I never sought to imitate him as I recently had to remind my wife who's reading The Unnamable at the moment to help her in editing my latest novel. Yes, there are echoes of Beckett—you're supposed to feel him there—but the style is still very much my own. Sure it would've been nice if he'd written a little more than he did but he left a lot, enough.
I'm not sure I care for "less possibilities". It should be "fewer possibilities" or maybe “less possibility” but I'll leave it as I wrote it.
Why Beckett though? I'm not sure I can put it into words. It's strangely enough not an intellectual thing. Yes, he makes me think but first he makes me feel. The first time I ever saw Waiting for Godot I knew I wasn't getting a fraction of it but I also knew I was watching something important, something that mattered, if only to me. On the page he can be a miserable git, that's for sure, but read interviews with anyone who knew him personally and you have to wonder how the man they describe could produce the kind of stuff he did. Only it was him and he rid himself of it. That's as best as I understand it. But that makes sense to me too. I could describe it in scatological terms and have but maybe not today.
After you broke away
I kept finding splinters
everywhere:
in the hall and in the bed
and even in my heart.
But you took the tweezers with you.
Well what would a man do with them?
6 August 1989
It’s been almost seven years since my first wife left me at this point. I had to look it up. I couldn’t’ve even told you the year. This September it will’ve been thirty-five years and I’ve still not got over it; I still get angry when I think about that time. For years after my daughter used to ask me why her mum and I broke up—the same question ever few years—and then one day the question changed; she wanted to know how on earth the two of us have ever got together in the first place. I’m not sure I answered that one any better than I’d answered her previous inquiries but I did my best. I wonder what her mother told her. I assume she asked her the same questions.
For the record I now own two pairs of tweezers, an ordinary pair and a pair with handles like scissors. Not sure I’ve ever used either of them.
The Plot Never Thickens – title of a New York Timesarticle on Handke
The Left-Handed Woman exists in two states, as a screenplay and a novella, both written by Peter Handke. Reviews of the film often say, “based on the novel by” but actually the screenplay came first so, I suppose, the novella—way too short to be called a novel—is a novelisation only it’s not really. Both have lives of their own but as Handke has worked continually since the mid-sixties there’s a great danger that a slight work like this might get lost under the mountain of books that followed it. That said, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick has managed to keep its head above water and become a fixture in many school curricula. The German version of The Left-Handed Woman (Die linkshändige Frau) was published in 1976; the film followed in 1978 along with an English translation so it’s easy to see why people might assume the film was an adaptation of the book. But why write the book?
I rewrote the film script in the form of a narrative for the following reasons: after several books in which “he thought” “he felt”, “he perceived” introduced many sentences, I wanted to make full use of a prose form in which the thinking and the feeling of the figures would not be described, where, therefore, instead of “she was afraid”, we would have “she went”, “she looked out of the window”, “she lay down next to the bed of the child”, etc. And I perceived that this kind of limitation with regard to my literary work was liberating. – Handke quoted in June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke, p.154.
So, essentially, an experimental novella then and, as we all know, experiments can go badly wrong and yet so many artists insist on doing this: typing, dancing or painting with one hand tied behind their back. Sad to say the novel was not received as enthusiastically as the film.
Ultimately one might argue that the inadequacy of this particular novel follows from just these austere limits which Handke chooses to impose on his language – for it seeks to convey an imagistic order which, by definition, can never really be made apparent in the novel and which, as a function of the work’s conception, has preceded it. – Timothy Corrigan, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, p.261 quoted in Martin Brady and Joanne Leal, Wim Wenders and Peter Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition, p.237
Or as Leal and Brady put it, “an arresting presence in the film can only remain an absence in the text.”
At the centre of Handke's work (be it prose or film) stands a specular subject: "Seeing is being for Handke's protagonists." Looking, watching, observing, are their primary occupations; hence, they position themselves almost in such a way they can look on as spectators or pure outsiders. – Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions, p.146
The film eschews dialogue but you can get away with that—the silent filmmakers did for years—and filmgoers cope (a good modern example would be the Japanese film Maborosi); readers aren’t always as resilient or patient. The director of Maborosi is Hirokazu Koreeda whose work is often compared to Yasujirō Ozu. I mention this purely because in the film version of The Left-Handed Woman the woman takes her son to see Tokyo Story; in the novella it’s simply “an animated cartoon”.
There is an autobiographical element to the book but what I found interesting (particularly since I do it myself in my novel Left) is that he chooses a woman as his protagonist. The book, an exploration of loneliness (at least on one level), was written after his first wife, the actress Libgart Schwarz, left him which was shortly after his mother committed suicide. Two losses; one straight after the other. It’s no great surprise then that a book like this might have been the result but actually there were two; the 1972 novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is based on his mother’s life. Handke, as he mentions in his play The Art of Asking, “writes out of his wound” and yet this is a surprisingly… numb book. Or maybe not so surprisingly.
The book has an omniscient narrator who tells it as he sees it but only what he sees:
She was thirty and lived in a terraced bungalow colony on the south slope of a low mountain range in western Germany, just above the fumes of a big city. She had brown hair and grey eyes, which sometimes lit up even when she wasn’t looking at anyone, without her face changing in any other way. […] The woman was married to the sales manager of the local branch of a porcelain concern well known throughout Europe; a business trip had taken him to Scandinavia for several weeks, and he was expected back that evening. Though not rich, the family was comfortably well off, with no need to think of money. Their bungalow was rented, since the husband could be transferred at any moment.
When her husband returns we learn her name is Marianne but the narrator insists on using “the woman”; likewise “the child”, even when his mother calls him Stefan. “The publisher”, “the shop girl”, “the chauffeur”, “the actor”, “the father” (i.e. the woman’s father)—the narrator keeps everyone at a distance apart from Bruno—he always calls Marianne’s husband “Bruno” (with the single exception in the quote above)—and Franziska, a close friend of the couple and also the boy’s teacher although once Stefan calls her “the teacher”—“Bruno wants to come over with the teacher”—and she objects—“I have a name. So stop referring to me as ‘the teacher,’ the way you did on the telephone just now.”
The first thing that struck me about the relationship of the husband and wife was her subservience:
The woman came from the kitchen, carrying a silver tray with a glass of vodka on it, but by then there was no one in the living room.
I’ve seen plenty of TV shows where a husband comes home after a hard day’s work and his wife hands him his favourite tipple but she never presents it on a tray no matter how well off they are. Servants, yes, absolutely, but not wives. Up until then he just seemed like a very, very tired man. He hugs his wife when they meet (once she’s relieved him of his luggage), talks about his trip—“Those northerners may not eat very well, but at least they eat off our china”—and tells his wife he missed her and then says something I found a little odd:
I thought of you often up there, of you and Stefan. For the first time in all the years since we’ve been together, I had the feeling that we belonged to each other. Suddenly I was afraid of going mad with loneliness, mad in a cruelly painful way that no one had ever experienced before. I’ve often told you I loved you, but now for the first time I feel that we’re bound to each other. Till death do us part. And the strange part of it is that I now feel I could exist without you.
She doesn’t reciprocate or respond. Her sole reaction is to change the subject.
The next thing that annoyed me about Bruno was this:
My ears are still buzzing from the plane. Let’s go to the hotel in town for a festive dinner. It’s too private here for my taste right now. Too—haunted. I would like you to wear your low-cut dress.
He doesn’t tell her, he doesn’t order her, but he doesn’t leave it up to her. They end up spending the night at the hotel. On the way home the woman has what she describes as “an illumination”:
“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s go home now, Bruno. Quickly. I have to drive Stefan to school.”
Bruno stopped her. “Woe if you don’t tell me.”
The woman: “Woe to you if I do tell you.”
Even as she spoke, she couldn’t help laughing at the strange word they had used. The long look they exchanged was mocking at first, then nervous and frightened, and finally resigned.
Bruno: “All right. Out with it.”
The woman: “I suddenly had an illumination”—another word she had to laugh at—“that you were going away, that you were leaving me. Yes, that’s it. Go away, Bruno. Leave me.”
After a while Bruno nodded slowly, raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and asked, “For good?”
The woman: “I don’t know. All I know is that you’ll go away and leave me.” They stood silent.
Bruno smiled and said, “Well, right now I’ll go back to the hotel and get myself a cup of hot coffee. And this afternoon I’ll come and take my things.”
There was no malice in the woman’s answer—only thoughtful concern. “I’m sure you can move in with Franziska for the first few days. Her teacher friend has gone away.”
Bruno: “I’ll think about it over my coffee.” He went back to the hotel.
And so they part. Just like that. No histrionics. No tears. No debate. Nothing. Bruno moves in with the teacher and no one seems that surprised or troubled. It’s all excruciatingly… civilised, a pre-emptive strike. We’re all going to die anyway so let’s just kill ourselves and get it out the road. There’s some sense to a sentence like that; death is unavoidable and it would be nice if we could meet it on our own terms but divorce is not inevitable. The statistics are not encouraging but plenty of marriages do stay the course.
She’s not the only one to have an “illumination”. In order to support herself the woman contacts the publishing house where she used to work to ask for some translation work; apparently her boss had been keen not to lose touch. He brings the manuscript he wants her to work on personally. An excuse to test the water—flowers and champagne were a bit much—but it comes to nothing and he doesn’t push it. As he’s about to leave though he tells the woman this story:
Not long ago I broke with a girl I loved. The way it happened was so strange that I’d like to tell you about it. We were riding in a taxi at night. I had my arm around her, and we were both looking out the same side. Everything was fine. Oh yes, you have to know that she was very young—no more than twenty—and I was very fond of her. For the barest moment, just in passing, I saw a man on the sidewalk. I couldn’t make out his features, the street was too dark. I only saw that he was rather young. And suddenly it flashed through my mind that the sight of that man outside would force the girl beside me to realize what an old wreck was holding her close, and that she must be filled with revulsion. The thought came as such a shock that I took my arm away. I saw her home, but at the door of her house I told her I never wanted to see her again. I bellowed at her. I said I was sick of her, it was all over between us, she should get out of my sight. And I walked off. I’m certain she still doesn’t know why I left her. That young man on the sidewalk probably didn’t mean a thing to her. I doubt if she even noticed him…
It is not that different to what happened with the woman and her husband only in Marianne’s case the other woman is purely imaginary.
From then on we follow the woman day by day as she comes to terms with her decision. Bruno pays lip service to the idea of reconciliation but that’s about it. Perhaps he saw it coming. Perhaps, although he wouldn’t have been the one to suggest it first, he’s glad she did or at least a part of him is.
Her publisher isn’t the only one to chance his arm. At a photo booth the woman runs into an unemployed actor. Some days later she encounters him again in a café; he says he recognised her car in the parking lot and came looking for her:
I’ve never followed a woman before. I’ve been looking for you for days. Your face is so gentle—as though you never forgot that we’re all going to die. Forgive me if I’ve said something stupid. […] Damn it, the second I say something I want to take it back! I’ve longed for you so these last few days that I couldn’t keep still. Please don’t be angry. You seem so free, you have a kind of”—he laughed—“of lifeline in your face! I burn for you, everything in me is aflame with desire for you. Perhaps you think I’m overwrought from being out of work so long? But don’t speak. You must come with me. Don’t leave me alone. I want you. Don’t you feel that we’ve been lost up to now? At a streetcar stop I saw these words on a wall: ‘HE loves you. HE will save you.’ Instantly I thought of you. HE won’t save us; no, WE will save each other. I want to be all around you, sense your presence everywhere; I want my hand to feel the warmth rising from you even before I touch you. Don’t laugh. Oh, how I desire you. I want to be with you right this minute, entirely and forever!
She fails to respond. Now watch how Handke handles what follows:
They sat motionless, face to face. He looked almost angry; then he ran out of the café. The woman sat among the other people, without moving.
A brightly lighted bus came driving through the night, empty except for a few old women, passed slowly around a traffic circle, then vanished into the darkness, its strap handles swaying.
This is poetry. In fact in an interview with June Schlueter in 1979 Handke talked about his books as “epic poetry” rather than novels. We don’t get to hear her thoughts. We have to make do with what she does and where she looks and use our imaginations.
So people come and go. They have their say and/or make their play but at the end of the book the woman is still alone:
Standing at the hall mirror, she brushed her hair. She looked into her eyes and said, “You haven’t given yourself away. And no one will ever humiliate you again.”
It is no great surprise to read that women—and not only feminists—appreciate this more that many of Handke’s other novels.
The title of the book isn’t obvious. There’s no indication given whether the woman is left- or right-handed although in the film the actress is right-handed. The title comes from a song the woman plays over and over again but not the one by The Statler Brothers (Johnny Cash’s original backing band), John Hartford or Jimmy Reed. The first verse goes:
She came with others out of a Subway exit, She ate with others in a snack bar, She sat with others in a Laundromat, But once I saw her alone, reading the papers Posted on the wall of a newsstand.
It’s an odd song mostly listing off unexceptional day-to-day things like leaving a building or sitting on the edge of a playground and these are exactly the kind of things we watch the woman do. One of the lines goes, “For there at last I shall see you alone among others,” and then later in the novel we read, “In the morning the woman, among others, walked about the pedestrian zone of the small town.” Her life is far from exciting but in an article entitled Forms of Identity: Stations of the Cross in Peter Handkeʼs Die linkshändige Frau Scott Abbott makes a few noteworthy observations about the structure of the book. (A version with the quotes translated into English can be found here.) Whether deliberate or not the book contains a great many nods to the life of Christ from the “discarded Christmas trees” to her telling her son about seeing “some pictures by an American painter”:
There were fourteen of them. They were supposed to be the Stations of the Cross—you know, Jesus sweating blood on the Mount of Olives, being scourged, and so on. But these paintings were only black-and-white shapes—a white background and crisscrossing black stripes. The next-to-last station—where Jesus is taken down from the cross—was almost all black, and the last one, where Jesus is laid in the tomb, was all white. And now the strange part of it: I passed slowly in front of the pictures, and when I stopped to look at the last one, the one that was all white, I suddenly saw a wavering afterimage of the almost black one; it lasted only a few moments and then there was only the white.
In the article Abbott identifies these as Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani. An odd thing for an author to have his protagonist talk to a young boy about unless there was a point to it. It’s not as if Handke is an especially religious man despite (or, perhaps, because of) his upbringing; he refers to himself as »religiös geschädigter Internatsmensch«, a religiously damaged person as best I can guess at a translation. Abbott makes a stab at his reasoning:
Handke’s story exploits the Christian Stations of the Cross not out of a sense for Christ’s divinity, but because that narrative form is part of our cultural vocabulary, because those words exist, because that is a useful language game (and that is exactly what this is, a Wittgensteinian language game) we are used to playing. […] These are the religious forms of Die linkshändige Frau, the Christian structures that, emptied of metaphysical content, can suggest dialectical possibilities as Marianne reconstitutes her life.
In a blog entry he describes Handke as “aesthetically religious, not spiritually religious”. I can buy that. It was why Beckett co-opted religious imagery into his texts, because it was familiar, to him first and foremost, but also he expected it to be familiar to his prospective readers. The simple fact is The Left-Handed Woman is nowhere near as simple as it first appears which is why it’s great that it’s so short because it won’t take long to reread.
Why left-handed though? Oral traditions worldwide associate left-handedness with evil. There’s nothing to suggest the woman is evil so what then? In John Hartford’s song he describes a contrary person:
Left handed woman You south pawed member Of the female gender Tender bender of My splendour Look at you You do everything backwards You inside out, upside down Left handed woman you
Up until the sixties children were coerced into right-handedness but it was more to do with standardisation than anything else. It's much easier to teach children (especially writing) if everyone in the class is the same. The book itself isn’t especially helpful. In fact the only thing the woman says that might give us some clue is this:
What I can’t bear in this house is the way I have to turn corners to go from one room to another: always at right angles and always to the left. I don’t know why it puts me in such a bad humour. It really torments me.
The climax of the book—I use the term loosely—takes place one evening when all the major players, and a couple of the minor ones, gather at the woman’s house for, as the Kirkus Review put it so well at the time, “a veritable orgy of meaningful exchanges and gestures. But Marianne remains alone.” Not exactly a last supper—not enough people for starters—but something of a final trial, a gauntlet to be run. Sort of.
This book appears at #317 on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It’s not why I read it. I picked up half a dozen books and this was the first one where I got past the first page. Simple as that. I can see why some people don’t like it. I can see why others love it. Everyone’s been alone at some time or other but how many of us would choose it? One reviewer on Amazon (who gave the book 4 stars) said, “This book will appeal to connoisseurs of claustrophobia and angst.” They’re not wrong but if I wanted to be reductive I’d say, “This book will appeal to all those who’ve looked at someone and wondered, What the hell is going on inside your head? and had to make up an answer for themselves.”
They say that God is everywhere
but I've not seen Him
for looking at you.
I'm sure He's been there –
I've just never noticed.
He wasn't in Edinburgh
and neither were you
but I saw you in everything.
I must get my eyes tested.
6 August 1989
I was never taught that God was omnipresent, that he exists in everything. It’s another one of those silly notions like the trinity someone dreamed up to keep the masses in check. Of course if, in the beginning—or, I suppose, before the beginning—only God existed then everything must’ve been created from him and so in that respect we’re all a part of God gone rotten. If you believe these things. Or care. I wasn’t taught that God existed everywhere but I was taught that he could see everything, even into my heart. And I get why I was taught that. Because most of the time what stops people doing stuff is there’s someone watching if only a CCTV camera. After a while, and you see this in social experiments like Big Brother, people either forget they’re being watched or pretty much stop caring. Wandering through the streets of Edinburgh everywhere I looked I thought I could see B. although the chances were remote. It didn’t really matter. All I could think about was her. I didn’t care if God knew what I was thinking.
A long time ago
someone bound me
to the pillar of reason.
It might even have been me:
I can't remember now.
But don't think me tamed
after all these years.
When was the last time
you looked at my eyes?
When was the last time
you really looked
at my eyes?
Even the finest chains rust in time.
6 August 1989
I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonable man. And then I started to think about what the word ‘reasonable’ actually means. When I say I’m reasonable am I saying I have sound judgement, that I’m fair and sensible? That sounds reasonable. It doesn’t feel quite right thought, does it? There’s the suggestion of only having moderate expectations. A reasonable man doesn’t hope for too much out of life. And that’s true of me too. I keep my expectations in check. So I’m rarely disappointed. But I still do get disappointed. So maybe I’m not doing it right. When someone asks you to be reasonable what are they really asking? For you to give the matter some thought? Or to back down. Or at least to give ground. Reasonable people settle.
In 1989 there was much about me that was settled. I’d recovered from the hiccup that was my first marriage and was pretty much where I would’ve expected to be at thirty. A reasonable man would count his blessings; pay the mortgage, check the air, oil and water in the car; mow the lawn; remember Valentine’s Day and his wedding anniversary; be on time to visit with his kid and make sure the Blockbuster videos were wound back to the start and returned on time. Yeah, all that stuff and more.
After he had gone
I knew you would be
in the beaver's meadow.
Your eyes met mine –
they were so blue –
and they did not lie
but I kept on looking.
And the beaver worked away
against the river of life
and the thieving magpie
flew away.
25 July 1989
This is a poem about Edinburgh, about something that happened in Edinburgh at least. But I’ve no idea what. This is your classic decoder ring poem only I lost the ring a long time ago. It’s typical of the kind of poems I was writing at this time, me trying to say one thing by saying something else. ‘Omnipresence’ (#672) although finished a month later is also about this particular visit.
I’ve not been to Edinburgh for almost twenty years. It’s not that far away, a bus and a train ride (I could be there in an hour and a half if I timed it right) but it’s not a place that holds many happy memories. In 2008 I wrote a poem called ‘Lonely City’ (#1011) about the place for ‘this collection’ which got turned into a short film. If you’ve never seen it and would like to it’d at the end of this post. I hadn’t listened to it in years and I have to say I was struck by how much of Alan Bennett there is in my delivery. Not deliberate. That’s how I talk.
It takes a good imagination
to dress the bones of the past
and have them looking good.
Memory has little to do with it.
28 July 1989
Studies published in Cognitive Neuroscience a few years back suggested that imagination is functionally distinct from related processes such as memory; it hides in a different part of the brain. Fine, I’ll buy that but that doesn’t mean they can’t pool resources; we fill in the blanks; we extrapolate. As Greg Nirshberg put it in an article in the same journal a couple of years earlier:
Every time you ‘remember’ a past experience you are not accessing some sort of stored ‘thing’ in your brain. You are constructing an entirely new experience in something akin to the imaginative process, and while what you construct this experience out of will have some sort of causal connection to synaptic changes made at the time of the original experience, and while there are ways to ensure that this imaginative construction is more justifiably in correspondence with the original event, that original event is gone forever; all that exists is your imagining in the moment. Let’s not be too tied to calling this experience a memory, without at least being cognizant of in how many ways this experience fails to fit that role.
As I look at each of the poems I’ve been publishing of late I have to say, hand on heart, that I’ve mostly been imagining the past and not remembering it. I don’t remember most of it. There’re huge, cavernous holes. This is one reason why I’ve never seriously thought to write any kind of memoir. I know even with the best will in the world it’d be fictionalised. Instead I incorporate the odd bit of fact into my fiction but don’t make too much of them, don’t attribute meaning that’s not there. How many times when you’ve wanted to describe a room have you cast your eyes around the very room you’re sitting in and relocated something? It’s not meaningful; it’s simply easier. The flat in The More Things Change is the one I lived in in Jordanhill; it was the flat I wrote most of the book in. The flat in Left is the one I’m living in just now minus Carrie’s office. The flat in Living with the Truth was, however, completely fictional and to be honest I don’t even have a floorplan of it in my head.
