Tender Is His Plight

...From the story the writer is working on there are these images: "The jet of the fountain met the cumulus cloud overhead...

...Or possibly Homer-Ulysses...

...In a wheat field near which sheep were grazing, the ears of grain crackled in the heat...

...Or a Blind Lemon Jefferson...

...If his sense of self-irony is not as pronounced as Fitzgerald's, it nonetheless keeps our brows from a too-constant knitting...

...His prose (in Ralph Manheim's superbly fluid translation) mirrors the sensibility of his hero...

...But Handke is too skilled to allow such an interpretation sole reign...

...the fourth, spraying his listeners with saliva, had cried out: 'I'm lost...

...All the writer remembers are "certain turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures, intonations...

...Some of the passersby stopped short, obviously wondering where they could have seen his face...

...Of the writer's confrontation with the patrons in a bar, the narrator notes, "If he had met them individually by day in the city, he would not have known where to place them, " though many had told him thenlife stories...

...Slowness is one of the work's central leitmotifs: "Why had no one ever invented a god of slowness...

...The Afternoon of a Writer is brief but masterful...

...Even in the novels he never lets us settle into a comfortable state of suspended disbelief...

...The piece is alternately ironic and elegiac...

...The novel proceeds with justsuchdeliberation...

...At times—notably in the early plays and poems—he has seemed conscious of little else...

...Again the writer's shoulders felt the strain of pulling the child up...

...Handke reproduces the story's structure...

...His "writer" (like Fitzgerald's " author," he is never named) is at home working when he feels "impelled to go out" into the December twilight...

...Over the course of his day, we are made to feel the slipperiness of his hold on his craft and sanity alike...

...the second went to Mass every Sunday because it always gave him acold shiver...

...His characters' struggles have as much to do with how they see the world as with what they do in it...

...We even meet a kind of Cyclops, a drunk who "stared from high above, as though he had only one eye...

...The closing Une—"To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment"—is as good a description of Fitzgerald's character as Handke's...

...Handke, by contrast, refreshingly accentuates the moment of realization that the boy is in danger...

...The accumulation of incident and observation is so evenly paced that it is easy to underestimate the sweep of the text...

...the city streets were covered with poplar fluff so light and airy that one could see through to the asphalt, and over the grass in the park there passed a droning which became a humming when the bumblebee that went with it vanished into a flower...

...Fortunately, Handke is conscious of what might be perceived as his ponderousness...

...the fifth was in the habit of saying that he had achieved all his aims in life—what the writer particularly remembered about him was that he had once touched the writer's wrist, a kind of nudge one might have called it, with a tenderness possible only for a man on the brink of despair...

...Handke, it will be recalled, has done some translations from the Greek...

...They approach conventions without ever quite conforming to them...

...grandeur is always hopelessly past...

...Handke's lyrical bent is also in evidence...

...There is a windy bridge to be crossed, an addiction to newspaper reading, an old poet with "naked eyes, wide open as though blind...

...Increasingly the writer comes to resemble another mythic wanderer, and Fitzgerald begins to seem a smoke screen for Joyce...

...And near the end the writer intones, "What am I? Why am I not a bard...

...An acute but fragile person, he ambles through an anonymous European city...

...Similarly, a mock solemnity marks the announcement, "Thus the writer, confident of being unobserved, made, as it were, his entrance into the city...

...The writer is confronted in the street "by dagger-eye after dagger-eye...

...He has much to say about writing (including a denunciation of "writers on cultural matters" who leave the reader "with a buzzingof wasps in his ears"), as well as the writer's position as a public figure...

...What is instantly apparent, however, is the sureness of Handke's hand...

...Not as recognizable as a movie star or a politician, the hero is not sure what to make of the glances from the people in the street...

...Pungent observation is yet another diverting aspect of the novel...

...What we discern is his immense curiosity about the workings of the world and his quiet respect for language...

...Handke gets his effects simply, with an accuracy of description and a building up of particulars rather than with overcharged language or exquisite metaphor...

...While moving the writer from one encounter to the next it provides little in the way of suspense to urge on the reader...

...thethird, a woman, referred to each of her rapidly changing lovers as her 'fianc...

...In the end, though, he too resolves to go on with his work...

...The swimmer in the river plunged his head into the water for the first time that year and once again the air and the sun and the feel of his nostrils gave the writer a sense of temporary reprieve...

...He had fallen off the wall...

...One of the episodes here concludes with this mild slapstick: "In his precipitate flight, a billiard cue grazed him, a dog snarled at him, and, lastly, the belt of his coat got caught on the door handle...

...Early on, Handke's writer seems to want nothing more than "to establish a harmony between what he was doing" and the "unhurried one-thing-after-another" of some workers he sees outside his window...

...Wasn't that the face on the 'Wanted' poster in the post office, the only picture that had not yet been crossed off...

...That story describes one uneventful day in its protagonist's life, episodically tracking his movements through Baltimore and recording his memoryladen reflections...

...In one scene, the writer is harangued by a drunk: "And then suddenly—for once this word, often so thoughtlessly used, is peculiarly apt—suddenly the writer lost the secret thread, known only to the two of them, and at the same time, just as suddenly and inexplicably, he lost the nexus with his next morning's writing, which he thought he had secured that afternoon and without which he would be unable to carry on with his work...

...Precisely because they were small and scattered, " says the narrator, "the catchfly, daisies, buttercups, and dead nettles enlivened the undulating landscape...

...The first had once blurted out: 'When I'm right, I get excited, when G m wrong, I lie...

...he had thought the child was playing because of the way he hopped while running...

...The writer's encounters start to strike a familiar chord...

...the rushing water prevented the writer from hearing the child, but then he saw by the movements of the child's lips that he was shouting for help...

...the writer asks himself...

...Since his first efforts he has put bits of his characters' more abstruse musings in quotation marks, capitals or italics—a kind of textual winking...

...It opens with the author feeling "better than he had for many weeks" and ends—after he suffers a crisis of confidence—with his resolution to go on writing...

...Sometimes introspection gives way to levity...

...A celebratory mystification of the self lends a mythic resonance to both narratives...

...contributor, "Massachusetts Review, " "Story Quarterly" This short novel was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Afternoon of an Author...

...He remembers a dream "about a book which—like a ship that had just set sail—was full of bookmarks...

...Consider the following account of one of the writer's recollections: "He saw a little boy running back and forth below the river wall...

...A less sensitive narrator would have played up the danger in the scene—the drama, perhaps, of the rising river and the terror of the child, the riskiness of the rescue...

...Soon after that entrance we begin to realize Handke is up to more than merely taking us for a walking tour...

...In the case of Handke's characters, present goals are scaled down, simplified...

...They die, drift away or settle for less...

...Fitzgerald's heroes, particularly in his later stories, never quite reach their goals...

...Handke has throughout his career been intensely aware of language...

...The day is filled with minor crises, including a hallucination-filled trek down a crowded street and an angry reaction to a daily newspaper...

...Yet neither Handke nor Fitzgerald believes fully in the myth...