by Peter Handke
The car ride the following day was the start of a journey that took us to the coast. The mistral had died down; a balmy, spacious winter’s day. Scant Mediterranean pines in a stony landscape. The woman taught me their name, which, accompanied by the date 1974, has often come back to me as a refrain: pins parasol. Sloping gently downward, the road led past them. There (not “suddenly”), along with the road and the trees, the world opened out. Besides, “there” became somewhere else. The world was solid, sustaining soil. Time stands still, eternally and day by day. The openness can also, repeatedly, be I. I can wish all barriers away. I should always be so calm in the outside world (amid forms and colors). It is my fault when, in danger of closing up, I reject the presence of mind that is always possible.
In a story I had written five years before, a landscape, though flat, arched so close to the hero that it seemed to push him away. Yet the radically different, concavely widened world of 1974, which relieves pressure and thinks the body free, still stands before me as a discovery to be communicated: the umbrella pines and my joy of life, those are valid reality. In any case, the pins parasol often came in handy when the entrances of strange houses arched up at me, though the “I” of that earlier world may time and again become distraught and bewildered (there is an intrinsic guilt).
Was it only then that something began to happen inside me? Wasn’t it much earlier, in the presence of other southern trees, that I first conceived of a rational joy? Among the dark cypresses of the summer of 1971 in Yugoslavia: what was it that, more each day, gave way in me, until someone finally opened her arms for the first time? (Here, too, I place the mulberry tree, in the shade of which we often sat, and the light-colored sand at its feet, sprinkled red with the juice of fallen berries.) It was then that the transformation occurred. The man I was came of age, but at the same time demanded to go down on his knees or to lie with his face down, and in all this to be no one.
The transformation was natural. It was the desire for reconciliation which, as the philosopher put it, comes from “desiring another’s desire.” This desire struck me as perfectly reasonable, and from then on, it has carried over into my writing.
Yet it was not a good time. (In mortal terror, my mother sent me appeals for help, and I didn’t know what to answer.) Consequently, I read the ancients’ magical trees of death into the cypresses. “Dream yourself into things” was long a writer’s maxim; imagine the objects to be dealt with as though seeing them in a dream, in the conviction that there alone they will acquire their true essence. And then they formed a grove around the writer, from which, of course, he had difficulty finding his way back to life. True, he repeatedly found an essence of things, but this essence could not be communicated; and in stubbornly trying to hold it fast, he became unsure of himself. No, magical images—and that went for the cypresses—were not the right thing for me. Within them lies a not at all peaceable nothingness, to which I never want to return. Only outside, in daylight colors, am I.
The state has been called the “sum of its norms.” I, however, know I am committed to a different system, the realm of forms, in which “true ideas,” as the philosopher said, “coincide with their objects,” and every form is powerful as a paradigm (even though the artists themselves in more recent times “are half shadows and now, in the present, are almost entirely unreal”).
But what justifies one in contributing to this realm? The question torments me every time I start a new piece of work; I keep thinking that I am no more than a benevolently silent reader. Still, once—before I had ever written anything—I felt justified. I had a vision of the theme, of the “book” I longed to write, of many books. Not in a dream, but on a sunny day; nor was this a lapse brought on by southern cypresses; no, I was right here and my subject right there. We were driving through gently rolling country on a fairly straight road, on a late-summer Sunday in Upper Austria. There was no one on the road. Just once, I saw a man in a white shirt and black suit, walking on the other side. His trousers were loose, they flapped against his legs when he walked. Later, when we drove back, the man, to my delight, was still walking, with his trousers flapping around his ankles and his jacket unbuttoned, on a Sunday in Upper Austria. At the sight of this man walking along, the “I” of my first book felt an obligation to go among men and tell them something. He resolved to go among them with might and main, and convince them. Should I then suppose that nothing new happened in connection with the pins parasol of 1974, but rather that something came back, which I was able to welcome as “Reality”?
There is a painting by Cézanne which has been referred to as The Great Pine. (He himself never gave his paintings titles, and seldom signed one.) It shows a tall, solitary pine by the Arc River southeast of Aix. This was the river of his childhood. After bathing, he and his childhood friends would sit in its shade; later, at the age of twenty, he asked Emile Zola, who had been one of these friends, in a letter: “Do you remember the pine on the bank of the Arc?” He even wrote a poem to the tree. In it the mistral blows through the bare branches; and the picture, too, suggests the wind, particularly in the way the lone tree slants. That tree, more than just about anything else, might be titled: “Out in the Open.” It transforms the ground from which it rises into a plateau, while the branches, twisted in all directions, and the infinitely varied green of its coat make the empty space around it vibrate.
The Great Pine is depicted in other paintings, but never is it so solitary. In one of them (which is signed) the bottommost branch seems to wave in the direction of the landscape. Along with the branches of a neighboring pine, it forms a vaulted gateway leading into the distance, where the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire lie stretched beneath the bright colors of the sky.
Before my encounter with Cézanne (but after I became acquainted with Edward Hopper), there was another painter who carried me away from mere opinions about paintings and taught me to view them as paradigms and to honor them as works.
At the time, I had been reading a description of a German village in the nineteenth century by a Swabian peasant turned poet. Wishing to avoid all petty views of man, he called his poems “Gospels of Nature, written by her reader.” (At the sight of a distant snowfield, which often in hazy sunlight is distinguishable from the sky only by a faint glow, his words in turn come home to me, his reader: “Yours are all things—the heavens themselves, and even the stars, if you have radiance for the radiance in the distance.”)True, when he wrote prose, he took a paltry view of people, of his villagers, and he knew it. Sometimes it grieved him that “the body fatigued by farm work could neither hear nor see.” (The life of this man, Christian Wagner, in whose poems the spirit spoke, but who, as the philosopher said, owes his enduring fame to his unity with “his subject, the body,” deserves the word “tragic,” which is so often used meaninglessly.)
It was then that I first looked seriously at the paintings of Gustave Courbet, many of which portray the life of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, and was moved by the lofty silence of these pictures, especially one entitled The Peasants of Flagey (Doubs), Returning Home from Market. And then I knew: these are the right pictures—and not only for me.
Courbet, as his precisely localized titles show, regarded the subjects of genre paintings, these scenes of everyday life, as the true events of history. And so it is that to the sympathetic mind his peasants—as they sift grain, stand at a graveside, prepare a dead woman for burial, or return home from market at dusk (and those as well who only sit and rest, sleep and dream)—form a self-contained procession, which today includes “my” genre painting of an old woman, who on a warm sunny day much later walked slowly down a back street in West Berlin with her shopping bag and, during a brief silence that made her everyday reality more profound, revealed to me the housefronts as our shared and still happily enduring peace procession.
During the Paris Commune of 1871, the painter Courbet was one of those chiefly responsible for having the victory column on the Place Vendôme razed. For,
he said, the square at the end of the rue de la Paix is no place for “a monument to war and conquest.” At the fall of the Commune, he spent several months in prison for this offense, and many pictures of the ensuing decade (his last) show nothing but a wild green sea, a wild sky, and very little beach. One of this series is titled The Great Wave. It shows hardly anything but water and air, but the rock colors give the effect of solidity, and the numerous interrelated forms make it dramatic.
As Cézanne saw it, Courbet had “the sweeping gesture and grand manner of the Masters.” He called The Great Wave “one of the discoveries of the century.” While looking at Courbet’s paintings in the Louvre, he would call out the names of the objects in them: “There, the hounds, the pool of blood, the tree. There, the gloves, the lace, the shot-silk coat.”
Ever since I began to think, I have felt the need for a teacher. Sometimes a word sufficed to spark off a desire to learn and make me feel drawn to someone. Today I am grateful to the few professional teachers who over the years have had something to communicate to me; but I would not call any of them “my teacher.” There was one man at the university who inspired me with a hitherto unprecedented thirst for knowledge. In a lecture on law, he formulated the ethical implications of things in enigmatically simple mathematical sentences; I should have liked (I truly longed) to be his “student.” Unhappily, he was only a guest lecturer, and after a short week he was gone. The writers whom I read seriously are dear to me more as brothers than as teachers—as brothers they are sometimes too close to me. The only person whom now, in retrospect, I sometimes regard as a kind of teacher is my grandfather (a common enough phenomenon, I believe). Whenever he took me for a walk in the country, that walk stayed with me as a lesson (though not at all in the same way as present-day “nature walks”).
Time and again I am afflicted by my ignorance, and this feeling gives rise to an aimless striving for knowledge which engenders no idea, precisely because it has no “object” with which to “conform.” But then one small thing may convey a message and thus instill the “spirit of the beginning”; then I may start to study in earnest, when previously, however busy and active, I had only longed to.
The Cézannes that I saw at an exhibition in the spring of 1978 struck me as such things of the beginning, and I was overcome with a desire to study such as had hitherto been inspired only by Flaubert’s prose style. These were works of his last decade, when he came so close to his aim of “realizing” his subject that the colors and forms alone sufficed to do it honor. (“By reality and completeness I mean one and the same thing,” said the philosopher.) And yet these paintings show no added light. The feted subjects owe their effect to their own colors, and sometimes the overall effect of the lighter landscapes is one of darkening. The nameless Provençal peasants of the late nineteenth century, the heroes of the portraits, loom large in the foreground; with no particular insignia of royalty, they dominate an earth-colored ground, which is their land, their country.
Darkness, lines, composition, reinforcement, darkening eyes; yes, I was shaken. And after two years of “study,” an appropriate sentence fits itself together: the silence of these pictures seemed so complete because the dark lines of a composition reinforced an overall tension, which (as the poet put it) I could attain by “darkening over” to it, that is, by a leap, in which two pairs of eyes, separate in time, met on a painted surface.
“The picture has begun to tremble,” I jotted down at the time. “What freedom, to be able to sing someone’s praises.”
One portrait in particular moved me, because it pictured the hero of the story I had yet to write. It was titled The Man with the Folded Arms: a man, whose picture would never bear a proper name (but who was not no one or just anyone), seen in the corner of a rather empty room defined only by its wainscoting; sitting there in the darkness of the earth tones that also modulate the man himself; a man, it seemed to me, at “an ideal age: already substantial, but still capable of yearning.” (True, when I studied his posture, I was put off by the hand tucked back under the arm, and it took an effort of will to unbend it.) The man’s eyes looked obliquely upward, without expectancy. One corner of the mouth was slightly distorted by a thicker shadow line: “humble sorrow.” His open white shirt was bright, as was his large rounded forehead under his deep-black hair—vulnerable in its nakedness. I did not see this man in my own image, or as a brother; I saw him, rather, as an accomplice, who, now that I have finished his story, is once again the inviolate Man with the Crossed Arms, radiating a silent little smile.
There were so many similar portraits that I had little mind to spare for the other pictures on exhibition. In a separate room, which seemed circular, one picture after another showed the top of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which the painter depicted from different angles, but always from below, from the plain and from a distance. He himself said: “The same motif, seen from different angles, offers an object of study of such extreme interest and such diversity that I believe I could keep busy for several months in the same spot, just turning now a little more to the right, now a little more to the left.”
At the exhibition the mountain did not stop me for long. But in time it darkened in my mind, and one day, much later, I was able to say that I had an aim.
The Mountain of Colors
Mont Sainte-Victoire is not the highest mountain in Provence, but it is said to be the steepest. It does not consist of a single peak but of a long chain, the crest of which describes a relatively straight line at an almost constant altitude of a thousand meters above sea level.
It looks like a sheer peak only when seen from the valley of Aix, situated half a day’s walk almost due westward. What from there looks like a single summit is in fact only the beginning of the high crest extending another half day’s journey eastward.
This mountain range, which rises gently on the north and on the south descends almost vertically to a high plateau, is a gigantic anticlinal calcareous fold, and the crest is its upper longitudinal axis. The western view of the three peaks seems especially dramatic, because it offers, as it were, a cross section of the whole mountain range with its different strata, so that even someone who knows nothing about this mountain can hardly help forming an idea of its genesis and regarding it as something very particular.
This one great block, jutting into the sky from the plain, is surrounded by a number of flatter ones, which are separated from one another by clefts and can be differentiated by the changing colors and patterns of the rock; and they too, under lateral pressure, have formed folds, thus on a smaller scale extending the forms of the mountain into the plain.
An astonishing and disturbing feature of Mont Sainte-Victoire is the light color and dolomitic luminousness of the limestone, described in a pamphlet for mountain climbers as “rock of the finest quality.” One cannot ride to the top. There is no practicable road on the whole mountain, not even on the gently sloping northern flank; nor is there any inhabited dwelling or inn (there is still a deserted seventeenth-century chapel on the crest). The south wall can be negotiated only by mountain climbers, but from all other directions one can climb it without great difficulty and continue for a long way on the ridge. Even from the nearest village, the expedition calls for a full day.
I had hardly left Aix on that July day, walking eastward on the Route Paul Cézanne, when I began, in my thoughts, to give travel pointers to an indeterminate number of people (and yet I was only one of the many who had undertaken this journey since the beginning of the century).
For a long while I myself had only toyed with the thought of seeing the mountain in the flesh. Wasn’t it an idée fixe to suppose that because a painter had once loved it there must be something intrinsically remarkable about it? It was only on the day when a spark leapt from thought to imagination that I made up my mind (and my decision was accompanied by an instant feeling of pleasure): yes, I would go and see Mont Sainte-Victoire! Thus my journey was not so much a quest for Cézanne’s motifs (most of which, moreov
er, I knew had been blocked by buildings) as a response to my own feeling: that mountain attracted me, as nothing in my life had ever attracted me.
Under the plane trees on the Cours Mirabeau, the crowns of which join to form a roof, Aix had been positively somber in the morning. The arch and the white fountain at the end of the long avenue glittered in the background like a small mirror. It was only as I left the town that I was surrounded by a mild gray daylight.
The day was hot and sultry, but I walked in airy warmth. The mountain was not yet in sight. At first the road curved gently over the rolling country, more uphill than down. The road was narrow, and lost its sidewalk while still within the city limits, so it was sometimes difficult to keep out of the way of the cars. But after a good hour’s walk, after Le Tholonet, it opened out.
In spite of the traffic, I had a feeling of stillness, just as the day before, in the midst of the Paris noise, I had felt stillness in the street where we had once lived. I had thought of taking someone with me; now I was glad to be alone. I was walking on “the road.” In the shady roadside ditch I saw “the brook.” I stood on “the stone bridge.” Here were the cracks in the rock. There, bordering a side road, were the pines; large, at the end of the road, the black-and-white of a magpie.
I breathed the fragrance of the trees and thought: Forever. I stopped still and noted: What possibilities there are—in the present! Stillness on the Route de Cézanne. A summer shower passed quickly. Drops glistening singly in the sun; then only the road seemed wet, the pebbles in the asphalt bright with color.
