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o write I went out into nature, into the fresh air, into the day, into the wind, into the forest, and then if possible every morning, right through the summer and far into the fall. (As recently as yesterday I remained stretched out there until I could hardly make out my own handwriting, and that was also because of the evening dew, for the pencils did not mark properly on the damp paper.)
A couple of times, when the rain became too heavy, penetrating the leaf canopy and not letting up, I continued with my writing in one of the few public buildings in the bay, but hardly ever back at my house; I have been spending more time in my study only since the somewhat quieter days of early winter.
In bad weather I most often sought refuge in the bay's little post office, the “auxiliary post office”âin general the local agencies have modifiers like “branch,” “annex,” or
“provisoire.”
There was a counter there intended specifically for filling out forms, even a windowsill, a spacious, broad one for propping one's arms on and looking out, just as I had wished for from the beginning for my writing year.
Outside the window nothing was to be seen but an area marked off by a brick-red wall at the rear, resembling a grove with its few widely spaced spruces and birches, on the ground the short, thick, yet never mowed grass and the several-year layers of spruce needles and cones, among which then in the course of the summer new white-and-red
mushroom caps kept erupting, harvested by me with the consent of the postmistress. This woman was alone most of the time and knitted behind the counter or talked on the telephone, as loudly asâfortunately for my concentrationâincomprehensibly; she was almost deaf. The fact that I came in out of the storm, sat there, and went away again without ever leaving a letter with her did not disturb her.
When she did have customers, as a rule they were older people, with postal savings accounts. Once there was a telegram to be sent, in Spanish, and it took her an hour to transmit the few words by telephone because of having to spell out everything several times, especially the address. The little place had no telex, for there was no demand, and when a person from elsewhere blew in one day wanting to send a “chronopost” overseas, she explained to him that this was the first time she had ever been asked to do this kind of mailing, whereupon the stranger drove off with his express package, to a post office outside the bay.
Otherwise a great stillness prevailed in the auxiliary post office, without the thumping of rubber stamps or radio music; at most the postmistress's little dog sometimes shifted in his basket. Nothing but the slapping of the rain against the windowpanes; a pattern of shadow from that on the windowsill, or a flash of lightning.
The disadvantage was only that this branch closed early, and thus I sometimes finished my day of recording in the next bay over, in the back room of the restaurant run by the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, whose raging misanthropy I had almost been driven to share by my neighbors' racket; from time to time it did me good.
In his rooms, too, there by the railroad embankment, in a former station restaurant, there were windowsills, wide ones, extending out to my ribs, and even the benches that went with them, as in the ancestral house in the Jaunfeld village of Rinkolach, and all of this shaken again and again by the wonderful rumbling of the trains directly above me.
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n this year the weather changed constantly, and always from one hour to the next. But whenever possible I sat outdoors with my project, out in the woods. And what then became my main sitting place was the spot that had attracted me most powerfully earlier on when I was out walking and doing nothing.
Writing beside a body of water was even more promising than writing beside a path. At first I tried it with the three ponds in the bay, one after the other. For a few days I worked halfway up the hill by a sunken road behind the Etang des Ursines, in the largest and also the oldest part of the settlement, where the prehistoric flintstone and stone ax had been found; after that at the weathered picnic table behind the pond with the crayfish, with the mental image of the war correspondent, now dead, of his shock of hair standing up, his stubble-beardedness, his paleness, his total incomprehension of a person like me; then by the one surrounded entirely by woods, without houses in view, called Hole-in-Glove Pond, under the birches there; everywhere I made good progress, except that I did not like to be seen with paper and pencilâsome people did pass by, who, however, mistook what I was doing for drawing; none of them came up closeâand except that some fishermen had transistor radios with them.
Nonetheless I finally set out for that body of water which, although it always struck me as the only really old one and also the most extensive one in all the forests of the Seine hills, is not marked on any map of the area, even the most detailed, nor does it have a name, even in the folklore of the bay (but who knows?), and which I privately call, after neither “bayou” (Mississippi) nor “Everglades” (Florida) stuck, the Nameless Pond.
Yet the word “pond” does not fit this puddle either, at the sight of which at least the first passersby call back their children or their dogs with exclamations of disgust and horror. In fact its surface, and not only during a longer drought, looks bubbly sometimes or glistens with an oily film, and I have hardly ever been able to see all the way to the bottom. Trees, long since dead, barkless all the way up, naked, only the whitish-gray trunks remaining, with a few broken-off forks of branches, stand there in the water, among those that have tumbled in from the banks and are still green, and aquatic vegetation with dark-haired root tangles below (masses of them in the light of low water).
A puddle, and yet extending far out? Yes, and this on the one hand by virtue of its complicated shape, going around one corner and then another, entirely different from a man-made pond, and especially by virtue of that unique shimmer of distance or enigma in its most remote spits, with a view through the vegetation and dead tree trunks, over
hundreds of sawed-off trunks barely rising above the water, a glow of distance reliable in a way I have never encountered in a puddle, but also not in a full-grown lake, either in that of Gennesaret or that of Michigan or that of Neusiedl. Every time, from sitting there awhile, from the farthest tongues of the puddle, along with the water's edge, air, and shore, even when nothing was moving, a pull emanated.
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nd in such an environment I settled down one lovely spring day to continue my work, and that became my established place, except during torrential rains, until the first frosts.
It was in the thicket on the other side of the Nameless Pond, but I had a view of the water, through a long cut, all the way to the bays in the more accessible bank; but anyone standing over there would have had to look hard to catch sight of me, until the time of leaf drop.
At my back, after a gap to slip through, the underbrush led right up to a forest in the background, not at all dark or crowded, extending up the hill, to the south, so that the sun, filtered through the foliage, shone on my paper as it crossed the sky.
In that same place, on my very first day, I came upon what was left from the sawing up of a mammoth oak, once a cylinder, which had been burned out from the core and had fallen apart, leaving two hollowed-out half cylinders. I rolled the sounder half, with some difficultyâit was so massiveâover and over along the mossy ground to a place where it bumped down a steep bank by itself to my watery corner. And there, on the soft, peat-black but not yet swampy ground, I set this shape upright, sat down on the ground, within a foot of my pond bank, leaned back into the half circle of wood, and had a wing chair, without legs, just right for my purposes.
It surrounded me literally and really like a set of wings, and moved with me on the peat soil, yielded, pushed me forward again, but would remain steadfast in the face of my most violent shoves; that was how heavy it was, also from the fire; and besides I felt protected in its curve during my work, shielded from the eyes of the joggers, one or another of whom, especially during mushroom season, would suddenly make the branches crack up there behind me.
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here I sat, leaning back (and would like to continue to sit and lean back), and promptly began, with my pencils lined up, the eraser next to them, to write, as if it were child's play, without the usual fear of beginning. I imagined the sentences following the movements of the water at the tips of my shoes, the air streaming all around the trees, the open sky, not exactly right above my head, but plentifully at brow level and as a reflection from the pond, while the sun, whether on the horizons or at its zenith, followed the outline of the semicircle of my backrest.
Unlike earlier I no longer ground to a halt when I realized that something I was just writing down had already been said long ago, by me or by someone else. If I repeated myself or another person now and then, that was fine with me, and of course I did come to a halt each time, except that now I approached the repetition with additional elan, positively elated at the prospect of it.
Certain other concerns also dissolved into thin air: that in the history of the bay and of my distant friends so little was happening; that the plot was not moving; that the sentences were too long for a book nowadays. I let them get as long as the image that was inside me and motivating me required; all that mattered was having such an image inside me. And if it was long-windedness, I felt it to be in harmony with the back-and-forth ripples of the wind on the water, around all seven corners of the pond, and with all that nothing-at-all in between, a little tremble far off, the drilling motion of the red-throated downy woodpecker in the dead wood, who, when I next look up, is giving its stomach a one-second bath, swooping down, with an incomparably delicate splash. It seemed to me as though such simultaneity acted on my storytelling like a verification; as if the water above all, there in its uniqueness, was what confirmed my workâwork? here more a mere synchronized breathing.
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esides, I had an infinitely easier time of it, there by that nameless pond, with my project, always in danger of becoming so tied up in knots that no air was left in it, of making paragraphs, or, instead of being forced to conjure up an appropriate transition and a compelling
sequence, keeping going imperturbably. Making paragraphs in this context meant only pausing in the middle for a catching of breath, impossible for me as a rule during indoor writing, for a walking away from the page so that it, too, could have a moment's peace.
Thus I remained calm when rainfall heavy enough to force its way through the leaves interrupted me. I tucked my portfolio between my jacket and my shirt, put on my hat, actually brought along for mushrooms, and waited.
The wilder the conditions around the water, the more serene and also patient I became. Stormy winds mingled with pounding rain, sand hit me on the fingers, terminal darkness broke in, thick branches came crashing to the ground, another tree tipped headfirst from the bank into the pond, the many birds of the area, large and small, fluttered back and forth, cawing and squawking, barely missing me, and I sat there, leaning back, with my manuscript, and watched, without batting an eyelash, warm around my heart, this panic-stricken world having emerged clear and whole behind the customary, fragmentary, chimerical one, and in the panic-stricken world that mixed-up creationânot chaosâin which I had always felt at home. “Now it's right.”
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hen I was busy there by the water, the surroundings looked entirely different from the way they would have looked if I had merely been sitting there idle. Without my specifically taking them in, they became part of me, in passing.
And again in my memory the animals appear first. (Yet I am not thinking here of the mosquitoes that fell upon me in droves, though not until dusk, when I was usually already finished.)
That all began with the migration of the hitherto completely invisible tribes of toads downhill through the woods to their spawning grounds. The Nameless Pond, by which I was sitting, was their chief destination, even for those toads coming from the most distant of the hills of the Seine, although all the other bodies of water offered more room.
But either they were polluted, like the most appealing of them, that pond called Hole-in-Glove, by the oily effluent from the factories up on the plateau, or they had unscalably steep banks, like the Crayfish Pond, unsuitable for amphibians, or, like the other pond, the largest pond in
the bay, the Etang des Ursines, they were separated from the forest by a highway. A resident of the bay had tacked a sign to a tree, asking that people leave the crossing as free of traffic as possible during the couple of days every year when the toad migration could be predicted; the animals were threatened with extinction. But, and not only because of the note on the tree, inconspicuous even to a pedestrian, most of the locals' cars drove as they always did, and every time I walked the road in those days, on my way to my writing place, the flattened corpses were stuck to the asphalt, and the few toads that had made it to the water alive were swimming along the edge of the pond, each seemingly all by itself.