Harold Ross, the founding editor of this weekly, was wary of, among many other things, “writer-consciousness,” and would mark phrases and sentences wherein, to his sensibility, the writer, like some ugly giant squid concealed beneath the glassy impersonality of the prose, was threatening to surface. Writing, that is, like our grosser animal functions, could not be entirely suppressed but shouldn’t be performed in the open. Yet fashions in aesthetic decorum change. Modernism, by the spectacular nature of its experiments, invited admiring or irritated awareness of the experimenting author. Intentionally or not, the written works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway were exercises in personality, each provoking curiosity about the person behind the so distinctive voice. Postmodernism, if such a thing exists, without embarrassment weaves the writer into the words and the twists of the tale. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the mirrors and false bottoms of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and The Gift, John Barth’s self-proposed and exhaustively fulfilled regimens of tale-telling—all place the writer right up front. …

Peter Handke, in The Afternoon of a Writer (translated from the German by Ralph Manheim), presents a texture that is almost alarmingly immediate. Handke can be hysterical—indeed, hysteria is his métier—but this brief tale of the after-work hours of one of those nameless writers (he walks into town, out of town, has a drink or two, walks home and goes to bed, alone) applies such an intense sensibility to his paragraphs that we seem to enter a supernatural dimension:

It was early December and the edges of various objects glowed as they do at the onset of twilight. At the same time, the airy space outside and the interior of the curtainless house seemed joined in an undivided brightness. No snow had yet fallen that year. But that morning the birds had cheeped in a certain way—in a monotone suggestive of speech—that heralded snow.

In a bramblebush, single crystals [of snow] would balance on thorns and then encircle them like ruffs. Though there was no one to be seen, the writer had the impression at every step that he was walking in the traces of someone who had been there before.

And when the hero comes in his walk to a convex traffic mirror, and gazes into its bent reflections, we labor along with the translator to realize the precise evanescent shades of reported sensation: “The rounding of the image gave emptiness a radiance, and gave the objects in this emptiness—the glass-recycling center, the garbage cans, the bicycle stands—a holiday feel, as though in looking at them one emerged into a clearing.”

Handke's hero is all eyes, all nerves. Being a writer gives his hypersensitivity a use, and also a professional alternation with insensibility. While he writes, he is all but oblivious of the outer world: “In his mind, it was only a moment ago that the midday bells of the chapel of the old people’s home at the foot of the little hill had suddenly started tinkling as though someone had died, yet hours must have passed since then, for the light in the room was now an afternoon light. … At first he was unable to focus on anything in the distance and saw even the pattern of the carpet as a blur; in his ears he heard a buzzing as though his typewriter were an electric one—which was not the case.” Preparing to leave the house, he returns to his study to make one last revision: “It was only then that he smelled the sweat in the room and saw the mist on the windowpanes.”

In his few human contacts, too, he is able to turn off. In the bar, a drunk addresses the writer at futile length:

As he spoke, his face came so close as to lose its contours; only his violently twitching eyelids, the dotted bow tie under his chin, and a cut on his forehead that must have bled recently remained distinct. … Not a single word of what he was saying came through to the writer, not even when he held his ear close to the speaker’s mouth. Yet, to judge by the movements of his lips and tongue, he was not speaking a foreign language.

The writer inwardly bemoans his deafness, his isolation, his “defeat as a social being.” He asks himself, “Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully? Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went?” Handke's writer suffers a Promethean, a Luciferian, isolation—that of the too greatly daring, the damned. “To write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin. Now, in the midst of the ‘gin-mill people,’ he had the same feeling of unpardonable guilt, the feeling that he had been banished from the world for all time.” A translator of his (apparently an American), whom he meets in his day’s one scheduled encounter, once wanted to be a writer but couldn’t bear the onus: “My attempt to decipher a supposed Ur-text inside me and force it into a coherent whole struck me as original sin. That was the beginning of fear.” Translation, while being sufficiently engaging, avoids the primordial fear: “By displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own.”

At his brief excursion’s end, our wounded but resolute hero climbs into bed. Trying to recall the hours so vividly just passed, he can visualize only two small details, both of them distorted. Already, he is writing. He is an inscrutable stewing, a transmuter of world into word. “To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment.” To a cold-eyed reader, however, he is in danger of seeming a self-dramatizing solipsist. With a phenomenal intensity and delicacy of register, the little book captures the chemistry of perception and of perception’s transformation into memory and language. We are there with the writer, behind his eyes and under his skin. But the cultural presumptions that make it worth our while to be there are perhaps more European than universal. These winter walks with reflective, misanthropic bachelors occur also in the brief, elegant contemporary novels of the Swede Lars Gustafsson and Handke's fellow-Austrian the late Thomas Bernhard, and go back to Olympian strolls with Kant and Goethe and Nietzsche. To an American reader, so reverent an examination, by a writer, of a writer’s psyche verges on the pompous and, worse, on the claustrophobic.

The Afternoon of a Writer is dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in 1936 published a short story called “Afternoon of an Author.” Freshly available in Scribners’ edition of “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” the story offers a sombre contrast with Handke's small, rapt novel. It has none of the Austrian’s triumphant undercurrent; Fitzgerald’s American scribe is in poor health and down on his luck. He wakes up after nine o’clock, gratefully observes that he does not feel distinctly ill, shuffles through “an annoying mail with nothing cheerful in it,” chats desultorily with his maid, has to lie down for fifteen minutes, and then unsuccessfully tries to write: “The problem was a magazine story that had become so thin in the middle that it was about to blow away. The plot was like climbing endless stairs, he had no element of surprise in reserve, and the characters who started so bravely day-before-yesterday couldn’t have qualified for a newspaper serial.” He ends by going through the manuscript “underlining good phrases in red crayon,” tucking these into a file, and dropping the rest into the wastebasket. The process, though dismal, seems more concrete than the creative processes in Handke's book, and there are phrases of sad self-illumination, of a flickering romantic light. Looking into a mirror, the writer calls himself “slag of a dream.” Out riding a bus, he comes into a district where “there were suddenly brightly dressed girls, all very beautiful … no plans or struggles in their faces, only a state of sweet suspension, provocative and serene.” He observes within himself a sudden spark of life force: “He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all.” A deflationary sentence immediately follows: “He thought perhaps he had made a mistake in coming out so soon.”

After getting a shampoo at a barbershop, he rides the bus back to his apartment, reflecting on reviews he received when young, at “the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had ‘fatal facility’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.” He feels fatigue and the “growing seclusion” of his life; he thinks of himself as needing “reforestation” and hopes “the soil would stand one more growth.” But, he further reflects, “it had never been the very best soil for he had had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing.” He makes it back home, chaffers bleakly with the maid, asks for a glass of milk, and lies down again: “He was quite tired—he would lie down for ten minutes and then see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner.” The reader doubts whether he will get started; the sketch of creative exhaustion is delicate but devastating. Death is not far off. Writer-consciousness, in Handke somehow exhilarating and enviable, in Fitzgerald weighs like a disease, a gathering burden of guilt. We pity the fellow, while perhaps admiring the subtle slight strokes by which his plight is sketched. As so often in Fitzgerald, we have only the afterglow of a dream to see by. There is a strong sense of professional predicament and none of cultural mission; a weary clarity but no wonderment.