His pen was a high-end metal ball-point instrument that rested in the crook of his right hand. You might have thought he had traveled to Europe, or that his parents allowed him a little wine with dinner. Like Frédérique, my classmate seemed to have a sense of style and grace that the rest of us lacked. And I still write like Frédérique today, and people tell me I have beautiful, interesting handwriting. Of course I pretended not to be surprised, I barely glanced at it. (Twenty years later I saw something similar in a dedication Pierre Jean Jouve had written on a copy of Kyrie). We almost all had the same kind of handwriting, uncertain, childish, with round, wide ‘o’s. When I saw her writing I couldn’t believe it. In our lives at school, each of us, if we had a little vanity, would establish a façade, a kind of double life, affect a way of speaking, walking, looking.
The first thing I thought was: she had been further than I had.” She is thrown for a loop when a new, slightly older girl named Frédérique arrives, with looks like “those of an idol, disdainful.” Our narrator is both enchanted and put off by Frédérique: “She had no humanity. The nameless fourteen-year-old narrator boards at a school called Appenzell in Switzerland. It was a comfort to see this precise sentiment presented in the opening pages of Fleur Jaeggy’s 1989 novella Sweet Days of Discipline, which was first published in English in 1993 (for New Directions, translated by Tim Parks).
To that end, I envied my new classmate to the point of bitterness. I wanted that to come through in the work I put out in the world. I liked it when something came out looking nice. Penmanship in elementary school was about following rules, which I thought I did well, but my grades in that area were atrocious to the point that I was made to do extra practice exercises, an assignment that offended me for what it implied about my priorities. It was astonishing to watch, and worse, he had no idea how good he was at it. When I was in fifth grade, our class was joined by a boy who had the most exquisite handwriting.
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