Robert Walser

An essay on this Swiss writer by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

You can read a lot by Robert Walser, but nothing about him.  What then is known by the few among us who understand how to take these venal barbs the right way?  Not that the hack writer yearning for glory would "elevate" himself to such matters, but that he would employ their contemptible, improbable readiness to gain in vivacity and pureness.  Only few know what we are to make of this "minor form," as Alfred Polgar called it, and how much hope from the brash pillars of so-called "great books" fluttered in their own humble chalices.  And others haven't the slightest notion as to why they should be grateful to a Polgar, a Nessel or a Walser for their tender or spinous blossoms in the desolate pages of their unflowered fields.  To Walser, as it were, they would come last.  The first stimulation of their carefully gathered knowledge – the only feature of their writing – advises them to consider harmless the "polished" and "patrician" form of those things whose content they deem nugatory.  And it is precisely in the work of Robert Walser that an entirely unusual, often hard-to-describe neglect surfaces.  That this nullity carries weight and this absentmindedness longevity would be the last qualities you would guess belonged to Walser's works.                

Not to say that they're easy.  We are accustomed to seeing the puzzle of an author's style emerge through more or less honed and intentional artistic works; yet now we are confronted with linguistic imbrutement that, while obvious, is utterly unintentional and nevertheless attractive and captivating.   Confronted with an ease of hand that displays all emotions from bitterness to grace.  Seemingly, we believed, unintentional.  Often has it been debated as to whether this is true.  But this is a moot point, and one notices it when one considers Walser's confession that he never edited or amended a single line.  One need not believe him, of course, but it would be better to do so.  Yet one may take solace in the following insight: to write and never to edit or amend is the perfect intersection of both extreme unintentionality and greatest intent. 

So far, so good.  Yet this can in no way prevent this neglect from getting to the bottom of things.  We have already said that it contains all forms.  Now we add: with the exception of one.   Namely that one most common form which depends on the contents and on nothing more.  For Walser, the How of his work is so secondary that everything he has to say goes completely against the meaning of his text.  One could say that in his writing he, well, kicks the bucket.  That point should be explained.  And here is where one stumbles upon the very Swiss element of this writer – his shame.  The following story comes from Arnold Böcklin, his son Carlo and Gottfried Keller: they were sitting one day, as was often the case, in an inn.  Their regular table had already long since become famous thanks to the laconic and reticent manners of its clientele.  This time as well the drinking partners sat together in silence.  Then, after a long time had passed, the young Böcklin remarked: "It's hot."  And a quarter of an hour later the elder Böcklin quipped: "And calm."  For his part Keller waited a while; then he stood up with the words: "I do not wish to drink during idle chatter."  This rustic, countrified shame in talking, met with an eccentric witticism, is Walser's thing.  Hardly had he taken up his pen when he was overcome by a desperado mood.  Everything seemed forlorn to him, and a torrent of words gushed forth in which every sentence's sole task was the make you forget the preceding sentences.  When he in a virtuoso piece transforms the monologue "he has to walk down this empty street" into prose, he begins with the classic words "down this empty street."  But here his William Tell is already beset by fear, and he seems weak, small, lost, and so he continues: "Down this empty street, I think, he has to walk."     

Certainly some similarities could be detected.  This prudish, artistic awkwardness in all language matters is the inheritance of fools.  If Polonius, the embodiment of garrulousness, is a juggler, Walser adorns himself like Bacchus with wreaths of language that will overthrow him.  Indeed, a wreath is the picture of his sentences. The thought, however, that stumbles upon this is a dawdler, thug and genius, like the heroes in Walser's prose.  As it were, he can only depict heroes and can never shake himself free of his main characters.  He even drops the matter in his three early novels so that he henceforth can live alone in brotherhood with hundreds of his favorite layabouts.

There are already some great examples in Germanic literature of the pococurante, good-for-nothing dawdler hero.  A master of such characters, Knut Hamsun, has just been celebrated.  Eichendorff with his good-for-nothing and Hebel, who created the Zundel brothers, are others.  How do Walser's characters function in this society?  And where are they from?  Where the good-for-nothing is from, we already know.  From the woods and valleys of Romantic Germany.  The Zundel brothers are derived from the rebellious, enlightened bourgeoisie of the Rhein cities at the turn of the century.  Hamsun's characters come from the primeval world of the fjords – people whose homesickness drives them to wander about aimlessly.  And Walser's?  Perhaps from the Glarus mountains?  Appenzell's meadows, where he's from?  Not from there, either.  They come from the night, blackest night, a Venetian night, if you will, lit by the comfortless lanterns of hope, with a solid sheen in their eyes, yet disturbed and sad enough to cry.  And what they cry is prose.  Sobbing is the melody of Walser's garrulousness.  It reveals to us where his loves come from – from madness, as it were, and from nowhere else.  There are characters who have their madness behind them and remain entrapped in a disruptive, so completely inhuman and unflinching superficiality.  If one wanted to name the happy and eerie facets to these characters in one word, one would use the word "healed."  Of course, we never learn anything of the healing process unless we take his "Snow White" – one of the most profound works of modern writing – which alone would suffice to make us understand why this apparently most misinterpreted of all writers was a favorite of the merciless Franz Kafka.

These stories are extraordinarily tender – that much is clear enough to everyone.  Yet not everyone sees that therein lies not the nervous tension of the decadent, but the pure and brisk mood of the convalescing life.  "I am horrified at the thought of having success in this world," said Walser in a paraphrase of Franz Moor's dialogue.  All his heroes share this fear.  But why?  In no way owing to repulsion and antipathy, a resentment in mores or pathos, but for completely epicurean reasons.  They wish to enjoy themselves.  And for that they have an utterly unusual fate, as well as an utterly unusual nobility and right.  No one, you see, enjoys life as much as the convalescent.  He is quite distant from the orgiastic; the flow of his renewed blood sounds like the purling of streams and his breath from his lips comes from the treetops. This child-like nobility is shared by Walser's people and fairy tale characters, who also appear out of the night and madness, the madness of myth.  One usually is of the opinion that this awakening achieved perfection in the positive religions.  If that were the case then it took place in no very simple or unambiguous form.  This should be handled in the course of the great profane debate with myth that fairy tales provide.  Of course, these characters do not possess any simple similarity to Walser's creations.  They fight to free themselves from suffering.  And Walser enters where the fairy tales stop.  "And if we're not dead, then we will still be living today."  Walser shows how they live.  His things are, and here I will end as he begins: stories, essays, poetry, shorter prose, and suchlike.      

Der Hund (part 2)

The conclusion to a story ("The dog") by this Swiss man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

How could I ever forget our love?  The windows loomed somewhere in the room as a horizon of slender right angles above our nakedness.  We lay there body against body, sinking further and further into one another, embracing with rising desire, and the noises from the street combined with the forlorn screams of our lust.  Sometimes it was the shuffling stumble of the intoxicated; at other times, the traipsing of the neighborhood harlots; at still other times, the long monotonous stomp of a passing army cohort which resolved itself into the crispness of horses' hoofs and the rolling of wheels.  We lay together below the earth's surface, swathed in its warm darkness, no longer afraid; and from the corner where the man was sleeping on his mattress soundlessly as if he were dead, we saw the yellow eyes of the dog staring at us, round slices of two sulphuric moons spying on our love.

An incandescent autumn came, yellow and red, followed late in the year by winter – mild, without the venturesome cold of previous years.  Nevertheless I never managed to lure the girl out of the basement to introduce her to my friends, to go to the theater (where radical things were taking place), or even to stroll together at daybreak through the woods that expanded over the hills and surrounded the town in waves.  She would only sit there at the fir wood table until her father came home with the big dog, and until she pulled me into her bed by the windows' yellow light.  As spring approached, however, and the town still lay in snow – dirty and wet and a meter high in the shade – the girl came to my rooms. 

The sun was shining crookedly through the window.  It was late in the afternoon and I had laid some firewood in the furnace.  And then she appeared, wan and trembling, and most likely freezing as well since she came coatless and, as always, in her dark blue dress.  It was only her shoes, red and lined with fur, which I had never seen before. 

"You have to kill the dog," said the girl, out of breath and still on the threshold of my door.

Her eyes were wide open and she had the distinct appearance of a ghost.  For that reason I dared not touch her and, instead, I went over to the closet and produced a revolver.

"I knew that you would eventually ask me to do this," I said, "so I bought a gun.  When should I do it?"

"Right now," replied the girl softly.  "Father is also scared of the animal – and now I know that he's always been scared of it."

I inspected the gun and put on my coat. 

"They're in the basement," said the girl as she lowered her gaze.  "Father's been lying on the mattress the whole day, so terrified that he cannot move much less pray, and the dog has stationed himself in front of the door."

We went down along the river and then over the stone bridges.  The sky was deep and threateningly red like a gigantic blaze, and the sun had just set.  The town was livelier than normal, full of people and cars moving beneath what resembled a sea of blood since in their windows and walls the houses reflected the evening light.  We walked through the crowds.  We hurried through ever-narrowing traffic, lines of stopped cars and careening buses that seemed like monsters with dull and evil eyes, and policemen in grey helmets motioning excitedly.  I pushed my way through with such determination that I left the girl behind.  Finally I ran down the street, panting and with my coat wide open as an increasingly violet and increasingly powerful twilight took hold – yet I came too late.  When I had kicked down the door and burst into the basement, gun in hand, I saw the enormous shadow of the horrible beast escaping through the window, its panes shattered.  And on the floor, a white mass in a black pool, the man lay there, having been torn to pieces by the dog to such a degree that he was unrecognizable.       

As I leaned trembling against the wall and sinking into the books, I heard the car sirens outside.  A stretcher was brought in.  In the shadows I saw a doctor by the deceased and heavily armed policemen with pale faces.  People were standing all around.  I called out to the girl.  Then I raced into town over the bridges and back to my rooms, but I didn't find her.  Desperately I searched without rest or sustenance.  Because everyone was afraid of the giant animal, the police was mobilized, as were the soldiers from the barracks who walked through the woods in long chains stretched over a distance.  Boats were dropped into the dirty yellow river and searches were conducted with long poles.  Then when spring came, bringing with it warm rain showers that led to an inordinate amount of flooding, the quarries and their hollows were searched with raised voices and torches.  The sewers were entered and the cathedral's screed was scrutinized.  But the girl could not be found and the dog never appeared again.

Three days later I came back late one night to my rooms, exhausted and without hope.  I threw myself on the bed fully dressed and then I heard steps on the street below.  I ran to the window, opened it and leaned out into the night.  The street lay before me like a black strip still wet from the rain which had fallen until midnight.  The street lamps were reflected on the street as coadunate golden specks; and outside along the trees, the girl was walking in her dark dress and red shoes, her hair flowing in long strands and shimmering blue in the lights of that late hour.  And beside her walked a dark shadow, gentle and silent like a lamb, the dog with its round, sparkling yellow eyes.

Der Hund (part 1)

The first part of a story ("The dog") by this Swiss man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

My first few days in town, on the small square in front of town hall, I found a few people gathered around a disheveled man who was reading aloud from the Bible.  Only later did I notice the dog lying at his feet; and only later did I wonder how such a huge and repulsive animal, a beast of deepest black and smooth, sweat-covered fur, had not gained my immediate attention.  Its eyes were the yellow of sulphur; when it opened its mouth, with horror I noticed teeth of the selfsame hue; and its shape was unlike any other being I had ever seen.  Once the sight of the enormous animal became unbearable I cast my eyes towards the preacher.  He was a stocky fellow and his clothes hung in rags upon his person; yet his skin shimmering through the patches and holes and even the tattered clothes themselves were all extremely clean.  His Bible looked expensive, with diamonds and gold twinkling about the binding.  The man's voice was steady and calm.  His words were distinguished by an extraordinary clarity so that his speech appeared simple and sure, and here I also noticed that he never used parables.  What came forth was a calm and unfanatical exposition of the Bible.  And if his words were not convincing, this was only because of the dog as he lay at the man's feet and watched the crowd with yellow eyes. 

This odd connection between preacher and animal was what captivated me at present and made me seek out the man again and again.  Every day he would preach on the town squares and in the streets, yet he was not easy to find.  Even though he would practice his craft well into the night, it was the town that confused me despite its clear and simple layout.  Many times it was evident that he left his home at varied hours and never had a set plan for his activity nor any rules for his performances.  Sometimes he would hold forth all day on the same square; sometimes he would change location every fifteen minutes.  But his dog, black and dauntingly large, accompanied him wherever he went, walked beside him as he paced the streets, then lay down with a thud when the man began to preach. 

He never enjoyed a large audience.  Mostly he would stand alone, although I was able to observe him in such a way as not to fluster him, and instead of leaving the square, he would simply keep talking.  I often saw him praying aloud in the middle of a small street as people inattentively walked by.  Since I was never able to develop a surer method of locating the preacher and always relied on chance, I decided to look for where he lived – but no one wished to give me the slightest bit of information.  To that end, I followed him one time the whole day long.  It turned out that I had to repeat my actions for many days since every evening he would vanish owing to my efforts to keep my face hidden and unknown.  At length, one night I was astounded to see him entering a house in a street that domiciled only the town's richest citizens.  Henceforth my behavior towards him changed: I forsook my clandestineness to place myself in closest proximity so that he would be obliged to take notice, an act that, as it were, disturbed him not in the least.  Only the dog growled every time I came up to him.

And in this way many weeks passed.  It was then in waning summer when he, upon completing his exposition of the Gospel of St. John, accosted me and asked whether I would walk him home.  He said nothing more as we walked through the streets; and as we entered his house it was already so dark that he turned on the lamp in the large room into which he had led me.  The room was more deeply situated than the street so that from the door we had to walk a few steps down and I could not see the walls as they were covered from floor to ceiling in books.  Under the lamp was a large, plain table made of fir wood at which a girl was standing and reading.  She was wearing a dark blue dress and did not turn around when we came in.  Beneath the two cellar windows imposed upon the room lay a mattress and, against the opposite wall, a bed; at the table stood two chairs.  By the door was a furnace.  Yet as we approached the girl turned around and I was able to see her face.  She held out her hand and indicated a chair, at which point I noticed that the man was already lying on the mattress and the dog, as always, laid itself down at his feet.

"That's my father sleeping," said the girl, "and he can't hear us talk.  The large black dog has no name.  He just came to our house one evening as my father began preaching.  We hadn't locked the door so he was able to push the handle down with his paws and make his way in." 

I stood numb before the girl and then asked in a soft voice about her father and his past. 

"My father was a rich man, the owner of many factories," said the girl and lowered her eyes.  "He left my mother and my brothers to spread the truth to humanity." 

"Do you think that what your father spreads is indeed the truth?"  I asked.

"It is," she said, "it is the truth.  I always knew that it was the truth.  That's why I moved into this cellar and continue to live with him.  But what I didn't know was that once he spread the truth, the dog would come."  

The girl fell silent and looked as if she were about to ask me for something that she dared not say aloud.

"Then send him away.  The dog, I mean," I replied.  But the girl shook her head.

"He has no name, and so he won't go," she said gently.  She perceived my indecision and sat down on one of the chairs at the table.  I sat down as well.

"Are you afraid of this animal?"  I asked.

"I have always been afraid of him," she said.  "When my mother came with her attorney about a year ago to take me and my father back, my brothers were also very afraid of our nameless dog.  The dog of course just plopped himself down next to my father and growled.  Even when I lie in bed I am afraid of him – and then especially so – but now everything has changed.  Now you have come and now I can laugh at the beast.  I always knew that you would come.  Naturally, I didn't know what you looked like; but I knew that sooner or later you would come home with my father one evening when the lamp was already on and the streets were quiet to celebrate our wedding night in this half-underground room, here in my bed near all these books.  And here we would lie next to one another, a man and a woman, and over there father would be on his mattress in the dark like a child, and the large black dog would keep a vigil over our love."                           

Rilke, "Und einmal lös ich in der Dämmerung"

A work ("Once I release at twilight's gleam") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

Once I release at twilight's gleam     
The shoulder and the lap-borne stakes
From my dark dress, a lie undone,                  
And pale and bare, dive at the sun 
And show my youth to my old sea –  

The breakers will in waves atone
And ready me for solemn days.
And each will tremble, each will shake, 
So how should I shout back alone?     
It scares me so ...                

Yet I know light-wrapped waves entice
The last remains of freshest wind;
And there again my arms will rise, 
And once again will it begin. 

Rilke, "Rufe mich zu jeder deiner Stunden"

A poem ("Call me each hour you still resist") by this Austrian writer.  You can read the original here.

Call me each hour you still resist  
The endless hours you call your life,                  
Beseeching near in dog-faced mist, 
Yet always turned away in strife

Should you now see their meaning's gloam. 
And mostly yours was what we lost; 
Yet we are free, left there to roam
Where we believe our paths first crossed. 

And fearful do we yearn for pause,   
Too young sometimes for yarn and lace, 
Too old for that which never was.  

And we alone still praise that place,
Alas, where we're both branch and brawn,
The sweetness of ripe danger's song.