Where Have You Been? (39 page)

 

ROBERT WALSER

So irregular, so appealing, and—if one may say—so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject's: “No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me.”

It's not that writing about Walser can't be done, it can be done endlessly and beautifully, but it seems unlikely to accomplish anything much. He offers so much scope for true statement, insight, and original expression. You write your piece, make your comparisons, press your claims, and at the end of it all you look up and see Walser, looking not much like your likeness of him, only slightly battered for having been the object of your attentions. It's like nailing the proverbial jelly to the wall. Susan Sontag talks about him slipping through the net of comparisons. It's perhaps not beside the point to recall that when a very young man, Walser wanted to be an actor, and while that ambition may have been squelched in the course of a typically humiliating encounter with an established actor who merely motioned toward the door, there remains something protean about him, even as a writer.

Walser inspires critics and admirers—and really he no longer has any of the former, only the latter—to feats of brilliant emulation, so that they outdo themselves, each other, and their subject. As a result, he can strike one not as a writer for readers, or even for other writers, so much as one for the commentators. Thus, to Susan Sontag (than whom one cannot easily imagine a more contrary personality or temperament), he is “a Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett.” Christopher Middleton writes: “Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte's apple (‘
Ceci n'est pas une pomme
').” Other comparisons on offer include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the inevitable Kafka, and a further trinity of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval, and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: “He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.” And a further, more modest name is offered: “The signature Harmless Crank could be appended to quite a few without discordance or much malice.” So we have Walser variously as yea- or nay-saying (does a “sweet Beckett” say yes or no?!), as priestly whiff of incense and as humdrum green ink, as artsy and crafty, as writer and eraser, eccentric and universal, recessive and bold. None of these is discounted by me; all, I think, are true. Just as true is another pair of opposed statements, Middleton again: “As author and individual, Walser articulates a large and general cast of mind, such as strictly ‘personal' writings seldom do.” And Gass again: “If Walser is a descriptive writer, and he is surely that, what he is describing, always, is a state of mind … and mostly the same mind, it would seem.” And to sum up the admirable summaries? That honor should go to Christopher Middleton, Walser's first translator—rare that that accolade should belong to someone working in the English language!—and his champion for nigh on fifty years, for whom his author remains “a wild particle,” whom one reads “for his blithe difference from colleagues in any age or condition—for his perfect and serene oddity.”

Start over. This is the essayist Franz Blei's recollection of his first meeting with Walser, in 1898:

A few days later, he stood in my room and said I am Walser. A tall rather lanky fellow with ruddy, bony features, under a thick blond thatch that fought off the comb, dreamy blue-grey eyes and beautifully formed large hands protruding from the sleeves of a jacket too small for him; they seemed not to know what to do with themselves, and wished they could have crept into the trouser-pockets so as not to be there. This was Walser, half journeyman apprentice, half page boy, all poet. He had brought along what I'd asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be crossed out and replaced in what was nonetheless a first draft. […] This young person gave every impression of having heard there was such a thing as poetry from hearsay or report, that he had invented the music and the instrument on which it was played at the same time, so wholly unformed by reading or literary taste were these poems.

Walser was twenty. The passage takes its place next to other celebrated early sightings, say, of Malcolm Lowry by Conrad Aiken, of Hugo von Hofmannsthal by Stefan George, of Rimbaud by Verlaine, of Whitman by Whitman. Blei captures what later observers would see too—what good readers of Walser could even intuit for themselves, I think—the strange mixture of ungainliness and delicacy, the rough, oxygenated outdoorsiness and the sheepish punctilio, the strong growth and the dreaminess, the evidence of health and the suspicion of pain, the high color and its confining translation into symbols on paper, the spiritual agency (speaking in the hands and the eyes) in an improbable and uncouth physical setting that is not, however, despised (any more than it is in Whitman). It shows Walser's self-aware, occasionally prickly poverty, his rough desire to please in the context of his independence, his extreme civilization—bashfulness, poems, beautiful hands that fear being seen—paired with his extreme wildness. All his life, it seems, he had a relish for the human animal, writing with notable, undissembled pleasure of walking, swimming, eating, but also a difficult flair for courtesies. Manners as difficulty, as confusion, as bristling or bridling defense, by the way, never as pleasantry or lubricant. (Walser wrote his own account of the meeting in a defiantly cringing, tormentedly grateful piece with the speaking title, “
Doktor Franz Blei
.” The squid in its cloud of ink encounters Cousteau.) It might be a scene reasonably early on in Caspar Hauser. The “page boy” is also no figure of speech or mistranslation; it is a recurring figure both in Walser's life and in his writing, the desire to be in service. At a later meeting in Munich, with a group of writers and publishers—notionally his equals and coevals in a joint venture, called
Die Insel
, the island—Walser promptly offered his services, Friday-like, to one young man, as it were, Blei's successor. There is a scene in service in Walser's first novel,
Geschwister Tanner
, where Simon goes to work for a woman who practically indentures him on the street, while the whole of his third,
Jakob von Gunten
, is set in an academy for—observe the self-contradiction—aspiring servants, like the one Walser himself attended in 1905. It is an expression of a whimsical but agonizing social and erotic desire, a relieving if also embarrassing admission of (then easily ironized) inferiority in a black-and-white world without gradations but offering instead a “place.” (See the stories “Tobold” or “Simon: A Love Story” in
Masquerade.
) The man who feels such a thing is clearly all at sea, with an endless craving for protection, disguise, or alibi, a uniform. (He enjoyed his time in the Swiss military.) He would like to give himself away but doesn't know how. It hardly needed Blei to note later, “but it turned out he could neither polish silver, nor iron a top hat.”

Twenty years later, 1919, another meeting, this time on Walser's own terrain, the Blue Cross Hotel in (Walser's birthplace) Biel, Switzerland, where he lodged for the best part of seven years in a garret. The man meeting him on this occasion, Emil Schibli, a Swiss writer, had come to express his admiration. Initial difficulty in establishing Walser's identity. He is somewhere among a group of workingmen taking their evening meal of coffee and potatoes (I think of the daunting ugliness captured in Van Gogh's early picture
The Potato Eaters
)—only which one is he? All look much of a muchness. Schibli makes inquiries of the waitress, duly intercepts Walser on his way out, explains his errand, would he care to walk with him awhile? Walser, not overjoyed, a little suspicious, agrees. They walk beside the lake in gathering darkness. Walser, thawing a little, begins to talk. Schibli realizes his last train home has left: what would Walser say to walking back with him in the night, it's two hours on foot. Walser promptly agrees:

The writer then stayed as our guest for a couple of days. Should I say something of his appearance? Well, he doesn't look the way a reader of his books would imagine him, or a painter paint him. All his books have something light, delicate, burbling, cheerful, elaborate, perhaps on occasion over-elaborate. The writer by contrast is heavy, taciturn, roughly built, a labourer, mechanic or engineer, it seems to me. At any rate he strikes me as being a thoroughly healthy man. His books are curious, eccentric, original, really bizarrely personal; the author is unremarkable, stolid, wholly unexceptional. Only his eyes are striking.

The page boy and the poet are effaced, but the longed-for anonymity is perfected. Only the eyes are left as a suggestion of an inner incongruity, a deep failure to match up or shape up. The behavior, already stiff in the early encounter with Blei, where one has a sense of someone negotiating a new presence and unfamiliar situation largely by sense of
smell
, is now even stranger: the traumatized hurtle of sympathy and trust from someone now and already almost beyond human contacts, frozen into habitual silence and self-communion, in which the burly frame and its delicate productions stare at one another aghast, in mutual suspicion and irony. Imagine Kafka as fat! Two rival identities, counteridentities, pretenders or pretendants. The difficulty of housing within oneself something so alien, or, conversely, of finding the human envelope so malapropos. Imagine Mishima in spreading middle age, or consider Franz Werfel's poem “Fat Man in the Mirror” in the translation by Robert Lowell: “O, it is not I.” But Walser's situation is worse: it is not one part of himself betraying or disappointing another, they are each at it. The centaur is neither a good human nor a good horse. Almost the most heartbreaking details in the accounts of him are the regular comments on his rude good health and his ultimately cordial if obstructed nature.

A third meeting, ten years on, in 1928, in the wake of a failed attempt to arrange a reading for Walser in the Swiss town of Thun. The recording visitor on this occasion is one Adolf Schaer-Ris, the setting the last of Walser's numerous short-term lodgings in Bern:

The badly dressed, gaunt figure that timidly appeared at the crack in the door, looking as if inclined to shut and bolt it immediately, has never left me in its moving helplessness. Nothing at all, nothing but the staring, soul-filled gleaming eyes betrayed the presence of this uncommon man. But for those eyes, one might have taken him for a common labourer. The voice sounded shaky, though perfectly friendly, warm and well-disposed. It proved impossible to get a proper conversation started. I had the feeling I was assisting at a human tragedy, and the name Hölderlin sounded in my head.

Hölderlin, who spent thirty-seven of his seventy-four years, half a lifetime in the words of his most celebrated short poem, in a state of what in German is called
Umnachtung
, benightedness—in the sense of having the balance of his mind impaired. In the following year, hearing voices, Walser is hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. He is—and later becomes—institutionalized. Opinions differ as to the reality and gravity of his condition. He continues to write and publish for a time, but later ceases—it appears almost consciously in order to conform to the expectations and conditions of madness. He dies on Christmas Day of 1956, from a heart attack while out walking.

The prevalent movement in Walser's writing—whether in sentence, paragraph, story, or entire career—is toward defeat. I don't quite like either of Susan Sontag's terms, “musicality” and “free fall”—musicality because it's a vague and rather tyrannical way of saying “I like this, even if you don't get it,” and free fall because it's untrue, in Walser you get fall of a most encumbered and musing and incident-filled kind—but they suggest the general area. The notion of defeat of course says nothing about the gallantry, the frolicsomeness, the imaginativeness, or the sheer assiduousness of Walser's writing, which remains the reader's overriding impression, but I don't think one can escape it. It remains a losing battle, and Walser's great qualities are displayed in an ironic, a rearguard or, most precisely, a Pyrrhic way, not least because he mistrusts an aesthetic of victory. Defeat, I think, is everywhere in him. Whether it's in possibly his single most famous sentence, his resignation from the Swiss writers' union of 1924, “Esteemed sir. After calmly considering the matter, I hereby announce my resignation from your union, signed Most Respectfully Robert Walser,” to almost arbitrarily selected beginnings and titles of pieces: “During this performance several people walked out” (“An Essay on Lion Taming”); “His birth was brilliant. If I'm not mistaken he was the outcome of an illicit relationship” (“Hercules”); “
And now he was playing, alas, the piano
…” (these instances all from his volume of short pieces,
Speaking to the Rose
), there is a Buster Keaton–like indomitably sad cheerfulness.

Puncturedness and swollenness appear indivisible, indistinguishable, it's impossible to say which condition brings on the other. The author is blowing into a wounded balloon. It's really no different in the early stories, in the other English collections: “The Boat” begins with a sinking feeling, “I think I've written this scene before, but I'll write it once again.” “Poets” begins: “To the question: how do authors of sketches, stories, and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: they are stragglers and they are down at heel,” and ends on the same note of ghastly jollity: “Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.” Here, incidentally, in that overqualified and hedged-about last sentence, put together from provocative falsehoods (“enchanting oblivion,” “like to lie”) and patnesses (“like … old bottles of wine,” “exalted to a place of honor”), is an instance of that blending of motivelessness and utter deliberateness, of control and abdication, that Walter Benjamin appreciated in Walser; he seems, by turns and putting it very bluntly, too stupid to be cynical and too cynical to be stupid. A sort of repro aesthetic (“Walser paints a postcard world,” says Gass) seems equally likely to serve a straightforwardly lyrical end as parody or persiflage: “Rarely have my eyes, ever eager to soak up beauty, seen a more delightfully and daintily situated little town than the one in which a quiet dreamer once requested, in an open, sun-splashed square, that a young intellectual with designs on becoming an authoress be so good as to inform him whether he might entertain hopes with regard to her excellent person” (“A Small Town”). One doesn't know whether to prescribe Don Quixote as an ideal reader for this sort of sweet Dulcinea tosh, or declare the adjective off-limits to the author. Certainly, he doesn't scruple to use them, either in a Roget-rrhoeal stream (“now there passed over the lake an exceptionally windy wind. It was a regular whirlwind racing over the clear, blue, beautiful, jubilant, bouncing, amiable, good water”) or with a bizarre, almost surreal pointedness.