The Tanners
Robert Walser
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
With an introduction by W. G. Sebald
(translated by Jo Catling)
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
Contents
Introduction, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” by W. G. Sebald
The Tanners
The Tanners
LE PROMENEUR SOLITAIRE
A Remembrance of Robert Walser
by W.G. Sebald
The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one food suit and one less so. Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written. What he read was for the most part borrowed. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions, so too was he remote from other people. He became more and more distant from even the siblings closest to him––the painter Karl and the beautiful schoolteacher Lisa––until in the end, as Martin Walser said of him, he was the most unattached of all solitary poets. For him, evidently, coming to an arrangement with a woman was an impossibility. The chambermaids in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, whom he used to watch through a peephole he had bored in the wall of his attic lodgings; Fräulein Resy Breitbach in the Rhineland, with whom he maintained a length correspondence––all of them were, like the ladies he reveres so longingly in his literary fantasias, beings from a distant star. At a time when large families were still the norm––Walser's father Adolf came from a family of fifteen––strangely enough none of the eight siblings in the next generation brought a child into the world; and of all this last generation of Walsers, dying out together, as it were, non was perhaps less suited to fulfil the prerequisites for successful procreation than Robert, who, as one may say in his case with some fittingness, retained his virginal innocence all his life. The death of Robert Walser, who, inevitably rendered even more anonymous after the long years in an institution, was in the end connected to almost nothing and nobody, might easily have passed as unnoticed as, for a long time, had his life. That Walser is not today among the forgotten writers we owe primarily to the fact that Carl Seelig took up his cause. Without Seelig's accounts of the walks he took with Walser, without his preliminary work on the biography, without the selections from the work he published and the lengths he went to in securing the Nachlass, the writer's millions of illegible ciphers, Walser's rehabilitation could never have taken place, and his memory would in all probability have faded into oblivion. Nonetheless, the fame which has accrued around Walser since his posthumous redemption cannot be compared with that of, say, Benjamin or Kafka. Now as then Walser remains a singular, enigmatic figure. He refused by and large to reveal himself to his readers. According to Elias Canetti, what set Walser apart from other writers was the way that in his writing he always denied his innermost anxieties, constantly omitting a part of himself. This absence, so Canetti claimed, was the source of his unique strangeness. It is odd, too, how sparsely furnished with detail is what we know of the story of his life. We know that his childhood was overshadowed by his mother's melancholia and by the decline of his father's business year after year; that he wanted to train as an actor; that he did not last long in any of his positions as a clerk; and that he spent the years from 1905 to 1913 in Berlin. But what he may have been doing there apart from writing––which at the time came easily to him––about that we have no idea at all. So little does he tell us about the German metropolis, so little, later, of the Seeland around Biel and his years there, and his circumstances in Berne, that one might almost speak of a chronic poverty of experience. External events, such as the outbreak of the First World War, appear to affect him hardly at all. The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it. When he can no longer go on we see him in the Waldau clinic, doing a bit of work in the garden or playing a game of billiards against himself, and finally we see him in the asylum in Herisau, scrubbing vegetables in the kitchen, sorting scraps of tinfoil, reading a novel by Friedric Gerstäcker or Jules Verne and sometimes, as Robert Mächler relates, just standing stiffly in a corner. So far apart are the scenes of Walser's life which have come down to us that one cannot really speak of a story or of a biography at all, but rather, or so it seems to me, of a legend. The precariousness of Walser's existence––persisting even after his death––the emptiness blowing through every part of it, lends it an air of spectral insubstantiality which may deter the professional critics just as much as the indefinability of the texts. No doubt Martin Walser is correct in remarking that Robert Walser––despite the fact that his work seems positive to invite dissertation––always eludes any kind of systematic treatment. How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows and who, nonetheless, illumined every page with the most genial light, an author who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, to whom his own thoughts, honed on the tiniest details, became incomprehensible, who had his feet firmly on the ground yet was always getting lost in the clouds, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, event and things of which it spoke. Was it a lady called Wanda or a wandering apprentice, Fräulein Else or Fräulein Edith, a steward, a servant or Dostoyevsky's Idiot, a conflagration in the theatre or an ovation, the Battle of Sempach, a slap in the face or the return of the Prodigal, a stone urn, a suitcase, a pocket watch or a pebble? Everything written in these incomparable books has––as their author might himself have said––a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable. Conversely, Walser's sottises often conceal the profoundest depths of meaning. Despite such difficulties, however, which seem designed to foil the plans of anyone intent on categorization, much has been written about Robert Walser. Most of it, admittedly, is of a rather impressionistic or marginal nature, or can be regarded as an act of hommage on the part of his admirers. Nor are the remarks which follow any exception, for since my encounter with walker, I too have only ever been able to read him in an unsystematic fashion. Beginning here and now there, for years I have been roaming around, now in the novels, now in the realms of the Bleistiftsgebiet (Pencil Regions), and whenever I resume my intermittent reading of Walser's writings, so too I always look again at the photographs we have of him, seven very different faces, stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe which has taken place between each.
The pictures I am most familiar with are those from his time in Herisau, showing Walser on one of his long walks, for there is something in the way that the poet, long since retired from the service of the pen, stands there in the landscape
that reminds me instinctively of my grandfather Josef Egelhofer, with whom as a child I often used to go for walks for hours at a time during those very same years, in a region which is in many ways similar to that of Appenzell. When I look at these pictures of him on his walks, the cloth of Walser's
three-piece suit, the soft collar, the tie-pin, the liver-spots on the back of hi
s hands, his neat pepper-and-salt moustache and the quiet expression in his eyes––each time I think I see my grandfather before me. Yet it was not only in their appearance that my grandfather and Walser resembled each other, but also in their general bearing, something about the way each had of holding his hat in his hand, and the way that, even in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat. For a long time I even imagined that my grandfather shared with Walser the habit of leaving the top button of his waistcoat undone.
Whether or not that was actually the case, it is a fact that both died in the same year, 1956––Walser, as is well known, on a walk he took on the 25th of December, and my grandfather on the 14th of April, the night before Walser's last birthday, when it snowed once more even though spring was already underway. Perhaps that is the reason why now, when I think back to my grandfather's death, to which I have never been able to reconcile myself, in my mind's eye I always see him lying on the horn sledge on which Walser's body––after he had been found in the snow and photographed––was taken back to the asylum. What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusion of the self and of the sense, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationship, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension? Carl Seelig relates that once, on a walk with Robert Walser, he had mentioned Paul Klee––they were just on the outskirts of the hamlet of Balgach––and scarcely had he uttered the name than he caught sight, as they entered the village, of a sign in an empty shop window bearing the words Paul Klee––Carver of Wooden Candlesticks. Seelig does not attempt to offer an explanation for the strange coincidence. He merely registers it, perhaps because it is precisely the most extraordinary things which are the most easily forgotten. And so I too will just set down without comment what happened to me recently while reading The Robber, the only one of Walser's longer works with which I was at the time still unfamiliar. Quite near the beginning of the book the narrator states that the Robber crossed Lake Constance by moonlight. Exactly thus––by moonlight––is how, in one of my own stories, Aunt Fini imagines the young Ambros crossing the selfsame lake, although, as she makes a point of saying, this can scarcely have been the case in reality. Barely two page further on, the same story relates how, later, Ambros, while working as a room service waiter at the Savoy in London, made the acquaintance of a lady from Shanghai, about whom, however, Aunt Fini knows only that she had a taste for brown kid gloves and that, as Ambros once noted, she marked the beginning of his Trauerlaufbahn (career in mourning). It is a similarly mysterious woman clad all in brown, and referred to by the narrator as the Henri Rousseau woman, whom the Robber meets, two pages on from the moonlit scene on Lake Constance, in a pale November wood––and nor is that all: a little later in the text, I know not from what depths, there appears the word Trauerlaufbahn, a word which I believed, when I wrote it down at the end of the Savoy episode, to be an invention entirely my own. I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, but it is one thing to set a marker in memory of a departed colleague, and quite another when one has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.
Who and what Robert Walser really was is a question to which, despite my strangely close relationship with him, I am unable to give any reliable answer. The seven photographic portraits of him, as I have said, show very different people; a youth filled with a quiet sensuality; a young man hiding his anxieties as he prepares to make his way in bourgeois society; the heroic-looking writer of brooding aspect in Berlin; a 37-year-old with pale, watery-clear eyes; the Robber, smoking and dangerous-looking; a broken man; and finally the asylum inmate, completely destroyed and at the same time saved. What is striking about these portraits is not only how much they differ, but also the palpable incongruity inherent in each––a feature which, I conjecture, stems at least in part from the contradiction between Walser's native Swiss reserve and utter lack of conceit, and the anarchic, bohemian and dandyesque tendencies he displayed at the beginning of his career, and which he later hid, as far as possible, behind a façade of solid respectability. He himself relates how one Sunday he walked from Thun to Berne wearing a "louche pale yellow summer suit and dancing pumps" and on his head a "deliberately dissolute, daring, ridiculous hate." Sporting a cane, in Munich he promenades through the Englischer Garten to visit Wedekind, who shows a lively interest in his loud check suit––quite a compliment, considering the extravagant fashion in vogue among the Schwabinger bohème at the time. He describes the walking outfit he work on the long trek to Würzburg as having a "certain southern Italian appearance. It was a sort of species of suit in which I could have been seen to advantage in Naples. In reasonable, moderate Germany however it seemed to arouse more suspicion than confidence, more repulsion than attraction. How daring and fantastical I was at twenty-three!" A fondness for conspicuous costume and the dangers of indigence often go hand in hand. Hölderlin, too, is said to have had a definite penchant for fine clothes and appearance, so that his dilapidated aspect at the beginning of his breakdown was all the more alarming to his friends. Mächler recalls how Walser once visited his brother at the island of Rügen wearing threadbare and darned trousers, even though the latter had just made him a present of a brand-new suit, and in this context cites a passage of The Tanners in which Simon is reproached by his sister thus: "For example, Simon, look at your trousers: all ragged at the bottom! To be sure, and I know this perfectly well myself: They're just trousers, but trousers should be kept in just as good a condition as one's soul, for when a person wears torn, ragged trousers it displays carelessness, and carelessness is an attribute of the soul. Your soul must be ragged too." This reproach may well go back to remarks Lisa was at times won't to make about her brother's appearance, but the inspired turn of phrase at the end––the reference to the ragged soul––that, I think, is an original aperçu on the part of the narrator, who is under no illusion as to how things stand with his inner life. Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age, transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity. This is why he had no time for the grandiose tones in which the "dilettantes of the extreme left," as he calls them, were in those days proclaiming the revolution in art. He is no Expressionist visionary prophesying the end of the world, but rather, as he says in the introduction to Fritz Kocher's Essays, a clairvoyant of the small. From his earliest attempts on, his natural inclination is for the most radical minimization and brevity, in other words the possibility of setting down a story in one fell swoop, without any deviation or hesitation. Walser shares this ambition with the Jugendstil artists, and like them he is also prone to the opposite tendency of losing himself in arabesques. The playful––and sometimes obsessive––working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details is one of the most striking characteristics of Walser's idiom. The word-eddies and turbulence created in the middle of a sentence by exaggerated and participial constructions, or conglomerations of verbs such as "haben helfen dürfen zu verhindern" ("have been able to help to prevent"); neologisms, such as for example "das Manschettelige" ("cuffishness") or "das Angstmeierliche" ("chicken-heartedness"), which scuttle away under our gaze like millipedes; the "night-bird shyness, a flying-over-the-seas-in-the-dark, a soft inner whimpering" which, in a bold flight of metaphor, the narrator of The Robber claims hovers above one of Dürer's female figures; deliberate curiosities such as the sofa "squeaching" ("gyxelnd") under the charming weight of a seductive lady; the regionalisms, redolent of things long fallen into disuse; the almost manic loquaciousness––these are all elements in the painstaking process of elaboration Walser indulges in, out of a fear of reaching the end to
o quickly if––as is his inclination––he were to set down nothing but a beautifully curved line with no distracting branches or blossoms. Indeed, the detour is, for Walser, a matter of survival. "These detours I'm making serve the end of filling time, for I really must pull off a book of considerable length, otherwise I'll be even more deeply despised than I am now." On the other hand, however, precisely these linguistic montages––emerging as they do from the detours and digressions of narrative and, especially, of form––are exactly what is most at odds with the demands of high culture. Their associations with nonsense poetry and the word-salad symptomatic of schizophasia were never likely to increase the market value of their author. And yet it is precisely his uniquely overwrought art of formulation which true readers would not be without for the world, for example in this passage from the Bleistiftsgebiet (Pencil Regions) which, comic and heartbreaking in equal measure, condense a whole romantic melodrama into the space of a few lines. What Walser achieves her is the complete and utter subjugation of the writer to the language, a pretense at awkwardness brought off with the utmost virtuosity, the perfect realization of that irony only ever hinted at by the German Romantics yet never achieved by any of them, with the possible exception of Hoffman, in their writings. "In vain, the passage in question tells us, regarding the beautiful Herta and her faithless Italian husband, "did she buy, in the finest first class boutiques, for her most highly respected darling rake and pleasure-seeker, a new walking cane, say, or the finest and warmest coat which she could find, procure or purchase. His heart remained indifferent beneath the carefully chosen item of clothing and the hand hard which used the can, and while this scoundrel––oh that we might be permitted to call him thus––frivolously flitted or flirted around, there trickled from those big tragic eyes, embellished by heartache with dark rims, heavy tears like pearls, and here we must remark, too, that the rooms where such intimate misfortune was played out were fairly brimming with gloomy, fantastically be-palmleaved decoration gilded further by the height and scale of the whole. "Little sentence, little sentence"––so Walser concludes this escapade which is all but grammatically derailed by the end, "you seem to me fantastical as well, you do!" And then, coming down to earth, he adds the sober phrase, "But let us continue."