At the same time chance gave him the opportunity to become a flagrant bumbler regarding one success, which he had presumed was his due but had been unable to effect.
To see him tumble from the height of his innumerable sanguinities to the depth of the loss of what had, until then, been his perfectly sincere impudence was a uniquely beautiful, but also quite risible, spectacle.
His splendid arrogance abandoned him.
Something rigid took possession of his demeanor.
Supplenesses bid him adieu.
The elderly made fun of his incarcerated appearance, since in fact he evoked the impression that his vivacity had been imprisoned and he personified self-captivation itself.
Whoever was young avoided him; whoever was pretty paid him no heed; whoever was elegant wrinkled their noses when he showed up; whoever had a beautiful and kind disposition looked at him as if he were vile.
What’s good is what pleases.
Why was it that so many began their careers with an excess of savoir faire?
Now he stood on the threshold of the vastness of the evening of his life, while I ask myself what embonpoint is.
What a droll word!
One certainly understands by it something quite nice and pleasant: health, élan, worthwhile transactions, relations to anything profitable, including female acquaintances.
Probably it was this that eluded him.
(1931–1932)
THE BOURGEOIS
RECENTLY I took delight in a book that allowed me, in its easy comprehensibility and comparatively clear form, to notice an identifiable-at-a-glance bourgeois enticed by the notion of being interesting.
That he was sweet-tempered by nature and birth embarrassed him not a little. Carrying on in a bourgeois manner, which came easy to him, he thought it his duty to penetrate the depths and rise to the heights.
When, for example, he had the opportunity, let’s say, to kiss the hand of a woman, he imagined without the slightest effort something far from ordinary.
Most of all it was the everyday he instinctively loved, and at the same time consciously—that is, in a sense, with the help of his literary knowledge, possibly, that is to say, nimbly flowing in and out of him—despised.
To be lively, polite, agreeable, sympathetic, and virtuous had something picayune and petty about it, which, when he lunched or went for a stroll, he more or less feared. He was afraid others might assume he was nothing more than an honest, nice, useful fellow.
Was he tied to the goddess Vanity’s little apron strings? Could be.
He read only unsimple, complicated books taking on or constituting the cosmopolitan or even the demonic, which deformed him, made him, in other words, from day to day more demanding on himself and his excellent fellow man.
If he met a neighbor who seemed to him bourgeois, he smirked or took the liberty to comment ironically on the fine weather, in order to impress on the addressee how insignificant he was to him.
Under certain circumstances to be insignificant is a blessing.
Thereby, it seems, the one who in no way wanted to be unworthy of recognition exposed his weakness.
Now and then he clearly recognized this. But then again not. When he felt completely content, he convinced himself he was doing himself harm. One has to be annoyed, was his possibly bourgeois, because anti-bourgeois, point of view.
One day the imperfect bourgeois met the consummate representative of coffeepot coziness, by whose manner the thought occurred to him that he, the one in conflict with himself, might be in error.
All the same, he continued never to be what he was, instead constantly attempted to envision what he was incapable of becoming.
An odd person, don’t you think?
(1931–1932)
THE PIPSQUEAK
THE PIPSQUEAK had been ruined by women.
With only a little effort, one can always catch certain men in their “flight from the female.”
When someone isn’t hugely successful in what he strives for and is surrounded by adversities, when life affords him the chance to struggle against obstacles and so on, his friends always say it’s due to women.
“It’s over with for him,” they pityingly cry out. “For the sake of his career, why didn’t he stay away from women?”
Because the pipsqueak was a sweetie to women, he meant nothing to them. One doesn’t even have to think about this.
Regarding the current writing profession, it seems today the pipsqueak is celebrating his fiftieth birthday.
He wrote close to a hundred short novels, which, no matter how harshly you criticize them from a literary standpoint, forced their way into the public.
It’s not known to me exactly whether his works, which we can divide or dissect into numerous individual dismemberednesses, could have been composed in a room on the ground floor, its windows and doors open during the act of writing, so that fresh air could waft around his enterprise.
From time to time the fervently poeticizing prose writer may have stepped up to the piano in order to melodiously recover from the strain of his literary profession.
The pipsqueak wrote mainly for those provincial girls who enter some kind of employment, of whom it’s easy to believe they possess great feeling, and whom nature has bequeathed the peculiarity quickly to lose heart and just as quickly deem themselves reinvigorated.
We gather from the pipsqueak’s countenance a by no means disagreeable procuration of reserve.
With a certain goodness he offered what sprang from the well of his exceptional disposition. As his altogether unattractive splendidness now and then was inclined to accept an honorarium and never thought about giving something in return, he was somehow, nonetheless, if we may lift lightly from Goethe, helpful and noble.
His art, if not epochal, afforded employment to all kinds of craftsmen’s hands. To each of his tiny works he bestowed the most advantageous titlings.
Now and again his skill, as if emanating from a kind of asleepness, bore the stamp of calculated naïveté and artificial unartificiality.
His picture can be found in a den offering a charming view of a distinctive landscape, where his poetic life’s work to the present, neatly ordered, finished, and at the same time still incomplete, is appropriately presented, volume after volume, on a shelf.
By the way, just as a precaution, for the moment I consider no one the prettiest lass in town.
If I don’t count the pipsqueak as one of the best, it’s partly because, in my opinion, what we call reality stubbornly refuses always to be in accord with us.
Regarding his more distant path, we can at least wish him luck.
(1932)
Translated with Annette Wiesner
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
EARTHY, fiery she’s rumored to have been. I’m much obliged for the perfection of her unmediatedness. She grew up in a happy circle. Nicely done! Because of her many drolleries and fresh-from-the-wellspring behavior, her social peers appeared to have worshipped her. I understand this and find the affection granted her by her relatives quite proper. She needed only to open her mouth to be met with thunderous applause. She became a wife and mother, but in spite of these developments, gazed cheerfully about her, offered up brilliantly witty flippancies. While her son followed his calling, she remained the youthful naif bristling with originality which, so to speak, she caressed. In matters of faith and hope she was something of a genius. For example, she knew how to instill her religiosity with idiosyncrasies. In the salons she behaved in a refined manner, yet at the same time gauchely. While chicly displaying her French, she clung with insuperable fervor to the candor of Germanity, which she called her home, whose allure above all she esteemed. Some responded with a typical shrug of their shoulders to the mishmash that made up her education. However, the aforementioned hodgepodge in itself was something so rich that she felt content with it. In general she was happy, and since this was the case, efforts were made to upset her enough so that she would cry, which was
considered enchanting. To be able to succeed in vexing her gentle heart could be called a kind of pleasure. By the way, occasionally she seemed to be the only one to blame, since she knew nothing more toned down or equable to do than, with her various uninhibitednesses, tease those subject to society’s dictates. In her spouse she caught a glimpse of her shadow; but there were others, too, and these others made her life miserable because of her twitting them. Once more, this mockery had everything to do with her upbringing. If I call her a little forward, at the same time I respectfully kiss her hand, and if I point out that it is precisely those dear to her who suffered because of her, it was part of the beauty of her nature, which I’ve here presented in a little portrait.
(1932–1933)
Translated with Nicole Köngeter
THE PRECIOUS ONE
YES, THIS delicate one led a precious existence. I don’t doubt this for a moment because I understand him, and this being the case, my pen hardly dares to describe or, let’s say, sketch the one who was sitting in a room, reading and trying his best to believe himself happy. Cautiously, carefully I handle him, so that the likeness I’m attempting resembles a breeze or fragrance. Understandably the house he inhabited was a magnificent building resting in a beautiful garden demurely and illusion-inducingly comprised of meadows, trees and paths, little fountains and pavilions. Whoever walked through this park felt distinguished simply by doing so and succumbed to beautiful imaginings. Swans, whose feathers seemed to sing, enlivened a small lake or pond that graced the garden with its softness and, by virtue of its resplendence, rendered it more serene and isolated than it already was. The air appeared to be the bride of the garden, and the garden the groom, and the leaves and flowers rejoiced when the cherished one strolled toward them, so that he might direct a few words to the ones whispering and pleasantly gazing about. Sometimes he ventured a boat trip on the water or rested for a while on a shady bench, in rapport with all kinds of thoughts that chimed with the quietness around him, and with whose scampering about he concurred because he did not begrudge them their rambling. The wind played with his hair. Even as a child in the crib a special quality veiled him. Never would he grow old, he divined, since aging is tied to the diminishment of one’s handsomeness, and it didn’t seem permissible to become graceless or give those in his presence occasion to think of something unpleasant due to his appearance. His purpose in life lay in being graceful and in his never experiencing disappointment. No one frowned upon him, which is why it was denied him to say no to anything that had breath and form. Beleaguered by considerateness, his activities were limited to behaving well-mannered, and much not-knowing, which is diverting, was the lot of his soul, which remained ungrown-upish.
What was expected—and because of his preciousness almost deemed proper to wish for—happened. He was gripped by an illness he could not resist, and leaving memories behind, let it lead him away.
(1932–1933)
SOMETHING ABOUT EATING
DON’T deliberate too long before you begin to write a sketch. All kinds of nice ideas can disappear, never to be seen again. On the other hand, I advise you not to tremble in the face of months, years even, of procrastination, since there’s something quite formative and educational in waiting.
Today I am discoursing on food, which is a necessity and at the same time can be a pleasure.
An apple at first seems to me a fine comestible, although I fear for a tooth when I bite into it. I prefer to eat it cooked rather than in its natural state.
Pears taste scrumptiously succulent. Nuts I handle with care, in that I chop them up fine in order to enhance their flavor.
Bread is as nutritious as it is delicious, if handled moderately. In my opinion a piece of chocolate can replace a cup of coffee.
Next in line comes meat, which naturally, of course, is something wonderful. How superbly baked fish agrees with me. Veal and lamb, each on its own, can also be most appetizing.
Beets are red, spinach and lettuce green, likewise beans, which perhaps I prefer above all other vegetables. Chicken in a sauce can be recommended as something tender.
Nonetheless, carefully prepared roast beef reinvigorates me to the utmost degree. I have a special predilection for eating sauerkraut with sausage.
Without hesitation I declare rice one of the most agreeable foods. In no way does asparagus seem indispensable; all the same, I appreciate it as a delicacy and highly esteem its digestibility.
Every sensible person sincerely praises a bowl of soup. From cherries and apricots we make pies.
Meals are eaten either at home or in a restaurant, bringing differences to light that aren’t necessarily significant.
Wherever we eat, certain useful precepts learned from experience are observed, for example, the little bit of politeness with which we sit down at the table and which consists, among other things, of our being satisfied with both the quantity of the dishes and their quality.
To treat food attentively enhances its value.
(1932–1933)
MOTHER NATURE
NATURE isn’t always good; no, often she’s enraged, and each time there are valid scientific reasons for this.
How lovely spring is, and in winter a charming, snowbound, pretty little village.
On the other hand, a mountain, from whose interior an unannounced fire erupts, makes us tremble. A river of liquid embers pours down into the valley, clearing a way for itself, consuming everything in its path, through gardens and cultivated fields. One thinks here of Pompeii.
Then one imagines an earthquake that, with a speed defying comprehension, breaks apart churches, rends the houses asunder, and draws cracks in the earth, so that when seen by the people of the region, they feel induced to flee.
Another unpleasantness is found in the ceaseless, unending rain and streams that overflow their banks. Soon the unchecked waters, their excess, bring forth a deluge, forcing one to climb onto a roof and wait for help to arrive. The water rises and rises; it covers the streets, paths, fields, farmland, equipment, lawns, beds, chairs, tables, cabinets, rooms and kitchens and barns and all kinds of objects related to domestic comfort, and the wet is still coming down on the mass of objects floating in and lying on the water, and where before we had gone on foot, now we take a boat and keep a lookout for people in the straitened condition of needing assistance.
I hasten to another rarity Nature creates, stand on a ship and see before my eyes an apparition in whose reality I can hardly believe, so strange and dreamlike it is. It’s an iceberg, which the captain has the task of carefully evading. With Vesuvius one had the boiling heat to deal with; here in the northern sea one has to concern oneself with the cold, the hard, and the frozen.
Now into a storm or hurricane, at least on paper, in thought. Lightning flashes. Ocean and sky are a single, tangled jumble. Black is the air, and high waves fall and sway back and forth, and in the middle of this reels a craft that, like a toy, dances and whirls and tilts obliquely as if already it were exhausted. In such a situation, apprehension and hope seem called for.
Enticed by alpinism, I go climbing in the mountains. I want to rejoice. Then an avalanche ploughs down the slope. It almost took hold and swept me away, but just barely missed me.
When she smiles and nothing befalls her, when she reveals herself in her untroubledness, how good Nature then is.
(1933)
AFTERWORD
Sovereign Insignificance
FOR THE feuilletonist anything can be an occasion for a prose piece: a walk in the mountains, a new hairstyle, an old fountain, shopwindows, a kitten, a carousel, a Parisian newspaper, an hour of the day. It is, however, the rare feuilletonist, no matter how fine a quick-sketch artist, who can bestow permanence to reality’s ephemera, which is one reason we tend to ignore miniaturists in prose—to our great loss in the case of a genius like Robert Walser.
Born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1878, Walser left school at fourteen to apprentice as a bank clerk. His primary cities of resi
dence during his active writing career (1898–1933) were Zurich (1896–1905), Berlin (1905–1913), Biel (1913–1921), and Bern (1921–1933), though he also worked for a time in Basel, Stuttgart, Thun, Winterthur, and Wädenswil, and as an assistant butler in Castle Dambrau in Upper Silesia. The pattern of his life was one of short-term jobs, mostly of a clerical nature, and short-term stays in furnished rooms—between 1896 and 1905, he changed residences seventeen times. Before the end of the century, his poems and short prose began to appear in literary journals and in the feuilleton sections of newspapers, and in 1904 his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), was published. More than a dozen others followed, including the novels The Tanners (1907), The Assistant (1908), and one of the twentieth century’s master novels, Jakob von Gunten (1909), whose eponymous narrator is a pupil of the Benjamenta Institute, a school for butlers (Walser himself attended one in Berlin) where “the educators and teachers are asleep, or they are dead, or seemingly dead, or they are fossilized, no matter, in any case we get nothing from them.”
Admired by and an influence on Kafka, Jakob von Gunten, though subtitled “A Diary,” is more an oneiric account of Jakob’s life in a school where the only class is “How should a boy behave?” and whose primary staff consist of the principal, Herr Benjamenta (“a giant”), and his sister, the mysterious, sad, beautiful Lisa Benjamenta. Even Jakob, in keeping with the world both outside and within him, has “contrived to become a mystery” to himself. The novel is bathed in unreality and shimmers with contradictions. Jakob is a dreamy, benevolent rascal, a sort of King Midas who turns everything he touches into riddles. It is his willingness to embrace the ordinary and the contradictory that allows him to thrive in the stultifying, rule-ridden atmosphere of the institute. “Everything that’s forbidden lives a hundred times over,” he writes, “thus, if something is supposed to be dead, its life is all the livelier. As in small things, so in big ones. Nicely put, in everyday words, but in everyday things the true truths are found.”