For the German novelist Martin Walser (no relation), Jakob von Gunten is “the most radical book I know.” Walser himself saw it as a rather bold poetic fantasy, and it was his favorite of his longer published works. Sales, however, were dismal, and its few critics mostly dim, as in this review by Josef Hofmiller in Süddeutsche Monatshefte: “Such feeble and sapless scribbling without a thought for tomorrow is unendurable.” Walser’s career as a writer would never really recover from this publishing fiasco.
In 1917 Walser suffered, “due to the pen, a real breakdown in my hand, a sort of cramp,” as he said in a 1927 letter. “With the help of the pencil, I was better able to play, to write; this seemed to revive my writerly enthusiasm.” The Mikrogramme, or microscripts, that were found after his death consist of 526 slips of paper containing drafts Walser wrote in pencil during the 1920s and early ’30s, many of which he revised and saw published in the leading newspapers and journals of his day. Jochen Greven, the editor of the twenty-volume Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben (1985), discovered that Walser’s tiny handwriting—once considered an indecipherable code and a sign of the author’s madness—was in the old German Sütterlin script and indeed decipherable. Transcribed by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, these scraps of paper with their minute script constitute the six volumes of Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet (From the Pencil Region, 1985–2000), which supplement Greven’s edition. Of the eighty-eight texts in Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories, all but three come from Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben, the exceptions being “The Belletristic Book” from volume five of Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet and “The Tip” and “The Carousel” from Feuer (2003), a collection of prose pieces and poems previously unknown, though many of them had appeared in journals and newspapers during Walser’s lifetime.
In 1929, after severe episodes of anxiety and depression, Walser entered Waldau, a psychiatric clinic outside Bern. There, after a while, he managed to return to writing, until four years later when a new director decided that Waldau should house only acute patients. (“The Precious One,” written while he was in Waldau, reflects, to a degree, his life and state of mind while there.) In 1933, against his wishes, Walser was transferred to a clinic outside Herisau, in eastern Switzerland, after which he apparently wrote no more. In the introduction to her translation of Walser’s final and truly most radical novel, The Robber, Susan Bernofsky cites an interview by Catherine Sauvat, the French biographer of Walser, with Josef Wehrle, a former attendant at the asylum in Herisau, who recalled observing Walser writing on scraps of paper after meals and then throwing them away. Walser destroying this writing (if he wrote anything in Herisau other than necessary and perfunctory letters) is certainly plausible, as he had discarded earlier manuscripts, including three novels (another was lost by a publisher).
For the first few years in Herisau, Walser expressed the hope that, after being out of the asylum for a few years, he might begin to write again, but by the 1940s this no longer seemed a possibility. “Why bother me with all this scribbling?” he tells the Swiss writer Carl Seelig, who would become his legal guardian and write Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (1957) based on their meetings during Walser’s last two decades. “Can’t you see I don’t give a damn about this? Leave me alone about it! All that’s far behind me.” He would remain in Herisau until the end of his life, doing his best to be, above all, a good inmate among his fellow inmates, to seek and wish for no special privileges. When Seelig, serving as a messenger for Walser’s doctor, asked him if he would like to move into a better section of the asylum, Walser responded, “I have just as little appetite for rank and privilege as you. I want to live with the people and disappear in them. That’s what suits me best.” On Christmas Day, 1956, he died of a heart attack while on a solitary walk across the snow-covered hills near the sanatorium.
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Because Walser wrote like someone upon whom nothing is lost and synchronized his syntax to thought, one might almost say he’s Jamesian. W. G. Sebald, in his homage to Walser entitled “Le promeneur solitaire” (in A Place in the Country), wrote that “with seismographic precision [Walser] registers the slightest tremors at the edges of his consciousness.” This is a consciousness able to sense that, as Walser wrote in “The idea was a delicate one,” in Speaking to the Rose, the “branches, the stalks, are remarkable, swaying, hushing, also in their speaking suppleness, and indeed how singular are the roots, in their dark existence, which, like the holiness of light, is the stuff of fairytales,” and that flowers “have incomparable grace and are friends without equal, fresh and gentle, carefree and humble, and they raise no objection to being smelled, or else they behave as if this were not forbidden; they are pious without knowing anything of piety, good without knowing anything of goodness, and they love nothing. Is that perhaps why one loves them so much?”
Such entranced encounters with nature, especially those written during the Biel years, may make one wonder if Walser’s relationship to nature is ingenious or ingenuous, ludic or non-ludic. Is there any reason for it not to be both and more? More than one reader of “Dear Little Swallow,” for example, has detected in Walser’s description of the swallow’s style of flight a mirror image of his own flights of language. In any case, to settle on one mode of approach to Walser is certainly not the point. “Quiddities never rest, they ramble,” he wrote in “Sampler Plate.” “Perpetual motion compels morality,” states Jakob von Gunten. “Everything reminds one of its opposite,” says the narrator of “Snowdrops.” In her biography of Walser, Sauvat sees his swings from one extreme to another as a kind of rotary machine. At the end of his story “Titus,” the narrator’s “most exalted is so beautiful and I worship her with such a holy respect that I attach myself to another and therewith must seize the opportunity to recover from the strain of sleepless nights, to relate to the successor how dear the past one was, to tell her, ‘I love you just as much.’ ” Walser intuited what neurologists later discovered—that movement not stasis is the essence of self.
Some readers may find the velocity at which Walser’s irony travels is too fast to follow; others, like Martin Walser, look down and see no bottom in sight. When is the mask of irony on, when off? And if one mask is lifted, how many more are left before we reach the author’s true self? How, for example, can we tell when he’s embracing Romanticism or composing elaborate, metafictional variations on methods and themes found in German Romanticism? Among the Romantic authors about whom he wrote prose pieces are Baudelaire, Brentano, Büchner, Dostoyevsky, Eichendorff, Gotthelf, Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Kleist, Lenz, Poe, Rousseau, Stendhal, and Tieck. In a postcard to Hermann Hesse, whose kindnesses (a typical Walser coinage) included six articles on Walser’s work, Walser wrote from Biel on December 3, 1917:
Dear Mr. Hermann Hesse,
I have just come back from a foot and snow hike in the Jura and am still filled with beautiful impressions and warmth from marching. Last week I read your short, very beautiful, noble exposition in the NZZ about [my] Poetenleben (Lives of Poets). That you have an uncommonly fine way of reporting about books, many will already have told you. By the way, I also am convinced of the incredibly high value of Eichendorff’s Taugenichts. What a German and what a graceful book. But because a stupid good fellow is the protagonist of this masterpiece and because everything is pure and quite natural, no sub-or side streams, nothing frightening, Strindbergian, nothing bent or sick, roguish, treacherous or gruesome occurs in it, the reader feels, so to speak, embarrassed. I thank you very much and greet you from my European war and diplomat’s room, that is Deputy chamber, sincerely, your friend Robert Walser.
On the other hand, in Walser’s first letter to Seelig, he responds on February 28, 1922:
Dear Sir,
Why don’t you have the Reader’s Circle Hottingen send you the booklet with my contribution “Rob. Walser’s Biography.” They will do that, and you will find in the essay what you need for your purpose. The Romantics and delicate authors I’ve put aside a bit. Now I look fo
r my essence elsewhere, and therefore am not that interested anymore. Best greetings, Robert Walser.
For Robert Musil—who, in a joint review of Walser’s seventh book and Kafka’s first, labeled Kafka “a special case of the Walser type”—Walser’s fiction contained “shades of puppetry, Romantic irony; but in this fun there is something else . . . all of a sudden the gravity of real conditions begins to drizzle along the thread of verbal association.” Kafka, by the way, would have understood being compared to Walser; as early as 1907 he was enthusiastically reading Walser and as late as 1917 was enough of a student to compare Walser and Dickens in the blurring effect of their abstract metaphors.
For the record, Walser’s other European admirers include Aichinger, Benjamin, Bernhard, Calasso, Canetti, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Jelinek, Koeppen, and Magris. Nonetheless, Walser’s idiosyncratic rambles earned him no favor from the general public of his time. But before dismissing his prose as the work of a frivolous eccentric, readers should also consider Sebald’s comment that Walser “was anything but politically naive,” and then read, say, from Selected Stories, “Masters and Workers” (“Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this”) or “Essay on Freedom” (“I hope I may be believed if I permit myself to say that freedom is difficult and produces difficulties, with which phrase perhaps there sprang from my mouth an insight the expression of which could be accomplished by none but a connoisseur and gourmet of freedom who notes and cherishes all the unfreedoms internal to freedom”), or from Masquerade and Other Stories a lesson in Swiss history in “The Battle of Sempach”: “Naturally the noble steeds trampled their own masters in frenzied flight; and many noblemen, attempting to dismount quickly, got caught in their stirrups with their stupid, fashionable shoes, so that they kissed the meadows with the backs of their bloody heads, while their horrified eyes, before they went out, saw the sky burning above them like a furious flame.” One might also consider the ethical-political implications bared in stories like “The Murderess,” “The Children’s Game,” and “Essay on Bismarck” from the present volume.
To Seelig, Walser said that as a writer he didn’t give “a damn about literary regulations, I simply kept on playing music.” One place Walser’s defiance of literary norms can be seen is in his willingness to use the plots of what he called Bahnhofhallenbüchlein, the dime novels of his time found for sale in the kiosks of train stations. On the plots of such books Walser performed astonishing improvisations, designed to simultaneously inspirit language, ironize kitsch, and mock the arbiters of literature who judge books only by the principles that can be extracted from them. Examples of such Walser arabesques in Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories include “The Red Leather Pouch” (where he takes on an espionage plot), “Detective Novel,” “Ghosts,” “Ludwig,” and “A Woman’s Book.” To understand how separate Walser is from the standard literary currents of his or any time, try to imagine a writer of his talent plumping his prose-piece nest with the plot shavings of today’s airport fare and finding therein the means for “truing language to matter,” as Christopher Middleton wrote in his 1958 essay “The Picture of Nobody: Some Remarks on Robert Walser”—still the single best essay in English on Walser’s prose I know.
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We’re fortunate that it was Middleton, a poet and essayist possessing his own special brilliance, who in 1954, while teaching at the University of Zurich, became the first person to translate Walser into any language. In his 1973 essay “Notes on Rhythm,” Middleton states: “The rhythm of a poem is a structure of variable tempos which realize its sounds as the radicles of meaning.” Only a translator alert to the tempo of Walser’s “radicles of meaning” can effectively mime his thought, especially at the syntactic level, where he performed his most daring turns about “the dream we call human life.” Take, for example, this passage from the 1930 prose piece “I Was Reading Two Stories”: “While for my pleasure I was reading how a woman of refinement, a model of cultivation, in demi-colleté, I mean with polite deliberation exposing to view her pretty bust, suddenly thought of something that had slipped her mind for a moment, a wagon halted outside the house and two horses attached to it stood there as motionless as two brass, or bronze, or marble statues.”
Such syntactically charged prose is, in large part, what appealed to me when, in 1973, I first read Walser in Great German Short Stories (1960), a Dell paperback edited by Stephen Spender that contained Middleton’s translation of “A Village Tale.” Here is a more or less literal translation of one of its sentences: “A writer wrote in a lamplit room at his rapidly growing work, while the maid, plagued by visions, got out of bed in order to run into the water, which was carried out with almost laughable promptness.” (Ein Schriftsteller schrieb in einer lampenbeleuchteten Stube an seinem zusehends wachsenden Werk, als die von Visionen geplagte Magd aus ihrem Bett aufstand, um ins Wasser zu laufen, was mit beinahe belachenswerter Promptheit ausgeführt wurde.) And here’s Middleton’s translation: “A writer was working in a lamplit room at his rapidly waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl rose up from her bed intending to rush into the pond, which she did with almost laughable alacrity.” Middleton translates to perfection Walser’s text and spirit.
Attracted to its alpine flowers, novices can easily crash and burn against the Walserberg. Fortunately, the two principal translators of Walser’s prose, Middleton and Bernofsky, adeptly scale its peaks, as have at times others, including Lydia Davis, Mark Harman, and Damion Searls. In his essay on translating Walser, “Translating as a Species of Mime,” Middleton notes that Walser’s “spirit, this manifold configuration in all its mobility, which the translator tries to mime, is of course not identical with the spirit he performs, or hopes to voice. Precisely that discrepancy is the area of risk which provokes the translator as mime to grapple with the manifold, now insightfully, now blindly. A translation can only achieve so much, no more, of a manifold spirit which persistently disseminates itself.” For a close, perceptive analysis of the challenges found in translating Walser, see Bernofsky’s “Unrelenting Tact: Elements of Style in Walser’s Late Prose” in Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, and for unsurpassable examples of translations of his late prose, see her translations of The Robber and Microscripts.
Like other modernist masters (Proust, Kafka, Beckett), Walser didn’t so much write about ideas as he found the formal means to embody them. For Sebald, the ideal Walser strived for was the overcoming of gravity, certainly not an easily obtainable goal for us “clumsy people [who] know nothing of winged existence.” In “Lightness,” his first lecture from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino warns us against mistaking lightness for frivolity, solemnity for weight: “In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.” Or as Walser’s microscript text “I would like to be standing” concludes:
Moreover I make with pleasure the confession—which perhaps characterizes me—that while writing I might have been silent about rather much, quite unintentionally, too, for as a writer I preferred to speak not of what could be irksome, or difficult to express, but of lightness, whereas into what has occupied me here I did open out, with all the heaviness in me, though fugitively, of course, as seems to be my wont.
Walser seems closer to someone like the French poet Francis Ponge than to his “weightier” peers such as Musil, Hermann Broch, or Thomas Mann. Both Ponge and Walser, through an almost phenomenological parsing and shedding of received notions, reveal the uniqueness of insignificant things. In his insignificance Walser was among the sovereign.
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Two of the pieces included in Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories have appeared in different translations in other selections of Walser’s prose: “The Nimble and the Lazy” (“Der Flinke und der Faule”) can be found in A Schoolboy’s Diary as “Swift and Sluggish” translated by Searls; “A Little Ramble,” which I’ve here revised from an earlier version of mine, first appeared in Selected Stories.
My Walser-relat
ed debts over the past five decades (and even the past year) are too numerous to list, but I would like to thank Paul Rosheim of Obscure Publications who brought out the limited-edition chapbook The Nimble and the Lazy (2000), which included earlier versions of nine of these texts, and the editors of The Baffler, Connecticut Review, Kestrel, and Witness, where some of these pieces appeared. I also want to thank Kate Deimling for reading my first version of the book; Tonja Adler for her numerous, essential suggestions; Nina Joanna Bergold for working with me closely on several texts that otherwise would have defeated me and for going over more than half of the book with me, line by line, alongside Walser’s German; Paula Flynn for her careful reading of this afterword; and my patient, generous co-translators, Annette Wiesner and Nicole Köngeter. Nicole also went over the majority of the translations for their fidelity to the original, though in the end all deviations there-from are due to my own decisions or deficiencies.