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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Foreword by Susan Sontag
Epigraph
RESPONSE TO A REQUEST
FLOWER DAYS
TROUSERS
TWO STRANGE STORIES
BALLOON JOURNEY
KLEIST IN THUN
THE JOB APPLICATION
THE BOAT
A LITTLE RAMBLE
HELBLING’S STORY
THE LITTLE BERLINER
NERVOUS
THE WALK
SO! I’VE GOT YOU
NOTHING AT ALL
KIENAST
POETS
FRAU WILKE
THE STREET (I)
SNOWDROPS
WINTER
THE SHE-OWL
KNOCKING
TITUS
VLADIMIR
PARISIAN NEWSPAPERS
THE MONKEY
DOSTOEVSKY’S “IDIOT”
AM I DEMANDING?
THE LITTLE TREE
STORK AND HEDGEHOG
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CELEBRATION OF CONRAD FERDINAND MEYER
A SORT OF SPEECH
A LETTER TO THERESE BREITBACH
A VILLAGE TALE
THE AVIATOR
THE PIMP
MASTERS AND WORKERS
ESSAY ON FREEDOM
A BIEDERMEIER STORY
THE HONEYMOON
THOUGHTS ON CÉZANNE
Postscript by Christopher Middleton
Copyright
Walser’s Voice
ROBERT WALSER is one of the important German-language writers of this century—a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908, Jakob von Gunten) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. This selection of Walser’s short prose was made (and mostly translated) by the admirable Christopher Middleton, who has labored for years to make Walser known to English-language readers, and draws from work done between 1907 and 1929.
Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced the latter “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.
In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small—as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament: he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed; and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive’s appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.
The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination. I’m ordinary—that is, nobody—declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don’t want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success—the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productive writer, who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an anti-romantic one, of the artist’s activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
Walser often writes, from the point of view of a casualty, of the romantic visionary imagination. “Kleist in Thun” (1913), both self-portrait and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of suicide-destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on the edge of which Walser lived. The last paragraph, with its excruciating modulations, seals an account of mental ruin as grand as anything I know in literature. But most of his stories and sketches bring consciousness back from the brink. He is just having his “gentle and courteous bit of fun,” Walser can assure us, in “Nervous” (1916), speaking in the first person. “Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser’s art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it—ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as rueful soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological, of that word: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.
In Walser’s fictions one is (as in so much of modern art) always inside a head, but this universe—and this despair—is anything but solipsistic. It is charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness. “What kind of people am I thinking of?” Walser’s voice asks in “A Sort of Speech” (1925). “Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the un-freedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?” That question mark at the end of the answer is a typical Walser courtesy. Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.
Susan Sontag
I am a kind of artisan novelist. A writer of novellas I certainly am not. If I am well-disposed, that’s to say, feeling good, I tailor, cobble, weld, plane, knock, hammer, or nail together lines the content of which people understand at once. If you liked, you could call me a writer who goes to work with a lathe. My writing is wallpapering. One or two kindly people venture to think of me as a poet, which indulgence and manners allow me to concede. My prose pieces are, to my mind, nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless, realistic story. For me, the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of
myself.
ROBERT WALSER, “Eine Art Erzählung,”
1928–29
Response to a Request
YOU ask me if I have an idea for you, a sort of sketch that I might write, a spectacle, a dance, a pantomime, or anything else that you could use as an outline to follow. My idea is roughly the following: Get hold of some masks, half a dozen noses, foreheads, tufts of hair, and eyebrows, and twenty voices. If possible, go to a painter, who should also be a tailor, and have him make a series of costumes, and be sure to obtain a few good and solid pieces of scenery, so that, wearing a black overcoat, you can walk up some stairs or look out at a window, then utter a roar, a short, leonine, thick, heavy roar, to make people really believe that a soul is roaring, a human heart.
I ask you to attend to this cry, put elegance into it, make it sound pure and right, and then, as you like, you may reach up to one of your tufts of hair and lay it, doucement, on the ground. This, if done gracefully, will have a horrifying effect. People will think that pain has made you stupid. In order to obtain a tragic effect, you must employ the nearest as well as the remotest means; I say this so that you’ll now understand that it would be good, next, to put your finger into your nose and pick around with it vigorously. Some spectators will weep when they see this, such a noble, somber figure as yours, behaving so rudely and deplorably. It depends on what sort of face you make and from which angle the light shines on you. Be sure to dig your electrician in the ribs so that he’ll take the right amount of trouble, and above all coordinate your features, your gestures, your arms, legs, and mouth.
Remember what I told you before; namely—and you’ll know it still, I hope—that it is possible for one eye alone, open or closed, to achieve an effect of terror, beauty, grief, or love, or what have you. It doesn’t take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave. It is the same, naturally, with anger also, and with feelings of speechless grief; briefly, with every human feeling. Incidentally, I advise you to perform athletic exercises often in your room, to go for walks in the forest, to fortify the wings of your lungs, to practice sports, but only select and balanced sports, to go to the circus and observe the behavior of the clowns, and then seriously to consider by which rapid movements of your body you can best render a spasm of the soul. The stage is the open, sensual throat of poetry, and, dear sir, it is your legs that can strikingly manifest quite definite states of the soul, not to mention your face and its thousand mimings. You must take possession of your hair, if, in order to manifest fright, it is to stand on end, so that the spectators, who are bankers and grocers, will gaze at you in horror.
So now you will have been speechless, will have, lost in thought, picked your nose like a rude and unthinking child, and now you begin to speak. But as you are about to do so, a greenish fiery snake crawls and licks its way out of your pain-contorted mouth, which makes all your limbs seem to tremble with dread. The snake falls to the ground and coils itself around the tranquil tuft of hair, a shriek of fright as from one single mouth goes through the whole auditorium; but already you are offering something new, you stick a long curved knife into one eye, so that the knife’s point, dripping with blood, appears from the lower part of your neck, near the throat; after this, you light a cigarette and behave in a curiously cozy way, as if you were privately amused about something. The blood that soils your body becomes stars, the stars dance around the whole stage area, burning and wild, but then you catch them all in your open mouth, and make them disappear, one by one. This will have brought your theatrical art essentially to a degree of perfection. Then the painted-scenery houses collapse, like frightful drunkards, and bury you. Only one of your hands is to be seen, reaching up from the smoking ruins. The hand is still moving a little, then the curtain descends.
[1907]
Flower Days
ON Cornflower Day, when everyone struts around in blue, it became evident how much the writer of the present scientific treatise feels himself to be a good, innocent child of his times. Indeed, I have participated in each and every nice and nasty cornflower folly with joy, love, and delight, and I must have behaved, I believe, very funnily. Several proud and earnest nonparticipants cast severe looks in my direction, but me, happy me, I was as if intoxicated, and I made a pilgrimage, I must confess, while blushing, from one distillery to the next, while buying, all along the way from Münzstrasse to Motzstrasse, patriotic flowers. Clad in blue from head to foot, I seemed to myself most graceful, but what is more, I felt myself most vividly to be a respectable member of the upper classes. Oh, this sweet feeling, how it befogged me and how happy it makes me, the beautiful, yes perhaps even, depending on circumstances, noble thought that I might fling to left and right, with very graceful gestures, pennies, healthy, true, honest, honorable, well-behaved, good pennies, thereby accomplishing a goodly work. Now come what may, let it happen to me, poor devil that I am: I am pleased with myself, thoroughly so, and a feeling of peace has overcome me, I cannot express it in carefully chosen or unchosen words. In my hand, or fist, I held a thick, huge, and evidently imposing bouquet of freshly picked paper flowers, the fragrance of which captivated me. I discovered, by the way, that such flowers are sold at seven pennies a dozen. A waiter, as honest as he is stupid, who always says “Very well” when he takes an order, told me this in a series of mysterious whispers. I am always on an intimate footing with waiters and suchlike people. That’s just by the way.
As for flower days in general, I would have to be a heartless rascal not to grasp at once the noble purport on which they rest, and therefore I leap forward as rapidly as possible and exclaim aloud: Yes, it is true, flower days are heavenly. They are not comical in the least, but have, to my feeling, a thoroughly noble and earnest character. Among us blokes or fellow beings, of course, there are still a few isolated and, it would seem, obstinate people who would scorn to wear, on a flower day, a day of peace and joy, a pleasure flower in their soul-buttonhole. We might hope that such people may soon learn better and nobler ways. As for me, as I may fortunately declare, I am radiant on flower days, with sheer flowery and flowerish satisfaction, and I am one of the most flower-encrusted persons among all those who are beautified, adorned, and beflowered. In a word, on such a Day of Plants I am like a swaying, tender plant, and on the charming Violet Day that soon is coming I shall, this I know for certain, appear in the world myself as a modest and secluded violet. For some magnanimous purpose I might even be able to transform myself into a daisy. In future, let anyone, I would here heartily plead, stick and wedge his buttercup between his lips, whether they be opened or grimly tight shut. Ears, too, are excellent props for flowers. On Cornflower Day I had stuck a cornflower behind each of my three ears, and it was most becoming. Ravishing, too, are roses, and the Rose Days soon to come. Let them descend upon me, those distinctive days, and I shall embellish my home with roses, and, sure as I’m a modern man and understand my epoch, I shall stick a rose in my nose. I can warm to daisy days most animatedly too, since any random fashion, absolutely any, makes of me a servant, a slave, or subject. Yet I am happy so.
Well, even then, such odd people, who lack character, have also to exist. The main thing is: I mean to enjoy my morsel of life as well and as long as I can, and if a person finds it amusing he’ll heartily go along with any kind of nonsense; but now I turn to the most beautiful subject of all—to women. For them, for them alone, the gracious flower days were invented, composed, poeticized. If a man wallows in flowers, it’s a bit unnatural; but in every way it befits a woman to put flowers in her hair and bring flowers to a man. Such a lady or virgin flower has only to make a sign, a gesture, and at once I hurl myself at her feet, ask her, my whole body trembling with joy, how much the flower costs, and I buy it from her. Then all pale in the face I breathe a glowing kiss upon her roguish little hand, and am prepared to surrender my life for her. Yes, indeed, in this manner, and others to mat
ch, I do behave on flower days. From time to time, to refresh myself, I plunge, it is true, into a snack hall and gulp down, there and then, a potted meat sandwich. I adore potted meat, but I adore flowers too. There are now many things that I adore. All the same, one has to do one’s duty as a citizen, nobody should make a face, nobody think he has a right to pass the flower days off with a quiet smile. They are a fact of life; but one should respect facts. Should one really?
[1911]
Trousers
I AM thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers, and thus to be licensed to plunge into meditation upon them; even as I write, a desirous grin, I can feel it, is spreading over my entire face. Women are, and always will be, so delicious. Well then, as regards fashion in trousers, tending as it does to excite all hearts and minds, and to quicken every pulse, that fashion must conduct the thought of any earnestly thinking man above all toward that which it accentuates and importantly clothes: the leg. The leg of the woman is thereby, to some extent, moved into a more luminous foreground. Anyone who loves, esteems, and admires women’s legs, as I do, can consequently, it would seem, only concur with such a fashion, and indeed I do concur with it, although I am actually very much in favor of skirts also. A skirt is noble, awe-inspiring, and has a mysterious character. Trousers are incomparably more indelicate and they suffuse the masculine soul, to some extent, with a shudder. Again, on the other hand, why should horror not grip us modern people, slightly? It seems to me that we do very much need to be woken up, to be given a shake.
Yet, if the world went all my way, as is fortunately not yet the case, to my great gratification (for what then should I do, poor man that I am!), trousers would be significantly tighter, so that against the soft, rounded flesh of the leg their material would press very closely, or, to phrase it with more elegance, nestle. For me that would be fashion’s triumph, and I would die of delight, or at least hit the floor in a swoon, if ever such a transformation occurred in the domain where ladies’ clothing is the question. All the same, it seems to me that this is the limit to which we have come, and, as for us discarded and regrettable lords of creation, we are entitled to anticipate excitedly what is still to come. I imagine that something is to come. A change is now on the way, no question; we men have obviously lost the edge, so the women are taking it over, and indeed, they have already begun, in trousers which still provisionally, to be sure, resemble skirts, to trample around before our very eyes. Knickerbockers! There’s something Asiatic about them, something Turkish, something, I must confess, without charm. Turks’ trousers and Turks’ turbans possess little charm for me. But still I think we may have in store for us a flowering and perfection of trousers. Trousers are still not quite trousers enough. The way they now are, they signify mere silliness. They are essentially too reticent, too embarrassed. O womenfolk, listen, you must: If you really want to impress us men, be more saucy, brazen, and complete in your trouserish, trouserly, and trouserful demands! Sweet ladies! Surely on the streets and in the city squares they will trouser around one day quite differently.