Selected Stories
They made her suffer, she made them suffer, and the patriarch suffered from his spouse, and the products suffered because of the producers.
This family, to which many families looked up without reluctance, displayed a pompous falling short.
No pen can describe the sighs they heaved together.
Folly upon folly was committed.
What use is the most dazzling scenery?
The father knew no peace till he could say: “One darn thing after another!”
All the members of the family longed to be constantly wept over; the daughters found their language instructor bewitching.
Meanwhile, a book had been through many too many editions, a book which had the virtue of being nicely written. The book had melody.
The family we are speaking of had melody too.
There was a Mediterranean island in it, where the best opportunities for perceiving realities were dreamed away.
Still to this day it lies there, witness of a disinclination to wash oneself spiritually, in the proper way.
But they all wore fitting clothes and were virtuosos of dissatisfaction.
And then she who bore the responsibility might step forward and say to her son: “I command you to suffer!”
He laughed at her.
She says: “Get out of my sight!”—but wishes inwardly for him not to obey, she wrestles laboriously with her composure.
She feels guilty and innocent.
She blames the times.
“Tell me all! Vindicate yourself!”
He quietly replies: “All this longing to cast off the shackles, to despise what the surrounding world imposes upon you, isn’t this what you’re injecting into me? What you prohibit me from doing you should also deny yourself,” and softly he adds: “Unbridled woman!”
Whereupon she has a scene with her husband.
If I felt talkative I’d repeat the reproaches she brought against him.
Her words slapped his face.
He thought it was very imposing to listen to her respectfully.
But his graciousness was for her a martyrdom.
Perhaps one can say that tact is the point from which powerlessness spreads more and more into the male world.
Defense to the last gasp seems to be not shrewd. If a man is shrewd, if he is conciliatory, relenting, submissive, the bonds are not torn, of course, but they still hang from him, more like threads, I mean as far as order is concerned, and women have won nothing, if one lets them win, although they tell themselves otherwise.
So he always eluded her, politely.
A reckless answer would have hurt her.
Together, by their fleeing from one another, they poisoned the atmosphere.
What kind of people am I thinking of, as I say this?
Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the unfreedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?
Well, I could go around from person to person, letting each say some new thing, new but also old.
For they constantly repeated themselves. Each had his own sort of idée fixe.
And, in the theaters, plays were being performed that wearied the spectators’ souls, made them rebellious and perverse, cringing, and eager for war.
Should one speak out or be silent?
[1925]
A Letter to Therese Breitbach*
Bern, Thunstrasse 20/III
(mid-October 1925)
RÖSI BREITBACH, altogether most esteemed young lady! Wishing that you should show, if your feelings permit it, my letters to your parents, in all simplicity, generosity, and affection, I would like to tell you that for some time now I have not found anything here to write about, because I have already written so many things. I’m sure you’ll understand this. Then I happened to read a small, silly sort of book, the kind you buy for a few cents at a kiosk, and it was most nicely entertaining to read it. I had read my fill of good books. Is it conceivable that you’ll understand what I mean? If so, it would be most kind of you. All the girls here find me enormously boring, because they are all spoiled by zesty young bucks. Our masculine world can be very self-assured in its behavior. Once I took the liberty of sending, for instance, to a singer in our meritorious municipal theater, as token of my admiration, a copy of my book Aufsätze, published by Kurt Wolff. The book was returned, with the observation that I hadn’t yet learned to write German. People hereabouts take me, generally, for an immature person, in every way. Even Thomas Mann, you know, that giant in the domain of the novel, regards me as a child, though a quite clever one to be sure. Once I was supposed to read from my work in Zurich, but the president of the Literary Circle which had invited me said that I had still not learned to speak German. For a time, people here thought I was insane, and would say aloud, in the arcades, as I was walking past: “He should be in the asylum.” Our great Swiss writer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, whom you certainly know, also spent some time in a sanatorium for people who were mentally not altogether at their best. Now people are celebrating the centenary of this poor man’s birth, with speeches and choral declamations. And yet once he no longer dared to take up his pen, in fear that he might botch everything he wrote. Then one day I went into a café and fell in love with a girl who looked so poetic. It was of course very foolish of me, all the utilitarians leaped upon me and reminded me of the bitter duties of my so lovely and expensive profession—which is of such a nature that it brings no money in. I loved this beautiful young girl, who seemed already to have an inclination toward corpulence, it was all because of the music I heard every day in the café. Great, indeed, is the power of music, sometimes immense. Suddenly everything changed. I made the acquaintance of a so-called Saaltochter, i.e., waitress, and from that moment the previous girl had for me in part only half a reality, in part no reality at all. Loving and what they call yearning are quite quite different things, different worlds. Then I used to go, very often, to nature, that is, walk into the country, many thoughts occurred to me, ideas, which I worked on. By doing this I left the place where the waitress served, and since then I haven’t seen her; I subsequently wrote poems to her, and, well, there are many people around, also in your country, I expect, who think that poems are not work, but rather something comical, unworthy of respect. That has always been the case, and always will be, in Germany, the land of poets and thinkers. Our town is very lovely. Today I went swimming in deliciously cold water, soft and delicate sunshine, in the river which runs shimmering around our town like a serpent. Needless to say, nobody knows about the girl whom I made terrible fun of, partly in prose, and whom I worshipped, on the other hand, partly in poems. I have lived in rooms where all night I could not close my eyes for fear. Now it’s like this: I no longer know for sure if I love her. Indeed, my dear Fraulein, one can keep one’s feelings very much alive, or let them grow cold, neglect them. And then, true, I’m interested in many other matters besides. In the hope that you are happy, that your days pass pleasingly, and that you will be a little content, and perhaps also a bit dissatisfied, with this letter, I send you my cordial and of course, so to speak, respectful greetings.
Robert Walser
A Village Tale
I SIT down somewhat reluctantly at my desk to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to discourse on the potato famine which long ago struck a village on a hill that stood about two hundred meters high. Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of more account than a country girl. The longer she labored, the less she was able to do for herself.
The stars were twinkling in the sky. The parson of the village where what is here told occurred was out of doors elucidating for his young protégés the planetary system. 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.
When she was found the
next morning in a condition which made it plain to all that she had ceased to live, the question rose among these countryfolk: Should she be buried or not. Not a soul was ready to lay a hand on the finished article that lay quite motionless there. Tribal displeasure asserted itself.
The bailiff approached the group, which intrigued him primarily from the viewpoint of painting, for in his leisure hours he would paint, government burdening him with no excessive duties. He urged the country people forthwith to be sensible, but his expostulations had no success; at no price would they inter the girl, as if they believed it might harm them to do so.
The sheriff strode into his office with its three large windows through which streamed the most dazzling light, and he wrote a report on the incident which he dispatched to the city authorities.
But what feelings assail me when I consider the famine whose waves rose higher and higher! The populace grew unspeakably thin. How they longed for food!
The very same day a laborer of superlative efficiency took his gun from its nail and shot, with authentic popular wrath, his rival who was crossing the street below, yodeling in all innocence, clear proof of how happy his days were. In fact the rival was just returning from a successful encounter with the young lady, who seemed to be a somewhat indecisive person, for ogling both she offered prospects to both of heaven.
Never in all my years as a writer have I written a tale in which a person, struck by a bullet, falls down. This is the first time in my work that a person has croaked.
Understandably, they lifted him up and carried him into the next-best cottage. Houses, in the present comfortable sense of the word, did not at that time exist in the country; there were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of straw reached almost to the ground, as one may still observe, at one’s leisure, in a few surviving examples.
When the young lady, a country belle with swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what had occurred on her account, she simply stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps her peculiar nature.
Her mother besought her to speak, but all in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a statue.
A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.
[1927]
The Aviator
A PERSON who wishes to voice a conviction in an appropriate fashion pronounces a vigorous, martial “Naturaleh!” “With martial greetings I remain your most obedient servant”—thus did I close a letter to someone who avowed to me that my martialism had taken him aback. “All of a sudden he heard somebody beside him exclaim: ‘That’s impossible!’” Couldn’t such an ordinary event as this occur in a novel that reflects its times and speaks of matters that are perhaps largely marginal issues? If I now exclaim in a booming voice “Naturaleh!”—I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties. A person who has no doubts at all about anything is prone to asseverate: “It’s clear as day!” That the aviator mounting his vehicle seemed to himself tiny in proportion to the magnitude of his task is clear as day to me, and perhaps I might be permitted to believe that in this significant moment he was lulling himself into the conceivably very artful illusion of being, in comparison with the universe, a babe in arms, and his flying machine was his crib, where the most decisive thing for him to do was to lie low, quietly watching. In my opinion, during the truly fabulous unwinding of his journey he thought most animatedly of his mother. Of this I am convinced, and now I come face to face with the question: Should one view the oceanist, the hero of the day, as a descendant of those mariners vanished long since from their sphere of influence, and furthermore did he, before he flew off, make it his precept to consider his enterprise as something that would, so to speak, be merely a schooling for him, an education? Especially a poet does well, among other things, to fly at a modest velocity on his winged steed, Pegasus by name, because ill chance may strike the most special person no less easily than the least consequential member of any human interest group or sphere. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.
As regards this appellation, which disconcertingly took wing from my otherwise so choice vocabulary, it seems I should explain that it denotes a low-down sort of character. By lummox, one should understand a fusion of every conceivable ineptitude in the person of a particular social fellow being. With a splendid, because moderate, velocity I strode today, as it happens, into a shoe solery to ask what steps had been taken, what progress made, toward finishing work in which I knew I had an interest. Instead of saying “lummox,” in a country that delights in its reputation for hospitality and where, besides which, I too am permitted to live, some folks make use of the designation dummer Cheib, or fathead. Neither the latter nor the former manner of speaking sounds polite; both shed a certain uncultivated dimness upon persons who put them to use. Like a bird of paradise he flew across the far-flung and not by any means entirely bland and composed carpet of meadows historically called the sea, the fool or lummox, who may be called a lummox insofar as he was gambling, so audaciously as to be well-nigh presumptuous, with the indisputable treasure of his life, on which apparently, since he was thus exposing it to all vicissitudes, he placed little value, in a manner which was, well now, how should one put it, almost indiscreet; for surely one may be right to think that a person who commits himself to the discharge of a duty, a general human concern, and thereby shows little or no regard for his own person, is in equal proportions a tall and broad, perhaps even towering, lummox or fathead? On the other hand, I can see in him someone who empowers himself to inhale and exhale the glory and delight of life, for when enjoyment, meaning the principle of healthy egoism, is set aside, then precisely does the richer and purer source of what is initially disdained begin. The careless or selfless person, it is my conviction, does persistently care for himself, although I am ready at any moment to admit the contradictoriness here apparent, which, in itself, is of great significance for me.
When, for instance, someone becomes self-important, it is popularly said that he has “a bee in his bonnet.” A person can be just as important as he pleases, in fact; but to appear so is not always pleasant for others.
In the finer sense, as in the one just indicated, I launch toward you, somewhat like a bee, the present essay.
[1927]
The Pimp
WHAT an irreparable error it would be, if to the high pile of errors that during my lifetime have slipped from me, as if hatched from eggs of misconception, I were to add that of declaring this house somewhere on a hilltop to be a palace, seeming as it did more like a villa or pavilion, a neat little convalescent home, where, as a lackey, for I could not have figured there as anything loftier or better, I performed tasks that were in my opinion of preeminent quality, although I cannot but realize that my manner of speaking is rather long-winded.
Even if I saw that my employer—I do not know if I should be saying this—sometimes indulged her habit of pressing together her unspeakably thin lips, still she was for me the world’s most beautiful woman, while it would never have occurred to me to extol her as a miracle of rare proportions, to which reality did give me every imaginable reason.
The mountain ridge upon which one looked across from one of the surely very numerous windows had a very pleasant face, by which I would like to have intimated that it was a joy to devote to it a proper measure of the attention it well deserved. Oh, the freedom, the finesse, of which it was, from afar, seeming to be at once both far and near, a perfect expression! I thought I could touch the mountain with my hands; in any event, its stoninesses had the effect of a face that responded, in content as in form, to each and every demand.
Days and days went by before I could somewhat orient myself as to what
sort of business the delightfully located house, ringed around as it was, so to speak, with little dancings, might be based upon. What very remarkable purpose did it serve? More than once, this was my question.
Unbelievably diffuse festivities spreading out for as long as one could wish over fabulously beautiful gardens and lasting from first light, each time so graceful it was like a goddess awakening, far into the dusk and longer still, to the edge of night, were lavished in the countryside in which this estate stood, proud as a temple and yet modest in every way, on all who wished to have a share in a healthy and thus worthwhile experience, some of whom had been invited by word of mouth, some in writing.
That the meadows, enlivened here and there most charmingly by trees, were of a green to the intensity of which even the most intense grumblers, and to the gaiety of which even the most innate peeves, could raise little if any objection, is almost certain to be as good as obvious.
The house was thronged with well-disciplined girls, vying with one another as regards their proper tasks, which is probably the best and most civil thing to be said about human apparitions clad generally in aprons and equipped with feathered dust absorbers.
From time to time I heard my beautiful and doubtless much beleaguered employer exclaim in quite a loud voice: “Don’t put me on edge!” To what species of earth dweller did she say this? Naturally for me it could only remain for a long time an inscrutable riddle, whose insolubility was like a sumptuous garment, of which I became, so to speak, enamored.
One thing I may and must mention with due care. In the garden which, bordered to the south perhaps by a stream that propelled itself with extraordinary gentleness along its course, and extending northward into a most motley hilliness, there was, like a bouquet of flowers, a multitude of delicious nooks, which really did appear like friendly little faces, and where, at one’s pleasure, that is to say, most freely, one could lark about, take a rest, make a little love—saying which reminds me that kind fate, of which I have undertaken never to complain, since that would not, in my opinion, be appropriate, once led me into a theater to share the spectacle of a play which simultaneously delighted me and left me somewhat dissatisfied. Might I confess to finding that it is exquisite to be of two minds regarding works of art? To find fault with something that I welcome on the whole, how nice I find this is!