Robert Walser - The Tanners

— TRANSLATED BY JO CATLING

One morning a young, boyish man walked into a bookshop and asked to be introduced to the proprietor. His request was granted. The bookseller, an old man of quite venerable appearance, gave a sharp glance at the one standing rather shyly before him and instructed him to speak. “I want to become a bookseller,” said the youthful novice, “I yearn to become one, and I don’t know what might prevent me from carrying out my intentions. I’ve always imagined the trade in books must be an enchanting activity, and I cannot understand why I should still be forced to pine away outside of this fine, lovely occupation. For you see, sir, standing here before you, I find myself extraordinarily well suited for selling books in your shop, and selling as many as you could possibly wish me to. I’m a born salesman: chivalrous, fleet-footed, courteous, quick, brusque, decisive, calculating, attentive, honest — and yet not so foolishly honest as I might appear. I am capable of lowering prices when a poor devil of a student is standing before me, and of elevating them as a favor to those wealthy individuals who, as I can’t help noticing, sometimes don’t know what to do with all their money. Although I’m still young, I believe myself in possession of a certain knowledge of human nature — besides which, I love people, of every variety, so I would never employ my insight into their characters in the service of swindling — and I am equally determined never to harm your esteemed business through any exaggerated solicitousness toward certain underfinanced poor devils. In a word: My love of humankind will be agreeably balanced with mercantile rationality on the scales of salesmanship, a rationality which in fact bears equal weight and appears to me just as necessary for life as a soul filled with love: I shall practice a most lovely moderation, please be assured of this in advance—”

The bookseller was looking at the young man attentively and with astonishment. He appeared to be having trouble deciding whether or not his interlocutor, with this pretty speech, was making a good impression on him. He wasn’t quite sure how to judge and, finding this circumstance rather confusing, he gently inquired in his self-consciousness: “Is it possible, young man, to make inquiries about your person in suitable places?” The one so addressed responded: “Suitable places? I’m not sure what you mean by suitable. To me, the most appropriate thing would be if you didn’t make inquiries at all! Whom would you ask, and what purpose could it serve? You’d find yourself regaled with all sorts of information regarding my person, but would any of it succeed in reassuring you? What would you know about me if, for example, someone were to tell you that I came from a very good family, that my father was a man worthy of respect, that my brothers were industrious hopeful individuals, and that I myself was quite serviceable, if a bit flighty, but certainly not without grounds for hope, in fact that it was clearly all right to trust me a little, and so forth? You still wouldn’t know me at all, and most certainly wouldn’t have the slightest reason to hire me now as a salesclerk in your shop with any greater peace of mind. No, sir, as a rule, inquiries aren’t worth a fig, and if I might make so bold as to venture to offer you, as an esteemed older gentleman, a piece of advice, I would heartily advise against making any at all — for I know that if I were suited to deceive you and inclined to cheat the hopes you place in me on the basis of the information you’d gather, I would be doing so in even greater measure the more favorably the aforementioned inquiries turned out, inquiries that would then prove to be mendacious, if they spoke well of me. No, esteemed sir, if you think you might have a use for me, I ask that you display a bit more courage than most of the other business owners I’ve previously encountered and simply engage me on the basis of the impression I am making on you now. Besides, to be perfectly truthful, any inquiries concerning my person you might make will only result in your hearing bad reports.”

“Indeed? And why is that?”

“I didn’t last long,” the young man continued, “in any of the places I’ve worked at thus far, for I found it disagreeable to let my young powers go stale in the narrow stuffy confines of copyists’ offices, even if these offices were considered by all to be the most elegant in the world — those found in banks for example. To this day, I haven’t yet been sent packing by anyone at all but rather have always left on the strength of my own desire to leave, abandoning jobs and positions that no doubt carried promises of careers and the devil knows what else, but which would have been the death of me had I remained in them. No matter where it was I’d been working, my departure was, as a rule, lamented, but nonetheless after my decision was found regrettable and a dire future was prophesied for me, my employers always had the decency to wish me luck with my future endeavors. With you, sir, in your bookshop (and here the young man’s voice grew suddenly confiding), I will surely be able to last for years and years. And in any case, many things speak in favor of your giving me a try.” The bookseller said: “Your candor pleases me, I shall let you work in my shop for a one-week trial period. If you perform well and seem inclined to stay, then we can discuss it further.” With these words, which signaled the young man’s dismissal, the old man at the same time rang an electric bell, whereupon, as if arriving on the gusts of a strong wind, a small, elderly, bespectacled man appeared.

“Give this young man something to do!”

The spectacles nodded. With this, Simon became an assistant bookseller. Simon — for that was his name.

At around this same time, Professor Klaus, a brother of Simon’s who lived in a historic capital where he’d made a name for himself, had begun to worry about his younger brother’s behavior. A good, quiet, dutiful person, he would dearly have loved to see his brothers find the firm respect-commanding ground beneath their feet in life that he, the eldest, had. But this was so utterly not the case, at least till now, in fact it was so very much the opposite, that Professor Klaus began to reproach himself in his heart. He told himself, for example: “I should have been a person who would long since have had every opportunity to lead my brothers to the right path. Until now I’ve failed to do so. How could I have neglected these duties, etc.” Dr. Klaus knew thousands of duties, small and large, and sometimes it seemed as if he were longing to have even more of them. He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them. They cause themselves to experience many a troubled hour because of these unfulfilled duties — never stopping to consider how one duty always piles a second one upon the person undertaking the first — and they believe they’ve already fulfilled something like a duty just by being made anxious and uneasy by any dark inkling of its presence. They meddle in many an affair that — if they’d stop to think about it in a less anxious way — hasn’t a blessed thing to do with them, and they wish to see others as worry-laden as themselves. They tend to cast envious glances upon naïve unencumbered people, and then criticize them for being frivolous characters since they move through life so gracefully, their heads held so easily aloft. Dr. Klaus often forced himself to entertain a certain small modest sensation of insouciance, but always he would return again to his gray dreary duties, in the thrall of which he languished as in a dark prison. Perhaps, back when he was still young, he’d once felt a desire to stop, but he’d lacked the strength to leave undone something that resembled a nagging duty and couldn’t just walk past it with a dismissive smile. Dismissive? Oh, he never dismissed anything at all! Attempting this — or so it seemed to him — would have split him in twain from bottom to top; he’d have been incapable of avoiding painful recollections of what he’d cast aside and dismissed. He never dismissed or discarded anything at all, and he was wasting his young life analyzing and examining things utterly unworthy of examination, study, attention or love. Thus he’d grown older, but since he was by no means anything like a person devoid of sensibility and imagination, he often also reproached himself bitterly for neglecting the duty of being at least a little happy. This was yet another neglect of duty, a new one, which with perfect acuity demonstrated that the dutiful never quite succeed in fulfilling all their duties, indeed, that such individuals are the most likely of all human beings to disregard their foremost duties and only later — perhaps when it’s already too late — call them once more to mind. On more than one occasion Dr. Klaus felt sad about himself when he thought of the precious happiness that had faded from his view, the happiness of finding himself united with a young sweet girl, who of course would have to have been a girl from an impeccable family. At around the same time as he was contemplating his own person in a melancholy frame of mind, he wrote to his brother Simon, whom he genuinely loved and whose conduct in this world troubled him, a letter whose contents were approximately as follows: