Robert Walser - The Tanners

The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one food suit and one less so. Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written. What he read was for the most part borrowed. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions, so too was he remote from other people. He became more and more distant from even the siblings closest to him — the painter Karl and the beautiful schoolteacher Lisa — until in the end, as Martin Walser said of him, he was the most unattached of all solitary poets. For him, evidently, coming to an arrangement with a woman was an impossibility. The chambermaids in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, whom he used to watch through a peephole he had bored in the wall of his attic lodgings; Fräulein Resy Breitbach in the Rhineland, with whom he maintained a length correspondence — all of them were, like the ladies he reveres so longingly in his literary fantasias, beings from a distant star. At a time when large families were still the norm — Walser's father Adolf came from a family of fifteen — strangely enough none of the eight siblings in the next generation brought a child into the world; and of all this last generation of Walsers, dying out together, as it were, non was perhaps less suited to fulfil the prerequisites for successful procreation than Robert, who, as one may say in his case with some fittingness, retained his virginal innocence all his life. The death of Robert Walser, who, inevitably rendered even more anonymous after the long years in an institution, was in the end connected to almost nothing and nobody, might easily have passed as unnoticed as, for a long time, had his life. That Walser is not today among the forgotten writers we owe primarily to the fact that Carl Seelig took up his cause. Without Seelig's accounts of the walks he took with Walser, without his preliminary work on the biography, without the selections from the work he published and the lengths he went to in securing the Nachlass , the writer's millions of illegible ciphers, Walser's rehabilitation could never have taken place, and his memory would in all probability have faded into oblivion. Nonetheless, the fame which has accrued around Walser since his posthumous redemption cannot be compared with that of, say, Benjamin or Kafka. Now as then Walser remains a singular, enigmatic figure. He refused by and large to reveal himself to his readers. According to Elias Canetti, what set Walser apart from other writers was the way that in his writing he always denied his innermost anxieties, constantly omitting a part of himself. This absence, so Canetti claimed, was the source of his unique strangeness. It is odd, too, how sparsely furnished with detail is what we know of the story of his life. We know that his childhood was overshadowed by his mother's melancholia and by the decline of his father's business year after year; that he wanted to train as an actor; that he did not last long in any of his positions as a clerk; and that he spent the years from 1905 to 1913 in Berlin. But what he may have been doing there apart from writing — which at the time came easily to him — about that we have no idea at all. So little does he tell us about the German metropolis, so little, later, of the Seeland around Biel and his years there, and his circumstances in Berne, that one might almost speak of a chronic poverty of experience. External events, such as the outbreak of the First World War, appear to affect him hardly at all. The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it. When he can no longer go on we see him in the Waldau clinic, doing a bit of work in the garden or playing a game of billiards against himself, and finally we see him in the asylum in Herisau, scrubbing vegetables in the kitchen, sorting scraps of tinfoil, reading a novel by Friedric Gerstäcker or Jules Verne and sometimes, as Robert Mächler relates, just standing stiffly in a corner. So far apart are the scenes of Walser's life which have come down to us that one cannot really speak of a story or of a biography at all, but rather, or so it seems to me, of a legend. The precariousness of Walser's existence — persisting even after his death — the emptiness blowing through every part of it, lends it an air of spectral insubstantiality which may deter the professional critics just as much as the indefinability of the texts. No doubt Martin Walser is correct in remarking that Robert Walser — despite the fact that his work seems positive to invite dissertation — always eludes any kind of systematic treatment. How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows and who, nonetheless, illumined every page with the most genial light, an author who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, to whom his own thoughts, honed on the tiniest details, became incomprehensible, who had his feet firmly on the ground yet was always getting lost in the clouds, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, event and things of which it spoke. Was it a lady called Wanda or a wandering apprentice, Fräulein Else or Fräulein Edith, a steward, a servant or Dostoyevsky's Idiot , a conflagration in the theatre or an ovation, the Battle of Sempach, a slap in the face or the return of the Prodigal, a stone urn, a suitcase, a pocket watch or a pebble? Everything written in these incomparable books has — as their author might himself have said — a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable. Conversely, Walser's sottises often conceal the profoundest depths of meaning. Despite such difficulties, however, which seem designed to foil the plans of anyone intent on categorization, much has been written about Robert Walser. Most of it, admittedly, is of a rather impressionistic or marginal nature, or can be regarded as an act of hommage on the part of his admirers. Nor are the remarks which follow any exception, for since my encounter with walker, I too have only ever been able to read him in an unsystematic fashion. Beginning here and now there, for years I have been roaming around, now in the novels, now in the realms of the Bleistiftsgebiet (Pencil Regions), and whenever I resume my intermittent reading of Walser's writings, so too I always look again at the photographs we have of him, seven very different faces, stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe which has taken place between each.