Robert Walser: Writing On The Periphery

Robert Walser (1878–1956) was one of the most idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. Unabashedly subjective, he knew how to "play on the instrument of his fancies . . . like a musician on the piano" in a way that earned him admiration from some German-language writers, including Kafka and Hesse, and that brought him condescension from others. Among those who failed to appreciate the playfulness and sophistication of his seemingly guileless voice was the then reigning king of German letters, Thomas Mann, who speculated that Walser's book Die Rose (1925) might have been written by a child. Like many contemporaries, Mann mistook Walser's often naïve-sounding persona for the author himself. Though almost forgotten by the time of his death, Walser is now recognized as a modern master, especially in continental Europe. This posthumous change in fortune might not have surprised Walser himself, who, in the words of the hero of his seminal novel, Jakob von Gunten (1909), foresaw the day when "some fragrance or other will issue from my being and my beginnings." After 1933, when Walser fell silent as a writer, that prediction became even more resonant.

Walser's productive life is a tale of four cities: Zurich (1896–1905), Berlin (1905–13), Biel (1913–21), and Bern (1921–29). In Berlin, where he became a more sophisticated and urbane writer, he published to little discernible effect two other novels, The Tanner Siblings and The Assistant (Susan Bernofsky's excellent English translation of the latter was published by New Directions in 2007). During his years in Biel he shifted his literary ambition to the feuilleton or sketch, which in his hands became an infinitely malleable form. After moving to Bern in 1921, he resorted to his pencil method, as he called it, in an effort to overcome a writing block that took the form of cramps in his writing hand. When he wanted to submit a piece to a newspaper or magazine, he would transcribe the microscopic pencil-script in which he had written his first draft into the regular copperplate ink handwriting of the final version. In the late twenties he began to suffer from nightmares and paranoia, and he occasionally heard voices. In January 1929, at the prompting of his sister Lisa, he entered an asylum at Waldau. Then, in June 1933, on being transferred against his will to another institution (Herisau), he gave up writing for good. Whenever he was encouraged to resume writing he would refuse, explaining that "the only ground on which a writer can produce is that of freedom." Occasionally he could be coaxed out of his taciturnity by visitors such as his friend and eventual literary executor, Carl Seelig, to whom he once said: "I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad." Seelig's Strolls with Robert Walser, which unfortunately has not yet been translated into English, shows that even as an inmate Walser retained his acute self-insight and quirky wisdom. When, on Christmas Day 1956, he collapsed and died of a heart attack while out on one of his solitary walks, his passing surprised a number of writers and critics who had believed that he was long gone.

Walser's obliquely autobiographical prose, which has been compared by critics with an odd assortment of modern artists ranging from Beckett, Kafka, and Stevie Smith to Paul Klee and Vincent van Gogh, also brings to mind the great sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. Although the phlegmatic Frenchman is poles apart from the effervescent Swiss, in his own way each man infuses every page he writes with a sensibility that is, as one of Walser's figures says of himself, "alert to everything." Walser himself insists, only half tongue-in-cheek, that each of his sketches is the product of an "artisan novelist," who tailors, cobbles, welds, planes, knocks, hammers, or nails together lines, which, when read as a whole, constitute a "variously sliced-up or...