Selected Stories
Authors: Robert Walser
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Contents
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CELEBRATION OF CONRAD FERDINAND MEYER
Postscript by Christopher Middleton
Walser’s Voice
R
OBERT
W
ALSER
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.
R
OBERT
W
ALSER
,
“Eine Art Erzählung,”
1928–29
Response to a Request
Y
OU
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.
