Selected Stories (20 page)

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)

R
ÖSI
B
REITBACH
, 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

W
HAT
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.