The Tanners (3 page)

Indeed, in the middle of his life writing had become a wearisome business
for Walser. Year by year the unremitting composition of his literary pieces becomes
harder and harder for him. It is a kind of penance he is serving up there in his
attic room in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, where, by his own account, he spends ten
to thirteen hours at a stretch at his desk every day, in winter wearing his army
greatcoat and the slippers he has fashioned himself from leftover scraps of
material. He talks in terms of a writer's prison, a dungeon, or an attic cell, and
of the danger of losing one's reason under the relentless strain of composition. "My
back is bent by it," says the Poet in the eponymous piece, "since often I sit for
hours bent over a single word that has to take the long slow route from brain to
paper." This work makes him neither unhappy nor happy, he adds, but he often has the
feeling that it will be the death of him. There are several reasons––apart from the
chains which, in the main, double-bind writers to their métier––why, despite these
insights, Walser did not give up writing earlier: chief among them perhaps the fear
of
déclassement
and, in the most extreme case in which he almost found
himself, of being reduced to handouts, fears which haunted him all the more since
his father's financial ruin had rendered his childhood and youth deeply insecure.
It
is not so much poverty itself Walser fears, however, as the ignominy of going down
in the world. He is very well aware of the fact that "a penniless worker is much
less an object of contempt than an out-of-work clerk…. A clerk, as long as he has
a
post, is already halfway to being a gentleman, but without a post becomes an
awkward, superfluous, burdensome nonentity." And what is true of office clerks
naturally applies to an even greater degree to writers, inasmuch as the latter have
it in them not just to be half-way to being a gentleman but even, given the right
circumstances, to rise to be figureheads of their nation. And then there is the fact
that writers, in common with all those to whom a higher office is entrusted as it
were by the grace of God, cannot simply retire when the mood takes them; even today
they are expected to keep writing until the pen drops from their hand. Not only
that: people believe they are entitled to expect that, as Walser writes to Otto
Pick, "every year they will bring to the light of day some new one hundred percent
proof item." To bring such pieces of "one hundred percent proof"––in the sense of
a
sensational major new work––to the cultural marketplace was something which Walser,
at least since his return to Switzerland, was no longer in a fit state to do––if
indeed he ever had been. At least part of him perceived himself, in his time in Biel
or Berne, as a hired hand and as nothing more than a degraded literary haberdasher.
The courage, however, with which he defended his last embattled position and came
to
terms with "the disappointments, reprimands in the press, the boos and hisses, the
silencing even unto the grave" was almost unprecedented. That in the end he was
still forced to capitulate was due not only to the exhaustion of his own inner
resources, but also to the catastrophic changes––even more rapid in the second half
of the 1920s––in the cultural and intellectual climate. There can be no doubt that
had Walser persevered for a few more years he would, by the spring of 1933 at the
latest, have found the last possible opportunities for publication in the German
Reich closed off to him. To that extent, he was quite correct in the remarks he made
to Carl Seelig that his world had been destroyed by the Nazis. In his 1908 critical
review of
The Assistant
. Josef Hofmiller contrasts the alleged
insubstantiality of the novel with the more solid earthiness of the autochtonous
Swiss writers Johannes Jegerlehner, Josef Reinhart, Alfred Huggenberger, Otto von
Greyerz and Ernst Zahn––whose ideological slant may, I make so bold as to claim, be
readily discerned from the ingrained rootedness of their names. Of one such
Heimat
poet, a certain Hans von Mühlenstein, Walser writes in the
mid-twenties to Resy Breitbach that he––like Walser himself originally from
Biel––after a brief marriage to an imposing lady from Munich has now settled in
Graubünden, where he is an active member of the association for the dissemination
of
the new spirit of the age and has married a country woman "who orders him first
thing in the morning to bring in a cartload of greens from the field before
breakfast. He wears blue overalls, coarse trousers of a rustic stuff and is
exceedingly contented." The contempt for nationalist and
Heimat
poets which
this passage reveals is a clear indication that Walser knew exactly what ill hour
had struck and why there was no longer any call for his works, either there in
Germany or at home in Switzerland.

Against this background, Walser's legendary "pencil system" takes on the
aspect of a preparation for al ice underground. In the "microscripts," the
deciphering of which by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte is one of the most
significant literary achievements of recent decades, can be seen––as an ingenious
method of continuing to write––coded messages of one forced into illegality and
documents of a genuine "inner emigration." Certainly Walser was, as he explains in
a
letter to Max Rychner, primarily concerned with overcoming his inhibitions about
writing by means of the less definitive "pencil method"; and it is equally certain
that unconsciously, as Werner Morlang notes, he was seeking to hide, behind the
indecipherable characters, "from both public and internalized instances of
evaluation," to duck down below the level of language and to obliterate himself. But
his system of pencil notes on scraps of paper is also a work of fortifications and
defenses, unique in the history of literature, by means of which the smallest and
most innocent things might be saved from destruction in the "great times" then
looming on the horizon. Entrenched in his impenetrable earthworks, Robert Walser
reminds me of Casella, the Corsican captain who, in 1768, alone in a tower on Cap
Corse, deceived the French invaders into believing it was occupied by a whole
battalion by running from one floor to another and shooting now out of one, now out
of another firing slit. Significantly enough, after Walser entered the asylum at
Waldau he felt as if he were perched outside the city on the ramparts, and it is
perhaps for this reason that he writes from there to Fräulein Breitbach that,
although the battle has long since been lost, now and again he "fires off" the odd
small piece at "some of the journals of the Fatherland," just as if these writing
were grenades or bombs.

At any rate I am unable to reassure myself with the view that the
intricate texts of the
Bleistiftsgebiet
reflect, either in their appearance
or their content, the history of Robert Walser's progressive mental deterioration.
I
recognize, of course, that their peculiar preoccupation with form, the extreme
compulsion to rhyme, say, or the way that their length is determined by the exact
dimensions of the space available on a scrap of paper, exhibit certain
characteristics of pathological writing: an encephalogram, as it were, of someone
compelled––as it says in
The Robber
––to be thinking constantly of something
somehow very far distant; but they do appear to me to be evidence of a psychotic
state.

On the contrary,
The Robber
is Walser's most rational and most
daring work, a self-portrait and self-examination of absolute integrity, in which
both the compiler of the medical history and his subject occupy the position of the
author. Accordingly, the narrator––who is at once friend, attorney, warden, guardian
and guardian angel of the vulnerable, almost broken hero––sets out his case from a
certain ironic distance, even perhaps, as he notes on one occasion, with the
complacency of a critic. On the other hand he repeatedly rises to the occasion with
impassioned pleas on behalf of his client, such as in the following appeal to the
public: "Don't persist in reading nothing but healthy books, acquaint yourselves
also with so-called pathological literature, from which you may derive considerable
edification. Healthy people should always, so to speak, take certain risks. For what
other reason, blast and confound it, is a person healthy? Simply in order to stop
living one day at the height of one's health? A damned bleak fate … I know now more
than ever that intellectual circles are filled with philistinism. I mean moral and
aesthetic chickenheartedness. Timidity, though, is unhealthy. One day, while out for
a swim, the Robber very nearly met a watery end. […] One year later, that dairy
school student drowned in the very same river. So the Robber knows from experience
what it's like to have water nymphs hauling one down by the legs." The passion with
which the advocate Walser takes up the cause on his client's behalf draws its energy
from the threat of annihilation. If ever a book was written from the outermost
brink, it is this one. Faced with the imminent end, Walser works imperturbably on,
often even with a kind of wry amusement, and––apart from a few eccentricities which
he permits himself for the fun of it––with an unerringly steady hand. "Never before,
in all my years at my desk, have I sat down to write so boldly, so intrepidly," the
narrator tells us at the beginning. In fact, the unforced way in which he manages
the not inconsiderable structural difficulties and the constant switches of mood
between the deepest distraction and a light-heartedness which can only be properly
described by the word
allegría
, testifies to a supreme degree of both
aesthetic and moral assurance. It is true, too, that in this posthumous
novel––already written, so to speak, from the other side––Walser accrues insights
into his own particular state of mind and the nature of mental disturbance as such,
the likes of which––so far as I can see––are to be found nowhere else in literature.
With incomparable sangfroid he sets down an account of the probable origins of his
suffering in an upbringing which consisted almost exclusively of small acts of
neglect; of house, as a man of fifty, he still feels the child or little boy inside
him; of the girl he would like to have been; the satisfaction he derives from
wearing an apron; the fetishistic tendencies of the spoon-caresser; of paranoia, the
feeling of being surrounded and hemmed in; the sense, reminiscent of Josef K. in
The Trial
, that being observed made him interesting; and of the dangers
of idiocy arising, as he actually writes, from sexual atrophy. With seismographic
precision, he registers the slightest remorse at the edges of his consciousness,
records rejections and ripples in his thoughts and emotions about which the science
of psychiatry even today scarcely allows itself to dream. The narrator does not
think much of the therapies the mind doctor offers to the Robber, and still less of
the universal panacea of belief, which he terms a "perfectly simple, paltry
condition of the soul." "For," he says, "one achieves nothing by it, absolutely
nothing, nothing at all. One just sits there and believes. Like a person
mechanically knitting a sock." Walser is not interested in either the obscurantism
of the medicine men or of the other curators of the soul. What matters to him, like
any other writer in full possession of his faculties, is the greatest possible
degree of lucidity, and I can imagine how, which writing
The Robber
, it
must have occurred to him on more than one occasion that the looming threat of
impending darkness enabled him at times to arrive at an acuity of observation and
precision of formulation which is unattainable from a state of perfect health. He
focuses this particular power of perception not just on his own
via
dolorous
but also on other outsiders, persons excluded and eliminated, with
whom his alter ego the Robber is associated. His own personal fate concerns him
least of all. "In most people," the narrator says, "the lights go out," and he feels
for every such ravaged life. The French officers, for example, whom the robber once
saw in mufti in the resort town of Magglingen, three thousand feet above sea level.
"This was shortly before the outbreak of our not yet forgotten Great War, and all
these young gentlemen who sought and doubtless also found relaxation high up in the
blossoming meads were obliged to follow the call of their nation." How false, then,
the rolling thunder of "storms of steel" and all ideologically tainted literature
sounds, by comparison and with this one sentence with its discreet compassion.
Walser refused the grand gesture. On the subject of the collective catastrophes of
his day he remained resolutely silent. However, he was anything but politically
naïve. When, in the years preceding the First World War, the old Ottoman Empire
collapsed in the face of attacks by the reform party, the modern Turkey constituted
itself with one eye on Germany as a potential protector, Walser was more or less
alone in viewing this development with skepticism. In the prose piece "The Farewell"
(
Abschied
) he has the deposed Sultan––who is under no illusions about
the shortcomings of his régime––express doubts about the progress that has
apparently been achieved. Of course, he says, there will now be efficient folk at
work in Turkey, where chaos has always reigned, "but our gardens will wither and our
mosques will soon be redundant … (and) railways will criss-cross the desert where
even hyenas quailed at the sound of my name. The Turks will put on caps and look
like Germans. We will be forced to engage in commerce, and if we aren't capable of
that, we will simply be shot." That is more or less how things came to pass, too,
except that in the first genocide of our ill-fated century it was not the Turks who
were shot and put to death by the Germans, but the Armenians by the Turks. At all
events, it was not an auspicious start, and one could say that in 1909, looking
through the eyes of Haroun al Rashid, Walser saw far into the future; and he will
hardly have been less far-sighted as the 1920s drew to a close. The Robber, whose
whole disposition was that of a liberal free-thinker and republican,
also
became soulsick on account of the looming clouds darkening the political horizon.
The exact diagnosis of his illness is of little relevance. It is enough for us to
understand that, in the end, Walser simply could not go on, and, like Hölderlin, had
to resort to keeping people at arm's length with a sort of anarchic politeness,
becoming refractory and abusive, making scenes in public and believing that the
bourgeois city of Berne, of all places, was a city of ghostly gesticulators,
executing rapid hand movements directly in front of his face expressly in order to
discombobulate him and to dismiss him out of hand as one who simply does not count.
During his years in Berne Walser was almost completely isolated. The contempt was,
as he feared, universal. Among the few who still concerned themselves with him was
the schoolteacher (and poet) Emil Schibli, with whom he stayed for a few days in
1927. In a description of his meeting with Walser published in the
Seeländer
Volksstimme
. Schibli claims to have recognised, in this lonely poet in the
guise of a tramp and suffering from profound isolation, a king in hiding "whom
posterity will call, if not one of the great, then one of rare purity." While Walser
was no stranger to the evangelical desire to possess nothing and to give away
everything one owns––as in
The Robber
––he made no claim to any kind of
messianic calling. It was enough for him to call himself––with bitterly resigned
irony––at least the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic Federation. We, though, can
grant Walser the honorific title with which he endows the Robber and to which in
fact he himself is entitled, namely the son of a first secretary to the canton.