Authors: Robert Walser
All the things he grasped became intermarried, and if we find it proper to speak of
his musicality, it was from the plenitude of his observation that it sprang, and from
his asking each object if it might agree to give him a revelation of its essence,
and most preeminently from his placing in the same “temple” things both large and
small.
The things he contemplated became eloquent, and the things to which he gave shape
looked back at him as if they had been pleased, and that is how they look at us still.
One could justly insist that he made the most extensive use, bordering on the inexhaustible,
of the suppleness and the compliance of his hands.
[1929]
Postscript
R
OBERT
W
ALSER
(1878–1956) wrote four novels during his thirty years as a writer. Three were published
during the first decade of this century (1906, 1907, 1908) and attracted some remarkable
minds, notably Morgenstern and Kafka, but they hardly appealed to a broad public.
The fourth novel was lost in the early 1920s. Eventually, the manuscript surfaced
in West Berlin and was published as
Der Räuber-Roman
in 1976. It is in the field of short prose that Walser excelled. There is some justice
to his claim to be writing, in separate swirls of short prose, a “long, plotless,
realistic story,” but his clownish and distinctly Swiss genius was at its best in
miniature fictions with a rapid pulse—those sketches, soliloquies, improvisations,
arabesques, and capriccios that form his ten collections (1904–25) and the four volumes
of uncollected work now available in the
Gesamtwerk.
Walser was largely self-educated, always poor, and just as dedicated to his mischievously
secret and independent life as Rilke was to his forbidding “work.” Among the various
types of short prose in the German tradition, going back to the medieval Latin
Gesta Romanorum,
there are certain strains which, like the ballad and the folk song, escape those
distinctions that have historically tended to reserve certain other genres for readers
of the upper or middle classes (e.g., the novel). Small wonder that Walser, with his
proletarian mode of life and his princely imagination, found in short prose his proper
habitat.
As for the tradition, one thinks of the anecdotes that pepper Abraham a Sancta Clara’s
sermons of the seventeenth century; of philosophical aperçus from Lichtenberg to Nietzsche
and Wittgenstein; of Johann Peter Hebel’s tales and reports of the early 1800s; of
the Expressionist “grotesques” of Salomo Friedländer (preceded by the fantasies of
Josef Popper-Lynkeus); and, by no means least, of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
masters of
feuilleton,
the miniature impressions, gossipings, entertainments, anecdotes, parables, often
with a lyrical twist, which since the 1820s—following French models—had been appearing
under the main news items on the front page of newspapers. All this was the humus
out of which eventually Walser’s short prose came; out of the same humus came, too,
Kafka’s Yggdrasill of parables.
Walser eked out a living as a feuilletonist, contributing also to periodicals, in
Berlin (1905–13), in Biel (1913–20), and in Berne (1921–32). Yet his prose surpasses,
in coloration and sensibility, the usual sketch or impression of the time. What I
have tried to do in this selection is present some of the main lines, or radiations,
of his power of invention in the miniature, of his charm in the grotesque, also of
his ironic reflexivity, viz., his jazzy oscillations between levels of discourse—dense
and transparent, straight and mocking. Conceivably, he was one of the earliest and
foremost artists in German prose to make positive fun of his understanding that the
truth of writing can deregulate or negate reference, while seeming to uphold it. Well
before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar
or Magritte’s apple (
“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”
).
The only period missing from the selection is the earliest one, about 1898–1904. Some
of
Fritz Kochers Aufsätze
might have been included, also an early miniature play, or “dramolet”—Walter Benjamin
thought
Schneewitzchen
profound and exemplary. At least in “Helbling” and “The Little Berliner” the reader
will find amplified versions of Fritz Kocher, the impish schoolboy soliloquist who,
not much later, becomes the
Kommis,
or clerk, as underdog, whose character as Walser portrayed him captured Kafka’s imagination.
Walser did not stop writing when he voluntarily entered the Waldau mental hospital
in Berne in 1929. It was only when he was forcibly transferred to Herisau in Appenzell,
in 1933, that he gave up, or switched, one might say, from being an incalculable alien
to being an official lunatic. His last “sane” book publication was
Die Rose,
in 1925; but throughout the 1920s he was writing prolifically, at times frenetically,
and always with gusto, in his extraordinary solitude. To Jochen Greven we are indebted
for the recovery and deciphering of hundreds of prose miniatures from that period.
These now appear, together with pieces that were published in newspapers and journals,
in the four posthumous volumes,
Festzug, Phantasieren, Olympia,
and
Der Europäer.
From these books I have chosen several texts; datings come from the same source.
To some extent Robert Walser was, in Artaud’s phrase, “suicided by society.” Certainly
he was one of the great European artists in language, since Christopher Smart, to
have risked all rather than compromise, and to have been broken eventually, like Hölderlin,
perhaps, or Nerval, by certain neuro-chemical effects of a demonic anguish. (Yet,
in his madness, Walser was surprisingly sane. To Carl Seelig, who became his legal
guardian in the late 1930s, he once said, when asked if he was writing anything: “I
am not here to write, but to be mad.”) Altogether, one reads Walser for his blithe
difference from colleagues in any age or any condition—for his perfect and serene
oddity. He composes a language that is prodigiously his own, even when the words in
their structures tally with Swiss German and High German. The translators have done
their best. Speaking for myself, I have taken few liberties and those only to mark
the whirling track of Walser’s dance more clearly in English than might otherwise
have been the case (also perhaps more quaintly than some solemn readers might relish).
The Walk and Other Stories
(1957) has been taken up into the present book, with some revisions. Acknowledgment
is made to John Calder for permission to reprint the four texts in that book. Acknowledgment
is made also to the little magazines in which Tom Whalen, having discovered Walser
in the forests of Arkansas and made of him, later, a sort of hero for some very gifted
young writers in New Orleans, placed his collaborative translations:
Barataria, Chowder Review, Lowlands Review, The Paris Review, Writ;
to
Delos,
in which Harriett Watts’s translation first appeared (1968); and to
Texas Quarterly,
in which “Helbling’s Story” and “Masters and Workers” appeared (1964). Walser’s third
novel,
Jakob von Gunten
(University of Texas Press, 1969), might appeal to readers who have enjoyed this
selection. For a brilliant, imaginative reconstruction of Robert Walser, as a spirit
touching fingertips with Erik Satie, the reader is referred to Guy Davenport’s “A
Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” in his book
Da Vinci’s Bicycle.
Christopher Middleton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975 by Verlag Helmut Kossodo
Foreword copyright © 1982 by Susan Sontag
Translation copyright © 1960, 1964, 1968, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1982 by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, Inc.
All rights reserved
Originally published in German in 1966 by Verlag Helmut Kossodo, Geneva and Hamburg,
as
Werkausgabe
Published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This paperback edition, 2012
“Kleist in Thun,” “The Walk,” “Frau Wilke,” and “The Monkey” from
The Walk and Other Stories
by Robert Walser, translation copyright © 1957 by John Calder Ltd. Reprinted by permission
of John Calder Ltd., London.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Walser, Robert.
Selected stories / Robert Walser; with a foreword by Susan Sontag ; translated
by Christopher Middleton and others.
[Translation of Werkausgabe]
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-25901-1
I. Title.
PT2647.A64 A25 1982
833'.912
[B]
82009257
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53362-5
eISBN 9781466834958
First eBook edition: November 2012
*
Therese Breitbach, with whom Walser exchanged letters between 1925 and 1932, was seventeen
and living in Germany when she first wrote to Walser; they never met.