The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  But let us continue. As the fantastical elements in Walser's prose works increase, so too their realistic content dwindles––or, rather, reality rushes past unstoppably as in a dream, or in the cinema. Ali Baba, quite hollowed out by unrequited love and pious devotion to duty in the diligent service of the most cruel of all princesses, and in whom we easily recognize one of Walser's alter egos––Ali Baba one evening sees a long sequence of cinematic images unfold before his eyes: naturalistic landscapes like the many-peaked Engadin, the Lac de Bienne and the Kurhaus at Magglingen. "One after another," the story continues, "there came into view a Madonna holding a child on her arm, a snowfield high in the Alps, Sunday pleasures by the lakeside, baskets of fruit and flower arrangements, all of a sudden a painting representing the kiss Judas gave Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, with his fat face, round as an apple, almost preventing him from carrying out his plan; then a scene from a Schüzenfest, and, civility itself, a collection of summer hats which seemed to smile contentedly, followed by expensive crystal, porcelain, and items of jewelry. Ali Baba enjoyed watching the pictures, each quickly dissolving and being replaced by the next." Things are always quickly dissolving and being replaced by the next in Walser. His scenes only last for the blink of an eyelid, and even the human figures in his work enjoy only the briefest of lives. Hundreds of them inhabit the Bleistiftsgebiet alone––dancers and singers, tragedians and comedians, bar-maids and private tutors, principals and procurers, Nubians and Muscovites, hired hands and millionaires, Aunts Roka and Moka and a whole host of other walk-on parts. As they make their entrance they have a marvelous presence, but as soon as one tries to look at them more closely they have already vanished. It always seems to me as if, like actors in the earliest films, they are surrounded by a trembling, shimmering aura which makes their contours unrecognizable. They flit through Walser's fragmentary stories and embryonic novels as people in dreams flit through our heads at night, never stopping to register, departing the moment they have arrived, never to be seen again. Benjamin is the only one among the commentators who tries to pin down the anonymous, evanescent quality of Walser's characters. They come, he says, "from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed."1 Nabokov surely had something similar in mind when he said of the fickle souls who roam Nikolai Gogol's books that here we have to do with a tribe of harmless madmen, who will not be prevented by anything in the world from ploughing their own eccentric furrow. The comparison with Gogol is by no means farfetched, for if Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, then it is Gogol. Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the center of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, and about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing. There is a scene which Nabokov quotes in his book on Gogol, where we are told that the hero of Dead Souls, our Mr. Chichikov, is boring a certain young lady in a ballroom with all kinds of pleasantries which he had already uttered on numerous occasions in various places, for example "In the Government of Simbirsk, at the house of Sofron Ivanovich Bezpechnoy, where the latter's daughter, Maria Gavrilovna, Alexandra Gavrilovna and Adelheida Gavrilovna; at the house of Frol Vasilievich Pobedonosnoy, in the Government of Penza; and at that of the latter's brother, where the following were present: his wife's sister Katherina Mikhailovna and her cousins Rosa Feodorovna and Emilia Feodorovna; in the Government of Viatka, at the house of Pyotr Varsonophyevich, where his daughter-in-law's sister Pelagea Egorovna was present, together with a niece, Sophia Rostislavna and two stepsisters: Sophia Alexandrovna and Maclatura Alexandrovna"2––this scene, none of whose characters makes an appearance anywhere else in Gogol's works, since their secret (like that of human existence as a whole) resides in their utter superfluity––this scene with its digressive nature could equally well have sprung from Robert Walser's imagination. Walser himself once said that basically he was always writing the same novel, from one prose work to the next––a novel which, he says, one could describe as "a much-chopped up or dismembered Book of Myself." One should add that the main character––the Ich––almost never makes an appearance in this Ich–Buch but is left blank, or rather remains out of sight among the crowd of other passing figures. Homelessness is another thing Walser and Gogol have in common––the awful provisionality of their respective existences, the prismatic mood swings, the sense of panic, the wonderfully capricious humor steeped at the same time in blackest heartache, the endless scraps of paper and, of course, the invention of a whole populace of lost souls, a ceaseless masquerade for the purpose of autobiographical mystification. Just as, at the end of the spectral story The Overcoat, there is scarcely anything left of the scribe Akakiy Akakievich because, as Nabokov points out, he no longer quite knows if he is in the middle of the street or in the middle of a sentence, so too in the end it becomes almost impossible to make out Gogol and Walser among the legions of their characters, not to mention against the dark horizon of their looming illness. It is through writing that they achieved this depersonalization, through writing that they cut themselves off from the past. Their ideal state is that of pure amnesia. Benjamin noted that the point of every one of Walser's sentences is to make the reader forget the previous one, and indeed after The Tanners––which is still a family memoir––the stream of memory slows to a trickle and peters out in a sea of oblivion. For this reason it is particularly memorable, and touching, when once in a while, in some context or another, Walser raises his eyes from the page, looks back into the past and imparts to his read––for example––that one evening years ago he was caught in a snowstorm on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin and how the vividness of the memory has stayed with him ever since. Nor are Walser's emotions any less erratic than these remembered images. For the most part they are carefully concealed, or, if they do emerge, are soon turned into something slightly ridiculous or at least made light of. In the prose sketch devoted to Brentano, Walser asks: "Can a person whose feelings are so many and so lovely be at the same time so unfeeling?" The answer might have been that in life, as in fairy tales, there are those who, out of fear and poverty, cannot afford emotions and who therefore, like Walser in one of his most poignant prose pieces, have to try out their seemingly atrophied ability to love on inanimate substances and objects unheeded by anyone else––such as ash, a needle, a pencil, or a matchstick. Yet the way in which Walser then breathes life into them, in an act of complete assimilation and empathy, reveals how in the end emotions are perhaps most deeply felt when applied to the most insignificant things. "Indeed," Walser writes about ash, "if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctant to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped on something." The intense pathos of this passage––there is nothing which comes near it in the whole of twentieth-century German literature, not even in Kafka––lies in the fact that here, in this apparently casual treatise on ash, needle, pencil and matchstick, the author is in truth writing about his own martyrdom, for these four objects are not randomly strung together but are the writer's own instruments of torture, or at any rate that which he needs in order to stage his
own personal auto-da-fé––and what remains once the fire has died down.

  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.