A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

by Robert Walser

  1917

  READING

  READING is as productive as it is enjoyable. When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid. Ardent readers are a breed of people with great inner peace as it were. The reader has his noble, deep, and long-lasting pleasure without being in anyone else’s way or bothering anyone. Is that not glorious? I should think so! Anyone who reads is far from hatching evil schemes. An appealing and entertaining thing to read has the good quality of making us forget for a time that we are nasty, quarrelsome people who cannot leave each other in peace. Who could deny this clearly rather sad and melancholy-inducing sentence? No doubt books often also sidetrack us from useful and productive actions; still, all things considered, reading has to be commended as beneficial, since it seems to be utterly necessary to apply a restraint to our violent craving for belongings and a gentle anesthetic to our often ruthless thirst for action. To a certain extent, a book is a fetter: It is not for nothing that one speaks of a captivating or gripping read. A book bewitches and dominates us, it holds us spellbound, in other words it exerts a power over us, and we are happy to let such tyranny occur, for it is a blessing. Anyone captivated and gripped by a book for a given time does not use that time to initiate gossip about his dear fellow man, which is always a great and crude mistake. To talk pointlessly is always a mistake. Anyone who holds a newspaper in his hand and assiduously reads around in it qualifies, practically automatically from that very fact alone, as a good citizen. A newspaper reader is not cursing, swearing, and blustering, and for that reason alone reading newspapers is a true benediction, that should be obvious. A reader always looks proper, decent, decorous, and consummately respectable. I have sometimes heard people talk about so-called harmful reading, e.g., infamous Gothic novels. That’s another story we shall avoid getting into, but we can say this much: The worst book in the world is not as bad as the complete indifference of never picking up a book at all. A trashy book is not nearly as dangerous as people sometimes think, and the so-called really good books are under certain conditions by no means as free of danger as people generally like to believe. Intellectual things are never as harmless as eating chocolate or enjoying an apple tart or the like. In principle, the reader just has to know how to cleanly separate reading from life. I remember that as a schoolboy I used to carefully creep under or behind a pear tree every once in a while with an absolutely phenomenally great and fat trashy Gothic novel that took place in Hungary, needless to say, so that my father wouldn’t catch me at my eager reading and greedy enjoyment, which would have resulted in a humiliating tribunal of justice. The book had the mysterious title: Sandor. To follow up on what I have just said about reading and life, perhaps I may be permitted to tell a short story as well, namely:

  THE WOMAN WHO READ GOTTFRIED KELLER

  A pretty young woman assiduously read the works of Gottfried Keller. Who does not admire these works? Anything I say here can budge the great writer’s reputation as little as it could a boulder. When this pretty young good woman had finished her beautiful book, which conveyed to her such a comfortably noble picture of the world and its inhabitants, she felt in a strange way depressed about life. Her own modest life path suddenly seemed to her very bare. She had become, through her reading, demanding. What she saw in Gottfried Keller’s books she would very much have liked to see in daily life as well, but life was and always is different from books. Living and reading are two very different things. The Gottfried Keller reader felt like hanging her little head in a disappointed sulk. She was almost angry at and resentful of human life, because it was not like the life in Keller’s works. Luckily, she soon thereafter realized that there was little or no point in bearing a grudge against everyday life, which was admittedly perhaps somewhat beastly from a certain point of view. “Be humble, don’t make special demands, and for God’s sake take existence as it is and comes and is given to you,” an inner voice said to the ardent reader of the works of Gottfried Keller, and as soon as she had realized clearly and unambiguously how necessary it was to be modest and undemanding from the bottom of your heart in this, as mentioned, arguably now and then rather cold and beastly world, she straightaway made a happy, cheerful face again, had to laugh at herself and her Gottfried Keller obsession, and was content.

  1917

  A DEVIL OF A STORY

  NOW, DEAR reader, let me tell you the story of a love that was of much too high and delicate a type to be able to have any sort of tangible, proper consequences. I should, of course, write a long and finely structured novel on such a moving and beautiful theme, but it’s so nice and sunny and hot outside at the moment that an ordinary person like me would rather take a walk, or perhaps nurse a glass of beer with visible pleasure in a shady garden under the plane trees, or maybe go swimming in the nearby lake under a refreshing west wind. So I will make it brief and say that once, a short while ago, there was a woman (oh, if only she had been Swedish, Russian, Danish!) who loved a young man, and in fact loved him so passionately that she wanted to run away with him out into the wide world, but the messed-up thing was that she was married, and the even more messed-up part of the story was that she was unable to do her husband wrong. Here, oh esteemed reader of Swedish and Nordic novels, I arrive at and in fact wade knee-deep into what is generally called the Danish or psychological novel. And so I continue, with trembling quill, no, hand (but thence quill!) and relate what a real writer cannot say without a sob, namely that the woman almost went out of her healthy and right mind. The good husband likewise, practically. Both of them were, that is to say, too tactful, refined, and sensitive ever to be able to bring their respective selves to cause each other sorrow. Behold the intricate and involved story I have so rashly embroiled myself in! The woman would have been all too happy to be up and off with her stormy lover, but she was too noble to run off, and, yes, she loved, oh dear Lord, them both: her husband as well as the young man. A frightful situation. Now, now I say!, by the honor I enjoy as an agile pusher of and painter with the pen, we are seriously daning and sweding now, in a way that I am unwaveringly convinced no one far and wide can match. Can I depart with my lover in search of wide open spaces if at the same time I want with all my heart to stay right here at home with my dear and good husband? Can I love my lover lovingly enough if I am unable to stop loving this legally wedded and espoused husband? Here, it seems to me, the situation is crawling with true if not indeed true blue spiritual and novelistic problems. But onward! The good husband wanted with all his soul to permit his wife to rush off, so that she might become intoxicated with monstrously unprecedented amorous joy, but then he did not give her his permission after all, since doing so would have torn his very heart asunder. From love he was happy to allow it, but then it was from love and nothing but that he begged and pleaded with her to stay nice and well-behaved at home, so that he would not go out of his poor, healthy mind, which nonetheless he would be only too glad to lose and lack forever out of love for her. The wife cried, first of all because she could not go out into the world with her lover, and secondly because she no longer found the strength to stay calmly at home with her husband and dutifully attend to the housework, as previously. The husband cried, tears poured down his face, and he was acting like a desperate man, first of all because he was simply compelled to say to his wife that she should please just stay home and calm down, which caused him pain, since after all as a loving husband he wanted to give his wife everything she wanted, and secondly because he wanted to allow his wife everything possible and everything thinkable, but just couldn’t. The wife wanted to, but was unable to, and similarly the husband wanted to, but couldn’t. And so they both cried. Even the young man had to partake of these tears, like it or not. All three of them wretchedly sobbed. It was just that all three were too sensitive, and so nothing came of it, and with that this story is over too.

  January 1916

  THE SOLDIER

  THE SOLDIER is calm, steadfast, brave, and humble. Grumbling a
nd bickering are not allowed. He must obey. If he obeys happily it is that much easier to obey, every soldier feels that. Soldiers who refuse to obey are not soldiers at all, and obedience intending to remain within certain limits is not the kind that every soldier owes his fatherland. He owes his fatherland obedience to the utmost. When I say soldier here, I also mean the officers, who are as much soldiers as the ordinary soldiers are. The officers, too, must obey, even the Commander in Chief must obey. Commands are only a form of communication and the cutting tone used to give orders is just a custom. When the simple soldier obeys his superior, he can tell himself that this superior is himself just a means to an end. In military service, everyone must serve. If the soldier is a servant, so too is the general a servant. He too has nothing higher and better in view than to render service. In the service, serving is the highest calling. Everything else, like for instance promotion, is just a tinkling of secondary importance. The most important thing is that everyone stands his ground, holds his position, and carries out his duties there. That is sometimes hard, but it is also quite simple. Service is not fun but then again there is no reason why it should be. If it was fun, then young girls would be best at it. Since, however, it isn’t, men are better suited for it. A brave man is probably best suited, in fact, for serious and difficult tasks. The soldier is serious and energy and goodwill are reflected in his face. This energy does not preclude merriment, and seriousness does not necessarily imply gloominess. The soldier is meant to defend the fatherland, and if fate decides that he should come under fire, he will act bravely because it is his duty to act bravely. Danger is less frightening when you face it bravely; it takes on monstrous proportions only when seen through the eyes of cowards and pitiful weaklings. The fact that one who neglects his duty is in precisely the same danger as one who does his duty makes it less difficult to carry out one’s duty and makes dereliction of duty less tempting. What true soldier would be capable, in the hour of universal need, in the wonderful hour of bitter earnestness, in the hour of danger, in the hour of desperate necessity, of being disloyal and forgetting what he owes to his fatherland? No friend of the fatherland can even imagine such a soldier. “There are no soldiers like that,” he says to himself. Every soldier says to himself: “There are no soldiers like that.” For every soldier is a friend of the fatherland.

  December 1914

  SOMETHING ABOUT SOLDIERS

  A MAN GETS used to the soldier’s life without at the same time ever quite being able to tell how. We can say, in general, that the service is bearable. Each day passes after the other. The tasks that a soldier has to perform can and indeed must be described as to a certain extent rather monotonous, but it probably has to be that way, since I don’t feel that we would be right to think that a man goes into the service merely with the goal of finding exciting and diverting entertainment every day. The life of a soldier has certain definite, constantly repeated hard things about it, and yet mastering those things requires in my opinion only a reasonable, not particularly great amount of patience. In addition, there is also no doubt great charm in the service as well, like for instance the constant cleaning. You are always cleaning and yet always find yourself in a situation in which additional cleaning is urgently needed. Herein lies, in my experience, the great and good manner of passing the time in the service, which, I would say, intrinsically possesses a kind of quickly accomplished, rough, and large-scale cleanliness. The soldier does not intend to, and cannot, detour into the tiny and tiniest details of cleanliness. That would be in no way soldierly. Have for example I even once during my service, or more than two or three times, used soap? Not that I know of. I washed my hands with dirt, it was simpler that way. When I got back home I would look at myself again in the mirror. The rather grimy appearance and degenerate look that had overtaken my face puzzled me a little. Still, I was honestly happy about it.

  I spoke earlier of the monotony of the service: this is probably inherent in military thinking as such. Only countless repetitions of one and the same exercise produce a high degree of competence, and competence is also beauty, and beauty is the suppleness that reminds one of the curious machinery and technology of a dream. In this consists the whole art of being a soldier, and it moves in high style from holding the weapon to combat.

  The soldier is lodged now in a schoolroom, now in a high, wide dance hall decorated with old or new murals, now in a horrible barn or granary, now in a hovel or barracks dug into a cliff, now in the corridor of a monastery or a cozy farmer’s cottage. Lying and slumbering on rough straw can be just as refreshing and just as delightful as stretching out for a rest on the fanciest, most expensive bed. It depends on what you’re used to; habit is the reigning queen of our lives. The person who happens to be an artist gets used to everything in life by virtue of a wonderful ability that is granted to him! The air in the quarters where around fifty or more people are lying right up next to each other is, as you might imagine, somewhat bad, and yet I do not believe that it is such a great misfortune to have to breathe in air that is rather thick and heavy with entirely natural exhalations and emanations every now and again. A healthy individual can disregard such and other similar matters with remarkable ease, all the more so since he can after all spend the whole day literally swimming and bathing in fresh air. A soldier is more likely to be found on the wide-open mountaintops or in a green forest or in the middle of a blossoming meadow than anywhere else. Rain and sunshine, wind and storms, harden his body in every way one might wish. Does not every soldier have, to mention just one thing that possesses great value and charm, a bread sack, from which, in the field, at an opportune moment, he can draw forth a piece of meat or a sausage or whatever else good and nourishing he has taken the precaution of packing into it and valiantly eat it, thereby rejuvenating his somewhat depleted life force? To march in formation and in time down spic-and-span streets, through a beautiful, rich country, is that not magnificent? If you are quartered in a pretty village and a fellow comes strolling across the street, the army post officer who follows you everywhere like a well-trained valet eager to serve will call out his name and he can pick up his letter or package just like that.

  The food a soldier receives is not exactly princely fare, of course, but he himself must admit that such a thing would be rather inappropriate and, incidentally, he would not be at all well served by it anyway. Simple food and a cheerful, unworried existence are better than fancy dishes bound up, perhaps, with sorrow and irritation. The soldier often curses and swears. But that doesn’t mean much. Swearing with honest dislike is better than a constant string of peevish grumbling objections. Someone who thunders and rages feels better afterwards.

  July 1915

  IN THE MILITARY

  THERE are some things in the military that are without question extremely nice and pleasant, like for instance marching to music through peaceful, friendly villages where schoolgroups, groups of women, and blossoming trees stand along the side of the road. What does a soldier have to think about all day? The fact is, for the thing we call militarism to work properly, he should really think absolutely nothing or deliberately as little as possible. He is only too happy to avail himself of a custom that frees him from discomfort and complaints, since thinking, as everyone knows, does cause headaches. How attractive, delightful, and magical it sometimes seems to me not to think. That’s the thing. The moments in the military when the proper command is “At ease!” are enchanting. The way the whole group or company dissolves its form in painterly, laid-back fashion and every man is free to wander off and away however he pleases, without any further consideration of obligation or drill, is most amusing and significantly fun. At once, the majority of these fellows or (to speak more politely of these defenders of the fatherland!) individuals stick a happy, jolly, jaunty cheroot or nice white slender cigarette into their mouths, light up whatever awaits lighting up, and smoke. The truth is, mountains and mints of money are smoked up in the military. To return to people’s thoughts, you have to
picture and imagine a million-strong crowd of fellows or (to be more polite) individuals who dispense with the thinking of any halfway or entirely reasonable thoughts. Is this not a picture to instill horror? Absolutely, almost! Unfortunately, I myself am one of those fellows who find it nice not to think. Also, I hold the principle of service in immensely high esteem, and thus I would prefer, in God the Merciful’s name, to keep silent on this embarrassing and inalterable circumstance or theme or I don’t know what all to call it. Soldiers in this category know how to write, gab, prattle, and nevertheless keep nice and properly quiet. But in all seriousness: There are beauties and freedoms in the military that cannot be bought at any price, and therefore I would not wish not to be a part of it. Where else but in the military and as a simple, ready-and-rough soldier could one ever dare and take the liberty to devour an apple or, say, plum tart around eight at night, in lovely evening light, on a public small-town street, with unbounded delight and complete peace of mind? Soldiers are a kind of children, and are actually a lot like children, too, sometimes treated and guided strictly, sometimes gently.