Jakob von Gunten

by Robert Walser

  ROBERT WALSER (1878–1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the “prose pieces” that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser’s works available in English are Berlin Stories and A Schoolboy's Diary (both available as NYRB classics), Thirty Poems, The Walk, The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932.

  CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and has translated numerous works by such writers as Goethe, Nietzsche, and Grass.

  JAKOB VON GUNTEN

  Robert Walser

  Translated and with an Introduction by

  CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation and introduction copyright © 1969 by Christopher Middleton

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Germany by Verlag Bruno Cassirer 1909

  Cover illustration: Karl Walser, Die Schulstube

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Walser, Robert, 1878–1956.

  [Jakob von Gunten. English]

  Jakob von Gunten / Robert Walser ; translated and with an

  introduction by Christopher Middleton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-940322-21-8 (alk. paper)

  I. Middleton, Christopher. II. Title.

  PT2647.A64Z868313 1999

  833'.912—dc21

  99-15894

  ISBN 978-1-59017-818-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  JAKOB VON GUNTEN

  INTRODUCTION

  JAKOB VON GUNTEN is one of several narratives of its period which transformed the world of German fiction. It is unlike any other German novel, and unlike any other work of European fiction. First, though, one has to realize that the German novel had for a long time been a compendium of writing in all shapes and sizes. So the journal form of Jakob von Gunten, subtitled “Ein Tagebuch,” was not something freakish. At the time when it was written (1908), the crux was a refining of the novel’s customary gross form into more compact and elementary forms. Whereas in older novels soliloquy (with introspection) had been one element among others, this element was now becoming independent. More, it was becoming analytic. So one might call Jakob von Gunten an analytic fictional soliloquy. That sounds, true enough, very portentous. In reality, the book is more like a capriccio for harp, flute, trombone, and drums.

  Three other fictions of the time show what mode of experience was shaping the transformation of the novel: Musil’s Törless (1906), Carl Einstein’s Bebuquin (1909), and Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). In each book, the hero explores remote and perilous regions of his mind; with perceptions of snailhorn delicacy he maps a shifting “inner world” of feelings and impulses; and he pursues a primal enigmatic reality dwelling somehow between the perilous inner world and the brutish disorder of the external world. Strindberg in Paris had started it with his Inferno (1896). In 1910 Kafka, soon to become master of the absurd, was starting to write his journal, and was already familiar with Walser’s prose, which he liked. During these four years, 1906– 1910, the point of leverage for a revolution in German fiction was being determined. The spirit, at all events, was crystallizing in the disparate imaginations of these writers: Rilke in Paris; in Berlin—unknown to one another—Musil, Einstein, and Walser; and Kafka in Prague. These cities form a neat right angle across the heart of Europe. Still on the fringe, by Lake Constance, lived another writer who was later to evolve his own form of soliloquy (and who also admired Walser): Hermann Hesse.

  Yet one fails to define Walser by placing him like this among certain crucial “historical developments.” Little known as he still is, he was one of the liveliest writers of his time; also he was a sophisticated writer. But his language is peculiar, because it is so unliterary (or what name should be given to this kind of intensity? When a new mode of imagining erupts into literature, it dislocates the rhetoric of its time, and is of subtler stuff than that rhetoric—“the infinite arrives barefoot on this earth,” says Hans Arp). It would be silly to regard Walser as an intellectual writer in the way that, say, Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, or Kafka were intellectual writers. Once, in Berlin, he actually said to Hofmannsthal at a party: “Couldn’t you forget for a bit that you’re famous?” No, Walser’s writing does retain, to the end of his anguished years as a writer, an eccentricity as balanced and as clownishly serious as the paintings of Henri Rousseau. In the framework of the developments sketched above, he stands apart. He is, in significant ways, untutored: something of a “primitive.” His prose can display the essential luminous naiveté of an artist who creates as if self-reflection were not a barred door but a bridge of light to the real. It is no coincidence that his twenty-five years of writing cover almost exactly the period when “naive” art was being discovered in the West: as a marvel of technique, as a revelation of wonder ranging from the most exotic dreams to the most banal things (while freely swapping their appearances)—new and joyous metaphors for a doddering civilization, and energy for Hamlet’s heirs.

  Walser was born in Biel, Central Switzerland, in 1878. His father, Adolf, owned a small bookbindery with stationery and toy shop attached. His mother, Elisa Marti, came from a family of country nailsmiths in Schangnau. Not far off in the background was the less lowly paternal grandfather, Johann Ulrich Walser (1798–1866), until 1837 an outspoken liberal-utopian pastor, who became a journalist and founded his own newspaper, Das Basellandschaftliche Volksblatt. Adolf and Elisa had eight children: four boys, a girl, two more boys, then another girl. Three of the boys were to distinguish themselves: the second, Hermann (1870–1916) became a professor of geography at Bern University, and Karl (1877–1942) became one of the outstanding stage-designers and book-illustrators of the time (he is the model for the brother described by Jakob von Gunten). Lisa (1874–1944) was also a remarkable person. She ran the household when the mother became mentally deranged, then, with some financial help from an uncle (Friedrich Walser, an architect in Basel), she studied at a seminary in Bern and became a teacher. It was to this strange and beautiful spinster that Walser often looked for guidance during his nomadic life.

  He left school when he was fourteen, and worked for a while as a clerk in a bank. Then in 1895 he went to Stuttgart, to work in a publishing house (though he hoped to become an actor). He came to Zürich in the autumn of 1896. In Zürich and several other eastern Swiss towns he earned a living with various odd jobs for the next nine years. His first poems appeared in the Bern newspaper Der Bund in May 1898. Soon after this, he met the elegant littérateur Franz Blei in Zürich, who described him as follows: “A tall, rather gawky lad, with a bony reddish-brown face, over which stood an uncombable shock of fair hair,[1] grayish blue dreamy eyes, and beautifully shaped large hands which came out of a jacket with sleeves too short and didn’t know where to go and would have liked best to be stuck into his trous
er pockets so as not to be there.” During this period, Walser was writing his first prose pieces, in which the clerk (commis) appears as a special kind of underdog. The commis as underdog was a figure who greatly interested the young Kafka in Prague. The period entailed a visit (or two) to Munich (1899? and 1901): the writers associated with the new magazine Die Insel—Otto Julius Bierbaum, Alfred Walter Heymel, and Rudolf Alexander Schröder—were curious about his work and published poems of his, some prose, and some miniature plays in verse. Walser’s first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze, was published by Insel Verlag in 1904, with illustrations by Karl. It was during the previous year, 1903, that Walser had worked as assistant to an unsuccessful inventor, Karl Dubler-Grässle, at Wädenswil near Zürich: this supplied the setting for his second novel, Der Gehülfe (1908). His first novel, Geschwister Tanner (1906), is a meandering impressionist version of his wanderings in East Switzerland, and concerns his relations with Lisa and Karl.

  In the spring of 1905, Walser went to live in Berlin. Here he stayed at first with Karl, in Charlottenburg. Karl was by now making his name as an illustrator, and working also as a stage designer for Max Reinhardt. Fraternal relations were sometimes very close, sometimes strained. Both were tall strong men, peculiar men, whose jokes at genteel Berlin parties could often seem excessively bucolic. Expelled and thrust into a cab, they would exit through the far door and grinningly confront their exasperated host, over and again, as he stood there each time dusting his hands. When Karl was away, Robert had the apartment to himself, except for Karl’s cat. During one such spell he wrote Geschwister Tanner, in six weeks, on a diet of sprats (shared presumably with the cat). Christian Morgenstern read the manuscript for the publisher Bruno Cassirer, and recommended it—Walser, he wrote, “sees the world as a perpetual miracle” (but he told Walser by letter that the writing was errant). It was before this that Walser, soon after his arrival in Berlin, attended a school for servants and then worked, during the winter of 1905, as butler—Monsieur Robert—in a Silesian château (Schloss Dambrau). In the later story, “Tobold,” he described how nice it was to tread across the Persian rugs at nightfall, carrying freshly lit lamps into quiet rooms. The school for servants was to become material for the Benjamenta Institute of Jakob von Gunten. The role of servant accorded with Walser’s passion for the minimal: elementary happenings and small private feelings which he calls “the true truths.” Max Brod, one of his first admirers, appositely remarked: “After Nietzsche, Walser had to come.” Or, as Walser himself said: “God is the opposite of Rodin.”

  During his Berlin years, 1905–1913, Walser was writing steadily at his shorter prose pieces, many of them feuilletons for literary magazines. His living remained precarious. Bruno Cassirer helped him financially until about 1908, and even offered him the chance of a trip to India. Walter Rathenau, likewise, offered to find him a job on Samoa; and the publisher Semmy Fischer asked him to travel in Poland and Turkey. All such invitations were refused. In Geschwister Tanner, Simon says: “I’m staying here. It’s nice, just to stay. Does nature go abroad? Do trees travel, to acquire greener leaves elsewhere and then to come back and show themselves off?” The shorter prose pieces were collected in the books Aufsätze (1913), Geschichten (1914), and Kleine Dichtungen (1914), all published by Kurt Wolff, who was then a leading avant-garde publisher. It is also said that Walser wrote three other novels during this time, all of them lost. The end of the Berlin period came with increasing poverty. The story “Frau Wilke” (in The Walk and Other Stories, London, 1957) can be read as an evocation of life in one of his last lodgings in a Berlin suburb (Schöneberg?): a ruinous room, imagined wistfully to have been once, perhaps, the lodging of a baron, or of an earl. The publication in 1909 of his poems (Gedichte) and of Jakob von Gunten seems not to have made any appreciable change in his material existence. Nor does his period of work as secretary in the Neue Sezession art gallery. It was probably in the middle of the Berlin period that he traveled by balloon from Bitterfeld to the Baltic coast, in company with Paul Cassirer (director of the Neue Sezession) and a good stock of cold cutlets and liquor. The up-and-coming Expressionists of the time (also those being published by Kurt Wolff) seem not to have known of him—Jakob van Hoddis, Georg Heym, Franz Pfemfert, Kurt Hiller, Franz Werfel, Herwarth Walden, Johannes Becher, none mentions him.[2] With Alfred Lichtenstein he might have got on happily. Lichtenstein’s prose has a bedeviled clownish irony with strong affinities to Walser.

  In the spring of 1913, Walser left Berlin and traveled back to Switzerland. He spent the next seven years in and around Biel. To start with, he lived in one of the three rooms of his sister Lisa’s apartment. He saw hardly anyone except her and her friend Frieda Mermet, who soon became a good friend to Walser. During this time he published four books of prose pieces, including the longer work Der Spaziergang (1917), and in 1919 his four miniature plays, Komödie. By now it was hard for him to find a German publisher, not least because of the war. For most of the time he lived in the attic of the Hotel zum blauen Kreuz. A visitor (Ernst Hubacher) described his room as follows: “There was only a bed, a table, and a chair. A cheap map of Europe was tacked to the wall.” Walser worked, clad in a military greatcoat and slippers which he had made from old bits of clothing.

  Then in 1920 he took a job as an archivist in Bern; after six months of it, he left the job, but he stayed in Bern. He was working on a novel, Theodor, which has not survived (another novel of the Biel period, Tobold, was also lost, or destroyed). The prose of the Bern period (1920–1929) is a very complicated matter. We have the book Die Rose, published by Rowohlt in Berlin in 1925. But there are also masses of other short prose pieces which appeared in magazines and newspapers in Zürich, Berlin, and Prague. There are important stylistic and thematic changes during this period. The stylistic invention ranges between maximum abruptness and beautifully timed arabesque dottiness. There is also an abstruse conflict going on in this prose between the spontaneous “primitive” Walser and the ironic self-reflective Walser of nightmare and psychic distress. Painstaking editorial work by Jochen Greven has solved many of the problems (Festzug, volume VII of the Gesamtwerk, 1966). The problems involved deciphering and dating about eight hundred prose pieces and dialogues in a microscopic script. This script was not a cipher system, as some scholars had supposed, but a kind of personal shorthand. Jochen Greven has established that some three hundred of these curious texts are versions of pieces extant in print or normal script, while some five hundred are either not identifiable or not decipherable. Greven has emphasized that the script was not a symptom of psychosis, but was habitual to Walser for drafting his work and had been so since the Biel years.

  Walser’s remaining productive years, while he was living in Bern, were a time of acute trouble for him. He corresponded with a few friends, like Frieda Mermet and Resy Breitbach. He kept changing his lodgings. He took long walks, as ever. He kept writing. It is a story with many dark corridors: the people in the streets of Bern saying audibly as he passed by, “That fellow belongs in the madhouse’’; Walser stubbornly resisting a few attempts by the paltry Swiss literary establishment to net him; the continued apathy of the reading public, despite loyal acceptance by such editors as Max Rychner in Zürich and Otto Pick in Prague. Walser was alone; he was without means; once or twice he attempted suicide. Eventually, early in 1929, Lisa persuaded him to enter the Waldau psychiatric clinic, which he did, voluntarily. In 1933 he moved to the asylum at Herisau in Canton Appenzell—still quiet in his ways. In July 1936 he was visited by Carl Seelig, the Swiss writer. For many years they used to take walks together, and in 1944, after Lisa’s death, Seelig became Walser’s legal guardian and financial support. Their conversations are to be found in Seelig’s book Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (1957). Walser conscientiously wrote no more (“I’m not here to write, but to be mad’’). Yet he could display an astonishing memory of other men’s writings, French, German, Russian, and English. Certain remarks also show that he recognized, not without b
itterness, his fate as an artist of the infinitesimal, eclipsed by grander scribes—the “imperialists,” like Thomas Mann, as he said. He died on Christmas Day in 1956, while out for a walk on his own.

  I have drawn a profile of Walser as an elusive deviant in a pattern of changes affecting the world picture of German fiction. Not losing sight of this deviancy, I want now briefly to note some ways in which Jakob von Gunten relates to some factors in tradition and to certain signs of its time. Some readers may want to ignore these notes and others may find them helpful once they have read the book. I offer these remarks as notes and suggestions only: the last thing I want to do is “fix” a perspective in literary-historical terms.

  (1) Jakob’s journal is a record, impromptu, of moment-to-moment life in the Benjamenta Institute. He is a boy, seventeen years old perhaps, who has run away from home in a remote province. The framework of improvisation, which suited Walser’s temperament, contains Jakob’s life design. This design assumes the form of successive small waves of time, etching on Jakob’s sensibility their contours and contents. Constant in the flux, as fact and fantasy collude, is Jakob’s passion for surprise, for paradox, and for self-knowledge. There are all kinds of ribbings and ripplings across the surface of Jakob’s record. After Lisa Benjamenta’s death, Kraus solemnly says: “When we eat, the fork will tell us how thou hast desired us to handle and manage it, and we shall sit decently at table, and the knowledge that we are doing so will make us think of thee.” This oddness is straight. Then one asks: or is it? One should not identify Jakob and Walser. They have much in common, but the book is not a self-portrait.

  (2) The Benjamenta Institute. It certainly makes fun of fictions like Goethe’s Turmgesellschaft (in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre); does it matter whether the fun is deliberate or not? Other such reformatory groupings in Germany around the turn of the century were the George Circle, and the Charon Circle, the Goethebund, the Dürerbund, the Darmstadt Künstlerkolonie, Johann Müller’s Freistatt persönlichen Lebens, and the Wandervögel. Thirty-five years before Jakob von Gunten, Nietzsche had seen Bayreuth as a center of cultural regeneration (before it became sanctimonious); thirty-five years after Jakob von Gunten, there is Hesse’s Kastalien (Das Glasperlenspiel). The German dream of integrating the individual and of an élite to spearhead cultural and social reform—Walser’s book was a new variant on this, if not a parody of it. The pretensions of maturity, and the intellectual pride, are tacitly annihilated, without brutish anti-intellectualism, for once. Jakob says: “I value the way in which I open a door. . . . The generations of men are losing the joy of life with all their treatises and understandings and knowledge. . . . I like running down stairs. What a lot of talk!”