A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  Who and what Robert Walser really was is a question to which, despite my strangely close relationship with him, I am unable to give any reliable answer. The seven photographic portraits of him, as I have said, show very different people: a youth filled with a quiet sensuality; a young man hiding his anxieties as he prepares to make his way in bourgeois society; the heroic-looking writer of brooding aspect in Berlin; a thirty-seven-year-old with pale, watery-clear eyes; the Robber, smoking and dangerous-looking; a broken man; and finally the asylum inmate, completely destroyed and at the same time saved. What is striking about these portraits is not only how much they differ from each other, but also the palpable incongruity inherent in each—a feature which, I conjecture, stems at least in part from the contradiction between Walser’s native Swiss reserve and utter lack of conceit, and the anarchic, bohemian, and dandyesque tendencies which he displayed at the beginning of his career, and which he later hid, as far as possible, behind a façade of solid respectability. He himself relates how one Sunday he walked from Thun to Berne wearing a “louche pale-yellow summer suit and dancing pumps” and on his head a “deliberately dissolute, daring, ridiculous hat.” Sporting a cane, in Munich he promenades through the Englischer Garten to visit Wedekind, who shows a lively interest in his loud checked suit—quite a compliment, considering the extravagant fashions in vogue among the Schwabinger bohème at the time. He describes the walking outfit he wore on the long trek to Würzburg as having a “certain southern Italian appearance. It was a sort or species of suit in which I could have been seen to advantage in Naples. In reasonable, moderate Germany, however, it seemed to arouse more suspicion than confidence, more repulsion than attraction. How daring and fantastical I was at twenty-three!” A fondness for conspicuous costume and the dangers of indigence often go hand in hand. Hölderlin, too, is said to have had a definite penchant for fine clothes and appearance, so that his dilapidated aspect at the beginning of his breakdown was all the more alarming to his friends. Mächler recalls how Walser once visited his brother on the island of Rügen wearing threadbare and darned trousers, even though the latter had just made him a present of a brand-new suit, and in this context cites a passage of Die Geschwister Tanner [The Tanners] in which Simon is reproached by his sister thus: “For example, Simon, look at your trousers: All ragged at the bottom! To be sure, and I know this perfectly well myself: they’re just trousers, but trousers should be kept in just as good a condition as one’s soul, for when a person wears torn, ragged trousers it displays carelessness, and carelessness is an attribute of the soul. Your soul must be ragged too.” This reproach may well go back to remarks Lisa was at times wont to make about her brother’s appearance, but the inspired turn of phrase at the end—the reference to the ragged soul—that, I think, is an original aperçu on the part of the narrator, who is under no illusion as to how things stand with his inner life. Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age, transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity. This is why he had no time for the grandiose tones in which the “dilettantes of the extreme left,” as he calls them, were in those days proclaiming the revolution in art. He is no Expressionist visionary prophesying the end of the world, but rather, as he says in the introduction to Fritz Kochers Aufsätze [Fritz Kocher’s Essays], a clairvoyant of the small. From his earliest attempts on, his natural inclination is for the most radical minimization and brevity, in other words the possibility of setting down a story in one fell swoop, without any deviation or hesitation. Walser shares this ambition with the Jugendstil artists, and like them he is also prone to the opposite tendency of losing himself in arabesques. The playful—and sometimes obsessive—working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details is one of the most striking characteristics of Walser’s idiom. The word-eddies and turbulence created in the middle of a sentence by exaggerated participial constructions, or conglomerations of verbs such as haben helfen dürfen zu verhindern [have been able to help to prevent]; neologisms, such as for example das Manschettelige [cuffishness] or das Angstmeierliche [chicken-heartedness], which scuttle away under our gaze like millipedes; the “night-bird shyness, a flying-over-the-seas-in-the-dark, a soft inner whimpering” which, in a bold flight of metaphor, the narrator of The Robber claims hovers above one of Dürer’s female figures; deliberate curiosities such as the sofa “squeaching” [“gyxelnd”] under the charming weight of a seductive lady; the regionalisms, redolent of things long fallen into disuse; the almost manic loquaciousness—these are all elements in the painstaking process of elaboration Walser indulges in, out of a fear of reaching the end too quickly if—as is his inclination—he were to set down nothing but a beautifully curved line with no distracting branches or blossoms. Indeed, the detour is, for Walser, a matter of survival. “These detours I’m making serve the end of filling time, for I really must pull off a book of considerable length, otherwise I’ll be even more deeply despised than I am now.” On the other hand, however, it is precisely these linguistic montages—emerging as they do from the detours and digressions of narrative and, especially, of form—which are most at odds with the demands of high culture. Their associations with nonsense poetry and the word salad symptomatic of schizophasia were never likely to increase the market value of their author. And yet it is precisely his uniquely overwrought art of formulation which true readers would not be without for the world, for example in this passage from the Bleistiftgebiet which, comic and heartbreaking in equal measure, condenses a whole romantic melodrama into the space of a few lines. What Walser achieves here is the complete and utter subjection of the writer to the language, a pretense at awkwardness brought off with the utmost virtuosity, the perfect realization of that irony only ever hinted at by the German Romantics yet never achieved by any of them—with the possible exception of Hoffmann—in their writings. “In vain,” the passage in question tells us, regarding the beautiful Herta and her faithless Italian husband, “did she buy, in the finest first-class boutiques, for her most highly respected darling rake and pleasure-seeker, a new walking cane, say, or the finest and warmest coat which she could find, procure or purchase. His heart remained indifferent beneath the carefully chosen item of clothing and the hand hard which held the cane, and while this scoundrel—oh that we might be permitted to call him thus—frivolously flitted or flirted around, there trickled from those big tragic eyes, embellished by heartache with dark rims, heavy tears like pearls, and here we must remark, too, that the rooms where such intimate misfortune was played out were fairly brimming with gloomy, fantastically bepalmleaved decoration gilded further by the height and scale of the whole.” “Little sentence, little sentence”—so Walser concludes this escapade which is all but grammatically derailed by the end, “you seem to me phantastical as well, you do!” And then, coming down to earth, he adds the sober phrase, “But let us continue.”

  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 may 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 Schützenfest, and, civility itself, a collectio
n 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 last only for the blink of an eye, and even the human figures in his work enjoy only the briefest of lives. Hundreds of them inhabit the Bleistiftgebiet alone—dancers and singers, tragedians and comedians, barmaids 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. Walter Benjamin is the only one among the commentators who attempts 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.” 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 plowing their own eccentric furrow. The comparison with Gogol is by no means farfetched, for if Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, it was 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, 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, Adelaida Sofronovna, was also present with her three sisters-in-law, 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 Rotislavna, and two stepsisters: Sophia Alexandrovna and Maclatura Alexandrovna”—this scene, none of whose characters makes an appearance anywhere else in Gogol’s work, 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 or “I”—almost never makes an appearance in this Ich-Buch but is left blank, or rather remains out of sight among the throng 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 reader—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, they are soon turned into something faintly 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 reluctance 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 you have stepped on anything.” 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 those which he needs in order to stage his own personal auto-da-fé—and what remains once the fire has died down.

  Indeed, by 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 h
e 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 halfway to 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 this 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 Der Gehülfe [The Assistant], Josef Hofmiller contrasts the alleged insubstantiality of the novel with the more solid earthiness of the autochthonous 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-1920s 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 a blue linen smock, with coarse trousers of a rustic stuff, and is exceedingly contented.” The contempt for nationalistic 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 in Germany or at home in Switzerland.