A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  Against this background, Walser’s legendary “pencil system” takes on the aspect of preparation for a life 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—the coded messages of one forced into illegitimacy, 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 Vaterland,” just as if these writings were grenades or incendiary bombs. At any rate I am unable to reassure myself with the view that the intricate texts of the Bleistiftgebiet reflect, in either 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 not appear to me to be evidence of a psychotic state. On the contrary, Der Räuber 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 chicken-heartedness. 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 lightheartedness 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 how, 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 tremors at the edges of his consciousness, records rejections and ripples in his thoughts and emotions of 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 the obscurantism either of the medicine men or of the other curators of the soul. What matters to him, as to any other writer in full possession of his faculties, is the greatest possible degree of lucidity, and I can imagine how, while writing Der Räuber, 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 dolorosa 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 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, and 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 hardly 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 farsighted as the 1920s drew to a close. The Robber, whose whole disposition was that of a liberal freethinker and republican, also became soul-sick 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 recognized, 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.

  The first prose work I read by Robert Walser was his piece on Kleist in Thun, in which he talks of the torment of one despairing of himself and his craft, and of the intoxicating beauty of the surrounding landscape. “Kleist sits on a churchyard wall. Everything is damp, yet also sultry. He opens his shirt, to breathe freely. Below him lies the lake, as if it had been hurled down by the great hand of a god, incandescent with shades of yellow and red.… The Alps have come to life and dip with fabulous gestures their foreheads in the water.” Time and again I have immersed myself in the few pages of this story and, taking it as a starting point, have undertaken now shorter, now longer excursions into the rest of Walser’s work. Among my early encounters with Walser I count the discovery I made, in an antiquarian bookshop in Manchester in the second half of the 1960s—inserted in a copy of Bächtold’s three-volume biography of Gottfried Keller which had almost certainly belonged to a German Jewish refugee—of an attractive sepia photograph depicting the house on the island in the Aare,

  completely surrounded by shrubs and trees, in which Kleist worked on his drama of madness, Die Familie Ghonorez, before he, himself sick, was obliged to commit himself to the care of Dr. Wyttenbach in Berne. Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile. On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings. And sometimes I imagine that I see with his eyes the bright Seeland and within this land of lakes the lake like a shimmering island, and in this lake-island another island, the Île Saint-Pierre, “shining in the bright morning haze, floating in a sea of pale trembling light.” Returning home then in the evening we look out, from the lakeside path suffused by mournful rain, at the boating enthusiasts out on the lake “in boats or skiffs with umbrellas opened above their heads,” a sight which allows us to imagine that we are “in China or Japan or some other dreamlike, poetical land.” As Mächler reminds us, Walser really did consider for a while the possibility of traveling, or even emigrating, overseas. According to his brother, he once even had a check in his pocket from Bruno Cassirer, good for several months’ travel to India. It is not difficult to imagine him hidden in a green leafy picture by Henri Rousseau, with tigers and elephants, on the veranda of a hotel by the sea while the monsoon pours down outside, or in front of a resplendent tent in the foothills of the Himalayas, which—as Walser once wrote of the Alps—resemble nothing so much as a snow-white fur boa. In fact he almost got as far as Samoa, since Walter Rathenau, whom—if we may believe The Robber on this point—he had met one day, quite by chance, in the midst of an incessant stream of people and traffic on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, apparently wanted to find him a not-too-taxing position in the colonial administration on the island known to the Germans as the “Pearl of the South Seas.” We do not know why Walser turned down this in many ways tempting offer. Let us simply assume that it is because among the first German South Sea discoverers and explorers there was a certain gentleman called Otto von Kotzebue, against whom Walser was just as irrevocably prejudiced as he was against the playwright of the same name, whom he called a narrow-minded philistine, claiming he had a too-long nose, bulging eyes, and no neck, and that his whole head was shrunk into and hidden by a grotesque and enormous collar. Kotzebue had, so Walser continues, written a large number of comedies that enjoyed runaway box office success at a time when Kleist was in despair, and he bequeathed a whole series of these massive, collected, printed volumes, coxed and boxed and bound in calfskin, to a posterity that would blench with shame were it ever to read them. The risk of being reminded, in the midst of a South Sea idyll, of this literary opportunist, one of the heroes of the German intellectual scene, as he dismissively calls him, was probably just too great. In any case, Walser didn’t much care for travel and—apart from Germany—never actually went anywhere to speak of. He never saw the city of Paris, which he dreams of even from the asylum at Waldau. On the other hand, the Untergasse in Biel could seem to him like a street in Jerusalem “along which the Saviour and deliverer of the world modestly rides in.” Indeed he crisscrossed the country on foot, often on epic nocturnal marches with the moon shining a white track before him. In the autumn of 1925, for example, he journeyed on foot from Berne to Geneva, following for quite a long stretch the old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. He does not tell us much about this trip, other than that in Fribourg—I can see him entering that city across the incredibly high bridge over the Sarine—he purchased some socks; paid his respects to a number of hostelries; whispered sweet nothings to a waitress from the Jura; gave a boy almonds; strolling around in the dark doffed his hat to the Rousseau monument on the island in the Rhône; and, crossing the bridges by the lake, experienced a feeling of lightheartedness. Such and similar matters are set down for us in the most economical manner on a couple of pages. Of the walk itself we learn nothing, and nothing of what he may have turned over in his mind as he walked. The only occasion on which I see the traveler Robert Walser freed from the burden of himself is on the balloon journey he undertook, during his Berlin years, from Bitterfeld—the artificial lights of whose factories were just beginning to glimmer—to the Baltic coast. “Three people, the captain, a gentleman, and a young girl, climb into the basket, the anchoring cords are loosed, and the strange house flies, slowly, as if it had first to ponder something, upward.… The beautiful moonlit night seems to gather the splendid balloon int
o invisible arms, gently and quietly the roundish flying body ascends, and … hardly so that one might notice, subtle winds propel it northward.” Far below can be seen church spires, village schools, farmyards, a ghostly train whistling by, the wonderfully illuminated course of the Elbe in all its colors. “Remarkably white, polished-looking plains alternate with gardens and small wildernesses of bush. One peers down into regions where one’s feet would never, never have trod, because in certain regions, indeed in most, one has no purpose whatever. How big and unknown to us the earth is!” Robert Walser was, I think, born for just such a silent journey through the air. In all his prose works he always seeks to rise above the heaviness of earthly existence, wanting to float away softly and silently into a higher, freer realm. The sketch about the balloon journey over a sleeping nocturnal Germany is only one example, one which for me is associated with Nabokov’s memory of one of his favorite books from his childhood. In this picture book series, the black Golliwog and his friends—one of whom is a kind of dwarf or Lilliputian person—survive a number of adventures, end up far away from home, and are even captured by cannibals. And then there is a scene in which an airship is