A Place in the Country

FOREWORD

It is a good thirty years since I first became acquainted with the writers who are the subjects of the essays in this volume. I can still remember quite clearly how, when I set out from Switzerland for Manchester in the early autumn of 1966, I placed Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, Johann Peter Hebel’s Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds, and a disintegrating copy of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten in my suitcase.¹ The countless pages I have read since then have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of these books and their authors, and if today I were obliged to move again to another island, I am sure they would once again find a place in my luggage. This unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller, and Walser was what gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late. The two pieces on Rousseau and Mörike had their origins elsewhere, but as it turns out they are by no means out of place in this context. The essays in this volume span a period of almost two hundred years — which goes to show how little has altered, in all this time, when it comes to that peculiar behavioral disturbance which causes every emotion to be transformed into letters on the page and which bypasses life with such extraordinary precision. What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that critical age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one’s head. Rousseau, who in his refuge on the Île Saint-Pierre — he is fifty-three years old at this point — already longs for an end to the eternal business of cogitation, nevertheless keeps on writing up to the very end. Mörike, too, carries on tinkering with his novel long after it has ceased to be worth the trouble. Keller retires at fifty-six from his official position as a civil servant in order to surrender himself completely to his literary work, and Walser can only free himself from the obsessive compulsion to write by as it were disenfranchising himself and withdrawing from society altogether. In view of this drastic measure, watching a French television documentary a few months ago I was profoundly moved by a remark by a former orderly from the asylum at Herisau, one Josef Wehrle, who related how Walser, despite having completely turned his back on literature, would always carry with him in his waistcoat pocket a pencil stub and a few scraps of paper, carefully cut to size, on which he would often jot down one thing or another. However, Josef Wehrle continued, Walser was always quick to conceal these scraps of paper if he thought anyone was watching, as if he had been caught in the act of doing something wrong, or even shameful. Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer’s point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification. Perhaps it would really be better simply to set down — as Keller originally intended — a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and a cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide. And so it is as a reader, first and foremost, that I wish to pay tribute to these colleagues who have gone before me, in the form of these extended marginal notes and glosses, which do not otherwise have any particular claim to make. That the final essay has a painter as its subject is also right and proper, not merely because for quite some time Jan Peter Tripp and I went to school together in Oberstdorf, and because Keller and Walser mean a great deal to both of us, but also because from his pictures I have learned how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface, that art is nothing without patient handiwork, and that there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.

1 Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry); Johann Peter Hebel, Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds (Treasure Chest of the Rhineland Family Friend); Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (Jakob von Gunten / Institute Benjamenta). Publication details of these and other texts and their English translations are given in the Bibliography.