Selected Stories

Postscript by Christopher Middleton

Postscript

ROBERT WALSER (1878–1956) wrote four novels during his thirty years as a writer. Three were published during the first decade of this century (1906, 1907, 1908) and attracted some remarkable minds, notably Morgenstern and Kafka, but they hardly appealed to a broad public. The fourth novel was lost in the early 1920s. Eventually, the manuscript surfaced in West Berlin and was published as Der Räuber-Roman in 1976. It is in the field of short prose that Walser excelled. There is some justice to his claim to be writing, in separate swirls of short prose, a “long, plotless, realistic story,” but his clownish and distinctly Swiss genius was at its best in miniature fictions with a rapid pulse — those sketches, soliloquies, improvisations, arabesques, and capriccios that form his ten collections (1904–25) and the four volumes of uncollected work now available in the Gesamtwerk.

Walser was largely self-educated, always poor, and just as dedicated to his mischievously secret and independent life as Rilke was to his forbidding “work.” Among the various types of short prose in the German tradition, going back to the medieval Latin Gesta Romanorum, there are certain strains which, like the ballad and the folk song, escape those distinctions that have historically tended to reserve certain other genres for readers of the upper or middle classes (e.g., the novel). Small wonder that Walser, with his proletarian mode of life and his princely imagination, found in short prose his proper habitat.

As for the tradition, one thinks of the anecdotes that pepper Abraham a Sancta Clara’s sermons of the seventeenth century; of philosophical aperçus from Lichtenberg to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein; of Johann Peter Hebel’s tales and reports of the early 1800s; of the Expressionist “grotesques” of Salomo Friedländer (preceded by the fantasies of Josef Popper-Lynkeus); and, by no means least, of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century masters of feuilleton, the miniature impressions, gossipings, entertainments, anecdotes, parables, often with a lyrical twist, which since the 1820s — following French models — had been appearing under the main news items on the front page of newspapers. All this was the humus out of which eventually Walser’s short prose came; out of the same humus came, too, Kafka’s Yggdrasill of parables.

Walser eked out a living as a feuilletonist, contributing also to periodicals, in Berlin (1905–13), in Biel (1913–20), and in Berne (1921–32). Yet his prose surpasses, in coloration and sensibility, the usual sketch or impression of the time. What I have tried to do in this selection is present some of the main lines, or radiations, of his power of invention in the miniature, of his charm in the grotesque, also of his ironic reflexivity, viz., his jazzy oscillations between levels of discourse — dense and transparent, straight and mocking. Conceivably, he was one of the earliest and foremost artists in German prose to make positive fun of his understanding that the truth of writing can deregulate or negate reference, while seeming to uphold it. Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).

The only period missing from the selection is the earliest one, about 1898–1904. Some of Fritz Kochers Aufsätze might have been included, also an early miniature play, or “dramolet”—Walter Benjamin thought Schneewitzchen profound and exemplary. At least in “Helbling” and “The Little Berliner” the reader will find amplified versions of Fritz Kocher, the impish schoolboy soliloquist who, not much later, becomes the Kommis, or clerk, as underdog, whose character as Walser portrayed him captured Kafka’s imagination.

Walser did not stop writing when he voluntarily entered the Waldau mental hospital in Berne in 1929. It was only when he was forcibly transferred to Herisau in Appenzell, in 1933, that he gave up, or switched, one might say, from being an incalculable alien to being an official lunatic. His last “sane” book publication was Die Rose, in 1925; but throughout the 1920s he was writing prolifically, at times frenetically, and always with gusto, in his extraordinary solitude. To Jochen Greven we are indebted for the recovery and deciphering of hundreds of prose miniatures from that period. These now appear, together with pieces that were published in newspapers and journals, in the four posthumous volumes, Festzug, Phantasieren, Olympia, and Der Europäer. From these books I have chosen several texts; datings come from the same source.

To some extent Robert Walser was, in Artaud’s phrase, “suicided by society.” Certainly he was one of the great European artists in language, since Christopher Smart, to have risked all rather than compromise, and to have been broken eventually, like Hölderlin, perhaps, or Nerval, by certain neuro-chemical effects of a demonic anguish. (Yet, in his madness, Walser was surprisingly sane. To Carl Seelig, who became his legal guardian in the late 1930s, he once said, when asked if he was writing anything: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”) Altogether, one reads Walser for his blithe difference from colleagues in any age or any condition — for his perfect and serene oddity. He composes a language that is prodigiously his own, even when the words in their structures tally with Swiss German and High German. The translators have done their best. Speaking for myself, I have taken few liberties and those only to mark the whirling track of Walser’s dance more clearly in English than might otherwise have been the case (also perhaps more quaintly than some solemn readers might relish).

The Walk and Other Stories (1957) has been taken up into the present book, with some revisions. Acknowledgment is made to John Calder for permission to reprint the four texts in that book. Acknowledgment is made also to the little magazines in which Tom Whalen, having discovered Walser in the forests of Arkansas and made of him, later, a sort of hero for some very gifted young writers in New Orleans, placed his collaborative translations: Barataria, Chowder Review, Lowlands Review, The Paris Review, Writ; to Delos, in which Harriett Watts’s translation first appeared (1968); and to Texas Quarterly, in which “Helbling’s Story” and “Masters and Workers” appeared (1964). Walser’s third novel, Jakob von Gunten (University of Texas Press, 1969), might appeal to readers who have enjoyed this selection. For a brilliant, imaginative reconstruction of Robert Walser, as a spirit touching fingertips with Erik Satie, the reader is referred to Guy Davenport’s “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” in his book Da Vinci’s Bicycle.