The Walk

by Robert Walser

  Over lunch I read, in a newspaper favoured by liberal thinkers, about a railway accident. I recall precisely that I ate lunch only three hours ago. A poem is pursuing me; I shall have the energy to write it down. When girls want to be noticed they start to make arrangements with their hair; this can be perceived as a subtle challenge to spend one’s time voluntarily falling in love, but time is expensive, it wants to be used up to the full. People without energy like to talk about energy. For my part I am convinced that I have a quiet will of my own. Ah, how distinctive she was, this servant girl leading a little boy by the hand! Once I blew, to a nursemaid who stood for a superior style of life, a kiss. The movement of her head told me: “Save yourself the trouble.” Often one is in somewhat too good a mood. The houses today had such a beauty, a restraint, just standing there, I can hardly find words for it. A poet, one of those disturbers of genteel little drawing rooms, took his lady, whom he idolized, by her tiny gloved hand and asked how she had liked the verses which he had been quite understandably saucy enough to send her. She answered, with a blush: “I was very glad, but please, meanwhile, let me go.” For the simplicity of such language the poet appeared to have no perfect understanding such as she would have desired. I drew his attention to the reprehensibility, or impropriety, which, I said, seemed to me inherent in his behaviour. While her molester was looking at me, the noble creature fled.

  A city notable mumbled something in his beard; the beard was absent, but the expression is favoured by many. Some turns of speech occur to us of their own accord. In a book-shop window shone, resplendent, the editions of a great poet. I refer to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated by the civilized world, which one might also call the impatient or rushing world. Civilization still seems to be an unfinished task. We shall always be vain about it, but never proud of it, and we shall never say that we have nothing more to learn, and we shall remember not only at the centenaries of famous poets the responsibilities which civilization lays upon us, and first and foremost when being civilized is our concern we shall not brag about it. To be sure, only the person who is always trying to be civilized is a civilized person, a person who is quite simply trying to be civilized, because that, if the truth were told, is not by any means so easy.

  1925

  A Sort of Speech

  This deputy, how he pursued in metropolitan suburbs his irresponsibilities garnished all in green, afterwards casting deeply troubled glances at the ceiling, a consolation.

  Certainly he’ll have been a splendid father. We are the last who doubt the opulence of his somewhat pear-mellow noble intentions.

  In the days of his youth he nodded with casual patience at the poets when they were introduced to him in his opera box.

  As for his wife, her first mistake was to follow him zealously on the paths of his trespasses, thereby inviting him, deviously, to believe that he was very much loved by her.

  Second, she was too involved with her brother, who could never be satisfied, on his solitary climbings, as morning breezes lisped around him, with mere medium heights.

  So she was more of a sister than a wife and almost an egoist rather than a performer of her really very lovely duties. Above all, she was a beauty and never as long as she lived got over the idea.

  Now to the sons, who carried jewellery caskets through woodlands by night, as if that were essential to them and their world.

  One of them dreamed only of disappearing entirely from sight. Often he must have read exciting stories. As a person, he was, in addition, nothing to speak of. So we shall dismiss him.

  The second settled, as a recluse, in a villa which enshrouding ivy had rendered almost invisible.

  The beard of this country-house dweller grew longer by the hour, until it extended out of the window, whereat he saw his life’s task completed – a belief we gladly allow him.

  The third found reason to become inconceivably incautious on account of a soprano, all naturally behind the wonderfully shaped back of his mother, who had a way of saying: “My sons displease me.”

  They made her suffer, she made them suffer, and the patriarch suffered from his spouse, and the products suffered because of the producers.

  This family, to which many families looked up without reluctance, displayed a pompous falling short.

  No pen can describe the sighs they heaved together.

  Folly upon folly was committed.

  What use is the most dazzling scenery?

  The father knew no peace till he could say: “One darn thing after another!”

  All the members of the family longed to be constantly wept over; the daughters found their language instructor bewitching.

  Meanwhile, a book had been through many too many editions, a book which had the virtue of being nicely written. The book had melody.

  The family we are speaking of had melody too.

  There was a Mediterranean island in it, where the best opportunities for perceiving realities were dreamed away.

  Still to this day it lies there, witness of a disinclination to wash oneself spiritually, in the proper way.

  But they all wore fitting clothes and were virtuosos of dissatisfaction.

  And then she who bore the responsibility might step forward and say to her son: “I command you to suffer!”

  He laughed at her.

  She says: “Get out of my sight!” – but wishes inwardly for him not to obey, she wrestles laboriously with her composure.

  She feels guilty and innocent.

  She blames the times.

  “Tell me all! Vindicate yourself!”

  He quietly replies: “All this longing to cast off the shackles, to despise what the surrounding world imposes upon you, isn’t this what you’re injecting into me? What you prohibit me from doing you should also deny yourself,” and softly he adds: “Unbridled woman!”

  Whereupon she has a scene with her husband.

  If I felt talkative I’d repeat the reproaches she brought against him.

  Her words slapped his face.

  He thought it was very imposing to listen to her respectfully.

  But his graciousness was for her a martyrdom.

  Perhaps one can say that tact is the point from which powerlessness spreads more and more into the male world.

  Defence to the last gasp seems to be not shrewd. If a man is shrewd, if he is conciliatory, relenting, submissive, the bonds are not torn, of course, but they still hang from him, more like threads, I mean as far as order is concerned, and women have won nothing, if one lets them win, although they tell themselves otherwise.

  So he always eluded her, politely.

  A reckless answer would have hurt her.

  Together, by their fleeing from one another, they poisoned the atmosphere.

  What kind of people am I thinking of, as I say this?

  Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the unfreedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?

  Well, I could go around from person to person, letting each say some new thing, new but also old.

  For they constantly repeated themselves. Each had his own sort of idée fixe.

  And, in the theatres, plays were being performed that wearied the spectators’ souls, made them rebellious and perverse, cringing, and eager for war.

  Should one speak out or be silent?

  1925

  A Letter to Therese Breitbach*

  Bern, Thunstrasse 20/III

  (mid-October 1925)

  Rösi Breitbach, altogether most esteemed young lady! Wishing that you should show, if your feelings permit it, my letters to your parents, in all simplicity, generosity, and affection, I would like to tell you that for some time now I have not found anything here to write about, because I have already written so many things. I’m sure you’ll understand this. Then I happened to read a small, silly sort of book, the kind you
buy for a few cents at a kiosk, and it was most nicely entertaining to read it. I had read my fill of good books. Is it conceivable that you’ll understand what I mean? If so, it would be most kind of you. All the girls here find me enormously boring, because they are all spoiled by zesty young bucks. Our masculine world can be very self-assured in its behaviour. Once I took the liberty of sending, for instance, to a singer in our meritorious municipal theatre, as token of my admiration, a copy of my book Aufsätze, published by Kurt Wolff. The book was returned, with the observation that I hadn’t yet learned to write German. People hereabouts take me, generally, for an immature person, in every way. Even Thomas Mann, you know, that giant in the domain of the novel, regards me as a child, though a quite clever one to be sure. Once I was supposed to read from my work in Zurich, but the president of the Literary Circle which had invited me said that I had still not learned to speak German. For a time, people here thought I was insane, and would say aloud, in the arcades, as I was walking past: “He should be in the asylum.” Our great Swiss writer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, whom you certainly know, also spent some time in a sanatorium for people who were mentally not altogether at their best. Now people are celebrating the centenary of this poor man’s birth, with speeches and choral declamations. And yet once he no longer dared to take up his pen, in fear that he might botch everything he wrote. Then one day I went into a café and fell in love with a girl who looked so poetic. It was of course very foolish of me, all the utilitarians leaped upon me and reminded me of the bitter duties of my so lovely and expensive profession – which is of such a nature that it brings no money in. I loved this beautiful young girl, who seemed already to have an inclination toward corpulence, it was all because of the music I heard every day in the café. Great, indeed, is the power of music, sometimes immense. Suddenly everything changed. I made the acquaintance of a so-called Saaltochter, i.e., waitress, and from that moment the previous girl had for me in part only half a reality, in part no reality at all. Loving and what they call yearning are quite quite different things, different worlds. Then I used to go, very often, to nature, that is, walk into the country, many thoughts occurred to me, ideas, which I worked on. By doing this I left the place where the waitress served, and since then I haven’t seen her; I subsequently wrote poems to her, and, well, there are many people around, also in your country, I expect, who think that poems are not work, but rather something comical, unworthy of respect. That has always been the case, and always will be, in Germany, the land of poets and thinkers. Our town is very lovely. Today I went swimming in deliciously cold water, soft and delicate sunshine, in the river which runs shimmering around our town like a serpent. Needless to say, nobody knows about the girl whom I made terrible fun of, partly in prose, and whom I worshipped, on the other hand, partly in poems. I have lived in rooms where all night I could not close my eyes for fear. Now it’s like this: I no longer know for sure if I love her. Indeed, my dear Fraulein, one can keep one’s feelings very much alive, or let them grow cold, neglect them. And then, true, I’m interested in many other matters besides. In the hope that you are happy, that your days pass pleasingly, and that you will be a little content, and perhaps also a bit dissatisfied, with this letter, I send you my cordial and of course, so to speak, respectful greetings.

  Robert Walser

  * Therese Breitbach, with whom Walser exchanged letters between 1925 and 1932, was seventeen and living in Germany when she first wrote to Walser; they never met.

  A Village Tale

  I sit down somewhat reluctantly at my desk to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to discourse on the potato famine which long ago struck a village on a hill that stood about two hundred meters high. Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of more account than a country girl. The longer she laboured, the less she was able to do for herself.

  The stars were twinkling in the sky. The parson of the village where what is here told occurred, was out of doors elucidating for his young protégés the planetary system. A writer was working in a lamplit room at his rapidly waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl rose up from her bed intending to rush into the pond, which she did with almost laughable alacrity.

  When she was found the next morning in a condition which made it plain to all that she had ceased to live, the question rose among these countryfolk: Should she be buried or not. Not a soul was ready to lay a hand on the finished article that lay quite motionless there. Tribal displeasure asserted itself.

  The bailiff approached the group, which intrigued him primarily from the viewpoint of painting, for in his leisure hours he would paint, government burdening him with no excessive duties. He urged the country people forthwith to be sensible, but his expostulations had no success; at no price would they inter the girl, as if they believed it might harm them to do so.

  The sheriff strode into his office with its three large windows through which streamed the most dazzling light, and he wrote a report on the incident which he dispatched to the city authorities.

  But what feelings assail me when I consider the famine whose waves rose higher and higher! The populace grew unspeakably thin. How they longed for food!

  The very same day a labourer of superlative efficiency took his gun from its nail and shot, with authentic popular wrath, his rival who was crossing the street below, yodelling in all innocence, clear proof of how happy his days were. In fact the rival was just returning from a successful encounter with the young lady, who seemed to be a somewhat indecisive person, for ogling both she offered prospects to both of heaven.

  Never in all my years as a writer have I written a tale in which a person, struck by a bullet, falls down. This is the first time in my work that a person has croaked.

  Understandably, they lifted him up and carried him into the next-best cottage. Houses, in the present comfortable sense of the word, did not at that time exist in the country; there were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of straw reached almost to the ground, as one may still observe, at one’s leisure, in a few surviving examples.

  When the young lady, a country belle with swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what had occurred on her account, she simply stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps her peculiar nature.

  Her mother besought her to speak, but all in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a statue.

  A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.

  1927

  The Aviator

  A person who wishes to voice a conviction in an appropriate fashion pronounces a vigorous, martial “Naturaleh!” “With martial greetings I remain your most obedient servant” – thus did I close a letter to someone who avowed to me that my martialism had taken him aback. “All of a sudden he heard somebody beside him exclaim: ‘That’s impossible!’” Couldn’t such an ordinary event as this occur in a novel that reflects its times and speaks of matters that are perhaps largely marginal issues? If I now exclaim in a booming voice “Naturaleh!” – I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties. A person who has no doubts at all about anything is prone to asseverate: “It’s clear as day!” That the aviator mounting his vehicle seemed to himself tiny in proportion to the magnitude of his task is clear as day to me, and perhaps I might be permitted to believe that in this significant moment he was lulling himself into the conceivably very artful illusion of being, in comparison with the universe, a babe in arms, and his flying machine was his crib, where the most decisive thing for him to do was to lie low, quietly watching. In my opinion, during the truly fabulous unwinding of his journey he thought most animatedly of his mother. Of this I am convinced, and now I come face to face with the question: Should one view the oceanist, the hero of the day, as a descendant
of those mariners vanished long since from their sphere of influence, and furthermore did he, before he flew off, make it his precept to consider his enterprise as something that would, so to speak, be merely a schooling for him, an education? Especially a poet does well, among other things, to fly at a modest velocity on his winged steed, Pegasus by name, because ill chance may strike the most special person no less easily than the least consequential member of any human interest group or sphere. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.