Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  Puncturedness and swollenness appear indivisible, indistinguishable, it’s impossible to say which condition brings on the other. The author is blowing into a wounded balloon. It’s really no different in the early stories, in the other English collections: “The Boat” begins with a sinking feeling, “I think I’ve written this scene before, but I’ll write it once again.” “Poets” begins: “To the question: how do authors of sketches, stories, and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: they are stragglers and they are down at heel,” and ends on the same note of ghastly jollity: “Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.” Here, incidentally, in that overqualified and hedged-about last sentence, put together from provocative falsehoods (“enchanting oblivion,” “like to lie”) and patnesses (“like … old bottles of wine,” “exalted to a place of honor”), is an instance of that blending of motivelessness and utter deliberateness, of control and abdication, that Walter Benjamin appreciated in Walser; he seems, by turns and putting it very bluntly, too stupid to be cynical and too cynical to be stupid. A sort of repro aesthetic (“Walser paints a postcard world,” says Gass) seems equally likely to serve a straightforwardly lyrical end as parody or persiflage: “Rarely have my eyes, ever eager to soak up beauty, seen a more delightfully and daintily situated little town than the one in which a quiet dreamer once requested, in an open, sun-splashed square, that a young intellectual with designs on becoming an authoress be so good as to inform him whether he might entertain hopes with regard to her excellent person” (“A Small Town”). One doesn’t know whether to prescribe Don Quixote as an ideal reader for this sort of sweet Dulcinea tosh, or declare the adjective off-limits to the author. Certainly, he doesn’t scruple to use them, either in a Roget-rrhoeal stream (“now there passed over the lake an exceptionally windy wind. It was a regular whirlwind racing over the clear, blue, beautiful, jubilant, bouncing, amiable, good water”) or with a bizarre, almost surreal pointedness.

  In structural terms, the effects are similar. The story “Kleist in Thun,” a manifest remake of Georg Büchner’s grievous masterpiece “Lenz,” has a most peculiar coda. First Kleist, his work, his depression, the beauty of the Swiss landscape, and then he leaves the story in a stagecoach when his sister comes to rescue him. The story, though, continues for another half a page. “Last of all,” says Walser—though it’s far from being the last thing—“one can permit oneself the observation that on the front of the villa where Kleist lived there hangs a marble plaque to indicate who lived and worked there.” There already is the mustache on the Mona Lisa, but Walser isn’t finished: “Thun stands at the entrance to the Bernese Oberland and is visited every year by thousands of foreigners. I know the region a little perhaps, because I worked as a clerk in a brewery there. The region is considerably more beautiful than I have been able to describe here, the lake is twice as blue, the sky three times as beautiful.” And then, with crowning, with quite superb bathos: “Thun had a trade fair, I cannot say exactly but I think four years ago.” This strange blandness, these final chords on tissue paper and comb, is absolutely characteristic of Walser. He refuses to take himself seriously, he insists, if you like, on disappointing and, in the course of the disappointment (a plaque on the wall, a clerk in a brewery, a trade fair), slipping himself into his story. Increasingly—though it is hard with a huge production like Walser’s, of many hundreds of pieces, of which I’ve read perhaps a quarter, to identify a trend—parody, upset, call it what you will, works back to the beginning and the whole conception of a story. Walser read and recycled romantic pulp, with a mixture, one may imagine, of wickedness and actual yearning. Dismayed perhaps by the difficulty of his life, and the persistent objections not of editors, who tended to be more enlightened and to appreciate him more, but of actual readers, who would write in to the editors to protest, he seems to reply, “You like popular, you want popular, all right, I’ll give you popular,” the results being of course among his most hilariously disturbing. The following comes from a one-page story from 1925 called “Je t’adore”:

  Chocolata sat, swathed in the smartest brown, which itself spoke the most distinguished of tongues, in the automobile; Fragmentino, a gallant just like in books but otherwise imbued with quite practical views on life, stood, with his hat respectfully removed, beside the vehicle which was all set to set off and proudly glittered and glanced in all directions. The chauffeur awaited Chocolata’s slight signal, but she seemed in no hurry to give it. Fragmentino’s way of standing there had something shopclerkish about it. His suit was treacherously redolent of the speed of its purchase in the ready-to-wear shop. What an unrelenting style I’m writing here!

  There is something twice-processed about this writing; it is a petit four, a romantic biscuit. The writer praises himself for his mastery of a “low” idiom, for his “unrelenting style.” “Just like in books” is high, ironic praise. As often with Walser, one thinks of Sterne or Quixote.

  It is said that the short piece remained Walser’s basic unit of production, the disquisition, the article, the scene, even in his novels: what the metal merchants and engineers of contemporary fiction call “riffs.” In themselves, therefore, the novels are also Pyrrhic. They crumble. Even where they exist, they are disrupted, and where they cease or alter they are so again. Characters make long speeches in which they say what they think of each other or themselves, or they write long and improbable letters, or (in Jakob von Gunten) compose a curriculum vitae. Geschwister Tanner is even supposed to consist of twenty chapters, each of ten pages: the novel is, as it were, an assemblage of Procrustean miniatures! And then there is the question of the content of these books, which again may strike one as Pyrrhic. Jakob von Gunten, the first of the early novels to have been translated, is the diary of a young man (or an old boy—Walser claimed sometime in the 1920s that “youth was among his gifts”) at a small, rather rackety school for servants. It ends with the death of the headmaster’s sister, and the quasi seduction of the headmaster who sets off an around-the-world tour with the hero. Geschwister Tanner (the Tanner Siblings, the Tanners, or—my suggestion—Meet the Tanners) is a story of the comings and goings of the various Tanners, closely corresponding to the comings and goings of the various Walsers, over a period of a year or two. It begins with a hilarious presentation of Simon Tanner at a bookseller’s (like Walser as a young man, Simon had employment and plenty of it, but never for very long) and ends with him retelling the whole story of himself and his brothers and sisters to a sympathetic female ear. Der Gehülfe (The Assistant), for my money Walser’s best book, is about a few months when he found himself as secretary to an inventor. Here, somehow everything comes together: rapturous descriptions of seasons, landscape, and weather, delighted consumption of food and coffee and wine, the deep enjoyment of a temporary parasitic status—the inventor is going to the dogs, and sooner or later everyone knows it—and sharp insights into family, society, and even capitalism. Both Der Gehülfe and Geschwister Tanner have recently appeared in English, published by New Directions, and translated by the gifted Susan Bernofsky, who has taken on this eccentric author from Christopher Middleton.

  These three novels came out in 1907, 1908, and 1909 from the respected firm of Bruno Cassirer (who later took on Wolfgang Koeppen). They represent Walser probably at the zenith of what it seems a mistake to call a career in anything but the most literal (and punning) sense. Walser was living in Berlin, sometimes in the house of his brother Karl, a famous and successful illustrator (he did an exquisite cover for Der Gehülfe), and making his way. But probably even then: a dearth of friendship, love, and money. Employers and relatives did duty for friends, and chance optical infatuations with waitresses or well-dressed ladies f
or lovers. Walser was never other than independent, and that only with some difficulty. He was short-tempered and high-maintenance, suspicious, quarrelsome, and demanding. Most of his life—like Rilke, of whom his writing persistently reminds me—he conducted by correspondence, but even being within epistolary reach was probably too near for many of his associates and employers. After his three novels, it must have seemed to his publisher that he could not sell this author, and to the author that he could not live from such books. Subsequent novels were lost, destroyed, rejected, or left incomplete. Walser retreated to the production of short prose pieces, and he retreated also to Switzerland, first to his sister, then to the hotel garret in Biel. Included in Masquerade is something from 1919 called “The Last Prose Piece”; it wasn’t, but it shows enough bitter necessity to have nonetheless informed such a thing: “This is likely to be my last prose piece. All sorts of considerations make me believe it’s high time this shepherd boy stopped writing and sending off prose pieces and retired from a pursuit apparently beyond his abilities. I’ll gladly look about for another line of work that will let me break my bread in peace.” Walser found further retreats and retirements. He went into employment again; he discovered the joys of apartment hopping (“I confine my nomadism to the city, a type of peregrination that seems very agreeable to me, because I am able to say I appear to be reasonably healthy, which is to say, I look to myself to be blooming” in a piece called Wohnungswechsel, “Changing abode”); he fell out, as already mentioned, with the Swiss writers’ union.

  One might think things could go no further, but then Walser fell out with his pen: from 1924 he wrote in pencil, and in “microscript.” So tiny were the letters—two millimeters, a quarter of an eyelash or so—that for decades it was assumed—I don’t know why, belt and braces presumably—that this was a private code. It wasn’t, it was regular German, or Walser’s version of it, but it was very small and very perishable. Five hundred sheets of this, often eccentrically but speakingly found on already literarily marked pages—rejection slips, postcards to himself, and so forth—were read, employing an optical device used for the counting of threads in weaving, transcribed, and spread into normal type to make up a further two thousand pages, six further volumes in addition to the twenty of Walser’s writings. This was the Bleistiftgebiet, the pencil area or pencil terrain. (It includes one entire novel, Der Räuber, a jaunty, glancing, elliptical book, translated already by Bernofsky as The Robber.) Some other pages from there are included in the latest short selection from Walser by Christopher Middleton, Speaking to the Rose. There, in Walser’s typically ornate but spoken style, we come across passages like this, from “I would like to be standing” of 1927: “Moreover I make with pleasure the confession—which perhaps characterizes me—that while writing I might have been silent about rather much, quite unintentionally, too, for as a writer I preferred to speak not of what could be irksome, or difficult to express, but of lightness, whereas into what has occupied me here I did open out, with all the heaviness in me, though fugitively, of course, as seems to be my wont.” In Zurich, I saw a street named after him, where he couldn’t possibly have afforded to live, and in a station somewhere a train, which he—who once walked to Stuttgart—couldn’t possibly have afforded to take. John Berryman wrote, “The Bach-Gesellschaft girdles the world.” So it goes.

  NOTE

  JOHN BERRYMAN

  1. Predictably, Henry—Berryman—isn’t a fan. “Yes, if only he’d learn to sing!” he is quoted as saying to students, in John Haffenden’s Life of John Berryman.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following, where many of these pieces first appeared: Australian Book Review, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Modern Painters, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Poetry Ireland Review.

  Most of “Robert Lowell” was given as a talk at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (and appears at the kind suggestion of C. K. Williams), and “The Passenger” was written for a collection of essays on film scenes projected by Robert Ray.

  “Robert Frost and Edward Thomas” was originally commissioned as an introduction to Elected Friends, edited by Matthew Spencer and published by Other Press in 2004; “John Berryman” was an introduction to the reprint of The Dream Songs on the occasion of the centenary of his birth; “‘Remembering Teheran’” was a contribution to Nick Gammage’s book of tributes to Ted Hughes on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, The Epic Poise (Faber and Faber, 1999); the essay on Gottfried Benn led off my 2013 selection, Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose (FSG, 2013).

  “Ted Hughes” (as “Stare at the Monster”) was awarded the 2005 Editors’ Prize for best review-essay in Poetry.

  Mary-Kay Wilmers and Chris Wiman were a joy to work for, Chris Richards was both warmhearted advocate and cool adviser, and Mareike Grover read the manuscript with wonderful and alarming acuity. Thanks are due to all, but especially to one: Jonathan Galassi.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

  POETRY

  Selected Poems

  Approximately Nowhere

  Corona, Corona

  K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems

  Acrimony

  Nights in the Iron Hotel

  PROSE

  Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures

  AS TRANSLATOR

  Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose by Gottfried Benn

  Angina Days: Selected Poems of Günter Eich

  Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems of Durs Grünbein

  AS EDITOR

  The Voyage That Never Ends: Fiction, Poems, Fragments, Letters—Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words

  Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology

  After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (with James Lasdun)

  A Note About the Author

  Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn’s Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Hofmann

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “Remembering Teheran,” by Ted Hughes, from Collected Poems, copyright © 2003 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25–

  [Essays. Selections]

  Where have you been?: selected essays / Michael Hofmann. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-25996-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-70916-7 (ebook)

  1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetry—Translations into English—History and criticism. 3. Poetics. I. Title.

  PN1136 .H64 2014

  824'.914—dc23

  2014020501

  www.fsgbooks.com

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