by W. G. Sebald
Keller’s love stories, though, do not always end so happily (or so hopelessly) as that of the Polish tailor who, after his fortunate rescue, still has a long and by no means enchanted career ahead of him. Indeed, the two “village children” Sali and Vrenchen, lacking the slightest means of support, really do forfeit their lives. The barge laden with hay on which, after their journey on foot through the homeland in which they are now strangers, they finally consummate their love, toward the end of the story swings out into the current and floats, slowly turning, downriver toward the valley. “Sometimes the river glided through tall dark forests that laid their shade upon it; sometimes it flowed past open fields; now silent villages slid by it, and now a lonely hut; here it widened into an expanse like the bosom of a lake, and the boat almost ceased to move; there the current rushed around great rocks and sped on swiftly by the sleeping shores. In the first flush of dawn a town with many towers rose up out of the silvery waters, while low down in the sky a red-gold moon laid its path upon the river. Down this path the boat drifted slowly sideways, and as it neared the wharves of the town, in the frosty autumn mist two figures, closely clasped, slipped over the side of the dark hulk and were swept beneath the bitter current.” Glide, flow, rush, pause, rise up, clasp, slip—these are the verbs by means of which, in this passage, a metaphor is gradually crafted for the physical act of love being consummated with every twist and turn of the boat and of the sentences, a love which Keller, who on paper at least can determine their fate, bequeaths to the youngsters from the village as their rightful due, even though—so far as anyone can tell—he never experienced such fulfillment himself. From the very beginning, despite a deep need of and evidently inexhaustible capacity for love, Keller’s life was marked by rejection and disappointment. The ladies whose hand he sought were not easily able to overlook his short stature, not Fräulein Rieter, nor the beautiful woman from the Rhineland whom he so admired as she rode along the Berlin boulevards, nor the Heidelberg actress Johanna Kapp. And Luise Scheidegger, the only one who was prepared to share her life with Keller, a few weeks after their engagement drowned herself in a fountain in Herzogenbuchsee. In his darker moments, Keller may well have seen this as proof that he was not wrong to be ashamed of his ill-proportioned body, so to speak not fully developed from the waist down, and that he was destined to bring despair upon those to whom he declared his love. The actress from Heidelberg, too, ended her days in mental darkness. In the Zurich Central Library there is a small watercolor by Keller of an idealized landscape with trees, which—via the painter Bernhard Fries, a member of the Feuerbach circle—came into the possession of Johanna Kapp, who during her illness cut away, in a minute and detailed operation, approximately a quarter of the lower part of the picture. What moved her to this drastic incision we do not know, nor what Keller’s feelings were when, after its return to him following Johanna’s death, he held the thus disfigured picture in his hands once more. But perhaps he may have sensed that the snow-white space which opens up behind the almost transparent landscape is even more beautiful than the colored miracle of art.
At any rate, the antithesis to this glimpse into a beyond consisting of pure nothingness, revealed by the unfortunate Johanna’s scissorwork, is the colossal scrawl which Heinrich Lee one day, in a melancholy moment, begins to execute on a large piece of cardboard, and which he continues each day with countless strokes of the pen until a vast gray cobweb covers almost the entire surface. “If you observed,” writes Heinrich, “the tangle more closely, you could discover therein the most commendable coherence and application, as it formed a labyrinth which could be followed up from the starting point to the end, in a continuous progression of strokes and windings which perhaps amounted to thousands of yards. At times a new style manifested itself, to a certain degree a new epoch of the work; new designs and motifs, often delicate and graceful, appeared, and if the amount of attention, sense of the appropriate, and perseverance that was required for this absurd mosaic had been applied to a real task, I certainly should have produced something worth looking at. Here and there only, hesitations, smaller or greater, appeared, certain twists in the labyrinths of my distracted soul, and the careful manner in which the pen had sought to extricate itself from the dilemma proved how my dreaming consciousness was caught in the web. So it went on for days and weeks, and the sole variation, when I was at home, would be that, with my forehead leaning against the window, I would watch the progress of the clouds, observe their shape, and in the meantime let my thoughts rove afar into the distance.” This description of the distinctly melancholic scrawl is reminiscent of the blue sheets of paper that Keller used as blotters as he toiled over
his Bildungsroman at his desk in Berlin, and which over and over again repeat the name of his unrequited love in long intricately entwined lines, swirls, columns, and loops in a myriad variations—Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. And around and between these five or six letters there is nothing, save here and there a sketch of a gateway to a walled garden, also with Betty inscribed above it, a Betty-mirror, a Betty-room, and a Betty-clock and next to it a Reaper, and another skeleton playing the fiddle, a funeral bell, and a kind of miniature coat of arms in which, through a magnifying glass, something can be made out which looks like a heart pierced through with pins. The art of writing is the attempt to contain the teeming black scrawl which everywhere threatens to gain the upper hand, in the interest of maintaining a halfway functional personality. For many years Keller subjected himself to this difficult task, even though he was aware early on that it was to no avail. The “somewhat melancholy and monosyllabic official,” who says at the end of his novel that nothing can now lighten the shadows which fill his desolate soul, already suspects that even the best arrangement of letters and sentences on the page, like the generosity he showed toward his characters, in the long term counts for little when set against the heavy burden of disappointment. Looking back on his career, he feels that all of this “was no life, and could not go on thus.” He speaks of a new imprisonment of the spirit in which he has become entrapped, and broods as to the means of escaping it, but so hopeless does his situation appear that from time to time, and ever more distinctly, as he says, there stirs in him the wish no longer to exist at all.
LE PROMENEUR SOLITAIRE
A remembrance of Robert Walser
The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so. Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written. What he read was for the most part borrowed. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions, so, too, he was remote from other people. He became more and more distant from even the siblings originally closest to him—the painter Karl and the beautiful schoolteacher Lisa—until in the end, as Martin Walser said of him, he was the most unattached of all solitary poets. For him, evidently, coming to an arrangement with a woman was an impossibility. The chambermaids in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, whom he used to watch through a peephole he had bored in the wall of his attic lodgings; the serving girls in Berne; Fräulein Resy Breitbach in the Rhineland, with whom he maintained a lengthy correspondence—all of them were, like the ladies he reveres so longingly in his literary fantasias, beings from a distant star. At a time when large families were still the norm—Walser’s father, Adolf, came from a family of fifteen—strangely en
ough, none of the eight siblings in the next generation of Walsers brought a child into the world; and of all this last generation of Walsers, dying out together, as it were, none was perhaps less suited to fulfill the prerequisites for successful procreation than Robert, who, as one may say in his case with some fittingness, retained his virginal innocence all his life. His death—the death of one who, inevitably rendered even more anonymous after the long years in an institution, was in the end connected to almost nothing and nobody—might easily have passed as unnoticed as, for a long time, had his life. That Walser is not today among the forgotten writers we owe primarily to the fact that Carl Seelig took up his cause. Without Seelig’s accounts of the walks he took with Walser, without his preliminary work on the biography, without the selections from the work he published and the lengths he went to in securing the Nachlaß—the writer’s millions of illegible ciphers—Walser’s rehabilitation could never have taken place, and his memory would in all probability have faded into oblivion. Nonetheless, the fame which has accrued around Walser since his posthumous redemption cannot be compared with that of, say, Benjamin or Kafka. Now, as then, Walser remains a singular, enigmatic figure. He refused by and large to reveal himself to his readers. According to Elias Canetti, what set Walser apart from other writers was the way in which, in his writing, he always denied his innermost anxieties, constantly omitting a part of himself. This absence, so Canetti claimed, was the source of his unique strangeness. It is odd, too, how sparsely furnished with detail is what we know of the story of his life. We know that his childhood was overshadowed by his mother’s melancholia and by the decline of his father’s business year after year; that he wanted to train as an actor; that he did not last long in any of his positions as a clerk; and that he spent the years from 1905 to 1913 in Berlin. But what he may have been doing there apart from writing—which at the time came easily to him—about that we have no idea at all. So little does he tell us about the German metropolis, so little, later, of the Seeland around Biel and his years there, and his circumstances in Berne, that one might almost speak of a chronic impoverishment of experience. External events, such as the outbreak of the First World War, appear to affect him hardly at all. The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it. When he can no longer go on we see him in the Waldau clinic, doing a bit of work in the garden or playing a game of billiards against himself, and finally we see him in the asylum in Herisau, scrubbing vegetables in the kitchen, sorting scraps of tinfoil, reading a novel by Friedrich Gerstäcker or JulesVerne, and sometimes, as Robert Mächler relates, just standing stiffly in a corner. So far apart are the scenes of Walser’s life which have come down to us that one cannot really speak of a story or of a biography at all, but rather, or so it seems to me, of a legend. The precariousness of Walser’s existence—persisting even after his death—the emptiness blowing through every part of it, lends it an air of spectral insubstantiality which may deter the professional critics just as much as the indefinability of the texts. No doubt Martin Walser is correct in remarking that Robert Walser—despite the fact that his work seems positively to invite dissertation—always eludes any kind of systematic treatment. How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows and who nonetheless illumined every page with the most genial light, an author who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, to whom his own thoughts, honed on the tiniest details, became incomprehensible, who had his feet firmly on the ground yet was always getting lost in the clouds, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events, and things of which it spoke. Was it a lady named Wanda or a wandering apprentice, Fräulein Elsa or Fräulein Edith, a steward, a servant, or Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, a conflagration in the theater or an ovation, the Battle of Sempach, a slap in the face or the return of the Prodigal, a stone urn, a suitcase, a pocketwatch or a pebble? Everything written in these incomparable books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable. Conversely, Walser’s sottises often conceal the profoundest depths of meaning. Despite such difficulties, however, which seem designed to foil the plans of anyone intent on categorization, much has been written about Robert Walser. Most of it, admittedly, is of a rather impressionistic or marginal nature, or can be regarded as an act of hommage on the
part of his admirers. Nor are the remarks which follow any exception, for since my first encounter with Walser I, too, have only ever been able to read him in an unsystematic fashion. Beginning now here and now there, for years I have been roaming around, now in the novels, now in the realms of the Bleistiftgebiet [Pencil Regions], and whenever I resume my intermittent reading of Walser’s writings, so, too, I always look again at the photographs we have of him, seven very different faces, stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe that has taken place between each. The pictures I am most familiar
with are those from his time in Herisau, showing Walser on one of his long walks, for there is something in the way that the poet, long since retired from the service of the pen, stands there in the landscape that reminds me instinctively of my grandfather, Josef Egelhofer, with whom as a child I often used to go for walks for hours at a time during those very same years, in a region which is in many ways similar to that
of Appenzell. When I look at these pictures of him on his walks, the cloth of Walser’s three-piece suit, the soft collar, the tiepin, the liver spots on the back of his hands, his neat salt-and-pepper mustache and the quiet expression in his eyes—each time, I think I see my grandfather before me. Yet it was not only in their appearance that my grandfather and Walser resembled each other, but also in their general bearing, something about the way each had of holding his hat in his hand, and the way that even in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat. For a long time I even imagined that my grandfather
shared with Walser the habit of leaving the top button of his waistcoat undone. Whether or not that was actually the case, it is a fact that both died in the same year, 1956—Walser, as is well known, on a walk he took on the twenty-fifth of December, and my grandfather on the fourteenth of April, the night before Walser’s last birthday, when it snowed once more even though spring was already under way. Perhaps that is the reason why now, when I think back to my grandfather’s death—to which I have never been able to reconcile myself—in my mind’s eye I always see him lying on the horn sledge on which Walser’s body, after he had been found in the snow and photographed, was taken back to the asylum. What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and of the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension? Carl Seelig relates that once, on a walk with Robert Walser, he had mentioned Paul Klee—they were just on the outskirts of the hamlet of Balgach—and scarcely had he uttered the name than he caught sight, as they entered the village, of a sign in an empty shop window bearing the words Paul Klee—Carver of Wooden Candlesticks. Seelig does not attempt to offer an explanation for the strange coincidence. He merely registers it, perhaps because it is precisely the most extraordinary things which are the most easily forgotten. And so I, too, will just set down without comment what happened to me recently while reading the novel Der Räuber [The Robber], the only one of Walser’s longer works with which I was at the time still unfamiliar. Quite near the beginning of the book the narrator states that the Robber crossed Lake Constance by moonlight. Exactly thus—by moonlight—is how, in one of my own stories, Aunt Fini imagines the
young Ambros crossing the selfsame lake, although, as she makes a point of saying, this can scarcely have been the case in reality. Barely two pages farther on, the same story relates how, later, Ambros, while working as a room service waiter at the Savoy in London, made the acquaintance of a lady from Shanghai, about whom, however, Aunt Fini knows only that she had a taste for brown kid gloves and that, as Ambros once noted, she marked the beginning of his Trauerlaufbahn [career in mourning]. It is a similarly mysterious woman clad all in brown, and referred to by the narrator as the Henri Rousseau woman, whom the Robber meets, two pages on from the moonlit scene on Lake Constance, in a pale November wood—and nor is that all: a little later in the text, I know not from what depths, there appears the word Trauerlaufbahn, a term which I believed, when I wrote it down at the end of the Savoy episode, to be an invention entirely my own. I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions, but it is one thing to set a marker in memory of a departed colleague, and quite another when one has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.