April 15, 1878

Robert Walser (April 15, 1878 to December 25, 1956), the Swiss writer, has a claim on our attention for the books he wrote before he was institutionalized, in 1933. His first novel, though not his first book, Geschwister Tanner (1906) was written in his brother's apartment. During a six weeks absence on his brother's part, Robert is said to have written the book while living on sprats. Sprats is a kind of herring, and the source of our information, the translator, Christopher Middleton, surmises that his brother's cat shared this diet. Middleton's translation of Walser's novel Jakob von Gunten, published in 1969, is our citation.

Many assumptions about Robert Walser are challenged in an essay by Jacob Silverman. We quote some of these points, to put Walser in a contemporary context:

...[M]y essay about Robert Walser, focus[es] on the Swiss author’s microscripts—peculiar short stories written in a minuscule script on business cards, receipts, torn-off novel covers, and other forms of scrap paper. Before entering the Herisau asylum in 1933, for a putative diagnosis of schizophrenia, Walser had written and published widely, including in many of Central Europe’s German-language newspapers. But by the time he died in 1956, he was, like many writers of his type, nearly friendless and forgotten, and he likely hadn’t written anything in years. He was, in many respects, alone and insubstantial.

On December 25, 1956, a group of children in Herisau found Walser’s body in the snow, his right hand on his chest, his left arm outstretched, a black hat lying nearby. Seventy-eight years old, he had died while on one of his customary long walks...[T]his ... life story, marked by recurrent insecurities, poverty, an inability to find satisfying companionship of the amorous or intellectual kind, and a quiet death... meant that he, too, like the rest of his siblings, would die childless. .... However low Walser’s reputation may have dipped...some Europeans say he never went out of fashion......The wealth of new translations of Walser works, as well as the frequent appearance of new critical pieces, has only cemented his status as an important representative of early twentieth-century European literature. His tangled microscripts, published in German but most not yet translated into English, ensure that his posthumous life will be a long one....

There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of this assessment, published in 2010.

April 15, 1878

Robert Walser (April 15 1878 to December 25, 1956), was a Swiss writer who participated in the German cultural world. Walser's father had the skills of a bookbinder, and ran a stationary shop. Robert was one of 8 children and his poetry and novels attracted critical acclaim. He died in a mental institution, where it is possible he was comfortable. Our excerpt is from his novel Jakob van Gunten (1909).

A beautiful black cat was lying on a dark red plush chair...If I were a painter I'd paint the intimacy of such an animal image. My brother came toward me in a very friendly way and we stood facing one another like measured men of the world who know how enjoyable the properties can be...Then a large and slender snow-white dog...ran up to us...Everything about John's apartment is good. He took the trouble to discover with love each of the objects and pieces of furniture in antique shops...He had managed to make something simple but perfect within modest limits...and make his apartment look like a painting.

J. M. Coetzee wrote of Robert Walser-- In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox. This quote is from his article, "The Genius of Robert Walser," in the New York Review of Books (November 2, 2000). In this article Coetzee quotes other critics. “I ask myself,” wrote the novelist Elias Canetti in 1973, “whether, among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is one who is ashamed of himself.”

And Walter Benjamin: Walser’s people, suggested Benjamin, are like fairy-tale characters once the tale has come to an end, characters who now have to live in the real world. There is something “laceratingly, inhumanly, and unfailingly superficial” about them, as if, having been rescued from madness (or from a spell), they must tread carefully for fear of falling back into it.

Coetzee himself points out " In Jakob’s cynicism about civilization and about values in general, his contempt for the life of the mind, his simplistic beliefs about how the world really works (it is run by big business to exploit the little man), his elevation of obedience to the highest of virtues, his readiness to bide his time, awaiting the call of destiny, his claim to be descended from noble, warlike ancestors (when the etymology he himself hints at for von Gunten—von unten, “from below”—suggests otherwise), as well as his pleasure in the all-male ambience of the boarding school and his delight in malicious pranks—all of these features, taken together, point prophetically toward the petit-bourgeois type that, in times of greater social confusion, would find Hitler’s Brownshirts so attractive.

All these comments point to a quality in Walser of being in between: in between social classes, professions, sexualities, and perhaps one could add, regarding an aesthetic awareness, that Walser was in between his own ability to analyze the worlds he inhabited, and a paralyzing glimpse of a greater mechanicity which leveled all.