The Walk
Authors: Robert Walser
ROBERT WALSER
was born in Berne, Switzerland in 1878. In a remarkably creative period between 1905 and 1917 he wrote three novels,
The Tanner Family, The Assistant
and
Jakob von Gunten,
and the short stories collected in
The Walk.
Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he entered hospital in 1933 in Herisau, Appenzell, where he remained until his death in 1956.
Praise for Robert Walser
âIf he had hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place' Hermann Hesse
â“Kleist in Thun” and “Helbling's Story” show him at his dazzling best' J.M. Coetzee
âA clairvoyant of the smallâ¦Walser has been my constant companion' W. G. Sebald
âAn essential writer of our time' Elias Canetti
âLast heir of the great romantics' Roberto Calasso
âI think it was Herman Hesse who said that if you can stomach Robert Walser's prose, you can't help but fall in love with it, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly. He's guileless but not stupid, an admiring observer of the inconsequential' Nicholas Lezard,
Guardian
âA writer of considerable wit, talent and originalityâ¦to be read slowly and savored' Ronald de Feo,
New York Times
âOne of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century' Juan José Saer
âThe dreamy confectionary snowflake of German language fictionâ¦the single most underrated writer of the 20th century [and] a sentence artist of the highest magnitude⦠some of the best short prose written in any language' Benjamin Weismann,
Los Angeles Times
âFrom his very first works Walser's style and vision were unmistakably his ownâ¦The totality of his work has already outlasted much that seemed great and important in his time'
Times Literary Supplement
âWalser was one of those individuals who stand at a slight angle to the worldâ¦his art was a beautifully sane challenge to the systematic assault on the subjective and quotidian that was already grinding away when he entered the madhouse. In an age that found it possible to diagnose the inner life as a sticky mass of tics and neuroses, Walser became a polite but stubborn champion of an everyday life in which psyche may play a central role, but pathology is not necessarily a given' John Burnside
â[T]he gallantry, the frolicsomeness, the imaginativeness or the sheer assiduousness of Walser's writing [â¦] remains the reader's overriding impression. [â¦] Walser's great qualities are displayed in an ironic, a rearguard or, most precisely, a Pyrrhic way, not least because he mistrusts an aesthetic of victory. [Walser writes with] a Buster Keaton-like, indomitably sad cheerfulness'
London Review of Books
âThe magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be? If Emily Dickinson made cathedrals of em dashes and capital letters and the angle of winter light, Walser accomplishes the feat with, well, ladies' feet and trousers, and little emotive words like joy, uncapitalized' Rivka Galchen,
Harper's Magazine
âTo his eye, everything is equal; to his heart, everything is fresh and astonishing; to his mind, everything presents a pleasant puzzle. Diversion is his principal direction, whim his master, the serendipitous the substance of his daily routine' William H. Gass
âWalser's writing cunningly masquerades irony with self-effacement, and vice-versaâ¦a language of hallucinatory virtuosity'
The Rumpus
âWalser's work is the closest thing to the truth about the human condition â the complexity of not knowing and wishing to know, the tragedy and humor of trying to find out what it is we're doing while we are alive. These are struggles that go on forever' Maira Kalman
ROBERT WALSER
Translated by Christopher Middleton and others
with a foreword by Susan Sontag
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Robert Walser to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Introduction Copyright © 1982 Susan Sontag
Translation copyright © 1960, 1964, 1968, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. “Kleist in Thun”, “The Walk”, “Frau Wilke” and “The Monkey” from
The Walk and other stories
by Robert Walser, translation copyright © John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1957.
Reprinted by permission of John Calder Ltd., London.
Translated from the German,
Werkausgabe
, copyright © Verlag Helmut Kossodo, Geneva and Hamburg, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975. License granted by permission of the owner of the rights, Carl Seelig-Stiftung, Zurich, Switzerland.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in Great Britain by Carcanet Press, Manchester, in 1982
First published in this edition in 2013 by Serpent's Tail
First published in 1992 by Serpent's Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3
A
Exmouth House
Pine Street
London
EC1R 0JH
website:
www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 958 1
eISBN 978 1 84765 505 9
Designed and typeset by MacGuru Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
CRO
4
YY
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Foreword: Walser's Voice
by Susan Sontag
A Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
Robert Walser is one of the important German-language writers of this century â a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favourite is the third, written in 1908,
Jakob von Gunten
) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot This selection of Walser's short prose was made (and mostly translated) by the admirable Christopher Middleton, who has laboured for years to make Walser known to English-language readers, and draws from work done between 1907 and 1929.
Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose â as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett. And, as literature's present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser's contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced the latter “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser's single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi's dialogues and playlets, that great writer's triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser's stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable
lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.
In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small â as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser's life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament: he had the depressive's fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed; and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive's appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice â musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.
The moral core of Walser's art is the refusal of power; of domination. I'm ordinary â that is, nobody â declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don't want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser's prose is the opposite of the egotist's: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success â the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productive writer, who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an anti-romantic one, of the artist's activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
Walser often writes, from the point of view of a casualty, of the romantic visionary imagination. “Kleist in Thun” (1913), both
self-portrait and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of suicide-destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on the edge of which Walser lived. The last paragraph, with its excruciating modulations, seals an account of mental ruin as grand as anything I know in literature. But most of his stories and sketches bring consciousness back from the brink. He is just having his “gentle and courteous bit of fun,” Walser can assure us, in “Nervous” (1916), speaking in the first person. “Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That's the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser's art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it â ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as rueful soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological, of that word: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.