Robert Walser (1878-1956) - German-speaking Swiss author of Jokob von Gunten and other novels and tales, a writer much admired by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin and Hermann Hesse. I can see the connection with Hesse since dreamy, hypersensitive Robert Walser could have been a character right off the pages of a Hesse novel.
Indeed, reading this collection of short entries on nature, art, writing, love and everyday occurrences, suffering toothache, wearing an overcoat, sipping tea, I had the strong sense Walser captures, in his own unique voice, much of the magic and tenderness of a child’s perception of the world.
You can read Tom Whalen’s informative ten page Afterward in this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition to become acquainted with Robert Walser’s life and writing, including how he worked as a clerk and butler and other menial jobs to support himself and how he spent his later years in mental institutions where he penciled tiny prose works in a coded microscript.
Back on Hesse, by my eye Walser’s connection to his fellow Swiss artist's romanticism and poetic vision of life is so directly linked, I’ve included Hesse watercolors to accompany quotes taken from several of the over eighty miniature pieces, each one usually one or two pages, that comprise Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories.
"I never wrote poems in summer. The blossom and resplendence were too sensuous for me. In summer I was melancholy. In autumn a melody came over the world. I was in love with the fog, with the first beginnings of darkness, with the cold. I found the snow divine, but perhaps even more beautiful, more divine, seemed the dark, wild warm storms of early spring. In the winter cold, the evening glistened and shimmered enchantingly." From Poetry
Reading Robert Walser also put me in mind of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, especially Octavia, the spider-web city, a thin city, with its ropes and chain and catwalks bound to two mountain crests over the void. Take a look at the below three quotes, where Robert feels the wind sweeping along like the hope of youth and experiences everything moving; or nature as so soft and delicate; or he reads a book without words, a book of pictures where clouds float in bold simple lines. We can imagine Robert Walser returning to Octavia in the evening where he will climb a rope ladder to mediate on the shape of the stars from a hammock outside his house, a house made like a sack.
"The wind swept along like the hope of youth, like a new, never before felt confidence. Everything moved, the wash flapped and fluttered, the train smoke flew up and was lost. I, too, lost myself. It was as if I were enchanted, as if born anew, and full of delight I looked up at the morning sky where the sacred, golden clouds floated. Melting into splendor and bliss they dissolved, and then the sun came out, day was here." from The Morning
"I stepped under the roof of a summerhouse that stands on the rocks. Everything green quickly became dripping wet. Down on the street a few people stood under the dense foliage of the chestnut trees as if under wide umbrellas. This looked so strange I don't recall ever having seen anything quite like it. Not a single raindrop pushed its way through the densely layered mass of leaves. The lake was in part blue, in part dark gray. Such a pleasant, stormy, sweet rustling in the air. Everything was so soft and delicate. I could have stood there for hours reveling in the world. But at last I went on my way." from On The Terrace
"This is a book without words, it tells its story in pictures, in fleetingly drawn sketches of a singular art and gracefulness; it contains a fine, understandable language, a tale filled with age-old suspense; it breaths with life, and when you turn its pages, the sorrow and bliss of nature step toward you entrancingly. The vast, sedate country life breathes its wind upon you. Wind and clouds blow and float in these bold and simple lines. Bushes blooming, country roads – and then the masterly pen compels the sun towards its natural, thought-provoking demise." from An ABC in Pictures by Max Liebermann
"Then, as I lay there comfortably and languidly summer humming all around, there appeared from out of the sunny ocean-and-sky-bright bliss two eyes that looked on me with infinite kindness. I also clearly saw cheeks drawing nearer to my own as if they wanted to touch them, and a wonderfully beautiful, as if formed from pure sun, finely curved, voluptuous mouth came out of the reddish-blue air close to mind as if it wanted to touch my mouth as well. The firmament I saw through my eyes I had pressed closed was completely pink and hemmed by a splendid velvety black. I looked into a world of pure bliss. But then all of a sudden I stupidly opened my eyes, and the mouth and cheeks and eyes were gone and all at once I was robbed of the sky’s sweet kiss. What’s more, by then it was time to go back down to the city to business and my daily work." from Lunch Break
Reflecting on the above quote, perhaps this is one reason Robert Walser spent the last years of his life in a sanatorium – he could take his long walks in nature, lie down in the grass or lie down in the snow and never be obliged to open his eyes and return to work so as to be robbed of the sky’s sweet kiss. Fortunately for lovers of literature, he kept his eyes open enough during his lifetime to pen or pencil a string of highly imaginative first-rate fictions.
Recognizing just how sensitive a man he was, we can begin to understand after a certain point he quite writing. As he told Carl Seelig, one of his great admirers, who payed visits to the sanatorium: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”
"I am crowned with the most cheerful serenity. Yesterday I was like a snapped-off plant, while today I’m a sturdy tree. What illusions can do to us! Brain power, you’re weird! Now that this Nobel Prize business no longer weighs on me, how noble I seem. Yes, the world is gay and serious.” from The Nobel Prize.
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