The Tanners

Who and what Robert Walser really was is a question to which, despite my strangely close relationship with him, I am unable to give any reliable answer. The seven photographic portraits of him, as I have said, show very different people; a youth filled with a quiet sensuality; a young man hiding his anxieties as he prepares to make his way in bourgeois society; the heroic-looking writer of brooding aspect in Berlin; a 37-year-old with pale, watery-clear eyes; the Robber, smoking and dangerous-looking; a broken man; and finally the asylum inmate, completely destroyed and at the same time saved. What is striking about these portraits is not only how much they differ, but also the palpable incongruity inherent in each — a feature which, I conjecture, stems at least in part from the contradiction between Walser's native Swiss reserve and utter lack of conceit, and the anarchic, bohemian and dandyesque tendencies he displayed at the beginning of his career, and which he later hid, as far as possible, behind a façade of solid respectability. He himself relates how one Sunday he walked from Thun to Berne wearing a "louche pale yellow summer suit and dancing pumps" and on his head a "deliberately dissolute, daring, ridiculous hate." Sporting a cane, in Munich he promenades through the Englischer Garten to visit Wedekind, who shows a lively interest in his loud check suit — quite a compliment, considering the extravagant fashion in vogue among the Schwabinger bohème at the time. He describes the walking outfit he work on the long trek to Würzburg as having a "certain southern Italian appearance. It was a sort of species of suit in which I could have been seen to advantage in Naples. In reasonable, moderate Germany however it seemed to arouse more suspicion than confidence, more repulsion than attraction. How daring and fantastical I was at twenty-three!" A fondness for conspicuous costume and the dangers of indigence often go hand in hand. Hölderlin, too, is said to have had a definite penchant for fine clothes and appearance, so that his dilapidated aspect at the beginning of his breakdown was all the more alarming to his friends. Mächler recalls how Walser once visited his brother at the island of Rügen wearing threadbare and darned trousers, even though the latter had just made him a present of a brand-new suit, and in this context cites a passage of The Tanners in which Simon is reproached by his sister thus: "For example, Simon, look at your trousers: all ragged at the bottom! To be sure, and I know this perfectly well myself: They're just trousers, but trousers should be kept in just as good a condition as one's soul, for when a person wears torn, ragged trousers it displays carelessness, and carelessness is an attribute of the soul. Your soul must be ragged too." This reproach may well go back to remarks Lisa was at times won't to make about her brother's appearance, but the inspired turn of phrase at the end — the reference to the ragged soul — that, I think, is an original aperçu on the part of the narrator, who is under no illusion as to how things stand with his inner life. Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age, transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity. This is why he had no time for the grandiose tones in which the "dilettantes of the extreme left," as he calls them, were in those days proclaiming the revolution in art. He is no Expressionist visionary prophesying the end of the world, but rather, as he says in the introduction to Fritz Kocher's Essays, a clairvoyant of the small. From his earliest attempts on, his natural inclination is for the most radical minimization and brevity, in other words the possibility of setting down a story in one fell swoop, without any deviation or hesitation. Walser shares this ambition with the Jugendstil artists, and like them he is also prone to the opposite tendency of losing himself in arabesques. The playful — and sometimes obsessive — working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details is one of the most striking characteristics of Walser's idiom. The word-eddies and turbulence created in the middle of a sentence by exaggerated and participial constructions, or conglomerations of verbs such as "haben helfen dürfen zu verhindern" ("have been able to help to prevent"); neologisms, such as for example "das Manschettelige" ("cuffishness") or "das Angstmeierliche" ("chicken-heartedness"), which scuttle away under our gaze like millipedes; the "night-bird shyness, a flying-over-the-seas-in-the-dark, a soft inner whimpering" which, in a bold flight of metaphor, the narrator of The Robber claims hovers above one of Dürer's female figures; deliberate curiosities such as the sofa "squeaching" ("gyxelnd") under the charming weight of a seductive lady; the regionalisms, redolent of things long fallen into disuse; the almost manic loquaciousness — these are all elements in the painstaking process of elaboration Walser indulges in, out of a fear of reaching the end too quickly if — as is his inclination — he were to set down nothing but a beautifully curved line with no distracting branches or blossoms. Indeed, the detour is, for Walser, a matter of survival. "These detours I'm making serve the end of filling time, for I really must pull off a book of considerable length, otherwise I'll be even more deeply despised than I am now." On the other hand, however, precisely these linguistic montages — emerging as they do from the detours and digressions of narrative and, especially, of form — are exactly what is most at odds with the demands of high culture. Their associations with nonsense poetry and the word-salad symptomatic of schizophasia were never likely to increase the market value of their author. And yet it is precisely his uniquely overwrought art of formulation which true readers would not be without for the world, for example in this passage from the Bleistiftsgebiet (Pencil Regions) which, comic and heartbreaking in equal measure, condense a whole romantic melodrama into the space of a few lines. What Walser achieves her is the complete and utter subjugation of the writer to the language, a pretense at awkwardness brought off with the utmost virtuosity, the perfect realization of that irony only ever hinted at by the German Romantics yet never achieved by any of them, with the possible exception of Hoffman, in their writings. "In vain, the passage in question tells us, regarding the beautiful Herta and her faithless Italian husband, "did she buy, in the finest first class boutiques, for her most highly respected darling rake and pleasure-seeker, a new walking cane, say, or the finest and warmest coat which she could find, procure or purchase. His heart remained indifferent beneath the carefully chosen item of clothing and the hand hard which used the can, and while this scoundrel — oh that we might be permitted to call him thus — frivolously flitted or flirted around, there trickled from those big tragic eyes, embellished by heartache with dark rims, heavy tears like pearls, and here we must remark, too, that the rooms where such intimate misfortune was played out were fairly brimming with gloomy, fantastically be-palmleaved decoration gilded further by the height and scale of the whole. "Little sentence, little sentence" — so Walser concludes this escapade which is all but grammatically derailed by the end, "you seem to me fantastical as well, you do!" And then, coming down to earth, he adds the sober phrase, "But let us continue."