Walser

It was a job like any other, Robert Walser said of writing; he wrote just as a farmer would sow and reap, or would feed his animals and muck out after them. He needed to eat, after all, and he had a sense of duty … It was just like any other job, he said. He could make a living, publishing in literary magazines. Shouldn't artists fit in with the ordinary? Shouldn't they be like anyone else? But then writing depends upon some measure of creative strength, and you can't count on that. Walser wrote best in the morning, before noon, and later, much later at night. 'The hours between noon and night found me stupid'. 'Things can only grow from me unforced', he said; this meant he couldn't bind himself to any particular newspaper, to any particular publisher (I'm quoting from Seelig's memoir of Walser, available in its entirety here). 

Walser's books. His first novel, The Tanners, published in 1906, was written in six weeks. The next year saw The Assistant, and in 1909, his own personal favourite among his books, the great Jakob von Gunten. In the same year, a volume of poems was published. Walser makes little money. He writes three more novels, but burns them, finding the form too long winded. He decides to return to the short stories, playlets and feuilletons which, he feels, were more suited to his talents.

Looking back on his youth, Walser worries later that he wrote too much. Shouldn't a writer save up his creativity for old age? Sometimes a writer will have nothing to say. 'Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence'. Doesn't writing demand the full strength of a human being? It can suck you dry. Perhaps this was why he appeared to enjoy moving home. Each time, he began again. Each time, he forgot the past and immersed himself in his new surroundings. 'Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible'. He never had a library, only a few Reclam editions. 'What else do you need?', he said.

Walser living became more precarious. His short stories and feuilletons, which he'd been writing steadily for some years, made little money. He was offered money by generous benefactors to go abroad – to India, to Turkey. But why should he go? 'It's nice, just to stay'. He remained, but in increasing poverty and isolation. He'd never got on with his fellow writers; he held back from those artistic circles where, if he did attend, he was liable to drink and become aggressive.

In spring 1913, he returned to Switzerland, to Biel, where he'd live for seven years. 'I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible'. He lived in his sister's apartment. He saw almost no one. 'I went walking by myself, day and night'. He continued to write, but due to the war, it had become harder to publish. Several volumes of prose appear nevertheless, although tastes in the reading public were changing. Who wanted to read feuillitons now? He had his admirers, of course; but they were busy with other things.

Walser moved into an attic room of a hotel. 'There was only a bed, a table and a chair. A cheap map of Europe was tacked to the wall', a visitor remembered. He wrote in a greatcoat and slippers, fashioned from scraps of worn out clothes, to protect him from the cold. Imagine it, the writer bent over his manuscript, his breath visible in the air … Soon he felt he'd written himself out. 'I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture'.

In 1920, he moved to Berne, taking a job for a few months as an archivist, before being dismissed for insubordination. He was soon back at his 'short prose factory', i.e., his desk. Walser took long walks as he always done. But by now he was drinking heavily, and displaying the signs of depression which ran through his family. He tried to take his life, but 'I couldn't make a proper noose'. Eventually, in 1929, his sister took him to an asylum in Berne. 'I asked her just outside the gate, "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do but enter?'

'The patient confessed hearing voices', it said in his medical records. 'Markedly depressed and severely inhibited. Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life'. Walser would recover, and continued to write and publish. In particular, he followed a way of writing he called the 'pencil method' – composing poems and prose on the back of envelopes, bank statements and other correspondence in a tiny hand, with individual letters no more than a millimetre in height. For a long time, these writings were assumed to be entirely hermetic, written in a private code, but they were deciphered – Walser had simply adopted an erratic style of abbreviation – and published in the 1990s.

Why did Walser adopt the pencil method? He experienced cramps in his right hand, which he interpreted as a psychosomatic hostility towards the pen with which he wrote. His switch to the pencil, then, allowed him to write, albeit with a completely altered script. But then, too, it seems that writing with a pencil allowed him to attain easily that state of mind in which he could produce his whimsical, dreamily associative prose. Although he continued to use a pen for fair copies and correspondence, Walser produced some 500 pages of microscript in these years, 24 of which yielded The Robber, 141 pages in print, a novel whose existence he didn't mention to others. He also returned to writing poems, many of which, unlike his microscripts, were published. (I'm drawing here on Coetzee's excellent essay. See also this volume of translations from 'the pencil area').

Walser continued to publish until he was moved, against his will, to a mental hospital at Herisau, where he could receive full welfare support. 'It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium', he says to Seelig, 'The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again'. And he did not write; but the room, paper or pen he claimed were not available to him could have been so. He lived quietly, unprotestingly carrying out the tasks the institution set for him. 'I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad', he told a visitor. Was he mad? His doctors wavered in their opinion. But Walser didn't want to leave, and resisted all attempts to resettle him.

Walser said he'd found the quiet he needed, in the asylum, he said to Seelig. He lay 'like a felled tree'; his desires had fallen asleep 'like children exhausted from their play'. He lived as in a monastery or a waiting room, he said. 'I was happy as things stood'. He wonders whether Hoelderlin's last 30 years might have also been happy. 'To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be'.

He was content; his needs were met; he could go out on the long walks he enjoyed. But there was another reason why he no longer wrote, at least initially. As he says to Seelig, 'my world was smashed by the Nazis', he said. 'The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed'. The world had changed around him. He wanted to find a still point – first of all in writing, whose source was always uncertain, always liable to fatigue, and then, when that was exhausted – when there was nowhere left to for him to move, no more bedsitters, no more attic rooms in which to rediscover his strength, his freedom - the sure world of the asylum.