Inner Workings Read online

  After the World War, the taste among the public for the kind of writing Walser had relied on for an income, writing easily dismissed as whimsical and belletristic, waned. He was too cut off from wider German society to keep abreast of new currents of thought; as for Switzerland, the reading public there was too small to support a corps of writers. Though he prided himself on his frugality, he had to close down what he called his ‘little prose-piece workshop’.7 His precarious mental balance began to waver. He felt more and more oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbours, by their demand for respectability. He quit Biel in favour of Bern, where he took up a position in the national archives; but within months he was dismissed for insubordination. He moved from lodgings to lodgings. He drank heavily; he suffered from insomnia, heard imaginary voices, had nightmares and anxiety attacks. He attempted suicide, failing because, as he disarmingly admitted, ‘I couldn’t even make a proper noose.’8

  It was clear that he could no longer live alone. He came from a family that was, in the terminology of the times, tainted: his mother had been a chronic depressive; one brother had committed suicide; another had died in a mental hospital. Pressure was put on a sister to take him in, but she was unwilling. So he allowed himself to be committed to the sanatorium in Waldau. ‘Markedly depressed and severely inhibited,’ ran the initial medical report. ‘Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life.’9

  In later evaluations Walser’s doctors would disagree about what, if anything, was wrong with him, and would even urge him to try living outside again. However, the bedrock of institutional routine would appear to have become indispensable to him, and he chose to stay. In 1933 his family had him transferred to the asylum in Herisau, where he was entitled to welfare support. There he occupied his time in chores like gluing paper bags and sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties; he continued to read newspapers and popular magazines; but, after 1932, he did not write. ‘I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,’ he told a visitor.10 Besides, he said, the heyday of littérateurs was over.

  (Years after Walser’s death, one of the Herisau staff claimed that during his tenure he saw Walser at work writing. But even if this is true, no manuscript material dating from after 1932 has survived.)

  Being a writer, someone who uses his hands to turn thoughts into marks on paper, was difficult for Walser at the most elementary of levels. In his earlier years he wrote a clear, well-formed script on which he prided himself. The manuscripts that survive from those days – fair copies – are models of fine handwriting. Handwriting was, however, one of the sites where disturbance in Walser’s psyche first manifested itself. At some time in his thirties (he is vague about the date) he began to suffer from psychosomatic cramps of the right hand. He attributed these to unconscious animosity toward the pen as a tool; he was able to overcome them only by abandoning the pen in favour of the pencil.

  Writing with a pencil was important enough for Walser to dub it his ‘pencil system’ or ‘pencil method’.11 The pencil method meant more than just use of a pencil. When he moved to pencil-writing Walser also radically changed his script. At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered from edge to edge in rows of delicate, minute, pencilled calligraphic signs, a script so difficult to read that his executor at first took the papers to belong to a diary in secret code. But Walser kept no diary, nor is the script a code. The late manuscripts are in fact written in standard German script, but with so many idiosyncratic abbreviations that, even for editors familiar with it, unambiguous decipherment is not always possible. It is only in ‘pencil-method’ drafts that Walser’s numerous late works, including his last novel The Robber (twenty-four sheets of microscript, some one hundred and fifty pages in print) have come down to us.

  More interesting than the decipherment of the script itself is the question of what the pencil method made possible to Walser as a writer that the pen could no longer provide (he was still prepared to use a pen when merely transcribing, or for writing letters). The answer seems to be that, like an artist with a stick of charcoal between his fingers, Walser needed to get a steady, rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became much the same thing. In a piece entitled ‘Pencil Sketch’ dating from 1926/7 he mentions the ‘unique bliss’ that the pencil method allowed him.12 ‘It calms me down and cheers me up,’ he said elsewhere.13 Walser’s texts proceed neither by logic nor by narrative but by moods, fancies, and associations: by temperament he is less a thinker following an argument or even a storyteller following a narrative line than a belletrist. The pencil and the self-invented stenographic script allowed the purposeful, uninterrupted, introverted, dream-driven hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.

  The longest of Walser’s late works is Der Räuber (The Robber), written in 1925–26 but deciphered and published only in 1972. The story is light to the point of being insubstantial. It concerns the sentimental entanglements of a middle-aged man known simply as the Robber, a man without employment who manages to subsist on the fringes of polite society in Berne on the basis of a modest legacy.

  Among the women the Robber diffidently pursues is a waitress named Edith; among the women who somewhat less diffidently pursue him are assorted landladies who want him either for their daughters or for themselves. The action culminates in a scene in which the Robber ascends the pulpit and, before a large assembly, reproves Edith for preferring a mediocre rival to him. Incensed, Edith fires a revolver, wounding him slightly. There is a flurry of gleeful gossip. When the dust clears, the Robber is collaborating with a professional author to tell his side of the story.

  Why ‘the Robber’ (der Räuber) as a name for this timid gallant? The word hints, of course, at Walser’s first name. A painting by Karl Walser, Robert’s brother, gives a further clue. In Karl’s watercolour, Robert, aged fifteen, is dressed up as his favourite hero, Karl Moor in Schiller’s early play Die Räuber (The Robbers; 1781). Robert the Robber of Walser’s tale is, however, no brigand hero but a pilferer and plagiarist who steals no more than the affections of girls and the formulas of popular fiction.

  Behind Robber(t) lurks a shadowy figure, the nominal author of the book, who treats Robber(t) now as a protégé, now as a rival, now as a mere puppet to be shifted around from situation to situation. This stage-master is critical of Robber(t) for handling his finances badly, for hanging around working-class girls, and generally for being a Tagedieb, a day-thief or idler, rather than a good Swiss burgher, even though, he confesses, he has to keep his wits about him lest he confuse himself with Robber(t). In character he is much like his rival, mocking himself even as he plays out his empty social routines. Every now and again he has a flutter of anxiety about the book he is writing before our eyes – about its slow progress, the triviality of its content, the vacuity of his hero.

  Fundamentally The Robber is ‘about’ no more than the adventure of its own writing. Its charm lies in its surprising twists and turns of direction, its delicately ironic handling of the formulas of amatory play, and its supple and inventive exploitation of the resources of German. Its author figure, flustered by the multiplicity of narrative strands he suddenly has to manage now that the pencil in his hand is moving, is reminiscent above all of Laurence Sterne, the gentler, later Sterne, without the leering and the double entendres.

  The distancing effects allowed by the splitting off of an author self from a Robber(t) self, and by a style in which sentiment can be indulged through a light veil of parody, allow Walser moments when he can write movingly about his own – that is, Robber(t)’s – defencelessness on the margins of Swiss society:

  He was always . . . lone as a little lost lamb. People persecuted him to help him learn how to live. He gave such a vulnerable impression. He resembled the leaf that a little boy strikes down from its branch with a stick, because its singularity makes it conspicuous. In other words, h
e invited persecution. (p. 40)

  As Walser remarked, with equal irony but in propria persona, in a letter from the same period: ‘At times I feel eaten up, that is to say half or wholly consumed, by the love, concern, and interest of my so excellent countrymen.’14

  The Robber was not prepared for publication. In fact, in none of his many conversations with his friend and benefactor during his asylum years, Carl Seelig, did Walser so much as mention the work’s existence. It draws on episodes from his life, barely disguised; yet one should be cautious about taking it as autobiographical. Robber(t) embodies only one aspect of Walser. Though there are references to persecuting voices, and though Robber(t) suffers from what in the psychoanalytic trade are called delusions of reference – he suspects hidden meaning, for example, in the way that men blow their noses in his presence – the more melancholic, more self-destructive side of the real Walser is kept firmly out of the picture.

  In a major episode Robber(t) visits a doctor and with great candour describes his sexual problems. He has never felt the urge to spend nights with women, he says, yet has ‘quite horrifying stockpiles of amorous potential’, so much so that ‘every time I go out on the street, I immediately start falling in love’. The stratagem he has devised to achieve happiness is to think up stories about his erotic object in which he becomes ‘the subordinate, obedient, sacrificing, scrutinised, and chaperoned [one]’. In fact, he confesses, he sometimes feels he is really a girl. Yet at the same time there is also a boy inside him, a naughty boy (shades of Jakob von Gunten). The doctor’s response is eminently sage. You seem to know yourself very well, he says – don’t try to change. (pp. 105–6) In another remarkable passage Walser simply lets the pencil flow (lets the censor doze) as it leads him from the pleasures of ‘damselling’ – experiencing a feminine life imaginatively from the inside – to a richly erotic participation in the experience of operatic lovers, to whom the bliss of pouring out one’s love in song and the bliss of love itself are one and the same. (p. 101)

  Christopher Middleton has been a pioneering student of Walser and one of the great mediators of modern German literature to the English-speaking world. His exemplary translation of Jakob von Gunten first came out in 1969. In her 2000 translation of The Robber Susan Bernofsky rises equally well to the challenge of late Walser, particularly to his play with the compound formations to which German is so hospitable.15

  In an essay concerning some of the problems that Walser presents to the translator, Bernofsky offers the following illustrative passage:

  He sat in the aforementioned garden, entwined by lianas, embutterflied by melodies, and rapt in the rapscallity of his love for the fairest young aristocrat ever to spring down from the heavens of parental shelter into the public eye so as, with her charms, to give the heart of a Robber a fatal stab.16

  The ingenuity of the coinage ‘embutterflied’ (for umschmetterlingelt) is admirable, as is Bernofsky’s resourcefulness in postponing the punch to the final word. But the sentence also happens to illustrate one of the vexing problems of Walser’s microscript texts. The word translated here as ‘aristocrat’, Herrentochter, is deciphered by another of Walser’s editors as Saaltochter, Swiss German for ‘waitress’. (The woman in question, Edith, is certainly a waitress and no aristocrat.) If we cannot be sure of the text, can we trust the translation?

  Now and again Walser sets a challenge to which Bernofsky fails to rise. I am not sure that ‘scalawagging his way through [the] arcades’ quite calls up the picture Walser intended, namely of a boy skipping school. One of the widows with whom Robber(t) flirts is characterised as ein Dummchen; and for two pages thereafter Walser proceeds to ring the changes on Dummheit in all its aspects. Bernofsky consistently employs ‘ninny’ for Dummchen and ‘ninnihood’ for Dummheit. But ‘ninny’ has connotations of mental incompetence, even of idiocy, absent from Dumm- words, and is anyhow rare in contemporary English. Neither ‘ninny’ nor any other single English word will consistently translate Dummchen, which carries senses sometimes of ‘dummy’ (a person who is dumb or stupid – the sense is stronger in American than in British English), sometimes of ‘nitwit’, and sometimes of emptyheadedness. (pp. 42, 26–27)

  Walser wrote in High German (Hochdeutsch), the language that Swiss children learn in school. High German differs not only in a multitude of linguistic details but in its very temperament from the Swiss German that is the home language of three quarters of the Swiss populace. Writing in High German – which, if he wanted to earn a living from his pen, was the only choice open to Walser – entailed, unavoidably, adopting an educated, socially refined stance, a stance with which he was not comfortable. Though he had little time for a Swiss regional literature (Heimatliteratur) dedicated to reproducing Helvetic folklore and celebrating obsolescent folkways, Walser did, after his return to Switzerland, deliberately begin to introduce Swiss German into his writing, and generally try to sound Swiss.

  The coexistence of two versions of the same language in the same social space is a phenomenon unfamiliar to the metropolitan English-speaking world, and one that creates intractable problems for the English translator. Bernofsky’s response to so-called dialect in Walser – comprising not just the odd word or phrase but a Swiss colouring to his language that is hard to pinpoint – is, candidly, to ignore it, or at least to make no attempt to reproduce it. As she correctly says, translating Walser’s more Swiss-German moments by evoking some or other regional or social dialect of English will yield nothing but cultural falsification.17

  Both Middleton and Bernofsky write informative introductions to their translations, though Middleton’s is by now out of date on Walser scholarship. Neither chooses to provide explanatory notes. The absence of notes will be felt particularly in The Robber, which is peppered with references to literature, including the obscurer reaches of Swiss literature.

  The Robber is more or less contemporary in composition with Joyce’s Ulysses and with the later volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Had it been published in 1926 it might have affected the course of modern German literature, opening up and even legitimating as a subject the adventures of the writing (or dreaming) self and of the meandering line of ink (or pencil) that emerges under the writing hand. But that was not to be. Although a project to bring together Walser’s writings was initiated before his death, it was only after the first volumes of a more scholarly Collected Works began to appear in 1966, and after he had been noticed by readers in England and France, that Walser gained widespread attention in Germany.

  Today Walser is judged on the basis of his novels, even though these form only a fifth of his output, and even though the novel proper was not his forte (the four long fictions he left behind really belong to the less ambitious tradition of the novella). He is more at home in shorter forms. Pieces like ‘Helbling’s Story’ (1914) or ‘Kleist in Thun’ (1913), in which watercolour shades of sentiment are inspected with the lightest of irony and the prose responds to passing currents of feeling as sensitively as a butterfly’s wing, show him at his best. His own uneventful yet, in its way, harrowing life was his only true subject. All of his prose pieces, he suggested in retrospect, might be read as chapters in ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’, a ‘cut up or disjoined book of the self [Ich-Buch]’.18

  Was Walser a great writer? If one finally hesitates to call him great, remarked Canetti, that is only because nothing could be more alien to him than greatness.19 In a late poem Walser wrote:

  I would wish it on no one to be me.

  Only I am capable of bearing myself.

  To know so much, to have seen so much, and

  To say nothing, just about nothing.20

  (2000)

  3 Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

  ROBERT MUSIL WAS born in 1880 in Klagenfurt in the Austrian province of Carinthia. His mother, who came from the upper bourgeoisie, was a highly strung woman with an interest in the arts, his father an engineer in the imperial administration who in his lat
er years would be rewarded for his service with elevation to the minor nobility. The marriage was a ‘progressive’ one: Musil Senior accepted without protest a liaison between his wife and a younger man, Heinrich Reiter, initiated shortly after his son’s birth. Reiter eventually settled in with the Musils in a ménage à trois that would last for a quarter of a century.

  Musil himself was an only child. Younger and smaller than his classmates at school, he cultivated a physical toughness that he maintained throughout his life. The atmosphere at home seems to have been tempestuous; at the demand of his mother – and, it must be said, with the boy’s enthusiastic consent – he was sent at the age of eleven to board at a military Unterrealschule outside Vienna. From there he moved in 1894 to the Oberrealschule in Mährisch-Weisskirchen near Brno, capital of Moravia, where he spent three years. This school became the model for ‘W.’ in Young Törless.

  Deciding against a military career, Musil enrolled at the age of seventeen in the Technische Hochschule in Brno, where he flung himself into his engineering studies, disdaining the humanities and the kind of student attracted to the humanities. His diaries of the time reveal him as preoccupied with sex, but in unusually thoughtful ways. He found himself reluctant to accept the sexual role prescribed for him as a young man by the mores of his class, namely that he should sow his wild oats with prostitutes and working girls until it was time to make a proper marriage. He embarked on a relationship with a Czech girl named Herma Dietz who had worked in his grandmother’s house; against the resistance of his mother, and at the risk of losing his friends, he lived with Herma in Brno and later in Berlin.