The Whiteness of the Tale

In his foreward to Masquerade and Other Stories, a collection of Robert Walser’s stories published in 1990 by Johns Hopkins University Press, William H. Gass writes:

"They found Robert Walser’s body in the middle of a snowy field. It was Christmas Day, so the timing of his death was perhaps excessively symbolic. I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper. There his figure, hand held to its failed heart, could pretend to be a word – not a statement, not a query, not an exclamation – but a word, unassertive and nearly illegible, squeezed into smallness by a cramped hand. It would be a word, if it were a word (such doubtful hesitations were characteristic of Walser), which would bring to an end a life of observant idling, city strolling, mountain hikes, and woodland walks, a life lived on the edges of lakes, on the margins of meadows, on the verges of things, a life in slow but constant motion, at a gawker’s pace: sad, removed, amused, ironic, obsessively reflexive."

As we have come to expect from Gass, the prose is precise, stately, detailed, nuanced, critically shrewd, lovely to hear, and "obsessively reflexive." The passage reminds me of another written by a very different sort of writer, one who inhabited a very different world:

"I dreamed of the paper I am now writing on as of an open field or a forest: oh to be able to lose myself in it, to take off and run on breathlessly and, without reaching the end or even the middle, put down somewhere at the edge or in a corner just a few rapid lines. . ."

He goes on:

"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."

Many writers are neurotic about the blank whiteness of a sheet of paper or computer screen. All that emptiness to fill induces a sense of vertigo and performance anxiety. The pristine purity poses a reproach to modest gifts. Not so Andrei Sinyasky, who wrote under a pseudonym he took from a renowned Russian-Jewish gangster, Abram Tertz. Historians date the start of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union to the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel. Both writers were charged with smuggling anti-Soviet manuscripts out of the country for publication elsewhere. Both were found guilty. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp; Daniel, five.

The passages above come from Sinyavsky’s A Voice from the Chorus, based largely on the two letters per month the Soviet authorities allowed him to send to his wife. During his six years in the camp, Sinyavsky was not otherwise permitted to write anything. To him, the whiteness of the page signified unfettered freedom of imagination. There's no fear, no anxiety, no sense of inadequacy. He has already endured the writer's hell of not having the freedom to write.

Sinyasky left the Soviet Union in 1973, settled in Paris, and died in 1997 . The English translation of A Voice from the Chorus was published in 1976. It remains my favorite among all of his books, a ragbag of prison folklore, stray thoughts both mundane and profound, observations on his evolving religious sense and even literary criticism. Among the later, this is my favorite:

"[Isaac] Babel exhibited a trait common, perhaps, to all writers: he was not merely an observer, he was also a snooper. All his life he spied 'through the keyhole' in the hope of seeing something interesting. As an author, he was always himself off stage, looking from outside at the bizarre scenes he picked out from some squalid area of life -- hence his reticence about his own views and the elusive quality of his biography. What kind of views, indeed, can a man have if he is entirely engrossed in the search for outlandish things and subjects buried among the rubbish? And his biography is that not of a living person, but of one seconded to life (his job of clerk in the Red Cavalry suited him admirably), who could fit into any surroundings or situation and look at it without prejudice. He was a spy in the service of literature who ferreted out wonders in everyday existence, a declasse secret agent who once rented a room in the house of a 'finger man' in order to write his Odessa Stories. His non-Russian origins were also a convenience for him."