Homage to Robert Walser

In memory of Robert Walser, who died 50 years ago on Christmas Day, Golden Rule Jones has undertaken a shamefully belated act of homage on behalf of the English-speaking world by translating from the German, with a friend, Carl Seelig’s Wanderungen mit Robert Walser. Walser spent more than 20 years of his life in mental hospitals. Seelig was an admirer and eventually the guardian of the great Swiss writer, and visited him once or twice a year from 1936 until Walser’s death. Seelig accompanied Walser on long walks in the mountains surrounding his sanitarium at Herisau. By 1936, Walser had stopped writing but Seelig worked to keep his friend’s work in print. Seelig’s book, published the year after Walser’s death, chronicles his visits, but so far as I can tell this intriguing and valuable sounding book has never been translated into English.

Here’s an excerpt from GRJ’s translation of the first chapter of Seelig’s memoir, describing his first meeting with Walser, on July 26, 1936:

“From an adjoining building came the esteemed 58-year old poet, accompanied by the warden. I was struck by his childlike expression, red-flushed cheeks, blue eyes, and trim, golden mustache. He was already turning gray at the temple. His well-worn collar and necktie were set somewhat crookedly, his teeth not in the best condition. When Dr. Hinrichsen wanted him to button the top button of his vest, Robert rebelled: `No! The top button must remain open!’ He spoke in a melodious Barndutsch, as he had no doubt spoken in his youth in Biel.”

GRJ also links to desolate photographs of Walser’s body, dead from a heart attack, supine in a field of snow. The image of this strange, brilliant man locked up in a mental asylum in neutral Switzerland, no longer writing, while Hitler’s madness raged across Europe, is a depressingly apt emblem of the 20th century. As his translator, the poet-critic Christopher Middleton said, “It was only when he was forcibly transferred to Herisau in Appenzell, in 1933 [the year Hitler came to power], that he gave up, or switched, one might say, from being an incalculable alien to being an official lunatic.” And it was to Seelig that Walser famously said, “I am not here to write, but to be mad.” Guy Davenport writes in “The Artist as Critic”:

“This renunciation of writing by so gifted a genius is one of the tragedies of our time, to be put beside the loss of Walter Benjamin, Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, and Federico Garcia Lorca. And yet we have just learned that Walser did not entirely quit. His friend Carl Seelig, who has left us an account of Walser’s time in the asylum (recording his conversations on walks with him), discovered that Walser had written, in a tiny hand, on the back of calendars and scrap paper elegant and fanciful little paragraphs, which have been published as the Micrographia of Robert Walser.”

In the same essay, collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, Davenport credits Walser’s Jacob von Gunten with being the source of ideas more famously elaborated on by Kafka, Thomas Mann and Hesse. Among Walser’s other admirable admirers were Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil. Davenport describes Jacob von Gunten as “about being a servant, about monotony, about the enslavement of time by money,” and describes Walser as “the Paul Klee of writing.” Here’s the final paragraph of Walser’s sketch from 1917, “Poets,” translated by Middleton:

“Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.”

Well done, Sam. Many thanks.