“I had the audacity to write a book that caused quite a stir. As a consequence I was permitted to interact in a casual manner with people of substance. The doors of serious, elegant households were flung wide open to admit me, which was most certainly to my advantage. All I had to do was stroll right in and take care to behave in an agreeable manner as consistently as possible. Once I set foot in a gathering of at least forty full-blooded celebrities. Just imagine how glorious that was!”
So begins “The Secretary” (1917), one of hundreds of prose pieces the Swiss writer Robert Walser composed in the first decades of the 20th century. Here, Walser looked back to an experience from his Berlin years. In 1907, he was hired by the art-dealer Paul Cassirer, the cousin of his then-publisher, to be the secretary for the Berliner Secession, an artist’s cooperative. He needed the work, because even though his first novel, The Tanners, had recently been released to strong reviews and decent sales, he was, as always, broke. Walser didn’t stay in the job for long — he never did — but he had fun while he did. In a letter written in his secretarial capacity to his friend Walter Rathenau, the future Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, Walser reminded him of his promise to buy one of the paintings on exhibit, a necessary outcome because “the profit has already been used up (drunk).”
That impish tone carries over to the later text. Except “The Secretary” is even more unstable. The narrator spends more time hailing hackney-cabs, sweet-talking potential clients, and spending evenings at a club rather than managing correspondence. What a foolish figure he is, this secretary. I’d say he has an eye for the main chance, but I’m not sure he’s quite selfish or cynical enough. He seems to love the beau monde his recent success has opened up to him. Is he not the definition of a parvenu, those breathless exclamations the equivalent of a gaping mouth? I’m a little embarrassed by this piece, in fact. Isn’t it, after all, rather hackneyed? The prose is wordy, littered with clumsy adjectives and needless qualifiers: “in a casual manner,” full-blooded,” “most certainly,” “as consistently as possible.”
I do wonder about that “audacity,” though. Who believes that? The narrator? The “people of substance”? What, exactly, is audacious here? Is it writing a book or is it writing a book that causes a stir? The latter, I suspect. But that doesn’t make sense, it would be like saying you’re audacious for having been audacious. Yet maybe people unironically important enough to be called “people of substance” would fall for such muddled thinking. The more I think about this paragraph, the more I puzzle over the narrator. Isn’t he putting it on a little thick? “Most certainly to my advantage.” “Full-blooded celebrities.” “How glorious that was!” Glorious? Really?
What is the tone here? Does the narrator believe anything he’s saying? I said before that the phrase “people of substance” tells us something about the narrator. But what if it says more about those people themselves? Maybe they are the ones dull enough to want mere consistency and agreeableness in the behavior of an upstart. Maybe the very idea of celebrity is foolish: it’s nonsense to imagine there’s something essential, even genetically superior (“full-blooded”) about such people. Maybe the narrator doesn’t think all this tedious schmoozing is glorious after all. If the tone of the passage inclines us to treat its sentiments as a joke, maybe the butt isn’t the narrator, but the celebrities. Or maybe it’s the reader, fooled by apparent artlessness. Maybe the exclamation mark that caps the paragraph is scornful, not breathless. Or maybe it’s sly, a cheeky wink acknowledging how hard it is to tell the difference.
What’s true of “The Secretary” is true of Walser in general. He’s easy to underestimate. To read Walser is to navigate — and experience — seemingly endless hesitations, reversals, and confusions. No one has made the joyously maddening task of reading Walser available to English speakers more capably than Susan Bernofsky, who has translated many of his works, including “The Secretary.” Now she has written a biography of this fascinating writer. The Clairvoyant of the Small is a triumph: an accessible, engaging, brilliant exploration of the intertwining of life and work.
The story begins in Biel, a small city at the confluence of German- and French-speaking Switzerland where Walser was born on April 15, 1878. His mother, Elise, grew up poor; his more well-to-do father, Adolf, apprenticed as a bookbinder. The instruments of artifice Walser would later refract in his work were literally under his childhood feet: downstairs from the family apartment his parents ran a shop that carried stationery, toys, and assorted objects including costume jewelry and mirrors.
Growing up the seventh of eight children, Walser never lacked for playmates, though he was closest to Karl,who was only a year older. The brothers got into all sorts of mischief, a tendency that lasted until they fell out in the 1920s. (A childhood friend later told the story of accompanying several of the Walser siblings on an outing in the countryside: the schoolchildren stopped at an inn, where “Röbi” [little Robert] ordered wine and rolls for the whole company, blithely ordering the innkeeper to send the bill to his father.) Walser’s older sister, Lisa, was the other important figure in his life, though she was more caretaker than playmate, a role forced on the girl when their mother’s mental health began to fail in the mid-1880s. Suddenly, everything in the Walser household was changing for the worse. The middle-class comforts of Walser’s young childhood melted away in an economic recession. The family moved frequently, always to slightly worse addresses. Adolf had to give up the shop. Elise struggled with depression and poor health, culminating in her death in 1894.
By then Walser had already left school. In other circumstances, his scholarly aptitude would have led him to enroll at the Gymnasium, the academic high school. But Adolf wanted the boy to start earning, so he found Walser an apprenticeship at a bank. Over the following years he held many clerical positions, perfecting the copperplate handwriting in which all transactions were recorded at that time. He also, according to Bernofsky, learned “the hidden power of the subservient” that would provide something of a personal manifesto and influence much of his writing.
Although Walser wrote all day long, filling ledgers and conducting correspondence, he was not yet a writer, not even a fledgling one. His interests were in theater, doubtless influenced by Karl who was apprenticing as a stage designer across the border in Stuttgart. Robert joined him and the brothers enjoyed pulling pranks like throwing their hats from the windows of their rooming house on to unsuspecting passersby. But Walser’s dreams of becoming an actor quickly fizzled and, after returning to Switzerland, he latched on to the idea of becoming a writer. His early interest left a mark, though: he never lost the belief that we tell the greatest truths when we wear masks.
From 1896, after abandoning a clerical job with excellent prospects — he had already perfected the skill of “making himself jobless,” as Bernofsky wryly puts it — Walser took only contract work, office gigs he stayed at only long enough to finance a few months of writing. He started with poetry, mostly because he thought he was supposed to. Thanks to the help of a critic named Franz Blei — who came across Walser’s work when a friend, a young psychiatric student named Otto Hinrichsen, who would later play an important, unhappy role in Walser’s life, brought it to his attention — Walser was soon published in an exciting new German literary magazine. His first success emboldened him to move to the metropolis, joining Karl in Berlin, where the latter was finding fame as a set designer and book illustrator. The wild Swiss brothers became notorious for their vast appetites and drunken party antics. (Once they drove a friend to distraction by foiling his effort at sending them home in cab — as soon as he closed the door behind them, the boys would pop out the other side.) But it wasn’t all fun and games. The brothers fought, possibly physically. Walser showed up with a scratched face; he told friends that Karl’s new cat had done it, but no one believed him.
Walser spent seven years in Berlin. They were good years. He published three novels — I particularly like The Assistant (1908), based on his time as amanuensis to a formerly successful inventor in a villa near Zürich in 1893 — wrote dozens of prose pieces similar to “The Secretary,” and was hailed by writers like the poet Christian Morgenstern, the novelist Robert Musil, and another writer who worked as a clerk, Franz Kafka. (For a time, Walser was much better known than Kafka, Musil even describing the future giant of world literature in an early review as “a special case of the Walser type.”) But the Berlin years were hard, too. His well-reviewed books didn’t sell. Karl got married and had less time for him; eventually they had an unspecified but definitive falling out and barely ever spoke again. And his imagination dried up. By 1912 Walser was plagued by a painful psychosomatic hand-cramp that he could alleviate only by writing in pencil (tentative and thus forgiving, Bernofsky speculates). Mentally and physically shattered, he returned to Switzerland. Except for a short trip in January 1915, he never left again.
Walser settled in with Lisa, who had become a schoolteacher in the village of Bellelay in the hills above Biel. As he recuperated, Walser began spending time with Lisa’s close friend Frieda Mermet, a single mother who had left her layabout husband and now ran a laundry. Walser and Mermet entered into a friendship that verged on but never quite became a relationship; the connection, whatever its nature, lasted the rest of his life. One of the pleasures of Bernofsky’s telling is the justice she does to the women in the story, Lisa and Mermet above all, but even seemingly marginal figures like a seventeen-year-old au pair the 43-year-old writer became infatuated with. Bernofsky imagines how unnerving this onslaught must have been. Elsewhere, she is similarly sensitive, dryly chiding Walser for using “the ever-seductive tactic of cloaking criticism in compliments” in writing to an early female champion.
At Lisa’s urging Walser moved into a temperance hotel in Biel, where he rented an attic room. He would stay until 1921, the most stable and happiest time of his life. Yes, he was poor — to economize on heat he wrote while wrapped in an overcoat and little slippers he made out of felt — but he thrived in a place that offered both privacy and company. He wrote all morning, had lunch with the other regulars, then spent the afternoon about town and in the surrounding countryside. All his life, Walser had been a great walker (in his prime, an outing of 30 miles was nothing to him). Increasingly he wrote his prose pieces about walks, whether real or imagined. The device offered structure: a naturalistic way to organize what otherwise might seem varied, even haphazard impressions, and an invitation to range in time as well as space. Walser’s greatest work of this type — the closest he ever came to literary success, selling over 12,000 copies despite the privations of war that affected even neutral Switzerland — is a novella aptly titled The Walk (1917). The narrator leaves his “room of phantoms” (transparently Walser’s attic room, filled with the echoes of his creations), sets out to run errands across Biel, and evades the demands of the people he meets along the way.
Like his narrator, Walser needed to distance himself from others, but he suffered from it, too. That dilemma became even more piercing in the 1920s, when the writer moved to the Swiss capital, Bern, to take up a briefly-held position at the national archive. The move came after another breakdown, and offered only temporary relief. Walser’s Bern years found him at the height of his powers and increasingly adrift. He alternated between writing constantly and not writing at all. More and more he composed in a tiny script no more than 2 mm high, using whatever paper came to hand. (A whole story fit on the back of a business card.) Bernofsky is especially good on Walser’s late style, with its wildly digressive, long sentences cluttered with relative adverbs, portmanteau words, and repetitions more reminiscent of Stein and Joyce than the 19th century writers like Dickens and Gottfried Keller he was actually reading. Sadly, the more he came into his own, the fewer readers he had.
Walser was now as frayed as the shabby clothes he wore around town. He lived in 13 apartments in five years; Bernofsky calls the constant displacement a slow-motion form of walking, as if to suggest that even his most reliable source of succor was deserting him. He suffered aural hallucinations, voices that castigated him relentlessly. He was spooked, anxious, depressed, drinking too much. (Bernofsky notes we would call this “self-medicating.”) Matters came to a head in early 1929. He proposed, one after another, to his landladies, two middle-aged sisters who were already looking to get rid of him because he would wake them up with his screaming. When they refused his overtures, he brandished a knife and urged them to kill him. Lisa was called in and took him to a psychiatrist who recommended institutionalization.
The final, most difficult, most famous chapter of Walser’s life began on Thursday, January 24th, 1929. As Bernofsky puts it, as evenhanded here as throughout her book, Walser’s “new mode of existence” inaugurated an “apprenticeship in the art of not writing.” He would no longer tell his own story; others would tell it for him. In some ways, though Walser was to live almost 30 more years, nothing more happened to him. Yet as Bernofsky’s language of “apprenticeship” implies, even within the asylum, Walser was beginning even in his ending. “Uneventfulness,” she concludes, “is an important part of this story.”
The doctors diagnosed schizophrenia; Bernofsky eschews labels, noting, however, that the condition once covered more symptoms than today. And Walser was ill: his continual depression, paranoia, flatness of affect, and now the psychotic episode. Luckily for Walser, he was admitted to the asylum at Waldau, in the countryside just outside of Bern. Its director, Wilhelm von Speyr, forbade the use of straitjackets, banned alcohol, and preferred work therapy to new treatments such as electroshock. It wouldn’t be too much to say that Walser thrived at Waldau, eventually beginning to write again and able to leave the grounds on his own recognizance. Sleeping in a dormitory seemed to calm the voices in his head; they persisted for the rest of his life, but they diminished, flaring up in times of stress. In the end, Waldau was a refuge, not so different from the temperance hotel in Biel.
Everything changed when Speyr retired in 1933. The new director arranged for the most well-adjusted patients to be sent to work on nearby farms. Walser refused; his siblings refused him; he was transferred to an institution in Herisau, in eastern Switzerland, far from anywhere he had ever lived. Walser was traumatized. It didn’t help that the director at new institution was Otto Hinrichsen, the former psychology student who, 40 years earlier, had passed Walser’s work on to his earliest patron. Hinrichsen made much of Walser, arranging a private room and asking Walser to look at some poems he himself had written. Some might have been flattered; Walser felt condescended to. He refused the room, declined to write, settled into an inner exile that led Hinrichsen to diagnose him as catatonic. As Bernofsky neatly puts it, “It’s true he was sick. He was also sick of Hinrichsen.” Things improved when a critic and editor named Carl Seelig wrote to propose a new anthology of Walser’s work. It was the start of a 20-year association. Their first meeting, in July 1936, began poorly — Walser was nearly silent — but then Seelig suggested that they go for a walk. Wandering the countryside, which had always been so important to Walser’s well-being, opened the floodgates. Bernofsky observes that Walser’s volubility with Seelig suggests the silence with Hinrichsen was a mask, perhaps the last and most mulish in a lifetime of roles.
Seelig transcribed their conversations and compiled them into a book published after Walser’s death. Walks with Walser, a delightful text in many ways, is the most important source we have for what Walser was thinking and feeling in his time in Herisau. Bernofsky gives Seelig — who became Walser’s legal guardian in 1944, interestingly, against the writer’s wishes — his due, but also cautions against accepting his presentation as gospel. Seelig kept Walser in the public eye through regular newspaper articles and new editions of the work, the money from which precluded his becoming a ward of the state. But Seelig also benefitted from being Walser’s voice. He romanticized the writer’s madness, presenting him as a sage of renunciation. Yes, Walser spent his days peaceably engaged in menial tasks: carding wool, recycling paper, sorting lentils, gluing paper bags. But he also read avidly, and, contrary to legend, even wrote. None of that writing has survived. Asylum attendants report that Walser would find a corner, turn his back on whatever was going on, and pull paper slips and pencil stubs from the pockets of his vest or jacket. He was also known to haunt the local post office, where he scribbled on forms.
These last decades were reduced; Walser was isolated. Karl and Lisa both died without him having seen them again, even though Lisa’s last wish was that he visit her. (He refused.) He outlived them both by more than a decade. His death has become a central part of his legend, and certainly it was both perfectly fitting and perfectly enigmatic. On Christmas Day, 1956, he set off after lunch on his preferred walk through fields and forests. As always he was dressed in a suit and hat. Halfway through, he collapsed from a heart attack; he was found some time later by two boys out sledding. Walser lay on his back, one hand on his chest, his body mysteriously some six feet from the last of his snowy footprints, as though he had flown through the air.
In her retelling of Walser’s life, Bernofsky is all sympathy. But she never idealizes. He’s excessive, unable to read social cues, and sometimes just plain weird. Some of these moments are sweet, as when Walser is invited to Zürich to give a reading (he walked from Biel — it took him three days) only to panic and refuse to perform. The fellow who invited him took over, while Walser sat in the audience, anonymous, applauding wildly. But others are darker, self-sabotaging, off-putting. He regularly pushed away people close to or important to him. Once, when a prospective publisher came to Bern to meet him, Walser opened the door, announced that his master, Herr Walser, would be out in a minute, and disappeared before returning a minute later, now wearing a jacket. (That contract went nowhere.) Years earlier, in the most intense stage of his relationship with Mermet, he often wrote her about underwear, detailing how much he wanted to slide some leg warmers he’d seen in a shop window under her skirts and, even more strangely, asking her for a pair of her son’s pants: he wanted to “love them and venerate them and gaze at them adoringly.” (She sent him the trousers.) Most troubling is a story told after Walser’s death by Karl’s widow, Trude, about a time when Walser and Lisa visited them at the lake near Biel. Walser and his sister shared the guest bedroom. The next day, Lisa told her that, as Bernofsky puts it, “Robert had beleaguered her all night and kept trying to get into bed with her.” Lisa later said that Walser had “behaved indecently” to her in the past. Trude never much liked Walser; she might have been exaggerating or making trouble. But it’s true that Walser’s relationship with Lisa cooled in the 1920s, and that tension, whatever its cause, contributed to his being institutionalized. Throughout his life, Walser was lonely and horny and anxious and needy but apparently repulsed by any of the accepted behavior that might alleviate those needs.
This attention to Walser’s psychological makeup (never intrusive, heavy-handed, or reductive) contributes to Bernofsky’s recontextualizing of Walser. The famous anecdotes are all here: Walser enrolling in butler school, traveling by balloon from Berlin to Königsberg with Paul Cassirer, telling the famous Austrian writer and librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal that he should stop being famous for just one second. But they read differently when placed in the larger story of the life and the times. There were in fact several schools for servants in Wilhelmine Berlin; yes, Walser wanted to shock Karl and his bourgeois friends and patrons, but he was also, Bernofsky argues, genuinely curious to deliberately relinquish power. As for the balloon ride, under the guidance of Cassirer’s cousin, a pilot, Walser traveled aloft overnight, landing the next morning in East Prussia. In the piece he wrote about the adventure, he archly made much of the food and drink the men enjoyed on board, but he genuinely loved the new perspective of “the slumberous earth.”. In the end, he was even more committed to art than to pranks. And he did indeed drag Hoffmannsthal at a party, but not from jealousy or insecurity. He genuinely admired the writer, but was dismayed by his snooty tone, which was in keeping with his frustration at the literary world of Berlin, which liked to play at bohemianism while remaining moralizing.
Bernofsky could not be more lucid about Walser’s life. But she is equally illuminating about the characteristics of his writing. Her close readings — whether of well-known works like “The Walk” or obscure gems like his first prose piece “Greifensee” (Lake Greifen) — fizz with energy and intellect. Her take on The Robber — written in 1925 but never submitted for publication and not found until after his death — is especially brilliant. Explaining its central comparison of writing to theft, she calls this underappreciated novel “a document of the erotics of subjugation” on par with the work of Sacher-Masoch. Noting the “extravagant coinages” and sentences layered “with a thick sediment of relativizing adverbs” (so to speak, as it were, possible, naturally, of course), Bernofsky sees the novel as exemplary of Walser’s use of “style to intervene decisively in the storytelling itself, foregrounding linguistic detail over denotation in a way that challenged every conventional notion of what it meant to signify.” Too bad Bernofsky’s language gets labored in such moments, for she is otherwise so clear. To be fair, Walser’s writing is as difficult as what she wants to say about it. I missed, however, the clarity of the insight made by the writer Max Brod when he said that Walser’s writing has three levels: apparent naivete, beneath which lies irony, beneath which lies a further layer that is “genuinely naïve, powerful, and Swiss-German.”
Actually, on this last point Brod and Bernofsky are similarly opaque. Despite arguing that his work was “too quirky, too seemingly modest, too Swiss” (her emphasis) for many of his first readers to appreciate, Bernofsky side-steps the relation of his national origin to his writing. Is there something like a Swiss ethos? If so, how does Walser reflect it? Does he perhaps shape it to his purposes? These questions go unanswered, which is a shame because her liberal use of questions is one of the most distinctive features of her book. Sometimes Bernofsky asks about things she genuinely doesn’t know, because the record doesn’t allow it. (Citing a text in which Walser describes a version of how things fell apart at the end of his job in the archive, she asks, “Was he relating an actual incident … or just a rebellious fantasy?”) Sometimes she speculates without seeming to, suspending assertion in a (passive-aggressive?) way that is decidedly Walserian. (Wondering why he took ten years to write about his stint as a servant, she asks, “Did it make him nervous, all those years later, to imagine that someone from that era of his life might read the story and decide he had betrayed some trust?”) Most of the time, she imitates Walser’s thoughts, blending her perspective with his. (In the study of narrative this is called “free indirect discourse.”) For example, describing Walser’s struggle to write a novel after years of prose pieces, she asks: “What if the novel wasn’t any good after all?” (“after all” indicating this as Walser’s own anxiety). Having cited from a racy letter to Mermet, she asks: “Would she allow him to go on addressing her in so clearly improper a manner?” The question is meant to be the writer’s, but it also the biographer’s, wondering at and over the test he seemed to be putting their burgeoning relationship to.
This tendency extends to other players in the story. About Lisa’s mixed feelings before Walser first came to stay with her in Bellelay, Bernofsky writes, beautifully, “Would there be room in her small apartment for both him and his disappointment?” Imagining Mermet’s uncertain feelings, Bernofsky asks, “If she entered into a relationship with him, would it prove a casual liaison and possibly damage her reputation?” In both examples, the use of pronouns rather than names furthers the sense that the women are asking these questions of themselves.
Walser’s peripatetic life and private nature ensure that any effort to tell his story must confront more gaps and evasions than usual. He kept no diary and discarded letters. And yet readers often think they know Walser; he incites powerfully intimate and emotional responses. After all, he almost always wrote in the first person and used events from his own life liberally. Yet this intimacy, these correspondences between life and art are also a ruse. The writing draws us close but then pushes us away — just as Walser so often did with people. In a late text called “The Child,” he writes, “No one is entitled to behave towards me as if he knew me.” And yet this straightforward assertion comes in a literary text that solicits readerly identification. For Bernofsky, “it’s as if his desire to bare his soul were wrestling with self-preservation,” which leads her to conclude: “It was precisely his point that we would never really know and to some extent, perhaps, neither would he.” It’s fitting that her assertion of unknowability modulates into hesitation (“to some extent,” “perhaps”). It’s as though Bernofsky were trying out what it was like to be Walser. The question she asks next feels at once crucial and unanswerable: “Was self-knowledge desirable, or even possible?”
For me, Bernofsky’s repeated hanging questions are a way to get close to Walser while still remaining distant. (Like the lover Walser, who preferred to write about kissing than actually doing it.) In so doing, she speaks for her subject but honors the reserve he needed to survive. To put every assertion to the test; to lay one’s soul bare, not despite but because of the mask one is wearing; to recognize the vertiginous relationship between our descriptions of the world and the world itself: these are Walser’s most characteristic preoccupations. Bernofsky doesn’t just write about them; in her questioning style, she manifests them.
Reading this welcome new biography, I was struck above all by how much care, attention, and love Walser elicited, both in life and literature. Writers and critics stuck out their necks for him. Lisa Walser, Frieda Mermet, and Carl Seelig, among others, looked out for him even though he sometimes hurt them. After his death, Walser’s legacy was cemented by the tireless efforts of the scholar Jochen Greven, who first realized the seemingly nonsensical miniature writing of the writer’s last years was in fact legible, and, following him, by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, who spent decades hunched over magnifying lenses transcribing what eventually became six volumes of prose rescued from those penciled scribblings. To this list we must add Bernofsky herself, whose work has literally been a labor of love, for that is the word she uses in describing her initial attraction to Walser’s writing: “I loved his gentle wit, his sly humor, his endlessly self-effacing grandiloquence, his metaphors that shift our understanding of how the world is made.” Reflecting on the decades she has spent in his company, she concludes: “All these years later, he still astonishes me.” The writer of “The Secretary” could not have imagined a better secretary.
[Published by Yale University Press on May 25, 2021, 378 pages, $35.00 hardcover]