Occasionally, on this blog and elsewhere, I begin what I intend as a thematic series, and, generally speaking, I don't keep it up. One such series was the blog posts introducing works of short fiction on the Internet. So far I have only managed two in the series, here and here. There has been a considerable gap since the second, but this will be the third.
And the third author whose work I wish to introduce is Robert Walser.
Unfortunately, in writing an introduction to the author and his works, there is very little I can say, as, peculiarly, I know very little about Robert Walser and have read almost nothing by him. Nonetheless, I know that I must not allow myself to arrive at my grave without first having read at least one whole book of his writing. He is somewhere near the top of my 'to read' list.
I don't know exactly how he got there. That is, writers usually arrive there because I have encountered their names in a number of different contexts in a way that intrigues me. The same must be true of Walser, but I have forgotten the very first way in which I heard his name. I do know that someone whose taste I trust described him as sometimes departing into an extraordinarily naive, artless style, or some such thing, in other words, sometimes seeming to lose all self-consciousness and all sense of readership or how one is supposed to write. This appealed to me.
I also learnt, after doing a little research, that Walser died under rather miserable circumstances. Since we are approaching Christmas Day, the tale is quite appropriate, as that was the day of the year on which Robert Walser's body was found, frozen in the snow, in the Swiss town of Herisau, in 1956. From 1933 he had been resident at an asylum there. He was, apparently, in full possession of his mental faculties, but had become, through a series of misfortunes, some nebulous condition composed of melancholia, anxiety, insomnia, etc., and insufficient interest at the time in his kind of writing, or even in writing generally (we can probably take that as read, so to speak), what is often known as 'institutionalised'. A medical report from a previous mental institution in Waldau noted the following of him:
Markedly depressed and severely inhibited. Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life.
All this and more you can read in this article by J. M. Coetzee.
In fact, it is the above-linked article that framed for me an archetypal irony of the life, work and death of a writer such as Walser. I have been in the habit of quoting this article whenever I want to make a certain point about the way in which the world treats writers. For instance, I quote the quote quoted in the Coetzee article here. The quote itself is from Elias Canetti, but I know it from this article. Let me quote it again now, as framed by Coetzee:
Walser's so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of his secret writings were the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected. Even the sudden interest in Walser became part of the scandal. "I ask myself," wrote the novelist Elias Canetti in 1973, "whether, among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is one who is ashamed of himself."
Since learning all this about Walser, the truth is, I have often wondered if a similar fate is in store for me.
Some months ago I read my very first piece by Walser. It was a short, epistolary piece, in the form of a job application, entitled, appropriately, 'The Job Application'. It was, to me, very amusing, but also quite piercing, managing to evoke in a single letter the utter misery of the position in which most human beings find themselves – the position of slaves advertising themselves as wares in the job market.
I remembered the story because of my recent move. No doubt I shall have to be writing letters like this soon. Or rather, I shall have to avoid writing letters like this, since the truth, at any cost, must be banished if one is to make a success of oneself in the world.
Anyway, here is the link to the story. It's only the length of one computer screen. It won't take you long out of your busy life to read it.
(PS. Will get back to answering comments soon.)
Robin Davies writes:Good piece. It reminded me a bit of H. P. Lovecraft’s job application letter which was a bit too honest for its own good.”Round pegs find round holes, square pegs find square holes. And by the same token, albeit with rather greater difficulty, I am sure that there must somewhere be a corresponding hole for such a peg as proverbial metaphor may dub trapezohedral!”I was also reminded of an alleged college application which was doing the rounds on the net a while ago. I’ve just done a search for it and it seems it was an essay rather than a genuine application. Shame. Still, it’s a good read:http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blbyol3.htm
I think I would have hired Lovecraft on the basis of that letter. If he didn’t get a job after that – well, we know that he didn’t – then it’s a sad world.
Cap writes:I can massively relate to almost everything in the letter. Except it is not quite true for me that “all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid”. Part of me feels this way, but another part of me doesn’t and screws over the first part. I wonder if there is any “quiet, sweet, small place in the shade” to occupy, for you or for me or for anyone like Walser’s job applicant. So far in my life the activities people have been willing to pay me to perform have been so overwhelmingly tedious and intolerable that there’s no savor left in the security and comfort thereby attained. Until the security and comfort are gone…. Another curse related to this topic is to have the applicant’s disposition, without his powers of articulation. Then you are really in trouble and can’t even say why. I find Elias Canetti’s quote a little off-putting (but then, I know almost nothing about the context). He seems to want to lay a pretty harsh judgment on those with a “leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life”. Are they not doing something close to what the applicant dreams of? I guess they’ve been luckier than Walser’s applicant, and not correspondingly humble. But anyways, when it comes time for you to write those letters you mentioned, I hope it helps to know there are people on your side.
I find Elias Canetti’s quote a little off-putting (but then, I know almost nothing about the context). He seems to want to lay a pretty harsh judgment on those with a “leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life”. Are they not doing something close to what the applicant dreams of? I guess they’ve been luckier than Walser’s applicant, and not correspondingly humble.In as much as the academics in question presumably appreciate Walser’s work first in order to make a living off it, I agree it is a slightly harsh position to take, but it does highlight some kind of irony or injustice that others could make a stable living from Walser’s work, but not he. Probably no one could make a living entirely from his work, but there are those who make a living from writers the majority of whom were unable to make a living from their own calling as writers. To me that’s the basic point.I don’t even know who to blame, really, except that for some reason, for most writers of quality, hardly anyone is prepared to read their work until they’re dead, when suddenly their genius becomes apparent and they are much appreciated. Why does it happen this way?I think that, as far as people are aware of writers at all, which is not that far, they cannot, for the most part, forgive those writers for actually being alive. Death makes removes that part of a writer that is most offensive to people.But anyways, when it comes time for you to write those letters you mentioned, I hope it helps to know there are people on your side.Thank you. No doubt I shall rise from the ashes of my former existence like a very dashing phoenix. Who waits tables.
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