Over lunch I read, in a newspaper favored by liberal thinkers, about a railway accident. I recall precisely that I ate lunch only three hours ago. A poem is pursuing me; I shall have the energy to write it down. When girls want to be noticed they start to make arrangements with their hair; this can be perceived as a subtle challenge to spend one’s time voluntarily falling in love, but time is expensive, it wants to be used up to the full. People without energy like to talk about energy. For my part I am convinced that I have a quiet will of my own. Ah, how distinctive she was, this servant girl leading a little boy by the hand! Once I blew, to a nursemaid who stood for a superior style of life, a kiss. The movement of her head told me: “Save yourself the trouble.” Often one is in somewhat too good a mood. The houses today had such a beauty, a restraint, just standing there, I can hardly find words for it. A poet, one of those disturbers of genteel little drawing rooms, took his lady, whom he idolized, by her tiny gloved hand and asked how she had liked the verses which he had been quite understandably saucy enough to send her. She answered, with a blush: “I was very glad, but please, meanwhile, let me go.” For the simplicity of such language the poet appeared to have no perfect understanding such as she would have desired. I drew his attention to the reprehensibility, or impropriety, which, I said, seemed to me inherent in his behavior. While her molester was looking at me, the noble creature fled.
A city notable mumbled something in his beard; the beard was absent, but the expression is favored by many. Some turns of speech occur to us of their own accord. In a book-shop window shone, resplendent, the editions of a great poet. I refer to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated by the civilized world, which one might also call the impatient or rushing world. Civilization still seems to be an unfinished task. We shall always be vain about it, but never proud of it, and we shall never say that we have nothing more to learn, and we shall remember not only at the centenaries of famous poets the responsibilities which civilization lays upon us, and first and foremost when being civilized is our concern we shall not brag about it. To be sure, only the person who is always trying to be civilized is a civilized person, a person who is quite simply trying to be civilized, because that, if the truth were told, is not by any means so easy.
[1925]
A Sort of Speech
THIS deputy, how he pursued in metropolitan suburbs his irresponsibilities garnished all in green, afterwards casting deeply troubled glances at the ceiling, a consolation.
Certainly he’ll have been a splendid father. We are the last who doubt the opulence of his somewhat pear-mellow noble intentions.
In the days of his youth he nodded with casual patience at the poets when they were introduced to him in his opera box.
As for his wife, her first mistake was to follow him zealously on the paths of his trespasses, thereby inviting him, deviously, to believe that he was very much loved by her.
Second, she was too involved with her brother, who could never be satisfied, on his solitary climbings, as morning breezes lisped around him, with mere medium heights.
So she was more of a sister than a wife and almost an egoist rather than a performer of her really very lovely duties. Above all, she was a beauty and never as long as she lived got over the idea.
Now to the sons, who carried jewelry caskets through woodlands by night, as if that were essential to them and their world.
One of them dreamed only of disappearing entirely from sight. Often he must have read exciting stories. As a person, he was, in addition, nothing to speak of. So we shall dismiss him.
The second settled, as a recluse, in a villa which enshrouding ivy had rendered almost invisible.
The beard of this country-house dweller grew longer by the hour, until it extended out of the window, whereat he saw his life’s task completed — a belief we gladly allow him.
The third found reason to become inconceivably incautious on account of a soprano, all naturally behind the wonderfully shaped back of his mother, who had a way of saying: “My sons displease me.”
They made her suffer, she made them suffer, and the patriarch suffered from his spouse, and the products suffered because of the producers.
This family, to which many families looked up without reluctance, displayed a pompous falling short.
No pen can describe the sighs they heaved together.
Folly upon folly was committed.
What use is the most dazzling scenery?
The father knew no peace till he could say: “One darn thing after another!”
All the members of the family longed to be constantly wept over; the daughters found their language instructor bewitching.
Meanwhile, a book had been through many too many editions, a book which had the virtue of being nicely written. The book had melody.
The family we are speaking of had melody too.
There was a Mediterranean island in it, where the best opportunities for perceiving realities were dreamed away.
Still to this day it lies there, witness of a disinclination to wash oneself spiritually, in the proper way.
But they all wore fitting clothes and were virtuosos of dissatisfaction.
And then she who bore the responsibility might step forward and say to her son: “I command you to suffer!”
He laughed at her.
She says: “Get out of my sight!”—but wishes inwardly for him not to obey, she wrestles laboriously with her composure.
She feels guilty and innocent.
She blames the times.
“Tell me all! Vindicate yourself!”
He quietly replies: “All this longing to cast off the shackles, to despise what the surrounding world imposes upon you, isn’t this what you’re injecting into me? What you prohibit me from doing you should also deny yourself,” and softly he adds: “Unbridled woman!”
Whereupon she has a scene with her husband.
If I felt talkative I’d repeat the reproaches she brought against him.
Her words slapped his face.
He thought it was very imposing to listen to her respectfully.
But his graciousness was for her a martyrdom.
Perhaps one can say that tact is the point from which powerlessness spreads more and more into the male world.
Defense to the last gasp seems to be not shrewd. If a man is shrewd, if he is conciliatory, relenting, submissive, the bonds are not torn, of course, but they still hang from him, more like threads, I mean as far as order is concerned, and women have won nothing, if one lets them win, although they tell themselves otherwise.
So he always eluded her, politely.
A reckless answer would have hurt her.
Together, by their fleeing from one another, they poisoned the atmosphere.
What kind of people am I thinking of, as I say this?
Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the unfreedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?
Well, I could go around from person to person, letting each say some new thing, new but also old.
For they constantly repeated themselves. Each had his own sort of idée fixe.
And, in the theaters, plays were being performed that wearied the spectators’ souls, made them rebellious and perverse, cringing, and eager for war.
Should one speak out or be silent?
[1925]
A Letter to Therese Breitbach[1]
Bern, Thunstrasse 20/III
1
Therese Breitbach, with whom Walser exchanged letters between 1925 and 1932, was seventeen and living in Germany when she first wrote to Walser; they never met.