(mid-October 1925)
RÖSI BREITBACH, altogether most esteemed young lady! Wishing that you should show, if your feelings permit it, my letters to your parents, in all simplicity, generosity, and affection, I would like to tell you that for some time now I have not found anything here to write about, because I have already written so many things. I’m sure you’ll understand this. Then I happened to read a small, silly sort of book, the kind you buy for a few cents at a kiosk, and it was most nicely entertaining to read it. I had read my fill of good books. Is it conceivable that you’ll understand what I mean? If so, it would be most kind of you. All the girls here find me enormously boring, because they are all spoiled by zesty young bucks. Our masculine world can be very self-assured in its behavior. Once I took the liberty of sending, for instance, to a singer in our meritorious municipal theater, as token of my admiration, a copy of my book Aufsätze, published by Kurt Wolff. The book was returned, with the observation that I hadn’t yet learned to write German. People hereabouts take me, generally, for an immature person, in every way. Even Thomas Mann, you know, that giant in the domain of the novel, regards me as a child, though a quite clever one to be sure. Once I was supposed to read from my work in Zurich, but the president of the Literary Circle which had invited me said that I had still not learned to speak German. For a time, people here thought I was insane, and would say aloud, in the arcades, as I was walking past: “He should be in the asylum.” Our great Swiss writer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, whom you certainly know, also spent some time in a sanatorium for people who were mentally not altogether at their best. Now people are celebrating the centenary of this poor man’s birth, with speeches and choral declamations. And yet once he no longer dared to take up his pen, in fear that he might botch everything he wrote. Then one day I went into a café and fell in love with a girl who looked so poetic. It was of course very foolish of me, all the utilitarians leaped upon me and reminded me of the bitter duties of my so lovely and expensive profession — which is of such a nature that it brings no money in. I loved this beautiful young girl, who seemed already to have an inclination toward corpulence, it was all because of the music I heard every day in the café. Great, indeed, is the power of music, sometimes immense. Suddenly everything changed. I made the acquaintance of a so-called Saaltochter, i.e., waitress, and from that moment the previous girl had for me in part only half a reality, in part no reality at all. Loving and what they call yearning are quite quite different things, different worlds. Then I used to go, very often, to nature, that is, walk into the country, many thoughts occurred to me, ideas, which I worked on. By doing this I left the place where the waitress served, and since then I haven’t seen her; I subsequently wrote poems to her, and, well, there are many people around, also in your country, I expect, who think that poems are not work, but rather something comical, unworthy of respect. That has always been the case, and always will be, in Germany, the land of poets and thinkers. Our town is very lovely. Today I went swimming in deliciously cold water, soft and delicate sunshine, in the river which runs shimmering around our town like a serpent. Needless to say, nobody knows about the girl whom I made terrible fun of, partly in prose, and whom I worshipped, on the other hand, partly in poems. I have lived in rooms where all night I could not close my eyes for fear. Now it’s like this: I no longer know for sure if I love her. Indeed, my dear Fraulein, one can keep one’s feelings very much alive, or let them grow cold, neglect them. And then, true, I’m interested in many other matters besides. In the hope that you are happy, that your days pass pleasingly, and that you will be a little content, and perhaps also a bit dissatisfied, with this letter, I send you my cordial and of course, so to speak, respectful greetings.
Robert Walser
A Village Tale
I SIT down somewhat reluctantly at my desk to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to discourse on the potato famine which long ago struck a village on a hill that stood about two hundred meters high. Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of more account than a country girl. The longer she labored, the less she was able to do for herself.
The stars were twinkling in the sky. The parson of the village where what is here told occurred was out of doors elucidating for his young protégés the planetary system. A writer was working in a lamplit room at his rapidly waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl rose up from her bed intending to rush into the pond, which she did with almost laughable alacrity.
When she was found the next morning in a condition which made it plain to all that she had ceased to live, the question rose among these countryfolk: Should she be buried or not. Not a soul was ready to lay a hand on the finished article that lay quite motionless there. Tribal displeasure asserted itself.
The bailiff approached the group, which intrigued him primarily from the viewpoint of painting, for in his leisure hours he would paint, government burdening him with no excessive duties. He urged the country people forthwith to be sensible, but his expostulations had no success; at no price would they inter the girl, as if they believed it might harm them to do so.
The sheriff strode into his office with its three large windows through which streamed the most dazzling light, and he wrote a report on the incident which he dispatched to the city authorities.
But what feelings assail me when I consider the famine whose waves rose higher and higher! The populace grew unspeakably thin. How they longed for food!
The very same day a laborer of superlative efficiency took his gun from its nail and shot, with authentic popular wrath, his rival who was crossing the street below, yodeling in all innocence, clear proof of how happy his days were. In fact the rival was just returning from a successful encounter with the young lady, who seemed to be a somewhat indecisive person, for ogling both she offered prospects to both of heaven.
Never in all my years as a writer have I written a tale in which a person, struck by a bullet, falls down. This is the first time in my work that a person has croaked.
Understandably, they lifted him up and carried him into the next-best cottage. Houses, in the present comfortable sense of the word, did not at that time exist in the country; there were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of straw reached almost to the ground, as one may still observe, at one’s leisure, in a few surviving examples.
When the young lady, a country belle with swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what had occurred on her account, she simply stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps her peculiar nature.
Her mother besought her to speak, but all in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a statue.
A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.
[1927]
The Aviator
A PERSON who wishes to voice a conviction in an appropriate fashion pronounces a vigorous, martial “Naturaleh!” “With martial greetings I remain your most obedient servant”—thus did I close a letter to someone who avowed to me that my martialism had taken him aback. “All of a sudden he heard somebody beside him exclaim: ‘That’s impossible!’” Couldn’t such an ordinary event as this occur in a novel that reflects its times and speaks of matters that are perhaps largely marginal issues? If I now exclaim in a booming voice “Naturaleh!”—I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties. A person who has no doubts at all about anything is prone to asseverate: “It’s clear as day!” That the aviator mounting his vehicle seemed to himself tiny in proportion to the magnitude of his task is clear as day to me, and perhaps I might be permitted to believe that in this significant moment he was lulling himself into the conceivably very artful illusion of being, in comparison with the universe, a babe in arms, and his flying machine was his crib, where the most decisive thing for him to do was to lie low, quietly watching. In my opinion, during the truly fabulous unwinding of his journey he thought most animatedly of his mother. Of this I am convinced, and now I come face to face with the question: Should one view the oceanist, the hero of the day, as a descendant of those mariners vanished long since from their sphere of influence, and furthermore did he, before he flew off, make it his precept to consider his enterprise as something that would, so to speak, be merely a schooling for him, an education? Especially a poet does well, among other things, to fly at a modest velocity on his winged steed, Pegasus by name, because ill chance may strike the most special person no less easily than the least consequential member of any human interest group or sphere. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.