Indeed, in the middle of his life writing had become a wearisome business for Walser. Year by year the unremitting composition of his literary pieces becomes harder and harder for him. It is a kind of penance he is serving up there in his attic room in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, where, by his own account, he spends ten to thirteen hours at a stretch at his desk every day, in winter wearing his army greatcoat and the slippers he has fashioned himself from leftover scraps of material. He talks in terms of a writer's prison, a dungeon, or an attic cell, and of the danger of losing one's reason under the relentless strain of composition. "My back is bent by it," says the Poet in the eponymous piece, "since often I sit for hours bent over a single word that has to take the long slow route from brain to paper." This work makes him neither unhappy nor happy, he adds, but he often has the feeling that it will be the death of him. There are several reasons — apart from the chains which, in the main, double-bind writers to their métier — why, despite these insights, Walser did not give up writing earlier: chief among them perhaps the fear of déclassement and, in the most extreme case in which he almost found himself, of being reduced to handouts, fears which haunted him all the more since his father's financial ruin had rendered his childhood and youth deeply insecure. It is not so much poverty itself Walser fears, however, as the ignominy of going down in the world. He is very well aware of the fact that "a penniless worker is much less an object of contempt than an out-of-work clerk…. A clerk, as long as he has a post, is already halfway to being a gentleman, but without a post becomes an awkward, superfluous, burdensome nonentity." And what is true of office clerks naturally applies to an even greater degree to writers, inasmuch as the latter have it in them not just to be half-way to being a gentleman but even, given the right circumstances, to rise to be figureheads of their nation. And then there is the fact that writers, in common with all those to whom a higher office is entrusted as it were by the grace of God, cannot simply retire when the mood takes them; even today they are expected to keep writing until the pen drops from their hand. Not only that: people believe they are entitled to expect that, as Walser writes to Otto Pick, "every year they will bring to the light of day some new one hundred percent proof item." To bring such pieces of "one hundred percent proof" — in the sense of a sensational major new work — to the cultural marketplace was something which Walser, at least since his return to Switzerland, was no longer in a fit state to do — if indeed he ever had been. At least part of him perceived himself, in his time in Biel or Berne, as a hired hand and as nothing more than a degraded literary haberdasher. The courage, however, with which he defended his last embattled position and came to terms with "the disappointments, reprimands in the press, the boos and hisses, the silencing even unto the grave" was almost unprecedented. That in the end he was still forced to capitulate was due not only to the exhaustion of his own inner resources, but also to the catastrophic changes — even more rapid in the second half of the 1920s — in the cultural and intellectual climate. There can be no doubt that had Walser persevered for a few more years he would, by the spring of 1933 at the latest, have found the last possible opportunities for publication in the German Reich closed off to him. To that extent, he was quite correct in the remarks he made to Carl Seelig that his world had been destroyed by the Nazis. In his 1908 critical review of
The Assistant. Josef Hofmiller contrasts the alleged insubstantiality of the novel with the more solid earthiness of the autochtonous Swiss writers Johannes Jegerlehner, Josef Reinhart, Alfred Huggenberger, Otto von Greyerz and Ernst Zahn — whose ideological slant may, I make so bold as to claim, be readily discerned from the ingrained rootedness of their names. Of one such Heimat poet, a certain Hans von Mühlenstein, Walser writes in the mid-twenties to Resy Breitbach that he — like Walser himself originally from Biel — after a brief marriage to an imposing lady from Munich has now settled in Graubünden, where he is an active member of the association for the dissemination of the new spirit of the age and has married a country woman "who orders him first thing in the morning to bring in a cartload of greens from the field before breakfast. He wears blue overalls, coarse trousers of a rustic stuff and is exceedingly contented." The contempt for nationalist and Heimat poets which this passage reveals is a clear indication that Walser knew exactly what ill hour had struck and why there was no longer any call for his works, either there in Germany or at home in Switzerland.