Re: [PDF] Walks With Walser
Mirthe Luria
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Good news for English readers, that this book has been made available to them (with or without photographs)! A truly enjoyable reading... albeit it doesn't compare with meandering through Walser's own pages.
I'm reading this now. I think it's a bit curious that there's no introduction, or at least a translator's note explaining more about who Seelig was and how he became involved with Walser than the little that's provided on the back cover. Perhaps the publishers assume that anyone reading the book already knows the story.
I speak no German, but the translation seems awkward here and there. There's sentence on page 31 beginning "As we cross the village..." that seems to be missing a verb, unless I'm simply reading it wrong.
As an avid walker, I'm impressed with the amount of travel on foot Seelig and Walser managed to accomplish.
Elegantly translated into English for the first time by Anne Posten, Walks with Walser is Carl Seelig's revealing and devoted account of his visits with the brilliant, eccentric friend for whom he served as a guardian and, eventually, literary executor.
With pleasure Robert shows me the beautiful old part of the village of Goßau. Most of the people are in church. It is very quiet: only a few sledding children and interned Poles in their yellow-green uniforms. We hike onward, now and then meeting a farmer's sleigh, the horse's harness jingling; the snow often comes to our knees. A farmhand shouldering a dung fork comes out of a stable. I call out: "Mornin'!" He doesn't answer, which prompts Robert to remark: "He's probably jealous that he's not out for a stroll like us!" In Arnegg we knock at the door of a tavern. But it remains deathly silent. Two hours later we are in Hauptwil, where Hölderlin was tutor to the Gonzenbach family around 1800. There is a baroque-style bourgeois house with a sundial containing the motto:
Across from it lies the Zum Leuen inn. We get excellent coffee and sharp Tilsit cheese. Robert asks me: "Don't you think that the proprietress comes from southern Germany? I suspect it from her dialect. Perhaps Hölderlin brought Württembergians here with him." We stop in front of the ample patrician house of the Gonzenbach family, who settled here at the beginning of the seventeenth century and grew rich in the canvas business, admiring the little tower through which the street passes, and the Venetian balconies, the quiet courtyard, the peaceful facade of the stately home with its double staircase and weathervane. The estate is now occupied by a school of home economics run by a charitable society, but Robert finds that the house has kept its painting-like quality, its grand and dreamy feel. I: "Shall we look at the Hölderlin plaque they put up last year?" Robert waves off this idea: "No, no, let us not bother with such placard nonsense! How repugnant are things that make a show of reverence. And by the way, Hölderlin's was only one of many human fates to play out here. A famous person must not cause one to forget the unfamous."
Train ride from Bischofszell to Gossau, where we feast on sweets in a pastry shop. I tell Robert about reading Erich Eyck's three-volume work on Bismarck, which contains the remark, concerning the year 1852: Bismarck wanted to destroy the big cities with their revolutionary inhabitants wholesale. I tell him that I am increasingly of the opinion that Bismarck was a forerunner of Hitler's people: a cynical pettifogger and, when it suited him, a brutal power politician and warmonger. Admittedly, Bismarck was a hundred times more clever and cultivated than the Nazis. Robert agrees and says that Mussolini strikes him as an Italian version of Count Bismarck. National socialism really began with Frederick the Great.
On the way to the train station I tell him that on New Year's Day I saw a French farce in Zürich. The infidelity motif of Parisian boulevard authors, now long pat, came off as rather clunky in German, however. Robert: "I'm sick to death of this motif. But perhaps the infidelity is there to keep the women awake. Otherwise they would get sleepy." During the conversation we pass a child pulling a sled, who looks at us with big eyes. Robert asks me: "Did you see his eyes? It's as if he guessed our mischievous mood!"
I love little books. You know the ones: closer to one hundred pages than two, with an appealingly slender profile on the shelf and just the slightest heft in your hands. I also love episodic books\u2014one thing happens, then another, then another; I don\u2019t really need it all to add up, or not explicitly. And, of course, I love books about the lives of writers and artists. So I was delighted last week to pick up Walks with Walser, a brief nonfiction account of one Swiss writer\u2019s walks with another Swiss writer between 1936 and 1956, published in English in 2017.
This excessive attention to detail, and the tendency to address himself in the third person with slightly self-deprecating humour, creates a distinctively Walserian tone that would influence Bernhard and be so admired by Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald.
As the narrator reaches his destination, the end point of his outing where he will rest and reflect, all pomposity and bravado give way to the underlying sadness and loss that he carries with him. He walks then, not just for inspiration, but to try escape a gloom that is not confined to his room alone.
To my shame, I had never heard of Robert Walser, so I looked him up at Wikipedia and have been reading about his life, and his astonishing long list of works. Is this the book you would recommend to start with for this author?
I have several of his novels which I have yet to read, but I love Berlin Stories which is a collection of very perceptive short prose pieces. The Walk is clearly a short novel where Walser is having fun with a rather self-centred narrator. I think it might be a great place to start.
It does sound like the book you mention derives some influence from Walser (directly or indirectly). This particular work is more melodramatic and stagey, but with a tongue-in-cheek awareness of the fact. And, in the end, the narrator shares a deep regret that humbles him.
Two summer or straw hats catch my eye. The thing about the straw hats is this: it is that I suddenly see two hats in the bright, gentle air, and under the hats stand two fairly prosperous-looking gentlemen, who seem to be bidding each other good morning by means of an elegant, courteous doffing and waving of hats. The hats at this occasion are evidently more important than their wearers and owners. Nevertheless, the writer is very humbly asked to be wary of such definitely superfluous mockery and fooling. He is called upon to behave with sobriety, and it is hoped that he understands this, once and for all.
An extremely splendid, abundant book shop came pleasantly under my eye, and I felt the impulse and desire to bestow upon it a short and fleeting visit, I did not hesitate to step in, with an obvious good grace, while I permitted myself of course to consider that in me appeared far rather an inspector, or bookkeeper, a collector of information, and a sensitive connoisseur, than a favorite and welcome, wealthy book buyer and good client.
This delicious fruit of the spirit he carried carefully and solemnly, as if carrying a relic charged with sanctifying magic. His face was enraptured; his manner radiated the deepest awe; and with that smile on his lips which only believers and those who are inspirited to the deepest core can smile, he laid before me in the most winning way that which he had brought.
Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I am lost. With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters. The highest and the lowest, the most serious and the most hilarious things are to him equally beloved, beautiful, and valuable. He must bring with him no sort of sentimentally sensitive self-love or quickness to take offense. Unselfish and unegoistic, he must let his careful eye wander and stroll where it will; only he must be continuously able in the contemplation and observation of things to efface himself, and to put behind him, little consider, and forget like a brave, zealous, and joyfully self-immolating front-line soldier, himself, his private complaints, needs, wants, and sacrifices. If he does not, then he walks only half attentive, with only half his spirit, and that is worth nothing.
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Walking with Walser, entertaining as well as profound, should be essential reading for Jane Jacobs fans, city cats and country mice, past and present devotees of Queen Street, dedicated pedestrians, and anyone with a sturdy sense of humour.
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