Books: Out of Limbo

SELECTED STORIES

by Robert Walser

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 194 pages; $16.50

In 1914 Author Robert Walser wrote: “How horrible it must be to know that one is famous and to feel that one doesn’t deserve it at all.” This problem was one that Walser (1878-1956) never had to face. Three of his novels were published during his lifetime, and his work won the admiration of such contemporaries as Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse. But the Swiss-born Walser received almost no public recognition or support. He spent the last 27 years of his life in mental institutions, and his writings, all in German, seemed permanently consigned to the limbo of the unread.

Selected Stories offers 42 reasons why Walser’s works earned obscurity and deserved far better. Chosen and largely translated by Poet Christopher Middleton, these prose pieces written between 1907 and 1929 convey a sensibility that was well ahead of its time. A half-century or so before Beckett, Walser was instructing an actor in how to end a play that would end all plays: “Then the painted-scenery houses collapse, like frightful drunkards, and bury you. Only one of your hands is to be seen, reaching up from the smoking ruins. The hand is still moving a little, then the curtain descends.”

Walser’s apocalyptic vision stole a march on the many literary ones that were to follow in this century. So did he also help invent what later became a modernist stereotype: the passive, clerkly man who must find ways of passing time while waiting for the end. In The Job Application, Walser portrays a degree of diffidence that borders on catatonia: “I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip.” Another of Walser’s monologists has a job but finds it pointless: “My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things.” He concludes his meditation by imagining an ideal state of loneliness: “No sun, no culture, me, naked on a high rock, no storms, not even a wave, no water, no wind, no streets, no benches, no money, no time, and no breath. Then, at least, I should not be afraid any more.”

Short of such negative nirvanas, Walser’s characters amuse themselves by strolling about. The Walk, a record of one such expedition and the longest piece in this collection, belongs on any short list of great 20th century stories. Its narrator is an excruciatingly proper and longwinded sort who turns a day’s worth of rambling into a small comic epic. He jousts with a tailor over a defective suit: “The sleeves suffer from an objectionable surfeit of length, and the waistcoat is eminently distinguished in that it creates the impression and evokes the unpleasant semblance of my being the bearer of a fat stomach.” His adventures are many, but nightfall brings them to an end: “As I looked at earth and air and sky the melancholy unquestioning thought came to me that I was a poor prisoner between heaven and earth, that all men were miserably imprisoned in this way . . .” Hindsight lends this perception, recorded in 1917, some added poignancy. Walser died on Christmas Day in 1956 while taking a walk on the grounds of his sanatorium in eastern Switzerland.

— By Paul Gray