‘Modest Modernist’

For the Romantics, the humble, unchanging countryside supplied the fertile yet fickle ground for the imagination. The modernists still rely on the vagaries of inspiration, but they try to take their fate in hand, terraforming the soul to produce works of genius, as well as hubris.

What makes Robert Walser such a difficult writer to categorize is that he is, perhaps, the sole instance of a mongrel species: the modest modernist. That might not sound like an especially rare beast, let alone the literary equivalent of a chimera. After all, the flip side of modernism is the obsession with the primitive: African art, in the case of Picasso; a lower-class wife, in that of Joyce. But the primitive, while experienced with the humble directness of the aficionado (Hemingway’s bullfights) is then appropriated into works of art that the bullfighters find boring.

Wordsworth, at first, just wanted to write a better folk song; his experience was mediated not by the vast superstructures of the modernists but “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Hence, while the Romantic ideal was the peasant poet, the nightingale-like spirit who would naturally compose inimitable ballads, the same ideal, transposed a hundred years into the future, sounds like the setup for a bad joke: a full-blown modernist suddenly walking out of the countryside, fractured narrative in hand.

To some degree, the life of Robert Walser is that joke, or as close as you could get in the early 20th century. His short stories and novels display a sense of irony as developed as any of his contemporaries; yet they remain provincially unrefined. Born to a shopkeeper in small-town, German-speaking Switzerland, he was taken out of school at 14 and apprenticed as a clerk. This alone makes Walser unusual, since few modernists possessed so little education. Furthermore, the provinciality of the Swiss is archetypal in Germany; famously intransigent, with an accent that sounds hickish, they are considered even more backward than the Bavarians.

Fortunately, two of Walser’s older brothers became highly successful–one as a professor, the other as an illustrator–and the budding young author managed to place a collection of short pieces with Insel Verlag, the publishers of Rilke and Hofmannsthal. But when Walser moved to Berlin to join his brother Karl, the illustrator, he felt out of place in literary society and quickly fell to playing pranks. One time he walked up to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great poet and librettist, and inquired whether he might for a moment forget that he was famous. At parties, Walser was well known for his baffling backwoods jokes; thrown into a cab, he’d hop out the other side and return to the salon. Once he and his brother even trapped Frank Wedekind–the author of Spring Awakening–in a revolving door and spun him around and around, shouting “muttonhead.”

Walser nonetheless found continued success as a writer, placing regular feuilletons–short prose sketches–in the newspapers and publishing three novels in quick succession: The Tanner Family (1907), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909). Although Jakob von Gunten and many of the sketches have already been translated, this is the first time The Assistant has appeared in English–a hundred-year delay that, despite the novel’s merits, comes as little surprise.

The premise is almost promising: A hapless young clerk, Joseph Marti, begins working for one Herr Tobler, a half-mad inventor who fritters away his inheritance on such promising ventures as the Marksmen’s Vending Machine, a clever device which spits out “not a little slab of chocolate, peppermint or the like, but rather a pack of live ammunition.” But as these characters progress through nearly 300 pages, the plot goes nowhere and Walser, ever humble, refuses to gin up interest by pushing Joseph and Tobler to the defiant psychological extremes of, say, -Dostoevsky. Where the Karamazovs dream of killing their father, Joseph takes the entire novel to ponder whether he should quit his job–or even demand his salary.

Refusing to push characters to extremes is not so terribly unusual among modernists. Just think of Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway, Nick Adams or Joseph K. But Joyce and Woolf redeem everyday life by pushing their prose to some of the greatest extremes in literature, while Hemingway and Kafka strip their writing down to its ennobling essentials. Walser once bragged that he never blotted a line, and it seems that we should believe him: He apparently wrote The Assistant in six weeks. Uncharitably, you might say that Walser pairs the boredom of Joyce’s plots with the hack prose of Dostoevsky. And yet Walser is a fine writer, and this pairing only suggests the strange paradox at the heart of his sensibility: how he combines everyday life with pedestrian prose in a way that somehow redeems both.

Consider the following passage from The Assistant:

You can see here what makes Walser so attractive and so difficult to define. “Light and lovely” looks like a cliché even if it isn’t, and the list that follows sounds tossed off. But it’s not bad; indeed, it’s almost very good–a compliment that carries an insult and yet, as you reach the end, it somehow seems arrogant to demand more.

Just compare Walser’s modest beauty with a few lines from Rilke’s “First Elegy,” written only four years later: “For beauty is nothing / But the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure / And we are so awed because it serenely disdains / To destroy us.” If Rilke sums up the arrogant side of modernist aesthetics, Walser suggests that the same sensibility need not be nearly so high-strung.

I took great pleasure in Walser’s writing, finding him a relief from many of his overbearing contemporaries. But there is something troubling about his appeal. Almost all of his defenders, from J.M. Coetzee to Sven Birkerts to Susan Sontag, warn that not liking Walser amounts to an inability to appreciate the small–a kind of arrogant repulsion at the insistently humble. But the dialectic of humility in which Walser takes part has, for most of literary history, been driven by religion. Pride and humility crop up all the time in civil society, but they are rarely taken to extremes; in politics, one might hope to know one’s place. Only before God must all abase themselves, absolutely humble. For those who can’t submit, this absolute demand leads to a cycle of despair.

James Wood has argued that such dialectics of pride–where “pride .  .  . is the sin of humble people and humility is the punishment of proud people”–almost only occur in religious writers, or writers deeply affected by religion. Such cycles are not necessarily religious; philosophically, pride comes down to the problem of skepticism, doubting whether other people really exist. But the great demands that a higher power places on humility has driven authors to some of the most remarkable extremes in fiction: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Chaucer’s Pardoner, Dostoevsky, and in the modern period, Hamsun and Beckett.

It’s tempting to think of Walser as the worthy shadow of these better-known authors, but he’s the first instance of another type entirely. Untroubled by religion or philosophy, tepidly dissatisfied yet afraid to challenge himself, it often seems as if Walser is the first instance of the Last Man in his artistic guise–a beautiful sensibility with a constant bourgeois fear of asserting himself. The tension between ages, religious and secular, is what makes modernist art so powerful; without that tension, the edifice crumbles.

Kafka, who was mistaken for a Walser pseudonym when young, provides the most salient comparison. Where Kafka’s insistently austere style made the greatest argument for his own nobility, picking up the pieces to create defiantly artistic works, Walser fell to mimicking and mocking his surroundings, toying with the fragments of culture like a child. That’s a harsh judgment, especially for a writer so tragic as Walser, who lived out the last few decades of his life in an asylum. Still, while I enjoy Walser’s playful style, I find it difficult to celebrate his achievement.

Charles Peterson is a writer in Brooklyn.