Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

by Susan Bernofsky

The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator

“Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist’s life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser’s exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait.”—Amy Sillman

“Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days.”—Eileen Myles

The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest—social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten—prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him “a clairvoyant of the small.” His revolutionary use of short prose forms had an enormous influence on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others.

He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his “extreme artistic delight.”

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literature, Germany, 21st Century, American

392 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2021

About the author

Susan Bernofsky’s literary translations include seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, Uljana Wolf and others. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee and is co-editor (with Esther Allen) of the 2013 Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Lannan Foundation. Her translation of Jeremias Gotthelf's classic tale of horror, The Black Spider, was published in 2013 by New York Review Books Classics, and her new translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is forthcoming from Norton in January 2014. She blogs about translation at www.translationista.org

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm an admirer of Walser, and of Bernofsky's translations of Walser, so perhaps it's no surprise that this book sings - and yet, the combination of line-level analysis, myth-busting (re: Walser's legendary sanatorium stay), and research is intoxicating.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb biography. It will fascinate Walserians, but its appeal is broader than that. This astonishing artist's struggle to work and remain afloat financially is moving, but when he fails, for in his day that's how he saw himself, it's heartbreaking.

Experiencing aural hallucinations, he checks himself into an asylum at the behest of his sister. Eventually he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which isn't the disease as we know it today, but more of a catch-all diagnosis. Most importantly, though he stopped riding in 1933.

After his death in the 1956 they found shoeboxes full of what are known now as micro, scripts.

If you haven't read Robert Walser I eagerly suggest you start with the Selected Stories, the one introduced by Susan Sontag. Author Bernofsky's recent translations of The Tanners and The Assistant are also indispensible.

Did you know that both Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse adored Walser's writings? Robert Musil was rather keen on them too.

"Kafka was still thinking about his work in October 1917 when he wrote in his diary that Walser reminded him of Dickens in his 'blurring employment of abstract metaphors.'" (p. 155)

"'This Robert Walser,' Hesse writes, 'who has already played a good deal of delicate chamber music, strikes even purer, sweeter, more buoyant notes in this new little book [Poet's Life] than in the earlier ones. If writers like Walser were among the leading minds, there would be no war. If he had one hundred thousand readers, the world would be better.'" (p. 199)

"Walser's 'very human kind of playfulness' and his 'uncommon command of language' 'one could fall in love' with it, [Robert] Musil said. . . . Musil found Walser sui generis, inimitable, his work 'not a suitable foundation for a literary genre.'" (p. 170)

Must read.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do I feel as if I know more about Robert Walser after reading this book? I’m not sure. I only had a vague impression of him as a person before reading it (much of it recklessly deduced from his own writing), and to be honest at best the blurry edges of that impression have since only marginally come into focus. To be clear, I do not in any way find fault with Susan Bernofsky, who I think has done an admirable job fashioning the paucity of detailed information about Walser into what is in the end a perfectly serviceable biography (and likely the best we can hope for). There are of course different approaches to writing a biography, just as there are different types of specifically literary biographies. Given the negligible amount of primary materials Bernofsky had to work with, though, I doubt she had much choice in what type of biography of Robert Walser to write.

This is not a long book, nor does it make for dense reading. [It only took me so long to read because I moved my living quarters in the midst of reading it.] It seems to be a biography that was written very simply and economically to convey what little there is to be known about Robert Walser as a person and writer. There do not seem to have been any specific facets of his life that were particularly rich in supportive documentation, beyond his constant address changes and his sometimes erratic attempts to get published. To that end, Bernofsky—as others have done before her—relies on Walser’s own writing to fill in gaps, meticulously noting when she does so in order to avoid reading too much into authorial intent.

So what this book sketches out for us is the hard life of an itinerant working writer who enjoyed walking long distances and—while he contemplated marriage and had at least one potential candidate in mind—remained a stalwart bachelor until the end. Walser wanted to write and he didn’t want to do much else, although he wasn’t a layabout, per se. He believed in the value of work; he just couldn’t make enough money at writing, which was his preferred occupation after he gave up being a clerk. His publishing career was also foiled by wars and being Swiss instead of German. Not only that but his writing was persistently misunderstood and mischaracterized—both by critics and readers—due in large part to his often idiosyncratic style. Much of his work fell outside of accepted literary norms and, as is often the case with truly original writers in their own time, not enough editors fully perceived his vision for him to have been widely known and appreciated in his lifetime.

Bernofsky provides as much documentation as she can of Walser’s personal relationships with family members, literary associates, and other acquaintances. Of these, his family are among the most significant. He came from a large family, and had varied amounts of contact with his siblings. Though Walser was very close to his artist brother Karl early in his adulthood (Karl frequently illustrated Robert’s published work), eventually they became estranged. His other close sibling, Lisa, tolerated his eccentricities as best she could, but even they also grew distant later in his life. She was the one who orchestrated Robert’s transfer to Herisau asylum after the new director of Waldau (the first asylum he lived in) identified him as a candidate for transfer or release during an in-patient reduction program. In fairness, she had little support (and even received some criticism) from her other siblings over this decision and as a result feared that if released Robert would become her sole responsibility.

Robert’s mental health issues remain somewhat enigmatic. For many years he reported hearing voices, which he said interrupted his sleep and his writing. Eventually it appears that he made a certain level of peace with them. The psychiatric evaluations he received in the asylums were not likely to have been accurate, certainly not by today’s standards (if you put stock in such evaluations). His treatment never extended beyond talk and work therapy. Though he lived for many years in asylums the question of whether he needed to be there remains wide open.

Biographies often raise questions such as: How well can you ever know a person? How much do you actually want to know about a person, especially a favorite writer? And how useful are other people’s impressions in painting an accurate portrait of a person? As she constructs Walser’s life, Bernofsky drops small hints at his peculiarities. These are never fully fleshed out, presumably as they are just that—hints—in what primary sources do exist. There is also the fact that some of these things are of a nature that people close to Walser may have been reticent to speak about, either to protect him and/or due to generational and societal norms. But they also may just be like anything else of a personal nature that many people prefer to keep to themselves. After all, each of us is a patchwork of our own peculiarities (hidden or not).

Taken together all of these hints meld into a kind of colorful glaze baked onto the more straightforward factual clay of Robert Walser’s life. The final work offers just enough to add more fuel to my wondering and pondering about this man and his writing. I don’t think I wanted all of my questions answered. I guess I had thought that maybe a few more answers would have come into the light, but it’s okay that they did not.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Little Landscape

There stands a little tree in the meadow's ground
and many more nice little trees as well.
A little leaf freezes in the frosty wind
and many more single little leaves as well.
A little snow heap shimmers on the bank of a brook
and many more white little heaps as well.
A pointy little mountain peak laughs down into the depths
and many more rascally peaks as well.
And in all these things the Devil lies
and many more poor devils as well.
A little angel averts his weeping face
and all the angels of heaven as well.


*

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Bernofsky leaves no stone unturned in examining the life of the enigmatic peripatetic Swiss writer, Robert Walser. The obsessive nature of her sleuthing is evident in her appendix uncovering the countless addresses that Walser had throughout his life. No detail escapes her notice, not even scouring the Anzeiger für die Stadt Bern (April 30, 1926):

“His search for a new home must have been precipitous, since the room on Junkerngasse he moved into on May 1, 1926, had been put on offer one day earlier in the cities free advertising circular. According to the ad, the room featured simple furnishings, electricity, and a private entrance; the tenant sought was to be a ‘tidy worker.’” (267).

These details make the book so special because—after all—very little is known about Walser’s daily pre-institutionalized life. Previously there were the reminiscences by Carl Seelig, whose biannual walks with Walser were recorded, albeit with some artistic license and only after institutionalization; one soporific biography; and a brilliant character portrayal by W.G. Sebald, whose description Bernofsky borrows for the title of her work. The inscrutability of Walser could make a biography tedious, but not in this case. Bernofsky approaches her subject with an unjudgmental tenderness that leaves the reader yearning for less lacunae; however, gaps in the life of this once largely relegated author are inevitable, as is the flexible chronology. For all the escapades that must have occurred, there is nary an example of a great first person account that leaves the reader feeling as if he or she were in the room when Walser rails or acts inappropriately in his heyday.

Best known for the inimical and creepy Jakob von Gunthen, where schoolboys know they are ciphers from the first page (the butler school which Walser actually attended after he was a published writer is barely mentioned as such in the work) and the brilliant Der Gehülfe (translated by Bernofsky as “The Assistant”), Walser gradually faded into obscurity and was institutionalized for the last third of his life. Short prose published in ephemera and various “Microscripts,” a word Walser never used, have come into prominence since his death. These prose pieces are often referred to as “feuilleton,” which unfortunately can evoke the negative judgment of the “Feuilleton Era” in Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel. However, the Walser feuilleton have proved to be timeless, not insignificant at all.

Susan Bernofsky’s work has been a labor of love. She championed Robert Walser since time abroad in Switzerland in the late 80’s and is his main English translator, eclipsing the late Christopher Middleton. This biography is—perhaps--the final word on Walser. My only quibble: It would have been nice if the original German to many of the quotations from Walser’s works had been provided along with the translations. After all, Yale is a university press and many Walser readers have at least a smattering of German.

Heartfelt congratulations to Bernofsky for this work. She, as unobtrusively as possible, has assembled the best account of Robert Walser’s life that we have. It is indicative of Walser’s life and work that there are countless studies and biographies on Franz Kafka, perhaps Kafka’s favorite writer, but—for sheer substance—just this solitary long-awaited work on Walser.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Filling in the Spaces Surrounding a Ghost

Susan Bernofsky provides the many details, both personal and social, that comprised the author Robert Walser. She avoids romanticizing his struggles and usually gives him the last word on matters pertaining to his own way of life and his unique thinking. There are unanswered questions and a somewhat subdued approach at work, but overall this biography is thorough and engaging.

[Ausma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernofsky’s biography of Robert Walser is infectious in its enthusiasm for its subject, whose literary ability was hard-earned, his success hard-fought, and his oeuvre largely overlooked until the 21st century. While reading, I found myself anxiously cheering for Robert’s first big break and continued literary success, despite knowing the truth about the slow, tragic end he came to. Walser’s determination to succeed at a craft he had little natural talent for is inspiring; he felt that writing was essential to being alive, and that the difficulty and suffering involved (which for him meant often living barely above the poverty line) was worth bearing. Writing was a means of transcending the banal society and literary culture that he always seemed to be operating (though not necessarily voluntarily) on the outskirts of.

In addition to characterizing Walser as a reluctant outsider, Bernofsky’s fascinating thesis is of Walser’s life and work embodying “the small,” in all meanings of the word: He physically wrote tiny microscript drafts of his works; he kept his radius of travel small, never venturing beyond the borders of Switzerland or Germany; and his short stories, themselves often only two or three pages long, typically feature minute observations and everyday moments. As I concurrently reread Jakob von Gunten, I was struck by how Jakob bemoans his smallness: “I’m so small. That’s what I’ll loosely hang on to, my smallness, smallness and worthlessness.” As Bernofsky’s biography explores, Walser was indeed prone to depressive lines of thought like this, but his self-conceptualization as “small” was also a response to his awe at the world around him. His protagonist, in all his Walserian mutability of spirit, desire, and action, also marvels at his “smallness,” viewing it with a confused sense of hope and motivation: “Me, I shall be something very lowly and small. The feeling that tells me this is like a complete and inviolable fact. My God, and do I have, all the same, so much, so much zest for life? What is it with me?”

Bernofsky excels at capturing the zeitgeist of the literary scene in Central Europe in the early 20th century as well as the geographical settings of Walser’s constant wanderings. Indeed, as she suggests (and perhaps even aimed to create a loose guide for), a reader could undertake their own Walserian trek around Switzerland and Germany, using the incredibly detailed information of the many places he stayed to map the eras of his life. Ironically, it’s towards the middle of the book, where Walser’s career is thriving and he’s regularly getting published, that the chapters stagnate and become a repetitive log of where his work appeared. Still, Bernofsky tries to maintain the pace by breaking up these plain facts with glimpses into Walser’s personal life and sociopolitical happenings across Europe during this era.

I was continually awed by what an immense undertaking and labor of love this book must have been to research and write given the large gaps in Walser’s life story, not at all helped by the fact that he was not a writer who wrote from personal experience often. Bernofsky somehow pieces together Walser’s varying and indecipherable mental states so precisely that there is a palpable mood shift from chapter to chapter. Her love for Walser’s work is tangible, yet she’s never fawning nor does she overlook the more uncomfortable facts of his life; for example, she doesn’t skirt around his at times cruel and unseemly behavior or allegations of abuse from his sister. Through her astute and lively writing style, she creates a living image of Walser and gives him the justice as a prose writer that he clearly deserves to be celebrated as.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

…He knew he was a great writer. He knew he was a failure. These two thoughts could coexist…
Please read my review here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/th...

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine biography—sometimes amusing—of a striking writer.

[Peter Raffel · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible

[Frank B. Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Walser was a Swiss-German writer who was well known in the earlier part of the 20th century but then mostly forgotten for a long period, though he is undergoing something of a revival today. When Kafka first came upon the scene, the important Austrian writer Robert Musil thought of him as somewhat of a derivative writer in the style of Walser. Walser’s writings often take a faux naive stance toward the material, and it is unclear whether a layer of irony that he introduces is trumped by another layer that ultimately undercuts that irony. There are emotional shifts of tone from one sentence to the next, as if different complex mental states are competing and as if more is at stake than what appears, and mood is far more important than plot. Walter Benjamin extravagantly praised a play by Walser called Snow White. In stories and novels such as Jakob von Gunten, he offers original and quirky observations of modest, inconspicuous moments and events. Walser actively trained for a career as a butler and briefly served as one to an aristocrat. That training seems to suggest a rather deep feature of his mental life. His works at times are concerned with implicit, ambiguous power relationships of dominance and submission, whether erotic or otherwise, with subordination sometimes played with as a mode of subtle mastery. On occasion in these writings there can be reference to a fluid gender identity and a homoerotic suggestiveness, though his male characters may also be notably disturbed by other men who express an erotic interest in them. Walser was pained much of his life by a profound sense of loneliness, and what he thought of as his friendly interactions with others could generate hostility on their part. The loneliness could become so oppressive that he might arise late at night and walk for twenty or thirty miles before having breakfast in the village he had reached. Because of depression and paranoia, as well as delusions and the hearing of voices, he remained in a mental asylum for much of the latter part of his life. Susan Bernofsky describes that life faithfully and sympathetically and gives us a sense of the intriguing oddness of his writing and of its appeal to his contemporaries, many of whom thought him superior to Kafka.

For further writing on topics and books like this one, see my Substack page: https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/

[Ton-Nu Nguyen-Dinh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exemplary work of biography that recounts the life of Robert Walser in great, illuminating detail and astute literary analysis. This book breaks down Walser’s life into 15 chapters, separated not by lengths of time but by density of events and encounters. Thus, the last 20 years of Walser’s life is written into one solemn chapter. I love the amount of details that we get about Walser’s life and interactions with his colleagues and the reading public, as well as with his close relationships. I cannot imagine how Susan Bernofsky was able to track down and reconstruct the events of one day in the life of RW during World War I, an especially tough day of long hours of marching and trench digging which he only reported to his friend and love interest as a “hard day”. I am recalling from memory, so it is not very detailed, but I want to mention this detail to counter a review below that says SB’s research depends merely on RW’s written works, which couldn’t be further from the truth. My favorite anecdote from the book is in chapter 13, “The Secret Novel”, where SB described Walser’s turn to linguistic puns that must have read as goofy then as they do now, and readers’ reaction to his pieces published in Neue Zurcher Zeitung: “irate readers threaten to cancel their subscription if “the nonsense didn’t stop,” as Korrodi later told Schibli happened every time he printed something by Walser.” I love this anecdote not only because it shows how Walser’s artistic experimentations was perceived as clowning by the public, which didn’t have the patience for it, but also the scope of SB’s research: not only Walser’s texts and correspondence, but also the correspondence of his colleagues. The depth of SB’s research and the people she acknowledges throughout the book, from the foreword to the epilogue and acknowledgement, gave me a newfound respect and admiration for what it takes to look after a literary and artistic estate.

[Lisa Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

In truth, I knew nothing of Robert Walser (1878 - 1956) when I picked up this book.
Can you imagine anyone, especially a writer, voluntarily spending the last few decades of his life in an asylum? Such is what Walser did when he could not sustain himself with his pen.
While in the asylum, he wrote short stories and novels and other types of prose. He was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award.

[Lucas Foster]

Blurb on the back-cover asserting walser might’ve been “proto-queer” reeee

[Amy]

DNF. Turgid. Was good only for insomnia.

[Paul Lizarraga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography

[Gigi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read The Assistant in 2010 or 2011 and quickly consumed all the Walser I could get my hands on. The Walk, Kleist in Thun, Helbling's Story, The Assistant, and The Robber are all works that are tattooed on my soul. All timers. Anyway, I became vaguely aware along the course of my reading that the translator was writing a biography. Finally having read it, the end result is good if also quite frustrating. I don't think I'm alone there, as Bernofsky also seems frustrated by the gaping lack of information (apparently) about her subject.

This is a great biography of Walser as an artist. The biography does an admirable, sobering, and I think necessary, job of excising most of the individualist romanticism associated Walser's life and shows it for what it was-- a pretty rough and merciless time, all things considered. Living that kind of Art Life, even back in the early 20th century coming from an even middle class background, chews you up and spits you out in several pieces. However, I disagree with the book's assertion that Walser's life "represents a rejection of and resistance to the pernicious commodification of contemporary life." Walser wanted to be acknowledged as a great writer, he had a massive ego and believed he was entitled (and I agree with him, he was!) to the fame, recognition, and money that came with it, even as he contradicted those feelings in his isolating and manic actions. Any rejection of the desire for these things came out of a place of suffering and self preservation, not some noble ethic. Those motivations are usually applied later like a balm, itself a form of self preservation.

So what the book does less effectively then is give a sense of Robert Walser, the man. I mean this guy was really, really weird-- but here, the weirdness is always kept at arm's length, his very often questionable/pretty bad behavior is as well. As a reader I felt removed from it, like I was being suddenly swept out of the room, or like Walser was being protected from the biography revealing too much. We just get quick flashes, the door opening, revealing its strange cutaway, and then shutting to be opened again at a later time. His strange behavior, even criticisms of his character, are often depicted through direct quotes, often from letters or interviews, which are more often than not going to be passing reminiscences, not very detailed. So it lacks analysis. Of course, most of this can most likely be chalked up to the fact that so little is actually known about the man. Specifics of his life are very sparse, so I don't blame Bernofsky-- but given these circumstances, instead of the countless rhetorical questions addresses to the reader, I wouldn't have minded some very educated speculation now and again. Not ideal for a biography perhaps, but then again neither are questions like "Was he hiding?" or "Did he even own an eraser?" or "What did he mean?" or "What happened to him in the German capital?" directed at the reader so why not do a little hypothesizing?

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Above all I am making an effort to always fully and completely grasp and use each moment. This is the golden kernel of reason. It’s just that my heart keeps ringing out overpoweringly."

“What can I do with feelings but let them thrash and die like fish in the sand of language?”