Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories by Robert Walser

Author:Robert Walser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

WALSER ON WALSER

HERE YOU can hear Walser the writer speaking.

To Robert Walser, Writer.

This is how the address on letters sent to me reads, as though certain people concerned about my welfare wanted to remind me of my writerly profession.

Is it perhaps asleep in me, my passion for writing?

Do the well-meaning perhaps want to awaken me?

When, for example, I experienced the events of my novel The Assistant, the writer Walser was at first also asleep. Otherwise I would have been an unnatural assistant.

In order to write The Tanners, it took a lot of long awaiting, which of course occurred unconsciously. I would remind a writer more of a human being than of a writer. Writing indeed originates in what is human.

I know people of the opinion that there’s too much scribbling going on, just as there’s too much painting.

I’m also of this opinion, and that’s why in no way am I concerned about the writer Walser at present seemingly asleep. On the contrary, his conduct pleases me.

When in reality I was an assistant, did I have any idea that from this scrap of experience a “true-to-life novel,” a literary work out of real work would come into being? Not in the least!

At that time Walser already lived and already slept and already wrote remarkably little. But because he was committing himself to experiencing life disinterestedly, that is, without any concern for writerly passion, which is to say not writing anything yet, he wrote his Assistant years later, that is, afterwards. He did not perish from the unconsummated desire to have books published.

Everything the writer Walser wrote “later” finally had to be experienced “earlier.”

Can a person who doesn’t scribble even drink his coffee in the mornings?

Such a person hardly dare breathe!

And at the same time Walser takes a walk each and every day for a little hour, instead of getting his fill writing. Instinctively he finds excuses to help waitresses set the table. Why once did Walser experience all kinds of things?

Because the writer in him happily slept, and thus did not get in the way of experience. That’s why he thinks it’s best to leave him lying there in his sprawled-out ignorance, and he asks the concerned ones for ten years’ patience, wishing his colleagues all imaginable success. Why is everyone else left less indifferent to Walser’s fame than he himself?

For example, when I wrote The Tanners, how unmoved I was by fame! Had I already been famous, the book would have never been born.

Thus I wish to go unnoticed. Should one nevertheless want to notice me, I for my part won’t notice the noticers. The penning of my books so far hasn’t been forced. I don’t believe writing a lot constitutes a rich literature. Don’t come to me about my “early books”! One shouldn’t overestimate them, and concerning the living Walser, one should try to take him for what he is.

(1925)

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