Outrunning Darkness

Our favourite writers do not just open doors to other worlds; they open doors to other writers. A few years ago, the South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee opened an important door for me. I had read all his novels, from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year. But my favourite was Life and Times of Michael K, his story of an innocent, an outsider with a cleft lip – ‘curled like a snail’s foot’ – who escapes a civil war with his mother and, after her death, keeps himself alive by growing fruit and living in a burrow in the veld. What appealed most was the heroism of K’s retreat, the novel’s sense of passion in privation, of redemption in the form of a pumpkin seed.

When I’d run out of novels, I started on the essays, hoping I’d find among the books Coetzee admired books I would admire too. The essays were, to put it mildly, level-headed, so one of the titles leapt off the page: ‘The Genius of Robert Walser’. I had never even heard the name, but two sentences quoted in the piece persuaded me that perhaps between this Swiss writer and a South African, writing at opposite ends of the century, there was common ground: ‘How fortunate I am’, Walser wrote, ‘not to be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching! To be small and to stay small.’ I went out the following morning and found a volume of Walser’s short fiction. Scanning the contents page, I could see that these were tiny stories about everyday subjects, most no more than a couple of pages long – prose sketches rather than conventional narratives – with titles like ‘Trousers’, ‘The Job Application’ or ‘The Boat’. But in the middle there was one covering more than sixty pages called ‘The Walk’. It was the first story I read by Walser, and it introduced me to a writer of both tragic and exultant modesty. But not, it should be said, simplicity. The story has a straightforward conceit but makes complicated progress. It describes a day’s jaunty stroll through ‘a semi-rural, semi-suburban, neat, modest, nice little poor quarter’, a place of utter mediocrity, of inns and houses, factories and workshops, provincial offices and bureaucrats. It consists of digressions, flights of fancy, mundane appointments and fantastic imagination, and much of its energy comes from its wandering tone. ‘My feelings I like to conceal from my fellow men,’ the narrator says. Following his switches from sarcasm to confession can feel like trailing someone through a forest, glimpsing him here, then there, the view often obscured and his voice ricocheting among the trees. But you catch the best sight of him in the middle. Halfway through his walk he visits the tax office. ‘Permit me to inform you’, he says to the official, ‘that I enjoy, as a poor writer and pen-pusher or homme de lettres, a very dubious income.’ He has written books but the public doesn’t like them. He can’t be seen on the streets on Sundays because he has no Sunday clothes. He is as thrifty as a field mouse and would like to be taxed as such. ‘But you’re always to be seen out for a walk!’ the official complains. The rebuke takes us to the heart of the narrator’s life. ‘Walk I definitely must,’ he replies,

to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could not write the half of one more single word, or produce the tiniest poem in prose or verse. Without walking I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed . . . Shut in at home I would miserably decay and dry up . . . 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.

Walser once remarked of Charles Dickens’s novels that he loved them because he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He could have been describing himself. That uncertainty is there from the beginning, when the narrator bounds down the stairs from his writer’s room – his ‘room of phantoms’ – and out into the street. The pain of the empty page disappears immediately, replaced by the radiant life around him. ‘Everything I saw’, he says, ‘made upon me a delightful impression of friendliness, of goodliness, and of youth.’ He loves the town chemist cycling by, the bric-à-brac vendor, the gardens planted with contented vegetables. He loves to see a dog staring at a child, two gentlemen doffing their hats, and the quiet of deep green woodland. He basks in these overlooked moments – these ‘living poems’ – but they cast shadows. When he sees children playing in the sun, he thinks to himself, ‘Let them be unrestrained as they are. Age one day will terrify and bridle them.’ It was a bridle that Walser was all too familiar with. ‘The Walk’ was written in 1917. He was 39 and living a solitary life in an attic room at the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz – the Blue Cross – a temperance hotel in Biel, Switzerland. He had very little money, and he spent his days hunched over his writing-desk wrapped in an old army coat. To keep his feet warm he made slippers out of rags. As a young man, he’d had various low-grade jobs. He’d worked as a banking clerk in Basel and for an insurance company in Zurich. Then in 1905 he took his literary ambitions to Berlin, where his brother was a prominent theatrical designer and illustrator. He published three novels between 1906 and 1909, including his most famous, Jakob von Gunten, based on a period he spent as a student at a school for servants. But they did not sell well, and he retreated back to Switzerland in 1913, first to Biel and then later to Berne. His only real contact during these years seems to have been with his sister Lisa. When he was asked later who he had dealings with in Berne, he simply replied ‘Myself ’. During his final year there he suffered from bad dreams: ‘thunder, screaming, strangling hands, hallucinatory voices’. Eventually he agreed, with Lisa’s encouragement, to enter an asylum in Waldau, and then another in Herisau. The official diagnosis was schizophrenia, but others have suggested that he was simply so solitary he couldn’t be left to live alone. It was while out walking on his own that he died on Christmas Day 1956, his body discovered in a snowy field by a group of children. His psychological precariousness appears most poignantly in ‘The Walk’ in the figure of a giant called Tomzack, whom the narrator meets on the road and with whom he’s on familiar terms. ‘In any other place and on any other road but this dear yielding country road I would have expected him,’ he says. Tomzack is homeless and unhappy, living ‘completely without love and without human joy’. Overshadowed by the giant’s dejected bulk the narrator feels like a persecuted child. And yet when he makes his escape and carries on his way, he does so with affection, murmuring to himself, ‘Goodbye, keep well nevertheless, friend Tomzack!’ You soon realize that, for all its pleasures, walking is also a desperate race to outrun darkness. His busyness takes on an aspect of sad dissembling. He puffs out his chest, but he can’t hide his fragile heart. To the tax official he insists that walking is a job of work, that ‘though I seem to be no more than delicate and dreamy, I am a solid technician!’ He assures the reader that his walk is ‘full of practical business affairs’, one of which is the posting of an urgent letter, which turns out to be a masterpiece of indignant humility. ‘People like you,’ he writes to the ‘Most respectable Sir’, ‘are so bold as to be hard, impudent, coarse, and violent with people who are poor and unprotected.’ He musters for a visit to the tailor the weapons of courage, scorn and wrath in order to ‘advance, successfully and victoriously, against the biting irony and mockery lurking under a simulation of friendliness’. When he ponders the end of his walk, he unleashes a tremendous imaginative outburst, lasting several pages, of ‘everyday things and street events’, a list of visions which keep the darkness at bay: a piano factory, an avenue of poplars beside a black river, a circus with elephants, horses, dogs, zebras, giraffes, lions in lion cages, tigers, monkeys and crocodiles. But there is a still point. He arrives at a railway crossing, where a small crowd of country people waits at a barrier for the train to pass. When it comes the train is full of soldiers, who wave at the people from the carriages. After the train has gone and the barrier is raised, the crowd disperses and he finds himself in a landscape of small fields and little houses with little gardens. ‘I felt as if someone I loved were calling me by name,’ he says, ‘or as if someone were kissing me and comforting me’, and then that ‘in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself ’. The world is largest when it is smallest, most beautiful when it is most humble. He exults in the ordinary because the ordinary is his achievement. It is all he can hope for and all he wants.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Simon Willis 2015