How Lovely It Is to Be Small

Everyone dies—except writers, who do it up to three times. Once when they choose to or are forced to retire; once when their bodies no longer support consciousness; and once when they are forgotten, which often enough occurs first in the sequence. Fortunately, for those writers whose achievements or notoriety during their lifetimes weren’t enough to warrant a posthumous existence, there are other ways to be rescued from oblivion. To this day, a corpse cannot be revived—but a corpus? For that, there is mythology.

To see how this works in practice, look no further than the case of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whose life appears at first glance to furnish a checklist of romantic tropes about the neglected outsider artist.

Walser was the seventh of eight children born to Elisa and Adolf Walser, prosperous general store owners in Biel, Switzerland. The young Walser had a happy childhood, but his happiness was short-lived. His eldest brother died of a sudden illness in 1884, and his father’s lackadaisical management style, combined with a recession, decimated the family fortune, forcing them to move farther and farther from the center of Biel. These events took a toll on Walser’s parents, especially the stalwart Elisa, who died in 1894, after a long struggle with depression, when Walser was 16. The state of the family business meant that Walser had to leave school. He took up an apprenticeship as a bank clerk in Biel and then as a bookkeeper at an insurance company in Zurich. By then, he’d caught the literary bug and began the habit of quitting a job to focus on writing only to take up another when his money ran out. He placed several poems in local newspapers and published a short book before joining his brother Karl, an up-and-coming painter and set designer in Berlin, the capital of the German-language literary scene.

In Berlin, he and Karl acquired reputations as dandies and enfants terribles. Walser wrote hundreds of short prose pieces for literary journals and for the feuilleton sections of newspapers. He also published three novels: The Tanners (1907), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909), a “poetic fantasy,” as Walser called it, based on his experiences at a butler’s school in Berlin and his short stint as a castle servant in Upper Silesia. Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann praised these works—which frequently featured schoolchildren, pageboys, junior clerks, and journeymen poets—as examples of naïve or outsider art. Walser was also an important and acknowledged influence on Kafka. Robert Musil, whose own schoolboy novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), had been a hit, dismissed Kafka’s debut collection as nothing more than a “special case of the Walser Type.” But aside from his novella The Walk (1917), which remains Walser’s best-known piece of writing, none of his novels or collections achieved commercial success. By the time The Walk was published, Walser’s career was beyond repair. He had already returned to Switzerland broke and burned out. The political and economic chaos in Germany that followed the First World War crushed any lingering hopes for literary recognition.

Still, Walser remained productive, even as his opportunities for publishing dwindled. The end of the 1920s found him living in one cheap boardinghouse after another, on the edge of poverty and homelessness, all but estranged from his siblings, his former friends, and his publishing contacts. He drank frequently, and his behavior became increasingly erratic and sometimes violent. In 1929, he was institutionalized at Waldau Asylum in Bern and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Not long after, he was transferred to a facility in Herisau, where he spent the next 23 years, living, as a late poem put it, “like a child, enraptured / by the idea that I have been forgotten” (“Agreeableness of Lament”).

Walser died of heart failure on Christmas Day 1956 during his daily walk outside the hospital grounds. The last photo of him, taken by a police coroner, is laden with pathos: the footprints leading to his sprawled corpse are already being covered by snow, as though the image were quoting the death of the poet Sebastian in The Tanners or a frozen version of the melancholy lines on Keats’s grave in Rome (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”) For Walser, it was the third and final death. His funeral was attended by a pastor; some hospital staff; a family friend named Freida Mermet, with whom he had kept up a long, one-sided, epistolary romance; and Carl Seelig, the young critic who had taken to visiting Walser in Herisau and had over time become his legal guardian and literary executor.

After the funeral, Seelig came into possession of shoeboxes that contained more than 500 miscellaneous scraps of paper—business cards, pay slips, and rejection letters, among them—all covered in pencil markings no more than a few millimeters tall. These manuscripts were all that remained of the last period of Walser’s life as a writer. They constitute around 1,300 distinct texts: around 80 short dramatic scenes, 470 poems, and 750 prose pieces, including a 150-page novel, The Robbers, which Walser managed to fit onto just 24 manuscript sheets. (They appeared in six volumes published between 1986 and 2000 as Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet: Mikrogramme aus den Jahren 1924–1933, translated into English as From the Pencil Territory: Microscripts, 1924–1933.) Looking at the tiny letters with the knowledge that they were written during a period of psychic turmoil leading to institutionalization, it is difficult not to imagine that their author was inscribing the asymptotic approach to his own disappearance. As it happens, they had the opposite effect. More than any other fact of his life, the microscripts form the kernel of what his translator Susan Bernofsky, in Clairvoyant of the Small (Yale University Press, 2021), the first biography of the writer to appear in English, calls the “Walser mystique.”

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If successful, a myth generates a revival of interest in a writer’s work, which is elaborated across the introductions to, and reviews of, posthumous publications, reissues, and new translations. At a certain point of reputational consolidation, the baton is passed to biographers, who are then responsible for paring back the stories that have accrued to the writer by comparing them against documentary evidence and contrasting testimony from witnesses, by qualifying them with additional context and hindsight, or by debunking them, as necessary, to send readers back to the work.

Bernofsky performs such tasks admirably, especially with regard to Walser’s mental breakdown in 1929. The myth of the mad writer was attached to Walser during his lifetime. For example, in a 1929 article, Walter Benjamin wrote that Walser’s characters came from “insanity and nowhere else,” even though he was probably unaware of Walser’s personal circumstances, let alone the existence of the microscripts. Walser’s drinking and his precarious circumstances would have been enough to occasion intervention; although Walser admitted to depression, suicidal ideation, and even to experiencing auditory hallucinations, Bernofsky argues there are good reasons not to take the initial diagnosis of schizophrenia at face value. (Not least because there seems to have been a clerical error in the processing of the notes from Walser’s intake interview in Waldau: the box labeled “provisional diagnosis” was left blank, and someone had typed schizophrenia into the box labeled “definitive diagnosis.”) From the point of view of present-day psychiatry, Walser was “certainly ill,” she writes, “even if a patient presenting with his symptoms today might be treated with a combination of medication and psychotherapy after a relatively short hospital stay.” For his part, Walser seemed capable of viewing his institutionalization with a degree of ironic detachment, at least if Seelig’s reports can be trusted. When Seelig asked Walser if he knew why he had been institutionalized, he answered, “Because I’m not a good essayist.” To Seelig’s follow-up question, he responded, “I am not here to write but to be mad.”

As for the microscripts, they are unusual, yes, but that Walser’s tiny handwriting was the result of mental illness can almost certainly be ruled out. Trained as a clerk and a bookkeeper, Walser demonstrated meticulous concern for the graphic presentation of his handwriting from a young age: a 1902 letter to his younger sister, Fanny, shows him writing with a smaller hand than usual to “produce a perfectly symmetrical block of writing,” and the manuscript of his first published book contains 20 sections of almost exactly equal length. Later, during his last years in Berlin, during a particularly severe case of writer’s block, he turned to drafting his texts with pencil “before inking [them] into definitiveness,” as he put it in a 1926 prose piece. The so-called “pencil method” of 1913 was not fundamentally different from the technique that produced the microscripts, except that in the later period, Walser often did not bother to make fair copies of the texts. The miscellany of the paper he wrote on probably has more to do with postwar paper shortages and Walser’s poverty than with any impulse toward hoarding. Filling up as much of these writing surfaces as possible was in no small part making a virtue of necessity. 

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Although the appearance of Bernofsky’s biography suggests that Walser’s position as an important early-20th-century modernist is now on solid ground in the English-speaking world, one part of his oeuvre remains marginal: his poetry. His poetic activity is clustered between the years 1898 to 1900 and again between 1925 to 1933—that is, at the outset of his career and then in the Pencil Territory texts at its conclusion. This is not an atypical distribution for writers known mainly for their prose and for whom poetry functions as a gateway into professional publishing in youth, which they pass through again in old age, chastened by worldly failure and in search of more spiritual modes of expression. “I myself don’t quite know how I started writing poetry,” admits the Berlin-bound narrator of “The Poems,” one of many Walser stories that features a young poet-protagonist. “I wrote poems out of a mixture of bright-golden prospects and anxious prospectlessness, constantly half-fearful, half almost bubbling over with exultation.” It is a familiar sentiment, but so is this one, recorded in “My Fiftieth Birthday”:

For about seven years I then lived
in Berlin as a hardworking prose writer
and, when publishers were no longer
willing to grant me an advance, I returned
to Switzerland…
…to persist
undauntedly in my poetic efforts.

Yet in Christopher Middleton’s foreword to Thirty Poems (2012), his translation of published and unpublished Walser poems from the 1920s, Middleton claims that Walser “was essentially a poet.” Middleton can have meant this only in the honorific sense because he immediately qualifies his statement with the observation that much of Walser’s prosody, especially in the earlier period, is “singularly conventional, if not jejune.” Deeply indebted to the German Lied tradition of “whispy singable delicacies,” Walser’s poems are “throttled,” in Middleton’s view, “by the insipidity of their many rhymes, by their perfunctory character.” “Trite” sound play—which neither Middleton nor Daniele Pantano (the other translator of Walser’s poetry, whose compilation Oppressive Light appeared in 2012) attempt to reproduce in English—dictates the development of many of Walser’s poems at the expense of nearly every other aesthetic consideration, including that of sense. Both translators largely omit these poems in favor of those that are unrhymed or irregularly rhymed, especially those on grander themes, such as politics, art, and nature. (These latter selections are a useful corrective to the view of Walser as a “naïve” writer, childishly oblivious to the monumental events taking place around him, but they aren’t particularly representative.) Middleton explains away his obvious embarrassment with some of the published poems by reminding readers that they were “consumer poems” written for newspaper audiences, and some of the unpublished poems remained only at the draft stage. Bernofsky concurs with this assessment. “Admirers of his early poetry emphasized that these works show talent while being interesting, quirky, and a little awkward,” she writes. “[N]o one considered them great, and in fact they aren’t. If such poetry was all Robert Walser ever wrote, he’d be forgotten.”

The writings from the Pencil Territory present difficulties of interpretation beyond the labor of deciphering and transcribing them, which required scholars Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlag to peer through the magnifying lenses of thread counters at letters no larger than 2 millimeters long for the better part of two decades. The first difficulty has to do with classification. How is one to tell which texts are poetry and which are prose? Some manuscript sheets contain both lineated and unlineated texts, and these are sometimes separated from one another by folds in the paper or by decorative drawn borders. However, if the distinction between poetry and prose has to do partly with their respective visual forms, isn’t this complicated by the unorthodox visual presentation of all of Walser’s pencil texts? The second, no less thorny issue has to do with completion status. Can one infer from the fact that Walser did make fair copies of some of the microscripts, altered their content, and submitted them for publication that all the writings from the pencil territory are drafts? Or did he decide at some point, perhaps after his opportunities for publication had dead-ended, that the miniature form was by no means incidental to his artistic vision?

These questions may be unanswerable, but granting Walser’s microscripts the presumption of authorial intent not only enables us to link his writing to a recognized, if little-known, publishing tradition and to contemporaneous modernist literary experiments, it also illuminates the relationship between his life and work.

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Bernofsky takes the title of her biography from “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” a 1998 essay by the late German writer W.G. Sebald. Smallness is the dominant motif of Walser’s oeuvre, from his status as a minor writer to the youthful characters who populate his work, from his preference for short prose forms such as the feuilleton to his frequent use of the modifier little in his titles. The motif finds its purest expression in the miniscule letters of the microscripts. If there is one exception to this rule, as Bernofsky observes, it is that Walser is not at all a minimalist. Rather, he is a maximalist miniaturist whose late style bears comparison to the word play, neologisms, syntactic complexities, and sheer verbosity of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the decades after Walser’s death, these writers, along with Germanophone luminaries such as Kafka, Sebald, and Thomas Bernhard, created the taste by which Walser’s late style could be appreciated. “The playful—and sometimes obsessive—working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details is one of the most striking characteristics of Walser’s idiom,” Sebald writes of The Robbers, Walser’s late masterpiece of “detours and digressions.” Instead of “fine brush,” though, he need only have said pencil stub. The medium of the microscripts is not parallel to Walser’s stylistic maximalism; it is part and parcel of it.

In her chapter on narratives of the miniature in On Longing (1984), the poet and critic Susan Stewart argues that maximalist miniaturism is hardly the oxymoron it might appear. Size is, above all, a matter of scale, and scale, in turn, is relative to the size of the perceiver, in this case, the human body. When a body encounters the miniature, it stands in “transcendent” spatial relationship to it; access to the miniature and the tiny details that comprise it come to that body only via fine-grained visual perception, or—if you prefer—clairvoyance. Depictions of small things therefore tend to be verbose, as the temporal hierarchy that structures narrative gives way to “an infinity of descriptive gestures.” “It is difficult for much to happen in such depiction,” Stewart concludes, “since each scene of action multiplies in spatial significance in such a way as to fill the page with contextual information.” What results is either a series of static tableaus—such as Walser’s early Fritz Kocher’s Essays (1904) or the late “Felix Scenes”—or what amounts to the same thing, an endless digressiveness, as in The Walk and Walser’s other walk stories. “Just as syntactical embedding is a matter not just of additional information but of a restructuring of information,” as Stewart argues, digression “[toys] with the hierarchy of narrative events.” A proliferation of detail frustrates readers’ desire for closure, distracts the attention, makes it difficult to determine what is significant and what is not, and “nearly erases the landmark[s]” described with them. All of this accounts for Sebald’s sense that Walser’s “prose tends to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke.”

These difficulties disappear, however, as soon as one recognizes that, as Bernofsky’s term maximalist miniaturism suggests, the primary mode of Walser’s late prose is lyrical, not narrative. Appreciating Walser’s late prose means adjusting generic expectations accordingly. Though it is true that, as Sontag puts it, Walser “spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space” through his legendary prowess as a walker, Bernofsky cautions against treating Walser as an instance of the flâneur encountered in the writings of Baudelaire, Benjamin, or Debord. Walser came from a long line of “tremendous walkers” and acquired the habit in his youth. If Walser “thought nothing of walking all night, traversing, say, the eighteen miles from Bern to Thun and then climbing a mountain in the morning,” the practice owes more to the tradition of Swiss Wandern than French psychogeography.

If writing about the small reveals the important truth that, as Stewart puts it, “every narrative is a miniature and every book a microcosm,” small writing, whether in the form of miniature books or micrographia, reveals the “disjunction between the book as object and the book as idea” and, by extension, the disjunction between the material and the abstract nature of the sign. There is no semantic difference between a printed sentence and a handwritten one or between a sentence written in normal-sized letters and one written in microscopic letters, but it does not follow that these changes to the materiality of the sign are insignificant. On the contrary, as the labor involved in the production of micrographia “multiplies, so does the significance of the total object,” as Stewart writes. On the reception side, labor also increases to the point where the physical difficulty of reading micrographia impedes the reception of the information presented in it. Removed from the realm of mechanical production and commodity exchange, minute writing returns the aura—to use Benjamin’s term—to the book as object and the sign as a physical mark.

By placing both prose and poetry on the same page and making each equally difficult to read, Walser’s microscripts call attention to what is typically obscured by print, namely that lineation no longer serves as a marker for the poetic as such but is a vestige of canons of visual presentation and layout. Something similar might be said of the childish, unrestrained rhyming in Walser’s poetry that so put off Middleton. Rhyme, after all, is also a material rather than a semantic feature of the sign, in this case of the verbal sign, and by pushing phonetic effects beyond the limits of good taste, Walser shows that here too the means of communication can be used to frustrate the ends of communication. In both respects, the writers with whom Walser had the most in common were the Italian and Russian futurists and Dadaists such as Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann, the latter of whom performed their experiments in sound poetry, typography, and optophonetics in Zurich and Berlin in the late teens and early ’20s. (It is unclear whether Walser was familiar with them, and Bernofsky does not mention it.) If reading Walser’s poetry in print gives the impression that his work is a cloying relic of 19th-century German Lied, reading it in manuscript—that is, in its original form—shows that, along with the futurists and Dadaists, he is the forerunner of the handwriting experiments of contemporary poets such as Robert Grenier, Susan Howe, and Anne Waldman. Here, rather than in any particular accomplishment as a writer of the short lyric, lies Walser’s real and as yet unacknowledged significance for the subsequent history of poetry and poetics.

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A final biographical mystery remains, however, especially once one accepts Bernofsky’s debunking of the myth that the microscripts are the product of mental illness. Given that Walser’s pencil method significantly increased the labor of production and significantly decreased the likelihood of its reception—some of his microscripts went unpublished because editors simply could not read them, and there is even doubt as to whether Walser could at a few days’ remove—and given that, unlike the Dadaists, for example, there is no record of his interest in philosophical questions about the nature of the sign, why did he write this way? A clue can be found in the history of miniature books and micrographia. The invention of printing coincided with the cultural invention of childhood, Stewart reminds us, and “from the fifteenth century on, miniature books were mainly books for children, and in the development of children’s literature the depiction of the miniature is a recurring device.” In writing his miniscule texts, what was Walser doing? Perhaps he was making toys.

If so, the most significant detail of Bernofsky’s biography would be the very first one: “Robert Otto Walser was born at three in the afternoon on April 15, 1878, in a back room above a general store that specialized in toys but also sold all sorts of sewing and stationary items, leather goods, music and umbrella stands, costume jewelry, and mirrors.” Most toys are miniatures: wind-up toys, toy soldiers, dolls, dollhouses, tea sets, building blocks, model trains, and so on. Viewed from the perspective of his nursery, the pervasive motif of smallness in Walser’s writing is the symptom of a powerful nostalgia—a word, let’s not forget, coined by a doctor from Switzerland—for the lost happiness of his childhood in Biel. In the “Felix Scenes,” a series of prose tableaux from the Pencil Territory, the eponymous narrator, a boy of “four or six years old,” is standing in front of his father’s shop, just as Walser must have at that age. “How lovely it is to be small,” Felix remarks. “You’re not responsible for a thing…All the beautiful goods in the shop window…it almost worries me that I have no worries.”

The memory of material comfort, associated here with the presence of commodities designed for the consumption of children like Felix—whose name is derived from the Latin word for happiness—is particularly evident in this passage. No less important is the shop window that mediates Felix’s view of these commodities (and Walser’s memory of them). Again, Stewart: “The glass eliminates the possibility of contagion,” namely, the contagion of linear time, which brings responsibilities and worries, disappointments and reversals of fortune, aging and death. “[A]t the same time…it maximizes the possibilities of transcendent vision” characteristic of the body’s relation to the miniature, which in turn is “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history.” Objects and scenes viewed through glass appear frequently in Walser’s writing, in poems such as “At the Window I,” “At the Window II,” “The Woman at the Window,” “How the Small Hills Smiled,” and “Spring (I)”; in microscript texts such as “The Prodigal Son” and “Childhood”; and in published prose pieces such as The Walk, “Shop Windows,” and “Three Stories,” in which what is described are the covers of imaginary books. Whether he was conscious of it or not, Walser’s miniature handwriting ensured that the way his most significant work would first be encountered would be under glass—as it so happens, under the glass of Echte and Morlang’s thread counters—in the same way shoppers first encountered the toys in his father’s shop. The toy unites all the strands of Walser’s work—form, subject matter, medium—into a single image. “[T]oday I want to turn / poetry into a children’s game,” Walser wrote in “Parade,” a line that could function as his ars poetica.

Anyone whose profession is to invent stories and play with language remains connected to the fantasy worlds of childhood, even if few major writers have made childhood their major theme, as Walser did. But perhaps Walser’s life and work are special instances of a general case and not just among writers. As Benjamin put it: “When a modern poet says that everyone has a picture for which he would be willing to give the whole world, who would not look for it in an old box of toys?”