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Christmas 1955
A cloudy morning, threatening rain, so that noon seemed more like night than day. Only a few travelers, since the early spring fields and forests made for poor winter sports.
On the way to St. Gallen we got into a detailed discussion about Kleist, whose play Zerbrochenen Krug I had seen performed a few days before. I told Robert about the wager with Zschokke and Wieland in Berne, which led to the completion of this comedy, Goethe's bad opinion of it, and the ill-received Weimar premier, where he was jeered and treated crudely. Robert recalls that he saw Prinz von Homburg while he was an apprentice bookseller in Stuttgart.
Just the other day he read Adalbert Stifter’s Witiko, which he found “desperately boring.” Stifter’s creative powers have been greatly weakened.
Robert also disparaged the new custom of distributing writing prizes to beginners: "If a young writer becomes accustomed to such things he'll stay like a schoolboy. To be a man one must bear suffering, misunderstanding, struggle. The government should not be the writer's midwife."
He was greatly amused by the behavior of the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness, who had been awarded this year's Nobel prize. He had never read anything of Laxness's; he had, though, seen a newspaper photo that he thought was characteristic. He was provoked to laughter by the boldness with which Laxness, during the festivities in Stockholm, had swung a Swedish princess as they danced. He demonstrated to me there on a path in the woods how a country boy in tails would whirl her about as if to gloat: "Now I lay in the arms of the East, and now in the arms of the West." (Laxness had recently received a prize from the Soviets.) Before such spirit the little band of German and Swiss Nobelists were reduced to provincials.
This is the end of my notes on our shared walks. A few pages from early on have been lost, while I took no notes of our last walk. Had I suspected the end was near? Did I want all traces to be blown silently away? I don't know. It would be foolish to brood over past mistakes. It would also have been foolish to present a retouched picture that didn't fit reality. The faithful description of his unique character and opinions must be my first rule, whose fulfillment alone justifies the publishing of these personal reports and the coming documented biography [sic. Seelig produced no such biography].
If in Wanderungen mit Robert Walser the subject is frequently food and drink, and certain subjects repeat themselves in occasionally contradictory ways, and passages occur which may perhaps shock a few readers, I've risked that for the sake of the integrity of a unique personality, even if that serves to cast a shadow on him. It's a consolation for me that our strolls brought some variety to the monotony of decades in confinement. I'll never find a more enthusiastic walking companion than him.
In the dusk of 25 December 1956 I looked out from my dark apartment into my neighborhood, where the lights of Christmas trees twinkled. Next to me lay my Dalmation Ajax, so sick that I didn't want to leave him alone. I had postponed the next Wanderung from Christmas to New Year's. A phone call from the assistant medical director that Robert had been found dead early that afternoon on a snowfield, in the very place where we had spent many wonderful hours on Christmas day, 1955, and Good Friday of this year.
That night I didn't want to see any more Christmas trees. Their light was too painful.