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16 May 1943
On Robert's 65th birthday we had agreed that the next time we would travel through the Ricken to Rapperswil. So I had the tickets in my pocket when I saw him in the train station in Herisau at 8 AM: 'Today we go through the Ricken. Startled, he shot back "No, no, why that? I am exiled to east Switzerland and will stay here. Why eat mushrooms in Rapperswil when we can have bacon in the Appenzellerland?"
I surrender and say that he should choose the route himself.
"Let's go to Peterzell, I know you'll like that," he ventures.
"Why not?" and already we're striding out.
"I was so happy this morning," said the enthusiastic Robert "when I saw clouds instead of blue sky. I don't care for beautiful views and backdrops. When the distant disappears, the close grows more intimate. Why shouldn't we be satisfied with one meadow, one forest, and a couple of peaceful houses."
"By the way, from now on come on Sundays, when you can. Since I don't practice the writing arts anymore, I can't afford the extravagance of strolling on workdays. That brings disorder into the order of the sanitarium. It's also quite pleasant to see the world in its Sunday best."
To my surprise, he begins, quite on his own, to talk about his stay in the hospital. "I liked my hospital room quite a bit. One lies like a felled tree, and never needs to move an arm or leg. Desires all fall asleep, like children exhausted from their play. It feels like a monastery, or the waiting room of death. Why have an operation? I was happy as things stood. It's true I got nasty if the other patients got something to eat and I didn't. But even this didn't last long. I'm sure that Hölderlin's last 30 years were not as unhappy as portrayed by the literature professors. To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to constantly satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be!"
Via Schwellbrunn we marched to St. Peterzell whose church, built in 1722, and distinguished parsonage please Robert greatly. We order bratwurst and schnitzel, and a soft wine from the Tyrol, and then bring on the sweets.
For half an hour over lunch Robert was agitated about a remark of mine about a writing colleague who had an unlucky romance during her college days, and almost immediately went to pieces: "The baby! Must she have her heart broken by a villain and then trumpet this little misfortune [malheur] to the world? That is a provocative style. This literary daisy wanted to be a writing Magdalene."
Under the grey dome of the sky, fog drawing in, no human in sight, Robert opened up and told me: "As a model for my novel Der Gehülfe I used my job as a bookkeeper in Wadenswil from the summer of 1903 to the beginning of January 1904, as I recalled it in Berlin. I got the job through the unemployment office in Zurich, where I worked for a time at the Kantonalbank after the Wadenswiler period. Max Liebermann told me he found Der Gehülfe boring as hell. But he loved Jakob von Gunten, for which I had gathered observations while a student at a school that resembles the school in the novel."
"That was shortly after my first publication with Insel Verlag, Fritz Kocher's Aufsätze, was remaindered to a Berlin department store, which my later publisher, Bruno Cassirer, would gleefully rub my nose in. But he published my first poetry, with etchings by Karl. Otto von Greyerz clobbered me in Bund afterwards because of the style of the poetry, so that the people who sat with me in the Blauen Kreuz in Biel went quite pale when they told me about this hatchet job. The Zurichers? They never noticed my poetry. They were caught up in the enthusiasm for Hesse. On his account I was left to slip quietly out of sight."
Our conversation touched on Geschwister Tanner, of which Robert said: "I wrote it in Berlin in three or four weeks, essentially without corrections. Bruno Cassirer cut out a few sections he found boring, like the one where Simon found the clerk's manuscript in the oven. That appeared later in the journal Marz, where Hermann Hesse was an editor. My praiseworthy medical director, Dr. Hinrichsen, who saw himself as an important writer, said once that the beginning was good, but the rest was impossible. He said it as though he would have gagged if he'd been forced to read the whole thing." Robert laughed heartily at his own description.
I note how right he is to live like Simon [sic] in poverty, simplicity and freedom, and how dishonest creative people are when they make compromises to secure their material existence. He nods enthusiastically and replies solemnly after a long silence: "Yes, but it's a journey from setback to setback, in general."
Near Waldstatt Robert noted: "Dishonest writers deserve to be whipped. They have sinned against their calling. Their punishment today is that Hitler has been unleashed on them. Modern literary art can't avoid the criticism that it's rough, arrogant, and conceited. I am convinced that good books could be put in the hands of every reader from the teenager to the old maid. Of how many products of modern literature could you say that?"
"You see, people complain about Marlitt. That is a schoolmaster's reading, unfair and narrow-minded. Recently I read in an old journal The House of the Bureau of Commerce and I have to say that her liberal attitude and her understanding of sociological and social change is impressive. In that sort of book you're more likely to find [tact and friendliness] than in the first rank of fat literary tomes. Do you know Marlitt is really named Eugenie John and is idolized by more than the Gartenlaube's] lady readers? It may be that she was a pompous and too-progressive lady; many prominent women of today could envy her for her fantasies and for her can-do nature. Sheis said to have been a gifted singer in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, as an invalid, she would have written all her books in bed: Gold; Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell; and Die Frau mit den Karfunkelstein. Am I mistaken to call her the first German feminist to fight class arrogance and smug sanctimony? Also J.V. Widmann tipped his hat respectfully to her, and enjoyed telling her how once, on the Schänzli [a hill in Bern] a farmer's wedding party from Emmental, in all seriousness, drank to her health."
A few remarks from this Wanderung that ended in two Herisau beerhalls: "Polite people are usually very sly." "People get interesting character traits through their mistakes. Evil is there to create contrasts, and thus bring life into the world." "No writer is pledged to perfection. He's loved for his humanity and folly." This during a conversation about Jean Paul's 'Titan,' whose sinuous [schlinggewächsartiger] style fascinated Robert.
"Creative types are not fond of theory. That distinguishes them from imitators."