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20 December 1937
Light snowfall. Robert waits without overcoat in the train station, holding a rolled-up, wurst-shaped umbrella. He is apparently not too cold. We look for pubs in St. Gallen and turn into the Gilge, where we are the only customers. Robert spoke later about the shapely waitress with the squint who stroked his back: "We should have stayed there." When I told him at lunchtime in the Marktplatz that our current waitress was much cuter and had nice legs, he says that that hadn't occurred to him. He observed the totality of people, especially their personality.
In a clothes store we look at a number of suits for Robert. The manager said that Robert could be my father. However, the clothes off the rack don't fit him well, because he has a round back. He wants "something like a farmer would wear, or at least nothing flashy." Since having his measurements taken and having his person touched made him more and more nervous, and his face began to flush, we fled without buying anything.
Dark Bavarian beerhall. Strong beer. He liked it here. He lit one Parisienne after another. He asked with dry irony if I had done a good business with Grosse Kleine Welt, which had appeared in Verlag Rentsch's Walser collection. He praised Wieland and Lessig, but finds Mattias Claudius too naive.
He says: "I was never envious of the classics, rather the second rank writers, like Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Storm, because I could write bourgeois-gemütlich stories as well as they could. Raabe's Saugemuetlichkeit angers me without fail."
"So you're also envious of Gottfried Keller?"
Smiling: "No, that was only in Zurich."
I told him that the Commission for Advancing Bernese Literature would be giving him an award. He was pleased.