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20 July 1941
Under a cloudy sky at the Herisau train station Robert stands waving, and climbs into my compartment without a ticket. "You're sure you want to ride further?"
"I don't have any money."
"I know. We'll just buy a ticket on board."
He was wearing a clean collar, but his tie was crooked, and during our Wanderung gradually lost its shape. I noticed a big bald spot on the right side of the back of his head. The doctor had already pointed it out. We rode as far as Urnäsch. Shortly after we left the village I asked if he wanted to stop for a bite.
"I'd rather not. We're in the swing now, we should keep going."
Few walkers, some cyclists. Robert is noticeably cheerful and talkative, uses "du" several times. I notice that his mouth is like a fish's that gasps for air when it's been landed. Small, a little rounded, quite red and often opened, the lower lip protruding a bit. The end of his nose turns a bit upward.
Across from the casino at Jakobsbad there's a baroque building that resembles a monastery, probably an old folks' home. "Should we go inside?"
Robert: "It looks much nicer on the outside. One should not try to reveal all secrets; I've believed that my whole life. Isn't it good, that in our life so much remains foreign and strange, as though behind ivy-covered walls? That gives it an inexpressible appeal, which more and more goes lost. Today it's brutal, how everything is desired and taken."
Discussing anything and everything we marched on to Appenzell where, in the the Krone we allowed ourselves beer and nuts. Robert didn't want to stay long, so we set off to Gais at a quick pace. There, in another Krone we had an elegant special and a bottle of Beaujolais. From there to a confectioner's and on foot to St. Gallen via Bühler. Heavy rain on the way. We crept into the Bayrische Bierhalle where we slowly dried off.
Robert told me that my schoolboy friend Egon Z. had been admitted to his ward and because of the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, whom he believes he can marry, had agitated discussions with the doctors. He became unruly and rebellious, as well as arrogant, but otherwise interesting, stimulating and clever. "He practices a kind of theatrical masculinity, which, he thinks, will impress the others. But it makes him seem like an old schoolmaster. It hangs on him like a wet dress on a hanger."
To our fellow guests he said "Look at Walser! He can focus on his reading!" When I told Robert that that old friend was named Egon, he stopped, enchanted, and laughs: "Wonderful, wonderful--this noble name--this noble name! It says so much. It obliges him to have a life like a novel. For that, shouldn't one be a Stendahl? For this Egon Z. women were like a trapeze, to help him fly higher. It's his bad luck that women don't want to get involved with him, because he's still like a farmer."
He continues: "For a few weeks there's been a mailman in our division, a well-off man, who, day after day, rushes around a table, behaving quite obscenely."
"Would you rather not have such neighbors?"
"Why not? Screwballs like that are welcome. They bring color into the sanitarium's gray."
He reported the death of the resident physician, Dr. Otto Hinrichsen, who was actually named Otto Hinnerk and came from Rostock. He had taken his job at the canton's sanitarium in 1923. The new physician--Dr. H. O. Pfister--had written a good obituary of Dr. Hinrichsen in some newspaper. To him, Hinrichsen had always seemed like a cross between a courtier and a circus performer. He could be quite charming, especially at Christmas, but also very unpleasant. When his comedy Liebesgarten was produced by the Stadttheatre in St. Gallen, Dr. Hinrichsen caught Robert unawares when he asked: "Has my triumph already reached your ears, Walser?"
"What did you say to that?"
"I said nothing, as usual in such cases. Silence is the only weapon I have, and it suits me in my reduced situation. I do find it unseemly that a 70-year-old in an elevated position uses romantic comedy to draw public attention to himself. The Doctor also gave me his play Ehr wurden Triborius." I never read it. He died without knowing my opinion. Another time he sat next me and asked who I was reading. 'Heinrich Zschokke' I said. 'Do people still read such stuff?' he said. I kept my mouth shut this time as well. Asking if one still reads Zschokke! He is such a subtle writer, full of high opinions. You should read the story Der Soldat in Jura or Goldmacherdorf, or his Selbstschau, where he reports on his meetings with Kleist and Pestalozzi. What a wonderful man! His Swiss novels, though, are just so much dry wood. There, he's not genuine, as he comes from Magdeburg. They were nothing but a courteous gesture. You can't make literature with courtesy alone."
On the matter of productivity: "It's not good for an artist to wear himself out in his youth. Then his heart is prematurely fallow. Gottfried Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Theodore Fontane saved up their creativity for old age, certainly not to their disadvantage."
"How has it gone for you?"
"During my last months in Bern I had nothing to say. Gottfried Keller might have experienced something of the sort when he accepted the post of National Author. Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence."
"A lot of artists won't agree with your remarks, for example, Jeremias Gotthelf, who always lived in the same atmosphere."
Robert knows my enthusiasm for Gotthelf and wants to provoke me a bit: "I've studied Gotthelf rather closely, so I think I can say that you're wrong. Things didn't change much for him, it's true. But he did have one stupid practice [Saushnörre]: he wasn't able to simply ['s Muul ha, de Schturmichaib.] He had to keep making corrections in his characters until they just weren't real to him. The realization of this eventually broke his will to live. I don't want to say that he was wrong; he was an important writer, a powerful preacher who had much in common with his Volk. But no one can emerge unpunished from making a cause against one's own nation. To the Bernese it must look like a betrayal, that he has [heruntergekanzelt] them in front of foreigners, for it's the Germans who read him."
"Goethe's instinct for people and his genius for conjuring up the best subjects for study at every stage of life remains extraordinary. It still has no equal. If he was tired of writers he'd study geology or botany, and newly refreshed, the foreign ministry or the theater. He always discovered new ways to rejuvenate himself."
Nietzsche: "He got his revenge for never having been loved by a woman. He himself was loveless. How many philosophical systems are revenge for lost happiness?"
About revolutionaries: "Remember how the French generals, from nothing but suspicion, envy, and ambition mutually ruined one another, so that there was room for Napoleon and a king? It could turn out that way with Hitler and Stalin. Perhaps Russia's digging a grave for both. Georg Büchner depicted this tragedy of the revolutionary in Danton's Tod."
About himself: "Wherever I've been there has always been some sort of plot to avoid vermin like me. The classy and arrogant would always avoid anything that didn't fit in their world: Pushed my way in? I would never even have the courage to peek in there. So I've lived my own life at the edges of bourgeois existence, and wasn't that a good thing? Doesn't my world have the right to exist even though it's a poor and powerless one?"
Robert: "You asked where I had served as a soldier. In the 25th Fusilier Battalion, Third Company; and in the 134th Landwehr Battalion. I always got on well with my buddies. But the officers always said 'Walser, you're a lazy devil." (ihr syt e faule Chaib.) That never embarrassed me."