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23 September 1945
Mouse gray rainclouds. The porter had forgotten to pass my message to Robert, who ran up to me, crumpled hat in his hand: “This is an unexpected pleasure!”
We trot on puddled paths through the fields to Flawil. He talked of how much he liked rain: it made the colors and fragrances stronger, and being under an umbrella was just like home.
In the Krone in Flawil huge vegetable and meat platters, and finally even a saucer of whipped cream are served to us. Since we were in cider country, we toasted with new cider. During the meal Robert said: “You asked last time about the patient A.D., whose nephew you know. I remembered him just after you had left. He died about a year and a half ago in our sanitarium. We called him 'the gold uncle.' I think he had spent a long time in the U.S., on a farm perhaps. In any case he bragged about secret wealth, which is to be expected there [sic; the US? the sanitarium?]. Once he was visited by a distinguished old lady. Her name was Sabine, and she looked like a character from a Gottfried Keller fable. This A.D. was a disgusting eater, always voracious, like a wolf. I watched him once as he emptied a whole salt shaker in his food. I would have gotten sick if I had watched him choke everything down the way he did. He usually vomited afterward, and probably had some sort of stomach affliction."
On the way to Gossau: "I have to tell you something about how quickly I wrote Der Gehülfe. As you know, the Scherl Verlag invited me to enter a novel contest. Well, why not? I had no ideas except employee conditions in Wadenswil. So I wrote that up, and was finished in six weeks." I told Robert that a Wadenswiler had assurred me that you could recognize every business and every character in the book. A clock advertising the inventor Tobler stands today in one of the stations of the Zuricher Oberlandes; Barentswil, perhaps. I ran into Tobler in Bern a few times, after his backruptcy. He was a hot-tempered man, his wife a tall, placid woman from Winterthur.
“Where did Geschwister Tanner take place?” “In Zurich and in the little Gemeinde of Täuffeln, where my sister Lisa worked as a teacher for a time, before she went to Livorno as a governess, and then to Bellelay, where she gave language lessons for almost 30 years. I stayed with her so often in Taeuffeln and Bellelay!”
Finally: “It’s a basic problem of the new Swiss literature that our writers portray our people as sweet and kind, as though everyone were a Pestalozzi. The unearned security in which our generation has lived since the turn of the century has evoked a preachiness that frequently gets on my nerves. Every demon is struck dead. Gottfried Keller was so different! I’m sure that a rascal lived in him. Max Wohlwend, too. Without misfortune, no artist is complete, but rather an odorless hothouse flower. How dreary is the effect of the do-gooders we have raised since Keller and Meyer."