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26 May 1947
In Gossau we encounter the Flurprozession [to celebrate the feast of the Ascension] where the red jackets of the servers glow like geraniums. We were going to Oberbüren, which Robert had never seen. He insisted on walking by the highway. Dozens of cars, and bikes and motorbikes, roared by us, dangerously close. It didn’t bother Robert, and he told me, as proof of how fidelity is rewarded and deception is punished the story of Balzac's Eugenie Grandet.
Finally he agreed to strike out on a side trail. On my recommendation we took the trail to the right, though Robert said “the right way often leads to the wrong, the wrong to the right."
Oberbüren lies [wie in einer Zaine] of trees. On the wall of a house we read:
Good luck and bad luck
May visit with you
Like you and me, brother,
They're just passing through.
Breakfast: tilsit cheese, butter, light coffee, beer. The female pubkeeper counts the take with an ascetic and haggard look, serious like Niklaus von der Flue. She sits at a neighboring table and counts under her breath, while the girl tends to us with a maternal air, concerned that we get enough to eat. From the kitchen you can hear them chanting prayers; apparently a religious group meets here.
I tell Robert that on Whitmonday at the premier of Strindberg’s Traumspiel I sat right behind Thomas Mann. He caught my eye with his long pointy nose and his full head of dark hair. Robert: "That's the healthiness of success. Failure sends so many to an early grave! But since he was a boy Mann has had everything: [Buergerruhe], security, a happy family, professional recognition. Not even leaving his country could throw him off--on foreign shores he wrote on like an attorney in his office, so the Joseph novels, which are a bit dry and [erschwitzt], are not nearly as wonderful as the amazing early works. Somehow in the later pieces one notices the stay-at-home atmosphere, and that's how their creator looks: like someone toiling at his account books. But his bourgeois respectability and his almost scientific efforts to place every detail in the right place, is something that must command respect."
Then, resting by a grove of trees heavy with fruit [sic: In May?]: "Trees are lucky: they bear fruit every year." Onward! Niederwil; the preacher, with friendly greeting, marching with the village band to a fest in Flawil. We turn again toward the highway, shimmering white in the midday heat; in the middle, like a dirty black stream, the tar stripe that divides the road. In the sun, Robert’s head reddens like a tomato. He smiles at me with enthusiasm: "It would be nice to keep going like this into the night."
Gossau. We pause before a [breitfrontigen] pub. A resident passes and says, without looking at us, from fear the owner would learn he was discouraging his customers, "Go to the Krone." We did, and were rewarded with a sumptuous meal: consomme, a tender schnitzel, beans, beets, noodles, salad, frozen meringues, and, at Robert’s explicit request, red Spanish wine.
At the next table the potbellied owner, who drags a leg, described to some other guests the preparation of a turkey: how you had to remove the nerves (sic) and carefully prepare the four kinds of meat. In any profession, it's pleasing to see such attention to detail and love of craft that resonates even in the businesslike tone.
We also spoke of the recent death of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Robert conceded that Ramuz was the most prominent novelist of western Switzerland, even though he found his regionalism outdated and sometimes forced. Art today should concern itself with all of humanity, not just the concern peasants in the countryside, in the style of Gotthelf.
I confess to an admiration for the melancholy noble bearing of Count Eduard von Keyserling, whose Harmonie and Bunte Herzen I’ve recently read. Had Robert ever met him? "Yes. Among other places, in the Café Stephanie, where he sat almost daily in proud solitude with a glass of cognac, almost blind, an unambitious man among the openly ambitious who wanted to make a career as quickly as possible. He seems to me the finest specimen of a lion." To my puzzled look he replied "The lion is king in his kingdom. An extinct king. Eduard von Keyserling was one." The grandeur of his prose had a powerful effect on Robert: "The true masters don’t have to play at being masters, they simply are. Basta!"
On the way back Robert remarked about clergy today: "It seems to me that they act as though they lived in the time of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, or Bullinger, and force themselves into an asceticism whose necessity they themselves no longer believe in. But they say they should be responsible to the tradition, even though they have much more important things they should be doing.” “Such as?” “Less talking about Jesus, and more acting like Him."