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28 January 1943
A tough march on the icy roads from Herisau to St. Gallen, where we warmed up in the train station cafeteria with coffee and cigarettes. Robert is astounded that we need ration cards for a helping of cheese. We take the tram through deserted streets to the end of the line at Heilig Kreuz, and the jovial conductor gives us directions to Bodensee. We set off at a trot, go left past the church, through the dimly lit forest, to the St. Peter and Paul game preserve, where chamois, stags, and roebucks appear out of the fog like fairy tale creatures. Robert is enchanted.
By the time we reach the preserve's restaurant we've completely forgotten our complicated directions, so we turn down a random street and ask two or three people the way to Bodensee. They all think it's odd that we want to go that far on foot. In the pub Zur Sonne we order vermouth and warm käswähe. It suits us royally.
When we've finished the chubby waitress tells us that we're not far from the tram stop where we had begun our walk. So we turned back in that direction and headed straight up the main road to Rorschach, which we reached around noon, after a two-hour walk. The main street was oddly quiet. Robert's collar and tie had come apart during our expedition, and I said he should stick them in a coat pocket, but at the dock he slipped into a bathroom to set things right. When he returned the tie and collar were both quite crooked. I told him the ladies like it like that. He laughed and seemed satisfied. We strolled casually about the town. Robert stopped, enchanted, at store windows and houses. The elegant Baroque style of Rorschach touched him, and he could scarcely tear himself away.
We wanted a meal in the Traube, a pub in a butcher shop. But there was only the proprietress and a blond girl with a bowl of corn, and they said there was nothing to eat. We see the oven standing cold in the kitchen. We study the menus at a couple of other restaurants until we wind up in the Post, which a customs agent recommended. We had red wine from the Buchberg and the daily special, which was actually quite good: Schnitzel with potato soup, beans, and peas. We cleared our plates and chatted afterward over coffee at a pastry shop. Return to St. Gallen, where I bought a copy of Gogol's Overcoat for a friend.
Without a topcoat, with rolled-up umbrella, Robert ran through the alleys ahead of me, as though he scented something. I didn't argue, and followed like a lamb. When we reached the Stadttheater I saw he was looking for the shadowy Bayrische Bierhalle, which we had visited before. Here he felt quite comfortable, and began to talk about himself, which he rarely did.
He liked oranges, so we bought some at the market, and, from a chattering woman whose left arm was crippled, warm chestnuts. Farewell drink in the train station cafeteria. Robert says several times: "That was an enchanting day, don't you think?" "Perhaps the next time to Bischofszell?"
It occurred to me again that his red, fleshy lips look like the mouth of a fish that's been pulled out of the water--just like they're gasping for air.
From his youth: "From Biel, where I went to elementary school and junior high. I spent three years as a bank trainee at the Kantonalbank, and then in the Spring of 1895 as a clerk in the bank and shipping house of Speyr and Co. in Basel, where I only stayed a few months. My brother Karl, who was working for a window display painter in Stuttgart, told me I should move there. So I replied to an advertisement of the Deutschen Verlagsanstalt, and got a position in their advertising bureau. I stayed there until the autumn of 1896. Then I headed for Zurich, where I found a place with an insurance company, then the Kreditanstalt. I was out of work a lot around then; that is, when I scraped a bit of money together, I gave notice, so that I could write undisturbed. Whoever wants to do something right has to do it full time, it seems to me. Writing in particular needs a man's full strength--it just sucks him dry. So in passing, an arabesque, so to speak, something worthwhile would emerge. At that time on the Spiegelgaße, where Lenin had lived and Georg Büchner had died, Fritz Kocher's Aufsätze was born, including the story about the painter. Another part on the right side of the Trittligaße where you climb the stairs from the upper town. I was very poor, and copied mountains of addresses at the [unemployment office]."
"Do you know why I was never really established as a writer? I'll tell you: I don't have the social instincts. I don't put on enough of an act for people. That's how it is! I understand it completely now. I've indulged myself too much in personal pleasures. It's true--I had an aptitude for vagrancy and scarcely tried to fight against it. This selfishness annoyed the readers of Geschwister Tanner; they believed the writer should not lose himself in subjectivity. They thought it arrogant to take myself so seriously. A writer is mistaken if he thinks the rest of the world is interested in his private affairs."
"My literary debut must have given the impression that I was peeved by upright citizens and didn't value them as I should. They've never forgotten me for that, I'll always be a [big fat zero] for them, a good-for-nothing. I should have included love and sadness, some solemnity and some applause in my books, also a little high romantic, as Hermann Hesse did in Peter Camenzind and in Knulp. Even my brother Karl has told me the same thing, indirectly."
"I'll tell you plainly: in Berlin I was fond of making the rounds of common bars and tingletangles, around the time when I lived with Karl and Muschi the cat in the loft. That's where he painted his Czech girlfriend with the borzoi, but not me. I wandered [foulierte mich] the world from the beginning."
"I was content with my poverty, and lived like a carefree dancer. I was also an industrious drinker. Eventually I became impossible to deal with, and it was only dumb luck that I made my way back to my wonderful sister Lisa in Biel. I never would have achieved such fame in Zurich."
"In Berlin, the Swabian playwright Karl Vollmöller, (who was born the same year I was and was sponsored by Max Reinhardt) told me, as impertinent as could be: 'Walser, you began as a clerk and will always be a clerk.' He also intrigued against me, enthusiastically, at Insel Verlag after Fritz Kocher was published. The result: today he is completely forgotten, as am I."
"At the Institute I reread the Grünen Heinrich--he always pulls me back. Imagine Gottfried Keller, that rascal [de luuschaib], a member of the oversight commission of the asylum Burghoelzli in Zurich! Heinrich Leuthold sank into the earth from embarrassment when they met during his inspection!"
"Now I'm not interested in going back to Biel or Bern. It's quite nice here in the east, don't you think? I find it enchanting. You have seen how warm and cheerful everyone was to us today! I couldn't ask for more. At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible."
"Wasn't this day wonderful? We're certainly no sun worshippers--we also love the fog and shady woods. I know I'll think back many times on the silvery-gray Bodensee, the fairy tale forest in the park, and the sleepy aristocratic town of Rorschach."