Book reading indeed requires good intentions - Wuthering Expectations in 2017

Don‘t deliberate too long before you begin to write a sketch.  All kinds of nice ideas can disappear, never to be seen again.  On the other hand, I advise you not to tremble in the face of months, years even, of procrastination, since there’s something quite formative and educational in waiting.

Such good advice from Robert Walser, as found in his 1933 sketch “Something about Eating,” as found in Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories (2016).  I always flail around a lot after a break, as if I have forgotten how to write.

The reading and writing on Wuthering Expectations, now in the winter of its tenth year, will likely look much like it did last year, for a time, at least.  More American literature, more Henry James, more poetry circa World War I.  The chronological drift continues, though, so more of the James will be the dreaded, beloved Late James.  The war poetry will become post-war poetry.  Books from 18XX will become more rare, books from 190X more common.

Twelve or so years ago I began reading 19th century literature intensely, reading through it with a chronological bias – not neurosis, I hope – in order to see how the pieces of the different literary traditions fit together, and how the traditions bumped against each other.  When I started Wuthering Expectations I was just leaving the 1830s, and thus writing about Balzac, Poe, and early Dickens.  Now I am looking forward to the end of the long 19th, the years before the war.  Conrad, Wharton, James; Lawrence, Kafka, Proust.

I spent some time reading Yiddish, Scottish, Portuguese, Scandinavian, Austrian, and Italian literature as a way to study those traditions from a different direction, separated from the drift.  These literatures are small – I mean, in the 19th century and especially in English – and manageable.  The chronological drift was really determined by British, French, American, and Russian literature.

For whatever reason, last year my reading of poetry raced forward into the 1910s.  The story these books of poems are telling remains exciting.  Even the early books of a diehard second-rater like Conrad Aiken, who aspired to the condition of music and thus labeled his poems “symphonies” and “nocturnes” and such nonsense, have been deeply interesting as part of the larger story of poetic Modernism.  So it is likely that I will drift into the 1920s.  Lorca, Eliot, Vallejo, WCW, Rilke, Moore, Yeats, Jeffers – what happened next? is what I keep asking.

The number of books published 18XX that I am excited about reading now and in reality, rather than someday and theoretically, has gotten pretty small.  But I am about ten percent of the way into War and Peace, which I have not read for a long time, in part because I have doubts about its bloggability, and it is among other things making me excited to reread Anna Karenina.  There are no rules here.

Book reading indeed requires good intentions…  I must stress, incidentally, that very few contemporary books, books of today, fall into my hands.

That’s Walser again, from “A Woman’s Book.” “The reader might note that none of this is so terribly significant.”  So true.

The teeming black scrawl - Sebald makes connections

Sebald is discussing the Robert Walser story “Kleist in Thun.”  He describes his discovery, “in a three-volume biography of Gottfried Keller which had almost certainly belonged to a German Jewish refugee,” of an old photograph of a house where Heinrich von Kleist lived and wrote.   Kleist, Keller, Walser, Sebald.  “Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (158-9) Sebald writes, and if anything tells us that I am not reading one of his prose fictions, it is the directness of this statement, which would have been cloaked in some way in the novels.

Eduard Mörike and his friends, as young German radicals, wear “open-necked shirts with wide flowing sleeves, Renaissance berets and suchlike extravagant headgear, sideburns and unkempt locks and those strange small steel-rimmed spectacles which have clearly been the hallmark of the conspiratorial intelligentsia since time immemorial” (76).  That is a joke there at the end.

All of this is visible in a drawing of the young writer and his friends on p. 75 of the essay on Mörike, but also in a drawing of young Gottfried Keller and his radical pals, no less than three of whom, including the author, who is leading the charge with a drum and top hat, wear the little glasses.  “It is difficult to imagine that these five heroes are off to storm the barricades” (96).  The theme is pinged again in the Walser essay, in a passage about his youthful dandyism, his cane and “loud checked suit,” but now “[a] fondness for conspicuous costume and the dangers of indigence often go hand in hand” (137).

Just as an example.  Everything is connected when made to be so by an artist of Sebald’s caliber.

Sebald does hide himself in A Place in the Country, or I think he does, and in one of the most common ways, by writing about visual art.  For example, when describing a painting of a bowl of grapes on a white tablecloth (reproduced in the book), Sebald writes:

The more I look at the paintings of Jan Peter Tripp, the more I realize that beneath the surface illusionism there lurks a terrifying abyss…  The dark background, the white linen cloth with the embroidered monogram – already we have begun to sense that it is spread out not for a wedding breakfast, but on a bier or catafalque.  And what is the business of painting in any case but a kind of pathological investigation in the face of the blackness of death and the white light of eternity? (177)

The question is absurd if taken literally, but I note that writing, and for that matter the act of reading, are generally a matter of a contrast between blackness and whiteness.

The word “pathological” is also questionable, but the previous five essays have been about people for whom writing is in fact pathological or close to it with Walser the most extreme case.  “No one… recognized the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head,” (58) – not even writing, but thought! 

So Walser, at the end of his essay, drifts off in a balloon provided by Nabokov; Keller writes to “contain the teeming black scrawl which everywhere threatens to get the upper hand, in the interest of maintaining a halfway functional personality” (122-3), and Mörike is last seen with his family, “not very content in his role as a poet from which – unlike his clerical calling – he can no longer retire.”  A painter friend

relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting things down which came into his head on special scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterward to take these notes and “tear them up again into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing gown.”  (91)

Today’s Mörike would perhaps instead do what I am about to do.

Unwavering affection - Sebald's A Place in the Country

The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it.  (129)

W. G. Sebald is describing Robert Walser in a chapter of A Place in the Country, his 1998 book of essays on all of my favorite writers:  not just Walser but Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Gottfried Keller, as well as the artist Jan Peter Tripp.  If not my favorites, exactly, I can at least say that I have read something by all of them, which must be rare among English readers although not among serious readers of Sebald.

I can still remember quite clearly how, when I set out from Switzerland for Manchester in the early autumn of 1966, I placed Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, Johann Peter Hebel’s Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds, and a disintegrating copy of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten in my suitcase.  The countless pages I have read since then have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of these books and their authors, and if today I were obliged to move again to another island, I am sure they would once again find a place in my luggage.  This unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller, and Walser was what gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late.  (3)

That last phrase is a little too sad.  The pieces on Rousseau, Mörike and Tripp have different origins but share thematic material with the others.  To point out an obvious one, Rousseau, Keller and Walser are Swiss, while Mörike, Hebel, and Tripp (and Sebald) are from nearby parts of Germany.

A Place in the Country is not a work of fiction, but it is written in the hybrid style Sebald had developed in his novels.  It is easy enough to imagine Sebald making it fiction.  It is no surprise to see, for example, Nabokov (another Swiss writer) make an appearance in the Walser essay, although this time as a writer, as a source of quotations, rather than as the ghost who floats through The Emigrants.  If Sebald’s fictional prose works are not exactly novels, this late work of criticism gestures towards fiction, more so than, I think, his next book, also criticism, On the Natural History of Destruction (1999).  This book is rather a history of destruction through writing.  Please revisit the description of Robert Walser up above.

Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling translated the text and added thoughtful notes.  She is, I am amazed to see, now translating Sebald’s earlier critical essays on Austrian writers, thornier stuff than in this book.  I never thought any of this would be translated – Hebel! Stifter! You gotta be kidding me! – but I could not be happier to be wrong.  I will wander in it for a couple more days.  Terry Pitts at Vertigo has, as one might guess, already written a piece on each chapter, beginning with Hebel.

Robert Walser quivers and startles with worldly life - Walser in Berlin

Robert Walser granted me a little break from Vienna with the newspaper sketches collected in Berlin Stories (1907-17, tr. mostly by Susan Bernofsky).  Walser was a young writer from the provinces let loose in the big city, and he sounds like it.  He walks and wanders all over the city, inside and out, and finds it all astounding.

Trevor Mookse wrote a piece a year ago that emphasized Walser’s energy.  I should avoid using any of his quotations.  He picks out the 1907 “Friedrichstrasse,” a fantasy about a street, which begins:

Up above is a narrow strip of sky, and the smooth dark ground below looks as if it’s been polished by human destinies.  The buildings to either side rise boldly, daintily, and fantastically into architectural heights.  The air quivers and startles with worldly life.  (9)

In that last sentence, please, as I did in the title, replace “The air” with “Robert Walser.”  I have some doubts about “polished by human destinies,” and some more about “architectural heights.”  What is on this street?  “[G]aping chasms… indescribable contradictions,” “countless heads,” the “siren Pleasure,” “foolishness.”  Walser could be spinning this thread about any busy street anywhere with little difference, and in fact writers around Europe were publishing similar Baudelaire-inspired flights in newspapers all over Europe.

Walser’s Berlin does not often have much Berlin in it, is what I am saying.  They are impressions of the city.  Peter Altenberg’s sketches, to pick a contemporary example, tell me more about Vienna.  Not necessarily a lot more.  Paris Spleen is not so informative about Paris, either.

If I just knew these pieces I would not know how strange Walser’s writing could be; knowing Walser’s strangeness the pieces perhaps seem stranger than they really are.  Or perhaps they are really are strange, perhaps my knowledge makes them strange.

The last quarter of the book contains pieces written after Walser had left Berlin, from 1914 to 1917, and whether the result of distance or some other stylistic change they become more concentrated and specific in their strangeness.  They become more like the Walser I admired from stories like “The Walk” and so on, all from roughly the same time.  Sebald’s Walser, as seen at the end of “Frau Scheer,” about a horrible German landlady, a subject of inexhaustible interest:

I still remember one New Year’s Eve when I stood together with Frau Scheer at the open window.  Everything outdoors was swathed in thick fog.  We were listening to the New Year’s bells.  The following autumn she fell ill, and the doctors recommended an operation… [I will snip her plainly described death and will]  As for myself, I soon left town.  I felt the urge to revisit my distant homeland, the sight of which I’d had to do without for so many years.  (133)

Strangest of all, the last story, “A Homecoming in the Snow” from 1917, although nominally about Walser’s return, following that “urge,” from Berlin to Switzerland for Christmas, feels like it could have been written about Walser’s own death in the Christmas snow in 1956.

I was not wearing a coat.  I considered the snow itself a splendidly warm coat.

Soon I would hear the language of my parents, brothers, and sisters being spoken once more, and I would set foot again upon the dear soil of my native land. (139)

Of course Jochen Greven, the Walser scholar who made and ordered the selections in Berlin Stories, did this on purpose, but still.  Strange, strange.

There was plenty of mustard - a Robert Walser story found by chance

Yesterday in a comment Caravanas Ricardo joked that he could count the Robert Walser short stories he had read on one finger.  Me too, before I read Selected Stories.  Although Richard has also read a Walser novel, so he is way ahead of me.

The Tom Friedman show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was twelve years ago.  Friedman is a highly conceptual sculptor whose signature is the creation of objects that should not exist.  A pencil shaving made from a single pencil, or a large sheet of paper on which he wrote every word from a dictionary, or a self-portrait carved from an aspirin.  That sort of thing.  I eventually bought a book about Friedman, the 2001 Phaidon Tom Friedman, just to have something to show people.  No, really, “Two identically wrinkled sheets of paper,” they're right here.

The book also included favorite prose selected by the artist, and one of Friedman's choices was Robert Walser’s “The Dinner Party,” 1919, tr. Susan Bernofsky.  So that was my one finger.

It was a delightful dinner party.  There was plenty of mustard, and the whole works was accompanied by the finest wine.  The soup was admittedly a bit thick, and the fish contributed nothing to the entertainment, but no one took it amiss.

That is the first one-eighth of the four paragraph story.  It gets odd fast.  The emphasis on mustard is bizarre, but the out-of-place rhetoric is also immediately visible:  the banal opening, calling a fancy dinner “the whole works,” the fussiness about the fish.

Duck follows (“[a]mong other things”), and cheese and coffee.  The narrator becomes poetical (“The liqueur made us swim in a more beautiful age”) perhaps because a poet recites some verses.  Or else it is the booze.  I have now summarized the story through paragraph two.  On to number three, which begins:

One of the guests was frozen.  All attempts to being him to life were in vain.  The ladies’ dresses were magnificent, they revealed quite a lot, thus leaving nothing to be desired.

At this point, I see for the first time in this sketch the similarity to his great admirer Kafka.  Coming from the wrong direction, I begin to see Walser as Kafkaesque, although the reverse is more accurate.  The frozen man at the dinner party could be the subject of his own parable.

The last paragraph:

In parting I slipped the butler a hundred-franc tip.  He returned it with the remark that he was accustomed to better wages.  I asked him to be content with less just this once.  Outside a car awaited me, which then whisked me away, and so off I drove, and no doubt am still doing so to this day.

Everything always reminds one of its opposite - not writing about Robert Walser

What an idea I had, to spend a few days writing about Robert Walser.  Some other few days, I hope.

I read through the 1982 Selected Stories, tr. Christopher Middleton and others, in part because, directed here by Fernando Pessoa, I was looking for literary clerks.  A cold trail is what I got for my trouble, although “Kienast” (1917) features “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything,” a fine Bartleby-like sentiment, except he is openly mean, greedy, and selfish, which is quite a ways from Melville’s transcendent character or the complex interior life of Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares.  Perhaps I should have tried the Walser novel with the promising title of The Assistant.

But it is Selected Stories I read, so it is Selected Stories that I will write about, despite the fact that I have so little to say about it.  Walser’s main tool is dissociation – the story is told through its gaps and breaks.  “Everything always reminds one of its opposite” Walser, a proto-deconstructionist, writes in “Snowdrops.”  Even in a little sketch, just a page or two, the little leaps and kinks make Walser’s writing not simply hard to interpret, but even worse hard to remember.  “The She-Owl” (1921):

A she-owl in a ruined wall said to herself:  What a horrifying existence.  Anyone else would be dismayed, but me, I am patient.  I lower my eyes, huddle.  Everything in me and on me hangs down like gray veils, but above me, too, the stars glitter; this knowledge fortifies me.

Hmm, perhaps I have found a clerk, disguised by metaphor.  But with the next paragraph, the voice shifts.  The “I” has clothes.  Yes, a metaphor.  The narrator is a woman, growing or grown old, wearing large glasses, reading a poet “whose finesse makes him fit to be digested by owls.”  This is pretty much the story, the page-long piece.

I have made Walser sound so gloomy when in fact he is so much fun. Mookse Gripes, reading Walser’s recent Berlin Stories collection, wonders where the exuberance comes from:  “one cannot help but notice the vibrancy, the wonder at life.”  Walser’s writing is actively imaginative and goofy.  He writes about a man with a pumpkin head, or a balloon trip to the sun, or an essay on trousers:

A skirt is noble, awe-inspiring, and has a mysterious character.  Trousers are also incomparably more indelicate and they suffuse the masculine soul, to some extent, with a shudder.  Again, on the other hand, why should horror not grip us modern people, slightly?

Much of the fun in Walser is right there:  the overly formal register that is not quite right for the subject, and the swerve towards “horror,” which is immediately followed by the hope that women will someday wear extremely tight trousers that would “nestle” against “the soft, rounded flesh of the leg”:  “I would die of delight, or at least hit the floor in a swoon.”

So it seems I could write about Walser all day just by leafing through this book.  What do poets like?  “Every true poet likes dust.”  Someday I will spend more time sifting through Walser’s dust.

The Best Books of the Year - 1909

Every year at Wuthering Expectations at this time, I look back 200 years and mourn the heroic deaths of all of the good books that have been culled by the fine-toothed winnowing machine that is time.

Or I am mocking people who make Best of 2009 lists.  Whatever.  That's not my point.

Perhaps I am cheating by going back so far.  Perhaps the first decade of the 19th century was unusually bad for literature.  That might be true.  But in my judgment, there is more to it.  The winnowing process, however it works, has pretty much run its course after 200 years.  Older books can still receive more or less attention - the process never entirely ends - but much of what will be, is.  Look back one hundred years, and the process is more visible.

Warning: from, here on out, I don't know what I'm talking about.  Nevertheless, my guess about the current status of the literature of 1909 gives me the following list of fiction:

Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Jack London, Martin Eden
H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay.

I have read none of those.  I have read Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, and Lamed Shapiro's single best story is from 1909. 

I don't know how to judge the children's books that came out this year:  Gene Stratton-Porter's The Girl of the Limberlost, or Lucy Montgomery's Anne of Avonlea, or Frank Baum's The Road to Oz (altough I have read that one).   Kids' books follow a different path. These are all still read, certainly, probably more than those Wells or London novels.

William Carlos Williams's first book of poetry was self-published in 1909.  Ezra Pound released two little collections.  My Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, Third Edition, politely ignores both books, as does the Library of America Selected Poems of WCW.  The first book of the modern Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos seems to be genuinely important, but now I have moved from ignorance to total ignorance.  How about Thomas Hardy's Time's Laughingstock, and Other Verses?  Or George Meredith's Last Poems?

I want to read all of these, at least the one's that are for adults.  But I doubt many will be read by non-scholars one hundred years from now.  Meaning, I predict that Tevye the Dairyman will still be read, and that there will be Sholem Aleichem scholars, and that some of them will read dusty old copies of Wandering Stars.  Same goes for some of the others, maybe all of them.

Have I cheated again, by picking a year that I knew in advance was thin?  Yes.

The 1909 painting is Both Members of This Club, by George Bellows.  Visitors to Washington, DC can see it in the National Gallery.