'Modest Modernist'

...His short stories and novels display a sense of irony as developed as any of his contemporaries...

...Born to a shopkeeper in small-town, German-speaking Switzerland, he was taken out of school at 14 and apprenticed as a clerk...

...The tension between ages, religious and secular, is what makes modernist art so powerful...

...Just compare Walser's modest beauty with a few lines from Rilke's "First Elegy," written only four years later: "For beauty is nothing / But the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure / And we are so awed because it serenely disdains / To destroy us...

...Walser once bragged that he never blotted a line, and it seems that we should believe him: He apparently wrote The Assistant in six weeks...

...But the dialectic of humility in which Walser takes part has, for most of literary history, been driven by religion...

...Soon everything Joseph beheld appeared to have become a natural, quiet, benevolent dream, not such a terribly beautiful one, no: a modest dream, and yet it was beautiful...

...But the great demands that a higher power places on humility has driven authors to some of the most remarkable extremes in fiction: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chaucer's Pardoner, Dostoevsky, and in the modern period, Hamsun and Beckett...

...Where the Karamazovs dream of killing their father, Joseph takes the entire novel to ponder whether he should quit his job—or even demand his salary...

...Kafka, who was mistaken for a Walser pseudonym when young, provides the most salient comparison...

...his experience was mediated not by the vast superstructures of the modernists but "emotion recollected in tranquility...

...All the best artists affected it, and while there exists a certain inherent humility in the Flauber-tian mot juste—constantly supplicating before the oracle of lan-guage—the model artist of the time is Nietzsche's overman, the master experimenter: "Here a large mass of second nature has been added...

...That's a harsh judgment, especially for a writer so tragic as Walser, who lived out the last few decades of his life in an asylum...

...The premise is almost promising: A hapless young clerk, Joseph Marti, begins working for one Herr Tobler, a half-mad inventor who fritters away his inheritance on such promising ventures as the Marksmen's Vending Machine, a clever device which spits out "not a little slab of chocolate, peppermint or the like, but rather a pack of live ammunition...

...Hence, while the Romantic ideal was the peasCharles Peterson is a writer in Brooklyn...

...philosophically, pride comes down to the problem of skepticism, doubting whether other people really exist...

...But it's not bad...

...And yet Walser is a fine writer, and this pairing only suggests the strange paradox at the heart of his sensibility: how he combines everyday life with pedestrian prose in a way that somehow redeems both...

...Light and lovely" looks like a cliche even if it isn't, and the list that follows sounds tossed off...

...Although Jakob von Gunten and many of the sketches have already been translated, this is the first time The Assistant has appeared in English—a hundred-year delay that, despite the novel's merits, comes as little surprise...

...You can see here what makes Walser so attractive and so difficult to define...

...One time he walked up to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great poet and librettist, and inquired whether he might for a moment forget that he was famous...

...ant poet, the nightingale-like spirit who would naturally compose inimitable ballads, the same ideal, transposed a hundred years into the future, sounds like the setup for a bad joke: a fullblown modernist suddenly walking out of the countryside, fractured narrative in hand...

...Wordsworth, at first, just wanted to write a better folk song...

...Dalloway, Nick Adams or Joseph K. But Joyce and Woolf redeem everyday life by pushing their prose to some of the greatest extremes in literature, while Hemingway and Kafka strip their writing down to its ennobling essentials...

...But when Walser moved to Berlin to join his brother Karl, the illustrator, he felt out of place in literary society and quickly fell to playing pranks...

...a lower-class wife, in that of Joyce...

...This alone makes Walser unusual, since few modernists possessed so little education...

...I took great pleasure in Walser's writing, finding him a relief from many of his overbearing contemporaries...

...What makes Robert Walser such a difficult writer to categorize is that he is, perhaps, the sole instance of a mongrel species: the modest modernist...

...James Wood has argued that such dialectics of pride—where "pride . . . is the sin of humble people and humility is the punishment of proud peo-ple"—almost only occur in religious writers, or writers deeply affected by religion...

...For those who can't submit, this absolute demand leads to a cycle of despair...

...The modernists still rely on the vagaries of inspiration, but they try to take their fate in hand, terraforming the soul to produce works of genius, as well as hubris...

...there a piece of original nature has been removed...

...Only before God must all abase themselves, absolutely humble...

...At parties, Walser was well known for his baffling backwoods jokes...

...Refusing to push characters to extremes is not so terribly unusual among modernists...

...without that tension, the edifice crumbles...

...Coetzee to Sven Birkerts to Susan Sontag, warn that not liking Walser amounts to an inability to appreciate the small—a kind of arrogant repulsion at the insistently humble...

...Still, while I enjoy Walser's playful style, I find it difficult to celebrate his achievement...

...Pride and humility crop up all the time in civil society, but they are rarely taken to extremes...

...Uncharitably, you might say that Walser pairs the boredom of Joyce's plots with the hack prose of Dostoevsky...

...Untroubled by religion or philosophy, tepidly dissatisfied yet afraid to challenge himself, it often seems as if Walser is the first instance of the Last Man in his artistic guise—a beautiful sensibility with a constant bourgeois fear of asserting himself...

...Walser nonetheless found continued success as a writer, placing regular feuil-letons—short prose sketches—in the newspapers and publishing three novels in quick succession: The Tanner Family (1907), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909...

...For the Romantics, the humble, unchanging countryside supplied the fertile yet fickle ground for the imagination...

...It's tempting to think of Walser as the worthy shadow of these better-known authors, but he's the first instance of another type entirely...

...That might not sound like an especially rare beast, let alone the literary equivalent of a chimera...

...Furthermore, the provinciality of the Swiss is archetypal in Germany...

...But there is something troubling about his appeal...

...But the primitive, while experienced with the humble directness of the aficionado (Hemingway's bullfights) is then appropriated into works of art that the bullfighters find boring...

...Once he and his brother even trapped Frank Wedekind—the author of Spring Awakening—in a revolving door and spun him around and around, shouting "muttonhead...

...thrown into a cab, he'd hop out the other side and return to the salon...

...To some degree, the life of Robert Walser is that joke, or as close as you could get in the early 20th century...

...Such cycles are not necessarily religious...

...After all, the flip side of modernism is the obsession with the primitive: African art, in the case of Picasso...

...But as these characters progress through nearly 300 pages, the plot goes nowhere and Walser, ever humble, refuses to gin up interest by pushing Joseph and Tobler to the defiant psychological extremes of, say, Dostoevsky...

...indeed, it's almost very good—a compliment that carries an insult and yet, as you reach the end, it somehow seems arrogant to demand more...

...Just think of Leopold Bloom or Mrs...

...yet they remain provin-cially unrefined...

...Consider the following passage from The Assistant: Everything was so gentle, so overcast, so light and lovely—it all became just as large as it was small, just as near-at-hand as distant, just as extensive as minute and just as dainty as significant...

...famously intransigent, with an accent that sounds hickish, they are considered even more backward than the Bavarians...

...If Rilke sums up the arrogant side of modernist aesthetics, Walser suggests that the same sensibility need not be nearly so high-strung...

...Fortunately, two of Walser's older brothers became highly successful— one as a professor, the other as an illus-trator—and the budding young author managed to place a collection of short pieces with Insel Verlag, the publishers of Rilke and Hofmannsthal...

...in politics, one might hope to know one's place...

...Almost all of his defenders, from J.M...

...Where Kafka's insistently austere style made the greatest argument for his own nobility, picking up the pieces to create defiantly artistic works, Walser fell to mimicking and mocking his surroundings, toying with the fragments of culture like a child...