I bought ‘Walks With Walser’ as a gift to myself, a delicacy, a luxury, a memoir of my favorite writer. A sort of literary macaron. I was right and I was mistaken. Because this book is not just a postscript, not only a curiosity. It’s a wonderful book in its own right, and, if you love Robert Walser, it is a necessity, not a footnote.
This is Carl Seelig’s memoir of his walks with Walser, while Walser lived at the asylum in Herisau. Seelig was his champion, literary executor and last friend. No small feat! As this book attests, Seelig took a lot of very arduous long walks in bad weather, with a hero who could be chatty or surly. Seelig’s literary heroism, along with that of Christopher Middleton, is a lot of the reason we still remember and rediscover Walser.
In the 20 years that I’ve been reading Walser, I had a really silly, simplistic, fade-to-black view of his final years -- 27 of them -- in the asylum at Herisau. In my mind it was only a tragedy, just a loss. But of course that is nonsense, in view of Walser, his philosophy, and his writing.
My favorite writer didn’t write for the last 27 years of his life. Turns out he spent many of his last days untangling and sorting twine at the post office. He clearly had no problem with that. Why should I?
As a writer who also lives on the edge of society, I loved Seelig’s account most when it praised living simply, in obscurity, and rescued Walser’s words from oblivion, words that are both help and vindication, for example:
"Wherever I've lived there have always been conspiracies to keep out vermin like myself. Anything that does not fit into one's world is always grandly and haughtily repelled. I never dared to push my way in. I wouldn't even have had the courage to take a peek into that world. And so I lived my own life on the periphery of bourgeois existence, and was that not a good thing? Does my world not also have the right to exist, even if it seems like a poorer world, a powerless world?"
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This memoir by his devotee Seelig is a good portrait of the man of determined innocence whose 'heartbreaking' ...
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 30, 2017
