Out of the gulfs of self-forgetting
If you read and enjoyed The Tanners, you might want to track down a couple of companion prose pieces:
“Simon: A Love Story,” trans. Susan Bernofsky.
in “Masquerade” and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins, 1990)
Walser told Carl Seelig about The Tanners that “I wrote it in Berlin in three or four weeks, essentially without corrections.” However, “Simon: A Love Story” (1903), shows that Walser was writing about characters who appear in The Tanners more than a year before he left Zurich for Berlin. The story features a young man called Simon, who falls in love with a woman called Klara, who is married to a man named Agappaia, who fires a shot one night in the darkness — all just as it is in the novel. It’s worth reading the story not only for the resemblances but also for the style of the story, which is very different from that of the novel. Here is a taste:
Already the road had begun to ascend, already darkness had begun to fall. Once more Simon strummed his mandolin, upon which he was a magician. The story sits down on a stone to listen, dumbfounded. Meanwhile the author has time to take a rest.
“Writing Geschwister Tanner,” trans. Christopher Middleton.
in Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932 (Nebraska, 2005).
In 1914, seven years after The Tanners was published, Walser, still living in Berlin, looked back on the circumstances in which the novel was written. It’s among the most beautiful pieces Walser ever wrote:
I remember that I began to write the book trifling hopelessly with words, with all sorts of thoughtless sketching and scribbling. — I never hoped to be able to compose something that was serious, beautiful, and good. A sounder train of thought, and, along with it, the courage to create, emerged only slowly, but this all the more rich in secrets, out of the gulfs of self-forgetting and of reckless disbelief. — It was like the present lay as if at my feet, a terrain right there in front of me came to life and I thought in my hands I could hold human activity, all human life, seeing it as vividly as I did. One image succeeded another and ideas played with each other like happy, graceful, well-behaved children. I clung delighted to the frolicking main idea, as as long as I went on busily writing, everything connected.
Any Walser fan should have both these volumes, in addition to Selected Stories.
And also, maybe, some posters.
Sam :: Dec.08.2009 :: The Tanners :: 3 Comments »
I’ve been wishing for a poster version of the Karl Walser painting of Robert dressed as a character from Schiller’s The Robbers (?).
But is it really US$190? And they spelled it “Shoppting Cart” which makes me a little wary.
Maybe that’s the Dutch spelling. Kidding.
Yes, $190, wow.
[...] Medin touches on a few things that caught my attention also, including that wonderful description Walser gave, in a later prose piece, of his experience in writing The [...]