The civilised world is the rushing world. It lays before us like a responsibility or an unfinished task. That is its vanity, even if every effort is made not to boast about it. The people who try to be civilised are civilised people, or rather they are trying to be. It is as if the future is caught up in a repetition of words that seems to be saying the same thing but isn’t. Robert writes such things on the centenary of the birth of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898), the Swiss poet and historical novelist whose story of the Thirty Years War is a tale of protestantism doing business with treason and murder. In the civilised world, meanwhile, centennial editions published in Meyer’s honour are placed on prominent display in the bookshop window. Outside, Bern officials observe a mannered reticence in their dealings with others, for example journalists. Theatre-folk quarrel, and a white-stockinged girl kicks along in red high heels. French is spoken. The sky, or rather the skitter-brained author, goes around hatless. Like any other, Bern is a place where—as one goes along—it is unnecessary to remark on the smallness of children, despite the obvious existence of larger ones; where a little time might be taken to read, in the liberal press, an article on a recent railway accident; where poems insist on being written; where warm, autumn sunlight splashed upon the clean-swept streets and buildings encourages the imagination to holiday in the hills and vineyards, the island forests and lakes of the Swiss countryside. Someone is cycling back from the fruit and vegetable market, and a beer wagon passes by. Lunch was taken several hours ago, three to be exact. In the meantime, a young man is rightly rebuffed for the verses he has written to a girl whose gloves stretch over tiny fingers and hands. The world rushes as much from impatience as anything else. It folds in on itself at every point, touching everywhere without quite coming together.
This piece was from the year that Robert wrote to me from Bern asking that I send money to secure a copy of his latest book, and suggesting I encourage others at Bellelay to do the same. The price he mentioned was awfully high. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Die Rose was to be the last book whose publication Robert oversaw personally, and the first for several years, full of little yarns and essays, many of them new, walking stories and pocket-change pieces, recountings of the penny-dreadfuls for which Robert had acquired a certain taste, picked up at the kiosk and chewed over with a German tongue. Die Rose saw him at a vanishing point. It told lewd tales that mixed up boys and girls with little self-portraits of a writer suffering confused desires. It had tipsyish encounters full of little kisses and delicate evasions. Hesse wrote a lukewarm review. The publisher had splashed out on full-page advertisements in a number of places, but the book didn’t sell. Robert’s novels were now behind him by more than a decade and a half, and he was in the process of being forgotten.
But I’m years ahead of myself. Let’s go back.
Bern, Murifeldweg 14. 15th February, 1921. Dear Frau Mermet—The city’s outskirts, to the east of the Aare, are full of newly developing districts and the streets are smartly bourgeois. It’s only now, after a month and a half of being here, that I’m writing to you. You’ll say I’m neglecting you a bit, and I can’t argue with that, but I’m not just sitting in my room in Biel like before. I spend the whole day in the archive down in the cellar of the old Rathaus, leafing through old writings, old files, letters, reports, ordinances and decrees. Making indexes, coming home quite late in the evening after only a short spell outside during lunchtimes. I took a stroll to Laupen on Saturday, so I’m getting to know my surroundings quite well. But I don’t have much other news. Those who work hard have very little to tell. If you’re interested, I can report that I recently lost a tooth, and now I have to walk on God’s dear earth with a considerable gap, like a small child. Many would take that rather badly. A terrible great hole, like an unfilled bit of a bookshelf. Years earlier, during the war, Robert had written a story about toothache in which the pain had sent him roaring into the fields like King Lear, dashing home to strike his head against the wall and slap his own face like Sancho Panza when finding his donkey was lost, smashing up valuable chairs from the Biedermeier period, screaming in the night and gulping down the finest cognac to no effect, and then taking a knife to himself before finally visiting a dentist and getting embroiled in an irritable yet flirtatious exchange with the nurse in which, at last, he gladly confesses to being the poor writer they’d taken him for at the surgery.
There are lots of pretty girls here, Robert tells me in his letter, but everyone is always in such a hurry, and that’s why you don’t get much out of it. At least I’m happy that I work every day—it gives me a good conscience. How are you, Frau Mermet? How is it that you don’t write anything about your stockings? Are you playing the long-suffering liverwurst? If I didn’t know you better, that’d be a tragedy. P.S. Don’t send any tea to Bern, I didn’t come here to drink tea, although if you have a nice leftover sausage that’d be another matter. R.W.
*
Later in 1921, Robert was to write a series of short pieces on the topic of ‘news’ in which he mentions a magnificent tooth falling out. The author—in receipt of a salary and bequeathed a certain sum by a dead uncle—is now well-dressed, sporting a tip-top hat. He settles his debts without delay, attends lectures on Dostoevsky and psychiatry, and goes to the theatre. Up to his neck in old paperwork, correspondence, regulations and directories, he enjoys a clear conscience. The world is open and invites a sense of belonging, even if his heart is no longer young. He says he feels at home. Self-confidence grows to the point of conceit, he has parquet flooring in his room, and perhaps only Hesse leads a more genteel life. A broken mirror does nothing to dim the spirit, he eats whipping cream and is occasionally happy, walking out in the evenings to distract himself, since he cannot write. Fleeting relationships and the thought of the future are not unpleasant; he writes of visiting little towns by the Aare and a brief exchange of letters with a woman, now apparently at an end; Robert wonders whether he’s already a bit bored of all this. In the next instalment, over-imbibers in the audience at a burlesque theatre are pandered to by the owner, young women affectedly smoke cigarettes, somebody loudly proclaims themselves the stupidest person alive—obviously incapable of considering they might be mistaken, quips Robert. The waitresses smile while the cash register rattles. On a different subject, recently I hiked to
THUN
A continuous operation of the legs, covering distance upon distance, past several villages, through a forest, in Heimberg the inns sport signs commemorating Swiss history, Wilhem Tell and a Rütli scene celebrating the formation of the Confederacy. The sight of Thun castle announces Robert’s return to the place he once served as an office clerk. Like a tourist he eats cake, window-shops, walks up the castle steps, in the churchyard catches the drifting sound of a rehearsal for a performance. The mountains shimmer in the sunshine while he visits the island where Kleist stayed. The last instalment features a little art exhibition, the painter emerging from behind a screen to welcome the occasional guest; Robert meets an unobtrusive lawyer, about which nothing is said; he heralds a wonderful night’s sleep in a pull-out bed; suavely drinks liquer with an American in a hotel lounge; and wears a pocket watch. Then he talks about a
NEWSPAPER
Whether or not to read it, since he does not care a jot about it—although it fascinates him just the same. Its unimportance proving compelling. Like an acquaintance—and everybody has acquaintances. They cause a certain degree of aversion, don’t they?
Bern, Murifeldweg 14. 18th April, 1921. I still have to thank you for the sausage you sent me, Frau Mermet. It’s been some time since then, so I’ve been a bit hesitant to write, which I hope you’ll excuse. I’m unsure how long I’ll stay here in Bern, but it’s been heartening to know I can return to another kind of work than writing. I take a brisk walk every Saturday and have got to know the surroundings very well. Since I last wrote I’ve visited the Emmenthal and been to Sumiswald and Huttwil and Burgdorf, and last Saturday I was in Thun. The little town looked so lovely with its elegant castle rising proudly above the square. On Sundays I usually drink coffee with Fanny. Her young gentleman, Arnold, isn’t at all well. He recently got the flu and is in a very bad way. Life is certainly palatable in Bern. but you’ll say you like Basel better and feel as though I went to America. It might seem that way because I was in Biel for so long, in room no. 27 at the Blaues Kreuz with the hotel governesses and chambermaids. One of the latter, the second to last, Rita, was nice and funny and such easy company when she came into my room and sat on the windowsill and chatted, always bringing another book for me to read. Last summer was the loveliest of all the summers I spent at the Blaues Kreuz. I had a different bouquet of flowers on the table every week, each one more beautiful than the last. There were so many flowers on the mountain in Biel. Being allowed to clean the Sunday boots for one of the maids, that was so charming. I wrote well last summer, too, things I hope to publish this year. All in all, I’ll never regret staying in Biel for so long. Yesterday I wrote to one of the young schoolmistresses I knew in Ticino, whom I visited after the war. She told me in a letter that she’d sat and read Geschwister Tanner to a friend of hers, a convalescing seamstress. I think of you always. Warm greetings to my sister Lisa, R.W.
Bern, Murifeldweg 14. 26th April, 1921. Monday evening. A prompt reply to my letter. Robert has taken a stroll to Hofwil, where the Bernese patrician Emanuel von Fellenberg founded an institute dedicating itself to the education of all—rich and poor, locals and foreigners alike. Hofwil is set on a hill, he tells me, above a small lake surrounded by forest and villages, very near to Münchenbuchsee and Zollikofen. Returning to Bern at six o’clock in the evening, Robert met a smartly dressed lady with a beautiful face, spoiled apparently by a moustache as black as shoe polish. The day before, there had been a motorcycle race and a dog show. Arnold is still very unwell, and it’s likely he’ll be sent away to recover. Robert pays me the compliment of praising my resilience—my good health seems to him a sign of my capacity for love. I’d invited him to Bellelay for Pentecost and he cheerfully replies: ‘I am yours to command’.
*
In a short essay on Ferdinand Hodler’s 1885 painting ‘The Beech Forest’, published in Prager Presse in December 1925, Robert remarks on a monument recently erected in Bern to commemorate the Swiss aviation pioneer Oskar Bider. He expresses irritation at the tendency to scorn memorials like this one and to deride the artists commissioned to make them—in this case the sculptor Herman Haller, who once made a bust of Robert’s brother Karl. Those who throw in their two-cents-worth assume that the meaning of such pieces should be immediately clear. Public art should be absolutely transparent to everybody. The merest prospect of debate is a scandal. A reproduction of the Hodler picture, meanwhile, is discovered in a bookshop window near to the monument. Robert recalls seeing the original hanging in its owner’s home, in a sort of maid’s room. Well, paintings do have to get hung somewhere, he says, it isn’t a picture for the parlour. While eating open-faced sandwiches and drinking tea, he indulges in elegant conversation with his figurine of a hostess about the Swiss poet Carl Spitteler. In the painting, meanwhile, a dense mass of slender trunks reach up into a pale sky. The branches are almost bare against the cold winter sunlight. They practically rasp, rattle and shiver in the cold. One sees a forest edging forward into the field of vision almost like the frozen advance of a dying army, except that for Robert it is so blue with cold as to verge on green. Nevertheless, almost involuntarily we sink our hands in our pockets at the sight of it. In the painting, shadows make paths into a darkening interior where it is as though we are already invisibly lost—even while seeing far, far beyond the forest into the most distant distance. It is as if the writer is stirred by the prospect of an artistic image infinitely disappearing before our eyes, and our gaze vanishing within it.
On other occasions Robert spoke warmly of watercolourists, whom he described as the feuilletonists of the visual arts. They’re suited to the painting of butterflies or short pieces for the piano, he says. Watercolours often miniaturise, so they can nicely capture the cloud-topped mountain villages of the Alps when viewed from a distance. Writing in the newspaper about an exhibition of Belgian art presented in Bern in 1926, Robert starts with the appropriate remark about public sponsorship by the two nations, which dictates the choice of venue and the selection of pieces. But soon enough he drifts into an adjacent gallery showing older Bernese paintings from the Renaissance. One of the artists was a provincial governor in the same region where Robert undertook a brief stint of military service during the war. He stops in front of an old Belgian painting depicting of the fall of Icarus. The artist Brueghel, who trudged across the Swiss Alps in order to behold the public splendour of the Italian cities, portrays his subject through a dizzying drop downwards. It is as if the artist’s own high ambitions go to his head, and he falls out of the sky as though falling from a mountain.
Long before, in the summer of 1913, Robert had published a short text in Die Zukunft about a painting by his brother made ten years earlier. The Dream is set on a vaulted bridge that arches over dark water beneath the lamplights of the city. Two figures are crossing over—an improbably tall red-headed lady dressed in floating chiffon-pink going hand in hand with a pierrot almost half her size, wearing narrow pantaloons, a wide-sleeved white blouse with large black buttons, and a dunces cap. The woman towers in front of dark silhouetted trees. Her black-gloved fingers grasp the boy firmly but seem to cause him to float up, a puppet yanked by its strings, a blank paper cut-out lifted to the light. The figures seem to glide into the foreground, their heads bowed like shadows of the dead. Robert dreams he’s the puppet boy of this dark, beautiful dream. Parentless, alone, without an inkling of hope, without thought, he is as free as air, joyously lost, inhuman. Just a scent, a feeling. A small thing that climbs into the woman’s heart, she as high as a pink-iced celebration cake, veined with sweet pink fringes. He swims in pleasure, tiptoes through space. He is her child, her mouse, a pocket trophy.
Bellelay is out on 6th May, published by UCL Press. It will be available as an open access title. You can get a copy here.
Simon Wortham is the author of a trilogy of novels published by Ma Bibliotheque (The small, Early Mass, and Berlin W) and has published books on a range of topics in modern European philosophy and literature.
minor literature[s] 