Editor’s Note: After scouring for all the Gottfried Keller short fiction I could find in English translation—which, truth be told, was scattered across a handful of rather minimally inclusive collections—a complete English edition of his shorter works is something devoutly to be wished for (especially the Zurich Tales, only three stories of which have appeared, and Epigrams, never translated so far as I can tell.)
The German Classics, Volume XIV: Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Joseph Victor Widmann, Carl Spitteler. Edited by Kuno Francke. New York: The German Publication Society, 1913-14. Read here.
Seldwyla Folks: Three Singular Tales by the Swiss Poet Gottfried Keller. Translated by Wolf von Schierbrand. New York: Brentano’s, 1919. Read here.
Gottfried Keller: Stories. Edited by Frank G. Ryder. The German Library: Volume 44. General Editor Volkmar Sander. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1982.
hat a retiring view we have of the Swiss! Cloistered up in their mod-furnished mountain cabins amid snow-laden pines, nestled between (and partaking of the cultures of) three lands, famously slow to become entangled in wars, confidential bankers, supremely practical creators of the world’s greatest pocket knife, and yet the Swiss are remote from us and therefore easily forgotten. We picture Switzerland as jagged peaks of ice and snow, rustic valleys, supine cows, and mild cheese. Switzerland is not of the world; it’s what Heaven would look like if brought to Earth. And Switzerland’s writers seem no less unworldly: The best known Swiss writer at the moment is Robert Walser, whose prose is as loose as an alehouse conversation and as heady as the thin alpine air. There is no Swiss writer who stuns you with stately poses or pronounces furiously on all the corruption in the world, no immortals like Tolstoy or George Eliot or Goethe.
Well, there is Gottfried Keller. The 19th century Swiss writer has his fans, as least in Germany. One German critic at the turn of the century called him “the greatest creative genius in our literature since Goethe.” Kuno Francke, editor of the 1912-1913 German Classics series, calls Keller “one of the most original figures since Goethe, a master of style worthy to be classed with the great names of all ages.” Much more recently (in 2000), Georg Lukacs wrote that Keller “clearly ranks as one of the great authors of world literature.” And if you are after a modern angle, well, W.G. Sebald wrote that “in no other literary work of the 19th century can the developments that have determined our lives down to the present day be traced as clearly as in that of Gottfried Keller.”
Strong reviews, but we still haven’t answered the main question: What’s in this (clearly admired) writer that should interest readers in 2017? If I may offer my preliminary findings, let me say that Keller is an extraordinarily imaginative writer; his descriptions of persons, places, and things are beautiful and intricate; he is good on a variety of subjects, and will make you laugh out loud when he goes off about one of those subjects. He is a master of the long short story (read: novella), and brings something like the psychological insight of one of the Russian masters while being a touch less realist and a bit more of a good-humored Romantic than your Tolstoys and your Dostoyevskis. He’s written–in “Romeo and Juliet of the Village,” “Clothes Make the Man,” “The Lost Smile,” “The Abused Love Letters,” and “Banner of the Upright Seven”–some of the most lovely, well-wrought, and tender love stories I’ve ever read. You’re not sold yet? Okay, the most obvious thing to do, from a publicist’s perspective, is to provide a compressed, backcover-style summary of Keller’s various conceits, which would read something like this:
In “Three Righteous Combmakers,” three fastidious tradesmen of that profession meet their doppelgangers and all three compete Amazing Race-style for the love (and generous wealth) of a widowed beauty. In “Clothes Make the Man,” a poor tailor wearing fancy clothes gets caught up in an elaborate misunderstanding and suddenly learns what it’s like to be treated like nobility. In “Spiegel the Cat,” a talking cat tries to regain his inheritance while negotiating life-or-death contract terms with a local sorcerer in need of his fat. In “The Abused Love Letters,” a woman frees herself from her demanding literateur husband’s penchant for turgid philosophical love prose by tricking an admiring schoolteacher into unknowingly writing equally grandiloquent love letters to her husband. In “Dietegen,” a rescue from execution by a town of sadistic law-and-order freaks turns into a supernatural tale of romance and betrayal etc. etc.
But this approach to describing Keller’s appeal synonymizes him with our own genre-bending conceits writers, their writing sharply workshopped, their back covers veritable pegboards of promising hooks; and quite unlike that milieu, Keller, a “master of style” though he may be, never hurries to reach his endpoint, but instead leisurely develops the story in ways that tonally convey the now-happy, now-hilarious, now-wistful vicissitudes of time. Most stories are concerned with getting their characters through the day, but Keller often shepherds characters through entire lives. What less capacious writers might feel to be a story’s natural endpoint, for the more audacious Keller is just the branching-off of another richly developed story-line. The narrative breath, as it were, of this storyteller calls for one more turn, one more unexpected place for the plot to go, which causes his stories to rather dilate in length. (His short stories are really novellas, and his first novel, Green Henry [Der Grun Heinrich] sprawls out to over 700 pages.)
Yet one never feels that Keller has padded out his narratives with superfluities; he writing is copious, not diffuse. It ripples with instances, funny little essays in which one angled attribute of a character is proven repeatedly, as in this paragraph in which he shows the superficiality of Jobst, the first of “The Three Righteous Combmakers”:
But if he did decide to take a walk, he first spent an hour or two fussing with his toilet, then took his walking cane and strode stiffly out before the city gate. Here he stood around, humble and bored, and conducted boring conversations with others who were lounging about and likewise had nothing better to do: poor old Seldwylers for the most part, who could no longer afford to go to that tavern. With them he liked to take up his post before a house that was just going up, before a young field of grain, a weather-beaten apple tree or before a new yarn factory and expound endlessly on the utility of these things, their cost, yearly prospects, the state of the crops, about all of which he hadn’t the vaguest idea. But that was not the point; in this way he could pass the time in the cheapest and, to his way of thinking, most interesting fashion, and the older people always spoke of him as that polite, sensible Saxon; for they also didn’t have the vaguest idea.
This passage comes immediately after Keller has already mocked Jobst for performing his job as a combmaker “soberly” and with “a lack of imagination.” Jobst schmoozes with these older people (today someone like me would contemptuously say he’s “networking”) and they get together to talk superficial shop about things that none of them really understand; and the attitude that finds this hilarious and worthy of mockery is a familiar one to me; you might say I share this attitude to some extent, because like Keller I am an educated, intellectually-curious person living and working in the midst of less educated, not-quite-so intellectually-curious people. And like many a mouth-flapping moron a creature of academia encounters in the working wilderness, both Jobst and the town dwellers he talks to exchange disconnected, unsystematized lore; they care much more about seeming to know what they’re talking about, Keller is suggesting, than actually knowing what they are talking about. (And the old town-versus-gown bias gives us this false sense that knowledge is inadequate until it has passed through the discriminating vice-judgment of a professional academic.) And yet precisely because Keller cannot get away from his surroundings, holding such people in contempt, deeming them to be social inferiors who can be easily ignored—these are luxuries a Keller cannot afford. Other people, however idiotic they may seem, aren’t going away; and so the only available recourse is to take an understanding, egalitarian outlook: yes, my fellow man has flaws, but he also has virtues, and I will celebrate those virtues while patiently trying to ameliorate his flaws.
This may seem like a rather cynical way to interpret Keller’s move from his lengthy first novel, Der Grune Heinrich (Green Henry)—a very personal, very autobiographical work depicting the coming-of-age and failures of an artist (which is what Keller initially was, a failed painter)—and his move toward a more communal outlook in his subsequent shorter fiction. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a humanist outlook, and an okay one, as long as you don’t allow your perceptions of moral superiority to turn you into a tyrannizing monster. The humanist needs to recognize human frailty and not just forgive it (which can turn into misguided expectations of gratitude) but embrace the whole person.
That transformation, I think, Keller ultimately accomplishes. A Keller story is like one of those conceit stories, except with more Tolstoyan human insight into the soul. His first short story collection, Seldwyla Folk (alt translation: People of Seldwyla), was released in two parts, the first five stories of which were written from 1850 to 1856, the second volume being released much later, in 1874. (During the interval Keller undergoes a change in his personal circumstances that dramatically changes his outlook.)
Seldwyla Folks is centered around a fictional sort of Swiss Everytown nestled in the mountains. (In his introduction to the second volume, Keller humorously notes the fan mail he has received, in which half a dozen towns all claim to be Seldwyla.) It is a laid-back town, where as the author writes in his introduction,
Not a soul in Seldwyla owns a farthing to bless himself with, and properly speaking noone knows what they have lived on for the past hundred years. However, live they do, and that in good and merry style too.
Every time the Seldwylers are invoked in the story, their laughter and devil-may-care attitude is what stands out. As the three combmakers race to determine who will win the love of Zus, the Seldwylers treat the occasion like the 4th of July:
A big crowd marched out before the city gate and lined both sides of the road, as when a racer is expected. The boys climbed up in the trees, the elderly and retired sat in the grass and smoked their pipes, happy to be afforded such cheap amusement.
If we understand Keller’s project as a humanist one, we can understand his two-sided depiction of the laughing Seldwylers. On the one hand, laughter and merriment are good because they allow room for human frailty and human error. A person can fail many times, can live a life where they’ve produced nothing, done nothing, failed at everything, gained a fortune and then pittered it all away, and yet still they are laughingly welcomed back among the good-for-nothing Seldwylers with open arms.
The flipside of the Seldwyler laughter is that striving—both the selfish, gain-seeking kind, and the more noble, self-improving kind—are looked on with utter contempt. A Seldwyler is a Seldwyler, no matter how ostentatiously he tries to be something else. At the conclusion of “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” when the two most righteous of the three are making a humiliating spectacle of themselves, the people of Seldwyla are totally having a ball. The contrast is dramatic and brutal:
There was dancing in many of the houses and in the taverns drinking and singing, as on days of the greatest festival in Seldwyla, for the Seldwylers didn’t need much of an excuse to organize a celebration in a masterful fashion. When the two poor devil’s saw how their valiant effort, by means of which they had thought to outwit the folly of the world, had only served to make this folly triumphant, their hearts almost broke, for they had not only failed in their plan of many years and ruined it wholly, they had also forfeited their reputations as prudent, calm, and law-abiding men.
That last phrase—“forfeited their reputations”—is striking to me in that it calls to mind these latter days in which so many figures of respect and veneration have been laid low by scandal and humiliation. I quibble with the common interpretation that Keller is castigating these men for their striving, for their ambition. We may equally say that it is the average Seldwyler’s lack of seriousness and lack of ambition that creates the groundwork for the ruination of the town’s most ambitious citizens. So we see that in “Clothes Make the Man,” when the protagonist has succeeded in convincing the whole neighbor town that he is an exiled Polish count as opposed to a poor tailor, it is his fellow Seldwyler tailors who show up to laughingly unmask him. Meanwhile in “The Lost Smile,” Jucundus, who has made himself into Seldwyla’s most prominent citizen by selling timber, is unable to convince his fellow Seldwylers to rise above petty mercantilism to save the 800-year-old tree. (Sebald commented that among his other qualities Keller is among the earliest fiction writers to show concern for ecological issues.) Seldwyla’s best and brightest are constantly being undermined by their own neighbors.
Much of the critical response I’ve read focuses on Keller as a political writer and champion of democratic values; I admit that, to me, that wasn’t really his most conspicuous attribute, but the loving depiction of the titular group of old revolutionaries in “The Banner of the Upright Seven” I found incredibly charming, and I have to surmise that writing this gentle (and appreciative) ribbing of his own milieu must have been for the older Keller a labor of joy. (I loved everything about this story; can I say that? The love plot, the ornery old democrats, the stately eloquence: it was all delightful.) I am a sucker for the gently parodic dialogues and orations Keller puts into the mouths of the Seven at the group’s meetings and at the festival, especially the impromptu oration of the young Karl Hediger, which is as good as Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides.
I would be remiss if I did not state that Keller has written some of the most charming love stories I’ve ever read. Granted, the traditional love story is of two basic kinds which we might term Juliet vs. Rosalind. In the former, the woman falls head over heels in love and the question is not will he get the girl but will they be able to live happily ever after once the prize is won. In the Rosalind type love story, the woman (or circumstance) makes the protagonist suffer for/earn love. The Juliet story is primarily about getting love, while the Rosalind story is about keeping it for the next 30-40 years. (Juliet stories, like Werther and Keller’s own “Romeo and Juliet of the Village,” have this unfortunate tendency to end in suicide; “these violent delights have violent ends,” to quote Friar Laurence.) Hence the heroine of a Rosalind love story is intelligent, independent-minded, maybe even a little mischievous. Occasionally, the heroine of a Rosalind story rejects the hero altogether. Such is the diabolical Zus in “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” who puts two of her suitors through hell and then goes back on her arrangement with them. Notably, Keller makes Zus the possessor, and her male suitors the seekers, after her money. This empowers Zus to make her decision in as crass or as mercantile a way as a man would. The heroines in Keller’s stories often go their own way, as with Aeen in “The Abused Love Letters,” who devises an ingenious workaround for her husband’s stupid, capricious philosophical letter fetish and then fights him to a draw in their subsequent divorce battle. Sometimes Keller’s heroines are in a dominant or at least equal position within the relationship, such as Justine in “The Lost Smile,” who comes from a wealthy family that tries to support her poorer husband when his business fails, and who separates from her husband over their disagreement on matters of religion. (Keller is as hilariously savage to Reformed Church Ministers in this story as Tolstoy is to physicians in “Death of Ivan Illyich.”) It is precisely this agency that makes Keller’s love plots more meaningful, the fates of the protagonists something to morn or feel good about.
With that said, what makes Keller’s love stories so emotionally satisfying perhaps undermines Keller’s claim to being a realist writer. He is a writer whose stories account for social class, true. And the psychology of his characters can get more-than-commonly complex, also true. At the same time, whatever the trials they go through, two lovers almost always get together at the end of these stories. Aeen and Justine eventually are reunited with absent lovers through a combination of forgiveness and fortuitous circumstances. The stupendous performance that resolves the love plot at the end of “Banner of the Upright Seven,” meanwhile, is comparable to that which attends Odysseus when he triumphantly returns to Ithaca—which is to say, it’s completely unbelievable, bordering on mythology; as readers we go along with it because we want these two adorable young people to be together, and so we are willing to allow Keller to machinate a series of unlikely events that allows that to happen. It’s wish fulfillment, basically—very enjoyable, granted—but it is narrative choices like this one that edge Keller closer to the Romantic category of writers as opposed to the Realist; at key moments, Keller can’t help at some level but to tell the sort of stories his audience wants to read.
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