Published 8.31.2009. New Directions Books. 350 pages. Translated by Susan Bernofsky.

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Robert Walser’s The Tanners—published in 1907 as Geschwister Tanner (the Tanner siblings)—was the Swiss author’s first novel and displays some common attributes of the species: While the title promises readers a family novel, a good nine-tenths of the book concerns itself solely with one Tanner, the “wastrel” Simon, with others—Kaspar, a visionary painter; Klaus, scholar and officious scold; Hedwig, a frustrated country schoolteacher; and a fourth sibling whose tragic life is summarized in a two page conversation—getting brief, albeit highly evocative treatment. (It takes little guesswork to know which character is the author’s autobiographical stand-in.)

The plot of the novel—which Walser translator Christopher Middleton not unjustly calls “meandering”—mainly concerns the struggles of a whimsical, poetically-inclined young man to get on with the world. We see Simon at various points boldly orating to potential employers—“My love of humankind will be agreeably balanced with mercantile rationality on the scales of salesmanship,” he tells a befuddled bookseller—getting jobs using his rhetorical gifts, and then equally quickly losing them or casting them aside due to a general dissatisfaction with the ways of work—the lifestyle of respectability which Simon views as impeding a life of happiness. Intermixed with such episodes of employment and lack thereof are a series of extraordinary soliloquies, dream sequences, and picturesque natural descriptions which illustrate how Simon justifies and distracts himself from his condition as a superfluous person.

Robert Walser knew this condition intimately. Having grown up in poverty, even while producing his three best-known novels during his time in Berlin from 1905 to 1912, Walser never earned much money or became widely known. “I’m a friend of misfortune,” Simon at one point opines to some bar mates, “for misfortune merits feelings of closeness and friendship. It makes us better—that’s doing us quite a good turn.” But after suffering from many years of hardship and beginning to experience hallucinations, in 1933 Walser checked himself into a sanatorium—he continued to write fragmentary sketches in a small, cryptic “pencil hand”—where he remained until his death in 1956. (In an eerie parallel to the death of the poet Sebastian depicted in The Tanners, the elderly Walser was found dead in the snow, having fallen during a walk in the mountains.) This first novel offers us a glimpse of Walser’s early years, when he shuffled from job to job, working as a bank clerk, an inventor’s assistant (an experience fictionalized in The Assistant), and a butler in a manor.

Those who since his death have come to admire Walser’s works admire, first and foremost, their style (which translator Susan Bernofsky certainly gives a credible approximation of to this non-German speaker.) It has been described as “lighter than light” (Village Voice), though this best characterizes Walser’s nature descriptions, which have a buoyancy to them that is striking but which (I found) grows tiresome on the fifth repetition. Much more compelling are those moments when his characters turn inward and talk (to each other and to themselves) in penetrating monologues that, for all their greatness as what they are, are nevertheless somewhat unbelievable as actual dialogue. It is perhaps best to view these monologues not as what the characters (or their real-life counterparts) said, but as rather what they would have said if imbued with the verbosity and heightened situational awareness of Walser (or his fictional counterpart, Simon). In fact, all the book’s major characters—including Hedwig, Klaus, Kaspar, and Klara, a wealthy housewife who falls in love with Simon and his brother—soliloquize in Simon’s nervous, rollicking voice.

But what a voice! The episode where Simon lies to a wealthy woman about having a rich, dilettante upbringing to convince her to hire him as a servant is a case study for its qualities. There is the mock pathos when she asks him of his history, and he exclaims, “My name is Simon, and as yet I’ve done nothing at all!” There is the loving detail, and exaggerated flitting between details, in the scene where he is getting the woman’s sick child dressed, or where he is performing table service:

Setting and laying, placing and touching and arranging, touching daintily, then more firmly, touching cloth only with fingertips and plates with great care, distributing and adjusting the silverware for instance, being noiseless in the process, swift and yet also cautious, both careful and bold . . .

. . . and so on in like manner; the pathology Walser shows us through this efflorescence of details is that for Simon, work cannot just be work. Work must be an act of love, an art to be performed beautifully in each exquisite particular, an attitude more decorous than the work-hired, labor-performed mindset. The delusion even goes further than this, because Simon imagines his excess of care will gain admiration from his employer, and fantasizes at length about what she must think:

Perhaps [Simon, imagining the wealthy woman’s inner monologue] I shall soon be permitted to treat him in a more confidential manner than one is usually forced to adopt with one’s servants. But I shall take care all the same not to give him an excuse to get fresh with me by overhasty friendly accommodations. His character contains a faint smack of impertinence and audacity, and these must not be encouraged. I shall always have to suppress the pleasure I take in him if I wish him always to have the desire to please me.

Simon is later fired after he goads this same woman into reading an “inappropriate” letter he had written concerning her, and this habit of characterizing people and sock-puppeting their points-of-view, while quite humorous, is also illustrative of one of the problems with Simon: Nothing can be banal; every aspect of his own life must be ideal, even the parts most people merely engage in for survival. Sure, Simon’s excuses for getting himself fired are various: at the bookseller, it is lack of a suitable desk; at the bank, it is his inability to show up an hour late if he pleases. But what underlies this are not merely matters of Simon being finicky. Other people, even his employers, are like fictional characters in Simon’s drama and all his interactions with them must possess something exalted.

Yet if Simon is guilty of overly solemnizing work even as he employs all manner of rhetorical tricks to get employers to hire him, it would be unfair not to recognize how the world (both then and now) creates the need for such contortions; today it is not uncommon to see job postings that ask, very rhetorically, “Do you love to do X?” as if employers were owed love for the task along with its performance. Simon would never have learned the necessity of lying to the wealthy woman about his origins or telling the bookseller not to inquire about past employers—“No, sir, as a rule, inquiries aren’t worth a fig”—were it not typical for employers to ask probing questions about employees’ pasts, or for business owners to regard themselves as doing employees a benefaction by giving them jobs.

To some extent, this is the aspect of the world Robert Walser most takes issue with in The Tanners: how people are compelled to do things to maintain respectability as opposed to living in the way that most makes them happy. The concept of respectability is first invoked in an impassioned monologue in which Simon’s sister, Hedwig, tells him why she must abandon her life as a country schoolteacher and leave for parts unknown. “But all the words I heard were superficial,” Hedwig recounts. “Do this, do that. It’s good you want to take up a profession. It does you honor.” But as time went on, Hedwig explains, the burden of her profession weighed on her greatly; she had no freedom. Therefore, she goes on:

I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life. What is respect compared to this other thing: being happy and having satisfied the heart’s pride. Even being unhappy is better than being respected. I am unhappy despite the respect I enjoy; and so in my own eyes I don’t deserve this respect; for I consider only happiness worthy of respect. Therefore I must try whether it is possible to be happy without insisting on respect. Perhaps there is a happiness of this sort for me, and a respect accorded to love and longing rather than cleverness.

Walser later puts the same sentiment into Simon’s mouth—“Human respect must always suffer beneath human love”—at a point in the novel in which Simon can no longer find any regular employment, and has to live on the meager wages given in a Copyists Office which employs the indigent. We also learn during this conversation—and in many others throughout the book—that Simon believes he should not have to dissemble in conversation with other people, that he wishes to engage other people in as frank and openhearted a way as possible: “I’ve taken it upon myself to engage in bold, heartfelt conversation with every single person so that I’ll quickly see what sort he is.” What this amounts to is a coherent worldview, though perhaps an impractical one.

It would be interesting to explore whether this manner of engaging with the world was adhered to by Walser or his characters in subsequent works, or whether they are forced to evolve. On this subject, The Tanners ends on an ambiguous note. We find Simon in a sort of ecstatic resignation (plain old resignation was insufficient): “When I still felt certain longings, I found people a matter of indifference, mere hindrances, I sometimes even despised them, but now I love them because I need them and I offer myself to them to be put to use.” He still manages some leverage, though: “If I had no choice but to tell myself that humankind had insulted me, I’d be inconsolable. No, things stand quite differently: It is I—I—who have insulted the world.” This does not so much seem a resolution as it is an acknowledgment that life does not offer easy resolutions for people like Simon. If exalting the small—or being “a clairvoyant” of it, as W.G. Sebald described Walser—is what allows a Simon to grin and bear life’s impossibilities, that may be as much resolution as there is.