Portrait of the Artist

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

by Susan Bernofsky. Yale University Press, 2021, $35.00 cloth.

THE SAME year Robert Walser checked himself into a mental institution, his writing career long since behind him, Walter Benjamin, then an unknown writer, published an essay on the German-speaking Swiss author that begins “We can read much by Robert Walser, but nothing about him.” A great deal has changed for Walser since 1929. The number of translations, appreciations, dissertations, and essays have shed much light on this enigmatic figure of twentieth-century literature. When New Directions began publishing Susan Bernofsky’s translations of Walser’s works in 2007, the author experienced something of a literary renaissance. Perhaps he’s still shy of the number of readers Herman Hesse once suggested he deserved (“If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place”), but it’s undeniable that Walser enjoys more admirers now than ever. We no doubt have Bernofsky in large part to thank for this, and we can extend our gratitude to her once more for her extraordinary biography, Clairvoyant of the Small.

Bernofsky’s study distinguishes itself in significant ways from its few predecessors, including Robert Mächler’s German biography from fifty years ago (which remains untranslated, as does the more recent one by relies heavily on dialogue contained in Seelig’s own memory or in the notebooks he kept during that time. This valuable work covers much of the twenty-seven years Walser spent as a patient in a mental asylum, a period that would otherwise be a major blind spot. (Bernofsky’s own biography tackles this nearly three-decade span in a single chapter, the last one.) But the fact that Seelig, who later became Walser’s literary executor, is quoting exclusively from his own memories certainly introduces an element of unreliability. As Bernofsky points out, “the image of Walser that Seelig presents is carefully controlled and to some extent manufactured.”