Robert Walser, the most diminished of writers, has been pared: his “Still Small Voice” has been perfectly parsed by Benjamin Kunkel in this week’s New Yorker. Walser watchers are already picking favorite paragraphs (comparing Woolf). Other readers offer reorientation (contrasting Kafka).
Yesterday, devouring Kunkel’s essay on my lunch break, I came across a sentence that would give anyone pause: “When Walser met Lenin in Zurich, during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’” I know what you’re thinking: fruitcake? Well, you’re right, the Kuchen in question was actually Glarner Birnbrot. Now I have a soft spot for this particular pear bread, so I felt it my duty to send a Letter to the (Lenin expert) Editor. I’ll post the letter after they don’t publish it.
Walser’s peregrinations were recorded in Carl Seelig’s Wandering with Robert Walser, where Walser is repeatedly paired with Hölderlin. (For example, here.) So it was a treat, still thinking of Walser’s purloined pears, when my boss asked me to catalog a magnificent folio edition of Hölderlin’s poems, Hölderlin: Gedichte aus der Wahnsinnszeit (Berlin: Drei Welten, 1923), with an original etching by Arno Nadel:
Like Walser, Hölderlin had “eine Stimme verschwebenden Schweigens” (Kings I 19:12) and a taste for pears. The finest of his short lyrics, “Hälfte des Lebens” begins:
Mit Gelben Birnen hänget
(With gold pears hangs)
But it appears that before becoming a fact-checker at the New Yorker, Augustine’s avenging angel (the saint of missing pears) was a typesetter at Drei Welten Verlag in Weimar Berlin. For where there should be Birnen, there are Blumen:
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