Max Frisch’s dream de-peared

As promised in my pearless post, here is the New Yorker letter that could be better:

With the help of Benjamin Kunkel’s marvelous essay on Robert Walser, Walser readers will finally fulfill—or the world will fail—Herman Hesse’s hope: “If Robert Walser had 100,000 readers, the world would be better.” But beyond bringing tens of thousands from the wider world to Walser’s winnowed one, Kunkel’s work serves scholarship besides, or—as Walser is a writer’s writer—authorship itself. With a most original observation, Kunkel précises the parallel to Kafka more pellucidly in a paragraph than unrelated unrelenter Martin Walser did in many pages. His observation that The Assistant anticipated Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” is no less original, if itself anticipated: at the Robert-Walser-Archiv[e] in Zürich, one can read the transcript of a conversation between Woolf and Walser. That it is authored does not make it less authentic. Analagously, Kunkel reports: “When Walser met Lenin in Zürich, during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’” Although Walser and Lenin both lived on the famous Spiegelgasse—where Lavater also lived, and Büchner died, and Dada was born—they did so a decade apart. (Walser left in 1905, Lenin arrived in 1916.) What Walser actually asked was, “Do you, too, like Glarner pearbread so much?” Lenin’s answer didn’t make it into the journal of the writer Max Frisch (born 1911, in Zürich), who, in 1968, recorded his dream in which “someone reported an authentic encounter between Walser and Lenin …whereby Walser asked Lenin a single question.” Reminding us, as Walser’s writing does, of the dream people call human life, Frisch adds, “I didn’t doubt the authenticity in the dream and sided with Robert Walser when I woke—I was still siding with Robert Walser as I shaved.”

Arcane (and artless) alliteration aside, Kunkel’s periscopic piece is the perfect preview of New Yorker book reviews to come, now that James Wood will be presiding. If Walser didn’t have 100,000 readers before, he surely will now. (That’s just 1/11th of NYer subscribers.) Plus: Kunkel should be applauded for publishing one of the two funniest Walser prose pieces on the web. (Kudos too to translator Damion Searls.)

NOTES: The Walser-Woolf dialogue is in Gerlind Reinshagen’s novel Göttergespräche. Martin Walser’s “Unrelenting Style” (as translated by Joseph McClinton) can be found in Robert Walser Rediscovered. Max Frisch’s dream is from his Tagebücher 1966-1971: “Jemand berichtet von einer verbürgten Begegnung zwischen Robert Walser und Lenin an der Straße in Zürich, 1917, dabei habe Robert Walser eine einzige Frage an Lenin gerichtet: Haben Sie auch Glarner Birnbrot so gern? Ich zweifle im Traum nicht der Authenzität und verteidige Robert Walser, bis ich erwache–ich verteidige Robert Walser noch beim Rasieren.” The translation is my own, but a professional rendering can be found in Sketchbook 1966-1971.

P. S. The Self Divider has written a better letter, less oblique and more (or better) obsequious(ness: less Kunkel, more Kafka.)