A story about Robert Walser

 Guy Davenport’s short story on the writer Robert Walser is called “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” Walser’s body was found in a field of snow outside the Swiss asylum where he lived on Christmas 1956, a fact not mentioned in the story.

We know how one of the great writers of Europe died. But what was he thinking when he wandered away from the asylum?

In Davenport’s account, Walser was thinking about a historic balloon trip from Saxony to the Baltic. Those were the days when ballooning required a proper outfit that included gauntlets and goggles and when peasants, fearful of balloons, were waiting on the ground to kill them with scythes and shovels.

And Walser thought of how he’d been spoken to by “Olympia,” created by Manet, who told about Manet’s Doppelganger, Monet. Walser thought about how William James had talked for so long with his tie in his soup that it wicked to his collar, turning it red.

In Davenport’s account, Walser is a writer who was fascinated by accidents or incongruities — how they can cluster, accumulate with interest, become catastrophic, ruin people.

The idea has two parts:

 

And everything is an incongruity if you study it well.

 

And:

 

The waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

 

What are the odds that Monet, painting in plein air, would be knocked cold by a discus?

Davenport was a master of the kind of story that fascinates me. It’s a biography, or an episode in a biography, treated as a short story.

Scholars and historians can tell us the facts of Walser’s last day.

What was on his mind?

We have to turn to fiction to get to the more interesting question.

I’m repeating points I’ve made before:

(1) I think the model for this kind of story is Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner.” Tapner was the last man to by executed on the isle of Guernsey. In 1854, Victor Hugo, probably the world’s most famous opponent of capital punishment, visited the island to investigate.

As history, it’s a footnote. In Davenport’s fiction, we get to see what the people of Guernsey thought of their famous guest and what Hugo thought of them.

(2) Other writers have been interested in this kind of story. Bernard Malamud called his experiments “fictive biographies” and “biographed stories.”

(3) I love them.

• Source: Guy Davenport, Da Vinci’s Bicycle; New York: New Directions Classic, 1997. “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg,” the last of 10 stories in the collection, is on pages 149-85. The quotations are on pp. 163 and 164. For more, see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’’ Nov. 22, 2022, and “Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.