The Shrinking World of Robert Walser

As a young man, the Swiss writer Robert Walser wanted to be an actor. In 1895, having fled a bank apprenticeship, he followed his brother, Karl, to Stuttgart, moving into an attic room across from the Royal Court Theater. A humiliating appraisal at the hands of another actor laid bare his inadequacies. The encounter is depicted in several later stories. (“You possess not the faintest trace of theatrical talent,” one doyenne concludes. “Everything about you is hidden, veiled, buried, dry, and wooden.”) That this great literary dissimulator should lack dramatic ability is one of the many appealing paradoxes Walser inhabits. But however unfit for the stage, he never abandoned the actor’s sense of improvisation. Even then, while yet a teenager, he disclosed a willingness to transform. “There isn’t going to be any acting career,” he wrote to his sister, “but if God so wills it, I am going to become a great writer.” For Walser, the difference between the two professions was negligible. In the ensuing decades, his life and writing would become their own kind of thrilling performance.