On The Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, by Susan Bernofsky

A talk given at Columbia University on the occasion of the publication of Bernofsky's biography of Walser, Spring 2021.

One of the “microscripts of Robert Walser. This one is number 215.

This summer, I found myself on a train going through the Swiss Alps. The scenery was just as expected—cows with collars and bells grazing in meadows, slopes with heaps of rubble from landslides and avalanches, prim villages, chalets with window-boxes of geraniums, the occasional factory that looked so clean I thought they could only be producing eyeglasses, or aspirin, or vaccines. As the train passed through deep valleys and crossed bridges, I would sometimes see farmers out raking hay into windrows on improbably steep slopes. To say it was all beautiful is to state the obvious—and it was beautiful—but the experience was most notable for what was happening inside the train car. For three hours, I was the only passenger in the car. On a loudspeaker, a voice announced in three languages that this train ride had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage experience, the only train ride to have that title, and so I was informed, that this trip had the official imprimatur of specialness. It was August, and since the pandemic, the tourists had not yet returned to Switzerland. In my week there, I met no other Americans, heard no Chinese or Russian spoken in the streets. Groups of hikers could be seen in boots and toting rucksacks, striding along on trails, but I surmised that these were the Swiss themselves and not those of us from the outside. My companion on this train and elsewhere on this trip, was The Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky’s brilliant biography of Robert Walser. I will admit that the scenery vied for my attention that day—and won—but in coming days I kept re-entering the book and the world of this most singular, strange writer.

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The book’s title, borrowed from a phrase by W. G. Sebald, offers its two operative words of “clairvoyant,” and “small,” and both have their own internal contradictions. We learn in Susan’s book how one author managed to produce a profoundly