STRIDING WITH SEELIG

I’ve been reading Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig. Robert Walser (1878 – 1956), has been discussed elsewhere on this blog.  He was a German speaking Swiss who published quite a few things in his early life, including the long short story “The Walk,” but spent his last 27 years in a mental asylum.  He was eventually celebrated by Susan Sontag and WG Sebald but if it hadn’t been for Carl Seelig, Walser might well have slipped into an obscurity from which he couldn’t be rescued.

Seelig (1894-1962) was an editor and writer who’d read and admired Walser’s work.  He visited him at the asylum, befriended him, promoted his work, and eventually became his literary executor.

Carl Seelig walking with Albert Einstein

On these asylum visits, which took place between 1936 and 1956, Seelig took Walser out for a walk and lunch.  The book recounts these occasions, and he did some Boswell-style setting down of the things Walser had to say about his life and his work, and about the works of others.  Of course there was a war going on for some of this time and Walser was by no means oblivious to events.

Walser and Seelig sometimes took spectacularly long walks and they had some spectacular lunches. Seelig writes on April 23, 1939,

“We make our way from Herisau to Wil in three and a half hours.  We feel as if we’re on roller skates.”  Well yes.  Google maps suggest various routes, but all of them are about 14 miles long, and none of them take less than four and three quarter hours.  Anyway, the pair do arrive in Wil, and Seelig writes, “we eat at Im Hof; we are tremendously hungry and stop for a bite at one pub after another. Five in total.”

That’s quite a walk. That’s quite a pub crawl.

And then on March 21, 1941, Seelig reports Walser as saying, “I tried to visit him (the author and painter Max Dauthendey) in Munich once.  But I found only his wife, who told me that her husband happened to be in Wurzburg. I therefore took this as an opportunity to set off in that direction, in light sandals and without a collar.  I covered the distance in a little over ten hours.  That was the fastest walk I ever took.  My feet were full of blisters when I arrived.”

I would think so.  This time Google has the route as 154 miles long, and they reckon it takes 51 hours to walk, which sounds about right.  Even on roller skates Walser’s time seems unlikely.

But perhaps the most interesting thing in that entry is that Walser felt it worth mentioning that he wasn’t wearing a collar.  Of all the many items of kit that “serious” walkers find necessary these days, a collar really isn’t one of them.  The vast majority of pictures I’ve seen of Walser show him in a three piece suit with a collar and tie, sometimes there’s a hat, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of him wearing an overcoat, or anything waterproof, although he does usually carry an umbrella.