Book of a lifetime: Microscripts by Robert Walser

From The Independent archive: Luke Williams celebrates the mysterious handwritten scraps – only deciphered decades after the author’s death – that revealed one of the most remarkable examples of Modernist literature

Robert Walser around 1900 and his posthumously published ‘Microscripts’ (Public domain/New Directions)

Wednesday afternoons in primary three were given over to free writing. I remember this only because of one particular class. While the rest of us struggled to compose our stories, a boy whose name I forget was scribbling at such a rate he broke his pencil. He was given a new one, and he continued with furious concentration, even after the teacher had ended the session. What had possessed this otherwise unremarkable boy? What was his story? He had not been writing a story at all, we later discovered, but the same word over and over again.

I don’t think I ever knew what that word was. What remains is the sight of him writing feverishly, the physical labour of it. There was something compulsively wretched in the way he covered page after page with this barely legible script. It was in the action, not the word, that meaning resided.

About the time of the First World War (the exact date is unclear), the Swiss writer Robert Walser developed his “pencil system”, a method of literary composition requiring him to write in radically shrunken letters. Walser had been a prodigious and acclaimed author of novels, stories and essays. Hesse and Kafka admired his work. But by the 1920s his output had stalled. Responding to a “hideous” and “frightful” hatred of his pen, he took up a pencil and “learned again, like a little boy, to write”.