The Code That Wasn't

Robert Walser wrote real novels. Jakob von Gunten in 1909, the kind Kafka loved. Then, sometime in the early 1920s, his hand began to seize on the pen. He called it a swoon, a cramp, a stupor, physical and mental. Other writers, faced with this, stop. Walser kept going. He just made the writing smaller.

He switched to pencil. He shrank his letters from six millimeters to about one. He wrote on whatever was nearby. Telegram forms. Calendar pages torn in half. A business card. The back of a publisher's rejection letter, which is the kind of detail you don't get to invent. The handwriting got so small that scholars later needed thread counters to read it, and for decades the prevailing theory was that it was code, the secret script of a man who had gone quietly mad in a Swiss asylum.

It wasn't code. It was just German. Five hundred and twenty-six scraps of ordinary German shrunk to a millimeter, including a whole novel called Der Räuber, written on twenty-four sheets.

He had simply found the writer's block too loud, and turned the volume down.

He died in 1956, walking in snow.