the writer on his last walk, a solitary Spaziergang through a winter landscape. He is going towards his favourite view, and he means to turn back once he has seen it, but he will die before he gets there. As if they know it, his last words are already on the wing, flocking around his steaming head like birds of passage.

(1992)

The Swiss writer Robert Walser spent the last twenty years of his life in a mental institution in the town of Herisau, capital of the canton of Appenzell, having been moved there against his will in 1933. On Christmas Day, 1956, after a solitary walk to settle his dinner, he collapsed on a snow-covered path and died. He was 78. The official cause of death was heart failure.

When I came across a photograph of Walser’s body in Jürg Amann’s book Robert Walser: Auf der Suche nach einem verlorenen Sohn, it touched me even though I had read nothing of his work.

The body lies in a field of snow. The frozen block of the photograph is a dirtier white than paper and this makes it visible on the page. There is not much else besides the snow and the body: a few posts and rails, iced with snow, jut into the frame from the right; in the distance, running obliquely towards the top right-hand corner, the pencil sketch of a fence.

In the foreground, a dozen footprints lead down a slope. He walked into the photograph, into the future, and stayed there. The snow is not deep but the prints are distinct, slanted to one side, as if he turned his feet to brace himself as he descended the path, resisting gravity, feeling the world slipping away beneath his soles.

Between the last prints and the outstretched body is a clear, untrodden band of snow. He fell on his back when his heart gave in or perhaps he lost his footing and fell before his heart failed and slipped further down the slope. It might have appeared comical in the moment, this fall and slide, this slapstick coming to an end. The footprints break off in mid sentence: his fall carried him on to the silence of a blank page. All that speaks now, eloquently beyond language, is the unfeeling body.

He lies on his back, facing away from us, his bare head pillowed in the snow and turned to the left. His right hand rests on his chest, his left arm is outflung. Beyond this hand lies his hat, fallen from his head. If he was standing up in this attitude, you would think he had just tossed his hat into the air. But he is not standing up, he is lying there supine, with his head bared and his hat tilted on its brim, and nothing expresses the fact that he is dead more coldly than the space between the two.

When I first saw the photograph, I was struck by the blank expanse of snow all around the body. Amann’s text says Walser was found first by dog, then by people from the neighbourhood, ’finally by the world’. None of them left a mark. The dog’s skinny pawprints might be invisible in the snow, but did no human being rush to help the old man? Did the photographer himself set up his tripod at a cool distance and take this photograph without even approaching his subject to see whether he still breathed? Perhaps the people, recognizing him for who he was, stepped carefully in his footprints—it would explain why they are stamped so clearly in the snow—and gazed at him from the end of the line.

I want to write a story about the last days of a writer, but I am preoccupied with hats.

In a pictorial history of the Second World War, which I keep on a shelf in my study, is a photograph of Yugoslav men from the village of Pancˇevo hanged by the Nazis in retaliation for attacks on German soldiers. A notice, posted on 21 April 1941, had warned that ten Serbs would be hanged for every German soldier who died. If this measure was unsuccessful, the figure would be doubled: “Sollte diese Massnahme keinen Erfolg haben, wird die Zahl verdoppelt.” Massnahme. A weighty, technical term suited to a precise levy in pounds of flesh.

It is a horrifying photograph. The bodies of seven or eight of the ten victims are visible, apparently hanged from a single branch of the same tree. Most of them have their backs turned to the photographer. Close to the foreground is a man facing us, a youngish man in a suit with a waistcoat and tie.

His head is bent to one side, and the rope, which seems too thin to support his weight, rises sharply past his ear. His neck is too long: presumably the bones were dislocated by the hanging. If not for this brutally suggestive fact he would appear almost peaceful, like a businessman who has nodded off on the evening tram with his head against the window.

There are many disturbing things in the photograph. The apparent calm of the spectators, for instance. I look in vain for horror or dismay. The men in the background are soldiers whose indifference might be expected, but the old peasant woman on the right, that busybody granny out of a folktale, bothers me. She seems calmly intent, pottering beneath the gallows. Could she be the wife or mother of one of these men? Impossible. Or have I misread her expression? Perhaps I don’t understand the physiognomy of fear or shock.

What pains me most when I look at this photograph, which I do repeatedly, with clichéd morbid curiosity, is that the young man with the peaceful expression is still wearing his glasses and his hat.

of all the things that people wear, nothing is more expressive of character than a hat, perhaps because it is so close to the wearer’s face, or even to his mind. This dead man’s hat is small, light and jaunty, with an impish tilt in the brim. It makes the random ending of his life seem more outrageous.

The question troubles me: why is he still wearing his hat, in these circumstances, in this extremity? Perhaps I need to rephrase the question: why would a man used to wearing a hat, as most men were in those years, remove it before he was hanged? He would no sooner take off his hat than his glasses. Why would anyone want to meet their death bare-headed or half-blind? Then again, he may have had no option: he was seized and his hands bound behind his back before he had a chance to think about such things. Is the hat a sign that he offered no resistance? Surely it would have been knocked off had he put up a fight. Or is it a sign of hope: any minute now they’ll come to their senses and I’ll go home to my dinner.

Looking at the photograph again, I am reminded that there is a second hanged man, one of those with his back turned to us, who also wears a hat. His head is jerked cruelly to one side and his hat balances on it at an odd angle. This suggests another explanation: the hat was jammed there by his murderers after they put the noose around his neck. It is meant to mock the man who has no earthly use for it, his head having been emptied of thoughts about hats, history and everything else.

In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer traces the meaning of the hat through American photography in the thirties. Before the Depression took its toll, the hat was a sign of affluence, even optimism; later, the battered, buckled hat became a mark of poverty and defiant endurance. Hold on to your hat, hold on to your dignity. Dyer reproduces Dorothea Lange’s photograph of two men sleeping on the cracked asphalt of Skid Row in San Francisco in 1934; one of them, lying on his side with his knees drawn up, dead to the world as the saying goes, is asleep with his hat on.

A little further on in Dyer’s book, I find André Kertész’s photograph of ’Washington Square Park’ in 1952. The park is covered with snow. The bare limbs of a few trees and the curved railing of a fence are inked against the white. On a slushy path, the blurred outline of a man in a dark overcoat, with his hands in his pockets.

This man looks to me like Robert Walser on his last walk in Herisau.

In a key passage on his understanding of photography, Dyer writes: “In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.”

NOTEBOOK, OCT. 1992
What about the story the writer would have written on the day after he died?

As this scrap from my notebook suggests, I cannot get away from chronology.

I want to write a story about the last days, hours, minutes of a writer. But the fact is that Walser had not written anything for twenty years when he died. “Man schweigt auch ein wenig,” Amann writes. One keeps silent a little too. A dying art. By the time he took his last walk, a field of snow lay between Walser and the dropped thread of his writing life. Clearly he is not the true subject of my story and that is why l cannot finish it.

Searching the internet to see if I can establish who took the photograph of Walser dead in the snow, I find instead a photograph of the same scene taken from the opposite side, further down the slope, looking back up at the body.

The new perspective changes my sense of the place completely. It clarifies things and I am sorry to have seen it. It shows, for instance, two men in the background, wearing dark coats and hats, watching from behind a rail: even if I revert to the old view, from now on these backgrounders will be looking over my shoulder. It reveals, as well, that Walser’s hat is further away from his outstretched left hand than I thought. In the other view, it appeared to be just beyond his fingertips, almost within grasp, but here the connection is broken. It also answers my question about the apparent lack of curiosity or feeling of those who found the body. There are footprints all around. I was misled by that small, indistinct image. And here is something new that I am glad to know: there is snow in the treads of Walser’s boots.

On the internet, I discover that J.M. Coetzee wrote an essay about Walser for the New York Review of Books. Only the Wikipedia entry on the author is more popular. And I see that the English writer Billy Childish made a series of paintings of Walser’s body based on the first photograph I described to you. I move on to the Google book results. A drift of information slides out of the monitor, burying my hands on the keyboard. I think of Peter Freuchen. Google him.