This essay is adapted from a chapter of “A Place in the Country,” a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), translated from the German by Jo Catling, which comes out next week from Random House. In these linked essays, Sebald takes up the troubled lives of five writers and one painter with the delicacy, intensity, and tone of sombre mystery for which he was known.

The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so. Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written. What he read was for the most part borrowed. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions, so, too, was he remote from other people. He became more and more distant from even the siblings originally closest to him—the painter Karl and the beautiful schoolteacher Lisa—until in the end, as Martin Walser said of him, he was the most unattached of all solitary poets.

For him, evidently, coming to an arrangement with a woman was an impossibility. The chambermaids in the Hotel zum Blauen Kreuz, whom he used to watch through a peephole he had had bored in the wall of his attic lodgings; the serving girls in Berne; Fräulein Resy Breitbach in the Rhineland, with whom he maintained a lengthy correspondence—all of them were, like the ladies he reveres so longingly in his literary fantasias, beings from a distant star.

At a time when large families were still the norm—Walser’s father, Adolf, came from a family of fifteen—strangely enough, none of the eight siblings in the next generation of Walsers brought a child into the world; and of all this last generation of Walsers, dying out together, as it were, none was perhaps less suited to fulfill the prerequisites for successful procreation than Robert, who, as one may say in his case with some fittingness, retained his virginal innocence all his life. His death—the death of one who, inevitably rendered even more anonymous after the long years in an institution, was in the end connected to almost nothing and nobody—might easily have passed as unnoticed as, for a long time, had his life. That Walser is not today among the forgotten writers we owe primarily to the fact that Carl Seelig took up his cause. Without Seelig’s accounts of the walks he took with Walser, without his preliminary work on the biography, without the selections from the work he published and the lengths he went to in securing the Nachlaß—the writer’s millions of illegible ciphers—Walser’s rehabilitation could never have taken place, and his memory would in all probability have faded into oblivion.

Nonetheless, the fame which has accrued around Walser since his posthumous redemption cannot be compared with that of, say, Benjamin or Kafka. Now, as then, Walser remains a singular, enigmatic figure. He refused by and large to reveal himself to his readers. It is odd, too, how sparsely furnished with detail is what we know of the story of his life. We know that his childhood was overshadowed by his mother’s melancholia and by the decline of his father’s business year after year; that he wanted to train as an actor; that he did not last long in any of his positions as a clerk; and that he spent the years from 1905 to 1913 in Berlin. But what he may have been doing there apart from writing—which at the time came easily to him—about that we have no idea at all.

External events, such as the outbreak of the First World War, appear to affect him hardly at all. The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it. When he can no longer go on we see him in the Waldau clinic, doing a bit of work in the garden or playing a game of billiards against himself, and finally we see him in the asylum in Herisau, scrubbing vegetables in the kitchen, sorting scraps of tinfoil, reading a novel by Friedrich Gerstäcker or Jules Verne, and sometimes, as Robert Mächler relates, just standing stiffly in a corner. So far apart are the scenes of Walser’s life which have come down to us that one cannot really speak of a story or of a biography at all, but rather, or so it seems to me, of a legend.

How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows and who, none the less, illumined every page with the most genial light, an author who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, to whom his own thoughts, honed on the tiniest details, became incomprehensible, who had his feet firmly on the ground yet was always getting lost in the clouds, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events, and things of which it spoke. Was it a lady named Wanda or a wandering apprentice, Fräulein Elsa or Fräulein Edith, a steward, a servant, or Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, a conflagration in the theater or an ovation, the Battle of Sempach, a slap in the face or the return of the Prodigal, a stone urn, a suitcase, a pocketwatch or a pebble? Everything written in these incomparable books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable.

Despite such difficulties, however, which seem designed to foil the plans of anyone intent on categorization, much has been written about Robert Walser. Most of it, admittedly, is of a rather impressionistic or marginal nature, or can be regarded as an act of hommage on the part of his admirers. Nor are the remarks which follow any exception, for since my first encounter with Walser I, too, have only ever been able to read him in an unsystematic fashion.

Beginning now here and now there, for years I have been roaming around, now in the novels, now in the realms of the Bleistiftgebiet [Pencil Regions], and whenever I resume my intermittent reading of Walser’s writings, so, too, I always look again at the photographs we have of him, seven very different faces, stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe that has taken place between each. The pictures I am most familiar with are those from his time in Herisau, showing Walser on one of his long walks, for there is something in the way that the poet, long since retired from the service of the pen, stands there in the landscape that reminds me instinctively of my grandfather, Josef Egelhofer, with whom as a child I often used to go for walks for hours at a time during those very same years, in a region which is in many ways similar to that of Appenzell. When I look at these pictures of him on his walks, the cloth of Walser’s three-piece suit, the soft collar, the tiepin, the liver spots on the back of his hands, his neat salt-and-pepper moustache and the quiet expression in his eyes—each time, I think I see my grandfather before me. Yet it was not only in their appearance that my grandfather and Walser resembled each other, but also in their general bearing, something about the way each had of holding his hat in his hand, and the way that, even in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat. For a long time I even imagined that my grandfather shared with Walser the habit of leaving the top button of his waistcoat undone. Whether or not that was actually the case, it is a fact that both died in the same year, 1956—Walser, as is well known, on a walk he took on the twenty-fifth of December, and my grandfather on the fourteenth of April, the night before Walser’s last birthday, when it snowed once more even though spring was already under way. Perhaps that is the reason why now, when I think back to my grandfather’s death—to which I have never been able to reconcile myself—in my mind’s eye I always see him lying on the horn sledge on which Walser’s body, after he had been found in the snow and photographed, was taken back to the asylum.