It’s perilous when the words spoken by a writer end up more well known than those he actually wrote. The line “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad” has appeared in most articles about Robert Walser written since his death in 1956. The “here” is, supposedly, the Sanatorium of Appenzell in Herisau, Switzerland, and the hearer was, allegedly, Carl Seelig, whose recollected visits to the no-longer-writing writer, Walks with Walser, was just published by New Directions.

In 1936 Seelig, a literary admirer, began traveling to Herisau to see Walser, then fifty-eight years old. Together they