From “To the Madhouse: A Novel”

Robert Rubsam offers a portrait of the artist as a lonely man, in an excerpt featured in the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: “Alien.”

By Robert RubsamOctober 1, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Fiction

This excerpt, adapted from the opening of an unpublished novel, To the Madhouse, is a preview of the LARB Quarterly no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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ON THOSE MANY lonesome nights when the fog drifts in across the city, and nothing can be made out, I close myself in my study, and I sit at my desk, and from the lower lefthand drawer take out a small accordion file. Sequestered between the sheaves, mixed in amongst all those letters and postcards, torn tickets and café receipts, newspaper clippings and magazine pages, theatrical programs, exhibition notices, even a few pressed flowers—mementos of the life I lived in Berlin, half a century ago—is the little hardback pocket journal I kept at that time of my life. Folded beneath the front cover is a small portrait, sketched in charcoal and ink on a monogrammed stationary sheet. It depicts a tall man beside a messy desk. One slender hand rests atop a pile of mismatched papers, while the other heroically hoists his dripping pen. His hair is overlong, his face sloppily stubbled; a few quick pen-strokes have granted a devious glow to his half-opened eyes. He stands before a small window, through which can be seen the treetops of a park. But the window has been left open, and the papers are blowing out into the street. You want to warn him that the stack is wavering, that soon there will be nothing left to hold him up. But his mind is elsewhere, and he does not notice.

He is the writer, the lunatic, the hero of my youth, the man who should have shared my seventy-eighth birthday—he is Robert Martin, and he was my friend. The greater part of my life has been so vague and so dim, except for those years when Robert was in it. I remember conversations and events, tastes and scents, the wind and the weather, the texture of my suit jacket, the strength of my coffee, even the color of my socks. All is light, so long as he is in my mind.

And I remember especially the day he entered my life.

It was October of 1911, at his brother Karl’s studio, that tall, dark room at the top of an old building near the Humboldt, burned in the war. The walls were lined four or five deep with canvases, a bed had been pushed into the corner, and the skylight was painted over from the outside.

We met there twice a month, a circle of ten intense young men intent on sharing our writing with one another. It was my life, this circle, my reason for staying in Berlin. I shared everything with them, read their favorite authors, went to their favorite galleries, picked up their favorite words, even modulated my accent to fit their standards. If they suggested a play, I went. If they commented on my clothes, I had them retailored. I shaved my mustache, and then grew it back.

And I wrote with them in mind, anticipating their criticisms, aiming to impress them with clever phases and trenchant observations. My words belonged to them as much as to me. It must have worked, for every month without fail I published one or two of my little essays. They paid a pittance, yet I was endlessly proud to have written them. They clarified my thoughts, opened my world up to others; they were my small contribution to the life of the city.

I arrived this particular Thursday to find our host in great agitation. Still in his smock, Karl strode back and forth across the darkening loft, peering down into the side street, checking his watch, sorting anxiously through his canvases, and then completing the circuit yet again. I asked what was wrong, but he did not answer. I took my seat, and I waited.

The room filled with other writers, until at last someone coughed into their hand.

Karl took a breath, and ran both hands through his hair, streaking blue and gray into his chestnut curls. “I’ll just be a moment,” he promised, and hurried from the room.

He was gone for nearly half an hour. There was some polite conversation, about work, and family, and how dark it was getting, but soon our sails flagged. I watched the shadows, a pair of students lulled near the windows, the playwright Max announced eight or nine times that he was going to leave and never come back. Just when it seemed the playwright would make good on his promise, Karl stepped back into the studio, leading a lean, hesitant man by the elbow.

The stranger was hatless, with a sunburnt face and a mouth that hung open to reveal an uncapped chip in his top left incisor. His soft, pale hands gripped a small, careworn valise. Everything about him was just a bit out of proportion. He was a few inches too tall, his red-gold hair hung past his ears, his sunfaded suit trailed at the heels and stopped well shy of his wrists. His lids hid his eyes, as if he were already halfway to bed. There was a sense of cloistered, provincial youth about him; he looked young in the way that a cow or a nun might. I would later learn that we were the exact same age, and for the longest time I would not believe it.

This man, Karl explained, was his brother Robert. He’d arrived on the 5:25 from Zürich without even a change of clothes, and had gotten lost on his way from the station. Karl had found him down the street, peering excitedly into the windows of a large department store.

It was hardly the most auspicious entrance. Robert looked sickly, perhaps even a bit feeble, and Karl had to coax him into the room. He did not respond to our greetings, only took a seat with the valise propped between his knees and sat there in silence.

As the others read, I thought of the review I was writing, I watched as the man beside me picked at a scab, and, from time to time, my gaze drifted towards Robert Martin. He had fixed his gaze at some point in the middle distance, eyes narrowed, ear cocked, straining after our words. Every so often he would lift his left index finger from the leather of his valise, as if to lodge an objection, or to ask what exactly he was doing here. I don’t think he said five words that whole evening. He certainly did not seem like a man with much to add. Had I never seen Robert again, I would not remember him.

Yet when we reconvened two weeks later, there he was, wearing one of his brother’s old jackets, both hands clutching tight to a single stationary sheet. He had been in Berlin two weeks, yet I thought I knew everything about him. I had once been just such a newcomer, after all. From old coat to heavy accent, he still struck me as hopelessly parochial; even his voice emerged in miniature, as if hushed by the metropolis. I doubted that he would survive.

But then he leaned forward to read, and it was as if a new man had taken his place. His mouth opened wide, his eyes narrowed with mischief, he seemed ready to float out of his shoes. His voice was free, calm, full of easy confidence. He was no longer the man I had first met.

His subject—a ritzy stretch of the Lindenstrasse—was minor enough; but nothing, as I was to learn, was too small for Robert. His eye drifted from bench to bench, taking in all those bright-shoed merchants and bemuffled ladies, the high-stepping actors and their indolent patrons, shopgirls with their beaus, cooks on their breaks sharing cigarettes with those back-alley bums who had once been their customers. The story filled perhaps half a page, but every word of it was so perfectly placed, and read with such delight, that for a few short minutes our dimming loft was transformed into that gleaming high street, lit up for the evening. I saw the buckle on every lady’s shoe, caught the faint swishing of their skirts, tasted the coffee in their cups, caught a feather as it fell from a noblewoman’s hat, and contributed my few words to their most delicate discussion on the hotel veranda. He noted everything and everyone, the independent couple and the nursemaid who pushes their pram, the young man who believes himself a gallant and the lady who knows him to be a ponce. But his story was not only these gleaming generalities; no, Robert’s eye fell also on burnt-out lightbulbs, scuffed tiles, the shadows stirring within a café’s smoke-rimed windows. He delighted in everything, and that was enough.

His reading was naive, even foolish. What did he see that I had not, a hundred times? Yet his foolishness was so, but so painfully beautiful, and the voice in which he spoke it was full of such joy! He made all that was familiar seem strange, because he had really looked. What were these fleeting impressions, these thousands of sensations lasting only their fugitive moment?

“What a joy,” he concluded, “it is to be alive.” With these final words, Robert glided back down to his chair. His mouth relaxed, his eyes dropped to his lap. Once again, he seemed nothing more than a timid man surprised by his own shyness. Not a hint remained of that brilliance I had seen burning in him but a moment ago.

Who was this man?

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It was some time before I would find out. All that winter, I was away for work, and spent the holidays with my family, and did not attend another meeting until the new year. The circle all seemed sluggish, out of step after so many months away. But no one lagged, and no one stuttered, and for the longest time I could not find what had been misplaced. It was only after my own reading that I looked around the circle and saw that Robert was not there.

Karl explained that his brother had gone to work as a bank clerk. The job took up most of his time, and he often worked late nights. He never came to meetings, and rarely wrote. It seemed that that first night would be his last.

At the end of the month, I happened to take a meeting at the Disconto-Gesellschaft bank. The investment manager, a dyspeptic man by the name of Felix, decided he would wow me with a tour of the bank’s intricate workings. He walked me across the marble lobby, opened a small wood door beside the tellers, and led me into the building’s inner sanctum. We toured the vault, greeted the guards, shook hands with the managers, and spoke in whispers outside the darkened offices of those peculiar mole-like forecasters who spend all day among their cables and reports, calculators forever ticking.

We emerged into the clerk’s office. In this long room with its walls of windows, at least forty men were perched upon stools, eyes down and backs bent over their desks, copying all manner of reports, correspondence, and memoranda in the neat, modest, anonymous hand of the Bank. It was a mesmerizing sight, that long tableau of nameless talent, and the longer I watched them, the more it seemed that I was not watching forty minds as they considered the work of forty pens across forty desks, but rather the rise and fall of as many levers in a single intricate machine, the keys in a typewriter, the hammers in a piano, all commanded by a great pair of hands whose neatly trimmed nails picked their way across the keys. Even the men began to appear like so many reproductions of a single model clerk, black-jacketed, slick-haired, and stiff-collared, taken every day from storage and returned there at dusk.

Then we turned back towards the exit, and there he was: Robert, seated at a junior clerk’s crowded desk, his face caught in the beam of a hanging lamp, his long skinny body hunched over the desktop, mouth pursed with irritation. His jacket was too small, showing cricked hands and ink-stained sleeves; the collar was so high it pinned up the fat of his cheeks, and pinched his mouth shut. Perhaps three or four times he raised his arm to shake a cramp from his fingers. He looked up; our eyes caught; I caught the look of a broken-down, demolished man.

The next evening happened to be my birthday, and I had gifted myself a pair of tickets to Kleist’s Penthesilea at the theater. I wrote Robert with an invitation, and he sent his acceptance by the morning post.

With his earnings from the bank, Robert and his brother had taken together a small apartment right around the corner from my own. I arrived that evening to find the clerk seated on the steps outside, shivering in his thin coat. “Couldn’t bear to wait for me?”

In fact, Karl had booted his brother from the apartment. The painter had invited over his mistress of the moment, a Dresden impressionist who was visiting for the week, and there was no question of entertaining them both. I clucked my tongue. “That hardly seems fair.”

“Oh, I’ve only just gotten here,” Robert replied. It had been nearly five months. “I hate getting in his way. And besides,” he said, turning around before me, “he lent me clothes for the evening.”

My invitation had included instructions for proper dress, and Robert had certainly done his best. He wore Karl’s freshly brushed jacket over a flimsy cardboard collar and a tie from which the spots had recently been scrubbed. The sleeves were uneven, and his pant legs sat high above a pair of Karl’s cracked brown shoes. We certainly made a strange pair on our way into the theater.

Our seats were in the first balcony. I asked Robert when he had last been to the theater, and he looked off, embarrassed.

“It’s hard keeping up on a clerk’s salary.”

“Not even in Zürich?”

“No one ever bought me a ticket.”

The play was long, and well mounted. I had picked out wonderful seats, from which we could freely admire the cavernous sets, the heavy costumes, the luxurious effects. And there at the center of it was Tilla Eyesoldt, so overcome with Penthesilea’s rage that she actually shook from the passion. Yet whenever the lights came up, Robert would be looking off into the audience, neck craning and head swiveling as he strained to take in all the many people gathered in their finery. I would ask his thoughts, but again and again he demurred.

I had a reservation for two at the Hotel Vienna. The headwaiter in his shirtfront and cummerbund looked Robert over, and led us across the gleaming tiled floor. I ordered us veal and wine and asked, once again, what Robert had thought of the play.

“Peter, please. No man’s opinion could matter less.”

“Yet here I am, asking for it.”

“I don’t know anything about the theater, I’ve never even been to a real play.”

“Yet in your writing, you miss nothing.”

“Oh, but my writing is different. All writing is. It creates a distance between me and my life. Not very large, just one or two steps, but distance enough that everything can become clear to me. Clearer, anyway. In the moment, everything is so imposing, so overwhelming, it blinds me, I see nothing, I fall apart. But when I step away from the scene, when I absent myself from my life and sit down to write, I finally see things for what they are, down to even the smallest details. To be present, I must be absent. How much better my life would be if I could live it from the other side of that gap, that distance, that absence. If I could impose on no one, and no one could impose on me. If I could slip through my whole life, completely unnoticed, looking on from a distance. That’s a life I could stand.”

“Can’t you bear this one?” But he seemed suddenly startled by his own speech, and would not answer me. I looked off for the waiter, and I turned back to see him quietly smiling, as if pleased with himself, as if he had eluded me.

I insisted that we stay out longer. Robert demurred, offering excuse after excuse: it was late; he was tired; Karl was expecting him; he had work in the morning. But I had finally grabbed ahold of Robert, and I would not let him go. “Just a drink.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Just one.”

“I’ve had plenty.”

“My treat.”

“In that case.”

We had both had enough of my society with its dress codes and silk ties, and for lack of other options I asked Robert where we should go. He led me north and across the river, to one of those basement music halls that were once everywhere in Berlin. The doorman greeted Robert by name and led us to his usual table, tucked away in a dark alcove across from the kitchen. The band was sluggish and the dancers fairly oozed across the floor, yet all of them made such a racket that we howled ourselves hoarse trying to speak.

Robert ordered us cognac, and we smoked through my tobacco, and then through his, and after many drinks, he began to tell me about himself. He had grown up in the small city of Biel, the youngest of eight children. His father, a bookbinder, had fallen into bankruptcy when Robert was still a boy. Karl had made out well enough, attending the arts gymnasium before apprenticing himself out to a local painter. But at fourteen, Robert had left school to work as a clerk. He had moved to Geneva, to Bern, and finally to Zürich, picking up dull jobs along the way. He had written occasional pieces for the local papers, but rarely, and to little notice. There just wasn’t the time. I saw that he, too, struggled with the gap between his responsibilities and his aspirations, surrendering to the latter until the former proved too compelling. While Karl had been in Berlin, Robert was clerking in the office of a pencil manufacturer, but his brother’s letters had grown too tempting, and on a whim he quit his job, bought a train ticket, and wrote his brother from the station. “I’m lonely. I’m coming.”

He awed me. “You really did it. You told your bosses to shove off, and you came to Berlin to make your name.”

“I only got another boss.”

“But at least you’re writing.”

“I’m not a writer, not really. I still have to work in the morning.”

From time to time throughout our night, he would call my attention to all the little details I would never have thought to notice: the Turkish cigarettes smoked by the barman, the actors seated to our left with greasepaint in their wrinkles, the Polish waitress who linked her forefingers behind her back as she took orders. I will see none of them again, and yet, thanks to Robert, at any time I can call up the piano player pounding away with his miniature fingers, the mazelike pattern painted on the walls, and that waitress with her broken tooth and haloed ears who floated across that basement hall in a state of grace, like a saint, like a ghost, so full of lightness that her feet seemed barely to brush the floor.

Robert ordered round after round, and by the time we left, I had never been so drunk. My friend helped me home, held my shoulders as I leaned over the gutter, even led me upstairs by the hand. He turned my key in the lock, guided me to a chair, and poured me a glass of water.

I’d never had a friend in my rooms. They were sparsely furnished, just a small bed and chest of drawers in the bedroom, couch and plush chairs in the parlor, and in the kitchen a half-table that I used mostly as a desk. Nothing hung on the walls, not even a decorative plate. In a vase was a spray of flowers I had bought myself, and they were already wilting. My only real possessions were books: full editions of Goethe and Hoffmann, Hebel’s almanacs, and many recent volumes from Zola, Schnitzler, the two Manns. I took pride in searching out new books from young authors, and I scoured the literary journals in search of fresh writers.

As I downed the water, Robert stood before my bookshelves, taking in the library with his hands in his pockets. Once or twice he reached out, touched a gold-lettered spine, and drew back. Yes, I was drunk, but so was Robert, and in that moment he had forgotten himself, forgotten to hide away the cavernous hunger yawning on the other side of his expression, a desire he had forgotten, for that moment, to withdraw.

I wobbled over to the shelves. “Which do you want?”

“No, never, I couldn’t.”

I grabbed a copy of Keller’s stories and tried to force the book on him.

“Take it. Take it. It’s an early birthday present.”

He checked the hour. “But it’s not even my birthday anymore.”

“Anymore?”

Robert clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Tonight?”

He nodded his head.

“Your birthday is tonight?”

He nodded again.

“Robert, why didn’t you tell me!”

“Because it’s your birthday.”

“And yours!”

“But we’re celebrating you.”

“And you too.”

“I couldn’t impose.”

“You already have,” I said, pulling down Kleist, Schiller, Büchner, and more. “If you don’t take my books, I’m throwing them into the street.”

“I refuse,” he replied, and one after another he took them all from me. “I haven’t even given you anything.”

“Your conversation.”

“That’s a burden.”

“Your company.”

“That’s no gift at all.”

I took his hand and led him to the door. “Write something for me. Write about tonight, however you want. Just write.” Robert shook my hand, piled the books beneath his arm, and walked down into the street.

I spent the night on the sofa, and awoke with the sensation of a slight, almost imperceptible absence, as if someone had bled me in my sleep.

Robert handed in his notice that morning, and we both arrived at the next meeting with our reviews in tow. They’re pasted here on opposing pages of my diary, surrounded by a filigree of notations and corrections, an afterimage of my youthful zeal. Mine ran in the arts section of the Berliner Tageblatt, between a rant against feminine poetics and a report that the publisher Samuel Fassbinder had finished his Grunewald villa. My piece is rigorous and thorough, expending many valuable inches on Kleist’s legacy and his mythological inspirations. So many, in fact, that I barely touch on the play itself, remarking briefly on the sets and the costumes and expending all of two sentences on Tilla Eyesoldt. A reader might be forgiven for concluding that I had not gone to the theater at all.

Robert’s, meanwhile, was written in a series of great, long, looping sentences sumptuously and slyly detailing all the many goings-on from our visit to the Deutsches Theater. He describes the bowties and fur stoles, the starched tuxedos in the orchestra and lopsided top hats in the cheap seats, the actors yawning in the wings and the stagehands heaving on pull-ropes, the boy who changes the footlights and the girl managing the concessions, his seat’s fraying upholstery and the curtain embroidered with silver stars. Only the play itself escapes his attention. “You must forgive my arrogance,” he concludes, “for venturing even these altogether humble and thoroughly modest little phrases on the art of the theater, of which I must confess, if it is not clear, I know decidedly little, indeed next to nothing. I only hope they might enliven your mind for a few fleeting minutes, and that you will forget them entirely, and forever after.”

An astounding performance, though I doubt Robert would have agreed. He leaps from thought to thought as if by instinct. He prefaces every statement with four or five hesitating clauses, like a servant who refuses to rise until his master is safely out of the house. And there is that mix of self-aggrandizement and genuflecting modesty so characteristic of his personality, as if he were at once king and pauper.

He charmed me; he charmed us all. But as I wrote again and again in the margins: And then? What next? Where were the piercing insights, the deeper thoughts? Yes, he was uneducated, self-taught, naive. Something was always missing.

Yet I now see that all this verbal genuflection has in fact achieved something remarkable. Robert draws your attention to so many peripherals, his details, his observations, his stagehands and cheap-seaters and third-string understudies, and yet one never gets so much as a glimpse of the man holding the pen. He points your gaze out into the world, and away from himself. He has given us all the slip.

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Featured image: Albert A. Hopkins, Fig. 11.—Man in a Bottle. From Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1897), p. 431. Book is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.