Steppenwolf (32 page)

As a new literary departure, then, Hesse published
Demian
in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair. The first-person narrator learns to reject any external norms as he tries to follow ‘what is urging outwards’ from within himself. For a moment, the war seems to offer him and all self-searching, ‘marked’ individuals the possibility of giving themselves up to a destiny shared with thousands of others. But
Demian
concludes by presenting the wounded Sinclair’s rather different vision of his inner self – far from having merged with a collective whole, he has become totally assimilated to his wise, dead friend, Demian. Hesse’s outsider has thus found himself in his own, radically self-reliant
alter ego. Paradoxically, once again, the novel’s individualist message turned it into the bible of the various post-war German youth movements.

In
Siddhartha
, published in 1922, Hesse’s cultural critique takes the form of an ‘Indian Tale’ set at the time of Buddha and partly inspired by the author’s journey to Ceylon and Indonesia in 1911. The son of a Hindu priest or Brahmin, Siddhartha eventually absorbs the essence of Buddhism (significantly, without ever submitting himself to Buddha’s doctrine) in a state of unteachable wisdom under the practical influence of an old man. Through the central character’s unflinching spiritual individualism, Hesse combined his own blend of Eastern religions with a distinctly Western element.

By the time
Steppenwolf
was published in 1927, Hesse’s well-established intellectual nonconformism had taken its toll. A feeling of having excluded himself irreversibly from a disgusting, laughable contemporary world was evident in his autobiographical notes published in 1924–5, recording his visits to the spa town of Baden near Zurich, and in 1927, reflecting on his tour of public readings in south Germany. The sense of irremediable loneliness and a suicidal repulsion by modern realities are depicted in the form of the midlife crisis experienced by the central character of
Steppenwolf
, Harry Haller. Unlike Sinclair/Demian or Siddhartha, Haller remains an outsider figure unable to achieve fulfilment within himself. Yet, as Hesse himself indicated, the character’s unresolved crisis, appealing powerfully to most readers and forming the basis of the novel’s global fame, constitutes only one
narrative level. The solution to Haller’s problems is implied in the novel’s serenely positive ‘higher world’ of contemplations and reflections, not least the dialogue with sublime ‘Immortals’ such as Goethe and Mozart.

By comparison with
Steppenwolf
, arguably the author’s outstanding modernist achievement in terms of content and form, the later
works seem to mark a regression. In
Narcissus and Goldmund
(1929–30), removed from the increasingly threatening world of the interwar years not only by a medieval setting, Hesse explored the dualism between other-worldly wisdom and life-affirming sensuality in the eponymous pair of outsider characters. The ‘wholeness’ to which they both aspire cannot be attained by either of them individually; it is to be found in their relationship.
The Glass Bead Game
(published in 1943), Hesse’s last big novel and the fruit of twelve years, presents the culmination of his ambitions as a writer. In opposition to the barbarism of Hitler’s Germany and the Second World War, it depicts a utopian future republic of the spirit, an elitist province
called ‘Castalia’. Here an exclusively male order of intellectuals celebrates the highest achievements of human cultural history in an esoteric, self-sufficient game, the rules of which are watched over by a ‘Magister Ludi’. The novel follows the rise of Joseph Knecht from gifted schoolboy to this highest office in the hierarchy. Although showing the intellectual gear of Hesse’s central figures, Knecht does not fall into the category of self-searching ‘outsider’ as long as he finds himself in harmony with the existing order. But eventually, in a reversal of the strife that is typical of Hesse’s earlier characters, Knecht leaves behind the artificial harmony of Castalia for an involvement with the ‘real world’. That world, too, is conceivably remote from the conflicts of the twentieth century, which Hesse’s future humanity is imagined to have overcome. This was a far cry from
Steppenwolf
in its
engagement with the realities of the 1920s and the acute crisis Hesse was experiencing as an ageing intellectual author.

On his own admission Hermann Hesse was a peculiarly autobiographical writer. The central figures of most of his stories
and novels were, he once declared, symbolic vehicles for his own experiences, thoughts and problems at particular stages of his life. Of all such characters, Harry Haller is the most striking example. He shares the author’s initials H. H. and his age – Hesse was approaching his fiftieth birthday when completing the novel. Like Hesse, Haller looks back on a broken marriage after his wife’s sudden mental illness. Like Hesse, he is pilloried in the right-wing press as a traitor to his German Fatherland because of articles of an internationalist and pacifist persuasion he has written during and since the First World War.

Beyond these broad biographical parallels, however,
Steppenwolf
deals in a concentrated way with a particular period of crisis in Hesse’s life, which was at its most acute during the years 1922 to 1926. Suicide is an option referred to more than once in Hesse’s letters of these years. Aged forty-eight in 1925, he writes to his friends Emmy and Hugo Ball of his despairing attitude to life, but claims that he has overcome the worst depression by allowing himself two years’ respite until his fiftieth birthday. Only then will he have the right to hang himself, should he still feel that way inclined. This is, of course, exactly the stratagem adopted by the ‘suicidal’ Haller in the novel.

An important forerunner of
Steppenwolf
is a cycle of over forty poems that Hesse wrote in the winter of 1925/6, significantly entitled ‘Crisis’. The whole cycle was not published until 1928, and then only in a limited edition, but a selection from it appeared in the November 1926 issue of the periodical
Neue Rundschau
under the title: ‘Steppenwolf. Extracts from a Diary in Verse’. The cycle includes the very poem ‘Steppenwolf’ that Haller, in the novel, says he has written late one night, and which he describes as ‘a self-portrait in crude rhyming doggerel’. Much the same could be said of most of the poems in the cycle, which have little aesthetic merit, as Hesse himself admitted in a letter of
October 1926 to the critic Heinrich Wiegand, before justifying them in the following terms:

Years ago I gave up all aesthetic ambition. I don’t write literature now but simply confessions, just as a drowning man or a man dying of poisoning no longer worries about the state of his hair or the modulation of his voice, but instead simply lets out a scream.

The ‘Crisis’ collection also contains verbatim the poem ‘The Immortals’, which Haller in the novel scribbles on the back of the wine list while waiting for Maria in a pub in the suburbs. Otherwise, however, its poems are mainly raw, subjective expressions of the problems Hesse is experiencing and his attempts to find new distractions as he feels old age coming on. Much the same ground is covered in his correspondence of the period before the real-life experiences find their way, often only slightly adapted, into the novel he sometimes called the ‘prose Steppenwolf’.

Hesse’s depressed state of mind in these years relates, as has already been stressed, largely to the process of ageing. His correspondence is full of complaints about physical ailments, principally sciatica and gout, but also failing eyesight and severe headaches, especially behind the eyes. All of these are reflected in the novel, as are Hesse’s own preferred means of coping with pain, whether by resorting to strong opiates or to heavy drinking. His excessive consumption of wine and brandy, in particular, is frequently mentioned in the ‘Crisis’ poems and letters of the period, and both drinks feature prominently in Harry Haller’s visits to city pubs in the novel.

Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which one of Haller’s other activities in the novel – his dancing lessons, the purchase of a gramophone, his attendance at the masked ball – is based on Hesse’s own experience at that time. A letter of February 1926
records that he has just finished a course of six dance lessons and, as far as can be expected of ‘an elderly man with gout’, now feels reasonably competent at the foxtrot and one-step. And one Saturday in March, during the Carnival season, he went, for the first time in his life, to a masked ball in Zurich, commenting shortly afterwards: ‘I have been a real fool
¹
to spend 30 years of my life wrestling with the problems of humanity without ever knowing what a masked ball is.’ In June of the same year he confides to a friend that he has bought himself a small
gramophone in Zurich and taken it back with him to his country retreat in Montagnola above Lake Lugano. There he winds it up from time to time of an evening and listens to ‘Valencia’ or ‘Yearning’, popular dance tunes of the time.

Hesse had moved to Montagnola from Berne in 1919 and very much regarded his house and garden there as a rustic refuge from city life and the modern world in general. His early years in this retreat were characterized by a degree of asceticism – he lived frugally, becoming a vegetarian for a spell, and also practised meditation. He saw himself as a kind of hermit, enjoying the isolation that was fruitful for his writing as well as the new art form he had taken up: painting. However, the harsh winters in Montagnola became unbearable and from 1924 onwards he regularly moved back to the city during colder months, taking lodgings in Basel and later Zurich. The experience of meeting friends, of living in proximity to ‘normal’ people like his first landlady in Basel, from whom he rented two rooms in the attic just as Haller does from the ‘aunt’ in the novel, led him to question the value of his years of isolation
and independence. It also led to regrets that he had spent so much of his younger years in the pursuit of some kind of higher wisdom, thus missing out on the simpler, unreflective enjoyments of life. In his own words, he was now
attempting to live for once like an ‘overgrown child’. Success was only partial, but it was pleasurable. It seems, in addition to the dancing and pub-crawling, also to have involved a degree of sexual liberation, certainly of renewed attraction to often younger women, though there is nothing as explicit in Hesse’s letters of the time as the account of Harry Haller’s erotic education at the hands of the prostitute Maria.

The winter months Hesse spent in Basel and Zurich during these years were of course not wholly devoted to this life of dancing, drinking and erotic escapades. He himself writes of the need to pack his suitcases carefully before leaving Montagnola, ensuring that he has with him the books he requires, his watercolours and sketch pads, a few pictures and other objects with which to deck out his city lodgings. In the novel, Harry Haller arrives in the city with just this kind of intellectual and aesthetic ‘baggage’, and he fills his rented attic room with it, turning it into a sort of hermit’s cell. His preferences correspond closely to Hesse’s own. The picture of a Siamese Buddha that the landlady’s nephew notices hanging on the wall, of course, reflects Hesse’s interest in oriental religion and thought, its replacement by a portrait of Gandhi his pacifism. The near identity of author and character
is even more strikingly apparent in Haller’s reading. German Romanticism was an early and lasting influence on Hesse, and two of his favourite writers of that period, Jean Paul and Novalis, figure prominently in Haller’s travel library. Heavily annotated volumes of Dostoevsky point to another preoccupation of Hesse. In 1920 he published three essays on the Russian novelist under the title ‘Gazing into Chaos’. The presence of the complete works of Goethe in Haller’s ‘den’ is of even greater significance in this respect. Hesse was a deep admirer of Germany’s major poet, novelist and dramatist, though not uncritical of him, especially in his late ‘Olympian’ phase as the ‘sage of Weimar’, and both his admiration and his
criticism are voiced by Haller in his dream encounter with Goethe in the novel. Goethe’s influence on
Steppenwolf
and his role as a character in the novel,
one of the so-called ‘Immortals’, indicate how firmly Hesse’s imaginative autobiographical fiction is rooted in the German literary tradition.

A prominent genre in German literature is the ‘Bildungsroman’, or novel of education. In contrast to the broadly realist novel traditions of England, France and Russia it focuses on the development of a central character from inexperienced youth to eventual maturity. Wider social concerns, while by no means ignored, tend to play a subordinate role to this process of personal education, in which philosophical ideas also often have a big part to play. Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
is a ‘Bildungsroman’, but with a difference in that Harry Haller is at the outset already a highly educated man, a published author and sophisticated connoisseur of literature and classical music. His is a very belated ‘education’, beginning in his late forties, and it follows a highly unusual curriculum. One of the key things he has to learn is to view himself differently. His image of himself as a hybrid
creature, half human by virtue of his intellectual, spiritual and artistic qualities, half wolf by virtue of his instincts, appetites and urges, is dismissed as an instance of crude binary thinking in the Steppenwolf ‘Tract’, a pamphlet that comes into his hands after a night out drinking. ‘Harry may be a highly educated human being, but he is acting like some savage, say, who is incapable of counting beyond two,’ we are told there. Yet the Tract also points to an example of such thinking on the part of a literary character who is anything but a primitive man: the learned Doctor Faust of Goethe’s drama and his famous
declaration: ‘Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!’ Such crude dualism is still central to Western thought, it is argued, despite the fact that Indian philosophy long ago exposed it as a delusion, since in reality human beings consist of multiple souls. Although he studies the Tract closely, there is
little evidence that Haller – unlike perceptive readers of the novel – learns from it at this stage. Only in the ‘Magic Theatre’ sequence towards the end, when confronted by the image of his multiple selves, whether in the giant mirror on the wall or in the form of miniature figures on a chessboard, does he begin to appreciate the fact.