Steppenwolf (19 page)

‘Hermione,’ I exclaimed in a pained voice. ‘Just look at me. I’m an old man!’

‘No you’re not, you’re a little boy. And just as you were too idle to learn to dance until it was almost too late, so you’ve been too idle to learn how to make love. You’re certainly capable of an excellent performance as a lover in the ideal, tragic mode, I’ve no doubt of that, my friend, and all credit to you. But now you’re also going to learn to love a bit in a normal human way. You see, we’ve already made a start. Pretty soon we’ll be able to let you loose at a ball, but you need to learn the Boston first. We’ll begin on that tomorrow. I’ll come at three o’clock. How did you like the music here, by the way?’

‘It was excellent.’

‘You see, you’ve made progress there too, learned something new. Until now you couldn’t stand all this dance music and jazz; it wasn’t serious or deep enough for you, but now you’ve realized that there is no need to take it seriously at all, though it can be very pleasant and delightful. Incidentally, the whole band would be nothing without Pablo. He’s the one who gives them the lead, puts some spark into them.’

In the same way that the gramophone had a harmful effect on the ascetic, intellectual ambiance of my study, and the alien American dance tunes represented a disturbing, indeed destructive, intrusion into my refined musical world, so new, daunting, disruptive elements were forcing their way into my hitherto so sharply defined and so strictly secluded life. The doctrine of the thousand souls expounded in the Steppenwolf tract and endorsed by Hermione was correct. In addition to all the old ones, every
day revealed a few new souls within me, all creating a fuss and making demands. Now I could see as clearly as daylight what a delusion my previous personality had been. The only things I had regarded as at all valid were the few skills and activities I happened to be strong in. I had painted the picture of a Harry and lived the life of a Harry who was in fact nothing but a very sensitively trained specialist in literature, music and philosophy. All the rest of myself, the whole remaining confused assemblage of skills, instincts and aspirations, I had felt to be a burden and had filed away under the label Steppenwolf.

Yet, far from being a pleasant and amusing adventure, my conversion to the truth, the dissolution of my personality, was on the contrary often bitterly painful, often almost unbearable. In the surroundings of my room, attuned to other frequencies, the gramophone often sounded truly devilish. And at times, when dancing my one-steps in some fashionable restaurant amid all the elegant playboys and confidence tricksters, it seemed to me I was a traitor to everything in life that had ever been honourable and sacred to me. If only Hermione had left me alone for a week I would have made a swift getaway from all these laborious and ludicrous experiments in living the high life. But Hermione was always there. I may not have seen her every day, but I was constantly seen by her, directed, supervised, assessed by her. She could even tell from the expressions on my face what angry thoughts of rebellion and escape were going through my mind, but she merely smiled in response.

As the destruction of what I used earlier to call my personality progressed I began to understand why, despite all my despair, I had been bound to fear death so terribly. I started to realize that this appalling and shameful dread of dying was also a part of my old, bourgeois, inauthentic existence. This previous Harry Haller, the gifted writer, the connoisseur of Goethe and Mozart, the author of critically acclaimed reflections on the metaphysics of
art, on genius and tragedy, and on humanity, this melancholy hermit in his cell crammed full of books was now being exposed, step by step, to self-criticism, and found wanting on every count. True, this gifted and interesting Herr Haller had preached reason and humanity, had protested against the brutality of the war, but he had not, while the war was taking place, allowed himself to be lined up against a wall and shot, which would have been the logical outcome of his ideas. Instead, he had arrived at some sort of accommodation, needless to say an extremely respectable and noble accommodation, but when all is said and done a compromise nonetheless. What’s more, though he had opposed power and exploitation, he had more than a few securities issued by industrial enterprises deposited at his bank, and he had no qualms whatsoever when spending the interest paid on them. And that is how things stood in every respect. Harry Haller may have succeeded wonderfully well in passing himself off as an idealist scornful of all worldly things, a nostalgic hermit and rancorous prophet, but at bottom he was a bourgeois who found the kind of life Hermione lived reprehensible, who fretted about the evenings he was wasting in the restaurant and the amount of cash he was squandering there. He had a bad conscience and, far from yearning to be liberated and fulfilled, was on the contrary dearly longing to return to those cosy days when all his intellectual dabbling still gave him pleasure and brought him fame. In this he was no different from the newspaper readers he so despised and derided who, because it was less painful than learning the harsh lesson of all they had endured, longed to return to those ideal times before the war. Ugh, he was enough to make you sick, this Herr Haller! And yet I still clung to him, or to what remained of the already crumbling mask he had worn, his flirtation with things intellectual, his bourgeois dread of all things random and contingent (of which death was an example too). And I scornfully and enviously drew comparisons between the
new, developing Harry, the rather shy and comical dilettante of the dance halls, and the pseudo-ideal image of the earlier Harry, in which he, the new Harry, had now discovered all the embarrassing features that had so disturbed him at the time in the professor’s Goethe engraving. He himself, the old Harry, had been just such a bourgeois-style idealized Goethe, an intellectual hero with a look in his eyes that was all too distinguished, radiating grandeur, high-mindedness and humanity as if his hair had been coated with brilliantine, and almost moved by his own nobility of soul. Damn me if that image hadn’t now got some bad holes in it! The ideal Herr Haller had been reduced to a wretched state. He looked like some dignitary with his trousers in tatters after being robbed of his wealth in the street. And he would have been better advised to learn the part of the ragged-trousered wretch he now was instead of wearing his rags as if his medals were still pinned to them and tearfully persisting in laying claim to his lost dignity.

Again and again meeting up with the musician Pablo, I was obliged to revise my judgement of him, if only because Hermione was so fond of him and assiduously sought his company. In my memory I’d registered Pablo as a handsome nonentity, a little, rather vain dandy, a happy child without a care in the world who took great delight in blowing into the toy trumpet he’d won at the fair and could easily be made to toe the line if you gave him enough praise and chocolate. But Pablo was not interested in my judgements. He was as indifferent to them as he was to my musical theories. He would listen to me in a polite and friendly way, smiling the whole time, but never giving any real response. In spite of this, however, I did seem to have aroused his interest, since he clearly went to some trouble to please me and show me goodwill. Once when, during one of these fruitless conversations of ours, I became irritated almost to the point of rudeness, he gave me a look of dismay and sadness and, taking hold of my
left hand and stroking it, invited me to take a sniff of something from a small gold-plated snuffbox. It would do me good, he said. I glanced inquiringly at Hermione, who nodded her approval, so I took a pinch and sniffed it. In no time at all I did indeed feel fresher and livelier, probably because there was some cocaine mixed in with the powder. Hermione told me Pablo had lots of substances like this, which he obtained by secret routes and occasionally offered to friends – to deaden pain, to help sleep, to produce beautiful dreams, to make you feel merry, to act as aphrodisiacs – and he was, she said, a past master when it came to mixing them and getting the dosage right.

Once, when I bumped into him in the street down by the river, he was perfectly happy to walk my way, and I finally managed to get a word out of him.

‘Herr Pablo,’ I said to him, as he toyed with a slender little ebony-and-silver cane, ‘you are a friend of Hermione, which is why I am interested in you. But I have to say that you don’t exactly make it easy for me to hold a conversation with you. I have tried several times to talk about music with you because it would have interested me to hear your opinion, your judgement or whatever counter-arguments you may have, but you never deigned to reply to me, even in the slightest way.’

Laughing at me heartily, he didn’t fail to answer this time but calmly said: ‘You see, in my opinion, talking about music is of no value. I never talk about music. I ask you, what should I have replied to your astute and accurate remarks? Everything you said was so right, you see. But listen, I’m a musician, not a scholar, and I don’t believe that being right is of the slightest value where music is concerned. With music, it’s not a matter of being right, or of taste and education and all that.’

‘Fair enough. But what is it matter of, then?’

‘It’s a matter of making music, Herr Haller, making music as well, as much and as intensively as possible! That’s the point,
Monsieur. I can have the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and be able to say extremely clever things about them, but that’s of no use to anybody. However, when I pick up my horn and play a brisk shimmy, regardless of whether it’s a good or a bad dance tune, it’s going to bring joy to people by putting a spring in their step and getting into their bloodstream. That’s the only thing that matters. Next time you are in a dance hall, just take a look at people’s faces at the moment when the music starts up again after a longish break. You’ll see their eyes beginning to sparkle, their legs starting to twitch, and their faces beaming brightly!
That’s
the point of making music.’

‘All very well, Herr Pablo, but music aimed at the senses isn’t the only kind. There’s music of the spirit and mind too. Nor is there only the music that people just happen to be playing at a given moment. There’s also immortal music, music that lives on even though it’s not currently being played. It’s possible for people lying alone in bed to bring back to life a tune from the
Magic Flute
or the
Matthew Passion
in their heads. Then you have music taking place without a soul blowing on a flute or bowing a violin.’

‘Certainly, Herr Haller. “Yearning” and “Valencia”
¹⁰
are also silently reproduced every night by lots of lonely and wistful people. Even the poorest of girls sitting typing in her office has the latest one-step going through her head and taps the keys to its rhythm. You are right, there are all these lonely people and as far as I’m concerned they are welcome to their silent music, whether it be “Yearning”, the
Magic Flute
or “Valencia”. But where do all these people get their solitary, silent music from? They get it from us musicians. It first has to have been played and heard
and has to have got into the bloodstream before anyone can think or dream of it in the privacy of their home.’

‘Agreed,’ I said coolly. ‘Nevertheless, you can’t go putting Mozart and the latest foxtrot on one and the same level. And it does make a difference whether the music you play to people is divine and ageless or the cheap variety that only lasts a day.’

Noticing from the sound of my voice how worked up I was, Pablo immediately put on his kindest expression, tenderly stroked my arm and adopted an incredibly gentle tone of voice.

‘Ah, my dear man, what you say about different levels may well be right. I certainly don’t mind you situating Mozart and Haydn and “Valencia” on any level that suits you. It’s all the same to me. It’s not for me to decide on levels, that’s not something I’m asked to judge upon. People may still be playing Mozart in a hundred years’ time, whereas in two years from now they will perhaps already have stopped playing “Valencia”. I think that’s something we can safely leave to the dear Lord to decide. He has control of all our lifespans, even those of every waltz and foxtrot, and, since he is just, he will surely do what is right. But we musicians have to do our bit by carrying out the duty assigned to us. That means we must play whatever people desire at the moment and must play it as well, as beautifully and as forcefully as we possibly can.’

With a sigh, I gave up. There was no getting the better of the man.

I was now often experiencing an odd mixture of the old and the new, of pain and pleasure, of fear and joy. One moment I was in heaven, the next in hell; mostly in both at once. Now the old Harry and the new would be living in bitter strife, now at peace with one another. Sometimes the old Harry seemed to be totally
extinct, dead and buried, then suddenly he was on his feet again, giving orders, ruling the roost and behaving like a know-all. And the new, little, young Harry, feeling ashamed, allowed himself to be pushed into the background without a word of protest. At other times the young Harry would seize the old one by the throat and nearly throttle him. That would lead to a deal of groaning, much mortal combat and many thoughts of the dreaded razor.

Often, however, I felt engulfed by sorrow and happiness in a single wave. There was one such moment only a few days after my first attempt at dancing in public when, going into my bedroom at night, to my indescribable amazement, dismay, shock and delight I discovered the lovely Maria lying in my bed.

Of all the surprises Hermione had sprung on me so far this was the most powerful. You see, I didn’t doubt for one moment that
she
had sent me this bird of paradise. For once I had not spent the evening with Hermione, but had instead gone to hear a good performance of early church music in the Minster. It had been a nice, wistful outing, a return to my former life, to the haunts of my youth, to the territory of the ideal Harry. In the high Gothic choir of the church, the beautiful net vaulting of which, brought to ghostly life by the few lights playing on it, seemed to be swaying back and forth, I had heard pieces by Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Bach and Haydn. Wandering once more down the much-loved paths of my past, I had again heard the glorious voice of a Bach singer, a woman I once counted my friend and in whose presence I had experienced many extraordinary performances. The voices in these old compositions, the music’s infinite dignity and sanctity, had reawakened in me all the uplifting experiences of my youth, everything that had then enthused and delighted me. Feeling sad, but totally absorbed, I sat there in the lofty choir of the church, a guest for an hour or so in this noble, blessed world which had once been my
home. During a Haydn duet I had suddenly been moved to tears and, not waiting for the concert to finish, had stolen out of the Minster, thus forgoing the opportunity to meet my singer friend again. Oh what marvellous evenings I’d spent together with the concert artists after such recitals in the old days! Now I had been walking till I was weary through the dark narrow streets in which here and there behind restaurant windows jazz bands were playing the melodies of my current existence. Oh what a dismal maze of error and confusion my life had become!