Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks, Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks

  of a night their warm flesh tastes so sweet –

  but sadly I seem to be lacking

  all that once made my life such a treat.

  The hairs on my tail are now grey,

  my eyesight’s no longer so clear.

  It’s years since my wife passed away,

  now I prowl, and my dreams are of deer,

  or sometimes of hares as well

  when, hearing the winter wind blow

  and slaking my thirst with the snow,

  I haul my poor soul down to hell.

  Now I had two portraits of myself to hand, one a self-portrait in crude rhyming doggerel, sad and anxious just like me, the other cool and, it would seem, highly objective, the work of someone uninvolved, picturing me from the outside and from above. Whoever wrote it knew more than I myself did, yet in some senses also less. And both these portraits together, my melancholy, halting words in the poem and the clever study by some unknown hand, caused me pain. Both of them were right, both painted an unvarnished picture of my desperate existence, both clearly revealed just how intolerable and unsustainable a state I was in. This Steppenwolf had to die, he had to put an end to his detestable existence by his own hand. Either that, or he must undergo the deadly flames of further self-scrutiny till melting point, then transform himself, tear off his mask and enter upon a new stage of self-development. Alas, I was no stranger to this process. I knew it of old; I had already experienced it several times, always in periods of extreme despair. In the course of this deeply disturbing experience my then self had on each occasion been shattered in fragments; each time profound forces had shaken and destroyed it; each time I had been deserted by and lost a cherished and particularly dear part of myself. In one such instance, as well as my worldly wealth, I had lost my reputation as a respectable citizen, and had to learn to live without the esteem of those who previously had raised their hats to me. A second time my family life had collapsed overnight. My wife, falling mentally ill, had driven me out of house and comfortable home; love and trust had suddenly turned into hatred and mortal combat; the neighbours watched me go with a mixture of sympathy and disdain. That had been the beginning of my progressive isolation. And once more, after a period of years, cruelly hard years when I had been able, in strict isolation and by means of harsh self-discipline, to construct a new life based on ascetic and spiritual ideals and to regain a certain degree of calm and sovereign control, this rebuilt existence, dedicated to exercises in abstract thought and strictly regulated meditation, had also collapsed, having all at once lost its noble and lofty purpose. Something launched me on mad, strenuous journeys around the world again, leading to new suffering and new guilt in abundance. And each time, before tearing off one of my masks and witnessing the collapse of one of my ideals, I had experienced the same dreadful emptiness and silence, the same sense of being caught in a mesh, isolated, without human contact, the same empty and barren hell, bereft of love and hope, that I was now obliged to go through once again.

  Every time my life had been shattered in this way I had, there is no denying it, ended up gaining something or other; something in the way of liberty, intellectual and spiritual refinement, profundity, but also in the way of loneliness, since I was increasingly misunderstood or treated coldly by others. From a bourgeois point of view my life had been, from each shattering blow to the next, one of steady decline, a movement further and further away from all things normal, acceptable and healthy. Over the years I had lost my profession, my family and my home, and now I stood alone, an outsider to all social circles, loved by no one, viewed with suspicion by many, in constant, bitter conflict with public opinion and public morality. And even though I still lived in a bourgeois setting, everything I thought and felt nevertheless made me a stranger among the respectable people of that world. For me religion, fatherland, family and state, having been devalued, were no longer matters of concern. I was sickened by the pompous antics of those involved in academic life, the professions and the arts. My opinions, my tastes, my whole way of thinking, which had once upon a time made me popular, a man of talent who shone in conversation, were now so degenerate and decadent that people found them suspect. I may have gained something as a result of my painful series of transformations, something invisible and incalculable, but I had been made to pay dearly for it, my life having on each occasion become harsher, more difficult, more isolated, more at risk. Believe me, I had no cause to want this journey of mine to continue since, like the smoke in Nietzsche’s autumn poem,1 it was heading for regions where the air would become thinner and thinner.

  Ah yes, I knew these experiences, knew them all too well, these transformations that fate has in store for its problem children, the most awkward of its progeny. I knew them as an ambitious but unsuccessful hunter may know the various stages of an expedition or an old stock-exchange gambler the sequence of speculating, making a profit, losing confidence, wavering, going bankrupt. Ought I really to go through that whole process yet again? All that torment, the terrible distress, all the insights into one’s own vile and worthless self, all the awful fear of failure, all the mortal dread? Wasn’t it wiser and easier to avoid any repetition of so much suffering by getting the hell out? Certainly, that was the easier and wiser thing to do. Whether the arguments about ‘suicide cases’ in the Steppenwolf pamphlet were correct or not, nobody could deny me the satisfaction of ending my life with the help of carbon monoxide, a cut-throat razor or a pistol, thus sparing myself any repetition of the bitterly agonizing process that I had, believe me, been obliged to endure all too often and too intensely. No, damn it all, no power in the world could require me to endure the mortal dread of another confrontation with my self, another reshaping of my identity, a new incarnation, the aim and outcome of which was never, of course, peace and quiet, but simply renewed destruction of the self followed by yet more self-redevelopment! Suicide might well be stupid, cowardly and shabby, it might be an inglorious and shameful emergency exit, but any exit from this grinding mill of suffering, even the most ignominious, was devoutly to be wished. My life was no longer a stage for heroes and the noble-minded; what I now faced was a simple choice between a slight, momentary pain and unimaginably agonizing, endless suffering. In the course of my so difficult, so crazy life I had played the noble Don Quixote often enough, preferring honour to comfort and heroism to reason. Enough was enough!

  When I finally got to bed, morning was already gaping in through the window panes, the leaden morning, curse it, of a rainy winter’s day. I took my decision to bed with me. However, at the very last moment, at the extreme limit of consciousness just before falling asleep, that remarkable passage from the Steppenwolf pamphlet flashed before my mind’s eye in which the ‘Immortals’ were mentioned. In connection with this I suddenly remembered that on a number of occasions, and only recently, I had felt close enough to the Immortals to be able to savour in a few notes of early music all their cool, bright, harshly smiling wisdom. The memory of it surfaced, shining brightly, only to fade again when sleep, as heavy as a mountain, descended on my brow.

  Waking towards midday, I was soon able to view my situation clearly again. The little booklet was there on my bedside table together with the poem, and my decision still stood. Overnight, as I slept, it had become firm and rounded, and now, emerging from the chaos that had been my life in recent times, it was taking a cool but kind look at me. There was no need to rush things. My decision to die was no passing whim, but a fruit that had ripened and would keep. It had grown slowly and was heavy now, gently rocked by the wind of fate and bound to fall when the next gust came along.

  In my travelling medicine chest I had an excellent painkiller, a particularly strong opiate that I only rarely resorted to, often denying myself for months on end the relief it brought. Only when racked by pain to the point where my body could no longer stand it did I take this potent analgesic. Unfortunately it was not suitable for committing suicide.
I had tried it out years ago when once again engulfed in despair. I had swallowed a fair old quantity of it, enough to kill six people, and still it did not kill me. It did put me to sleep, and I lay there fully anaesthetized for a few hours, but to my terrible disappointment I was then half wakened by strong stomach convulsions. Without fully coming to, I brought up all the poison and went to sleep again, only finally waking up midway through the next day. I felt horribly sober, burned out and empty-headed, scarcely able to remember a thing. Apart from a spell of sleeplessness and irritating stomach pains the poison had no after-effects.

  This means was therefore out of the question. But I now formulated my decision as follows: as soon as my condition was again bad enough to make me reach for that opiate, I should be allowed, instead of slurping it in search of fleeting relief, to seek lasting salvation in death – and a certain and reliable death, what’s more, either by a bullet or the blade of a razor. This clarified the situation. To wait until my fiftieth birthday, the solution oddly suggested in the booklet about Steppenwolf, seemed to me far too long. After all, there were still two years to go till that date. Whether it was a matter of a year or a month, whether tomorrow even – the door was now open.

  I cannot say that the ‘decision’ greatly changed my life. It made me a little more indifferent to ailments, a little more careless in my consumption of opium and wine, a little more curious about the limits of what I could bear, but that was all. The other experiences of that evening had stronger after-effects. I read through the Steppenwolf tract once more, now with rapt attention and gratitude as if I knew that some invisible magician was wisely determining my fate, now with scorn and contempt against the tract’s cool objectivity which, so it seemed to me, totally failed to understand the tenor and tension of my life. The points made in it about lone wolves and suicide cases, for all their accuracy and intelligence, were ingenious abstractions, valid only for the general category and type. However, it seemed to me that my person, my real psyche, my own unique, individual destiny could not be caught in so wide-meshed a net.

  However, what preoccupied me most was that hallucination or vision I had had at the church wall, the dancing illuminated letters with their inviting message that tallied with some of the things intimated in the tract. I had been promised much then, the voices from that strange world had greatly aroused my curiosity, and I often spent hours on end deeply absorbed in contemplation of the matter. In the process, the warnings contained in those inscriptions became more and more clear to me: ‘Not for everybody!’ and ‘For mad people only!’ So I had to be mad and quite remote from ‘everybody’ if those voices were to reach me, those worlds to communicate with me. My God, had I not long since been living at a sufficient remove from everybody, from the lives and minds of normal folk? Had I not been enough of an outsider, mad enough, for years? And yet, deep down inside me, I fully understood this summons, this invitation to go mad, to jettison all reason, inhibition and bourgeois respectability, and to surrender myself to the fluctuating, anarchic world of the soul, of the imagination.

  One day, after yet again searching the streets and squares in a vain attempt to find the man with the placard on a pole and roaming several times on the lookout past the wall with the invisible portal, I encountered a funeral procession in the suburb of St Martin. Contemplating the faces of the mourners who were trudging along behind the hearse, the thought went through my head: Where is there anyone in this city, in this world, whose death would be a loss to me? And where is there anyone to whom my death might matter? True, there was Erika, the woman I loved. Well yes, but we had been in a very unsteady relationship for ages, rarely seeing one another without falling out, and at that moment I didn’t even know where she was staying. From time to time she would come to me or I would travel to see her and since we are both solitary and difficult people, to some degree like each other in mentality and mental sickness, some sort of bond continued to exist between us despite everything. But might she not breathe a sigh of relief if she heard of my death? I didn’t know, nor could I guarantee my own feelings with any certainty. To have any knowledge of such matters you have to live a normal, practical life.

  In the meantime I had, on a whim, joined the funeral procession, jogging along behind the mourners as far as the cemetery, an up-to-date concrete affair, complete with crematorium and all mod cons. However, our deceased one was not cremated. Instead, his coffin was unloaded in front of a plain hole in the ground and I watched the clergyman and the remaining vultures, employees of some undertaker, going about their business. Attempting to invest their activities with a semblance of solemnity and grief, they overdid things to the point where, through sheer theatricality, awkwardness and insincerity, they ended up being comic. Dressed from head to foot in flowing black robes, the uniform of their profession, they were doing their utmost to instil the right mood in the assembled mourners, hoping to force them to their knees before the majestic spectacle of death. But all their efforts were in vain; nobody wept; none of them seemed to miss the deceased at all. Nor could anyone be persuaded to adopt a solemnly religious air. Again and again the clergyman addressed the assembly as ‘dear brothers and sisters in Christ’, but all these silent shopkeepers, master bakers and their wives merely looked at the ground in front of them, forced expressions of seriousness on their tradespeople’s faces. They were awkward and insincere, wishing for nothing more than a rapid end to this uncomfortable ceremony. Well, it did come to an end and the two Christian brethren standing furthest forward, having shaken hands with the speaker, went to the edge of the nearest bit of lawn to rub the damp clay, in which their deceased had been laid, from their shoes. Without the slightest delay they resumed their normal, human appearance, the face of one of them suddenly striking me as familiar. It seemed to me to be the same man who had carried the placard that night and thrust the pamphlet into my hand.

  The very moment I thought I recognized him he turned round, bent down and busied himself with his trousers, painstakingly rolling them up above his shoes. Then he rapidly walked off, an umbrella tucked under his arm. Walking after him, I caught him up and nodded to him, but he seemed not to recognize me.

  ‘Is there no show tonight?’ I asked, attempting to give him a wink, as people who are in on some secret do. However, the time when such knowing facial expressions came naturally to me was all too long past. After all, I had almost forgotten how to speak, so secluded a life did I lead. I myself sensed that I only managed a stupid grimace.

  ‘Show tonight?’ the man snarled, looking me in the eye as if he didn’t know me from Adam. ‘The Black Eagle’s the place to go, for goodness’ sake, if that’s what you are in need of.’

  In fact I was no longer certain that he was the man. Disappointed, I continued on my way, not knowing where to go. For me there were no goals, nothing to strive for, no responsibilities. Life had a dreadfully bitter taste. I felt the nausea that had been mounting for a long time reach its peak, felt myself cast out by life, thrown on the scrap heap. I walked through the grey city in a rage. Everything seemed to me to have an odour of damp earth and burial about it. I wasn’t having one of those vultures standing at my graveside in his black clergyman’s robes, oh no, nor any of that sentimental twaddle about brothers and sisters in Christ! Sad to say, wherever I looked, whatever I turned my thoughts to, there was no joy to be found, no one to call out my name. Nothing felt the least bit attractive; everything had the smell of stale second-hand goods, of stale, lukewarm contentment. It was all old, faded, grey, listless, worn out. My God, how was it possible? What had managed to reduce me – inspired youth, man of letters, lover of the arts, widely travelled man and ardent idealist – to such a sorry state? How had this paralysis so slowly and stealthily come over me, this hatred of myself and everyone else, this emotional constipation, this profound, evil disgruntlement? How had I ended up, my heart empty, in this filthy hellhole of despair?

  As I was going by the library, I bum
ped into a young professor with whom I had earlier had occasional conversations. When I was last staying in this city, I had even visited him several times in his flat in order to discuss oriental mythologies, an area of study I was much occupied with at the time. Walking stiffly in my direction, this learned scholar, who was rather short-sighted, only recognized me as I was already about to pass him by. Hurling himself at me, he greeted me most warmly, for which I, given the lamentable state I was in, was moderately grateful. Pleased to see me, he became animated, reminding me of detailed points from our former conversations and assuring me that he had benefited a great deal from my suggestions and had often thought of me. Since then, he said, he had rarely had such lively and productive exchanges with colleagues. He asked me how long I had been in town – only a few days, I lied – and why I hadn’t looked him up. As I gazed into the charming fellow’s learned, kind face I actually found the scene ridiculous, but like a starving dog I nevertheless enjoyed the scrap of warmth, the sip of love, the morsel of recognition it brought me. Steppenwolf Harry was so touched that he began to grin; his parched gullet filled with saliva and, against his will, sentimentality made him grovel. I did indeed grovel, lying through my teeth, saying I was here only briefly, to do some research, and in any case I didn’t feel particularly well, otherwise I would of course have paid him a visit. And when, despite everything, he then warmly invited me to spend the evening at his home I gratefully accepted, asking him to give my best wishes to his wife. What with all this energetic smiling and talking my cheeks, no longer accustomed to such exertions, were now aching. And while I, Harry Haller, caught unawares and feeling flattered, courteous and anxious to please, stood there in the street, smiling back at the kind face of this friendly, short-sighted man, the other Harry was standing next to me, a grin on his face too. And as he stood there grinning, he was thinking what a strange, twisted and two-faced chap I was, since only two minutes ago I had been fiercely baring my teeth against the whole damned world. Now, as soon as I heard someone call my name, immediately upon being innocuously greeted by some solid respectable citizen, I was so moved that I couldn’t wait to give my blessing and consent to everything. Like a little pig in muck, I was wallowing in the minimal benevolence, respect and friendliness shown to me. Thus the two Harrys, neither cutting a particularly sympathetic figure, stood facing the worthy professor, mocking each other, observing each other and spitting at one another’s feet. As always in such situations, they were once again wondering whether their behaviour was simply a sign of stupidity and weakness, a common feature of human nature, or whether such sentimental egoism, such spinelessness, emotional dishonesty and ambivalence were merely personal characteristics of a peculiarly Steppenwolf kind. If this disgraceful behaviour was a common feature of human nature, I was justified in hurling my contempt in humanity’s face with even greater force than before; if it was just a personal weakness, then I had reason to indulge in an orgy of self-contempt.