Steppenwolf (10 page)

We are not now talking about human beings as educationalists, economists and statisticians understand them. We are not concerned with the millions of them that roam our streets. They are just like so many grains of sand or the spray from waves breaking on the shore. Whether there are a few million more of them, or fewer, is unimportant. They are mere material, nothing more. No, we are talking about human beings in the ideal sense of the term, about the goal reached at the end of a long process of becoming fully human, about sovereign human beings, about the Immortals. Genius is not as rare a phenomenon as often seems to us the case, although it is of course not as common as histories of literature or the world, not to mention newspapers, would have us believe. Harry the Steppenwolf would, it seems to us, be blessed with sufficient genius
to venture along the road to becoming fully human instead of pitying himself whenever he encounters the slightest difficulty and, as an excuse, falling back on the stupid notion of himself as Steppenwolf.

The fact that individuals of such potential can fall back on Steppenwolf imagery and clichés like ‘two souls, alas’ is just as surprising and depressing as the cowardly affection they often have for things bourgeois. Any human being capable of understanding Buddha, who has some idea of the heights and depths of human experience, ought not to be living in a world where ‘common sense’, democracy and middle-class culture prevail. It is only cowardice that makes him live there, and whenever he finds his confines oppressive, whenever his poky little middle-class room becomes too cramped for him, it is the ‘wolf’ he blames, refusing to acknowledge that at times the wolf is the best part of him. ‘Wolf’ is the name he gives to all the wild elements in himself. He feels them to be wicked, dangerous, apt to frighten the life out of respectable citizens, yet – despite thinking himself a highly sensitive artist – he cannot see that apart from the wolf, behind the wolf, there are a lot more creatures living inside him. Nor is every creature with sharp teeth a wolf. Harry is home to the fox, the dragon, the tiger, the ape, and the bird of paradise too. He can’t understand that by sticking to his fairy-tale of the wolf he has turned his whole world, this Eden full of creatures lovely and terrifying, great and small, strong and gentle, into an oppressive prison house. In much the same way, the pseudo ‘human being’ of bourgeois convention is suppressing and shackling the true human being within him.

Just imagine a garden with hundreds of different trees, thousands of different flowers, hundreds of different fruits and herbs. Now, if the only botanical distinction the gardener knows is that between edible things and weeds, he will not know what to do with nine tenths of his garden. He will uproot the most enchanting flowers, fell the finest trees, or at any rate detest and frown upon them. This is just what Steppenwolf is doing with the thousand blooms in his soul. He is totally ignoring anything that doesn’t come under the heading of ‘human being’ or ‘wolf’. And there is no end to the things he counts as ‘human’! All things cowardly, vain, stupid and mean are classed as ‘human’ if only because they are not exactly wolf-like, just as all strong and noble qualities are attributed to the ‘wolf’ simply because Harry hasn’t yet managed to master them.

It is time for us to take leave of Harry and allow him to continue his journey on his own. Just suppose he were already in the realm of the Immortals, had already reached what seems to be the goal of his arduous quest. How amazed he would be to observe Steppenwolf’s wild meandering, as he zigzags here and there, unable to make up his mind as to the best course to take. How he would smile at him – both encouragingly and reproachfully, with compassion as well as amusement.

When I had finished reading it occurred to me that a few weeks ago during the night I had once written out a rather strange poem, also on the subject of Steppenwolf. I searched for it among the jumble of paper that took up the whole of my desk, found it and read:

Steppenwolf is on the prowl,

the world is covered in snow.

Up in a birch I spot an owl,

but no hare is in sight and no roe.

On tender hinds I love to prey,

the nicest things in wood or heath.

If only one would come my way,

I’d grasp her with my claws and teeth.

I’d treat my sweetheart really well:

Give her thighs a good deep bite,

of her bright red blood I’d drink my fill,

then howl all alone through the night.

A hare would be better than nothing –

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.