Steppenwolf (4 page)

The key to my understanding was provided by some remarks of Haller. Once, when we had been discussing so-called acts of cruelty in the Middle Ages, he said to me: ‘What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche’s mettle had to endure our
present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood.’

Often, when reading Haller’s notebooks, I couldn’t help thinking of these words. For Haller is one of those people who end up caught between two eras, deprived of all security and innocence; one of those fated to experience to an intense degree, as a personal torment and hell, all that is questionable about human life.

That, it seems to me, explains the significance his notebooks may have for us, and it is why I resolved to make them public. Beyond that I wish neither to defend nor pass judgement on them. That is something for each individual reader to decide according to his or her conscience.

The day had gone by as days tend to. I had whiled away the hours, gently killing time in the only way I know how to, unworldly and withdrawn as my life is. I’d spent a few hours working, poring over old books. For two hours I had been in pain, the way people getting on in years are. I had taken a powder and rejoiced at the outcome, for pain could be outwitted. I had lain in a hot bath, soaking up the welcome warmth. I had had three deliveries of post and flicked through all the letters and printed matter I could do without. I had done my breathing exercises but had skipped the mental ones, too idle for them today. I had been out walking for an hour and discovered fine, delicate, precious patterns traced in the sky by small wisps of cloud. This was very pleasing, just as reading the old books or lying in the warm bath had been. Yet, all in all, it had not exactly been a delightful or particularly glorious day, a day of happiness or joy. Instead, just one of those normal, routine days which for a long time now had been my lot: moderately pleasant, perfectly tolerable, reasonable, lukewarm days in the life of an elderly, discontented gentleman; days without exceptional pain, without exceptional worries, devoid of actual grief or despair. Days when, without getting upset or feeling anxious, it is even possible objectively and calmly to consider whether the time might not have come to follow the
example of Adalbert Stifter by having an accident while shaving.
¹

Anyone who has experienced those other days, the nasty ones when you get attacks of gout or the sort of severe headaches, firmly lodged behind your eyeballs, which cast a diabolical spell on every activity of the eyes and ears, transforming all joy into agony; or the soulless days, bitter days when you feel empty inside and at the end of your tether, when, wherever you set foot on this devastated earth, sucked dry by joint-stock companies, the leering face of humanity and so-called culture will confront you in all its fake and vulgar, tinny fairground glitter, acting like an emetic, concentrated within your own sick self to the point where it becomes insufferable. Anyone who has tasted those hellish days will be more than content with normal half-and-half days such as today. All such people will sit thankfully by the warm stove and be grateful, on reading the morning paper, to find that today again no war has broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no particularly crass foul play has been discovered in politics or industry. Then, tuning the strings of their rusty lyre, they will intone a moderate, reasonably cheerful, almost happy psalm of thanksgiving to their silent, gentle, half-and-half god of contentment who, somewhat sedated with bromide, will find it boring. And in the thick, lukewarm air of this contented boredom, this highly commendable painlessness, both of them – the bored, dozing half-and-half god and the slightly greying half-and-half human being singing the muted psalm – will look just as alike as twins.

It’s a fine thing, this contentment, this painlessness, these tolerable days when you keep your head down, when neither pain nor desire dare to raise their voices, when you do everything at a whisper, stealing around on the tips of your toes. But my problem, sad to say, is that precisely this kind of contentment doesn’t
agree with me. After a short spell, finding it insufferably detestable and sickening, I have to seek refuge in other climes, possibly by resorting to sensual pleasures, but if necessary even opting for the path of pain. For a short time I can stand to inhale the lukewarm, insipid air of the so-called good days, free of desire and pain. But, childish soul that I am, I then get so madly sore at heart and miserable that I fling my rusty thanksgiving lyre in the smug face of the drowsy god of contentment and opt for a true, devilish pain burning inside me rather than this room temperature so easy on the stomach. At such times a savage desire for strong emotions and sensations burns inside me: a rage against this soft-tinted, shallow, standardized and sterilized life, and a mad craving to smash something up, a department store, say, or a cathedral, or myself. I long to do daringly stupid things: tear the wigs from the heads of a few revered idols, stand the fares of some rebellious schoolboys desperate to visit Hamburg, seduce a little girl, or twist the neck of the odd representative of the bourgeois powers that be. For of all things, what I hated, abhorred and cursed most intensely was just this contentment, this well-being, the well-groomed optimism of the bourgeois, this lush, fertile breeding ground of all that is mediocre, normal, average.

It was in such a mood that, as darkness fell, I ended this middling, run-of-the-mill day. I didn’t succumb to the lure of my already-made bed with the hot-water bottle in it, as might be expected of a man who is slightly off-colour. Instead I irritably put on my shoes, slipped on my overcoat and – disgusted with my paltry day’s labour – made my way through darkness and fog into town to drink what drinking men traditionally call ‘a drop of wine’ in a pub called the Steel Helmet. This entailed walking down the stairs from my garret, those alien stairs I find it hard to climb, the thoroughly bourgeois, well-swept, clean stairs of a highly respectable rented property with space for three families, in which I have my solitary retreat under the roof. I don’t know
how it comes about, but this rootless lone wolf of the steppes who detests the world of the petit bourgeoisie is forever living in true bourgeois housing. It’s an old sentimental fad of mine. I don’t make my home in palaces or working-class housing. No, of all places I prefer such highly respectable, highly boring, immaculately maintained refuges where there is a whiff of turpentine and soap, and where just closing the front door loudly or walking in with dirty shoes on is enough to give you a fright. No doubt my love of such an atmosphere stems from my childhood, and my secret longing for something like a true home from home keeps on leading me, when I am desperate, down these same old stupid paths. So it is, and I also like the contrast between my life – my solitary, loveless, hectic, utterly disordered way of life – and this bourgeois, family milieu. I like to savour the smell of peace and quiet, of cleanliness, decency and domesticity on these stairs. It never fails to move me, despite my hatred of the bourgeoisie. Then I like to cross the threshold of my room, where all that ceases to exist; where there are cigar butts and wine bottles lying around between the piles of books, where everything is an untidy mess, the opposite of homely. Here everything – books, manuscripts, ideas – is steeped in and marked by the anguish of those living alone, the problematic nature of human existence, and the strong desire to invest new meaning in this human life which has become meaningless.

And now I was passing by the araucaria plant. On the first floor, you see, our stairs go down via a little landing outside a flat that is certain to be even more immaculate, tidy and well swept than the rest because this little landing radiates a pride in housekeeping that is superhuman. It is a shining little shrine to tidiness. On a parquet floor you hardly dare set foot on there are two dainty stools, each with a large plant pot on it. One contains an azalea, the other a quite majestic araucaria, a healthy, strapping specimen of a dwarf tree, the very acme of perfection. And there
isn’t a single needle on a single one of its twigs that doesn’t gleam as if freshly washed. Occasionally, when I know no one is watching, I use this place as a shrine. I sit down on one of the stairs above the araucaria, rest a while, fold my hands and look down into this little garden of order. The touching upkeep of it, its absurdly isolated location, somehow moves me to the depths of my soul. Beyond this landing, in the sacred shade, one might say, of the araucaria, there is, I suspect, a flat full of gleaming mahogany where lives full of decency and health are lived by people who rise early, do their daily duty, have moderately jolly family parties, go to church on Sundays, and are tucked up in bed early every night.

By now, putting on a brave face, I was crossing the damp asphalt of the roads at a trot. The street lamps, as if shedding tears of grief, shone through the cool, damp gloom, sucking inert reflections of themselves from the wet ground. The forgotten years of my youth came to mind. How I used to love dark and gloomy evenings like this in late autumn and winter! Then, I would eagerly and enthusiastically soak up their atmosphere of loneliness and melancholy as, wrapped in my overcoat, I spent half the night walking in rain and strong wind through hostile, leafless nature. I already felt lonely even then, but I deeply enjoyed my isolation and my head was full of verses which I wrote up afterwards by candlelight in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed. Well, that was over and done with now; I had drunk that cup dry, and it had not been replenished. Was it a matter for regret? No, it wasn’t. Nothing that was over and done with was a matter for regret. What I did regret was the here and now, all the countless hours and days lost to me because I just endured them and they brought neither rewards nor profound shocks to my system. Yet, praise be to God, there were also exceptions. There were occasional, rare hours that were different, that did bring shocks and rewards, tearing down walls and
taking me – lost soul – back again to the living heart of the world. Feeling sad, yet deeply moved, I tried to recall my last such experience. It had been during a concert in which a magnificent piece of early music was being played. Suddenly, between two bars of a passage played
piano
by the woodwind, the door to eternity had opened up for me again. I had flown through heavens, seen God at work. I had suffered blissful pains, no longer resisting or fearing anything the world had to offer. I had affirmed everything, surrendered my heart to everything. The experience had not lasted long, perhaps a quarter of an hour, but it recurred in the dream I had that night and ever since, through all the dismal days, its secret gleam had now and again resurfaced. Occasionally I saw it clearly for minutes, passing through my life like a golden trace of the divine, but it was almost always deeply buried under layers of filth and dust. Then it would shine forth afresh in a shower of golden sparks, apparently never to be lost again. Yet it was soon lost once more, totally. Once, lying awake at night, I found myself speaking lines of poetry, lines far too beautiful and strange for me to consider writing them down. In the morning I no longer knew them, yet they lay hidden inside me like the heavy nut inside an old, brittle shell. On another occasion it came back when reading a great writer, when thinking through an idea of Descartes or Pascal in my head. And once it shone forth again, its golden trace guiding me onwards up to the heavens, when I was with the woman I loved. Sadly, this trace of the divine is difficult to pick up in the midst of the life we now lead, this so extremely contented, so extremely bourgeois, so extremely shallow life, and faced with the kind of architecture, business, politics, human beings that are all around us. How can I help being a lone wolf and disgruntled hermit, surrounded by a world, none of whose aims I share, none of whose joys appeal to me? I can’t bear to sit in a theatre or cinema for long, I can scarcely read a newspaper, hardly ever a modern book. I can’t
understand the pleasures or joys people now seek in crowded trains and hotels, in crowded cafés with their obtrusive hot-house music; in the bars and variety theatres of expensive, fashionable cities; at the world’s fairs, at street carnivals, in the public lectures for those desperate to improve their education, or at large sporting venues. I am unable to understand or share any of these joys which thousands of other people jostle one another to experience, though they would of course be within my reach. On the other hand, what I experience in my own rare hours of joy, what invigorates, delights, uplifts me, and sends me into ecstasies, the world at large knows, looks for and loves if at all only in works of literary fiction. In real life they find it mad. And in fact, if the world at large is right, if the music in the cafés, these mass entertainments, these American-style people who are content with so little are all right, then I am wrong, I am mad. I am indeed the Steppenwolf that I often call myself, a beast that has strayed into an alien and incomprehensible world and is no longer able to find its home, the air it is used to breathing or the food it likes to eat.