Steppenwolf (6 page)

By now I was back in the fold of the city’s old quarter. Its lights extinguished, the little church stood there in the greyness, looking unreal. Suddenly I recalled what I had experienced earlier that evening: the mysterious Gothic doorway and the mysterious sign above it, mocking me with its flickering neon letters. What message had they spelled out? ‘Admission not for everybody.’ And: ‘For mad people only.’ I stared intently across at the old wall, secretly wishing that the magic might start afresh, the written invitation might be meant for the madman that was me, and I might be allowed through the little portal. Perhaps I would find what I was yearning for there; there, perhaps, they were playing my music.

In the profound gloom the dark stone wall looked at me calmly, seemingly locked up in its own deep dream. And nowhere was there a gateway, nowhere a Gothic arch, just dark, motionless wall with not a hole in it. I walked on with a smile and a friendly nod to the old stonework: ‘Sleep well, Wall, I won’t wake you. There will come a time when they will tear you down or stick
the greedy publicity for their firms all over you, but for now you are still there, still beautiful and peaceful, and I am very fond of you.’

Suddenly I was startled by a figure emerging without warning from the black depths of a street right in front of me. It was a man wearily going home late on his own. He was dressed in a blue smock, had a cap on his head, and was carrying a pole with a placard on it over his shoulder. Strapped in front of his belly was an open tray of the kind people use to sell things at fairs. He walked on wearily ahead of me without looking round, otherwise I would have greeted him and given him a cigar. In the light of the next street lamp I tried to read the device on his banner, the red placard, but it was swaying from side to side on the pole and I could not decipher anything. I called out to him, asking to be shown the placard. When he stopped, holding his pole fairly straight, I was able to pick out some flickering, swaying letters:

A
NARCHIST EVENING SHOW
!

M
AGIC
T
HEATRE
!

A
DMISSION NOT FOR EVERY
 …

‘You are just the person I’ve been looking for,’ I shouted, delighted. ‘What is this evening show of yours? Where is it? When?’

He had already started walking on again.

‘Not for everybody,’ he said in a sleepy voice, as if he didn’t care, and went on walking. He had had enough, he couldn’t wait to get home.

‘Stop,’ I cried, running after him. ‘What have you got in that tray of yours? I want to buy something from you.’

Without stopping, the man reached mechanically into his tray and took out a little booklet, which he held out to me. I took it quickly and put it in my pocket. As I was fumbling with my coat
buttons, wanting to fish out some money, he turned aside into a gateway, pulled the gate to behind him and was gone. I could hear the sound of his heavy footsteps in the courtyard, first on flagstones, then on wooden stairs. After that I heard nothing more. And all at once I too was very tired. I felt as if it were very late, high time to go home. Walking faster, I had soon made my way through the sleeping suburban street to my area between the old ramparts of the city where, behind bits of lawn, the civil servants and people with small private incomes live in neat little ivy-covered blocks of rented accommodation. Walking by the ivy, the lawn and the little fir tree I came to the front door, found the keyhole, found the light switch, and crept up past the glass doors, the polished cupboards and the pot plants before unlocking the door to the attic, my little pseudo-home. The armchair and the stove, the inkwell and the box of paints, Novalis and Dostoevsky were waiting for me, just as other, normal people expect their mother or wife, the children, the maids, the dogs and cats to be waiting for them when they get back home.

When taking off my wet overcoat, I happened on the little book again. Removing it from my pocket, I saw it was one of those thin pamphlets, poorly printed on poor paper, which you see on sale at fairs. ‘Tips for those born in January’ or ‘How to make yourself twenty years younger in a week’, that kind of thing.

But when I had settled down in the armchair and put on my reading glasses, I was amazed and suddenly filled with foreboding to see on the cover of this cheap pamphlet the title: ‘On Steppenwolf: A Tract. Not for everybody.’

The contents of this document, which I read with constantly increasing suspense at one sitting, were as follows:

For mad people only

Once upon a time there was a man called Harry, otherwise known as Steppenwolf. He walked on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but in actual fact he was still a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a lot of the things sensible human beings are capable of learning, and he was a fairly clever man. One thing he had not learned, however, was to be satisfied with himself and his life. He was incapable of this; he was a dissatisfied human being. This was probably because in the depths of his heart he always knew (or thought he knew) that he wasn’t actually a human being at all, but a wolf of the steppes. Wise minds might argue the point as to whether he really was a wolf; whether he had once, even before his birth, been transformed by magic from a wolf into a human being; whether he had been born a human being but endowed with and possessed by the spirit of a lone wolf; or, alternatively, whether his belief that he was in fact a wolf was merely a delusion or a form of sickness on his part. One possibility, for instance, would be that he was wild, boisterous and disorderly in his youth. Those responsible for his upbringing had then tried to stifle the beast in him, but precisely by doing so had led him to imagine and believe that he really was in fact a beast, clothed in only a thin veneer of education and humanity. It would be possible to go on discussing this at length, entertainingly so; or even to write whole books on the subject. However, that would be of no help to Steppenwolf because to him it was a matter of complete indifference whether the wolf had been instilled in him by magic spells, by beatings, or whether it was merely a product of his imagination. Whatever other people might think about it, and even what he himself might think, was of no use to him at all. He certainly wasn’t going to get the wolf out of his system by speculation of that kind.

Steppenwolf’s nature was thus twofold, partly human, partly wolfish. This was his fate, and it may well be that such a fate was nothing special
or unusual. There have been quite a number of reported sightings of human beings with a great deal of the dog or fox, the fish or snake in their make-up, yet they had no special difficulties on that account. In their cases, the human being and the fox, or the human being and the fish simply coexisted without either of them harming the other. The one was even of help to the other, as can be seen from many an instance of men who are envied because of their great success in life. They owe their good fortune more to the fox or the monkey in them than to the human being. This is of course common knowledge. Harry’s case, on the other hand, was different. In him the human being and the wolf went their own separate ways. Far from helping one another, they were like mortal enemies in constant conflict, each causing the other nothing but grief. When two mortal enemies are locked in one mind and body, life is a miserable business. Well, to each his lot. None of us has it easy.

In Steppenwolf’s case, the fact is that, like all hybrid creatures, he lived with the feeling of being sometimes a wolf, sometimes a human being. However, as a wolf he was forever conscious of his human side lying in wait, observing, judging and condemning him; just as the wolf did when he was a human being. For example, whenever Harry in his capacity as human being had some lovely idea, experienced some fine and noble sentiment, or did a so-called good deed, the wolf in him would bare its teeth and laugh him utterly to scorn, indicating how ludicrously out of character all this fine play-acting was in a wild animal of the steppes, a wolf who at heart knew perfectly well that his real pleasure lay in stalking alone across the plains, occasionally quaffing blood or pursuing a she-wolf. Seen thus from the wolf’s point of view, every human action became frighteningly comic and self-conscious, vain and inane. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved like a wolf, when he showed other people his teeth or became murderously hostile to humankind as a whole, hating all its hypocritical and degenerate manners and customs. For then it was the human side of him that lay in wait, observing the wolf, calling him a brute and a beast, spoiling and souring all the pleasure he was taking in the straight-forward life of a healthy untamed wolf.

This was the way of things for Steppenwolf, and one can imagine that Harry’s life was not exactly a pleasant and happy one. However, this doesn’t mean to say that he was unhappy to some quite unusual degree (even though this did seem to him to be the case, all human
beings tending to consider their share of suffering to be the greatest). That ought never to be said of anyone. Even those without a trace of wolf in them are not necessarily happy. And even the unhappiest of lives has its hours of sunshine, small flowers of contentment that dot its sandy, stony ground. And so it was for Steppenwolf too. He was usually very unhappy, there is no denying that, and he was capable of making others unhappy too; the ones he loved, that is, and those who loved him, for all those who grew fond of him only ever saw the one side of the man. Some took a liking to him as a refined, intelligent and exceptional person, only to react with horror and disappointment on suddenly discovering the wolf in him. And this was inevitable because Harry, wishing his whole self to be loved, as everybody does, was for that very reason incapable of denying the wolf or concealing its existence from those whose affection meant a lot to him. There were, however, others who of all things loved the wolf in him, precisely the side of him that was free, wild, untameable, dangerous and strong. And they in turn were of course extraordinarily disappointed, indeed miserable, when the wild, wicked wolf suddenly turned out to be human too, still felt a strong desire to be kind and gentle, still wanted to listen to Mozart, read poetry and keep faith with the ideals of humanity. More than any others, these people were especially prone to react with anger and disappointment, and thus Steppenwolf transmitted to all the strangers whose lot it was to come into contact with him something of his own dual, divided nature.

Any readers now thinking they know Steppenwolf and can imagine what his wretched life, lived at odds with himself, was like, are mistaken, however, because they don’t know the half of the story. Just as there are exceptions to every rule, and one lone sinner may under certain circumstances be more pleasing to God than ninety-nine righteous people, there were, though we haven’t mentioned them yet, exceptions and strokes of luck in Harry’s case too. At times he had no difficulty breathing, thinking and feeling purely as a wolf, at other times purely as a human being. On very rare occasions, the two even made peace with one another, lived for each other’s sake, so that it was no longer the case that one of them slept while the other was on watch. Rather, they reinforced one another, each acting as the other’s double. Moreover, as happens all over the world, there were also times in this man’s life when all things habitual, everyday, familiar and routine seemed only
to exist in order to be put on hold for a matter of seconds, momentarily disrupted so as to make way for something extraordinary and miraculous, for grace. It is of course debatable whether these rare and brief periods of happiness made up for and alleviated Steppenwolf’s otherwise wretched lot so that his happiness and suffering eventually balanced one another out. Perhaps the fleeting but potent happiness of these rare moments even absorbed all his suffering, leaving a positive residue. This is one more question that those with time to spare might care to brood upon. The wolf frequently did brood upon it, and the days he spent doing so were wasted, pointless days.

There is one more thing to be said about this. There are quite a lot of human beings of a similar kind to Harry; many artists, in particular, are members of the species. All such people have two souls within them, two natures. Divine and devilish elements; maternal as well as paternal blood; a capacity for happiness and suffering can be found side by side and intermingled in them in just as hostile and confused a manner as were the wolf and human being in Harry. And in their rare moments of happiness these people, whose lives are very unsettled, now and then experience something powerful and ineffably beautiful, lifting them like dazzling spray so high above the sea of suffering that the fleeting glow of their happiness can radiate outwards, touch others and enchant them. It is in such moments of elation, fleeting and precious like spray over a sea of suffering, that all those works of art have their origins in which suffering individuals have managed to rise above their personal fates to such a degree that their happiness radiates like a star. To all those viewing it, it seems like something eternal, like the happiness they themselves have been dreaming of. All people of this kind, however their actions or works are defined, actually have no lives at all; that is to say their lives have no being, no shape. They are not heroes or artists or thinkers the way other people are judges, doctors, shoemakers or teachers. Instead, their lives are an eternal ebb and flow full of suffering; unhappy, ghastly, riven lives that are without meaning unless one is prepared to see their meaning in precisely those rare experiences, actions, thoughts and works that, rising above the chaos of such lives, suddenly shine forth. It is among people of this kind that the dangerous and frightening idea originated that human life as a whole may be merely a dreadful mistake, the botched outcome of a serious miscarriage suffered by some primeval mother, an experiment of nature gone wildly and
horrifyingly wrong. However, it is also from among their ranks that a very different idea arose: the idea that human beings may not merely be moderately rational creatures, but rather children of the gods, destined for immortality.