Steppenwolf (7 page)

Every human type has its hallmarks, its personal signatures. Each has its virtues and vices, its own deadly sin. Steppenwolf was a nocturnal creature; that was one of the things that marked him out. Morning was a bad time of day for him, a time to dread because no good ever came of it. In his whole life there wasn’t a single morning when he felt really cheerful. In the hours before noon he never achieved anything of value, never had good ideas, never managed to bring joy to himself or others. Only in the course of the afternoon did he slowly warm up and come to life. And only towards evening, on his good days, did he spring into action and become productive, at times passionate and excited. His need for solitude and independence was also linked to this. No one has ever had a more profound and passionate need for independence than he did. In his youth, when he was still poor and having difficulty earning his daily bread, he would rather wear tattered clothes and go hungry if only to salvage some small fragment of his independence. He never sold himself in exchange for money or a good life, never became a slave to women or people in power. To preserve his freedom he was prepared on countless occasions to throw away or reject things the world at large saw as advantages or blessings. He could not imagine anything more detestable and horrifying than having to follow some profession, keep strictly to a daily and yearly timetable, and obey others. He utterly loathed the idea of an office, secretariat or legal chambers, and his worst nightmare was to be confined in army barracks. He was able to avoid all such predicaments, though it often meant sacrificing a great deal. This was the man’s great virtue and strength. In this respect he was incorruptible, unwilling to compromise, steadfast and unwavering in character. On the other hand, this virtue was inextricably linked to his suffering and eventual fate. The same thing happened to him as to everyone. The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker. Thus it was Steppenwolf’s independence that
proved his downfall. He achieved his goal; he became more and more independent. He took orders from no one; he was required to comply with no one’s rules. He alone could freely determine what he did or did not do, for all people of strength unfailingly achieve whatever they are compulsively driven to search for. But, having achieved his freedom, Harry suddenly realized when experiencing it to the full that it was a living death. His position was a lonely one; it was uncanny the way the world left him to his own devices. Other people were no longer of concern to him; he wasn’t even concerned about himself. The air around him was getting thinner and thinner the more solitary he became, severing all contact with others, and he was slowly suffocating as a result. For the situation now was different. No longer his desire and goal, solitude and independence were a fate he was condemned to. He had made his magic wish and there was no going back on it. However strongly he yearned to re-establish contact with others, however willing he was to hold out his arms to embrace them, it was of no avail: they now left him alone. Yet there was no indication that people hated him or found him repugnant. On the contrary; he had lots of friends. Lots of people liked him. But friendliness and sympathy were the only reactions he ever encountered. People would invite him to their homes, give him presents, write him nice letters, but nobody got close to him, no attachments were ever formed, nobody was able or willing to share his life. He was now breathing the air that the lonely breathe, living in an atmosphere that was still, adrift from the world around him. No amount of yearning or goodwill had any effect on his inability to form relationships. This was one of the significant hallmarks of his life.

Another was his suicidal nature. At this point it has to be said that it is wrong to use the term ‘suicide case’ solely to designate those people who actually take their own lives. Even many of the latter to some extent become suicide cases only by chance. They are not necessarily suicidal by nature. Among the ranks of people devoid of personality or individual stamp, sheep-like people leading run-of-the-mill lives, destined for nothing of strong significance, there are many who end up committing suicide. Yet nothing in their whole character and make-up qualifies them as typical suicide cases, whereas conversely many of those who are by nature suicidal, perhaps the majority of them, never in fact lay a finger on themselves. The typical ‘suicide case’ – and Harry was one – need not necessarily live in a particularly close relationship to death. It
is possible to do that without being a suicide case. What is, however, peculiar to all suicide cases is the sense that their own selves, rightly or wrongly, are particularly dangerous, questionable and endangered natural growths. It seems to them that they are in an extraordinarily exposed and vulnerable position, as if they are standing on the narrowest of all cliff ledges where a slight push from someone else or some minute weakness on their part will be enough to plunge them into the void. People of this kind typically have written in their line of life the message that they are most likely to meet their death by suicide, or at any rate they imagine this to be the case. Their cast of mind almost always becomes apparent when they are still quite young, remaining with them for the rest of their lives, but it is not, as one might think, conditioned by any unusual lack of vital energy on their part. Quite the opposite: extraordinarily tenacious, voracious and also audacious characters can be found among these ‘suicide cases’. However, just as there are people prone to develop a temperature whenever they have the slightest ailment, those we call ‘suicide cases’, by nature always sensitive and highly strung, tend to react to the mildest distress by giving serious consideration to suicide. If we had a branch of science courageous and conscientious enough to occupy itself with human beings rather than simply the mechanisms of life’s phenomena; if we had an anthropology or a psychology worthy of the name, these matters of fact would be common knowledge.

It goes without saying that all these pronouncements of ours on the subject of suicide cases only scratch the surface of the matter. They are psychology, and therefore belong to physical science. From a metaphysical point of view, the issue looks different, much clearer. Viewed from such an angle, ‘suicide cases’ appear to us to be suffering from guilt feelings with regard to their very individuality. They are those individuals who no longer see self-development and fulfilment as their life’s aim, but rather the dissolution of self, a return to the womb, to God, to the cosmos. Very many people of this kind are utterly incapable of really committing suicide because they have a profound insight into the sinful nature of the act. In our eyes they are nevertheless suicide cases because they see death as their saviour, not life, and they are prepared to jettison, abandon and extinguish themselves in order to return to their origins.

Just as every strength can turn into a weakness (indeed
must
do so
under certain circumstances), the converse is true. Typical suicide cases can often make their apparent weaknesses into strengths and means of support; what is more, they manage to do so with remarkable frequency. Harry, our Steppenwolf, is just such a case. For him, as for thousands of his kind, the notion that death was an option available to him at any time had become more than just the melancholy play of an adolescent imagination. It was from this very idea that he derived his consolation, his main support in life. As is the case with all people of his kind, every shock to his system, every pain, every bad situation he experienced in life did indeed arouse in him the desire to choose death as an escape. Yet gradually he was able to turn this of all tendencies to his advantage by deriving from it a useful philosophy of life. As he grew accustomed to the idea that an emergency exit from life was always to hand, it gave him strength, made him curious to experience painful and wretched conditions to the full. And occasionally, when his life was a real misery, he might take a kind of perverse and grim delight in gleefully feeling: ‘Why not go on? I’m curious to see just how much a human being can bear! Once I reach the limit of what is bearable, all I need to do is open the door and I’ll have escaped it all.’ Very many suicide cases derive extraordinary strength from this idea.

On the other hand, all suicide cases also know what a struggle it can be resisting the temptation to take their own lives. In some small corner of their minds they all know that suicide, though it offers a way out, is nevertheless merely a shabby and illegitimate emergency exit. At bottom, the nobler and finer course is to let oneself be defeated and laid low by life itself rather than by one’s own hand. This knowledge, this bad conscience – which can be traced to the same source as the bad conscience, say, of so-called self-abusers – forces most ‘suicide cases’ to engage in a constant fight against temptation. They fight against it just as kleptomaniacs fight against their vice. This battle was something Steppenwolf also knew well; he had fought it with a whole range of different weapons. Eventually, at the age of roughly forty-seven, he hit on a good idea that was not without its humorous side and often filled him with delight. He decided on a firm date when he would allow himself to commit suicide: his fiftieth birthday. He agreed with himself that he should be free to use the emergency exit, or not, depending on the mood he was in that day. Whatever might happen to him in the meantime, whether he fell ill, experienced poverty, grief or suffering, it
was all only for a limited period. At the most it could only last these few years, months and days, and their number was getting smaller with each day that passed! And in fact he did now find it easier to put up with many trials and tribulations that would previously have caused him deeper and longer agonies, perhaps even shaken him to the core. If for some reason or other he was going through an especially bad patch; if in addition to his usual bleak, solitary and turbulent life he was suffering some particular pain or loss, he was now able to respond to the pain by saying: ‘Just you wait, two more years to go, then I’ll get the better of you!’ Then he would take deep delight in imagining all the cards and congratulatory letters arriving on his fiftieth birthday just when, sure in the knowledge that his razor wouldn’t let him down, he was bidding farewell to all pain and closing the door behind him. Then the gout in his joints, all the bouts of depression, the headaches and the pangs in his stomach could find some other poor devil to torment.

It still remains to us to explain Steppenwolf’s individual case, and his curious relationship to the bourgeoisie in particular, by relating these phenomena to the basic laws that govern them. Since it seems the obvious place to begin, let us take that relationship of his to things ‘bourgeois’ as our starting point.

According to his own understanding Steppenwolf was a total outsider to the world of the bourgeoisie since he knew no family life and had no ambition to climb the social ladder. He felt himself to be an out-and-out loner, now an eccentric and unhealthy recluse, now an individual of potential genius, far superior to the petty average. Conscious of despising the average bourgeois, he took pride in not being one. And yet in many respects his own life was thoroughly bourgeois. He had money in the bank and gave financial support to poor relatives; he dressed casually, but respectably and modestly; he sought to remain on a good footing with the police, the taxman and suchlike authorities. Beyond this, however, an intense, secret yearning constantly attracted him to the small world of the middle classes, to respectable family houses with their neat little gardens, their spotlessly clean staircases and their totally unassuming atmosphere of orderliness and good repute. He took pleasure in his little vices and extravagances, liked to feel that he was a creature apart from the bourgeois world, an eccentric or genius, yet he
never, if we can put it this way, chose to settle in any of those areas where bourgeois respectability is now non-existent. He never felt at home in the atmosphere of misfits or people prone to violent behaviour; never sought the company of criminals or social outcasts. No, the sphere he always lived in was that of respectable citizens, for he could constantly relate to their atmosphere, their customs and standards, if only in a spirit of opposition and revolt. Moreover, his own upbringing had been of a narrow, middle-class kind, and he still adhered to a whole host of ideas and stereotypical notions inculcated in him when he was growing up. In theory he hadn’t the slightest objection to prostitution, but he would have been personally incapable of taking any whore seriously or actually regarding her as his equal. Those the state and society made outlaws of, political criminals, revolutionaries, persuasive demagogues, he was capable of loving as brothers, but he would have had no idea how to react to a thief, burglar or sex killer other than disapproving of them in a rather conventional bourgeois manner.