Steppenwolf
Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other
distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this
garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting
flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a
loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the
thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either
man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all that he imputes to
“man”! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean--while to the
wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master,
is set down all that is strong and noble.
Now we bid Harry good-bye and leave him to go on his way alone. Were he
already among the immortals--were he already there at the goal to which
his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would
look back to all this coming and going, all this indecision and wild
zig-zag trail. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and
joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.
When I had read to the end it came to my mind that some weeks before
I had written one night a rather peculiar poem, likewise about the
Steppenwolf. I made a search among the snow-drift of papers on my
writing table, found it, and read:
The Wolf trots to and fro,
The world lies deep in snow,
The raven from the birch tree flies,
But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe.
The roe--she is so dear, so sweet--
If such a thing I might surprise
In my embrace, my teeth would meet,
What else is there beneath the skies?
The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.
Even a hare I would not despise;
Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.
Is everything to be denied
That could make life a little bright?
The hair on my brush is getting grey.
The sight is failing from my eyes.
Years ago my dear mate died.
And now I trot and dream of a roe.
I trot and dream of a hare.
I hear the wind of midnight howl.
I cool with the snow my burning jowl,
And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait
in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with
the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew
more and yet less of me than I did myself. And both these pictures
of myself, my dispirited and halting poem and the clever study by an
unknown hand, equally afflicted me. Both were right. Both gave the
unvarnished truth about my shiftless existence. Both showed clearly
how unbearable and untenable my situation was. Death was decreed for
this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested
existence--unless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he
underwent a change and passed over to a self, new and undisguised.
Alas! this transition was not unknown to me. I had often experienced it
already, and always in times of the utmost despair. On each occasion
of this terribly uprooting experience myself, as it then was, was
shattered to fragments. Each time deep-seated powers had shaken and
destroyed it; each time there had followed the loss of a cherished
and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more.
Once, I had lost my profession and livelihood. I had had to forfeit
the esteem of those who before had touched their caps to me. Next, my
family life fell in ruins over night, when my wife, whose mind was
disordered, drove me from house and home. Love and confidence had
changed of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbours saw me
go with pitying scorn. It was then that my solitude had its beginning.
Years of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a
new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a
certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to
the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation.
But this mould, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted
and noble intent. A whirl of travel drove me afresh over the earth;
fresh sufferings were heaped up, and fresh guilt. And every occasion
when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful
vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and
unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair,
such as I had now to pass through once more.
It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I
had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in
spiritual growth and depth, but with it went an increased loneliness,
an increasing chill of severance and estrangement. Looked at with
the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one
shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from
all that was normal, permissible and healthful. The passing years
had stripped me of my calling, my family, my home. I stood outside
all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in
unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and
though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter
stranger to this world in all I thought and felt. Religion, country,
family, state all lost their value and meant nothing to me any more.
The pomposity of the sciences, societies, and arts disgusted me. My
views and tastes and all that I thought, once the shining adornments of
a gifted and sought-after person, had run to seed in neglect and were
looked at askance. Granting that I had in the course of all my painful
transmutations made some invisible and unaccountable gain, I had had
to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life was harsher, more
difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to wish to
continue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the smoke
in Nietzsche’s harvest song.
Oh, yes, I had experienced all these changes and transmutations that
fate reserves for her difficult children, her ticklish customers.
I knew them only too well. I knew them as well as a zealous but
unsuccessful sportsman knows the stands at a shoot; as an old gambler
on the Exchange knows each stage of speculation, the scoop, the
weakening market, the break and bankruptcy. Was I really to live
through all this again? All this torture, all this pressing need, all
these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness of my own self,
the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death. Wasn’t it
better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings and
to quit the stage? Certainly, it was simpler and better. Whatever
the truth of all that was said in the little book on the Steppenwolf
about “suicides,” no one could forbid me the satisfaction of invoking
the aid of a gas-stove or a razor or revolver, and so sparing myself
this repetition of a process whose bitter agony I had had to drink
often enough, surely, and to the dregs. No, in all conscience, there
was no power in the world that could prevail with me to go through
the mortal terror of another encounter with myself, to face another
reorganisation, a new incarnation, when at the end of the road there
was no peace or quiet--but forever destroying the self, in order to
renew the self. Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you
please, call it an infamous and ignominious escape; still, any escape,
even the most ignominious, from this treadmill of suffering was the
only thing to wish for. No stage was left for the noble and heroic
heart. Nothing was left but the simple choice between a slight and
swift pang and an unthinkable, a devouring and endless suffering. I had
played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put
honour before comfort, and heroism before reason. There was an end of
it!
Daylight was dawning through the window panes, the leaden, infernal
daylight of a rainy winter’s day, when at last I got to bed. I took
my resolution to bed with me. At the very last, however, on the last
verge of consciousness in the moment of falling asleep, the remarkable
passage in the Steppenwolf pamphlet which deals with the immortals
flashed through me. With it came the enchanting recollection that
several times, the last quite recently, I had felt near enough to the
immortals to share in one measure of old music their cool, bright,
austere and yet smiling wisdom. The memory of it soared, shone out,
then died away; and heavy as a mountain, sleep descended on my brain.
I woke about midday, and at once the situation, as I had disentangled
it, came back to me. There lay the little book on my bed-side table,
and my poem. My resolution, too, was there. After the night’s sleep
it had taken shape and looked at me out of the confusion of my youth
with a calm and friendly greeting. Haste makes no speed. My resolve to
die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had
grown slowly to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose
next breath would bring it to the ground.
I had in my medicine-chest an excellent means of stilling pain--an
unusually strong tincture of laudanum. I indulged very rarely in it
and often refrained from using it for months at a time. I had recourse
to the drug only when physical pain plagued me beyond endurance.
Unfortunately, it was of no use in putting an end to myself. I had
proved this some years before. Once when despair had again got the
better of me I had swallowed a big dose of it--enough to kill six
men, and yet it had not killed me. I fell asleep, it is true, and
lay for several hours completely stupefied; but then to my frightful
disappointment I was half awakened by violent convulsions of the
stomach and fell asleep once more. It was the middle of the next day
when I woke up in earnest in a state of dismal sobriety. My empty brain
was burning and I had almost lost my memory. Apart from a spell of
insomnia and severe pains in the stomach no trace of the poison was
left.
This expedient, then, was no good. But I put my resolution in this way:
the next time I felt that I must have recourse to the opium, I might
allow myself to use big means instead of small, that is, a death of
absolute certainty with a bullet or a razor. Then I could be sure.
As for waiting till my fiftieth birthday, as the little book wittily
prescribed--this seemed to me much too long a delay. There were still
two years till then. Whether it were a year hence or a month, were it
even the following day, the door stood open.
I cannot say that the resolution altered my life very profoundly. It
made me a little more indifferent to my afflictions, a little freer
in the use of opium and wine, a little more inquisitive to know the
limits of endurance, but that was all. The other experiences of that
evening had a stronger after-effect. I read the Steppenwolf treatise
through again many times, now submitting gratefully to an invisible
magician because of his wise conduct of my destiny, now with scorn and
contempt for its futility, and the little understanding it showed of
my actual disposition and predicament. All that was written there of
Steppenwolves and suicides was very good, no doubt, and very clever. It
might do for the species, the type; but it was too wide a mesh to catch
my own individual soul, my unique and unexampled destiny.
What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the
hallucination, or vision, of the church wall. The announcement made
by the dancing illuminated letters promised much that was hinted at
in the treatise, and the voices of that strange world had powerfully