Steppenwolf
annihilating the celebrated man with its crushing yet delicate irony.
That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed
utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly
of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual
with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer
and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude
of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture
was announced--no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch,
its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the
whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated
intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below
the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our
culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke
eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one
who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: “See
what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!” and at once all renown, all
intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards
the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a
monkey’s trick!
With this I have gone far ahead and, contrary to my actual plan and
intention, already conveyed what Haller essentially meant to me;
whereas my original aim was to uncover his picture by degrees while
telling the course of my gradual acquaintance with him.
Now that I have gone so far ahead it will save time to say a little
more about Haller’s puzzling “strangeness” and to tell in detail how I
gradually guessed and became aware of the causes and meaning of this
strangeness, this extraordinary and frightful loneliness. It will be
better so, for I wish to leave my own personality as far as possible in
the background. I do not want to put down my own confessions, to tell a
story or to write an essay on psychology, but simply as an eye-witness
to contribute something to the picture of the peculiar individual who
left this Steppenwolf manuscript behind him.
At the very first sight of him, when he came into my aunt’s home,
craning his head like a bird and praising the smell of the house, I was
at once astonished by something curious about him; and my first natural
reaction was repugnance. I suspected (and my aunt, who unlike me is the
very reverse of an intellectual person, suspected very much the same
thing)--I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in
some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him
with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time
replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so
long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In
course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction
was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of
gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller
was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings
of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a
boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that
the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for
however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in
his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and
foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he
hated and despised.
And here I cannot refrain from a psychological observation. Although I
know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good
reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very
pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine, that makes
the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.
But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break
the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud
and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only
in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent
and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth
of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose
upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could
command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr.
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic
and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no
harm, for the love of his neighbour was as deeply in him as the hatred
of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s
neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate
is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds
the same cruel isolation and despair.
It is now time, however, to put my own thoughts aside and to get
to facts. What I first discovered about Haller, partly through my
espionage, partly from my aunt’s remarks, concerned his way of living.
It was soon obvious that his days were spent with his thoughts and
his books, and that he pursued no practical calling. He lay always
very late in bed. Often he was not up much before noon and went
across from his bedroom to his sitting-room in his dressing-gown.
This sitting-room, a large and comfortable attic room with two
windows, after a few days was not at all the same as when occupied
by other tenants. It filled up; and as time went on it was always
fuller. Pictures were hung on the walls, drawings tacked up--sometimes
illustrations cut out from magazines and often changed. A southern
landscape, photographs of a little German country town, apparently
Haller’s home, hung there, and between them were some brightly painted
water-colours, which, as we discovered later, he had painted himself.
Then there were photographs of a pretty young woman, or--rather--girl.
For a long while a Siamese Buddha hung on the wall, to be replaced
first by Michelangelo’s “Night,” then by a portrait of the Mahatma
Gandhi. Books filled the large book-case and lay everywhere else as
well, on the table, on the pretty old bureau, on the sofa, on the
chairs and all about on the floor, books with notes slipped into them
which were continually changing. The books constantly increased, for
besides bringing whole armfuls back with him from the libraries he
was always getting parcels of them by post. The occupant of this room
might well be a learned man; and to this the all-pervading smell of
cigar-smoke might testify as well as the stumps and ash of cigars all
about the room. A great part of the books, however, were not books
of learning. The majority were works of the poets of all times and
peoples. For a long while there lay about on the sofa where he often
spent whole days all six volumes of a work with the title _Sophia’s
Journey from Memel to Saxony_--a work of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean
Paul showed signs of wear, also Novalis, while Lessing, Jacobi and
Lichtenberg were in the same condition. A few volumes of Dostoievski
bristled with pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and
papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box,
generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave
nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle
usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little
shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of Burgundy as well
as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly
emptied in a very brief space--after which it disappeared in a corner
of the room, there to collect the dust without further diminution of
its contents. I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried
on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of
intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the
same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a
middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality;
I am also an abstainer and non-smoker, and these bottles in Haller’s
room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.
He was just as irregular and irresponsible about his meal times as he
was about his hours of sleep and work. There were days when he did not
go out at all and had nothing but his coffee in the morning. Sometimes
my aunt found nothing but a banana peel to show that he had dined.
Other days, however, he took his meals in restaurants, sometimes in the
best and most fashionable, sometimes in little out-lying taverns. His
health did not seem good. Besides his limping gait that often made the
stairs fatiguing to him, he seemed to be plagued with other troubles
and he once said to me that it was years since he had had either a
good digestion or sound sleep. I put it down first and last to his
drinking. When, later on, I accompanied him sometimes to his haunts
I often saw with my own eyes how he drank when the mood was on him,
though neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk.
I have never forgotten our first encounter. We knew each other then
only as fellow-lodgers whose rooms were adjoining ones. Then one
evening I came home from business and to my astonishment found Haller
seated on the landing between the first and second floors. He was
sitting on the top step and he moved to one side to let me pass. I
asked him if he was all right and offered to take him up to the top.
Haller looked at me and I could see that I had awoken him from a kind
of trance. Slowly he began to smile his delightful sad smile that has
so often filled my heart with pity. Then he invited me to sit beside
him. I thanked him, but said it was not my custom to sit on the stairs
at other people’s doors.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and smiled the more. “You’re quite right. But wait
a moment, for I really must tell you what it was made me sit here for a
bit.”
He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where
a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the
stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall
cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of
the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an
araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked
very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had
often noticed with pleasure.
“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria
and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a
moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and
extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s
so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably
clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath
of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is
here--the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine
blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of
superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done
and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind
that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless
mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s
little habits and tasks.”
“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing
in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the
world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in
another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a