Hesse: The Wanderer And His Shadow

by Gunnar Decker

translated by Peter Lewis

Harvard University Press, £30

Review by Brian Morton

Hermann Hesse died in 1962. The following year, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner published an essay which stated without preamble or evidence – Hesse himself would have been furious – that the novels were essentially accounts of a drug trip. Hesse’s adoption as a key figure in the 1960s counterculture had begun. By the end of the decade, Easy Rider was being soundtracked by a band called Steppenwolf. Young swains were inscribing copies of Demian to their older mistresses, as a way of giving their own self-absorption a degree of philosophical respectability.

There are many reasons for reading – or writing – a literary biography. In some careers, there is a fascinatingly close correlative between life and art. In others, there is none, and the biographical interest lies in the perceived gap between the man or woman and the artist. For the first 500 or so pages, Decker’s Hesse seems as snivellingly complacent, cold, disengaged and hysterical as he often does on the page. Few bodies of modern literature can make me so pointlessly angry as the span of fiction Hesse wrote between Peter Kamenzind, which in 1904 either confounded or confirmed the Pietist suspicions of the Hesse family and became a best-seller, and Narziss und Goldmund in 1930, after which the more general charge against the Swiss-dwelling Hesse was that he was soft on fascism. The latter accusation is unfair. Though a niece was married to the man who pioneered mobile asphyxiation units for the Nazis (she later committed suicide), Hesse was drawn to the communists and had no time for Hitler or Hitlerian nationalism, or the kind of “patriotic” writing that was supposed to support it. The former charge, that their son was “morally insane”, is harder to deny the devout Hesse family. There was a repeated history of absconding, of attempted or para-suicide, of a lack of either faith or willed direction in life.

Hesse’s private life was a shambles. He seems to have rejected the passionate and intelligent courtship of Helene Voigt – whose 1898 photographic portrait seems both incredibly modern and flagrantly sexy – and then married the utterly unsuitable Maria Bernoulli, who later and perhaps as a result of her treatment spent long periods in psychiatric institutions. In Ruth Wenger, he found another muse/wife/helpmeet/dogsbody, but she had perhaps too much personal pride and self-esteem, if not quite the intellectual capacity, to submit totally to Hesse. Eventually, in Ninon Dolbin, he found a partner who was able to devote herself completely to his needs, while maintaining an entirely parallel life of her own. Whether Hesse was bisexual, homosexual or possibly even asexual remains unclear. He liked to be photographed during nude rock-climbing, though this may be German naturism in extreme form. His closest bonds seem to have been with le petit cénacle of aspiring poet-intellectuals he adhered to while trying to free himself from childhood Calw and its atmosphere of Swabian piety. As always, though, the more one attempts to escape a background, the more it influences the life.

All great writers tend to show their flaws in print, rather than hiding behind polished craft, but Hesse was not just capable of writing fearful rubbish. He was almost committed to an aesthetic of kitsch superficiality, insisting that the act of writing was more important than the text. He is one of those figures – D. H. Lawrence was certainly one, Norman Mailer may have been another, and there is an important third – who is almost as important as a presence as he is for anything actually published. A more obvious parallel, and again instinct with the 1960s counter-culture, is J. D. Salinger, who was valued for his silent absence as much as for the deliberately anti-virtuosic writing of The Catcher in the Rye. Hesse’s withdrawal from literary life; his final forty years are dealt with in maybe 50 out of nearly 800 pages.

I’ve never held a book from a major university press that was so poorly proofread, or that used so many exclamation marks – more common in European usage, admittedly – to reinforce points. And yet, weirdly, the very sloppiness of the text, and Decker’s waffly, speculative style actually make very acute sense of the subject. He is intensely aware that Hesse is one of those literary enthusiasms that educated people are inclined to dismiss in later life as an aberration of youth. It is very hard to read Der Steppenwolf or Journey To The East (his mother was born in India) or Siddhartha with comfort and without a whiff of patchouli and dope coming off the page, but then it’s unfair to reduce Hesse to his hippy fanbase.

His own philosophical journey, which involved a sublimation of the writing process itself, led him to create in The Glass Bead Game of 1943 – fiddling while Europe burned? – a philosophical treatise rather than a novel and one that proposes nothing more than a radical approach to reading which doesn’t so much reflect the hedonistic eclecticism of the 1960s (“whatever makes you feel good, is good”) as sums up the whole modernist/post-modernist/cybernetic project in one. Hesse himself said that das Glasperlenspiel “is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture”. The Magister Ludi – “Gamesmaster” has such a contemporary resonance – improvises with the great art of the past the way a painter might improvise with his palette, or an organist make use of every stop and pedal to create an infinite kaleidoscope of experience, unique to the individual. This is more than just sitting round a campfire, blowing weed and muttering haikus. Decker sums up Hesse’s philosophical resting place brilliantly, dismissing a lot of the cultural charges in the process: “This stoic withdrawal into a kind of exile, which can also be a protective place in which to cloister oneself away from the violence of the prevailing political world, became the setting for The Glass Bead Game.” Here is “a place to overwinter” the horrors of totalitarianism, to slip away from the world while retaining some of its treasures. Not a few of us, late in life, espouse something similar, and are taken to be “conservative” for it. As the Steppenwolf discovered, the Magic Theatre is “not for everyone”, and nor is this lengthy biography. Its subject is about as exasperatingly unlikeable as it is possible to get, but he does eventually transcend adolescence, narcissism, emotional denial in order to become a remote eminence in the history of 20th century literature. It seems clear that many of the hippies who turned on and dropped out to his rhetoric have made versions of the same journey. Growing up isn’t for everyone, but it’s quite impressive when it happens.