HERMANN HESSE

Hesse was a very prolific author and also a very religious one. The son of a pastor, he nevertheless rebelled against the institution of the Church and set out on a quest for his own spirituality, for a new religious orientation. Many of his books reflect this search for an alternative belief, as in Journey to the East, Steppenwolf, and Demian. But his final position, if position it can be described as, led him not to transcendentalism, nor even back to Christianity, but to a kind of neo-pagan complacency in the natural-world-order, as represented, in particular, by the countryside in which he lived and its relationship to the sun. Not that he was devoid of an inner life or the concept of 'God within the self', as expressed by Christ. For he most certainly gave expression, from time to time, to his belief in its existence. But his love of nature never deserted him and he could not have excluded the Creator from his theological integrity. He was a man who hated the city, as indeed most manifestations of modern life, and therefore wasn't capable of any advanced degree of transcendentalism, which depends on the artificial as a precondition of its development. He was a provincial, a country-dweller, a garden-tender, and, above all, a bourgeois. Dualism remains the keynote to Hesse's creative life, the dualism, in his case, of a rather unorthodox Christian. His most famous novel, Steppenwolf, takes the crisis of warring selves within an ageing bourgeois as its leitmotiv and ultimately resolves it by bringing both his lower and higher selves into perspective and striving to reintegrate them. Herr Haller's personality is torn between beast and scholar, natural man and civilized man, and the only solution to this crisis, as Hesse sees it, is to compromise the warring selves in the interests of human wholeness. Thus when Haller emerges triumphant at the end of the novel, it is not as a revolutionary Mondrianesque character that we see him but ... as a reformed bourgeois, newly elated by his return to humanistic compromise. He had been deprived of sex and company for too long. Now he could look forward to a less ascetic existence in the company of his new-found friends, including the jazz musician, Pablo. So ends the Steppenwolf, bringing a perverted bourgeois back, like a Prodigal Son, to the humanistic fold.

A later novel, Narziss and Goldmund, seems to show the influence of Spengler on Hesse's thinking. For it involves a return to the 'Culture', Spengler's term for a religious phase of civilization, as we follow the largely sinful path of its youthful protagonist through medieval Germany in pursuit of adventure. Having abandoned the spiritual life, as personified by Narziss, his one-time teacher at the monastic school where he was educated, Goldmund's life of adventure in the outside world eventually leads him to prison, from which unhappy place he is rescued, however, by Narziss and brought back to the monastic sanctuary of Mariabronn, where he is assured the prospect of a new and better life. At the end, then, Narziss and Goldmund are reconciled, the life of the flesh giving place to the life of the spirit. Certainly this is compatible with the Spenglerian concept of a 'Culture', an epoch of intense religious faith, and although dualism is involved, the final victory of the spirit over the flesh is only to be expected in the heyday, as it were, of medieval Christendom.

Not so, however, with the 'Civilization', an epoch of material and social achievement, to which The Glass Bead Game, technically Hesse's finest novel, takes us in anticipation of a future elite society dedicated to the protection and emulation of past cultural achievements. Here, by contrast, the flesh eventually triumphs over the spirit in the form of Joseph Knecht's resignation from the Castalian order to which he had been attached as Magister Ludi, or principal 'Glass-Bead-Game' player. For the future order of Castalia is not the fresh young monastic establishment of the 'Culture', nor even the tail-end of it in the Steppenwolf's split-personality dilemma, but the full-blown decadence of the 'Civilization', when only the past is capable of providing cultural nourishment, and nothing new is created. This has the ring of a ghastly and objectively false projection of Spenglerian ideas, but it evidently appealed to Hesse's bourgeois limitations.

If Huxley was a positive decadent, or one who anticipated proletarian trends in his later writings, then I would argue that Hesse was very much a negative decadent, which is to say, a man who entertained a return to pre-humanist criteria in the form of neo-paganism. Not as radically decadent in this respect as John Cowper Powys, he was nonetheless sufficiently decadent to have more in common with that brilliant Welsh writer than perhaps any other man, including André Gide. For one thing, they were both sons of Protestant pastors, and both of them rebelled against orthodox religion. But they rebelled against it in a negative way, as advocates of pre-humanist naturalism. Neo-paganism was of course fairly popular in Germany between the wars, not least of all in terms of sun-worship and nudism. Whether or not Hesse was influenced by this trend, he must have been aware of it and sympathetic to its anti-urban, anti-artificial bias. Certainly he never went out of his way to desert the countryside and become a city-dweller. He never took a firmly transcendental path, even though he dabbled in oriental literature from time to time and wrote Siddhartha as an exercise in alternative religion. His interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, however, was mainly tangential, serving to gratify his search for an alternative faith, a fresh religious orientation. It was partly hereditary and, as far as we know, he didn't take it beyond the theoretical plane. Neither, for that matter, did Aldous Huxley bother to take meditation all that seriously, since, like Hesse, he was primarily concerned with its philosophical implications, as bearing on his writings. The life of a professional author was both sufficiently time-consuming and spiritually-gratifying to preclude either the necessity of or inclination for meditation. The nearest both men probably came to meditating was when they listened to music, which, incidentally, is how it is for most intelligent people these days.

Besides writing novels of unequal quality and length, Hesse was also a prolific short-story writer, poet, and essayist. His writings were generally short, like most of his novels, and intellectually undemanding. Indeed, many of them, not least of all the poems, are so short and simple as to seem naive. Like D.H. Lawrence, his poetic development led from fairly conventional beginnings to a free-verse style superior, in essence, to the general content of his poems. Consequently one cannot describe him as a major poet, even though he regarded himself first and foremost as a poet. He was one of the twentieth-century's most important minor poets - which for a Nobel prize-winning novelist is no mean achievement. Of his shorter prose works, the most interesting are his autobiographical writings, particularly A Journey to Nuremberg and A Guest at the Spa, the former focusing on a poetry-reading tour he made through various German cities, the latter on his visit to Baden-Baden as a victim of and, hopefully, convalescent from sciatica. It is in this work, paradoxically, that one is offered shreds of humour not usually characteristic of his writings, and for this reason, too, that it, together with its companion piece, must rank as one of his most entertaining and memorable works, remaining in the mind long after most of the more spiritually earnest, rather sombre writings have faded from it.

Despite his generally poor health, however, Hesse lived to a ripe old age of eighty-five and continued working until the end. Having come approximately full-circle in his literary career - the theme of excessive asceticism leading either to suicide or lechery being common to both his earliest novels and his last one (The Glass Bead Game) - he dedicated most of his remaining time to the penning of short essays and letters, often as an exercise in elucidating and justifying his principal works. Should he be especially remembered for anything in the future, however, it will probably be as the author of Steppenwolf rather than as a poet or essayist. He was, throughout his career, a sort of combination of Goethe and Nietzsche, and nowhere is such a combination better expressed than in his most autobiographical, contemporary, and original novel.