Books: The Outsider

With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst. . .

Who is the subject of that accolade? Allen Ginsberg? Bob Dylan? John Lennon? No; a German raveler of spiritual mysteries named Hermann Hesse, who died in 1962 at 85. His champion was Thomas Mann, and he was reflecting the impact of Hesse’s 1919 novel, Demian, on German youth. Today Hesse is no longer so ardently esteemed in his native country, but in the past decade in the U.S. he has steadily risen to the status of a literary cult figure. College students rank him in the pantheon of literary gurus with Dostoevsky, Tolkien and Golding. In hippie hovels, those of his novels already available in English—Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Siddhartha, Demian, The Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund—are family bibles. Another early Hesse novel, Beneath the Wheel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $4.95), has now appeared in English. It will undoubtedly attract his youthful admirers too, although it is less likely to arouse their admiration, since it is too labored and predictable.

What seems to attract young people nowadays is Hesse’s preoccupation with Eastern mysticism and his soul-racked characters, who suffer from that now common malaise of the under-30 generation, the identity crisis. Not far from the Berkeley campus, a favorite hangout is a beer joint called Steppenwolf, so named by its original owner (Max Scherr) because that novel symbolizes the loneliness of the intellectual. At Harvard, where Hesse’s books sell better than any of his contemporaries except Faulkner, Senior Joel Kramer says: “Reading him is a gut, emotional experience.” Adds Harvard Graduate Student Mark Granovetter: “Well, he was the first hippie, wasn’t he?”

True Profession. Not quite. Hesse’s parents were Protestant missionaries, and so it was assumed that he would be a minister. At 14, however, the stultifying confinement of school sent him fleeing from the Maulbronn seminary in Swabia. Unable to find a meaning in his life, unhappy with a rigid German society that seemed to crush his artistic sensibilities, he tried to commit suicide. His parents responded by sending him first to a faith healer, then to a school for the mentally retarded. In 1911, he visited India on a spiritual quest. World War I was a “gut, emotional, experience” for Hesse; renouncing German authoritarianism, he joined the pacifist Romain Rolland in writing antiwar tracts, and as a result fell into political, social and literary disfavor.

During this period, his first marriage broke up, he underwent a course of psychiatric treatment with a disciple of Jung in a sanatorium near Lucerne. From 1912, he lived in Switzerland, where, until his death, he continued his spiritual struggle. “The true profession of a man,” he said, “is to find his way to himself. I have become a writer, but I have not become a human being.” This obsession was to be the driving factor in all of his novels.

Hesse’s works are not so much fiction as philosophical treatises that grapple with the question of how man can best live his life. Torn between the spiritual and the sensual, Hesse rebelled against Western materialism, yet was unable to escape totally into the nirvana of Eastern mysticism. In essence, Hesse wrote the same book over and over, as he developed his examination of this problem.

The first novels—Beneath the Wheel, Peter Camenzind and Demian—came directly out of the Romantic tradition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister. In these “educational” novels, Hesse presented a procession of oversensitive, fragile young schoolboys. They were misunderstood by their elders, mocked by their peers, and driven to flee (as he himself had been) the constricting environment of an insensitive home life or the too rigid disciplines of a classical education. In Beneath the Wheel, for example, young Hans Giebenrath is defeated by the succeed-at-any-cost pressures that plague his monastic school existence. His life is extinguished by the impersonal, almost mechanized regime of the German school system. Employing the moralistic prose that characterizes much of his early work, Hesse stressed the uniqueness of the individual: “The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one. They realized for a fleeting moment how irrecoverable and unique is each life and youth, on whom they perpetrated so much thoughtless harm at other times.”

Fusion. Hesse’s later novels anticipated the existential fiction of Sartre. Harry Haller, the aging hero of Steppenwolf, suffers an emotional “nausea” as he confronts the bourgeois salons of German academic life. He escapes into the sensual world of a bar, where he finds partial rejuvenation. Then, in a treatise which he may possibly have written himself, Haller reads about his own schizophrenic state. In this treatise he finds an existential examination of the courage or cowardliness of suicide as an answer to the grey horrors of bourgeois life. Eventually he enters a “MAGIC THEATER. FOR MADMEN ONLY.” It is a psychedelic hall of mirrors, reflecting the conscious and subconscious conflicts of Haller’s own mind: “On I went through the long corridors, full of tender embraces, and down the stairs to hell. There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish lights, and the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly.” Hesse leaves Haller there, stumbling through the hallucinatory visions of his subconscious mind.

Hesse’s spiritual quest led him deeper into the Eastern philosophies. In Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund and The Journey to the East, his new message, added to the old complaints, was that man must somehow succeed in serving humanity, despite the world’s seeming indifference. Siddhartha, for example, after studying under Buddha, weds a courtesan and becomes a wealthy merchant, only to throw it all away and become a ferryboat attendant—his form of service.

In his last and most complex and intellectual book, Magister Ludi (The Bead Game), after which he won the Nobel Prize in 1946, Hesse built a whole metaphysical society, a kind of Platonic republic, to illuminate this new sentiment of service. As in his earlier books, he posed two characters, one symbolizing the spiritual, the other the materialistic. But in this case, Hesse sought to achieve a dynamic, life-serving fusion of the values of each viewpoint. As part of this visionary process, he conceived an elaborate system of thought—the bead game—designed to protect the intellect and the spirit in a world troubled by political upheavals. Although Hesse did not completely explain it, the bead game—developed originally from the abacus—entailed a ritualistic form of intellectual worship, embracing all the arts and sciences. However, it too proved unsatisfactory; and its master, Joseph Knecht, deserts an intellectual brotherhood to become a simple schoolteacher.

Earth Mother. Hesse’s mystery tour leads from the anachronistic simplicity of his early works to the complicated intellectual games of his more mature novels. Along the way, he constantly celebrates the goddess of nature—the all-healing Earth Mother so desperately sought after by many of his characters. In Demian, he describes her in a way that suggests some kind of ecstatic revelation: “A huge city could be seen in the clouds out of which millions of people streamed in a host over vast landscapes. Into their midst stepped a mighty, godlike figure, as huge as a mountain range, with sparkling stars in her hair, bearing the features of Frau Eva.”

It is this spiritual agony and ecstasy—or the attempt to achieve it—that makes Hesse so attractive now to so many youngsters. Colin Wilson, in The Outsider, speaks of Hesse’s characters, who are forever struggling with “the unreality of their lives.” Hesse, writes Wilson, “has a deep sense of the injustice of human beings having to live on such a lukewarm level of everyday triviality; he feels that there should be a way of living with the intensity of the artist’s creative ecstasy all the time.” In his pursuit of the answers, Hesse was at times heavyhanded. But the zeal and fire with which he asked the questions makes him a symbol for the disaffected youths who feel that salvation lies within themselves—if only they dream hard enough.