Steppenwolf (2 page)

I have already given some indication of Steppenwolf’s outward appearance. Even at first sight he gave every impression of being an important, a rare and unusually gifted individual. His whole face had the look of an intellectual about it, and the extraordinarily gentle and nimble play of his features was visual evidence of an interesting, highly agile, uncommonly delicate and sensitive life of the mind. If, in conversation, he went beyond the conventional niceties – which wasn’t always the case – and uttered something personal and peculiar to him, arising from his alien nature, then the likes of you and me simply couldn’t help but defer to him. He had thought more than other people and when it came to intellectual matters he had that almost cool objectivity, that secure knowledge based on careful reflection, which only truly intelligent people possess, being quite without ambition and never seeking to shine, to talk others round to their point of view, or always to be proved right.

I recall one such utterance from the last days of his stay with us, even though it wasn’t even an utterance as such, but merely a look. A famous philosopher of history and cultural critic, a man with a big name throughout Europe, had announced a lecture in the great hall of the university, and I had managed to persuade Steppenwolf to go to it, though at first he had no desire to do so.
We attended it together, sitting next to each other in the lecture theatre. When the speaker mounted the podium and began his address, many in the audience, supposing him to be some sort of prophet, were disappointed by the rather polished and vain appearance he presented. And when, by way of introduction, he then made flattering remarks about the audience, thanking them for coming in such numbers, Steppenwolf cast a fleeting glance at me, a look critical of these remarks and of the speaker’s whole person. And what a look it was! So unforgettable and terrible, you could write a whole book about its significance. His look wasn’t just criticizing that particular speaker, reducing the famous man to ruins with its compelling though gentle irony. That was the least of it. It was a look of sadness much more than irony. What is more, it was immeasurably and desperately sad, its content a quiet despair which, to a certain extent, it had become habitual for him to express in this form. Such was the clarity of this despairing look that it was able at one and the same time to show up the speaker in all his vanity, to cast the present situation in an ironic light, to dash the expectations and mood of the audience and pour scorn on the rather pretentious title of the advertised lecture. But that was by no means all it did. No, Steppenwolf’s look penetrated our whole age. It saw through all its hustle and bustle, all its pushy ambition, all its conceitedness, the whole superficial comedy of its shallow, self-important intellectualism. And sad to say, his look penetrated deeper still, well beyond the mere deficiencies and hopeless inadequacies of our age, our intellectualism and our culture. It went right to the heart of all things human. In a single second it eloquently expressed all the scepticism of a thinker – and perhaps of one in the know – as to the dignity and meaning of human life as such. His look seemed to say: ‘Don’t you see what apes we are? That’s what human beings are like, just take a look!’ and all celebrity, all cleverness, all intellectual achievements, all humanity’s attempts to
create something sublime, great and enduring were reduced to a fairground farce.

In telling you this I’ve got well ahead of myself. I have already – contrary to what I actually planned and intended – basically said all there is in essence to say about Haller, whereas my original intention was to unveil his portrait only gradually by recounting my acquaintance with him step by step.

Since I’ve anticipated so much, there is now no need to go on talking about Haller’s enigmatic ‘strangeness’ or to report on the way I gradually sensed and recognized the reasons behind this strangeness, this extraordinary and terrible isolation, and what it variously signified. All the better, since as far as possible, I’d like to keep myself in the background. I’ve no desire to parade my own confessions, to play the literary storyteller, or indulge in psychology. I merely want to contribute something as an eyewitness to the portrait of the peculiar man who left behind these Steppenwolf manuscripts.

Even on that very first occasion, when I saw him enter my aunt’s flat by the glass door and cock his head in bird-like fashion, praising the place because it smelled so good, I’d been struck by the peculiarity of the man, and my initial naive reaction had been to dislike him. I sensed (and my aunt, who in contrast to me isn’t remotely intellectual, sensed almost exactly the same thing) that the man was ill, in some way or other mentally or temperamentally ill, and like all sane people my instinct was to defend myself against him. In the course of time, my defensiveness gave way to a sympathy based on great compassion for someone constantly and acutely suffering, a man whose progressive isolation and emotional decay I was witnessing with my own eyes. During that period I became increasingly aware that the illness he was suffering from didn’t stem from any deficiencies in his nature. On the contrary, he had strengths and talents in abundance, but had never managed to combine them harmoniously, and that was his only
problem. I came to realize that Haller had a peculiar genius for suffering, that he had, in the sense that Nietzsche intends in many of his aphorisms, trained himself to the point where his capacity for suffering was masterly, limitless, awesome. At the same time I realized that his pessimism wasn’t based on contempt for the world but on self-contempt, for however ruthlessly critical he could be when condemning institutions or individuals, he never spared himself. He himself was always the first target of his barbed remarks, the prime object of his hatred and rejection.

At this point I can’t help including a psychological comment. Although I know very little about Steppenwolf’s life, I do have every reason to suppose that he was brought up by loving yet strict and very religious parents and teachers in that spirit which makes ‘breaking of the will’ the foundation of child-rearing and education. In the case of this pupil, however, their attempt to destroy his personality and break his will had not succeeded. He was far too strong and tough, far too proud and mentally alert for that to happen. Instead of destroying his personality they had only succeeded in teaching him to hate himself. Now, for the rest of his life, it was against himself, against this innocent and admirable target, that all his imaginative genius and brainpower was directed. For in one respect he was, despite everything, a Christian through and through, a martyr through and through. That is to say, he aimed every cutting remark, every criticism, all the malice and hatred he was capable of, first and foremost at himself. As far as others around him were concerned, he made the most heroic and earnest efforts to love them, to be fair to them, not to hurt them; for ‘Love thy neighbour’ had been drummed into him just as deeply as hatred of self. Thus his whole life was an example of how impossible it is to love one’s neighbour without loving oneself, proof that self-hatred is exactly the same thing as crass egotism, and in the end leads to exactly the same terrible isolation and despair.

But the time has now come to put my own thoughts to one side and speak of actual facts. Well, the first thing I learned about Herr Haller, partly through my snooping, partly from observations made by my aunt, had to do with the way he led his life. It soon became apparent that he was not pursuing any practical profession but was a man of ideas and books. He always stayed in bed very late, often only getting up shortly before midday, when he would walk in his dressing gown the few steps from the bedroom across to his living room. A big, homely attic space with two windows, within a few days this living room already looked different from how it had when occupied by other tenants. It was filling up, and as time went by it got more and more packed with things. Pictures were hung, drawings stuck on the walls, sometimes illustrations cut from magazines, which were frequently replaced by others. There was a southern landscape hanging there, photographs of a small German country town, evidently Haller’s home, and between them bright watercolours which, as we only discovered later, he had painted himself. Then came the photograph of a pretty young woman, or young girl. For a while there was a Siamese Buddha hanging on the wall, but a reproduction of Michelangelo’s
Night
took its place, and it in turn gave way to a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. There were books everywhere, not just filling the large bookcase, but lying around on the tables, on the fine old writing desk, on the divan, on the chairs, and on the floor. Slips of paper that constantly changed were inserted in them, marking the pages. And the number of books constantly grew because he brought whole bundles back from the libraries as well as very often receiving parcels of them in the post. The man occupying this room was quite possibly a learned scholar. The cigar smoke that enveloped everything fitted this picture, as did the ashtrays and cigar stubs that lay around everywhere. Yet a large proportion of the books was not academic in content, but literary. Works by great writers of all periods and
nationalities made up the vast majority. On the divan, where he frequently spent whole days reclining, all six fat volumes of a late eighteenth-century work entitled
Sophia’s Journey from Memel to Saxony
could be seen lying around for a time.
¹
A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean Paul
²
seemed to be much in use, as did the works of Novalis,
³
but there were also editions of Lessing, Jacobi and Lichtenberg.
⁴
Some volumes of Dostoevsky were full of slips of paper with notes on them. Among the many books and papers on the fairly large table there was often a bunch of flowers. A set of watercolour paints lay around on it too, but it was always full of dust. Next to it were the ashtrays and – I see no reason why I should hide the fact – an array of bottles containing drink. One bottle woven in straw was usually filled with an Italian red wine he fetched from a small shop near by. Occasionally you would spot a bottle of burgundy or Malaga, and once I saw a squat bottle of kirsch being virtually emptied in next to no time, only to disappear in some corner of the room where it gathered dust without its remaining contents being reduced. Without wishing to justify my snooping, I openly confess that in the early days all these signs of a life being wantonly frittered away, however much it was occupied with intellectual pursuits, aroused loathing and suspicion in me. It’s not just that I lead the orderly life of a solid citizen, keeping precisely to a timetable.
I’m also teetotal and a non-smoker, and the sight of those bottles in Haller’s room was even less to my liking than the rest of his bohemian clutter.

When it came to food and drink, the stranger was just as irregular and capricious in his habits as he was when sleeping and working. Some days he didn’t go out at all and apart from his morning coffee had absolutely nothing to eat or drink. At times, the only remaining trace of a meal my aunt found was a banana skin, yet on other days he would dine in restaurants, sometimes good, fashionable ones, sometimes small pubs in the suburbs. He didn’t appear to be in good health. Apart from the difficulty with his legs – climbing the stairs to his room was often a real struggle – he seemed plagued by other infirmities. Once he remarked in passing that he hadn’t managed to digest his food or sleep properly for years. Primarily I put this down to his drinking. Later, when I occasionally went along with him to one of his pubs, I witnessed him rapidly downing the wines as the whim took him, but neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk.

I shall never forget our first encounter of a more personal kind. We knew each other only in the way next-door neighbours tend to in rented accommodation. Then one evening, coming home from work, I was astonished to find Herr Haller sitting on the stairs close to the landing between the first and second floors. He had sat down on the top step, and moved to one side to let me pass. Asking whether he was unwell, I offered to accompany him right to the top.

From the look Haller gave me I realized that I had roused him from some sort of trance. Slowly he began to smile that appealingly pitiful smile of his that so often saddened my heart. Then he invited me to sit down next to him. I declined to, saying I wasn’t in the habit of sitting on the stairs outside other people’s flats.

‘Oh, quite so,’ he said, smiling more intensely, ‘you are right.
But wait a moment longer. You see, I must show you why I felt the need to stay sitting here for a while.’

As he spoke, he pointed to the landing outside the first-floor flat occupied by a widow. There, against the wall on the small area of parquet floor between the stairs, the window and the glass door, was a tall mahogany cupboard with old pieces of pewter on it. On the ground in front of it, resting on small squat stands, were two large plant pots, one containing an azalea, the other an araucaria. They were attractive-looking plants, always trim and immaculately well tended, and they had already made a favourable impression on me too.

‘You see,’ Haller continued, ‘this little patio with the araucaria has such a fantastic smell, I often can’t pass by without stopping for a while. Of course there is a good smell to your aunt’s home too, and she keeps everything as tidy and clean as one could wish, but this spot with the araucaria is so spick and span, so well dusted, polished and washed down, so immaculately clean that it is positively radiant. I just have to take a deep breath and fill my nostrils with it every time. Can’t you sense it too? The way the smell of floor polish and a faint after-scent of turpentine together with the mahogany, the moistened leaves of the plants and everything combine to produce a fragrance that is the ultimate in bourgeois cleanliness, a superlative example in miniature of meticulous care, conscientiousness and attention to detail. I don’t know who lives there, but there must be a paradise of cleanliness and dust-free bourgeois existence behind that glass door, an Eden of order and painstaking devotion to little routines and chores that is touching.’