Steppenwolf (3 page)

Since I remained silent, he went on: ‘Please don’t think I’m being ironic. The last thing I would want to do is pour scorn on this orderly bourgeois way of life. It’s true, of course, that I myself live in a different world, not this one, and it may well be that I couldn’t survive for even one day in a flat like that with its
araucaria plants. Yet even though I’m an old Steppenwolf, inclined to snap at people, I am the son of a mother, and my mother too was a respectable housewife who grew plants and saw to it that the living room, the stairs, the furniture and the curtains were presentable. She always did her utmost to make her home and life as neat, clean and tidy as was humanly possible. That’s what this whiff of turpentine, that’s what the araucaria reminds me of, and that’s the reason why every now and then I’m to be found sitting here, gazing into this little garden of order and rejoicing at the fact that such things still exist.’

He wanted to stand up but, finding it a struggle, didn’t object to my giving him a bit of a helping hand. I still didn’t break my silence, but I was under some sort of spell that this peculiar man was now and then able to cast on people, just as he had previously on my aunt. We made our way slowly up the stairs together and then, standing outside his door, the key already in his hand, he looked me full in the face again and in a very friendly manner said: ‘You’re just back from work? Well you see, that’s something I have no knowledge of, living a bit apart as I do, a bit on the margin of things. But I believe you also take an interest in books and the like. Your aunt once told me you had been to grammar school and were good at Greek. As it happens, just this morning I found a sentence in Novalis. Can I show you it? I’m sure you’ll be delighted with it too.’

Taking me with him into his room, where there was a strong smell of tobacco, he drew out a book from one of the piles and leafed through it, searching.

‘This is good too, very good,’ he said. ‘Just listen to this sentence: “One ought to take pride in pain – all pain is a reminder of our exalted rank.” Marvellous! Eighty years before Nietzsche! Only that’s not the saying I had in mind – wait a bit – now I’ve got it. Here you are: “Most people have no desire to swim until
they are able to.”
⁵
Isn’t that a laugh? Of course they don’t want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren’t made to think, but to live! It’s true, and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all’s said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he’ll drown.’

He had now captured my interest and I stayed in his room for a short while. From then on it was no rare thing for us to bump into one another on the stairs or in the street, when we would exchange a few words. To start with, just as when we met by the araucaria, I always had a slight feeling that he was poking ironic fun at me. But this wasn’t the case. He had nothing but respect for me, positive respect, as for the araucaria plant. His isolation, his rootless existence ‘swimming in water’ had honestly convinced him that it was sometimes actually possible, without any hint of scorn, to regard with enthusiasm the everyday activity of normal citizens, for instance the way I went to work punctually in the office, or some expression used by a servant or the conductor of a tram. To begin with this struck me as a quite ridiculous and exaggerated response, the kind of whimsical sentimentality typical of a gentleman
flâneur
. However, I was increasingly forced to recognize that because of his very nature as alienated lone wolf, living as in a vacuum, he did in fact positively admire and love the small world most of us conventional people inhabit. It represented all that was solid and secure, homely and peaceful, but it was remote and unattainable since, for him, there was no road leading there. He showed genuine respect for our charwoman, the good soul, always raising his hat to her. And whenever my aunt had occasion to chat with him for a while,
pointing out to him some item of laundry that needed repairing, say, or a loose button on his coat, he would listen to her with remarkable attention, weighing her every word. It was as if he were making indescribable, desperate efforts to force his way through some tiny chink into her little peaceful world, hoping to find a home there if only for a brief hour.

As early as our first conversation by the araucaria he called himself Steppenwolf, and this too I found a bit off-putting and disturbing. What kind of way to talk was that, I wondered. However, force of habit taught me to accept the term as valid, and soon it was the only thing I myself called the man in my private thoughts. Even to this day I couldn’t conceive of a more apt and accurate word for such a phenomenon. A stray wolf of the steppes, now part of the herd of city-dwellers – there could be no more compelling way of picturing him, his wary isolation, his wildness, his restlessness, his homelessness and his yearning for home.

Once I was able to observe him for a whole evening. I was at a symphony concert when, to my surprise, I saw him sitting close to me, though he hadn’t noticed my presence. The concert began with some Handel, a fine and beautiful piece, but Steppenwolf sat there immersed in himself, cut off from both the music and his surroundings. He was looking down at his feet like someone who didn’t belong there, a solitary and alien presence, his expression cool but careworn. Next came a different piece, a little symphony by Friedemann Bach, and I was quite astonished, after only a few bars, to see my strange loner start to smile and abandon himself to the music. He was completely absorbed, looking so engrossed in joyous reverie, so lost in contentment for what must have been a good ten minutes, that I paid more attention to him than to the music. When the piece came to an end he roused himself, sat up straighter and made as if to stand, apparently intent on leaving. However, he remained in his seat after
all, listening to the final piece as well. This was a set of variations by Reger, a composition that many felt to be rather long and wearying. To begin with Steppenwolf showed willing, continuing to listen attentively, but he too switched off again, putting his hands in his pockets and withdrawing once more into himself. This time, however, there was no sign of joyous reverie. He appeared to be sad and, in the end, cross. His face was grey and lifeless, its expression again distant. He looked old, unwell and discontented.

After the concert I spotted him again in the street and followed in his footsteps. Hunched up in his coat, he was making his way tiredly and listlessly back towards our district of town. Outside a small, old-fashioned pub, however, he came to a halt and, glancing at his watch as if to make up his mind, went in. Obeying a momentary impulse, I followed him. There he was, sitting at the bar of this petit bourgeois establishment, being greeted by landlady and waitress as a familiar customer. I said hello to him too, joining him at the bar. We sat there for an hour, during which I drank two glasses of mineral water while he ordered half a litre of red wine, followed by another quarter. I told him I had been at the concert, but he didn’t pursue the topic. Reading the label on my water bottle, he asked whether I wouldn’t care for some wine too. It was on him, he said. When he heard that I never drink wine, his face again assumed a vacant expression and he said: ‘I suppose you are right not to. For years I too lived abstemiously, even fasting for long periods, but at the moment I’m again under the sign of Aquarius, a dark and damp sign of the zodiac.’

When I now jokingly picked up on this reference, implying that I found it improbable that he of all people should believe in astrology, his response was to again adopt the polite tone of voice that I often found hurtful. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid astrology is yet another branch of knowledge I can’t believe in.’

Taking my leave of him, I went home. He didn’t return until
the early hours, but his steps sounded the same as usual and as always he didn’t go to bed immediately, staying up for another hour or so in his sitting room with the light on. Living next door to him, I could of course hear his every movement.

There was another evening that I haven’t forgotten either. I was at home on my own, my aunt having gone out, when there was a ring at the front door. I opened it to find a pretty young lady standing there, and when she asked after Herr Haller I recognized her as the one in the photograph in his room. After showing her the door to his lodgings, I withdrew. She stayed up there for a while, then I heard them go down the stairs together and out of the building. They were engaged in lively conversation, cheerfully joking with one another. I was amazed to discover that this hermit of a man had a lover, and such a young, pretty and elegant lover at that. All I had assumed about him and the kind of life he led was again called into question. But scarcely an hour later he was already back home again, on his own, trudging up the stairs with sad steps, then quietly stealing to and fro for hours in his sitting room, just like a wolf in a cage. The lights were on all night in his room, almost till morning.

Though I know nothing of this relationship of his, I just want to add that I did see him with the woman once more. They were walking arm in arm along one of the streets in town, and he looked happy. Once again I was amazed to see how childlike and graceful his otherwise careworn and lonely face could appear. I could well understand the woman’s feelings, just as I understood my aunt’s affection for this man. Yet in the evening of that day too he came back home sad and miserable. Encountering him at the front door, I noticed, as was often the case, that he had his Italian wine bottle with him, under his coat. And he sat up there in his lair with it half the night long. I was sorry for him, but what else could he expect, having chosen to lead so miserably forlorn and vulnerable a life?

Well, I think that is enough of my gossiping. I feel no need to report further on Steppenwolf or add to my descriptions of him since what I have already said should suffice to demonstrate that he was leading a suicidal life. Nevertheless, I don’t believe he did take his own life that day when, though he had settled all his outstanding debts, he quite unexpectedly left town and, without saying goodbye, disappeared without trace. We have never heard a thing of him since, though we still keep a few letters that arrived for him after his departure. He left nothing behind apart from his manuscript, written during his stay here, in which he penned a few lines, dedicating it to me and indicating that I could do with it whatever I liked.

I had no possible means of checking how far the experiences recounted by Haller in this manuscript corresponded to reality. That they are for the most part imaginative fictions, I don’t doubt, but not in the sense of stories arbitrarily invented. I see them rather as attempts to express deeply felt psychological processes by presenting them in the guise of things actually occurring before our eyes. I suspect that the partly fantastical things that happen in Haller’s writings originate from the last period of his stay here, and I have no doubt that they are based on his experience of some slice of external reality. During that period our lodger’s behaviour and appearance did indeed change. He was away from home a very great deal, sometimes for whole nights, and his books lay untouched. On the few occasions I encountered him at that time, he seemed strikingly vivacious and rejuvenated, sometimes positively cheerful. True, this was immediately followed by a new spell of profound depression when he lay in bed all day without wanting food. And it was also during that time that an extraordinarily violent, indeed brutal row took place between him and his lover, who had reappeared on the scene. All the tenants were up in arms about this, and Haller apologized to my aunt about it the next day.

No, I am convinced that he didn’t take his own life. He is still alive, somewhere or other still going up and down other people’s stairs on his weary legs, staring somewhere at shiningly polished parquet floors and neatly tended araucaria plants, spending his days sitting in libraries and his nights in pubs. Or he is lying on a rented sofa, listening to all human life going by outside his windows and knowing that he is excluded from it. Yet he won’t kill himself, because some remnant of faith tells him that he has to drink this bitter cup to the last dregs, go on suffering this vile heartache, because this is the affliction he must die of. I often think of him, though he didn’t make my life easier, wasn’t gifted with the power to cheer me up or reinforce what strengths I possess. Quite the opposite, I’m afraid. But I am not Haller, and I don’t lead his kind of life, but my own. It is the insignificant life of a middle-class man, but it is a secure and thoroughly responsible one. As it is, my aunt and I can look back on Haller in a spirit of peace and friendship. She would be better placed to say more about him than me, but what she knows remains hidden within her kind heart.

Where Haller’s notebooks are concerned, these bizarre, partly pathological, partly beautiful fantasies rich in ideas, I’m bound to say that if they had chanced to come into my possession without my knowing their author, I would certainly have thrown them away in indignation. But my acquaintance with Haller has made it possible for me to understand them in part, indeed to approve of them. If I merely regarded them as the pathological fantasies of some poor, mentally ill individual, I would have reservations about communicating their contents to others. However, I see something more in them. They are a document of our times, for today I can see that Haller’s sickness of mind is no individual
eccentricity, but the sickness of our times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs. Nor does it by any means appear to afflict only those individuals who are weak or inferior, but precisely those who are strong, the most intelligent and most gifted.

It makes no difference how much or how little they are based on real life, these notebooks are an attempt to overcome the great sickness of our times, not by evading or glossing over the issue, but by seeking to make the sickness itself the object portrayed. They signify, quite literally, a journey through hell; a sometimes anxious, sometimes brave journey through the chaos of a mind in darkness. But the journey is undertaken with a strong determination to traverse this hell, to face up to the chaos and to endure the bad times to the limit.