Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

  She didn't relent. Having apprehensively got to my feet, I was walking towards the beautiful girl just as the music began again.

  'Actually, I'm not free,' she said, looking at me curiously with her big fresh eyes, 'but my partner seems to be caught up at the bar. All right, come on.'

  Putting my arms around her, I danced the first few steps, still amazed that she hadn't sent me packing. Then, having noticed already what a hopeless beginner I was, she took over the lead. She danced wonderfully well, and I was swept along by her momentum. Forgetting for a few moments all the rules I'd been taught, I simply drifted with the tide. I could feel the taut hips, the swift, supple knees of my partner and, looking into her youthful, radiant face, I confessed that today was the first time I had danced in my life. She smiled and encouraged me, responding with marvellous suppleness to the looks of delight in my eyes and my flattering remarks, not with words but with gentle, enchanting movements that brought us all the more enticingly close together. Holding her tight by my right hand just above the waist, I joyfully and zealously followed the movements of her legs, her arms, her shoulders. To my amazement, I never once trod on her toes. When the music stopped we both stood there clapping until they played the dance once more and I, enamoured, again went through the ritual with zeal and devotion.

  When the dance was over, all too soon, the beautiful girl in velvet withdrew and suddenly Hermione, who had been watching us, was standing next to me.

  'Have you noticed something?' she asked, laughing appreciatively. 'Have you discovered that women's legs aren't table legs? Well, good for you! You can do the foxtrot now, thank God. Tomorrow we'll make a start on the Boston, then in three weeks' time there's a masked ball in the Globe Rooms.'

  There was a break in the dancing now and we had returned to our seats. Senor Pablo, the good-looking young saxophonist, came over too and, after nodding to us, sat down next to Hermione. He seemed to be very good friends with her, but I must admit I didn't take to the man at all that first time we were together. He was handsome, undeniably so, both in looks and stature, but that apart I couldn't detect any great merit in him. Even his supposed multilingualism turned out to be no great achievement since he didn't really speak at all, just words like 'please', 'thanks', 'indeed', 'certainly', 'hello' and the like, though he did, it is true, know these in several languages. No, he didn't say a thing, our Senor Pablo, and he didn't exactly seem to think a great deal either, this handsome caballero. His business was playing the saxophone in the jazz band, and he seemed to fulfil his professional obligations with love and passion. When the band was playing he would sometimes clap his hands all of a sudden or indulge in other outbursts of enthusiasm, such as loudly breaking into song with words like 'oh oh oh oh, ha ha, hello!' Otherwise, however, he clearly lived only in order to appeal to women, to sport the latest fashions in collars and ties, and also to wear lots of rings on his fingers. In his case, conversation took the form of sitting at our table, smiling at us, looking at his wristwatch and rolling cigarettes, at which he was highly skilled. Behind his dark, handsome, half-cast eyes and under his black locks there lurked no secret romance, no problems, no thoughts. When observed at close quarters, this good-looking exotic demigod turned out to be nothing more than a happy and somewhat spoiled boy who was agreeably well mannered. I talked to him about his instrument and about tone colours in jazz. He must have realized that in matters musical I was an old hand, appreciative and knowledgeable, but he didn't respond. While I, out of politeness to him or actually to Hermione, embarked on a sort of theoretical justification of jazz on musical grounds, he just smiled his harmless smile as if oblivious to me and the effort I was making. I suppose he was totally ignorant of the fact that there had been other kinds of music before jazz and apart from it. He was nice, nice and well behaved, his large, vacant eyes smiling sweetly, but there seemed to be nothing that he and I had in common. Nothing that might be important or sacred to him could also be so to me; we came from opposite ends of the earth; there wasn't a word in our respective languages that we shared. (Subsequently, however, Hermione told me something remarkable. She said that after this conversation Pablo had asked her, whatever she did, to take real care in her dealings with 'that chap' because he was, as he put it, so very unhappy. And when she asked what made him think this he had said: 'Poor, poor chap. Look at his eyes! Can't laugh, he can't.')

  When black-eyed Pablo had taken leave of us and the music started up again, Hermione got to her feet. 'You could dance with me again now, Harry. Or have you had enough?'

  Now, when dancing with her too, I was lighter, freer on my feet and more cheerful, though not as carefree and unselfconscious as with the other girl. Hermione got me to lead and, as light and gentle as a petal, adjusted her movements to suit mine. With her too I now discovered and experienced all those beautiful sensations, as her body from time to time closed on me, from time to time retreated. She too had the scent of woman and love about her; her dance too was a gentle, intimate song, the sweetly alluring song of sex, yet I was unable to respond to all this freely and serenely, could not totally forget myself and surrender. I was far too close to Hermione. She was a companion to me, a sister, a kindred spirit. She was like me and like my boyhood friend Hermann, the dreamer and poet who had so enthusiastically shared in my intellectual and spiritual pursuits and escapades.

  'I know,' she said afterwards when I spoke of this. 'You don't need to tell me. I do mean to make you fall in love with me one day, but there is no rush. For the time being we will remain companions. We are two people hoping to become close friends because we have recognized each other for what we are. Let's now learn from one another, play with one another. I'll show you my little theatre, I'll teach you to dance, to experience a bit of happiness and foolishness, and you'll reveal your ideas to me and some of your knowledge.'

  'Ah, Hermione, there's not much to reveal. It's clear you know far more than me. What a remarkable person you are, lass. There's nothing about me you don't understand, you're a step ahead of me in every respect. Can I possibly mean anything to you? Surely you must find me boring?'

  Her eyes darkening, she looked down at the ground.

  'I don't like to hear you talk like that. Think of the evening when you first came across me and I became your companion. You had been living a tormented life, isolated from others; you were washed up, desperate. Why do you think I was able to understand you then, to recognize you for what you were?'

  'Why, Hermione? Tell me.'

  'Because I am like you. Because I'm just as lonely as you and just as incapable as you are of loving and taking life, my fellow human beings or myself seriously. There are always a few people like this, as you know, who make the highest possible demands on life and have a hard time coming to terms with the stupidity and coarseness of it.'

  'You, you!' I cried, deeply amazed. 'I understand you, my friend, I understand you as no one else does. And yet you are a mystery to me. You haven't the slightest difficulty in coping with life; you have this admirable reverence for the little things, the minor enjoyments it offers; you have mastered the art of living to such a degree. How can you suffer at the hands of life? How can you despair?'

  'I don't despair, Harry. But, suffering at the hands of life, oh yes, that's something I'm experienced at. You are amazed that I'm not happy since I can, after all, dance and am well versed in the superficial aspects of life. And I, dear friend, am amazed that you are so disappointed with life since you, after all, feel at home with precisely the things that life at its finest and most profound has to offer: things of the mind, the arts, ideas. That's why we attracted one another, that's why we are kindred spirits. I'm going to teach you to dance, to play, to smile and still not to be satisfied. And I'm going to learn from you how to think and know things, and still not be satisfied. Don't you know that we are both children of the devil?'

  'So we are, yes. The devil - that's our intellectual faculty, our mind - and we are its unfortunate children. W
e have fallen away from nature and are now left dangling in the void. But now I'm reminded that in the Steppenwolf tract that I told you about there is a passage explaining that it is only a figment of Harry's imagination when he thinks he possesses two souls or consists of two personalities. Every human being, it says there, is made up of ten, of a hundred, of a thousand souls.'

  'I like that very much,' Hermione exclaimed. 'In you, for instance, the intellectual faculty is very highly developed, but on the other hand, when it comes to all sorts of little skills needed in life, you are backward. Harry the thinker is a hundred years old, but Harry the dancer is barely half a day old as yet. He is the one we now need to foster, and all his tiny little brothers who are just as small, stupid and ungrown-up as he is.'

  She looked at me with a smile on her face, then, in a changed tone of voice, quietly asked:

  'And how did you like Maria, then?'

  'Maria? Who is that?'

  'She's the one you were dancing with, a beautiful girl, a very beautiful girl. As far as I could tell you fell for her a bit.'

  'Do you know her, then?'

  'Oh yes, we know each other really well. Do you care that much about her?'

  'I liked her, and I was glad that she showed so much consideration for my attempts at dancing.'

  'Well, if that's all there is to it! You ought to court her a bit, Harry. She is very pretty, and such a good dancer. And you have fallen for her too, haven't you? I think you'll be successful.'

  'Oh, I've no ambitions in that direction.'

  'Now there you are telling a bit of a lie. I know, of course, that somewhere or other in this wide world you've got a lover. You see her once every six months, and then only to fall out with her. It's very sweet of you, wanting to remain faithful to this strange girlfriend, but forgive me if I can't take the whole affair quite so seriously. And anyway, I have my suspicions that you treat love in general as a terribly serious matter. You may do that, for all I care, go on loving in your idealized fashion as much as you like, it's your business. My business is to see to it that you learn to master life's little, simple skills and games a bit better. In that sphere I am your teacher, and I'll be a better teacher for you than your ideal beloved was, you can depend on that! What you're desperately in need of after all this time, Steppenwolf, is to sleep with a good-looking girl again.'

  'Hermione,' I exclaimed in a pained voice. 'Just look at me. I'm an old man!'

  'No you're not, you're a little boy. And just as you were too idle to learn to dance until it was almost too late, so you've been too idle to learn how to make love. You're certainly capable of an excellent performance as a lover in the ideal, tragic mode, I've no doubt of that, my friend, and all credit to you. But now you're also going to learn to love a bit in a normal human way. You see, we've already made a start. Pretty soon we'll be able to let you loose at a ball, but you need to learn the Boston first. We'll begin on that tomorrow. I'll come at three o'clock. How did you like the music here, by the way?'

  'It was excellent.'

  'You see, you've made progress there too, learned something new. Until now you couldn't stand all this dance music and jazz; it wasn't serious or deep enough for you, but now you've realized that there is no need to take it seriously at all, though it can be very pleasant and delightful. Incidentally, the whole band would be nothing without Pablo. He's the one who gives them the lead, puts some spark into them.'

  In the same way that the gramophone had a harmful effect on the ascetic, intellectual ambiance of my study, and the alien American dance tunes represented a disturbing, indeed destructive, intrusion into my refined musical world, so new, daunting, disruptive elements were forcing their way into my hitherto so sharply defined and so strictly secluded life. The doctrine of the thousand souls expounded in the Steppenwolf tract and endorsed by Hermione was correct. In addition to all the old ones, every day revealed a few new souls within me, all creating a fuss and making demands. Now I could see as clearly as daylight what a delusion my previous personality had been. The only things I had regarded as at all valid were the few skills and activities I happened to be strong in. I had painted the picture of a Harry and lived the life of a Harry who was in fact nothing but a very sensitively trained specialist in literature, music and philosophy. All the rest of myself, the whole remaining confused assemblage of skills, instincts and aspirations, I had felt to be a burden and had filed away under the label Steppenwolf.

  Yet, far from being a pleasant and amusing adventure, my conversion to the truth, the dissolution of my personality, was on the contrary often bitterly painful, often almost unbearable. In the surroundings of my room, attuned to other frequencies, the gramophone often sounded truly devilish. And at times, when dancing my one-steps in some fashionable restaurant amid all the elegant playboys and confidence tricksters, it seemed to me I was a traitor to everything in life that had ever been honourable and sacred to me. If only Hermione had left me alone for a week I would have made a swift getaway from all these laborious and ludicrous experiments in living the high life. But Hermione was always there. I may not have seen her every day, but I was constantly seen by her, directed, supervised, assessed by her. She could even tell from the expressions on my face what angry thoughts of rebellion and escape were going through my mind, but she merely smiled in response.

  As the destruction of what I used earlier to call my personality progressed I began to understand why, despite all my despair, I had been bound to fear death so terribly. I started to realize that this appalling and shameful dread of dying was also a part of my old, bourgeois, inauthentic existence. This previous Harry Haller, the gifted writer, the connoisseur of Goethe and Mozart, the author of critically acclaimed reflections on the metaphysics of art, on genius and tragedy, and on humanity, this melancholy hermit in his cell crammed full of books was now being exposed, step by step, to self-criticism, and found wanting on every count. True, this gifted and interesting Herr Haller had preached reason and humanity, had protested against the brutality of the war, but he had not, while the war was taking place, allowed himself to be lined up against a wall and shot, which would have been the logical outcome of his ideas. Instead, he had arrived at some sort of accommodation, needless to say an extremely respectable and noble accommodation, but when all is said and done a compromise nonetheless. What's more, though he had opposed power and exploitation, he had more than a few securities issued by industrial enterprises deposited at his bank, and he had no qualms whatsoever when spending the interest paid on them. And that is how things stood in every respect. Harry Haller may have succeeded wonderfully well in passing himself off as an idealist scornful of all worldly things, a nostalgic hermit and rancorous prophet, but at bottom he was a bourgeois who found the kind of life Hermione lived reprehensible, who fretted about the evenings he was wasting in the restaurant and the amount of cash he was squandering there. He had a bad conscience and, far from yearning to be liberated and fulfilled, was on the contrary dearly longing to return to those cosy days when all his intellectual dabbling still gave him pleasure and brought him fame. In this he was no different from the newspaper readers he so despised and derided who, because it was less painful than learning the harsh lesson of all they had endured, longed to return to those ideal times before the war. Ugh, he was enough to make you sick, this Herr Haller! And yet I still clung to him, or to what remained of the already crumbling mask he had worn, his flirtation with things intellectual, his bourgeois dread of all things random and contingent (of which death was an example too). And I scornfully and enviously drew comparisons between the new, developing Harry, the rather shy and comical dilettante of the dance halls, and the pseudo-ideal image of the earlier Harry, in which he, the new Harry, had now discovered all the embarrassing features that had so disturbed him at the time in the professor's Goethe engraving. He himself, the old Harry, had been just such a bourgeois-style idealized Goethe, an intellectual hero with a look in his eyes that was all too disting
uished, radiating grandeur, high-mindedness and humanity as if his hair had been coated with brilliantine, and almost moved by his own nobility of soul. Damn me if that image hadn't now got some bad holes in it! The ideal Herr Haller had been reduced to a wretched state. He looked like some dignitary with his trousers in tatters after being robbed of his wealth in the street. And he would have been better advised to learn the part of the ragged-trousered wretch he now was instead of wearing his rags as if his medals were still pinned to them and tearfully persisting in laying claim to his lost dignity.

  Again and again meeting up with the musician Pablo, I was obliged to revise my judgement of him, if only because Hermione was so fond of him and assiduously sought his company. In my memory I'd registered Pablo as a handsome nonentity, a little, rather vain dandy, a happy child without a care in the world who took great delight in blowing into the toy trumpet he'd won at the fair and could easily be made to toe the line if you gave him enough praise and chocolate. But Pablo was not interested in my judgements. He was as indifferent to them as he was to my musical theories. He would listen to me in a polite and friendly way, smiling the whole time, but never giving any real response. In spite of this, however, I did seem to have aroused his interest, since he clearly went to some trouble to please me and show me goodwill. Once when, during one of these fruitless conversations of ours, I became irritated almost to the point of rudeness, he gave me a look of dismay and sadness and, taking hold of my left hand and stroking it, invited me to take a sniff of something from a small gold-plated snuffbox. It would do me good, he said. I glanced inquiringly at Hermione, who nodded her approval, so I took a pinch and sniffed it. In no time at all I did indeed feel fresher and livelier, probably because there was some cocaine mixed in with the powder. Hermione told me Pablo had lots of substances like this, which he obtained by secret routes and occasionally offered to friends - to deaden pain, to help sleep, to produce beautiful dreams, to make you feel merry, to act as aphrodisiacs - and he was, she said, a past master when it came to mixing them and getting the dosage right.