The Journey to the East: Reading Hermann Hesse

The following is an excerpt from my memoir Touched By The Presence. It tells of the profound impact reading Hermann Hesse had on me in my early teens. I was, of course, not alone in this, and was one among the many who fell under Hesse's spell in the 1960s and early 70s. My interest in Hesse changed over the years, but he remains a central influence on me. So much so, that I will be speaking about Hesse and how his work was at the roots of the counter culture, in his time and ours, at the Kosmos Institute's First Annual Colloqium, held in Ascona, Switzerland, December 17-21, on the site of the legendary Monte Verita, the "Mountain of Truth."

            By the time the hippie girl I had a crush on handed me a paperback copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha - the one with the blue cover with a statue of the Buddha that Bantam had put out - Hesse had been dead for eight years. He died in 1962, just as the various revolutions that would rock the sixties were getting started. By 1970, the year I first read him, Hesse’s books were as much a part of the counter culture as marijuana and rock and roll and sold as well as, if not better than both. Had Hesse lived until then – and it is possible he could have, although at ninety-three he would have been pushing it – he no doubt would have been surprised, if not baffled, by his enormous success. He once said that he would never be popular in America and that he was understood there by at best ten people. Either Hesse underestimated the ability of Americans to understand his work, or millions of adolescents and members of the love generation were reading him avidly but without comprehension.

Hermann Hesse:

            Yet Hesse, who lived long enough to be aware of the rising American interest in his work, had reason to wonder if his new readers across the Atlantic were getting his point. Except for a brief spell in the 1920s, he had never really been popular with Anglophone readers.[1] In German speaking countries, he was, of course, very well known, in fact he was quite an established figure. He had two distinct periods and achieved a wide readership in both. Peter Camenzind (1904) established the mould of most of Hesse’s early novels, with the hero rejecting conventional life and taking to the high road in search of adventure. It expressed the sort of sensibility familiar to the Wandervogel generation, the ‘wandering birds’ German youth movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were young people who abandoned bourgeois security and took to the roads, getting ‘back to nature’ and singing and playing guitar along the way, much like the hippies who read Hesse did. Unfortunately, many of these ‘wandering birds’ later found their way into the National Socialist Party, while much of what was left of the younger Wandervogel entered the ranks of the Nazi Youth.

Sing Ho, for the open highway!

Peter Camenzind put Hesse on the literary map and made his name, but in the aftermath of World War I and Hesse’s own psychological crises, Hesse produced a book so unlike his earlier romances that he published it under a pseudonym, that of Emil Sinclair, the book’s protagonist, and the reading public could not tell it was him. It was only after the book won a prestigious and lucrative prize as the best first novel of the year, that Hesse returned the prize money and made it known that he was the author. The book was Demian (1919), the product of the chaos of the war and of the confusions of Hesse’s own soul, to clarify which Hesse had undergone extensive analysis first with Jung and then with Josef Lang, one of Jung’s disciples.

Following the promptings of one's true self

Yet by the late 1940s, Hesse had stopped writing novels. His last, The Glass Bead Game (published by Bantam as Magister Ludi ),had appeared in 1943 but had been written during the ‘30s and although awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946, for the post-war generation he was decidedly passé. Romantic novels about ‘"inwardness" and the "search for the self" were of little interest in a Germany levelled by the war and split by global politics.

Hesse wasn’t troubled and he enjoyed his withdrawn and quiet life in Montagnola, in the hills above Lake Lugano in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, which he would depict in his novella, Klingsor’s Last Summer (1919). I would visit Hesse’s Casa Camuzzi in 2008, while working on my book on Jung, and drink a glass of wine in his honour.

Hesse was always a solitary character, and he protected his solitude, erecting a notice at the entrance to his home, letting potential visitors know that he was not available and wished to be left alone.[2] One suspects that the readers he had in his last years were courteous, polite, and considerate and would have respected his wishes. But by the mid-sixties, a flock of wandering birds from the United States, eager to let it all hang out, would most likely have ignored it. It may have been just as well that, by then, Hesse had left the building.

Casa Camuzzi, where Hesse lived 1919 - 1931

Hesse’s American success started in 1951 when Henry Miller – a favourite writer of mine during my early days in New York – suggested to his publisher, New Directions, that they put out an edition of Siddhartha, translated by Hilda Rossner. They did, and the paperback that appeared in 1957 was the edition that adorned beatnik bookshelves until Bantam acquired the work. Miller praised the book far and wide, suggesting it to friends and urging it on correspondents. Another Hesse promoter was Colin Wilson, who included Hesse in his study of alienation in the modern world, The Outsider. Wilson’s extended analysis of Hesse’s work in this surprise existential bestseller brought the reclusive German romantic into many American and British homes.[3]

In Search of the Self

One spot in the New World that seemed very interested in Hesse was the North Beach area of San Francisco. This was the West Coast stomping ground of the Beat Generation, just getting started around the time New Directions issued their paperback edition of Siddhartha. But although the Beats were eager to take their own journeys to the East – the title of a novella by Hesse - it was Hesse’s at the time more shocking and ‘transgressive’ novel Steppenwolf , that was making the scene. We can say that the Beat Generation was born at the famous reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights would publish the poem the next year - in its trademark plain wrap black and white cover - and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road would follow in 1957. Given a founding poetic text entitled Howl, it’s not surprising that the wandering birds nesting in North Beach would be taken with a novel about a man who believes he is a ‘wolf of the steppes’.

For Madmen Only

Yet in 1961, a year before his death, when word of Steppenwolf’s popularity among the Beats and at least one angry young Brit had reached Hesse’s retreat, Hesse added a note to a new edition of the book. Hesse pointed out that of all his books, Steppenwolf was the one that was “more often and more violently misunderstood than any other.” Hesse regretted that it seemed that only one side of Harry Haller’s – the book’s protagonist – character was appreciated, that of the ‘wolf of the steppes’. But behind Haller’s torment and suffering lay a different, more detached world, a “second, higher, indestructible world…a positive, serene, superpersonal and timeless world of faith.”

This was the world revealed when, at certain moments, Harry is suddenly reminded of “Mozart and the stars,” moments when his heart stands still “between delight and sorry” and he sees “how rich was the gallery of my life and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations.” These are moments of remembrance, as are the moments when Marcel in Proust’s novel ‘recaptures the past.’

When I first read Steppenwolf, I was not aware of the importance of this phenomena, nor that it would form the heart of Colin Wilson’s insights into what he calls “Faculty X,” our inherent but little understood – or even recognised – ability to grasp “the reality of other times and places.” Yet when I first read The Occult, one reason I was taken with it was that in it, Wilson often referred to Hesse, as well as to Nietzsche and Sartre, two thinkers whom I would meet, at least through their work, soon after reading Hesse. And when I later read The Outsider - at the start, I might say, of my tenure as one - I was well prepared for Wilson’s extended look at Hesse’s work, having by then read everything of his I could find.

The gateway book for me

           But the book of Hesse’s that had the greatest effect on me in my teens wasn’t Siddhartha or Steppenwolf, but Demian, the work that emerged after Hesse’s analysis with Jung and Josef Lang, although an earlier work, Beneath the Wheel (1906), was another favourite. Both Demian and Beneath the Wheel are about adolescence and coming of age and the difficulties that sensitive youth have in a world geared toward the practical business of making a living, something with which I, and others like me, could identify. Both books depict characters caught in a system that has no place for poetry or inwardness. Both are in the mould of the Bildungsroman, the “novel of education.”

Hans Giebenrath, the intellectually brilliant but emotionally starved protagonist of Beneath the Wheel, is crushed by the system, the ‘wheel’. Whatever spark of creativity and imagination he may have possessed is drummed out of him by his parents and teachers; in the end he drowns after a night carousing, after spending time, as Hesse did, in an asylum.

But Max Demian is a different story. He is the idealised portrait of a character who has ‘individuated’, in Jung’s term. We can see him as an expression of the archetype of the Self, someone who has ‘become who he is’. He acts as a model and mentor for Emil Sinclair, a sensitive youth like Hans Giebenrath, who has had the good fortune to meet Demian, who appears at different times in his life, helping him to surmount certain difficulties in his development. If Hesse’s earlier Bildungsroman concerned youth’s encounters with the world and its education – along the lines of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship - in Demian the protagonist’s education concerns an encounter with his Self.

Poetic youth crushed by the system

  Like Steppenwolf, Demian is a happy hunting ground for Jungian symbols and archetypes; they are all there: the Shadow, the Anima, the  Self. And although I read and re-read Steppenwolf and was particularly fascinated by Harry Haller’s adventures in the Magic Theatre, entrance to which is “for madmen only” (my friends and I at the time relied on marijuana to get us in), it wasn’t until I was older that I began to identify with its themes more seriously. It is really a book for older readers, those who have entered midlife, which, as Jung tells us, is when the task of individuating really begins. This becomes clear when we recognise that the Steppenwolf’s problem is not so much that he is a divided soul, a man and a wolf, although a central theme running through all of Hesse’s work is the need to reconcile the polarities in human nature, a theme he shared with Jung and which informs his medieval fantasy, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930). Harry Haller’s real problem is one I would become aware of when I began to read Sartre and Camus: the problem of freedom.

Haller’s is free, but he doesn’t know what to do with his freedom, and his lack of purpose turns his freedom into such a burden that he considers escaping it by slitting his throat. What we can call the “Mozart and the stars effect” happens when the reality of his freedom comes back to him, and he is reminded of life’s infinite potential.

The inner journey starts anywhere

Demian is a different story. Although Hesse wrote it when he was in his forties, Demian is a young person’s book. The Bantam edition I read and re-read obsessively, with the cover image of Frau Eva holding Demian and Emil Sinclair close to her breast, and the hawk, a symbol of the Self, hovering in the background, begins with this statement: “I only wanted to live in accord with the promptings that came from my true self. Why was that so difficult?”

Why indeed? Why is it so difficult to follow the promptings of our true self? That was a question I asked myself repeatedly throughout my teens and sought the answer to in my reading. Nothing should be easier than to be oneself. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows, nothing can be so difficult, especially when you make your first attempts. Being oneself is difficult at any age. But those first steps taken in that direction often precipitate considerable chaos and confusion.

Abraxas

“He who would be born must destroy a world” – this is the message that miraculously appears on Emil Sinclair’s school desk after he has sent a picture he has drawn to Demian, of a hawk emerging from an egg that he had seen in a dream. This is the hawk depicted on the book’s cover. “The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world.” The bird must destroy the world in order to fly to the Gnostic god, Abraxas. Abraxas, the cock-headed god, is an antinomian figure. He is beyond society’s conventions, beyond good and evil. He unites the opposites and is associated with individuation and the Self. Demian learns about Abraxas through his conversations with the church organist Pistorius – who, I later learned, was based on Hesse’s analyst, Josef Lang.

Hesse was one of the few people to whom Jung sent a privately printed copy of his strange work of ‘spiritual dictation’, The Seven Sermons to the Dead, that came to him during his ‘descent into the unconscious’ following his breakup with Freud. It emerged with the same material that Jung recorded in his Red Book and is fundamentally concerned with the process of ‘differentiation’, of separating from the undifferentiated Pleroma (read: unconscious) and achieving one’s own individuality.[4] Abraxas figures largely in Jung’s Seven Sermons and this strange text was included in the edition of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections that I stole from my high school library.

It was clear that the Seven Sermons and Demian were about the same thing and in a very real sense I can say that after reading Demian I became a Gnostic. Not in the sense of embracing the doctrines of the ancient Gnostic sects, about which I knew nothing at the time. But in the more fundamental and vital sense of wanting gnosis, the kind of inner knowledge that Hesse and Jung spoke of, and which also involves a kind of remembering, a re-experiencing of what we already know, but have forgotten.

Seven Sermons to the Dead

Yet these reflections were far from my consciousness when I first read Demian. More to the point was the reality of having to “destroy a world” in order to be born.  “World” in my case meant my family life at home. Depending on your point of view it was either a blessing or a burden that I came of age during the tail end of the sixties, when the challenge not to conform and to “do your own thing” still had currency.[5] The Generation Gap had opened and was widening. The alienation from my family I experienced because of my love of reading now escalated into more or less open warfare. The war in Viet Nam was one reason. My father had fought in Wordl War II and had been decorated for bravery. He was not taken with the hippies, draft dodgers and anti-war protesters while I, all of fourteen and of course knowledgeable about these things, took their side.[6]  It was a generational conflict played out in millions of American homes.

[1] My hardcover copy of Steppenwolf published by Henry Holt and translated by Basil Creighton was published in 1929.

[2] One visitor Hesse did enjoy meeting was T. S. Eliot, who sought him out after reading his little book about Dostoyevsky, A Glimpse into Chaos (1919) and referred to it in the founding modernist poem The Waste Land (1922).

[3] It did the same for G. I. Gurdjieff. The Outsider is one of the first books in which someone outside the Gurdjieff ‘work’ writes about it at any length.

[4] An excellent exploration of Jung’s Seven Sermons can be found in Stephan Hoeller’s The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, Il: Quest Books, 1982).

[5] A favourite television program at the time was Then Came Bronson, about a disillusioned journalist who travels across the states on a motorcycle, in search of the meaning of life. It lasted one season, from 1969 to 1970.

[6] [6] Years later, when I came to write my first book, Turn Off Your Mind, about the Sixties, I was surprised to discover how antipathetic I came to feel toward the popular ‘revolutionary’ figures of the time, characters like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis et al, whom I had unreflectively considered heroes back then. They struck me as presumptuous, self-righteous egoists, more concerned with power, self-aggrandisement and celebrity than anything else. In saying this, I am not suggesting that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, bête noires of the Sixties radicals, were preferable or that the war in Viet Nam was justifiable. But I could understand how my father, and others like him, who had risked their lives in WWII, would feel less than sympathetic to these individuals. My political sympathies today are neither right nor left, conservative or liberal and I am of the firm conviction that the most important questions about human existence cannot be answered through politics.