Hesse's proto-hippie Narcissus and Goldmund - that which was all-important to him, apart from the ecstasy of love: freedom

After the inventiveness of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the first big chunk of The Man Without Qualities (1930), it was a surprise to read such an old-fashioned but contemporary book as Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund (1930, tr. Leila Vennewitz) that deliberately reached back to the 19th century German-language novella.  To Goethe and that crowd.  The first sentence describes a chestnut tree “brought back generations earlier by a pilgrim returning from Rome” (Ch. 1).  I had met that pilgrim, many times, in German literature.  Goldmund is another in that line, even if he never leaves German-speaking territory.

Goldmund is a student in a monastery who discovers that he is irresistible to women.  The secret is in his voice, apparently.  So that’s it for the monastery!  Goldmund becomes a wanderer, a tramp, really a kind of hippie.  A proto-hippie.  The reason for the Hesse boom in the 1960s was quickly obvious.  Of course dissatisfied young people wanted to read this book.

Digression – this is James Laughlin in The Way It Wasn’t (2006):

I went through it [Siddhartha] and thought it was very readable, but a little too Germanic and the message was just Buddhism with a sugar coating. I stalled but Henry [Miller] would write about every three months saying I had to publish that book.  Finally, to oblige Henry, I did.  The first year it sold only 400 copies, but sales kept growing and at the height of the Hesse boom we sold a quarter of a million copies in a year. (290)

This novel, like Siddhartha is more or less picaresque, and it was the a long episode about art that drove home Hesse’s hippie ethos.  Goldmund informally apprentices himself to a Tilman Riemenschneider-like limewood sculptor and becomes a real artist, but worries that artists are too bourgeois:

For more than three years Goldmund had sacrificed to art that which was all-important to him, apart from the ecstasy of love: freedom.  To be free, to roam wherever he pleased, to live the random life of the wayfarer, to stand on his own two feet and be independent: all this he had renounced … Art, that goddess who seemed so spiritual, required so many banalities!  It required a roof over one’s head, and tools, wood, clay, paint, gold; it demanded work and patience.  (Ch. 11, 140)

So he gives it up.

The novel is set during the 14th or 15th century.  Is there a pandemic in it?  There sure is.  The plague arrives in Chapter 13, and Goldmund lives, with some other refugees, in an isolated forest idyll.  “There being no bread, they adopted another goat, and they also discovered a small field of turnips” (Ch. 13, 169).  This lasts until the world intrudes.  Hesse is unsparing about the horrors of the plague, and the horrors of people during the plague.

Narcissus, up there in the title, is a monk, priest, teacher and friend of Goldmund’s who appears only in the opening and closing episodes.  Hesse apparently found the form of the novel insufficient for his ideas, because both of these sections include philosophical dialogues of dubious value.  They seemed artless, and the ideas expressed shallow.  Philosophy for twelve-year-olds.  Well, they need philosophy, too.  But the scenes, the action of the novel, and Goldmund’s responses to what he found out in the world, good and bad, expressed ideas, too, and with more art.

I borrowed the image of the Riemenschneider sculpture from the Museum für Franken in Würzburg.

It was not surprising that none of these things was any help - Hesse tells two stories

It was the anti-school angle that attracted me to Hesse’s Unterm Rad aka The Prodigy.  I was curious to bounce it off of the French books that attacked school, like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jules Vallès, and especially to skeptical German-language fiction like Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, another book about sensitive boarding school boys that was published just a year after Hesse.  The Prodigy does not otherwise have much in common with Musil, but does resemble Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855/ 1879) in a number of curious ways.

Hesse reaches towards the thickly described, distantly narrated fiction of Theodor Fontane and Thomas Mann, but formally he has written a classic 19th century German novella.  I think the most distinctive, irritating feature of the novel, the clumsy, sarcastic, intrusive narrator is his own.

I showed that narrator yesterday, and will just give one more example of how he can stomp on his own scenes.  The apple harvest has come in – it’s cider time!

The many children, however, rich and poor alike, ran about with little mugs, all of them carrying an apple they had bitten into in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other; for as long as anyone could remember there had been a saying – quite groundless – that if you ate bread at the cider harvest you did not get the colic.  (Ch. 6, 121)

You either cringe a little at “quite groundless” or you will get along better with the narrator than I did.  The digression on Swabia in Chapter 3 may still test your patience.  “And so this fruitful province whose politically great traditions stretch back into the past still exerts” okay let’s cut that short.

I don’t want to complain any more.  There is some fine stuff in this book.  There is, just a couple of pages after that Swabian nonsense, a student who is so cheap he secretly uses other students’ soap and towels and takes violin lessons, even though he hates the violin, just because they are free.  There is this doctor:

The pale ex-student strolled round in the open air every day, joyless and weary, avoiding even the few opportunities of social intercourse that were offered.  The doctor prescribed drops, cod-liver oil, eggs and cold shower baths.

It was not surprising that none of these things was any help.  (Ch. 6, 119)

No, not such a surprise.  I am piecing together the comic novel hidden in the actual more gloomy one.  But I what I want to end on is the uncanny part of the novel, which is not just obligatory in the German novella but greatly deepens and possibly even upends the meaning of the novel.

After a promising start, Hans has washed out of the theological college, for reasons discussed yesterday.  Back home, he revisits his childhood, including the fairy tale slum, full of vice and crime, which he loved:

The ‘Falken’ was the one spot where a fairy tale, a miracle, a dreadful horror could happen, where any magic was credible, where it was possible to believe in ghosts and where you could feel the same thrilling shudder that you felt as you read old legends…

The activities of the tanners in the various chambers, the cellar yard and on the floors were weird and peculiar, the vast, yawning rooms were as quiet as they were intriguing, the powerfully built and surly master was shunned and dreaded as an ogre, and Liese went about the remarkable house like a fairy protector and mother to all the children, birds, cats and puppies, brimful of kindness, stories and ballad songs.  (Ch. 5, 116-7)

Hans has at this point taken his exams, gone to college, and washed out.  This strange neighborhood and Hans’s strange relation with it has never been hinted at until this point, as if Hesse had just thought of it, as if he knew that the sternness of the schools was inadequate to the story he was telling, a story which is more fundamentally about the loss of childhood.  The more complex symbolic story, in this episode strongly literalized, dominates and perhaps crushes the more topical protest against teaching boys Greek.

His task is not to educate unusual boys but to produce good honest fools - Herman Hesse hates school

From one prodigy to another, to The Prodigy, a  short 1905 Hermann Hesse novel.  Unterm Rad is the real title, which is not even remotely The Prodigy, but rather, to use the title of an older translation, Beneath the Wheel.  The wheel of school and homework and society so on.  The novel is about a sensitive boy genius who is destroyed by the inflexibility and lack of imagination of his school and his thick-headed father.  There is another way to tell the story, but let’s go with this one.

John Stuart Mill was, by contrast, a comparatively insensitive genius, although more sensitive than he or anyone else had guessed.  Both Hesse’s prodigy and Mill lost their mothers at an early age, so they have that in common.

That is not true about Mill, by the way; completely wrong.  His mother lived a long time.  I had just assumed that she had died when Mill was young because he never mentions her.  It did strike me as odd, given that his mother was obviously absent, that younger siblings kept appearing.  Autobiography may be a much stranger book than it first seems.

Back to Hesse.  I know that the above summary of the novel is correct because the narrator directly tells me so:

A schoolmaster would rather have a whole class of duffers than one genius, and strictly speaking he is right, for his task is not to educate unusual boys but to produce good Latinists, mathematicians, and good honest fools…  we have the comfort of knowing that in true geniuses the wounds almost always heal, and they become people who create their masterpieces in spite of school and who later, when they are dead and the pleasant aura of remoteness hangs over them, are held up by schoolmasters to succeeding generations as exemplary and noble beings.  (Ch. 4, 85)

The narrator has picked his side.  The novel – the narrator – can have a tone of adolescent self-pity that is not so appealing.  Hesse was twenty-eight when it was published, but the narrator sounds younger.  Perhaps Hesse was younger when he wrote the book.  He did have the sense to create some distance by making the more autobiographical character not the main hero but rather the hero’s school friend, a wilder, more poetical creature, who reads not the Classics but rather Romantics like Schiller, Shakespeare, and Ossian, and who speaks “in the manner of romantic youths enamoured of Heine” (71).  Hesse can then explore the real mental crisis he experienced at school from different perspectives by dividing his symptoms and sufferings among the two characters.

Here’s how wild that poetic kid, Heilner, is:

Hans was also horrified when he first noticed how Heilner treated his text-books…  He was disgusted to see that [Heilner] had covered whole pages with pencilled scribble.  The west coast of the Spanish peninsula [it’s an atlas] had been distorted into a grotesque profile in which the nose reached from Oporto to Lisbon and the Cape Finsterre region had been stylized into a curly wig, while Cape St Vincent formed the beautiful twisted point of a man’s beard.  It went on like this for page after page…  Hans was accustomed to treat his books as sacred possessions and this disrespect seemed to him partly a desecration of the holy of holies, partly a criminal yet heroic act.  (70)

A madman.  Thank goodness he is expelled.

The boarding school portrayed in the novel is real and still operating.  It is housed in a Cistercian monastery dating back to the 12th century.  Neither sensitive nor a genius, I thought it sounded pretty great.

Quotations and page numbers are from the W. J. Strachan translation, Penguin, 1973.