Soul of the Age (27 page)

I have to congratulate you for the book, and myself as well, even though I don't, of course, always agree with you, and even though I'm generally rather bashful, and actually don't like being the focus of attention. Last night, I dreamed about something in connection with your book: I could see myself sitting there, not in a mirror, but as a second living figure, who was more alive than I. I was unable to scrutinize myself, because that would have violated an inner taboo, would have meant a fall from grace, but I was able to squint through the chink for a second, and I saw the living Hesse.

Well, I don't intend this as a quibble, but it has just occurred to me that this is your second-best book (it would be your best if the subject were as dignified as that of the Byzantine volume
200
). I have also just noticed how well you describe the legend of this life rather than the banal facts; you have discovered the magic formulae. And even when you make a mistake—e.g., incorrect dates—you are nevertheless right and on target. I still have some slight objections to a very few passages, but do not yet have the distance necessary to assess matters of detail correctly. You taught me some new things about myself, not only in the Maulbronn chapter, but especially in the section on the relationship between Lauscher and Camenzind. Maybe I shall eventually get around again to reading
Camenzind,
something I haven't done in at least fifteen years.

Your words occasionally make me feel embarrassed out of modesty. But since you have again shown in this book your mastery of genuine literature, the art of discovering hieroglyphs and ideograms, I can tell you how delighted I am that this essential point has been understood by one of the few people whom I regard as a brother and fellow practitioner.

I hope that you are pleased with the finished book and receive some joy from it.

I bought a few copies and have given one each to my sister, Dr. Lang, Schoeck. I'm telling you this, so you don't send those people another copy.

To celebrate the birthday or launching of your book, I would like to invite you to select a watercolor at my place.

 

PS: My morning mail has just arrived. A dear friend in Germany
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to whom I sent your book writes: “
Librum excellentissimum, quem de Chatti vita, moribus, operibus egregie conscripsit Hugo Ball, hesterno accepi die gratiasque tibi ego vel maximas.
”
202

TO HERMANN HUBACHER
203

Montagnola, June 24, 1927

Caro amico,

You were right to send this pretty girl to live in my house.
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Actually, I'm not alone at the moment; Frau Dolbin
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is here for a while, but I like having beautiful Lilly around.

I understand what you're saying about your piece, which I like a lot. It has a certain lyrical quality, which may have been something of a danger to you in the past. But to this reader the lyrical note sounds wonderfully genuine, melodic, and natural. I'm delighted, and wish to thank you, my dear friend!

I have changed a bit since I vanished. I now have a dark brown tan from sunbathing on my terrace at close to a hundred Celsius, am also thin because of my fasting, and look like a Hindu—which is quite appealing to the ladies, but doesn't impress my wretched gout, which is awfully stubborn. I have also been off cigarettes for the past five weeks.

People are pestering me every day about my birthday, which is eight days away. I'm not going to receive the few things I would really like, whereas I wouldn't mind getting rid of all those birthday wishes. There was a nice one from a Japanese man of letters who said he brought me greetings from my Japanese readers; I am the European writer they know the best, they don't like the others. He is going to send me some Hiroshige reproductions.

I'm almost a hundred years old, have written all my books, and have even had a biography written about me, so it's high time for me to enter the Academy of the Immortals and be buried. You will be notified in due course.

Addio,
greetings to Anny and the boys, and let's remain good friends.

TO HELENE WELTI

Montagnola, July 25, 1927

Thanks for your kind letter. I'm glad to hear that you're thinking of coming to Ticino and may visit me at some point. Please do!

You would like to hear more about my birthday? Well, my report will have to be rather brief. My girlfriend from Vienna has been here with me all summer, but there hasn't been a complete symbiosis. She lives in the house next door, and eats in the restaurant, but she is around, and I'm no longer leading the life of a hermit. I wanted to celebrate my birthday with her and also Hugo Ball and his family, but that was impossible, because three days beforehand Ball had to be rushed to Zurich for an operation,
206
which actually took place on my birthday. However, we went ahead with the party. The Wassmers
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came by car from Bremgarten. They brought along some wine, and had already reserved lunch in a nearby country inn. Those present apart from me were my friend Ninon, the Wassmers, Hans Moser
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(who came with the Wassmers), a brother of Louis Moilliet with his beautiful wife, a sister of the painter Cardinaux, a daughter of Frau Ball from her first marriage, and my friend Dr. Lang with his daughter. We ate a chicken, a good vegetable soup, and cake, drank Fendant and Chianti, and eventually repaired to my apartment, where there were dozens of telegrams and batches of letters, which kept piling up for days afterward. It took me three weeks to read them all. We drank tea at my place, sat on the terrace, which has new garden furniture, danced the fox-trot; then the girls had to kiss me, which affected my girlfriend's mood. In the evening we went to a grotto in the wood, where we had some bread, cheese, and local wine. That was the end of the party, and everybody left by car at around ten in the evening.

By the way, not a single official body, university, or institute in Switzerland or Germany has pestered me.

The press, on the other hand, has been yapping away. If quantity were decisive, I would certainly qualify as a great man. I was sent more than eighty newspapers, but the majority of the articles contained silly fabrications. Most of them had only heard of
Camenzind
or, at most, of it and
Rosshalde.
The nationalist papers ignored the entire affair, the bourgeois publications were polite but superficial, and the socialist press asserts virtually unanimously that I'm a bourgeois author who cannot be taken seriously.[ … ]

They only brought Hugo Ball back yesterday from Zurich, where half his stomach was removed. He is lying in bed, wants to get well, and doesn't yet realize the hopelessness of his condition. I was with him yesterday and today, and shall be very concerned about him in the immediate future. He is happy about the reactions to his book, which have been almost entirely favorable. My elder sister was here for a week since then, and my son Heiner also spent a few days here after walking across the Engadine.[ … ]

TO NINON DOLBIN

Stuttgart, Tuesday evening, April 10
[
1928
]

My dear, clever woman,

My head is still rumbling terribly from the noise of the propellers. I flew in a very large, uncomfortable airplane halfway across Germany, from Berlin to Stuttgart, in just five hours. I wanted to tell you that I saw a lot and really enjoyed myself. The world generally looks wonderful from a height of 600 to 1,200 meters—e.g., the sand-dune colors of the naked earth, empty fields, etc. And we had a delightful flight over the forests and mountains of Thuringia; in some ravines, I could spot the last traces of the snow that we ran into two weeks ago. The nice thing about flying, as opposed to traveling by train, is that you get to see so much forest, sand, fields, and moors, whereas the cities and factories look like relatively insignificant pockmarks.

And now to the most remarkable part: I flew over Würzburg about two or three in the afternoon, in bright sunshine, at about 900 meters, right above the Residenz and the Hofgarten, and within a few minutes I had seen every bridge, street, church again: the chapel, river, St. Burkard, everything! That was the most beautiful experience of all.
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[ … ]

I saw a big Berlin horse race in Karlshorst on Easter Monday, yesterday in other words, but that seems like months ago, and I have forgotten everything.

TO THEODOR SCHNITTKIN

Montagnola, June 3, 1928

Thanks for your letter. I'm finally at home again after an absence of seven months.

Psychoanalysis is quite problematic. In theory, the method—that is, the simplified categories which Freud uses to depict psychic mechanisms and also the Jungian mythology and typological classifications—ought to help identify psychic phenomena. But in practice the situation is very different. Of the half dozen psychoanalysts I have known, not one would, for example, be capable of noticing any positive or worthwhile qualities in a person such as myself or, let's say, a poet like Rilke, if we hadn't received any public recognition! Suppose a good contemporary psychoanalyst had to evaluate me. He would get to know all the material about my life, and also read my works. But if he didn't know that those works are widely read, and have brought me money and fame, he would no doubt classify me as a gifted, but hopeless neurotic. After all, nowadays the average person (i.e., the standard by which a physician determines normality) has no appreciation for the inherent value of productive work and creativity. To them, figures such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Lenau, Beethoven, Nietzsche would just seem like severely pathological types, since the shallow and absolutely bourgeois-modern attitude of psychoanalysis (including Freud's) precludes any understanding or assessment of creativity. That is why the voluminous psychoanalytic literature about artists hasn't yielded anything worthwhile. They discovered Schiller suffered from repressed patricidal longings, and Goethe had some complexes. If the analyst reading the works of these writers were not aware of their identity and reputation, he might even fail to notice that these men have constructed a world of their own by drawing on their complexes. Analysis, and modern science in general, has no conception of the following: Every cultural achievement is a product of complexes; culture itself arises out of the resistance and tension between instincts and intellect. Achievements do not occur when complexes are “healed,” but when extreme tensions can be creatively satisfied. How could it? Medicine, including analysis, doesn't set out to understand genius and the tragic nature of the intellect; it tries to ensure that patient Meyer gets rid of her asthma or psychosomatic stomach problems. The mind has other paths to follow, certainly not those.

Enough, I can rarely afford to write such chatty letters.

TO ANNY BODMER

[
End of September 1928
]

Thanks a lot! No, I have no use for visitors, and keep my front door tightly bolted. Why should I stand around chatting with people who feel so comfortable in their thick skins? No, let's proceed to Aquarius and Pisces.[ … ]

Ah, a hellish winter is upon us again.
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I have to get the big suitcase from the attic and spend the next few days packing. The old rigmarole is starting again next week: Baden, Zurich, the same pointless old cycle. How tired I am of this ritual!

There is a new book about me by a certain Herr Schmid,
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who wrote it for his doctorate. I have never seen a person's life and work being plucked to bits in this manner. The world has given me nothing in return for my thirty years of ascetic labor, whereas Schmid is awarded a doctorate for pilfering a book full of quotations from me and then poking fun at my decadence. The world is absolutely delightful. So I'm off soon to Baden, and then on to Zurich. Ninon is going to Vienna; I'm happy about that, since she has been quite moody and depressed of late. Goldmund will keep me company.

Anny, let's keep in touch. One really feels grateful to one's few friends. Fond and heartfelt greetings

TO ERHARD BRUDER

[
October 1928
]

I received your greetings while traveling, and read your essay about
Krisis
early this morning.
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Thank you very much for it.

I realize that you needed to distance yourself from the problem by writing this piece and that you just cannot afford to keep mulling over these issues, which are similar to your own problems. By the way, I also have three sons, but am unfortunately only on good terms with one of them. I know all about what it means to support three growing sons financially (the youngest is seventeen already) and also about the moral responsibility one feels for their lives.

I very much liked your essay, which is unusually dense and well articulated. You have come up with a wonderful description of the difference between being alone and being lonely in relation to the “crisis,” and I now see some things more clearly than heretofore.

Since you have understood so much, I should tell you where I feel you didn't fully understand me. In the first place, everything in my being and thought has its origin in religion, and this is something none of my critics, with the exception of Ball, has ever understood. Regardless of whether we consider this a plus or a minus, my upbringing was intensely and even passionately religious, and this has affected me strongly, even though its religious character has been modified and in my case somewhat perverted. So Harry's
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despair is not just about himself, but about the entire age. Nothing could be more symptomatic of the era than people's indifference to their wartime experiences, which they soon forgot entirely. Between 1914 and 1919, there was no way a religious German who had any feeling of personal responsibility for the well-being of humanity and of his own people could avoid experiencing that kind of despair.