Soul of the Age (55 page)

I'm glad you came across my story in a recent
Zürcher Zeitung.
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It's something completely new, the only worthwhile piece I have done this year. Apart from that—insofar as I'm at all capable of working—I'm being worn out by the daily bustle with which the world honors and devours its famous people.

We're having warm, springlike days, a light foehn is blowing, and a brimstone butterfly occasionally hovers brightly amidst the muted pink and violet of the landscape.

TO CARL SEELIG

[
January 1957
]

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to wield a pen, otherwise I would have written to you immediately after hearing about the death of dear Robert Walser.
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I would at least like to take this opportunity to say that you have been on my mind frequently these past few days. All who loved Walser have cause to be grateful to you, but not all will say so. I'm grateful to you for having lit up his solitary life over the course of many years with joy and a glimmer of companionship, for taking care of his work, and for helping to preserve his memory. I'm also grateful for the obituary in the
National-Zeitung.
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POSTCARD TO J. J. SCH.

January 30/31, 1957

I dislike the useless dissection of poetry in the schools. If I haven't managed to express myself adequately in my poem, how could I possibly do any better in countless letters to students and teachers?

Let me say the following about “Steps:”
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The poem is part of
The Glass Bead Game,
a book in which the religions and philosophies of India and China play a certain role. In that part of the world, people generally believe in the reincarnation of all beings rather than in the Christian hereafter, with its paradise, purgatory, and hell. I'm quite conversant with that idea, and so is Josef Knecht, the fictive author of the poem. I was indeed thinking of an afterlife or new beginning after death, even though I do not believe in reincarnation in a crude, material form. The religions and mythologies represent an attempt on the part of mankind to convey those inimitable truths in pictures, and your attempt to translate the poem into flat, rational terms will be futile.

TO PETER SUHRKAMP

Sunday
[
July 11, 1957
]

My dear friend,

Your kind, lengthy letter-cum-report arrived yesterday.
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I'm utterly amazed by everything you have undertaken and accomplished in the past few days.
Quod Deus bene vertat!
480

We celebrated July 2 way up on the Gotthard, with sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren; we had hired a taxi for the day and were back home shortly after 8 p.m. Our wonderful secretary
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had already sorted out the newly arrived packages and letters, opened some and glanced at them, and all the rooms were full of flowers. We've been battling through the piles of presents and letters ever since; a week later there are still more than 1,000 letters waiting to be read.

As happens every summer, Ninon has finally broken down in the great heat and fallen ill; tomorrow is the secretary's last day here. The uncanny saga of the runoff water
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around the house continues unabated; we have had earth walls built in front of the house. The architect is finally supposed to arrive on Thursday from Zurich. No doubt there will be a lot of construction going on for weeks, and that will mean having to dig up our driveway, which will be unusable. So you see, the atmosphere isn't particularly festive, many of the flowers are already wilting.[ … ]

Enough. Must get back to the drudgery. But many of the gifts were kind and touching.

TO MAX WASSMER

[
1957
]

A few readers wrote expressing anger at the pamphlet of a young writer who has attacked me for producing romantic kitsch.
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They asked how I'm going to respond, and I replied:

A boy on the street sticks out his tongue at an old man and throws a handful of dirt at him.

Will the old man pursue the boy, who can probably run much faster? Or will he contact a lawyer and file a suit against the boy's parents?

He adopts neither course, unless he is uncommonly stupid, and simply says to himself that the left wing of the avant-garde has always greatly enjoyed sticking out its tongue and throwing mud about. He will go home, get his coat cleaned, and resume his activities.

TO MAX BREITHAUPT, DIRECTOR OF STUDIES

January 30, 1958

Thanks for your letter about the talk by Thornton Wilder.
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I don't agree with everything in the talk either. But my response isn't as negative and passionate as yours. I love Wilder's work and have a high regard for him, and don't find anything wrong with his decision to avoid voicing the idealistic sentiments that would be pleasing to church and state, and to focus instead on his personal convictions. If contenders for the Frankfurt Peace Prize had to be unobjectionable, believing Christians, Albert Schweitzer and Reinhold Schneider would be the only previous recipients worthy of the award.

No, I approve of Wilder's right to entertain and express those convictions, even though I don't share his touching, childlike belief in the ideals of democracy. The thing I didn't like about his speech was no more than a minor blemish. I felt that, as a representative of the cultural and intellectual life of America, he shouldn't have given the Germans yet another lecture on democracy.

TO HIS SON HEINER ON HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY

[
February 1959
]

Well, on my fiftieth birthday, Max Wassmer arrived, and we had a festive meal at a small inn in Sorengo. After dinner we climbed up to the Casa Camuzzi, where we continued celebrating; Ninon was there for the first time. That very same day my best friend at the time, Hugo Ball, had an operation in Zurich. They opened him up, saw how hopeless things were, and stitched him together again. It was two months before he died. But on July 2 we hadn't yet grasped the gravity of the situation, and celebrated with chicken, risotto, and lots of wine, then had coffee and cake at my place; Natalina
485
was there too. Among the presents from Ninon was a Japanese dwarf tree, which looked tiny and comical in its pot; a few years later I planted the little tree in the garden of the new house, where it grew to be immensely strong and stout. That's what comes to mind when I think of you celebrating your fiftieth birthday. I'm sending you my presents together with a thousand good wishes for you and your family. Ciao, my dear!

TO HIS FORMER WIFE, RUTH (HAUSSMANN)

Sils Maria
[
End of July 1959
]

Your letter catches me in the Engadine; I have been here a few days, am staying three to four weeks. I took along Peter Suhrkamp's essays, radio talks, etc., and am supposed to make a selection. It wasn't my idea in the first place; Peter's successor at the publishers talked me into it.
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I have become completely indifferent to literary matters since the death of Suhrkamp; I just don't feel like being involved anymore.

I understand why you can't look at the pictures of Ticino in Dresden
487
without becoming nostalgic. But you have to realize that more or less the same thing is happening to me. The fairy-tale Ticino of our good times together exists no longer. Although the prominent features of the landscape have remained the same, and the mountains and valleys are still covered in forests, the villages have turned into small suburbs. Montagnola has three to four times as many houses and inhabitants as it had then; the vineyards and meadows have given way to new houses with little fenced-in gardens and broad cement highways; factories are sprouting in the valleys, etc., etc. Well, that no longer upsets us old people so much, but corruption has naturally also surfaced in this “booming” new era. The farmers around Montagnola have hiked the price of their land to between thirty-five and forty francs a meter; the speculators purchase it, subdivide it, and construct entire developments; the village has an ultramodern post office, two cafés, a newspaper kiosk, etc.

Enough of that. I was delighted to get your kind letter and the wonderful picture of Charles VII, thank you.

TO KURT KARL ROHBRA

[
1960
]

Thanks for your greetings from the mountains.

My first taste of a mountain winter was in Grindelwald in 1902—one of the first winters the Swiss mountain hotels remained open. The book contains the poems I wrote there.
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Very few skiers were to be seen yet; we enjoyed walking, skating, and tobogganing. I had been sent there on doctor's orders to recuperate after an appendicitis.

In Munich around 1909, my friend Olaf Gulbransson supplied me with my first pair of skis. They were made of ash wood and lasted until around 1928, when one of the skis broke, and I bought new ones in St. Moritz, made of hickory. Until 1931, I used to spend a few weeks every winter skiing in the mountains, but not since then.

I hope you felt rested when you got home.

I have just thought of something. A good photo of me
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was used without my knowledge in a picture postcard series, “The Portrait”; I just happened to come across a copy. If you can find them anywhere, I would be grateful if you could send me some (A. Egger, Publishers, Cologne 10). Things aren't going especially well, but I'm managing somehow.

TO ADOLF GEPRÄGS

January 1960

I read your letter with some astonishment. So you want to set up a Hesse room,
490
and expect me to fund it, donate the furniture, pictures, etc., etc. You want all this from a person who has never liked personality cults and has only tolerated that kind of thing in his old age, out of a mixture of exhaustion and good-naturedness.

Now that you have described your request in detail—in your first letter you unfortunately neglected to do so—I would advise you that it would be better to abandon your plans for the room. You certainly have no right to expect me to assume this burden; it's absolutely out of the question. As regards the furniture: I don't have a single piece from my parents' house. When there were legacies, etc., I gave everything to my sisters, including money, furniture, pictures, etc. All my sisters are deceased. As far as I know, any material, such as documents, correspondence, etc., in their possession has gone to Marbach, where the Schiller Museum is carefully collecting everything concerning me and my family. But there are also other Hesse collections, which have been around for many years. The Swiss State Library has the largest collection of letters; the library of the Zurich Polytechnic has another large collection.
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Recently, Herr Kliemann of Munich sold somebody in America
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a large collection of newspaper and privately printed pieces, which he had spent many years collecting, with some assistance from me. There was also a teacher named Weiss in Cologne who established a Hesse Archive there, entirely on his own initiative; it lasted for many years. Without informing me, he visited all my relatives, friends, and correspondents, soliciting money, books, manuscripts, photos, etc., and then, finally, sold his entire archive to Marbach for 14,000 Deutschemarks. So, as you can see, you're too late in the day with your plans, and will no doubt understand how utterly disillusioned I am after all these experiences. I regret having to cause you such disappointment.

TO G. WALLIS FIELD
493

[
February 10, 1960
]

H. Hesse, who is ill and overworked, dictates the following answer for you:

You can find something on older English literature in my booklet
Library of World Literature,
published by Reclam.

I have the same high esteem for English literature as I have for that of Germany and France. In my younger days I used often to read French. I never understood English well enough to read good literature in the original. My parents and sisters spoke English fluently; we often had English and American visitors in our home. But I only practiced reading a little easy literature, some Mark Twain, some Kipling. I read a considerable amount of English literature in translation; I have loved recent authors such as Hardy, Meredith, Virginia Woolf, Forster, some others.

That's all I can say in reply to your questions.

TO A MUSICIAN
494

[
March 1960
]

Some time ago, you sent me a handsome little book by Erich Valentin,
Musica Domestica.
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I wish to thank you and the author for the hours of stimulation it has afforded me. What captivated me at once in the first chapter were those often delightfully baroque titles adorning seventeenth-century musical publications. And that brought to mind a classical saying of Anatole France's: No book could interest him more or give him greater pleasure than the catalogue of a secondhand bookseller. By weaving together scholarship and folksiness, by compressing an enormous mass of knowledge and research into a tight space, while nonetheless managing to get through it, he informs readers with a halfway decent musical education about the history and semantic metamorphoses of such terms as “musica domestica”; he also kindly takes us along on a stroll through the imposing fields of music history and musical interpretation; he refers en passant to virtually everything we ever came across in books of that sort. Of course, I was amused and a little flattered by his attempt to highlight and upgrade the role of listener vis-à-vis that of musician: the musically incompetent amateur lying on the sofa listening to the radio or record player is ennobled as a collaborator and connoisseur. Some people will be pleased to hear this—with varying degrees of justification. Encouraged by my enhanced status, I shall attempt, at a later point, to describe something beautiful I heard on the radio.