“FOR MADMEN ONLY”
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance
with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or
two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours,
as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the
pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its
kindly warmth. Three times the post had come with undesired letters and
circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found
it convenient to-day to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an
hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns pencilled
against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the
old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all,
it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a
day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one
of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the
moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days
of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without
special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days which
put the question quietly of their own accord whether the time has
not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal
accident while shaving.
He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or
those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a
spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture,
or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when,
on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the
world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying,
vulgar, brazen glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of
an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focussed to the last pitch
of the intolerable upon your own sick self--he who has known these
days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like
to-day. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure
yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and
no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no peculiarly
disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance.
Thankfully you tune the strings of your mouldering lyre to a moderated,
to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving
and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly muzzy half-and-half
god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom
and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half
god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm
look as like each other as two peas.
There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these
bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is
audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is
that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short
time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation
I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that
cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain
and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these
so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul
that I smash my mouldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the
slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn
in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong
emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless,
flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something,
a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to
pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious
schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one
or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For
what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this
contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved
optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of
mediocrity.
It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and
very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming
a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle.
Instead I put on my shoes ill-humouredly, discontented and disgusted
with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy
streets to drink what men according to an old convention call “a glass
of wine,” at the sign of the Steel Helmet.
In this plight then, I went down the steep stairs from my attic-cell
among strangers, those smug and well-brushed stairs of a three-storey
house, let as three flats to highly respectable families. I don’t know
how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the
hater of life’s petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just
such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither
in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and
deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle
class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is
a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love
of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood,
and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though
with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I
like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly
disorderly existence and this middle-class family-life. I like to
breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness
and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me
in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the
threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead,
cigar-ash and wine-bottles among the heaped-up books and there is
nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books,
manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely
men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new
orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.
And now I came to the araucaria. I must tell you that on the first
floor of this house the stairs pass by a little vestibule at the
entrance to a flat which, I am convinced, is even more spotlessly swept
and garnished than the others; for this little vestibule shines with a
super-human housewifery. It is a little temple of order. On the parquet
floor, where it seems desecration to tread, are two elegant stands and
on each a large pot. In the one grows an azalea. In the other a stately
araucaria, a thriving, straight-grown baby-tree, a perfect specimen,
which to the last needle of the topmost twig reflects the pride of
frequent ablutions. Sometimes, when I know that I am unobserved, I use
this place as a temple. I take my seat on a step of the stairs above
the araucaria and, resting awhile with folded hands, I contemplate
this little garden of order and let the touching air it has and its
somewhat ridiculous loneliness move me to the depths of my soul. I
imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of
the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of
sound respectability--early rising, attention to duty, restrained but
cheerful family gatherings, Sunday church-going, early to bed.
Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow
streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the
chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground.
The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the
dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed
their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I
strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless
winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and
full of poetry which later I wrote down by candle-light sitting on
the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and
would never be filled again. Was that a matter for regret? No, I did
not regret the past. My regret was for the present day, for all the
countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought
me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening. But, thank God, there
were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that
brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back
again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and
yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences.
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of
the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped
through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped
all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted
all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very
long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at
night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it
now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading
my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was
blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks
as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in
verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to
think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished;
and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old
brittle husk. Once it came to me while reading a poet, while pondering
a thought of Descartes, of Pascal; again it shone out and drove its
gold track far into the sky while I was in the presence of my beloved.
Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of
this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness,
with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I
fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one
of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for
long in either theatre or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper,
seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they
are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the
packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and
variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot
understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for
which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to
me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy
and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in
life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this
music of the cafés, these mass-enjoyments and these Americanised men
who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast
astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that
is strange and incomprehensible to him.
With these familiar thoughts I went along the wet street through one
of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side
there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed
with pleasure. Old and serene, it stood between a little church and an
old hospital and often during the day I let my eyes rest on its rough
surface. There were few such quiet and peaceful spaces in the centre
of the town where from every square foot some lawyer, or quack, or
doctor, or barber, or chiropodist shouted his name at you. This time,
too, the wall was peaceful, and serene and yet something was altered
in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic
arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether
this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. It
looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed portal
with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago onto
a sleepy convent yard, and did so still, even though the convent was
no longer there. Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not
noticed it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh and caught my eye for
that reason. I paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing
over, as the street between was so deep in mud and water. From the
sidewalk where I stood and looked across it seemed to me in the dim
light that a garland, or something gaily coloured, was festooned round
the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a
bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written.
I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went
across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on
the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing
and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more. So that’s
it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric
sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared
again for an instant; but they were hard to read even by guess work,
for they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly,
and then abruptly vanished. Whoever hoped for any result from a display
like that was not very smart. He was a Steppenwolf, poor fellow. Why
have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the
Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they
so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in
catching several words on end. They were:
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The
display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its
uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but
no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood
waiting in the mud, but in vain.
Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few coloured
letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front
of me. I read: