In Descent of Man T.C. Boyle Shows Us What We've Ascended To

In T. Coraghessan Boyle's Descent of Man, the dominant theme of modern day folly lurks throughout every story. The collection seems to be asking, we've come all this way for...this? For what?

To fall below the IQ level of precocious apes? To destroy the only home that gives us life? To instill animosity between genders? To collect useless items in our homes, and waste precious money and time to get our hands on goods and artifacts that have nothing to do with enhancing our lives? To be considered champions of consumption, with the greatest champs being cheered on by everyone else? To sink mercilessly into sentimental entertainment again and again?

If all of that seems overwrought and overdone, it never feels preachy. Rather, it's quite the opposite. If you've read enough doom and gloom in the newspapers, and been made to feel like a guilty associate of our postindustrial society's environmental catastrophe, you'll be reinvigorated by Descent of Man's energy.

Boyle's language rises to meet the darkly humorous, satirical premises of his stories. If it didn't, the collection would fall flat in many places, and would risk dropping into the gutter of fiction serving as panic pieces.

Some, such as That Inscrutable Thing, have accused this collection of stories that "read more like writing exercises than stories--experimental pieces of fiction in which the young Boyle is only attempting to explore a particular concept, story idea, or literary form." I think that's fair, and I hadn't thought of it quite that way until I read it. There is a writing exercise feel to Desecent of Man. 

I'm more partial to Max Apple's take. He characterized Boyle's stories as, "A certain restlessness, a temporary energy takes over, a singing in the brain that is too intense to live with for the duration of a novel. That energy roams the lines of the story looking for a way out. James Joyce called that way out an epiphany, but in our time it is more like the quick release of passion than the stately illumination of the intellect."

Maybe the most surreal, yet most serious story in Descent is "Bloodfall". A group of young people who all live in the same house barely notice one evening when the rain they hear on the windowpanes turns out to be bright red.

In that brief silence between songs, I heard it--looked up at the window and saw the first red droplets huddled there, more falling between them. Gesh and Scott and Isabelle were watching TV with the sound off, digging the music, lighting the cigarettes, tapping fingers and feet, laughing. On the low table were cheese, oranges, wine, shiny paperbacks, a hash pipe. Incense smoked from a pendant urn (47).

At least the dogs like it when they're let outside. They lap it up and come back in covered with it. It's blood, and it smells like a butcher's shop outside.

The dread is passed off. Maybe it's a plague. Maybe it's pollution. You know, humans desperate to go back to the pleasant, comforting entertainment of their evenings without having to really give a second thought to the carnage going on outside their homes. Boyle displays that urge, that complacence in us.

Amy howled from the basement. "Hey you guys, guess what? The stuff is ankle-deep down here and it's ruining everything. Our croquet set, our camping equipment, our dollhouse!" The announcement depressed us all, even Gesh. "Let's blow a bowl of hash and forget about it," he suggested. 

"Anyhow," said Walt, "it'll be good for the trees." And he started a bass riff with a deep throbbing note--the hum of it hung in the air even after the lights went out and the rest of his run had attenuated to a thin metallic whisper (52).

As they lose the lights, the electricity, the warmth, the smell of blood is apparent. There's no question of keeping it out.

The reader can imagine the gore being attributed to any number of human atrocities--the blood of

credit: Martin Prechelmacher

those slaughtered in Vietnam, Iraq, and other helpless millions assaulted by the military might of the West. Or the blood of the masses being drained to support a cozy lifestyle for a small section of the planet. Or the lifeblood of the earth, from the chopped trees and slashed mountainsides mined for metals.

One day, it'll seep back to us, fall from the sky, rise up from the ground, and we won't be able to smoke it away, entertain it back into the ground, or sleep through it (which is ultimately what they try to do when the rain does not cease).

Most of the other stories are more playful in tone, even if they have dark underpinnings. One of Boyle's most pleasant techniques is how he bluntly begins, and anchors the story, in absurdity. From "A Women's Restaurant":

It is a women's restaurant. Men are not permitted. Women go there to be in the company of other women, to sit in the tasteful rooms beneath the ancient revolving fans and the cool green of spilling plants, to cross or uncross their legs as they like, to chat, sip liqueurs, eat. At the door, the first time they enter, they are asked to donate twenty-five cents and they are issued a lifetime membership card. Thus the women's restaurant has the legal appearance of a private club, and its proprietors, Grace and Rubie, avoid running afoul of the antidiscrimination laws. A women's restaurant. What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out (83-4).

Boyle sets up each story with care, almost like a circus carefully builds the foundations and tracks for its rides, so that once attached, the participant can be flung along on the wild, colorful ride with confidence that the whole absurd contraption will hang together and not defy its own laws of physics.

There is plenty of mockery in these stories, and the best example is "Heart of a Champion", a story featuring Lassie. A dog more handy than a human, more loyal than any dog on the planet, until she meets a scraggly coyote and lets down her guard over the boy she always protected.

Just as if we're watching a TV show, Boyle uses the omniscient plural to hover over the action, zoom in when necessary, and switch scenes instantly. We cut to Timmy: eyes closed, hair plastered, his left arm looking as though it should be wrapped in butcher's paper. How? we wonder. How will they ever get him out of this? (45). That perspective also gives the author clearance to mock the smoothly audience's reaction and heart levels while in the heat of the drama, as we'll see below.

Little Timmy can't seem to help falling into extremely dangerous situations on a daily basis. One day he falls into a river and is drowning while being swept along by a river rushing toward a gigantic waterfall. Will the dog be able to save him? This is where T.C. Boyle shines by asking us, Do you really enjoy the garbage you people call entertainment? How far can TV take this sentimentality and absurdity and pass it off as heartfelt entertainment?

Then she's in the air, the foaming yellow water. Her paws churning like pistons, whiskers chuffing with the exertion--oh the roar!--and there, she's got him, her sure jaws clamping down on the shirt collar, her eyes fixed on the slip of rock at the falls' edge. Our blood races, organs palpitate. The black brink of the falls, the white paws digging at the rock--and then they're safe. The collie sniffs at Tommy's inert little form, nudges his side until she manages to roll over him. Then clears his tongue and begins mouth-to-mouth (39).

Ultimately, the status of these stories depends on what the reader is searching for. Quirky, darkly humorous, jagged jaunts of the imagination dominate Descent of Man and you won't find even-keeled, slowly unfolding plots. These stories are bursts, like flares, that light up quickly and hit their peak. Not all of the stories succeed, but they are short enough and intriguing enough not to wear out their welcome.

Boyle's first collection is innovative enough to shake the reader or writer out of a rut and goad a frantic cleverness and humor out of a stale or tired mind.

T. Coraghessan Boyle. Descent of Man. Penguin. 1987. 219 pages.

A Fair Thought About Consumption in Steppenwolf

Sometimes a writer nails an idea so well you just have to share it with somebody. In Saul Bellow's Herzog I highlighted just such a paragraph that seemed to encapsulate the entire thrumming pulse of that novel.

Such is the following example from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf:

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver of a slaughtered calf (34).

The varied shades of consumption reflect back until they spin around each other, each granting more meaning to the other.

Building Suspense for Your Character: Hermann Hesse Defines His Steppenwolf

One of the great challenges in literature is to produce genuine interest in a supposedly madman character without hamfisting his madness, or jamming it down the reader's throat about how nuts he is.

What makes him crazy? What tortures him? The writer quickly runs the risk of creating a whiny character who is not authentically mad, or genuinely wild in his thoughts and actions, enough to justify throwing him into wacky situations and having him commit even wackier atrocities or misdeeds.

Fine examples of truly mad characters? The title character in John Bennett's Bodo. Ahab in Moby Dick. Norman Mailer's portrayal of William King Harvey in Harlot's Ghost. Dean Jocelin in Golding's The Spire. And one very recent book I read where the character falls very short of his self-described lone wolf, "I'm so different" attitude, called Black Magic, by Hamdy el-Gazzar.

So, in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, we must ask, Why is this "For Madmen Only" manuscript left

behind by Harry Haller worth reading about, anyway? Hesse builds us up by framing the manuscript.

In the preface we learn the nephew of a renter is publishing Haller's records because he's disappeared and left them behind, and the nephew believes maybe somebody could make some use of them or find interest in them. He admits that if he hadn't met the Steppenwolf himself, and greatly distrusted him at first, he wouldn't have found much interest in the pages.

A madman must have peculiarities that are at once not too overt, yet believable enough to fall within the parameters of so-called skillful writing. Or, in other words, the author isn't using the excuse of "look how crazy my lone wolf character is" for writing in random, off-sequence events without proper framing and buildup.

The only request he had made was that his arrival should not be notified to the police, as in his poor state of health he found these formalities and the standing about in official waiting rooms more than he could tolerate. I remember very well how this surprised me and how I warned my aunt against giving in to his stipulation. This fear of the police seemed to me to agree only too well with the mysterious and alien air the man had and struck me as suspicious (6).

Yet, the aunt agrees to the terms. But the key is that Hesse has her skillfully agree without ramming it down our throats like a screenwriter for horror films would do just to have a nice family board with a psychopath. We don't want to feel like the writer's twisting his character's arm.

I explained to my aunt that she ought not on any account to put herself in this equivocal and in any case rather peculiar position for a complete stranger; it might well turn out to have very unpleasant consequences for her. But it then came out that my aunt had already granted his request, and, indeed, had let herself be altogether captivated and charmed by the strange gentleman. For she never took a lodger with whom she did not contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or, rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this weakness of hers (6).

Basically, this isn't the first time she's granted a strange lodger's request. Not only was she charmed by him, but it's in her personal history to create a warm relation with the lodger. So if it seems unlikely that she would rent to the mysterious Harry Haller, Hesse quite expertly plugs that hole with reasonable justification. She's done it before, she'll do it again.

The suspense is created. Who is this Haller fellow? We'll never hear from the nephew again, as the rest of the book is Steppenwolf's manuscript, so Hesse stacks up the outside perceptions of his star character before turning the reader over to the bleak and hopeful shades of Haller's mind.

Two days after this the stranger's luggage--his name was Harry Haller--was brought in by a porter. He had a very fine leather trunk, which made a good impression on me, and a big flat cabin trunk that showed signs of having traversed far--at least it was plastered with labels of hotels and travel agencies of various countries, some overseas (7-8).

It becomes humorous how the nephew begins reading signs among all of Haller's belongings and facial expressions. He is worried about his aunt, after all. So maybe he's justified sneaking into Haller's rooms when he's out and doing a little snooping.

Hesse is also taking advantage of having a hyper-alert young man scout our protagonist and hand more unique details to the reader.

The nephew notices the Steppenwolf sitting near him at a lecture of a celebrated historian who was to speak in a school auditorium. When the lecturer says a few flattering things about the audience by way of introduction, and thanks them for coming in such numbers, we see the piercing quality of Harry Haller's disdain:

...the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced--no, the Steppenwolf's look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life (9).

Notice how fine Hesse picks his way through the nephew's awe of Steppenwolf. With less skill, the reader might be turned off by thinking we're supposed to believe Haller to be some sort of intellectual superman, so he finely combs the minute details of the look, analyzes their parts, and produces a convincing, moving portrait of a man who really can pop the bubble of an entire generation with one sad, sour look.

And with that, the reader might be thinking that this Haller would truly be a difficult character to spend much time with. Finally, we get an analysis of the Steppenwolf that also delicately portends to the metaphysical occurrences that happen to him:

...I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy.... In course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony (10).

Instinct of the healthy. What a fine phrase that throws our perception of Haller into some murky, opposite corner of what is the instinct of unhealthy. This cultivates a deeper distrust and dis-ease of Harry Haller by locating his peculiarity to something worse than just strange, as an affliction seated somewhere you can't quite locate, between body, mind, and spirit. And yet, the defect, the nephew suspects, is due to a disharmony of something fantastic, maybe borderline mystical.

Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf. Picador. 218 pages.

Missed Opportunities in Black Magic by Hamdy el-Gazzar

Maybe the most striking aspect of Hamdy el-Gazzar's novel, Black Magic is the missed opportunity to delve deeper into the quiet, but internally unsettling life of a young man living in an apartment above the shop of an old undertaker.

The first twenty pages detail the aged undertaker sewing shrouds for the bodies he will prepare for their graves each week. Not a better chance for an extended metaphor, yet the power set up by el-Gazzar gets squandered by the far too common insights and revelations of Nasir, the protagonist, agonizing over how he feels having struck up an intimate love affair with a women twice his age.

In my last review, we saw how Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf navigated the complex circuits of a very uniquely miserable character. In Black Magic, the legwork is not done well enough, or extensively enough to convince the reader that Nasir has the same quality of unique misery that is worthy to fill up dozens of pages. We're told, but we're not convinced:

...I'm like some great mystic saint, el-Hallaj for example--a person impossible to accept, rejected by his people, his family, his society. I object to nothing and I don't engage in dialog with the apparatus of authority or the high priests of thought or the men of letters, of the sciences, of the administration. I'm not necessarily some kind of obstreperous animal, or a bird that has separated itself from the flock; my deviancy consists in neither allowing myself to be provoked nor provoking others. In return, what is called society subjects me to amazing repression, over and above the normal censorship and taboos. I am suspended--that's all there is to it--far from things and human relations by a tacit decision to be insignificant, to not belong to any category or fit any niche (92).

El-Gazzar's passage--or the translation by Humphrey Davies of the passage--is not poorly written or boring, but it is one dimensional in the novel. It's too much like having a friend you consider a fairly normal chap with regular ups and downs in his life tell you how weird he is, and how he doesn't accept the norms of society, and society, or what is perceived and called society, doesn't accept him (and, would you believe it, even tries to strike him down).

There is very little in Black Magic to back up this statement, and when it's given to the reader, it's not convincing, because it doesn't light up previous passages and incidents, or lend a higher understanding to the pages that come before and after.

Throughout the novel, it is the camera that supposedly sees life in its truest, most basic form--which is a form not many of us wish to encounter. Nasir is called a great photographer but a terrible employee by his boss. He zooms in, often, on his target, as the rest of his team works to cover the function for which they were hired.

The camera captures something more severe each time Nasir uses it. The final, cataclysmic moment is when he steals a very close look at the sheikh reciting in a Sufi gathering. We suffer the following disenchantment:

In zooming in I got closer to his eyes and lips and flesh. What I saw terrified me. I repented my ugly act and removed my eye from the lens. I should have left an appropriate distance--a 'medium' or a 'total,' a general shot, distant or middle-ground.... Why can't you be satisfied with the sublime--the joyous, awe-inspiring sublime? Sublimity, the sublimity of your bewildering, mysterious, exceptional, unique voice, makes my soul shake with longing.... May the earth swallow anyone who seeks beauty here! Beauty is the blasphemy of the lover's love for the beloved. I have been touched, made sick, rendered diseased by this instrument that I know as well as I know the color of my fingernails and the evil of my innermost thoughts, this deranged camera, this wild beast that goes in close and strips away the mask, pulls back and reveals all, wallows in details, makes the blind see, shocks and humiliates, beautifies and lies and divests all of their clothes and their intentions... (176).

For Nasir, the camera strips bare what we're supposed to see, and what is really to be seen.

The least interesting developments in the book concern his ill-fated relationship with an older woman--a woman divorced, once a frequent adulteress, and then gone rusty (as Nasir says).

More than a couple pages littered with poetic prose about the transcendental wonders of passionate sex get in the way of other worthy characters that need more development, more room to act, such as Nasir's abusive male neighbor, Gum'a, who beats his sister every night. Or the old undertaker. Or the treacherous leader of his photography crew.

Fiction at its best should light up new pathways for thought, should turn inside out old ideas and inspire connections between life experience and knowledge. Fiction can be like a slow burning LSD that plumbs the mind and challenges the soul, without the dangers and immediacy of actually putting some of the real stuff on the tongue.

That is why books like Black Magic frustrate me. Not altogether poor or meager in content and insight, but much potential wasted to re-devour the same longing for physical intimacy coupled with the frustrations and confusion of maintaining a supposedly good thing with a lover. And again, it's the camera's work that becomes the catalyst for everything that's wrong with their relationship.

At el-Gazzar's most poetic and haunting, he nails the maddening dance of having fallen too far with someone he'd never meant to, and of the breathless uncertainty ahead. I suspect it would be even more profound if read in the original Arabic:

She will never let herself get trapped into going that extra distance. She draws borders with precision and has a clear, complete map of most things. In her heart is a huge little doll, a daughter who ate lots of hamburgers and pizza and toast and stuffed vegetables and lamb-and-rice in days when they lived in luxury in the Arab Gulf and who doesn't want to stay in Egypt; and in some other space, a young man, whom she now thinks of as a small, fragile shackle--she who believed that she had rid herself of all shackles. She also has a car that she loves. Once I suggested to her that she exchange it for a horse and a small wooden two-seater carriage so that she could progress with the beauty and stateliness of the old fiacre. She agreed, on condition that I be the horse and pull her carriage behind me. She thought I had excellent hooves and a strong back and that I would prove capable of withstanding the blows of the whip, which she would enjoy plying, albeit gently and softly--nevertheless the comparison shocked me ( 180).

Hamdy el-Gazzar. Black Magic. Trans. Humphrey Davies. The American University in Cairo Press. 2007. 186 pages.

Creating An Unforgettable Character like Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

One of the most complicated and intriguing characters in any book I've ever read has to be Harry Haller, in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. Like other depressed characters I've recently read oozing malaise through the pages of their stories, such as Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe and Percy Walker's protagonist in The Moviegoer, so to is Haller having intense sickness of heart and undergoing what might be carefully termed as a 'spiritual crisis'.

The difference between some of the other notoriously miserable characters in literature is that there is far less plot and contrivance of narrative action in Steppenwolf than the others. It's a lot closer to Notes From the Underground in that respect, than what is mentioned above.

This book is still memorable for spiritual seekers and disillusioned Westerners the world over because of the way it flips a character inside out through a varied combination of Eastern speculation and Western mechanics. But how does one create a character who has transformed its readers and has been the catalyst for many a seeker in life?

First, the author must map out the internal dialogue within the character with enough detail that it takes on an energy of its own. Hesse does this with such clarity, and lets it dominate the novel, that many readers will be put off by the lack of plot and material tension. The tension is within the language, within the man's thoughts, and believing that he really will test his mettle with his shaving razor.

If one's despair over life starts to spin its linguistic tires, the mud will fly and there will be no ground covered. The internal system must build on itself, come back around again, connect, and show its capacity to build more. It must move. Otherwise, it's just mere complaining thinly veiled from the mind of a grouchy, petty writer.

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 (27).

Fair enough. I feel the same way. But the risk with a book like Steppenwolf is that this complaint wears thin, becomes hypocritical, and poisons an otherwise good treatise on soul sickness. But Hesse carries it through, and we're given a more concrete example pages later to link to the abstract detestation:

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, it 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 long in either theater 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 cafes 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 (30).

We then see what at first seems like a dual nature battling within Haller, which Hesse defines for us in abstraction, then transmutes into a moment of human longing and abstention:

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve. 

From a dance hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped for a moment. This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality.  

I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a whole. It was the music of decline (37).

How authentic and human it feels to have the push and pull of sensuality and good sense. Words like

Hesse, 1926, public domain

'raw' and 'hot', 'steam' and 'flesh' underlines the sexuality in the music, sniffing it angrily, and fighting the craving for the experience to lower oneself into the fast rushing stream of animal passion, yet noticing the repugnant way others do it without a thought otherwise. It's the soul and the body and the multiplicity of self in each.

To bring it all home, dark and serious, reality and abstraction, we hit the rock bottom result of what so many like Harry Haller contemplate, and even this is studied, and he has a theory on it. It is an 'in a nutshell' moment that shows the works, exposes all the gears of the character:

The "suicide," and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide. What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature; that his is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant's weakness from within suffices to precipitate him into the void (47).

Overall, the author must understand the terms of his own character's philosophy, and then prove its depth by mocking the contradictions and then paving an ever deeper system of justifications over those contradictions to plummet deeper and crumble more barriers set up within the psyche.

How painful it is when the author doesn't quite understand the limits and terms of his character's levels and abilities and the thoughts turn vindictive and dribble out like nothing more than a childish whining. The internal mind is its own universe in a novel, and its tendencies must follow its own rules and laws.

Most novels do not need the kind of overt plumbing of the mind to succeed in rewarding the reader for taking time with its words, but Steppenwolf is a study of character first.

Second, we must get a sense of the character's background. Characters are, after all, only organized bits of information on the page. They aren't real humans, but at their best, can realistically transmit and spark new ideas to real humans reading about them. The human condition and all its extended wrath can then be understood an a unique way.

In many books, reading about the character's childhood and surge into adulthood for twenty or more pages is excruciating. It is often at those points I want to find a better book to read. Hesse is more deft in this. He doesn't beat us over our skulls with cluttered files of personal history like, say, Richard Ford.

We only need to see the outline of the gears in the back of the clock to have faith that it's not magic that makes the hands go round the face. We don't even have to fully understand how the gears work or be able to reproduce them to take the clock's word, at face value, that what it's telling us is true.

We find out somewhere in the middle of the short novel (which is his strange and haunting manuscript he leaves in an attic room he rented) that Steppenwolf's wife one day, rather suddenly, dismissed him from her life and kicked him out.

Haller had been so trusting in who he perceived her character to be, and in thinking that she too indeed loved him, that her sudden casting off of him from her life left a wound so deep and vicious on his person that he could never, it seems, be sure of anything again. That's hardly what the book is about, but rather an excuse traumatic enough to launch a man into a wandering abyss, from which we'll learn lessons never before imagined by the reader.

credit: CherryX

This is apparent in Haller's life. He's polite and cordial, but mostly he stays away from people. The third propeller for testing the tortuous inner complexity of a character is his dealing with other characters.

When the Steppenwolf meets an old friend in the street, he lies about how long he's been in town by telling him he's only passing through for a few days (the truth: he's been there for months and has rented rooms). The old friend remembers the wonderful talks they'd had about Krishna, yet Haller has moved on and isn't interested in chatting about subjects that decades ago fascinated him.

Inwardly, he is transformed constantly, and never is able to place faith in any one idea for long. He is not content settling on a subject, or attaining a long term happiness. He's guarded, looking for the truth, and despises falsity in himself.

And when he went on to invite me very heartily to spend the evening with him, I accepted with thanks and sent my greetings to his wife, until my cheeks fairly ached with the unaccustomed efforts of all these forced smiles and speeches. And while I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street, flattered and surprised and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellow's kindly, short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what a funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be falling all over myself in eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting of the first good honest fellow who came my way, to be wallowing like a suckling-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and friendly esteem (75).

Haller cannot let himself go in public. Yet, when he finds himself gushing over an insipid conversation with an old friend, the lone wolf inside of him, the one that he says rips sentimentality to pieces, tears into his pretense at being just another happy joe on the street, willing to chat and laugh over the superficial nothingness that others consume themselves with. This treachery within is something with which many can identify, even if not as intense as in Haller.

The dinner with his friend goes awry when Haller criticizes the noxious way his favorite, esteemed poet Goethe is depicted in a painting. The Steppenwolf ends up storming out of the house and decides certainly he'll kill himself with a razor that night. But he lingers in the dimly lit pubs and underground bars, having one drink after another, not willing to admit that he's truly afraid of death. Until he meets a woman named Hermine. A flirt who seems to be a mirror of himself in the way she diagnoses his troubles and speaks harshly to his sensitivities by calling him a baby.

This interaction marks a dramatic shift in the book. Fresh air rushes into the stuffy apparatus that Hesse had created. The mad musings and mental wanderings had built and became so structured they felt as familiar as the two small rooms the Steppenwolf paced back and forth in.

Until the girl. The new understanding of Hesse's complex character is shattered. For a moment, the depth of his spiritual grief and dismay for the way society functions, yet his admittance that he likes the stability of a middle class life, is all swept aside with the harsh, not-untrue reaction of a pretty bar girl with a strong chin: You're a baby.

The sympathetic reader suddenly wonders: Really? Maybe I've been duped to go along with this pitying the self. Is Harry Haller the weakest imbecile self-tortured in Western literature? But that quickly recedes as Haller's feelings are often verified and given new analysis by his female friend.

Through Hermine's speech we can verify or dismiss certain truths related to us by the Steppenwolf, such as when she insists Harry take a bite of tender duck meat from her fork:

Oh, you're a sheep! Are you ready? I'm going to give you a piece off the bone. So open your mouth. Oh what a fright you are! There he goes, squinting round the room in case any one sees him taking a bite from my fork. Don't be afraid, you prodigal son, I won't make a scandal. But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission (111).

How adept Hesse is at defining and redefining everything the Steppenwolf has said about himself. He truly is uncomfortable in public, showing himself in intimate fashion, and letting himself go like the other thousands who strive for those pleasures every day. Internally, for him, it's a small scandal, and Hermine calls it out perfectly.

Harry's female companionship opens him up to new levels of warmth, and regrettably he dips a few toes into the swirling waters of careless fun--dancing and music. The internal battle rages all the while. He meets one of the musicians, Pablo, who is friend of his lady's. With Pablo, who becomes a type of foil, the reader sees the opposite of the Steppenwolf, which again sharpens the image of our protagonist, highlights more of his borders and outlines, and the many creases and wrinkles of his composite persona.

Often during the course of the music he would suddenly clap his hands, or permit himself other expressions of enthusiasm, such as, singing out "O O O, Ha Ha, Hallo." Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number of rings on his fingers.... His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts. Closely looked at, this beautiful demigod of love was no more than a complacent and rather spoiled young man with pleasant manners (124).

In some ways, meeting Pablo confirmed exactly the way Hermine described the animals--which impressed Haller very much:

"Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma or a giraffe. You can't help seeing that all of them are right. They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky..." (114).

It is from these hints in the book, that sometimes contrast, sometimes expose, and sometimes guide us through the difficult mind of Harry Haller. Because of the depth and connection of thoughts, coupled with the introduction of people who seem to fill, and then defy the very lifestyles and easy mentalities of the people and society that the growling Steppenwolf circles and despises, yet sometimes admires and crouches close, the reader has an opportunity to view himself in the looking glass and watch his own pretenses, hypocrisies, triumphs, and inner quarrels break into pieces that can only vaguely be fit back together again.

Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf. Trans Basil Creighton. Picador. 218 pages.

Remembering Poet Doug Draime

I wanted to take a moment to remember poet Doug Draime, as he passed away last week. I found out through John Bennett's Shard email list, after Doug's wife alerted him. Doug had sent me a dozen or so poems over the last couple of years, of which I posted a few on my other website, Dear Dirty America.

credit: Outlaw Poetry

Doug's poetry was often considered hard-hitting stuff about the streets, poverty, income disparity in America, and he often tackled political and social problems with a hatred for hypocrisy and elitism.

Draime's ebook, Speed of Light can be found online for free. It's worth checking out.

Here's one of his poems that he sent me. It's a good beginning to Draime's work.

Question Everything

Question this poem

and the publication

    it is appearing in.

      Question every moment

inside your ever changing cage. Now, is the

         release of your age old

                         servitude. Question the

ghosts of shadows, that your past and

                 future parade before you like

monkeys in a barrel. Question the abstract

            projector of your mind.

Question every thought

of mind: of war and

                 conflict. Question greed and all political 

  thinking. Question every hint of fear

             and betrayal. Question all

                                                      things of form

and weight. Question intensely every shade and

  shape of ego. Question the Commander

                   & Chief of the ego, Death. Question it relentlessly

until you know the truth.

                   Now, is the release of your age old servitude. Question

           every stinking lie since the Big Bang.

John Keats Slogging Away: Getting Your Writer's Education

In a previous post, I highlighted a recent article from FSG's Work In Progress about how one of America's most unique writers, Kurt Vonnegut, became that way. He recognized the wealth of information and material he had to work with at his day job of writing press releases for General Electric's newest inventions and technological escapades.

It is important to recognize what kind of writer you are, and what your strengths might be. Where might you find your richest experience? In books? Have you done a synoptical study of a subject that would make for interesting reading in story form? Do you work somewhere with many unique types of people? The more aware you are of the types of information or experience you're steeped in through every day life, the better prepared you are to incorporate them into your novel or short stories, and when you do that, the writing will most likely feel more vibrant as it's coming from an organic place in your life.

Zadie Smith, in her book Changing My Mind, gives an inspiring account of the tragic John Keats' personal education that eventually spawned a very thin, but very memorable book of poetry during his short twenty-five years on this earth:

For Keats went about his work like an apprentice; he took a kind of MFA of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower-middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence -- he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in  poetic form; in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it's there, famously, in his reading of Chapman's Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him (103-4).