Hi, BigEd! Back in the spring of 1969, when I was pretending to be a college student while making sure that my country never again would invade, unprovoked, another small country (<SIGH>) and while I was sampling various altered states of consciousness that were available to me, I went through Hermann Hesse like a Mac truck. It was de rigeur training for the Revolution, you know (like reading D. L. Lawrence, whom I had devoured the previous fall), and I went to it with a will. I shall never forget reading
Demian, which had appeared exactly fifty years earlier in Weimar Germany and which had created just as much a sensation there among young people in 1919 as it was to create here in America in 1965 when a decent translation finally appeared in paperback. (Of course, now I realize that there was an
excellent reason why 1919 and 1965 were so similar in emotional tone to young people, but that line of thought does not belong here in this thread…) Then I joyously plowed through the rest:
Siddharta,
Steppenwolf,
Journey to the East and
The Glass-Bead Game.
But the novel that characterizes that deeply sad, totally lost, but utterly magical, time for me and which formally introduced me to German Romanticism (one of the
biggest intellectual and emotional influences on my life) was
Narcissus and Goldmund. I went over the moon with that novel, and to this day, I cannot think of myself as a 20-year-old kid in the Summer of Protest without thinking of that book. It is one of the great masterpieces of late German Romanticism; I made all of my friends read it (they were in training for the Revolution, too, you know, and Hesse was universally revered as one of the prophets); and I longed --- even then --- for it to become a great film. (This was right at the time when Franco Zefferelli was making
Romeo and Juliet and when Ken Russell was making
Women in Love, so anything seemed possible for the classics.) I always presumed that David Lean, then of
Doctor Zhivago fame, would be just the guy to do justice to this work, but he, alas, never got around to doing it. But just three weeks ago I suddenly found another director, who is famous for his intensive preparation, who has already filmed a masterpiece of literature (by Jane Austen, no less), who has a hypnotic love-affair with the beauty of nature, and who would be perfect,
just perfect, for the job. Guess who, folks? And no question about it --- there’s another Oscar out there waiting for him if he decides to take the job!
For
Narcissus and Goldmund, which is a truly wild novel (and not just sexually either), is every bit as much a celebration of the power of passion as
Brokeback Mountain is. But if the latter demonstrates that love is a force of nature, then the former demonstrates that art is too. Art reflects nature, arises out of the agonies and ecstasies of nature, and completes an otherwise uncompletable nature. As Goldmund passes from city to city and from bed to bed amid medieval sieges, savage witch-hunts, the ritual burning of heretics, and the total social breakdown caused by the plague, his inevitable sorrows and disappointments involuntarily and inevitably pile up memories and emotions in his heart, demons that can be exorcized only by his art. There are no wrist watches in this world, just the silent passage of time as measured by the majestic change of the seasons (which Hesse was a genius of the first order at depicting). And there is no peace, not a drop of it, to be found, except by sailing beyond the crumbling beauties of this world through the power to art to “the artifice of eternity.” And even then, no safety for the artist from the horrors of this world…”Unless soul clap its hands and sing, / And louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.”
What images come back to me from that novel! The leaves of the chestnut tree, symbol of Goldmund’s soul (in both senses of that term), fluttering in the spring wind in the courtyard of the Mariabronn cloister. The panting and the grunting of lovers in the wildflower meadows and the barn hay lofts. The antlike busyness of a medieval witch-hunt roaming the countryside among the piles of unburied plague victims left rotting in their houses. The resolute sound of Goldmund’s chisel as he attempts to create the perfect Madonna, the one that embodies the best of every woman he has ever enjoyed, while the creative image within his mind eternally mocks his efforts to do so with her Mona Lisa smile. The rattle of autumn leaves through the deserted streets of a medieval city. The smell of incense wafting through the arcades of a medieval cloister at dusk. The sound of Gregorian chant bouncing off the great pillars of a Gothic cathedral at midnight. And above all else, the quiet conversation by flickering candlelight of two small figures, the one a shiftless and dirty vagabond and the other a elegantly dressed priest, both lost within an terminally insane and terribly violent world, and certain only of their unconditional love for another. Oh God, Ang, you gotta do this film! Only
you could do
this film right! A film that nobody else has ever thought of making!
But all of this was almost four decades ago in my life, BigEd, and as Goldmund comes to realize in the end, all things must pass. The happier time in which I first read
Narcissus and Goldmund has long since passed away in its turn, and I myself am close to becoming an old man now, just like Narcissus was at the end of the novel. Oh my, it must be at least twenty-five years since I last read this book! I am almost scared to open it again. Too many heart-memories there, you know… A couple of years ago, I did re-read
The Glass Bead-Game, which, frankly, confused me a little in 1969, and now it is one of my favorite novels. I can see now what I could not see then --- why Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 for
that novel and not for any of his others --- but still it’s a damn shame that I had to purchase my insight into this work with the naiveté and passion of my youth! But that’s just the way it is, BigEd. Hesse stressed this point all the time in all of his works. Which is why, in the end, he is
not a novelist for kids. Oh no, not at all…
Thanks for the memories that awakened within me today when I read your post. It’s so nice to see that truly great works of art are never
really forgotten, although they sometimes appear to be. And it really made me smile to know that somebody else out there is rediscovering one of the most powerful novels that I have ever read, all those years ago. Happy reading, BigEd…