Books: The Outsider

With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst. . .

Who is the subject of that accolade? Allen Ginsberg? Bob Dylan? John Lennon? No; a German raveler of spiritual mysteries named Hermann Hesse, who died in 1962 at 85. His champion was Thomas Mann, and he was reflecting the impact of Hesse's 1919 novel, Demian, on German youth. Today Hesse is no longer so ardently esteemed in his native country, but in the past decade in the U.S. he has steadily risen to the status of a literary cult figure. College students rank him in the pantheon of literary gurus with Dostoevsky, Tolkien and Golding. In hippie hovels, those of his novels already available in English—Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Siddhartha, Demian, The Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund—are family bibles. Another early Hesse novel, Beneath the Wheel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $4.95), has now appeared in English. It will undoubtedly attract his youthful admirers too, although it is less likely to arouse their admiration, since it is too labored and predictable.

What seems to attract young people nowadays is Hesse's preoccupation with Eastern mysticism and his soul-racked characters, who suffer from that now common malaise of the under-30 generation, the identity crisis. Not far from the Berkeley campus, a favorite hangout is a beer joint called Steppenwolf, so named by its original owner (Max Scherr) because that novel symbolizes the loneliness of the intellectual. At Harvard, where Hesse's books sell better than any of his contemporaries except Faulkner, Senior Joel Kramer says: "Reading him is a gut, emotional experience." Adds Harvard Graduate Student Mark Granovetter: "Well, he was the first hippie, wasn't he?"

True Profession. Not quite. Hesse's parents were Protestant missionaries, and so it was assumed that he would be a minister. At 14, however, the stultifying confinement of school sent him fleeing from the Maulbronn seminary in Swabia. Unable to find a meaning in his life, unhappy with a rigid German society that seemed to crush his artistic sensibilities, he tried to commit suicide. His parents responded by sending him first to a faith healer, then to a school for the mentally retarded. In 1911, he visited India on a spiritual quest. World War I was a "gut, emotional, experience" for Hesse; renouncing German authoritarianism, he joined the pacifist Romain Rolland in writing antiwar tracts, and as a result fell into political, social and literary disfavor.

During this period, his first marriage broke up, he underwent a course of psychiatric treatment with a disciple of Jung in a sanatorium near Lucerne. From 1912, he lived in Switzerland, where, until his death, he continued his spiritual struggle. "The true profession of a man," he said, "is to find his way to himself. I have become a writer, but I have not become a human being." This obsession was to be the driving factor in all of his novels.