In the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.

Interviewed by Bill Moyers.

Not the band, the book.

I’m even reading the same Bantam edition with the same unfortunate cover (see photo) as the copy I read as a teenager.

I’m re-reading Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf to see how my perceptions of it might have changed. Not because I expect my opinion of it to have decreased, but because Hesse himself complained how it was his most misunderstood book on account of it being a book about a man nearing fifty but was most frequently read by young men. I don’t know if young people still read it, anymore than I know if they still read Naked Lunch or On the Road, but I certainly read it as a young man and I have no doubt that I misunderstood in the fashion as all the young people Hesse complains about.

But I’m older now, ten years younger than the steppenwolf himself, Harry Haller. Has my understanding changed?

I am not so sure. I wonder if I am not still an angry young man inside. A slightly mellower angry young man, but and angry young man, nonetheless.

I also wonder whether Harry Haller is not himself just an angry young man with gray hair and an older man’s creaks and pains.

But because I am older, I am also less sympathetic to Harry. When I was much younger and put myself in his shoes, I didn’t see anything wrong with pursuit of and love affairs with young women because I pursued and had love affairs with young women because that’s what young men. Now it strikes me as unseemly, though that is also just one of my particular irritants.

While I agree with Harry’s muse who, when they first meet, calls him a ‘baby’ because he had indeed spent that evening acting like a child. But, as Hamlet says, ‘all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.’ Which is to say that I don’t hold with young folks speaking so to their elders upon first meeting. So maybe I am getting older. And as I get older, I’m not so blinded by idealizations of women to fail to recognize that Hermine is, to be blunt, a very nice call girl.

The dime store mysticism of Hesse is of less interest to me these days, which means that the famous Treatise on the Steppenwolf within the novel was a distraction rather than a revelation.

The finale is, ultimately, just an extended hallucinogenic drug trip and I have little patience for those who argue that such experiences are mystical and enlightening. Sensational and fun, but not a route to spiritual gnosis. I found Pablo’s theater for madmen to be something akin to Jim Morrison-esque pseudo-poetic platitudes.

I will also say that even though Hesse may have seen the young people who read his book as being mistaken, I can still see their point of view. Especially because Haller’s courtesan/muse, the lovely, gender bending Hermine, is that young person who sees themselves as the Steppenwolf.

Overall, I think that I could have done without re-reading Steppenwolf .