The other European classis of the era of the First World War that I read while in hospital was by Herman Hesse, who became a sort of guru to the hippies of the sixties. This book was not amongst their icons, though it too was an affirmation of life as Hesse saw it, as opposed to the straitjacket of the society in which he lived.
The book consisted of three stories which were published separately, just after the war, but they were afterwards usually clubbed together under the title of the last and longest story, ‘Klingsor’s Last Summer’. All in dealing with German society before the war they express a desperate desire to escape from conventional confines.
Herman Hesse’s expressionism, the desperate desire of his characters to fulfill themselves, seems dated in comparison with Gide. Klingsor is an artist who lives life to the full, though one tires of the blown up descriptions of him and his mates enjoying themselves, excessively so through walks in exotic countryside.
The novella is set in Italy, as is ‘Klein and Wagner’ about a man who defrauds his firm so that he can live freely in Italy. Mixed up in Klein’s aspirations is the story of a man called Wagner who murdered his family, something Klein felt he was close to doing to escape a life that stifled him.
The third story in the book seems very different, about a boy who stole a plum from his father’s cupboard, but this too can be seen as an expression of the need to break out. Excessive though all this seems, it is interesting to recall how oppressive the imaginative found the world before the war, and I realized that nostalgia for the world P G Wodehouse created is totally misplaced, though that should not prevent one wallowing in it for amusement as well as relaxation.
Hesse’s explorations of uninhibited sexuality were of course very different from what Gide wrote about though did not really illustrate in The Vatican Cellars which I last wrote about. Bbut there is similarity in the manner in which both writers are concerned with a personal perspective. The interactions of both Klein and Klingsor, while full of devotion to women, are emphatically about the protagonist’s search for self-fulfilment. And at the end of the other book there is no doubt that Lafcadio, having sought his through a meaningless murder, is not really going to cling to the innocent young lady he had fleetingly thought his ideal.
So we have moved from the world of the Victorians and even the questioning Edwardians, with society taking a back seat except inasmuch as it is a spur to finding oneself beyond social constraints and even relationships. And even if all this seems a bit forced now, it is interesting to reflect on exactly how restricted the world before the First World War was, and to grasp how the political changes that that wrought were part and parcel of a massive wind of change that swept through the world.