Hesse Holds Up!

I don’t remember as much as I should about my youthful meanderings through Hesse; remember only my basement bedroom in Naples and the way the French doors opened to the garden and the kind of yellow plums with three seeds Agnello the gardener would bring me while I so stubbornly stayed all day propped up on pillows in bed fulfilling my book-a-day commitment …never budging, not even for meals, not even when I knew I should turn out the light and go to sleep because the school bus would arrive—Lord, I don’t remember how early, but early, maybe six. I remember the compelling urgency to get to the end of the novel at least before daybreak and remember especially (besides Journey to the East!)Damian, because of the god Abraxas, the god of good and evil—a god I’d never heard about in Presbyterian Sunday School. I still see the “Damian” my imagination mustered, looking strangely like the boy in Viscounti’s Death in Venice which the high school Italian teacher made us endure every year--androgynous, mesmerizing, the projection of anima and animus both—in this allegory of individuation based on Hesse’s analysis by Jung. I remember certain other moments of the other novels, but find them mixed up shards of stain-glass window glass, and can’t recall what shard goes with what picture goes with what book. Thirty years it’s been since I’ve visited these novels…more than thirty years! But yesterday, in the course of two train journeys, a handful of fragments came together in a mind-blowing way as I found myself finding myself in Peter Camenzind.

As you may recall, I’d ordered this first of Hesse’s novels because I’d read that it traces his journeys through Umbria and explores his love of St. Francis. There has been some speculation between me and my friend Michelle about his having written this book at the Villa Pambuffetti in Montefalco. As mystic-fate would have it, I must take students on a field trip to Montefalco next Friday, but was hopeless about the book arriving ahead of time. Long before Christmas I’d ordered several books from Amazon.uk that still have not arrived. I ordered Peter Camenzind last week and got home late from work Wednesday night—and eccolo…only Peter Camenzind has been permitted to penetrate the forcefield that has inhibited the distribution of mail in Italy since early December.

The chills began with the back cover blurb: “Peter Camenzind…seems destined for an academic post, yet he does not choose this path, but instead seeks enlightenment and self-knowledge through travel [in Italy] and worldly pleasure. But this salvation proves hard to attain, and it is not until he returns to his home village to care for his dying father that he can find the path that leads back to himself.”

Chills, oh chills, the sense of having been cornered by God and hit over the head by this book, by something I did indeed need to figure out. Hadn’t I been feeling torturously guilty all day about abandoning my father-- after assuring my boss I would be in Italy forever to fulfill our high-faluting schemes—guilty for leaving him alone (but he's not that alone!) in his old age (but surely he's not dying!) in Georgia while I frolick. How odd, too, that the ordering and arrival of the book, complicit with my "partner in Hesse" Michelle, happened during the week of her own father's death and her return to her "home village" Perth, in Australia. The back blurb radiated through me like “strange news from another star”—a phrase I use so often and have used since time out of mind to describe synchronicity that is particularly jolting--having forgotten until this very train-ride that Hesse himself gave it to me all those thirty years ago; it’s the title of a collection of his short-stories.

From Peter Caminzend’s attitude toward poetry, toward writing and being a writer, to his social unease, and romantic destiny with unrequited love, to the call of St. Francis and Umbrian hills, to his almost pagan vision of nature as the language of god, to his longing to read endlessly, walk endlessly; to the acutely believable development of Peter’s relationship and love for the hunchback…and the three deathbed scenes in the novel, the sensation of life draining out of his mother’s hand, the child Agi’s death, that perfect Hospice moment of surprise when Boppi dies and, instead of grief, Peter feels surprising joy…has anyone ever confronted such moments so directly? So honestly? So sincerely? Ever? And how rare to pick up a slim little book and find it working on all one’s own personal conundrums: love gone wrong-wrong again, the mystic lure of Umbria, what to do with an aging father, how to follow the muse, how to trust the writing, how to love when one is not loved: the perfect guidebook for my moment.

Where I’m confounded is: How could I have identified so powerfully with the book at 15, when I had not yet held the hand of someone dying, had not yet reached that middle-aged moment when “one learns to regard life as a brief stretch of road”? Was I formed enough in my thinking to know his was the kind of writer and life and passion I was destined to live? I am convinced that my interest in St. Francis began with Peter Camenzind, even though, until today, I wouldn’t have given Hesse nor Peter credit for that interest or for my living specifically in Umbria, but now I wonder. It’s not a mere matter of Hesse having “shaped” me. In whatever beveled mirror the book was for me at the time, I must have found enough of myself already there for it to crystallize, become confirmed, validated…encouraged enough for me to find myself living the story I live today.

I must write at least two more blogs on Hesse in the course of the next week: One on his identification of unrequited Love with Clouds. And of course Friday I will be reporting on his Inn at Montefalco.

In the meanwhile, dear friends, listen carefully for your own star’s strange news and pass it on!.