MIDLIFE CRISIS LIT

1. I Was a Teen-aged Steppenwolf!

Recently I re-read two novels to revisit certain mental territory, namely the place in my mind where I stored impressions from my earlier readings. This is one of the big attractions of re-reading after time has passed. No one, of course, has done more to extract the truths of being a different person dipping into what is supposedly the same stream than Proust. And maybe it's the changes made in my head by my first reading of Proust that have established this ongoing sense of rediscovery -- not only of the books themselves, but of me -- in the act of re-reading. Which, if so, means there's nothing quite like re-reading Proust, for then one gets to contemplate all of the narrator's re-visitings while always alive to the fact that the reader is revisiting too. It doesn't get any better than that.

The two books I was re-reading were not Proust caliber, but both had left a mark on me that I wanted to trace again. Or it might be more accurate to say that my reading of the first, Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) occasioned an interest in re-reading Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964). Why? Well, that's the point of this commentary.

Steppenwolf is irrevocably associated with my adolescence. I can still remember sitting on the top bunk in my bedroom reading it by the light through the front window, looking out on the church across the street. I don't know why that memory is so clear, since I read the novel probably about six times in the course of high school. Was that the first reading? Probably, but so what? I can only assume -- and Proust would understand -- that my mind went on a little journey when I paused in my reading to look up and that, in some sense, my mind is still on that journey. What part of the novel was it? Of that I'm not sure. Probably it was the part when Harry Haller, the hero of the novel, is reading the little book For Madmen Only. It's at that point that a teen reader would be looking inward, trying to decide if he were in fact 'a steppenwolf' -- enthralled by bourgeois respectability but also harboring a certain lunatic urge to be a glorious outcast. The kind of reflection that comes easily when seated in one's parental home, annoyed to be called for punctual dinner before hitting a natural break in the text. 'Oh, if only I could live according to the demands of my spirit!' one says, shutting the book angrily and then taking one's place docilely at the family board.

But what hit me this time is the fact that Harry is almost fifty years old (as am I). And the book is essentially a midlife crisis book. And the fact that I strongly associated with Harry says something, indeed, about the teen I was or aspired to be. My own father was probably forty-six at the time. So here comes that premature aging that literature has a way of bequeathing. Suddenly I was a high school student in the midst of a midlife crisis: 'the wine of life is drawn and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of,' as Macbeth would say, and as I knew he said, then. There was something heady in that feeling -- which Hesse does his best to convey -- that the quaint little social rituals of high school and family life, and even of the big world of regular jobs beyond, is nothing but a sham, something to escape by means of . . . imagination? art? daring adventures? Could be. Hesse wisely refrains from making Harry some kind of undiscovered genius or former adventurer. Harry is simply what I wanted to be: a person whose interiority is entirely determined by books. And, lately, the books don't work any more. Thus the crisis. The lesson, more or less, is that one must look to one's fellow man for the meaning of life, not in books, not in the precise satisfactions of aesthetic fabrications. And yet this truth is brought home to him by a rather aesthetic night-out, a nightclub Walpurgisnacht in which he must experience something like the dissolution of his conscious, ego-driven mind. As Mozart tells him, in person (it's magic! or it's hallucination! -- in either case, it's cool for readers after the '60s); 'you must learn to laugh.' Laughter is the key.

To give Hesse credit: it's thanks to him and his rather tendentious evocation of humor that I sought out the philosopher I like to call 'the laughing lion': Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. But that story's for another time. For the moment, it's enough to say that humor, even if not much in evidence in Hesse's novel, is a good lesson to give to a painfully self-conscious and shy kid with a mind full of literature and little else. Fair enough, but is it a good lesson for the same kid pushing fifty? I wanted to think so, reading Steppenwolf again and charmed to find Harry deciding that he'd end his life on his fiftieth birthday. But then a lovely young woman takes him in hand and shows him a good time. What more is there? I'm sure as a kid I thought this was a cop-out. Girls! Jeeze, as if. They (the teen version in the 'burbs anyway) were the fiercest upholders of bourgeois sanctity and social rituals -- all seemingly eager for dating, mating, and the whole long slog through parenthood. Who needs it? But of course Hesse had his answer to that -- enough to beguile any teen with a fondness for fantasized versions of otherwise flesh and blood females -- a woman of the demimonde! And even if it was too late to find someone with the panache of Hesse's Hermione -- essentially a flapper with a penchant for existentialism -- in the age of feminism and the aftermath of the sexual revolution, there was still cause for hope, sorta, in the idea of a woman who knows (cf Page/Plant).

What does she know? As a teen I couldn't quite figure that out. But she knew something, enough anyway to master the Steppenwolf and treat him fondly as though a child. Is it a truth that an aging, played out artist manqué merely wants to be fondled fondly? I guess so, and, since I was reading this in the Gay Lib era, the suggestion that Harry needed to go bi a little really to live wasn't exactly a headtrip. Later, in both lit history and my reading, the Beats would be more aggressive on that point; in Hesse, it was Freudian thematics of the self, but without the hilarity at the unconscious that Joyce whipped up in his own Magic Theater in Ulysses. In any case, it should be pretty evident that a teenaged Steppenwolf grows into a middle-aged Steppenwolf, still enthralled primarily to literature, no matter how funny popular culture is, or how laughable the times. In Steppenwolf, Harry/Hesse has to try mightily to overcome his dislike of jazz (Pablo, the sax player, being both the purveyor of animalistic jazz and androgynous sex), but when I was first reading the novel, the kids had already killed the man, and so I had to break up the band (cf Bowie).

And that, I think, is the main point about midlife crisis lit like Steppenwolf. Hesse turned fifty the year it was published and all it can offer, as a means to overcome the malaise, is some kind of detente with youth and whatever they're into at the time. In a sense it's about surrendering one's heroes to the times, leaving off the querulous dissatisfaction that underwrites every evocation of "in my day." But what Hesse tries to push to -- to give him credit -- is dissatisfaction with the consolations of literature. It's a cautionary tale about a man who let his texts furnish him a world and then found that world stale. While outside, the times they were a-changin'. As far as the '20s were from Hesse's twenties in the 1890's, in other words, is the 2010s from the 1980's? Guess so. Tattoo it, pierce it, and upload it, Harry, it's a brave new world.

And what about Herzog? 'That's for another time,' Daddy said, as he put the book back on the shelf.

TRÈS BON, BONNARD

Friday I visited an exhibition at the Met: "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors." The exhibit features luminous canvases painted from 1923 to 1947 that provide ample evidence for a reading of Bonnard as a great modernist, a relentless experimenter with color and form. In sharing those interests with the better known and more protean Henri Matisse, Bonnard does not suffer from the comparison. Bonnard, unlike Matisse, creates a sense of unease and disruption, of those forces -- such as love of beauty -- that sustain the artist, as well as those forces -- such as existential dread and a sense of the arbitrary interplay of imagination and perception -- that question art's purpose and reach. While Matisse feels, for the most part, celebratory about art's role in life, Bonnard suggests a burden in life that art can only suggest, never expiate.

In Bonnard's work the color is dense, featuring many virtuoso overlays, but it is also color that departs from any merely mimetic function. While always interested in depicting light as it demarcates different areas in a room, or as it reflects off some surfaces and is swallowed by others, Bonnard's sense of color makes light a pattern more than a presence. It doesn't simply illuminate his subjects, it makes a phantasmagoria of color effects play upon them. Along with the liberties of palette and the merging of foreground and background that occur because of the difficulty of reading gradations of color in a straight-forward manner -- in which they would be employed to create depth -- Bonnard's canvases present effects of composition that constantly keep the viewer off-guard, never able to settle into a comfortable viewing space where the frame "captures" all we need to see, and where spatial orientation is consistent. Tables appear vertical creating a sense of objects floating rather than sitting upon them; objects and figures are cut-off by the edge of the painting, sometimes looming like vague shapes in our periphery, sometimes sliding in like apparitions that haven't quite taken shape; shadows beneath plates, or within a fireplace, or -- most ominously -- within a partially open door are fraught with somber implications; figures -- most often Bonnard's wife, Marthe -- seem crouched, furtive, at times alive with vibrant colors that seem a mask or covering, at times rendered in schematic lines that recall Gauguin or Matisse; windows look out upon a landscape in which a garden or the distant strand of Cannes may appear as flat as a wall-painting or as radiant as a celestial realm.

But nothing I've said gives any sense of what it's like to stand before these paintings, engaged in reading the interplay of colors that truly create a world of their own without ever completely departing from the assumptions that govern our perceptions of our world. Bonnard only occasionally risks utter abstraction or the extremely notational manner of Picasso. Meanwhile, a tablecloth seems to contain a Diebenkorn, a stretch of wall offers subtle color relations that put to shame a "colorist" such as Guston. Bonnard learned from the Impressionists the mannerism of light rendered as overlayed brushstrokes of color, but he took that technique in a direction more extreme, which is to say, more self-involved. Painting from memory and notes rather than in situ, Bonnard creates an art of the mind's eye, an interior view of interiors that circle, again and again, upon a tablecloth that seems to stand for the canvas itself and a window that stands for the external world as yet another painting. If this sounds claustrophobic, it is, but at the same time, these paintings offer vistas of tension that play before one's eyes like astounding drugged or dream visions.