Learn to Laugh

Learn to laugh. That seems to be the lesson Jerry Brown wanted to impart when recently he answered an interviewer’s question: What book should people read?

In January 2019, Brown relinquished his role as governor of California, having served four four-year terms with a 28-year gap in the middle. His life story inspires reflection in thoughtful people: his father was also governor; he entered a seminary to become a priest, dated Linda Ronstadt, worked with Mother Teresa in India and was elected mayor of Oakland, California. His endorsement was enough for me to check out “Steppenwolf” from my local library.

Herman Hesse wrote the novel about the spiritual journey of Harry Haller, a tormented intellectual confronting his fiftieth year and the prospect of suicide. The title derives from the protagonist's description of one of his personalities as "wolf of the Steppes," or Steppenwolf, that snarls at his other bourgeoisie-loving self. 

 

A manuscript found by the narrator, a neighbor in a boarding house, is the device to tell the story set in an unnamed German city where Steppenwolf reveres Mozart and Goethe, condescends to everyone else and is socially isolated. Walking through the city on a rainy night, he sees an “electric sign” that flashes then vanishes. It reads: “Magic Theater / Entrance Not For Everybody.” He tries and fails to open the adjacent door then wanders away but sees reflected on wet asphalt: “For Madmen Only!” (52)*

The scene rings a bell for me about life in the city, where so much is concentrated in a small space that you don’t have time to pursue everything at once. Such things brought to your awareness become a promise for the future.

 Before gaining entry to the Magic Theater he encounters Hermine, a female representation of the best friend of his youth, Herman, and the first guide on his spiritual journey. She tells him: "'You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable place where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him -- the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints -- is a fool and a Don Quixote...'"(267)

Jerry Brown, it seems to me, has that picture inside, and I sometimes find it difficult to explain to others my desire to write and compose. If I am such a fool, I can’t be anything but.

Hermine draws Steppenwolf out of isolation, challenging and teaching him to dance, setting him up with a beautiful woman to love and introducing him to the jazz and club scene. The lesson demonstrates that his disdainful intellectual’s guise is self-imposed, echoed later in the Magic Theater where he gazes at his reflection in a mirror, which shatters into shards that transform into chess pieces, the “many selves” comprising the “unity of (his) personality.” 

A chess player sitting “in Eastern fashion on the floor” places some of the pieces on the chessboard and says, “’…man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves…that he can rearrange…in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. (341-344) The chess player plays a series of games in which the pieces, representing Steppenwolf in youth, in old age, singly and as part of groups, interact. 

Our society, however, considers as crazy those displaying multiple selves and lauds those with a singular focus. A contender for a job might be encouraged to say, “My whole life I wanted to be a hedge fund manager (or banker or accountant).” That’s ridiculous and I pity anyone really thinking that. Perhaps I’m shortsighted, waiting on the next day to reveal what life has in store, which requires that I roll with punches, admit mistakes and turn around at dead-ends. 

Pablo, another guide, holds a mirror before Steppenwolf and says, “You will now erase this superfluous reflection, my dear friend. That is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet it, if your mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school of humor. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.” (317)

I had to learn not to take myself seriously. When I left the Marines, I moved to San Francisco to continue my education. Subconsciously, I thought gorging on knowledge was enough and was satisfied to be isolated from people “content with eating and drinking…” Life, though, is too large and complex to comprehend without interaction with others who help reveal your mistakes. That’s comedic enough; add the mistakes of others and soon you’re Uncle Albert bouncing off the ceiling!

In his first eight years, Jerry Brown attracted significant opposition, which might have been a reflection of his youthful white-hot intensity. In the second eight, he seemed better able to absorb criticism and even head it off by moderation. “Paddle a little to the left and a little to the right,” is one of his sayings about navigating politics. That’s funny and true. Jerry learned to laugh.

By the end of the novel, Steppenwolf still has more to learn. Pablo tells him: “[Y]ou have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and splattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality…” In the last lines of his manuscript, Steppenwolf writes: “One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh…” (388-89) Steppenwolf vanishes from the boardinghouse and the reader is left to ponder whether he lives or commits suicide.

Life in the city is about awareness and exploration of the new and strange. This curiosity goes hand in hand with relinquishing control to a collective experience. The difference is like that between riding a bus and driving your own car. Laugh –quietly-- at the guy ranting in the back while on your way to the waterfront to see tall ships pass through the Golden Gate.  

On encountering the unknown, don’t resort to guns and knives. Instead, laugh and inquire. Learn to understand why something’s been unknown (to you) so long and consider where you have been. Steppenwolf, I believe, has turned to the next page of his life and I second the recommendation to turn the pages of this curious novel.

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 * Excerpts from Steppenwolf  (First Picador Modern Classics Edition: November 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) The novel was originally published in 1927 and translated from the German in 1929.