Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.David writes in between work and volunteering at lit mags. You can find more of his creative criticism here, his flash here, which was long listed for the Wigleaf 50, and more about him in this interview. Follow him at DaveNashLit1 on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Here, he shares with us the book that made him — Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse.
I passed out on my first official college visit and again on my second - no, it wasn’t from drinking. Both times I sat in a hall of interested students listening to an administrator lecture about acceptances and trajectories. I felt heat building on the back of my neck, empty in my stomach, sweat on my forehead. I sensed the room overflowing with overbearing parents, over-ambitious students, and over-promising counselors. I exited for the lavatory - too fast, blood drained away, blackness closed in from the periphery. I was out. This had never happened to me before, it happened twice in the same month, and wouldn’t happen again for twenty-five years.
Hans Giebenrath, Beneath the Wheel’s protagonist, suffers headaches, heartbreak, and deteriorating health after he leaves his provincial Black Forest town to attend the big school in the capital city. Like me, the pressures and burdens for Hans build to a breaking point.
My mother gave me this novel when I was sixteen when I didn’t have the ambitions I would have at eighteen, and when I wasn’t the reader I would become. At sixteen I marveled at its remarkable relevancy. Hesse writes from his boyhood experience in late nineteenth-century Swabia and here I was a hundred years later in New York relating not only to the pressure of higher education, but to the overreaching father, the secular pastor, and the selfish administrator. However, a Nobel Prize-winning author doesn’t write a novel that could have been a New York Times Op-Ed.
As I’ve returned and reread Beneath the Wheel, I’ve come to suspect that the cause of Hans’ burden has more to do with his misplaced identity and his inability to form meaningful relationships than how intellectual conformity stifled his art and wounded his soul. I don’t think that the system or the overbearing father, pastor, or principal from his hometown are solely to blame because Hans wastes no time at the Cistercian Monastery in Maulbronn establishing himself as the model student. Where he struggles is in forming healthy friendships. Hesse comments that at the monastery boys look for completeness in other boys - the farm boy and the town boy, the mountain boy and the lowlander - this coupling is common at the school. Hans finds his match - a young aesthete, Heilener. But the relationship is unbalanced and badly matched. This stems from Hans’ loneliness in his hometown. His pastimes - fishing, swimming, and sleeping in the garden are solitary. His mother is long dead, his dad artless. This new relationship is a great treasure for Hans, but a lark and luxury for Heilner. After his first kiss with Hans, Heilener gets in trouble with another student. Hans chooses his ambition over loyalty and budding love and betrays Heilner.
Hans comes home for Christmas to lavish presents. He spends his break ice skating on the river in his new suit and his green school hat. He radiates victory over his former schoolmates. But when Hans returns from break, tragedy shatters the monastery’s romantic idyll. A boy has drowned in a frozen pond. Hans looks on while the boy is carried out on a stretcher. Hans doesn’t see the boy, he sees Heilner on the stretcher. Hans feels the pain and anger his betrayal inflicted on Heilner. Death makes his guilty concious take over, leading Hans to take the first step to reconcile with Heilner. After that their friendship takes off and as a result Hans’ school work takes a dive. The headmaster makes a kind, if awkward attempt to save Hans the model student, but the changed Hans will not betray Heilner. Hans will find the spring tumultuous, but the storms force will him to become the captain of his own ship and autumn will bring him a second wind.
If the point of Beneath the Wheel is to condemn the education system for choosing grammar grinds over aspiring aesthetes, then I would simply humble brag about how my high school accomplishments led to admission to an elite university and one time I got lucky there and then it was all downhill, but I became the captain of my own ship and now I’m making art, so hurray for me. What’s more difficult to write about is my failed relationships. Relationships based on need and inequality. Relationships that left me shook when I discovered my identity was false. It’s more difficult to write that I can’t blame my artless aloof father or the corrupt culture-hating church any more than I can blame the books on the library shelves. For I faced the same problems that Hans faced - in my people pleasing, in my validating needing, and in my questing for male approval. To lay bare like Hesse the things I did because a man told me to, because I could not open myself up, and because I didn’t seek mutual relationships, no, that’s a much harder essay to write.
If nothing else, Beneath the Wheel led me to the rest of Hesse. I appreciated his simple, direct style. Though Hesse writes from the third person, he’ll slip in a “you” or an “our” as if he’s having a conversation with me. Yet his style runs deep beneath the surface like his characters who seek meaning beyond their troubled lives. Through their challenges and through motifs like rivers and wheels, Hesse leads me to insights about the human condition. I discovered the Mark of Cain in Demian, the Noble Truths and Eightfold Path in Siddhartha, and inscrutable wonder in The Glass Bead Game. Then I kept going with German-language writers. I read Heinrich Boll’s The Clown, which I found more sophisticated than The Catcher in The Rye, and Boll’s Group Portrait with Lady, which I found without comparison. I met Oskar Matzerath, the unreliable narrator with his Tin Drum, and climbed The Magic Mountain with Hans Castorp, an adventure that still cuts through me like the Alpine wind.
Last month I sat in a dentist's room watching my son in the operating chair. His mother looked on anxiously while the oral surgeon with his assistant applied three types of anesthesia - oral, topical, and local. In the tiny room with its hanging exam light shining down on the assortment of drills, I felt heat on the back of my neck. We discussed the procedure like a healthy couple, but I kept my doubts. Was this too much for him or me? My stomach turned when I saw the metal pliers rip his left molar right out of his young gums. Sweating in my chair, I had enough, I made a run for the cool air of the waiting room. I was out.
I came back to Beneath the Wheel. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the straight narrow path to the great wheel. At sixteen I could agree with the surface-level reading because I had little ambition. But a little got a little more and more because I found approval is like a narcotic - acceptance feels like a euphoric rush, and success is the high that never lasts. It was like Requiem for a Dream, I was terrified and intrigued by the protagonist’s drug of choice - what could be so powerful to send him to those depths, to instill such a single-minded focus? At eighteen I was heading to college, laced like a shoe and fiending. At twenty-seven I returned to my inner pusher when my career was soaring. At thirty-three I was dealing in PowerPoint presentations and asset acquisition, and so on - all the comebacks and comedowns, recoveries and relapses, all times when I chose my ambition, when I chose to inflate my ego, and when I chose need for approval over my true self.
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So worth the read; thank you.
Such an intriguing review! I read Beneath the Wheel a long time ago, possibly I was sixteen as well or a little older. Growing up in Austria, my parents had a copy lying around that I of course picked up & read. My main takeaway has always been that our education system is antiquated & can be toxic to young minds not suited to it. For me personally, the "traditional" school (compulsory Latin for five years) I went to was exactly the right environment & I know how lucky I am in that! Maybe Beneath the Wheel served as a healthy reminder that many other students aren't so lucky, that we should focus on what others really need to flourish rather than what we think they need.