Pictor's Metamorphoses Read Free Page A

and “The Hard Passage.” And in many of his fictional works—e.g., Demian and Steppenwolf —dreams function as an outlet for fantasy.
    Hesse was fully aware of the significance of the wartime Märchen and dreams in his personal development. In August of 1919 he wrote his publisher that Demian along with the Märchen that he composed from 1913 to 1918 were “tentative efforts toward a liberation, which I now regard as virtually complete.” By means of the fairy tale, he had succeeded in reestablishing the link with the unconscious that had been ruptured. Yet the fairy tale as a genre was only a passing phase in his literary career. In another letter of August 1919, he wrote to a friend that “the Märchen were for me the transition to a new and different kind of writing; I no longer even like them.” This wholesale rejection of his Märchen was a bit premature; some of his most charming efforts in the genre were still to come. However, the tone begins to change from the high seriousness of the wartime fables to the irony of “The Painter” and “Tale of the Wicker Chair,” which anticipate Hesse’s movement toward social satire in the twenties.
    It is no accident that these two fantasies deal with painters, for toward the end of the war years Hesse had discovered in painting a new avocation. For a time, indeed, he toyed with the notion of attempting an entirely new career as an artist rather than a writer. Although this shift did not come about, Hesse continued to paint until the end of his life. (Indeed, his accomplishments as a painter have only recently come to be more widely appreciated, thanks to major exhibits of his work since the centenary of his birth in 1977). For many years, moreover, he earned money for special purposes—during World War I for his war-relief work, and then during the thirties for the relief of refugees from Nazi Germany—by producing holograph editions of his poems on commission: characteristically, a handwritten copy of a poem, or group of poems, accompanied by original watercolor illustrations. “Pictor’s Metamorphoses” ( pictor is the Latin word for “painter”) celebrates and exemplifies this activity.
    Following the separation from his first wife in 1919, Hesse moved to southern Switzerland, where he at first lived a relatively isolated life. Coming to realize eventually that this solitude was neither natural to him nor productive, the mid-fortyish writer courted and, in 1924, was briefly married to a much younger woman, the singer Ruth Wenger. “Pictor’s Metamorphoses” amounts to an allegorical account, in fantasy form, of that love affair. The painter, entering the paradise of Ticino (as depicted in the accompanying aquarelles), first lives alone as a tree and then, recognizing his mistake, reenters the natural cycle of transformations by attaching himself to a beautiful young woman. It is significant that, apart from a limited edition in 1925, Hesse did not allow this work to be published until a facsimile edition of an early version was brought out in 1954. Here the text is so closely tied to the watercolor illustrations—indeed, the text emerges from them, as Hesse wrote to Romain Rolland when he sent a presentation copy—that the full meaning is apparent only when word and image are taken together. For three decades Hesse took enormous satisfaction from preparing new holographs of this fairy tale, in which the impulse toward fantasy is as pronounced in the illustrations as in the story itself. (The illustrations reproduced in this volume are those that Hesse did for a copy he presented in 1923 to Ruth Wenger.)
    Hesse was by no means the only writer of his generation to be attracted to the genre of fairy tale or fantasy. Indeed, no period since German romanticism produced as many fairy tales as the years around World War I. This fact was noted by early reviewers of Hesse’s