Sidney Bechet and the Steppenwolf

In 1926, novelist Herman Hesse attended performances of the Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Steven C. Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, writes that the character of Pablo in Hesse's novel Steppenwolf was "inspired by Bechet's playing."

The novel's narrator Harry (Hesse) is older than more staid than the free-wheeling Pablo, who plays music ecstatically. (Hesse was 20 years older than the Creole musician Bechet.) Harry is introduced to Pablo by a character named Hermine, an androgynous creature named it seems for Hess and perhaps Hermes, the god who transports souls to the underworld. With a face "like a magic mirror to me," Hermine seemed to know all about Harry, though he muses, "Perhaps she might not understand everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire."  

Harry tries conversing with Pablo about classical music, but their conversations lead nowhere. Hesse writes: 

His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to devote himself with love and passion.... Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining us consisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watch and in rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts.....

Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humor, over one of the fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it, he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. 

Hermine told me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love...."

Harry dates a woman named Maria who is "fond" of Pablo. "At times she, too, availed herself of his secret drugs and was for ever procuring these delights for me also; and Pablo was always most markedly on the alert to be of service to me. Once he said to me without more ado: 'You are so very unhappy. That is bad. One shouldn’t be like that. It makes me sorry. Try a mild pipe of opium.'" 

After visiting Pablo at his hotel with Maria and taking a drink he offered, "a mysterious and wonderful draught" which put the Harry "into a very good humor," Pablo proposed, "with beaming eyes, to celebrate a love-orgy for three." When Harry refuses, Pablo says, "'But I’ve got another idea.' He gave us each a little opium to smoke, and sitting motionless with open eyes we all three lived through the scenes that he suggested to us while Maria trembled with delight. As I felt a little unwell after this, Pablo laid me on the bed and gave me some drops, and while I lay with closed eyes I felt the fleeting breath of a kiss on each eyelid."

Later, at a ball, Harry says:

For my part, the whole building, reverberating everywhere with the sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by degrees a wild dream of paradise. Flower upon flower wooed me with its scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit. Serpents looked at me from green and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes. Lotus blossoms luxuriated over black bogs.....An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and student —the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy.  

A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by a common enthusiasm.... Even in recent days I had marveled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and this smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the blissful intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured and ecstatic, he looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man with the banjo...

And when Pablo saw me so radiant, me whom he had always looked on as a very lamentable poor devil, his eyes beamed blissfully upon me and he was so inspired that he got up from his chair and blowing lustily in his horn climbed up on it. From this elevation he blew with all his might, while at the same time his whole body, and his instrument with it, swayed to the tune of Yearning. I and my partner kissed our hands to him and sang loudly in response. Ah, thought I, meanwhile, let come to me what may, for once at least, I, too, have been happy, radiant, released from myself, a brother of Pablo’s, a child....

Pablo takes Harry to a magic theatre; "a world of pictures, not realities," where he turns him to face a giant mirror, in which he sees "multitudinous Harrys...They sprang from each other in all directions, left and right and into the recesses of the mirror and clean out of it." Pablo tells him, "We supplement the imperfect psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We demonstrate to any one whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life."

Then, "with the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his [chess] board for a game...."

“And if I do not submit? And if I deny your right, Mozart, to interfere with the Steppenwolf, and to meddle in his destiny?” “Then,” said Mozart calmly, “I should invite you to smoke another of my charming cigarettes.” And as he spoke and conjured up a cigarette from his waistcoat pocket and offered it me, he was suddenly Mozart no longer. It was my friend Pablo looking warmly at me out of his dark exotic eyes and as like the man who had taught me to play chess with the little figures as a twin....

He took Hermine who at once shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of a toy-figure and put her in the very same waistcoat-pocket from which he had taken the cigarette. 

Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I was utterly done-up and ready to sleep for a year. 

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. 

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

Source: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse translated from the German by Basil Creighton.