[In] spite of his 1946 Nobel Prize [Hesse's] work is somehow not admitted into the canon of "great" twentieth-century German authors. Germans, at least, would be amused nowadays, or mildly astonished, if a foreigner were to mention him along with Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, or Brecht….

It is partly because the canon has no place for a writer whose work, though a coherent whole, is so curiously mixed. It is sometimes cloying, sometimes profound, then quixotically un-ironic, then at once brisk, mysterious, and topical, and at other times, if not in his last two fictions, what Germans patronizingly call pubertär—and most of this in a prose that has a mercurial texture all its own….

[The years Hesse spent with his first wife at Gaienfofen, on Lake Constance, shaped him] as a mildly disturbed but polite author of Swabian small-town tales and of two novels about desperate but rather dreary artists. He was successful, second-rate, and trapped. The change came in the middle of the First World War….

Yet Hesse does not quite belong among those writers who extracted from the war, besides horror, disgust, and irony, a distinctly altered outlook, a vocabulary purged of cant, and a new approach to poetry. Doubt toward any pretension to dignity and nobility—that is one attitude Hesse confessed he drew from the war. Also a heightening of the color, tempo, urgency of his prose could be taken for a sign that he too now believed all the idylls were over. But this is not quite the case. Hesse's utopian fantastic impulse was not subdued but quickened, and its shattering against the historical world was recorded now with just that much more intensity. What did change Hesse, or what he came to create, was a new narrative form, in which his polymorphous interior life could be reflected. This was the fictionalized monologue, with a figured bass of images (later he called this his "private mythology") that recur in modulations and, from book to book, explicitly or tacitly organize the events….

Hesse was one of the first European writers to be psychoanalyzed, but his analysis was never purely clinical and always broken off. He duly became … a self-analytical novelist whose fictions orchestrated psychic crises of his own, and, rather mysteriously, thousands of readers could find their own troubles reflected in those of his protagonists. (p. 31)

Although he was basically a confessional writer, his self-revelations are (to us now, it must be said) mostly moderated by a discretion which used to be the mark of civilized persons. Hesse never was the sort of untamed self-eviscerator whom Henry Miller and Timothy Leary thought they were shepherding into the scene when they praised him….

Hesse's sentimentality and solipsism often tiresomely over-shadow the more incandescent aspects of his personality and work, manifesting themselves in limp stereotypes, clichés, and other forms of low-energy escapism….

[Non-German] readers could not see how Hesse's sentimental and solipsistic aspects connect the writer Hesse with all kinds of German psychosocial malaise—with morose philistine paltriness, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement. His other-worldly utopianism, whether or not accompanied by deep Indian equations between the self and the world, was eccentrically part of a broader tendency to wishful thinking that inched the German middle class via hero-worship and "inwardness" into hideous self-deception and eventually Nazism. The "floating irrationality" which American fans adored in Hesse was, as a matter of historical fact, a major impulse in German middle-class psychology….

I am not saying that Hesse was a deliberate irrationalist like D. H. Lawrence or Knut Hamsun…. In fact, for all his quasi-mystical proclivity, Hesse never did espouse irrationalism, least of all its terrorist fringe. Quite the reverse: he thought his task in the 1930s was to wrest the utopian impulse from its manipulators, and to enshrine it in an unassailable imaginative form (The Glass Bead Game). (p. 32)

For me … there is a durable but abstruse Hesse to be disengaged from the defenses he built into his writings and around them. All the seraphic talk of his being a pilgrim, wayfarer, a magician, a sage, and so forth tends to reflect only the sedentary and cerebral habits of readers who fancy Hesse so.

Yet he certainly was what Germans call a "seeker." In his thirties he used to advertise himself as a "quiet" or "secret" lyricist. If only his poems were not so insipid, this might offer a clue to his abstruse side…. His naïveté is perhaps what deserves to be noticed now, and understood. (p. 34)

There was, in and under everything, something wild about Hesse, something of the ungovernable child of Pietist missionaries. He kept it alive, sometimes in grotesque forms, sometimes in luminous ones. And there was in him, too, something of his Swabian intellectual ancestors, whom he came upon quite late in life: great God-hounded deviants, dreamers, and delinquents, from Albertus Magnus to Hölderlin and Mörike, each peculiarly rapt in his vision of the One in the Many, the Many in the One, and some of them coming apart in pursuit of that vision. What is it, after all, that Hesse's protagonists seek, if not naïveté reborn as illumination through grace? And something more: not the subjugation of reason to any system, but a just peace between the naïf and intellectual claims of consciousness. Just you listen, he says, listen actively, there it is, "the wooden horse is neighing in the wind." (p. 35)

Christopher Middleton, "Neighing in the Wind," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1979 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. XXVI, No. 3, March 8, 1979, pp. 31-5.