Klingsor’s Last Summer is a set of three short novellas that build in intensity to the title story; the blazing last summer of an artist possessed by a such an irresistible sense of life and beauty he extinguishes his own flame.

In the first piece, A Child’s Heart, Hesse shares something of his childhood with us, a world overshadowed by the stern Protestant moralism of his father, a pastor. The child trips up trying to behave according to his excessively black-and-white moral code; then absolute trust in the parent is lost and, because this is a world of absolutes, a rebel is born. In the second piece, Klein and Wagner, a rebel is not born or rather born far too late, as a man in early middle age feels impelled to kick over the traces, defrauds money from his employer and flees to the glamorous and sensual Southland... In an accelerated few weeks of following ‘the secret intentions of the heart’ he experiences for the first time real solitude and the self-reflection it makes possible, real affinity with a woman and finally a sense of immersion in nature, a stripping away of his old self... In other words he experiences a rebirth. Although it sometimes seems a little forced and obvious Klein and Wagner might also be an excellent little guide to spiritual liberation.

The title story Klingsor’s Last Summer itself is much more of a work of art, and one of Hesse’s favourites. Partly autobiographical — Hesse fled from his early writing success and marriage to Ticino in Switzerland — it’s also perhaps a fantasy version of the life Hesse would have liked to have lived himself if he’d been able to escape the narrow psychological bounds of his strict Protestant background. As an old man he said he had set out to live ‘a real, personal, intensive life’, and finally had become ‘a writer, but not a human being’.

Klingsor is a larger-than-life artist, a heroic walker, drinker, painter, womaniser, boon companion... We see him at the height of his powers, aged forty or so as was the author, in the middle of his most creative period as he reaches a crescendo of joyous activity, living a splendid life in an artist’s colony in southern Switzerland. Klingsor has embraced the Southern dream; ‘We need so little for happiness.... eight or ten hours work a day, a bottle of Piedmontese, a half pound of bread, a cigar, a few girls, and of course warmth and good weather.’

Klingsor is beautiful and hopeful, celebrating a sensual and creative life, more than anything a life lived with attention and outlining possibilities of existence far from the dreary slavery to the comfortable and conventional most of us ‘voluntarily’ end up in.

‘When he had painted for hours, restlessness drove him to his feet. Uneasily, unsteadily, he paced his rooms, the door slamming behind him, pulled bottles from the cupboard, pulled books from the shelves, rugs from the tables, lay on the floor reading, leaned out of the windows, breathing deeply... Everything blew about sadly when the rain-filled wind entered the windows. Among old things he found the picture of himself as a child, a photograph taken at the age of four; he was dressed in a white summer suit and under his light blond, almost white hair a sweetly defiant boy’s face looked out. He found the pictures of his parents and photographs of old sweethearts of his youth. Everything occupied, excited, tensed and tormented him, pulled him back and forth. He snatched up everything, threw the things away again, until his arm twitched once more and he bent over his wooden panel and went on painting. Deeper and deeper he drew the furrows through the clefts of his portrait, broadened the temple of his life, more and more forcefully addressed the eternity of all existences, louder and louder bemoaned his transitoriness... Then he sprang to his feet again, a hunted stag, and tramped the prisoner’s walk through his rooms. Gladness flashed through him, and the deep delight of creation, like a drenching joyous rainstorm, until pain threw him to the floor again and smashed the shards of his life and his art into his face. He prayed before his picture and spat at it. He was insane, as every creator is insane. But with the infallible prudence of a sleepwalker, in the insanity of creativity he did everything that furthered his work. He sensed with a deep faith that in this cruel struggle with his self-portrait more than the fate and the final accounting of an individual was involved, that he was doing something human, universal, necessary. He felt that he was once again confronting a task, a destiny, and that all the preceding anxiety and his efforts to escape and all the tumult and frenzy had been merely dread of his task and attempts to escape it. Now there was neither dread nor escape, nothing but pushing on, cut and slash, victory and defeat. He conquered and was defeated, he suffered and laughed and fought his way through, killed and died, gave birth and was born.’ p332