Painting Against Time in Klingsor’s Last Summer
This essay discusses Klingsor’s Last Summer in full, including its ending.
The painter is dead before Hermann Hesse’s story begins. A preliminary note tells us that Klingsor spent his last summer in the southern landscape he loved and made pictures that some connoisseurs prefer to his earlier work. News of his death reached his friends in late autumn. Rumors of suicide and madness have already attached themselves to him. The narrator disputes their authority and retains a more credible fact: Klingsor sometimes drank to deaden pain and melancholy.
So the story’s urgency cannot depend on whether he will survive. We know that he will not. Hesse transfers the pressure into how much the artist can perceive, desire, and make before the remaining time is gone.
The note supplies a remarkably particular palette: cadmium yellow and red, Veronese green, emerald, cobalt, cobalt violet, and further bright pigments. Before the living Klingsor appears, we have materials through which to imagine the work he leaves behind. Biography begins to acquire color.
Then measured description gives way to feverish movement. The summer days burn away; short nights fill with dreams; the weeks rush past. From his balcony, Klingsor looks over a garden crowded with trees, vines, pale leaves, and immense magnolia flowers. The scene admits smell, distant music, and the peacock’s harsh cry. Hesse keeps opening another sense before the previous one has exhausted its object.
That appetite gives the novella its distinctive prose. Klingsor’s desire to live more intensely becomes a pressure upon the sentence, which must keep accommodating another color, another plant, another sound. The excess is a working principle. Its success depends on whether the accumulating particulars retain relations, or merely join a procession of ecstatic adjectives.
One color answers another
Hesse lets the painter explain those relations while reviewing his sketches. Natural forms can be distorted; colors can be intensified or substituted. What must survive is their relative tension. A bold red and blue can remain faithful to an experience through their relation even when neither copies the surface literally.
But if one wanted to remake a piece of nature in color, what counted was that the few colors stood in exactly, precisely the same relationship, in the same tension to one another as in nature. — “Klingsor”; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
This is a principle of construction with consequences for the surrounding prose. The villa is a glowing red against green vegetation; a brickworks chimney becomes a red flare before cool foliage; brown-red demands the presence of a hostile metallic blue. The description keeps opposing and adjusting colors. They acquire force through what stands beside them.
The painter’s discrimination prevents his ecstasy from becoming uniformly approving. He can reject much of a day’s work while retaining one successful relation. A sketch interrupted by painful sunlight may still have captured the essential encounter between brown-red and blue. Hesse grants the extravagant artist a precise capacity for selection.
At the end of July, painting a fairground, Klingsor addresses the pigments as active companions. Cadmium must ring out, madder must boast, lemon yellow must laugh. The narrative shifts from describing the painter to carrying his exclamations, then turns his colors into weapons aimed at death.
The passage’s energy comes from changing verbs and changing directions of address. He looks, commands, devours, attacks, implores. Pigments first reproduce visible relations, then perform emotional actions. The prose makes the brushstrokes feel like responses to an adversary who cannot be painted out of existence.
That progression also exposes a limit. As every gesture becomes a battle with death, ordinary variation risks being absorbed into one enormous significance. The story can overheat. Hesse’s writing is most convincing when the strong color remains attached to a particular shabby tent, dusty roadside, or wheeled caravan. Those unprestigious objects give the painter something to transform besides his own reputation for intensity.
His impatience with time clarifies the problem:
Why was there time! Why always only this idiotic succession, and no roaring, satisfying simultaneity? […] One always sang song after song; never did the entire full symphony sound with all its hundred voices and instruments at once. — “Klingsor”; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
The comparison with music describes an impossible desire. A symphony needs succession to develop its relations, however full its simultaneous texture becomes. Klingsor wants the gratification of everything without the passage that makes experiencing anything possible. His appetite contains the condition of its own frustration.
Hesse gives that frustration a childhood precedent. During a game in which each boy had ten lives, Klingsor insisted on preserving all ten. Escaping with nine counted as a disgrace. The recollection makes the adult ambition instantly legible: survival itself is insufficient if living requires him to spend what cannot be replenished.
Even the late-summer conviviality cannot produce lasting satiety. Food, wine, friends, and speech offer real pleasures; each completed pleasure also measures another interval gone. The novella’s abundance repeatedly generates the hunger it appears poised to satisfy.
Hesse varies the evidence for this hunger by interrupting the narrative with a letter. Addressing a woman, Klingsor doubts his ability to love and tries to separate desire, gratitude, pleasure, and the search for a flattering reflection. The painter who can judge adjacent colors so precisely cannot make equally stable judgments about adjacent feelings. His letter protests that expressed thoughts become lifeless, even as its restless revisions keep trying to express them better.
The change of form is something we should pay attention to. We have heard a preliminary biographical judgment and followed the rush of his perception; now we encounter the language through which he presents himself to another person. Each mode places a different demand on belief. The obituary compresses, perception accumulates, the letter hesitates and recasts. Their alternation gives the novella more range than uninterrupted rapture could sustain.
His adopted name, Li Tai Pe, extends the experiment into self-dramatization. He borrows a Chinese poet’s identity and calls a companion Thu Fu, allowing a summer among friends to participate in an imagined poetic fellowship. Hesse keeps that ambitious play beside the local tents, roadside dust, and physical fatigue that it cannot wish away.
All the faces on one surface
The self-portrait attempts a pictorial solution. A single image can hold what life requires Klingsor to undergo separately: childhood, desire, achievement, humiliation, deterioration. Hesse describes him looking into a mirror and finding face after face behind the familiar one.
The resulting picture is crowded with ages and incompatible expressions. Its grandeur includes brutality; its sensual appetite includes disgust; the head can look like an idol while the skin acquires the marks of decay. Landscape vocabulary enters the body through ravines, fissures, and roots. The painter who has consumed the visible world now carries that world within his features.
This is where Hesse’s accumulation achieves its strongest formal purpose. Earlier lists try to seize more of the summer. The portrait’s lists compress successive selves into a surface that can be seen at once. Klingsor’s wish for simultaneity becomes a task the medium can partly fulfill.
The story also supplies more than one voice for assessing it. Friends see in the picture a representative exhausted European, refined by desire and sickened by excess. Their interpretation belongs to the people looking at the work; it need not become the final truth of every face Hesse has described. The opening has already warned how readily an artist’s work attracts a ready-made explanation.
The narrator’s own rhetoric is less consistently cautious. Having rejected the confident diagnosis of madness in the preliminary note, the story later calls Klingsor mad as every creator is mad. The phrase replaces a reductive medical explanation with a romantic generalization. Neither can demonstrate the achievement of a particular painting. The detailed work on the portrait provides stronger evidence than the mythology of artistic derangement around it.
Hesse makes that work materially strenuous. Klingsor studies photographs, old drawings, and childhood images, filling his surroundings with the remains of earlier lives. He repeatedly returns to the panel. The artist’s retrospective vision develops through things he can inspect, rearrange, and carry back to the painted face.
When the picture is finished, he puts it away without showing it. He sleeps for a day and a night, then washes, shaves, dresses, and goes out again. The release is almost disarmingly ordinary after the struggle that precedes it. Making the image has temporarily changed what his remaining life demands.
The preliminary obituary remains true, but the narrative has given us an achievement that its biographical summary could only name. We have followed a desire that wanted every life at once until it found a form capable of holding several ages, faces, and failures together. Klingsor cannot keep all ten lives. His painting can preserve relations among the ones he has spent, and Hesse makes the prose crowd and strain until that limited victory becomes perceptible.
Sources
Hermann Hesse, Klingsors letzter Sommer: Erzählungen, S. Fischer, Berlin, 1920. German text, Project Gutenberg no. 42338. This essay concentrates on the title novella, particularly “Vorbemerkung,” “Klingsor,” “Die Musik des Untergangs,” and “Das Selbstbildnis.” The same volume also contains “Kinderseele” and “Klein und Wagner.” English block quotations were translated for this essay from this German edition; the bracketed ellipsis marks an omission.
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