(1) What gave you the idea for the story?
Someone once said that there are really only two stories – Cinderella and
Jack and the Beanstalk. Everything else is just a re-working of one or the
other.
That bothered me. I thought about it for a long time and finally I decided that
they were wrong. There are other stories. There are the Peter Pan stories -
the Ebenezer Scrooge stories - the Candide stories (Voltaire's story of the
young innocent man who goes out into the world only to fall into every trap
waiting for him, gradually learning through trial and error that this is a
dangerous and deceitful world where some people are better off staying
home).
There are the Iliad or Trojan War stories, and the Odyssey or lost wandering
hero stories. There are the Don Juan stories, the Red Riding Hood stories
and the Sleeping Beauty stories.
And there are the Ugly Duckling stories.
My favorite version of that one is Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse's 1927 tale of
fifty year old Harry Haller, another duck who couldn't be a duck – or, in his
case, a duck who refused to be a duck no matter how much the world
demanded it. Instead of discovering that he was a swan, Haller decided that
he was a 'steppenwolf', a wandering dissatisfied 'wolf of the steppes', a
man never able to be happy because the wild predatory part of his nature
couldn't accept life within the tame, hypocritical, unfeeling monstrosity that
civilization had become.
Steppenwolf, a book I first read in 1972, was the seed for my novel The
Birdcatcher.
From the time I first read of this Steppenwolf wandering alone at night
through the streets of German towns and cities, because only there could
he find any semblance of the freedom his spirit required, I knew that his
was an eternal story that would have to be told and retold. The chance
meeting between him and the bar girl Hermine, in the crowded jazz hall on
the night when he had resolved to kill himself, could not end with that book.
They would have to meet again and again, to repeat over and over the
magic of the encounter.
Yes, I thought about the lonely Steppenwolf for a long time, until, in the
spring of 1998, I set out to bring his story up to date. If you're interested in
the result, read The Birdcatcher.
Alan Conrad