Anton's crush.

When I read Narziß und Goldmund for the first time, the book struck me―hardly surprisingly, lonely and sensitive teenager that I was―immediately and obviously as a kind of love story, albeit a love story gone to seed in cerebrality's garden. In fact Hesse's oddly claustrophobic, utterly homosocial novels have always appealed to my basic romantic loneliness; how could these not be the documented yearnings of a gay intellectual? And yet, a lazy glance at his biography reveals nothing of the kind―the man took wives; I hear no google-rumors of male lovers. And yet, as they say, it moves.

As it happens, I'm rereading Das Glasperlenspiel. The first time through I was too young, too basically stupid to take much from it except a hazy feeling of my own superiority; reading it as an adult―well, as whatever I am now―I tripped and fell across a passage in chapter 3 that confirms that homosexual attraction was at least a pixel in his worldview. Knecht is at Mariafels and encounters a novice, Anton, who immediately succumbs to the influence that Knecht has always exerted over younger men:

As time went on, it became evident to Knecht that this young man with the intense eyes under heavy black brows was devoted to him with that enthusiasm and readiness to serve so typical of the boyish adoration he had encountered so often by now. Although every time it happened he felt a desire to fend it off, he had long ago come to recognize it as a vital element in the life of the Castalian order. But in the monastery he decided to be doubly withdrawn; he felt it would be a violation of hospitality to exert any sway over this boy who was still subject to the discipline of religious education. Moreover, he was well aware that strict chastity was the commandment here, and this, it seemed to him, could make a boyish infatuation even more dangerous. In any case, he must avoid any chance of giving offense, and he governed himself accordingly.

This certainly doesn't prove anything about Hesse―although I'll leave the elaborate prophylaxis to Henning Bech and his absent homosexuality―but just in case this is insufficiently explicit, a page later we watch Knecht watching Anton watching Father Jacobus with filial solicitude, which the anonymous pedant explains in unambiguous terms:

Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling.

Well, I leave this for what it is. There are doubtless subtle articles on the topic, but, bless the Lord, I'm a schoolteacher; why should I do actual research when I can instead attend three-hour classes on administering Formative and/or Summative Assessments? These, by the way, mean "exam" and "final exam" to the initiated, if you are curious.

I take my quotations from the R. & C. Winston translation, one of the very few paperbacks I've bought in recent memory―sometimes you need to possess a book At once!!, as Propertius may well have known.