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Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi

I read Hermann Hesse’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game, for the second time last week. I read it for the first time when I was about twenty. Now I’m seventy. The book is more relevant today than it was at the height of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s, but the book read better fifty years ago.

I read it first while still an undergraduate studying Chinese philosophy and literature. My German was better then, and I had read a few of Hesse’s German essays and stories in language classes. The book was popular among my friends in those days. I tried to read a German edition from the library, but I gave up and bought a translation. I remember I liked it, except that I thought it contained rather superficial references to the Chinese book of divination, The Book of Changes (I Ching), which was popular at the time. Not much else stuck with me, except a good feeling about the book.

In the intervening years, Hesse has gotten his share of criticism for misogyny and protagonists who only appeal to adolescents, and I agree.

First, Hesse needed a disciplined editor. The mass-market paperback I read last week, the same one I read in 1970, has over 500 pages of small print and narrow margins. It should have been cut to 300 pages.

I usually read for pleasure slowly, mulling over books as I read them, but I found myself skimming because Hesse used too many words, over-described, and repeated unnecessarily. Joseph Knecht, the protagonist of the novel, was a sincere and meticulous educational bureaucrat. We don’t need to be told, shown, retold, reshown in long paragraphs that seem to repeat every few pages. The Magister took too many contemplative walks and rhapsodized too much on the pleasures of nature. The novel was published in 1943 and set in the future 24th or 25th century. But it is populated with peasants, aristocrats, townsmen, and heating systems from a pre-Renaissance monastery. The pages of description do little to illuminate this odd setting.

The glass bead game is a made up game that required erudition and connoisseurship to play. The protagonist, Joseph Knecht is the master of the game. After striving to become a perfect academic manager, teacher, and player of game, and reaching the pinnacle of delectation of music, arts, philology, and mathematics, Knecht gives up his position, resigns from the order, and dies trying to outswim an adolescent in freezing lake.

As I read, I felt compelled to consult Hesse’s biography. I had to know if Hesse knew what he was talking about. Had Hesse ever experienced anyone like his hero? I haven’t known any bureaucrats who came even close to that mold and I’ve known hundreds. For me, the character and plot was unrealistic and hard to believe. In Hesse’s defense, realistic heroes have never been a requirement for a good story, but I could not empathize with Joseph Knecht.

And what about women? The story is about an all-male, celibate, elite order until we get to the final section, three short lives set in various eras and locations. The first life describes a matriarchy dominated by men. In the other lives, the women are spiritless toys. I suspect that Hesse might have been comfortable hanging with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who Hesse would have been happy to allow to buy his way into The Glass Bead Game, the way Epstein bought his way into MIT Labs.

I’m being negative—justifiably, I believe—but the book also raises important points and is worth reading. If you can ignore the male elitism (which is not easy), the story is about educated universal culture, populist nationalism, and governance, which is on many people’s minds today.

Hesse was born and grew up in Germany, but he spent much of his life as a Swiss citizen. Although he helped many Jewish and other dissident intellectuals out of Nazi Germany, he was not outspoken in opposition to Hitler’s Nazi state. Nevertheless, this book is clearly critical of nationalist fascism and was banned in Nazi Germany. In The Glass Bead Game, all the misogyny and juvenility aside, Hesse raises questions about the relationship between the rise of totalitarians like Hitler and educated elites that are relevant and pressing today. I didn’t see that fifty years ago.

I compare the Bead Game to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and J.K. Rowling’s Ministry of Magic. They all depict elites confronting forms of unreasoning and amoral nationalism. I doubt that The Glass Bead Game, due to its prolixity and dated misogyny, will ever be read popularly like Tolkien and Rowling, but it taps some of the same electricity and it carries a message that is more apt today than it was in the 60s and 70s when it was popular among young intellectuals.

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Rex Stout’s Black Orchids

Black Orchids is Rex Stout’s darkest novel, written in 1940 and 1942. Nero as a name is often construed to mean “dark” or “black,” suggesting that black orchids are Nero’s special province.

Calling Black Orchids a novel is not strictly correct; it is two novellas, loosely knit together with a few paragraphs of inserted narration from Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin. The first depicts Wolfe’s acquisition of the black flowers. In the second, Wolfe sends a spray of the dark posies for the coffin of his client, whose murder he eventually solves.

The first novella displays the worst sides of Wolfe’s character. To get the orchids, Wolfe blackmails their owner by threatening to reveal the aristocratic fancier’s involvement in murder, greedily insisting on all the specimens for himself. Then he tricks the murderer into gassing himself with Wolfe’s own fumigation setup. In real life, Wolfe would be lucky to get off with second-degree murder. On top of that, the novella’s inciting killing occurred when Archie pulled a string that discharged a pistol and drove a bullet into the top of the victim’s skull. The deaths in the first novella were all at the hand of the Wolfe establishment on a greedy mission. Black orchids indeed.

The second novella is similarly dark. Wolfe is hired by a woman who arranges swanky novelty parties and whom Wolfe clearly detests as a frivolous snob, but he takes her money. Archie investigates, attending a flamboyantly gruesome outdoor cocktail party with an obnoxious chimpanzee, a pair of cranky black bears, and an alligator that causes Archie to wound his hand. The human guests are equally sullen and unpleasant. When the chimp knocks a tray of drinks from the butler’s hands, glass shatters, and the client’s toe is cut. The wound is treated with what appears to be iodine but contains live tetanus bacilli. Three days later, the client dies a tortured and miserable death from lockjaw. The farewell scene is uttered from between clenched teeth and interrupted with bone-cracking spasms. Nero sends black orchids to the funeral but refuses to investigate until he is angered by the hapless Inspector Cramer. To spite the police, Wolfe finally acts, and the murder is eventually caught through an act of self-mutilation. Yikes.

Peeking under the covers into Stout’s life may be questionable criticism, but the early 1940s when Black Orchids was written were fraught. The Nazis were ascendant in Europe and the U.S. was torturing itself over the decision to enter the war. Stout was in the center of the argument, urging American entry and contending with the America First movement that opposed involvement. John McAleer, Stout’s biographer, says that Stout began having trouble with indigestion, which is echoed in Wolfe resorting to Amphogel antacid in the second novella. Wolfe’s execution of the first murderer with cyanide gas is also telling as rumors of holocaust gas chambers were beginning to enter the American consciousness. I find it easy to think that Black Orchids reflected Stout’s tense mood as World War II began.

Dark stories are not bad stories. Last week was at least my fourth reading of the two novellas and I’ve enjoyed them every time including this last.

But on this read, I noticed their darkness. In most of Stout’s stories, Wolfe’s brownstone in mid-town Manhattan is an island of stability where orchids are always tended for two hours twice a day, meals are never interrupted by business, and the conversation is always witty. The gourmet meals are painted as exotic, but they are closer to Sunday dinner in Stout’s home Kansas than Le Bernardin. Wolfe may be a sophisticated émigré from the Balkans, but he usually acts more like a shrewd mid-western autodidact. Most of Stout’s work is in some way optimistic and uplifting, but he slipped deep shade into this pair of novellas. It’s quite an achievement to write stories as gloomy as Black Orchids and yet leave the impression that they are typically placid Nero and Archie tales.

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A Retired Software Architect

Mornings, I have walked Waschke Road and its fields covered in the fog, and wandered through the foggy woods. Bitterly cold winter ice fog, gentle late summer ground fog, sodden brooding November fogs. Wisps of vapor drift three steps away. Waiting for sun, watching daytime moons, searching for hounds, bay horses, and turtle doves.

Photo by Christopher Waschke

Fog on Waschke Road comes from the west, the Salish Sea, the Straits of Georgia, the Straits of Juan De Fuca, the Islands of Japan. China. The fog floats up the Nooksack, Silver Creek, Deer Creek, slides on greased skid roads, rolls on gravel, asphalt, and concrete. It comes up from the red loam and down from the gray sky. From the water to the land, settling in among the firs and cedars.

Owls glide in the morning fog with muffled wing flaps, field mice scream as red talons pierce their downy pelts and lift them from their damp tunnels, carrying them beyond the fog and into the treetops and the gables of the barn.

Flying owl. C9 Photography

Software architects build castles of fog. Wood, steel, and concrete castles break your toes, collar bones, and skull when forces are unbalanced, but software castles are drifting electrical signals. Software architects dispel them with “cd /; rm -Rf *”. And, trust me, they never forget how.