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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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Word For Writers

“The biggest problem with Word is that it is way too much program for 90% of creative writers and self-publishers.” JW Manus.

Yep. I read discussions of Word on the network all the time. Many of the comments are negative. Sometimes I take time to defend Word or offer tips on how to use Word more effectively. But I have to admit that something about Word is seriously broken, but not the application itself. It’s better than ever.

Agile programing and continuous update have changed the software industry. In the old days, we spent months or years designing a program down to the last detail. Then code and unit test for another year or so. Then quality assurance system testing executed tests based on the design, not the as-built code. Every failed test was a dagger in your heart. If you were “lucky” QA was cut short to meet roll out deadlines. And, more often than not, when the product finally hit the customers, it was a travesty.

Software is maddeningly complex, and its presence often changes its environment in ways that invalidate the requirements which the software is intended to meet, and software is more fluid than any physical object. A program designed several years before a real user touches it, never meets user expectations.

The enormous cost overruns and failed projects that plagued software of the 1990s were largely due to a methodology called called “waterfall development.” In the waterfall, design, construction, testing, and acceptance of the final product proceed in strict order. Each phase must be completed and signed off on before the next phase can begin. Administrators loved it because they always had signed documents to shake in people’s faces. It worked great for bridges, skyscrapers, World War II, and the moon landing, but failed for software.

Today, the prevailing approach is to build software in small increments. Build a single feature, release to a test user group, look at the problems and let the release generate further ideas, then fix the defects, incorporate the ideas, and roll out another incremental release. Keep the increments small and rinse and repeat forever. The network bandwidth and speed available today makes it possible to develop continuously in small increments. This has proven to be much more successful than the waterfall.

Microsoft and many other software developers have adopted the agile methodology, but the new methodology has its own problems.

An unforeseen consequence of agile programming and continuous update is that documentation doesn’t keep up well with the development of the product. Microsoft has opened a fire hose of development and innovation in Word and documentation has not kept up.

Writing and revising documentation often takes as much time as developing and testing code. Asking a writer to document incomplete code easily degenerates into a time-wasting mess. Distinguishing defects from features is often hard and software can turn on a dime. The documentation often has to be rewritten at the last minute anyway. Consequently, the documentation usually trails behind the product.

However, documentation is also critical to software quality. If a feature is not clearly enough documented for a customer to use it well, the system is broken, no matter how perfectly it works.

Microsoft Word has suffered from the efficiency of agile development and frequent updates. Word processing in general has leaped ahead in the last few decades and it becomes more powerful with every automatic software upgrade, faster processor, increase in available memory and storage, and jump in network bandwidth.

So often, when I read of writer’s problems with Word, I think of some poor sap trying to cut a two-by-four with a Skillsaw without plugging it in or turning it on.

And I sympathize. They’re writers. They don’t have time or inclination to become experts on a huge and challenging system like Microsoft Word. Writers usually learn just enough to get the job at hand done and then get back to their serious business of writing. The solution might work but be all wrong down the road. Two months later, when they tackle a similar problem, their half-learned and half-remembered solution lets them down. And intervening updates may have improved the process, but they also changed it. Who wouldn’t be mad?

Microsoft has not made it easy. These days, most developers aspire to programs that are so simple to use, they don’t need documentation. But that’s an aspiration that is devilishly difficult to realize when the work done by the program is as complicated and hard to understand as word processing today.

I’m a software engineer and architect who coded his first word processor at the same time he started using word processors forty years ago. In recent years, I’ve burned hours puzzling over Word help forums. I’ve resorted to reading the xml in docxs and studying Word OLE documentation to get a feeling for Word’s internals. I used to know developers on the Word dev team and watched them stumble while using Word. In the end, I’ve always concluded that Word is a good product, well-designed with surprising power and flexibility, but first priority for writers is to write, not become Word experts.

Nevertheless, the writers who plug in their Skillsaw, instead of going back to a handsaw, will make more sawdust.

Today, if you are having trouble with Word, I suggest getting a copy of Word For the Wise by JW Manus. It will help. I have some disagreements with some of her approaches—I go farther with styles and I think my process is easier and more foolproof—but you won’t go wrong following her advice. Her book is still the best I’ve seen.