True romance
STUART HOOD
The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Cape 60s) There is a German romantic tradition which conceives of intellectual life—all the activities of the Geist —as being nurtured, developed and handed on to future generations by an elite Of masters and pupils. Goethe holding court at Weimar is at the beginning of it. Among its latest expressions (in life) was Stefan George and his circle intoning his verses in hieratic voices. In literature there is Zarathustra emerging from his cave to recruit disciples and transform mankind. There are the masters and adepts in that curious and interesting book by Ernst Juenger, On the Marble Cliffs. There is the Magister Ludi in Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.
At its silliest the tradition makes one think of solemn readings by elderly authors in velvet smoking jackets surrounded by eager young men. At its best it stood for a refusal to accept the values of modern in- dustrial society—what Hesse calls the values of the feuilleton—and, by a logical process, a rejection of the political manifestations of that society as it developed in Germany, whether they were the imperialism of the Wilhelmine age or of the Third Reich. It is significant that. in their own ways, George, Juenger and Hesse, all opposed the funda- mental principles of Nazism. But theirs was a curious inner resistance to tyranny couched in the language of metaphysics and aesthe- ticism rather than of politics. It has about it a cloudy quality which one sees reflected, tragically, in the thought and writings of a man like von Trott zu Solz, who perished after the 20th of July plot against Hitler's life.
Hesse was the son of an evangelical pastor. Sent to a Protestant seminary, he ran away to become a book-binder, a mechanic, a dealer in antiques. There is, therefore, not by chance, something about his early years that reminds one of that archetypal figure of German romanticism—the wandering apprentice: der fahrende Geselle. During the First World War he was a conscientious objector working in Switzerland to help Ger- man prisoners of war. In 1919 he settled per- manently in that country from which, during the Nazi tyranny, he published Vivos voco, a periodical addressed to his fellow intellec- tuals in Germany. During the Second World War he wrote his last and, by common con- sent, his most considerable novel: The Glass Bead Game. In 1946 he received the Nobel prize. He died in Switzerland in 1962.
The Glass Bead Game is played in the country of Castalia by the members of a lay order which is supported by the state and dedicated to the cultivation of the intellect. The Game is described in a long introduction to the book, which is a masterpiece of vague- ness. What emerges is that it is played on an elaborate abacus; how is not clear. It is primarily a form of music-making in which the wires of the abacus are the lines of the stave, but over the centuries its range has been extended to include philology, mathe- matics, science.
It is presumably a symbol for that level of cultural and intellectual achievement where the disciplines merge and the master of the game can range from one to another, having mastered the basic patterns. It repre- sents a love of standards for 'even during the heyday of the feuilleton there were everywhere individuals and small groups who had resolved to devote all their energies to preserving for the future a core of good tradition, discipline, method and intellectual rigour.' It is, in this sense, an antidote to the aleatory element in modern art. Curiously the masters of the Game indulge in what might, at first sight, seem an anti-intellectual activity—meditation in the Eastern style. But Hesse was a disciple of Jung whose in- fluence also appears in the use by the Master of bundles of sticks for casting lots and divining—this is the technique of I Ching, The Book of Changes, which is of great antiquity and occasionally alarming in its accuracy. (it is said that even Chairman Mao does not scorn to use it.) The hero of The Glass Bead Game is an orphan with the symbolical name of Joseph Knecht (Knecht being the German for 'ser- vant'). Joseph rises to the highest levels of the order and becomes Magister Ludi which, by another paronomasia, means both master of the game and head master, chief instruc- tor. He has grown up with a friend in the outside world called Designori (another pun), an aristocrat who lives in the order for a time and feels its pull but leaves because he is a man of action. He is like Hans Castorp's soldier cousin in The Magic Mountain, who is incapable of being an invalid in the sana- torium up among the snows and must return to the plains, to the vita activa.
When Joseph at last becomes disillusioned with the order because of its remoteness from the world, he renounces his high office and elects to tutor Designori's son who is talented, wild but consumed—this is what attracts the Master—with a desire to buy back the old family town-house which his father has sold to move into a modern build- ing. The boy is a traditionalist. Before Knecht can begin his teaching, he is drowned swimming with the boy in an icy lake. The boy is left with a sense of guilt and of the
need to face a life which 'would demand
greater things of him than he had ever before demanded of himself.'
This is a Bildungsroman in a triple sense —that it describes the education, the forma- tion of Knecht, that it is about the uses of education, and that it has a message: that the human spirit cannot, after all, flourish in seclusion. To which one can only say Amen. As a novel it is a museum-piece. The style is mannered, polished, slightly archaic; the translators have brilliantly caught its quality, its perilous closeness to fustian and preten- tious fine writing. It is a book from another, the pre-atomic age, and from a tradition which modern German writing has rejected on both stylistic and political grounds. Hesse was the last great German Romantic novelist.
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