Master of the Game

MAGISTER LUDI (502 pp.)--Hermann Hesse--Holt ($5).

When Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946, few U.S. readers had ever heard of him. Magister Ludi, his last and his greatest book, is not likely to make Hesse popular with them, but it will at least serve to give them an idea of what his dry, remote, ironic and highly individual writing amounts to. Hesse was born in Germany 72 years ago, wrote autobiographical novels and lyric poetry in his youth--he is considered one of the best German lyric poets since the age of Goethe --became a Swiss citizen during World War I in protest against German militarism. He traveled in India, wrote a volume on Hindu mysticism in his middle years, published a Dostoevskian psychological , novel in 1930 and after 15 years of silence brought out his masterpiece in 1945.

Magister Ludi has an underlying theme as savage as some of Jonathan Swift, but it is written in an elegant, leisurely, almost wearily lyrical prose. The combination is arresting. The book, laid in some remote and undefined future, purports to be a study of the career of one Joseph Knecht. Hesse is not so simple as to imagine that biographers in the future will write like those of the present. Many dates, names and places will mean little then, and many historical events nothing. This biographer of the future in the present rambles and rapturizes, leaves out everything a contemporary would regard as essential information and is, by current standards, as dull as Historian Robert Sherwood might have seemed to Suetonius.

Variable Alphabet. It appears, however (by page 320) that after a satiety of bloodshed and moral corruption, "a colossal need arose for truth and justice, for reason and for some form of order out of the chaos." The very alphabet and the multiplication table had become instruments of power politics, and were liable to be changed from one moment to the next. There was a growing longing for reason and "the rediscovery of a common idiom, for order, morality and valid measures." Out of this need arose the Order of . Eastern Wayfarers, a semi-religious body composed originally of scholars and musicians. Members were chosen as students, sent to elite schools, from which only the best were selected to become members of the Order. Since they were not allowed to marry, they were much favored as lovers in the towns where they received their training; after they became members, they followed lives of chastity. But to the biographer of the future, sex is of little interest and the subject is otherwise scarcely mentioned.

Out of the monastic life of the Order came the Bead Game, a kind of synthesis of human learning, which, in its subtlety, resembled both the chess game of master players and the improvisation of great musicians. One player stated a theme, perhaps a thought of a great philosopher, or a phrase of some medieval musician; his opponent replied with a complementary phrase, or with one opposing it, or related to it, and the Game proceeded, with constantly deepening associations, with references more varied, subtle and ingenious. The greatest players became the leaders of the Order, and the greatest of all its central authority, the Magister Ludi (master of the Game), who was regarded by the members as almost a god.

Paper World. Prior to this happy time, there had been the dismal Age of the Digest (mentioned with good-natured scorn), in which the effort of the intellectuals was to reduce knowledge to capsule form, and in which lectures and articles were turned out in a wild spirit of competition in almost inconceivable numbers, until the emptiness of a world built of paper brought on a collapse.

Where Protagonist Joseph Knecht fits into this is not as clear as it might be. He comes & goes between long essays on music, philosophy, theology, the Game and the Order. He was an orphan, was chosen for one of the elite schools, joined the Order, spent two years in China trying to incorporate Chinese thought into the Game, was sent on a sort of exchange scholarship to a Benedictine monastery, and at 37 became the youngest Magister Ludi in the history of the Order. After reaching the greatest height of the Order, he left it, and tried to return to the world, hoping to become a village schoolteacher.

Hesse is plainly smiling at all ivory-tower intellectuals, all tight little groups that seek salvation by separateness. Joseph Knecht apparently learned his lesson just in time. "We're all in this together,"

Joseph might conceivably have said. But sardonic Author Hesse, casting himself as the historian of the future, is not interested in making the history of the present as plain as all that. He leaves the reader to guess just what did happen to Joseph.

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