The Swabian Solipsist

By LANCE MORROW

HERMANN HESSE, PILGRIM OF CRISIS

by Ralph Freedman; Pantheon;432 pages; $15

In the late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents, for their intense spiritual questing and abused sense of exclusion. The affinity was natural. The novelist remained something of an adolescent himself for all of his 85 years.

Hesse knew that he was "by no stretch of the imagination a storyteller." The fragmented 20th century, he thought, had destroyed the common cultural ground a writer needs to share with his audience. So he fabricated a sweeping drama of self-regard, of fictive autobiography and moral essay. Often, as in Siddhartha, he wrote in the mock profundities of fable enveloped in the incense of the East. The effects could be silly: " 'Govinda,' said Siddhartha to his friend, 'Govinda, come with me to the banyan tree. We will practice meditation.' " Hesse hung his earlier stories with necromantic swags. In the middle period of Steppenwolf, he contrived a surreal kind of existentialism. In his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi, the English title), composed during precisely the years when Hitler consolidated his power, Hesse invented his own classical serenity, all civilization encoded in an infinite chess game to be played like the Pythagorean music of the spheres, but in a motionless universe. The book was completed in Hesse's Swiss redoubt at Montagnola just about the time that Dachau and Auschwitz were becoming busiest. An overheated concern with relevance was not one of Hesse's faults.

Yet his work fascinated his countrymen from around 1905 to his death in 1962. They ranked him with Thomas Mann. In 1946 Hesse won the Nobel Prize, principally for The Glass Bead Game. Despite what one critic called "his self-indulgent solipsism raised to a more or less fine art," his meditations obviously found a strong resonance with the preoccupations and diseases of his century.

Ralph Freedman, a native of Germany who teaches comparative literature at Princeton, gives the author a fair and thorough hearing; his admiration for Hesse does not prevent his seeing clearly what an absurd and depressing character he could sometimes be. Freedman takes Hesse far too seriously, but perhaps any biographer is bound to, for Hesse was himself a painfully humorless man.

He was born in Calw, Wu"rttemberg, the son of Pietist Christian missionaries who once worked in India. At age 14, he bought a gun and tried to use it on himself. A parson pronounced it a case of "moral insanity." Melancholies came down on young Hermann like Black Forest fogs. All his life was surrounded by a disagreeable German neuroticism--hypochondria, threats of suicide, long rest cures at Baden, flirtations with alcoholism. Hesse was almost constantly in pain from eyestrain and other ailments, and was almost always in some stage of nervous breakdown (for a time, he was psychoanalyzed by Jung). In some clinical sense, he seemed to embody the breakdown of the century.

A narcissist is not a very good spiritual master. But in Hesse all kinds of ironies were at work. Despite his tortured self-preoccupation, he possessed a "genius for friendship." For a mystic, he was a very tough negotiator with his publishers. For all the fatuity of some of his spiritual excursions, he had at least some solid convictions rooted in the real world around him: a hatred of technology, for example. If action is character, of course, Hesse's honor was not served well by his comfortable Swiss silence during the Hitler years. His third wife, Ninon, was Jewish, but Hesse's mind was so torn by ambivalent impulses that he could not rouse himself to speak, even after his own works were banned by the Nazis.

Once in the '20s the pained introvert wrote his sister Adis: "Is it a pleasure to have been born human?" That self-pity kept wafting him back out of the world, into his spiritual dreams. Hesse had a lifelong romance with the East, but when he actually went there once in 1911 and saw the real thing, he was repelled. The Indians under the banyan tree were unwashed and miserable. It took poor Hesse years to recover his Brahmanic daydream. When the unpleasant details had been sufficiently transformed in the shrewd loneliness of the author's brain, he was then ready to retail the spiritual East as art again.

"Hesse had complicated feelings about Jews. On the one hand, Ninon was Jewish... At the same time he shared certain cliches about Jews that had already entered the language of the time. The word 'Aryan' crept into his personal letters ... Especially revealing was a letter to his friend Josef Englert, written in 1933, in which Hesse wrote at length about the 'cowardice' of the German Jews, echoing the German Jewish prejudices against Eastern Jews in allowing himself a phrase like, 'One might almost say that it serves them right if that were not too cruel under the circumstances.' His lack of prejudice, by his lights, was underscored by the further remark that 'Jews, like Germans, include next to their rough, stupid, and cowardly majority, a fine, wise, brave minority.' And he praised Martin Buber for not having given in 'either to the German or to the cowardly German-Jewish kind.' Whatever his sentiments, these remarks suggest that he had absorbed, to some extent, the racist language of the day."

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