Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  To make the tale more credible, let me add: One of the jurors of the poetry contest had called me gifted and recommended me to the man named Richter as a participant, but the latter had hesitated until then to invite me.

  Anyway, the poet kissed his young wife, who was a dancer, tucked seven or nine poems into his pocket to keep the tale going, boarded the bus, descended at Rupenhorn House, and entered the sumptuous villa – once inhabited by some Nazi bigwig – in the early afternoon, when the members of the Group, founded in 1947, were taking a coffee break and were talking cleverly with and past each other. This too was worthy of Hans Christian Andersen.

  The vague impressions that I, the sculptor who thought of himself as a poet, had of the Group’s existence and what held it together came from newspaper reports. Of the year ’47 itself, however, I had very clear impressions based on my own experience: it was then – the year of that hardest of winters, a winter that refused to give in, and of more paneless windows than panes available on the market – that I began my training as a stonemason, using pointed and toothed chisels to turn Silesian marble into children’s tombstones, and wrote poems on the side, mere ditties, really, of which not a line has remained.

  As I entered the Wannsee villa I saw men and women sitting at neatly laid tables. They were drinking coffee, eating cake, and talking clever. Knowing none of the assembled poets yet wishing to move the tale forward, I took a seat at an unoccupied table and possibly thought about the year ’47, when the winter was so severe that the Düsseldorf Academy of Art was closed because of a coal shortage.

  A waitress wearing an apron and cap came up to the table where I was sitting so lost and forlorn and asked the new arrival if he was a poet. It was a question that hurt.

  When the fairy-tale prince responded with a casual yes, the waitress took him at his word, curtsied, and brought him a cup of coffee and a piece of cake that tasted like the cake the master stonemason Göbel’s wife used to bake. She who kept a goat named Genoveva that I had to take out on a rope to forage in the spring of ’47, and that made me a sorry sight.

  The story of the goat came back to me in the form of a fairy tale, comparable to the one that had just begun, though I was no longer a sorry sight; no, I was a confident young man with nothing to lose and everything imaginable to gain, like the soldier home from the wars who makes his fortune in Andersen’s tale ‘The Tinderbox’.

  What I saw and experienced seemed oddly unreal or of an exaggerated reality. Nevertheless, I knew some of those gathered there by name. I had read something or other of Heinrich Böll’s. I liked a few of Günter Eich’s poems: I had read more of Wolfgang Koeppen and Arno Schmidt, but they didn’t belong to the Group. Böll and Eich were inter-war years and war years older than the sculptor who saw himself as a poet.

  Suddenly a portly man with full eyebrows appeared at my table to help the tale along. He gave me a stern look. He wanted to know what I was doing there with all the coffee-drinking, clever-talking writers, who I was, where I came from. Later he said the new arrival had looked suspicious to him. He’d seen me as a shady character up to no good, possibly even an agent provocateur intent on disrupting the gathering.

  Only after I had produced and smoothed out the telegram did the stern look disappear. ‘I see. So that’s who you are. Right. We were expecting another poet this afternoon.’

  Then the man named Richter, who plays the King Thrush-beard role in the tale and who had invited me as a stopgap but couldn’t see that he would soon become the young poet’s mentor, said, ‘Right after the coffee break so-and-so is going to read, then Bachmann, and then someone else. And then – what’s your name again? – it’s your turn.’

  Who ‘so-and-so’ and ‘someone else’ were I didn’t know. The only name that had something vaguely familiar about it – she was well enough known for him to have used her surname only – was Bachmann.

  ‘There will be criticism afterwards,’ he announced. ‘That’s the way the Group does things.’

  It is certain that the man named Richter turned back after moving away and told the young poet, ‘Make sure your voice is loud and clear.’

  I’ve kept that in mind all my life when I give public readings. My friend Joseph, who by 1947 had become a student of philosophy and theology at the seminary in Freising, read his pious rubbish to me from a little black book as we huddled there under the tent at the Bad Aibling camp in a voice so soft and breathless that in a tale sewn of a completely different cloth I thought, He won’t amount to much.

  Everything proceeded as my ‘fairy-tale uncle’ Richter had predicted. When a man I didn’t know read a prose passage before Bachmann and another man I didn’t know read a prose passage after her, both readers were criticized by the Group members almost before they could close their manuscripts: roundly, brutally, some accurate, some wide of the mark.

  That was the way the Group did things. When the Group first met, which was the year before they had taken a name, there were readings immediately followed by criticism. Father Stanislaus, the man in charge of the library at Caritas House, had read poems by Georg Trakl to the young poet when he was still a stonecutter. They were very sad, very beautiful, and easy to imitate.

  One of the critics who appeared in the never-ending tale had the last name of Kaiser – though an emperor he was not – and the first name of Joachim. He looked about my age but spoke so like a book – though with an East Prussian tinge – that, ashamed of my inner stammer, I said nothing, much as I would have liked to contradict him.

  And when Bachmann, who struck me as diffident, began to read or, rather, weep her extraordinarily beautiful poems – the weepy quality coming from the quivery plaintive tone of her delivery – I said to myself, If that ever so eloquent Kaiser comes down on the terribly frail Bachmann the way he did on the unknown man who preceded her, you will ask for the floor and stand up for the weeping or near-weeping poet, stammer or no stammer. Didn’t one of the poems she read, ‘Tell me, my love’, have a line in it tantamount to a cry for help: ‘One stone can soften another’?

  But that Kaiser, who in the year the Group was founded was just as much a twenty-year-old as the former junior stonemason but was studying how to talk like a book with Adorno in Frankfurt-am-Main and learning to analyse everything, including the dialectics of Grimms’ fairy tales, played the part of ‘the stone to be softened’ and lauded everything Bachmann read: she was ‘clearly on her way to consummate form’.

  The well-read Franciscan Father Stanislaus had said much the same thing when he solemnly entrusted the small Trakl volume to me. So the young poet held his tongue and did not open his mouth until he was sitting on a chair beside the man named Richter and began to read his poems, seven or nine in number, including ‘Open Wardrobe’, ‘Polish Flag’, and ‘Three Lord’s Prayers’, to the members of Group 47 in a ‘loud and clear’ voice, as he had been advised.

  And so the tale moved on: Once upon a time there was a young sculptor who made his first appearance as a poet. He did not suffer from stage fright because he was confident in his poems, having inhaled them from the Berlin air. And since he followed the instructions and read each line loud and clear, everyone in the audience could understand every word.

  Afterwards what he had read received praise from all sides. Someone spoke of a ‘predatory spirit’ and hazarded an evaluation that other critics took up and, searching for other comparisons, varied. Though it may be that someone, possibly the Kaiser whose first name was Joachim, warned against exaggerated praise. But since even the man, with the bushy eyebrows, called Richter, who sat next to the reader’s chair – the ‘electric chair’, as it was called – appeared satisfied or at least said he had heard ‘a refreshingly new voice’, he asked to be told again the name of the young sculptor who had just performed as a poet, because he had forgotten it and now felt it should be written down in full, and that is how the man to whom I later, much later, dedicated my story The Meeting in Telgte got to hear my name.

&nbs
p; Even when the young sculptor who had just proved himself a poet got up from his chair, the tale did not want to end. He immediately found himself surrounded by half a dozen editors, who introduced themselves as representing the publishers Hanser, Piper, Suhrkamp, and S. Fischer. They grabbed the seven or nine poems the poet had typed up at home in his damp cellar room on his Olivetti portable in two copies, thanks to a sheet of blue carbon paper. They refused to give them back and kept talking about themselves in the plural – ‘You’ll be hearing from us’, ‘You can expect to hear from us soon’, ‘We’ll be in touch’ – so he was tempted to think that before long he would experience if not a golden, then a silver, age.

  AFTER THAT THE tale loses its momentum: I heard not a word from the editors who had promised so much. Only a man with a physique that looked somehow askew who had introduced himself as Walter Höllerer, the publisher of a literary journal called Akzente, kept his promise and published several of my poems.

  Then, once the recently praised poet had got his sculptor hands full of clay and plaster, the tale started up again. An editor from Luchterhand who claimed to have been elbowed out of the crowd by the other editors after the young unknown poet’s reading asked me politely whether – if I had not long since signed up with Suhrkamp or Hanser – I was still free. If so, he, Peter Frank, would like to publish a selection of my verse.

  What a beautiful beginning, a beginning that put an end to both the poet’s anonymous existence and his hidden innocence: ‘How good it is that nobody knows my name is Rumpelstiltskin …’

  Because Peter Frank, a gentle soul with an Austrian lilt and a tendency to stray from the beaten path, paid a visit to our idyllic ruin, and no sooner did I show him some of my sketches with lyrical motifs than he agreed to include, as I had suggested, a dozen of my pen-and-ink drawings in the poetry volume and to pay, as I had demanded, extra for them. He even agreed – in the name of the publisher, Eduard Reifferscheid – to my request for a royalty of 12.5 per cent of the retail price for each copy sold. If I was so straightforward, it was because I saw the rate as the basis for my material existence.

  The Luchterhand house, so I had heard, had made a success of publishing chiefly legal literature, including a loose-leaf compendium, but at the publisher’s express request now wished to expand into post-war German literature and had charged the well-known writer Alfred Andersch to run their literary journal Texte und Zeichen. Some of the poems could appear there first and – ‘it goes without saying’ – I would receive separate payment for them. How good it was that my poor mother taught me so early on to collect debts.

  But, to bring the tale to a close, when signing the contract, which provided me with yet another payment, this time for the cover image, I was blinded by fairy-tale thoughts of a young poet’s first book and overlooked the option clause, that paragraph of small print stating I was obligated to offer my next book to Luchterhand first.

  WAS THERE ANY reason to believe in a next book? Was there anything besides The Flood, a play in two acts, the one-act Ten Minutes to Buffalo, and some sketches for a play in four acts that was to be called Uncle, Uncle and was meant as my tribute to the absurd? Was there even an inkling in the direction of a book? Or to put it another way: did I see my debut as an event that could be repeated in the foreseeable future?

  Not likely. I had been writing poems for as long as I could remember. Writing them and throwing them away. I would never have just foisted such things on the reading public just because I felt compelled to write. I was as certain of the inadequacy of everything my pen had created until then, as I had been confident in earlier years about my future possibilities.

  The poems that came to me in the Berlin air were the first that were entirely my own, the first that demanded to be spoken, read, printed. At the same time, the pen-and-ink drawings for the small paperbound volume The Merits of Windfowl that was to become my first book were no mere illustrations; they were a graphic anticipation and continuation of the verse. They were done with a very fine point and arose out of a series of sketches in which filigree fowl are scattered by the wind, spiders sink into glasses, locusts occupy a city and at the same time are food for prophets. A doll squints and thereby escapes being hit by arrows; twittering scissors fly; piles of ears lie on the beach; and human-sized midges become visual metaphors. Word and image flow from the same ink in a highly personal and concrete take on the world.

  Whenever I call to mind where my sorcery on paper took place, the basement of a world-war ruin near Berlin’s Dianasee, I get the feeling that without seeking it I had found something on a double track that suited my egocentricity and sense of humour and made the author think it perfectly natural to have the poems and drawings published together. The first printing proceeded according to contract – a contract reflecting my fairy-tale wishes – though only 735 copies were sold in the course of three years.

  NOT UNTIL LATER did it become clear, in isolated lines and half-lines, to what extent the poems foreshadowed my second book. From ‘School for Tenors’, in which glass-shattering songs are tested, to the final poem, ‘Music for Brass Band’, in which there is a child with a helmet folded from an old newspaper on his head, motifs come to the fore that point to things still concealed in the white-red and red-white play of the ‘Polish Flag’.

  One could have taken all of it as finger exercises sufficient unto themselves. When I read ‘My Green Meadow’ – my first prose piece, the result of the previous year’s trip to Spain – at a meeting of Group 47 six months later, there was no way of knowing that, ‘naked and sensitive’, the snail made monumental in the course of the narrative would pave the way to future prose: that its slimy trail would later measure out political battlegrounds and that it would talk progress out of the dream of a great leap forward.

  At first, however, there were only hints, gropings, and unconscious anticipation for which there was no explanation. We might surmise that a vast mass of material lay trapped and was showing signs, but lacking form it was not yet ready for the light of day.

  Writing or drawing, I practised the art of evasion with all the skill I’d picked up along the way; I delicately circumvented obvious abysses, had no qualms about making excuses, and chose material that celebrated stasis: fiction nurtured on Kafka and suffering from anorexia, drama revelling in hide-and-seek language, wordplay that led merrily to more wordplay.

  I could easily have engaged in productive time-wasting and made myself look interesting at Group 47 meetings with new artistic devices if the massive weight of the German past and hence my own could have somehow been ignored. But it stood in the way. It tripped me up. There was no getting round it. As if prescribed for me, it remained impenetrable: here was a lava flow that had barely cooled down, there a stretch of solid basalt, itself sitting on even older deposits. And layer upon layer had to be carried away, sorted, named. Words were needed. And a first sentence was still missing.

  THE TIME HAS come to close the drawers, turn the pictures to the wall, erase the tapes, and bury the snapshots, in which one after the other I look older and older. The junk room full of archived manuscripts and accumulated prizes must be sealed. Everything left over after word making, the unused grist, the dust-laden glory, the obsolescent disputes must be removed from view, so as to focus, with memory now unburdened, on the young man who around the year 1955, wearing a beret, then a cap, is trying to form a first sentence out of as few words as possible.

  Without actually intending to, he had not so much abandoned the world of earthy clay and plaster dust as expanded into the field of literature. This is known as the split in gymnastics. Was it so strenuous that it tore me apart?

  Until then I had propped up the bar drinking beer and schnapps among painters and sculptors; now I found myself in the company of writers drinking red wine into the dawn. Only yesterday I had listened while Lud Schrieber went on about his doings, the sufferings of superfluous Ptolemaists, the splendours of antiquity; now I had the ring of my literary contemporar
ies in my ear: Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s verbal acrobatics took my breath away, Martin Walser’s torrent of words swept me into unknown regions.

  My teacher Karl Hartung had with few words turned me into a master pupil, but I was still spending a good part of my time in the ruin near the Dianasee, where the clattering, stuttering Olivetti ate up sheet after sheet of typing paper and never seemed sated.

  The dancer at two weddings. I could go on listing reasons for my unrest, but no clearly delineated picture would come of it: I am unable to piece myself together, there are only fragments. In one photograph I’m sitting next to a standing bronze figure that resembles a bird in its upward stretch and appears in a prose poem of purely literary provenance: ‘Five birds. Their childhood was: being a post, casting a shadow, being nice to every dog, being counted …’

  Anna, however, was still keen on leaps and turns, even after she exchanged Mary Wigman’s temple for Tatjana Gsovsky, trading the constant foot pain of modern dance for the torture of classical ballet. In ‘The Ballerina’, my first essay for Höllerer’s Akzente – written in the following year, after we had left Berlin – a declaration of love now plain-spoken, now concealed, I compared the agony and ecstasy of both forms of dance and came in the end to an appreciation of Kleist’s marionettes, Kokoschka’s life-size dummies, and Schlemmer’s triadic figurines.

  Then, after a cold, wet winter, Anna began to have health problems. The idyllic basement flat, where summer was not long enough for our togetherness, proved hard on her kidneys and bladder. The outside wall had dry rot. Everything smelled musty. The window wouldn’t quite close. And the stove smoked even though its flue went through the outside wall and into the open air.

  I was insisting on a move. Anna wanted to stay. And when at last in early ’56 or late ’55 we loaded the rented van with our cheap furniture, the wardrobe, the double mattress, she couldn’t tear herself away from the view of the garden’s undergrowth, the neighbouring villa in ruins, and the sunsets; so permanently had she nested. As the sunlight filtered obliquely through the window from the west, she kept sweeping the flagstones so people would say that when we moved from the Königsallee to Uh-landstrasse we had left our rented basement in mint condition.