Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  This is a Christmas story, yes; yet it is first and foremost a cautionary tale. We are that corpse whose face is covered with a veil; we dare not take the veil away, for fear we shall see ourselves lying there. ("Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion!") This is a Christmas story, yes; as such, it has a happy ending. But, as Marley's Ghost tells Scrooge, the tale is truly a warning. We had best improve our capacity for human sympathy -- or else! We must love one another or die unloved.

  Most of us have seen so many renditions of A Christmas Carol that we imagine we know the story, but how long has it been since we've actually read it? Each Christmas we are assaulted with a new Carol; indeed, we're fortunate if all we see is the delightful Alastair Sim. One year, we suffer through some treacle in a Western setting: Scrooge is a grizzled cattle baron, tediously unkind to his cows. Another year, poor Tiny Tim hobbles about in the Bronx or in Brooklyn: old Ebenezer is an unrepentant slum landlord. In a few years, I'll be old enough to play the role of Scrooge in one of those countless amateur theatrical events that commemorate (and ruin) A Christmas Carol every season. We should spare ourselves these syrupy enactments and reread the original -- or read it for the first time, as the case may be.

  It may surprise us to learn that there is not one scene of Scrooge interacting with Tiny Tim, although that is a cherished moment in many made-for-television versions; it is also surprising that, in the epilogue, Dickens anticipates his own detractors. Of Scrooge, the author writes: "Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

  "He had no further intercourse with Spirits," the author adds in the final paragraph.

  Ironically, the success of A Christmas Carol prompted greed of such a shameless nature that only Ebenezer Scrooge {before his conversion) could have been pleased. It was not the first time that Dickens was plagiarized. Previously there had been published The Posthumous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, and Nichelas Nickleberry -- and even Oliver Twiss. But the imitations of A Christmas Carol were more offensive, more bold; in a weekly called Parley's Illuminated Library there appeared a plagiarism of A Christmas Carol -- together with the outrageous claim that it was "reoriginated from the original by Charles Dickens." Dickens attempted to stop publication, but the pirate publishers argued that when they had "reoriginated" The Old Curiosity Shop and Bar-naby Rudge, Dickens hadn't objected. Furthermore, the pirates argued, they had actually "improved" A Christmas Carol; among their additions to the original was a song for Tiny Tim!

  The legal efforts that Dickens made were not rewarded; in fact, his court costs of 700 pounds were a bitter blow to him. In A Christmas Carol, he had written of greed and redemption, but the law had treated him as if he "were the robber instead of the robbed." Only his readers would treat him faithfully.

  To his readers, Charles Dickens called himself "Their faithful Friend and Servant." In his Preface to the 1843 edition of A Christmas Carol, Dickens bestowed a generous benediction; he confessed his hopes for his "Ghostly little book" and for his readers -- "May it haunt their houses pleasantly." In truth, even in the troupe tent of an Indian circus -- not to mention here and now, 150 years after the Carol was written -- Dickens's "Ghost Story of Christmas" continues to haunt us pleasantly.

  The most famous child cripple in fiction is still wringing hearts. "His active little crutch was heard upon the floor," Dickens writes. Indeed, we can hear Tiny Tim's crutch tapping today.

  An Introduction to A Christmas Carol (1993)

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  A few fragments of this Introduction to A Christmas Carol first appeared in the same essay ("In Defense of Sentimentality") that The New York Times Book Review published on November 25, 1979, but that essay is more clearly identifiable as the origin of my Introduction to Great Expectations than it is recognizable as the origin of this Introduction. It is mystifying to me, however, to see how many readers reserve Dickens-- and hopefulness in general -- for Christmas. Indeed, what we applaud in Dickens -- his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity -- is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season. (The other name is sentimentality.) The same Dickens of A Christmas Carol can be found in Dickens's other work; yet today A Christmas Carol is loved around the world -- while much of Dickens's "other work" is not nearly as widely read.

  My Introduction to the Carol, not quite in its present form, was published on December 24, 1993, in The Globe and Mail, under the title "Their Faithful Friend and Servant"; it was also published, in the form you find it here, as "An Introduction to A Christmas Carol" in a Modern Library edition (1995).

  More than a century and a half ago, Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol; it was just two days after Christmas -- 2,000 people gave the author their rapt attention, and frequent applause. The reading took three hours, though in later years Dickens would prune A Christmas Carol to a two-hour performance; he liked it well enough that first time, however, to repeat the same reading three days later -- this time to an audience of 2,500, almost exclusively composed of working people, for whom he requested that the auditorium be reserved. He always thought they were his best audience.

  "They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried," Dickens said, "and [they] animated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together." He makes me wish I could have been there.

  It was at the author's insistence that the price of A Christmas Carol was kept as low as five shillings -- so that it might reach a wider audience. Dickens needn't have worried.

  GUNTER GRASS: KING OF THE TOY MERCHANTS

  There is still a youthful restlessness to the work of Gunter Grass -- an impatience, a total absence of complacency, a shock of unexpected energy that must be gratifying to those German writers who, in 1958, awarded Grass the prize of the Group 47 for his first novel, The Tin Drum. In the more than 20 years since its publication, Die Blechtrommel, as it is called in German, has not been surpassed; it is the greatest novel by a living author. More than 14 books later, Grass himself has not surpassed The Tin Drum, but -- more importantly -- he hasn't limited himself by trying. He has allowed himself the imaginative range of an international wanderer, while at the same time, at 54, he has remained as recognizably German as he was at 31 -- he was only 31 when he wrote The Tin Drum.

  One reason Grass remains forever young is that he exercises no discernible restraint on the mischief of his imagination or on the practical, down-to-earth morality of his politics. Gunter Grass is a writer whose political activism has included writing almost a hundred election speeches for Willy Brandt (in 1969), and 'whose recent fictional undertakings have included a dense, short, but crammed-full historical novel -- The Meeting at Telgte -- set at the end of the Thirty Years' War (1647), and a huge, discursive novel--The Flounder--that begins in the Stone Age and arrives in the present at a most contemporary "Women's Tribunal," where a talking fish is on trial for male chauvinism.

  Fortunately for the pleasure of his readers, Grass has not acquired a single gesture of literary detachment or intellectual pompousness. He remains engaged -- at once dead serious and a tireless prankster. He is our literature's most genuine eccentric. Writers as unique as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and as derivative as Jerzy Kosinski are under the shadow of what Grass does better than anyone else: against the authoritative landscape of history, he creates characters so wholly larger than life, yet vivid, that they confront the authority of history with a larger authority -- Grass's relentless imagi
nation. He does not distort history; he outimagines it.

  Perhaps, one day, he'll slow down and write an introduction to his work -- either to something new (if he feels old enough), or (if he feels patient enough to offer us some hindsight) to something old: possibly to a new edition of The Tin Drum, or to one of the less popular, more difficult works, Local Anaesthetic, From the Diary of a Snail, or Dog Years. (The last is an expansive Odyssey of a novel set in wartime and postwar Germany; it suffered popularly -- and wrongly -- by being ill-compared to The Tin Drum.) But until such a time, when Grass is willing to check his astonishing forward progress with the necessary calm required of reflection, we have no better general introduction to the methods of his genius than Headbirths.

  Written in late 1979, shortly after Grass returned from China (from a trip with the film director of The Tin Drum, Volker Schlondorff), Headbirths is first a political speculation -- set just before the 1980 German elections, when Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democrats (Grass's party) defeated the Christian Democrat and Bavarian Prime Minister, Franz Josef Strauss. It is also the creative musings for a film Grass never made (with Schlondorff) about a fictional German couple who travel to Asia to investigate how that part of the world is living, carrying with them the loaded political and personal problem of world population growth and their own ambivalent feelings about having a child. The premise of this slim, innocent-appearing book is what Grass calls a "speculative reversal."

  "What if," he writes, "from this day on, the world had to face up to the existence of 950 million Germans, whereas the Chinese nation numbered barely 80 million, that is, the present population of the two Germanys."

  As Grass mischievously asks, "Could the world bear it?"

  The title of the book, and the would-be film -- Headbirths -- refers to the god Zeus, "from whose head the goddess Athene was born: a paradox that has impregnated male minds to this day." The subtitle, The Germans Are Dying Out, originates from Franz Josef Strauss -- a fear-inspiring notion meant to provoke the anxiety, among Germans, that other, less-restrained nations are outproducing them and will overtake them.

  "And since fear in Germany," Grass writes, "has always had a high rate of increment and multiplies more quickly than do the Chinese, it has provided fear-mongering politicians with a program." Thus, right-wing election tactics and a trip to China provide Grass with an insight to a moral and political global concern: world population growth, world starvation, and the complicated, personal dignity that is called for in a conscientious contemporary couple's decision to have or not to have a child. With the accessibility of a diary or a journal -- an accessibility rare to the writer's more recent work -- Grass constructs a fictional couple and imagines their trip to Asia (on the eve of the German elections in which they are seriously, and liberally, involved).

  Within this deceptively plain narrative, Grass uncovers insoluble, irreducible complexity; he writes at his baroque best. "A couple straight out of a contemporary picture book," he calls his invented family -- he, named Harm; she, Dorte. "They keep a cat and still have no child." (They met at a sit-in against the Vietnam War.) They're serious; their political consciousness is keen. She belongs to the Free Democrats; he lectures about the Third World at Social Democratic meetings. Regarding China -- their Asian adventure -- they are schoolteachers traveling for their education; they care about being informed, and about being right. This problem about having a child or not having one -- it nags at them, personally and politically. "The child is always present. Whether they are shopping at Itzehoe's Holstein Shopping Center or standing on the Elbe dike at Brokdorf, bedded on their double mattress or looking for a new secondhand car: the child always joins in the conversation, makes eyes at baby clothes, wants to crawl on the Elbe beach, longs at ovulation time for the sprinkling that fructifies, and demands auto doors with childproof locks. But they never get beyond the what-if or supposing-that stage, and Harm's mother (as surrogate child) is alternately moved to their apartment and shipped to an old-people's home, until some forenoon shock derails their single-tracked dialogue."

  Like so many motifs in Grass's work, the couple's dilemma is repeated, is used as a refrain, is compounded; sometimes it is converted into elegy, sometimes it is mocked. That he is writing a book as instructions for a film provides Grass with the opportunity to visualize the couple's indecision. He accomplishes this with characteristic irony and compassion. "This time Dorte's laugh is really a bit too loud. And just as spontaneously, she can take the contrary view. 'But I want a child, I want a child! I want to be pregnant, fat, round, cow-eyed. And go moo. Do you hear? Moo! And this time, my dear Harm, father of my planned child, we're not calling it off after two months. So help me. As soon as we're airborne ... I'm going off the pill!'

  "The director's instructions are roughly: Both laugh. But because the camera is still on them, they do more than laugh. They grab hold of each other, roughhouse, peel each other's jeans off, 'fuck,' as Harm says, 'screw,' as Dorte says, each other on the dike among the cows and sheep, under the open sky. A few guards at the still-future construction site of the Brokdorf nuclear power plant may be watching them, no one else. Then two low-flying pursuit planes. ('Shit on NATO!' Dorte moans.) In the distance, ships on the Elbe at high tide.

  "A note on one of the slips I took with me to Asia and then home again says, 'Shortly before landing in Bombay or Bangkok -- breakfast has been cleared away -- Dorte takes the pill.' Harm, who only seems to be asleep, sees her and accepts it with fatalism."

  And, intricately woven through this would-be screenplay, Grass reveals his actual Asian travels with Schlondorff. "In every city we stopped in I read simple chapters from The Flounder: how Amanda Woyke introduced the potato into Prussia." In every great novelist's mind, everything is related to everything else; the history of food, Grass notes, "is timely in present-day Asian regions." It takes a cook, which Grass is reputed to be -- and a good one -- to give food the honorable role of subplot, which a German liver sausage is given here. A "plot-fostering sausage," it is rightly called. Harm and Dorte are stuck with a kilo of it to take with them to Asia, a typically German gift intended for some obscure relative of a friend of a friend, supposed to be living in Java and pining away, of course, for liver sausage from the Fatherland.

  And so our German tourists, despite their serious-mindedness, carry a sausage with them, a sausage that never finds its customer. In countless hot hotel rooms, deprived of refrigeration, the sausage sits, grows green and dubious, gets packed up and travels again. Finally, this world-traveling sausage returns to Germany -- in somewhat the same state as the accompanying couple, a little the worse for wear, and symbolically undelivered: Dorte and Harm, at the book's end, still don't know whether or not to have a child. "Even in China," Grass chastises them, they wouldn't know "whether or not to bring a child into the world." (It's not an easy question.)

  As with the characters in his other books, Grass makes fun of Harm and Dorte without ever removing his sympathy from them. As with his masterful handling of the subplot of the liver sausage, he demonstrates-- even in this little book -- his scrupulousness of detail, which is the truest indication of a writer's conscience. On a "wide sandy beach ... a stranded turtle becomes a photograph"; in a village of 5,000 inhabitants, 3,000 are children ("worm-ridden, visibly ill, marked by eye diseases. They don't beg, they don't laugh or play; they're just quietly too many").

  Of his travels, Grass writes that he "loyally wrote 'writer' on the profession line of [his] immigration card. A profession with a long tradition, if the word was really in the beginning. A fine, dangerous, presumptuous, dubious profession that invites metaphoric epithets. An East German apparatchik, a Chinese Red Guard, or Goebbels in his day might have said what Franz Josef Strauss, leaving his Latin on the shelf, said a year ago in German. Writers, he said, were 'rats and blowflies.'"

  Of himself and Schlondorff, Grass remarks: "What did we drink to? Since our glasses were often refilled, we drank to contradictions, to the repeatedl
y contested truth, naturally to the health of the people (whoever they may be), and to the white, still-spotless paper that clamors to be spotted with words. And we drank to ourselves, the rats and blowflies."

  He calls himself "childlike like most writers." Probably this is why the mischief lives in him still. He is serious enough to know what any truly serious person knows: that the confidence for enduring mischief can come from only the greatest seriousness. In The Flounder he writes, "Fairy tales only stop for a time, or they start up again after the end. The truth is told, in a different way each time." And at one point in Headbirths, he keeps Dorte and Harm "circling over Bombay without permission to land, because I forgot to inject something that's in my notes and should have been considered before takeoff: the future."

  As for the future, Grass is wisely cautious about ours. He even speculates that the Germans may be dying out. "And is it not possible that German culture (and with it literature) will come to be prized as an indivisible but manifold unity only after and because the Germans have become extinct?" Although he is fun to read, Grass is never so insecure as to be polite.

  (In praising the work of Celine, Kurt Vonnegut has written: "He was in the worst possible taste ... he did not seem to understand that aristocratic restraints and sensibilities, whether inherited or learned, accounted for much of the splendor of literature ... he discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes. Every writer is in his debt... no honest writer ... will ever want to be polite again.")

  Grass also knows how to be harsh. Of his character Dorte: "Now that she wants a child -- 'This time my mind is made up!' -- she has been tiptoeing on religious pathways. With Balinese women she offers up little flower-patterned bowls of rice in temples under holy trees, in each of which a white, fertility-bestowing woman is said to dwell." On the other hand, she stops sleeping with Harm ("I haven't got to that stage yet'").