by John Irving
Of the limitations of the movie art: "The cave breathes what a film cannot communicate: stink."
Of Dorte and Harm's whole generation, which is my generation, the student-protest generation: "They have found themselves knee-deep in prosperity-determined consumption and pleasureless sex, but the student protest phase left sufficient imprint to keep the words and concepts of their early years available to them as an alternative, as something they can relapse into wherever they may be sitting or lying."
Of us all: "Our complexities and neuroses are mass-produced articles."
He writes (in 1979): "There's no shortage of great Fuhrer figures; a bigoted preacher in Washington and an ailing philistine in Moscow let others decide what they then proclaim to the world as their decision. Of course we still have (as trademarks of salvation) good old capitalism and good old communism; but thanks to their tried and true enmity, they are becoming more and more alike ... two evil old men whom we have to love, because the love they offer us refuses to be snubbed.
"And so we grope our disconsolate way into the next century. In school essays and first novels, gloom vies with gloom."
But the gloom that Grass perceives is always underlined with wit, and elevated by it: "My proposal to my Eastern neighbor-dictator would be that the two states should exchange their systems every 10 years. Thus, in a spirit of compensatory justice, the Democratic Republic would have an opportunity to relax under capitalism, while the Federal Republic could drain off cholesterol under communism."
Grass asks, "How will Sisyphus react to Orwell's decade?"
To Orwell he writes: "No, dear George, it won't be quite so bad, or it'll be bad in an entirely different way, and in some respects even a little worse."
Of Sisyphus he asks: "What is my stone? The toil of piling words on words? The book that follows book that follows book?... Or love, with all its epileptic fits?" (The writer's stone, he says, is a "good traveling companion.")
Headbirths also provides us with some terse, shorthand insights into Grass's earlier work: "It was a mistake to imagine that Cat and Mouse would abre-act my schoolboy sorrows. I never run out of teachers. I can't let them be: Fraulein Spollenhauer tries to educate Oskar; in Dog Years, Brunies sucks his cough drops; in Local Anaesthetic, Teacher Starusch suffers from headaches; in The Diary of a Snail, Hermann Ott remains a teacher even when holed up in a cellar; even the Flounder turns out to be a pedagogue; and now these two teachers from Holstein ..." his Dorte and Harm, who take up teaching, Grass admits, "with the best intentions." What prevents him from letting his teachers be, he writes, is "that my growing children bring school into the house day after day: the generation-spanning fed-upness, the to-do over grades, the search, straying now to the right and now to the left, for meaning, the fug that stinks up every cheerful breath of air!"
For such a small book, this is such a rich one. "In our country everything is geared to growth," Grass writes. "We're never satisfied. For us enough is never enough. We always want more. If it's on paper, we convert it into reality. Even in our dreams we're productive. We do everything that's feasible. And to our minds everything thinkable is feasible."
And of that truly German question -- its divided East and West parts -- he says, "Only literature (with its inner lining: history, myths, guilt, and other residues) arches over the two states that have so sulkily cut themselves off from each other." It is what Grass provides us with every time he writes: "Only literature." His gift for storytelling is so instinctually shrewd, so completely natural. If it's true, as he says, that he never runs out of teachers, he never stops being a teacher either. In The Flounder--which is, he writes, "told while pounding acorns, plucking geese, peeling potatoes" -- he doesn't resist indulging his irritation with the world of fools on whom fiction is largely wasted. "A good deal has been written about storytelling. People want to hear the truths But when the truth is told, they say, 'Anyway, it's all made up.' Or, with a laugh, 'What that man won't think up next!'"
Scherbaum, the favorite student in Local Anaesthetic, tries to reach the conscience of Berliners by setting fire to his beloved dachshund. He observes, with a sad truthfulness, that human beings are more apt to notice the suffering of animals, and be moved, than they are likely to care for the suffering of fellow humans. It's possible that, in the character of Scherbaum, Grass was thinking of the radical Rudi Dutschke, whom Grass calls (in Headbirths) a "revolutionary out of a German picture book." (Following an epileptic fit, Dutschke drowned in a bathtub.)
"What makes me sad?" Grass asks. "How he was carried away by his wishes. How his ideals escaped him at a gallop. How his visions degenerated into paperbacks."
At the time of his death, Dutschke was 39 -- my age (as of this writing). "Seldom has a generation exhausted itself so quickly," Grass writes. "Either they crack up or they stop taking risks." How true: we are a generation lacking in staying power.
Headbirths is not the literary jewel that Grass's second novel, Cat and Mouse, is. That gem is as fine a short novel as The Tin Drum is a triumphant major undertaking. And Cat and Mouse remains the best book with which a new reader might introduce himself to Grass, the novelist. But in all of Grass's work (and abundant, even, in this fictional, nonfictional, would-be movie of a book) one finds that flowering honesty that V. S. Pritchett calls fundamental to the Russian novelists of the 19th century ("the call to bare the breast and state one's absolute convictions"). Turgenev, Pritchett reminds us, believed that "art must not be burdened with all kinds of aims," that "without art men might not wish to live on earth," and that "art will always live man's real life with him." Grass celebrates this Russian conviction with everything he writes.
In 1920, seven years before Grass was born, Joseph Conrad wrote in his Introduction to The Secret Agent (published 12 years earlier): "I have always had a propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To justify. Not to insist that I was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses,"
Like Conrad, Grass freely indulges in such a "propensity to justify" his action -- and his work. It was unnecessary, however, for Conrad to conclude his Introduction as he did, claiming that he never "intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind." Of course he didn't! Gratuitousness is a charge fashionably aimed at good writers by squeamish and second-rate critics.
Writers today need to be thicker-skinned than Conrad, somehow more immune to such moralistic posing in intellectual garb -- though of course we aren't. "We all bear wounds," as Thomas Mann has noted. "Praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless," Mann wrote, "if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength."
Like Mann's, Grass's literary self-confidence is always present. He seems somehow born knowing that any violence done in the course of a novel's discovery of the truth is never gratuitous. In The Tin Drum, when the Nazis force the Jewish toy merchant, Sigismund Markus, to kill himself, little Oskar Matzerath knows he has seen his last tin drum. For poor Herr Markus, for himself -- for a Germany forever guilty for its Jews -- little Oskar mourns: "There was once a toy merchant, his name was Markus, and he took all the toys in the world away with him out of this world."
For readers who found The Flounder and The Meeting at Telgte too inaccessible, Headbirths will seem warmer, more personable and approachable. For the hard core of Grass's fans -- those of us who have tolerated (indeed, loved) each of his excesses -- Headbirths has the clear voice and familiar consciousness of a letter from an old friend. And to those nonreaders, if there still are any -- to those moviegoers who kn
ow of him only through Volker Schlondorff's admirable rendition of The Tin Drum -- this little book would be a mild, wise, mischievous starting place: a view of Grass, the good artist, taking notes, setting his shop in order.
Some readers find that the diary form offers access to a fiction writer's mind by exposing components rarely made available in the fiction (more often, concealed). Personally, I'd still recommend that one's initial experience with Grass be Cat and Mouse, but Headbirths is broadly entertaining enough to satisfy the most strenuous and demanding of Grass's faithful readers, and it is accessible enough to be inviting to the beginner. In whatever category of reader you see yourself, you can't be called well read today if you haven't read him. Gunter Grass is simply the most powerful and versatile writer alive.
Gunter Grass: King of the Toy Merchants (1982)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
"Gunter Grass: King of the Toy Merchants" was originally published in Saturday Review (March 1982). Ten years later, I introduced Grass to an audience at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City; the occasion was a public reading from The Call of the Toad-- Grass read in German, and I followed with the English translation. Some of my notes (from that spoken introduction) make a worthwhile follow-up to my essay of 13 years ago.
That night in New York, I said it was important for us to realize that Gunter Grass has a longstanding reputation of telling Germans what they don't want to hear. Understandably, there are many Germans who do not find Mr. Grass to be a friendly writer. When Grass made very serious fun of the Germany of the Third Reich (in The Tin Drum), many Germans laughed with him. When Grass makes very serious fun of the Germany of today, fewer Germans are laughing.
I know this firsthand. I was on a silly TV show with Mr. Grass at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the beginning of October 1990. On October 3rd, when the two Germanys became one, I was lying in my bed in my hotel room in Frankfurt, watching television. (I didn't know that -- precisely one year later -- my son Everett would be born on the first anniversary of this historic day.) In Bonn and in Berlin, the Germans were singing the publicly approved stanza of the anthem -- the official hymn of the Federal Republic: "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit fur das deutsche Vaterland? I asked my wife to turn off the TV; I was afraid I would soon be singing in my sleep -- it was already after midnight. Almost an hour later, in the dark, I woke up hearing another stanza, those different but familiar words (to the same melody).
"I thought you turned off the TV," I said to Janet.
"I did," Janet said. But the television had not turned itself back on. In the streets of Frankfurt, even under our hotel window, some conservative louts and general shitheads were singing "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles?
In the morning I went to a bookstore where I was supposed to autograph some books. The bookseller was embarrassed by the swastika that someone had painted on his window with a can of spray paint. "This means nothing," the bookseller told me. "They are merely vandals."
But how could a swastika in Germany mean exactly nothing?
On the silly TV show at the book fair, there had been three writers: Mr. Grass, myself, and the Russian poet, Yevtushenko. Mr. Yevtushenko was the oddest-looking of the three of us, because he wore an orange leather suit and American cowboy boots of a similar color; I remember that what he said was odd, too. Yevtushenko said he thought that the reunification of Germany was a good idea because it clearly made so many people happy. But Gunter Grass wasn't happy about it, and what was even odder than Mr. Yevtushenko's remark was how no one in the television audience really wanted to hear what Mr. Grass was unhappy about. They already knew.
Grass had already said that if Germany unified too quickly -- without certain careful stages (in preparation for the devastating changes) -- there would be rioting against foreigners, and renewed right-wing extremism; and Grass asked, wisely, what could possibly alleviate the anticipated bitterness of the greatly disadvantaged new citizens from the East... about 17 million of them. In essence, he was saying SLOW DOWN!
Frankly, this was the point of view I'd expected Grass to have, and I agreed with him. Quite the opposite of trivializing the past, Mr. Grass has always said that it is impossible to maximize the Holocaust -- that too much could never be made of it. And as for his predictions regarding a reunified Germany, he has been largely right; to be right about such horrors as now befall the new Germany does not make Mr. Grass any happier. Nor are Grass's critics in Germany altogether happy with him. On a recent cover of Der Spiegel (August 21, 1995), there is a photograph of Marcel Reich-Ranicki -- a senile tyrant, but a celebrated critic -- ripping Grass's newest novel in half; actually, Reich-Ranicki appears to have butted the book in half with his bald head. One would think that Germans would be sensitive to such a symbolic display of publicly and literally destroying a book. (Is ripping a novel in half a politically correct substitute for book-burning?) Grass, at least, was sensitive to the image: he withdrew a recent interview with Der Spiegel from publication.
The concept of a celebrated critic is an oxymoron to me; nevertheless, I feel I must explain to my fellow Americans that German literary culture is quite different from our own. Our literary culture is small and contained; our writers are of no political influence in our society. One happy result of the relative unimportance of writers in the U.S. is that literary critics are of even less importance to us. (Try to imagine any critic on the cover of Time or Newsweek!) But writers are important in German society, and they are of political influence, too; the perversion is that a critic of Reich-Ranicki's shrill and pompous sort can -- if only temporarily -- achieve a stature in Germany almost equal to Gunter Grass's stature there.
Would Woody Allen be on the cover of People magazine, and be on 60 Minutes, if what Woody wanted to tell us was why he disapproved of speedy reunification of Germany? Woody Allen is this country's most original filmmaker; I would be very interested to hear his views on German reunification -- and on a host of subjects related to his work -- but the only subject that has made Mr. Allen such widespread cover-story material in our culture is the melodrama of his legal battles with Mia Farrow.
We must remember that what writers say -- I mean, not only in their work -- is of much more sizable interest in Europe than it is here. And what Gunter Grass says in Germany is of the utmost interest to Germans. Furthermore, it is not just Germany that Mr. Grass has been critical of. In 1982, following a trip to Nicaragua, Grass said he felt ashamed that the United States was an ally of his country. He asked this provocative question: "How impoverished must a country be before it is not a threat to the U.S. government?"
This was first published in Die Zeit and later reprinted in Grass's collected essays On Writing and
Politics, which include his essay called "What Shall We Tell Our Children?" In it, Grass cites the guilt of the Protestant and Catholic churches for what happened to the Jews.
"In Danzig," Grass writes, "the bishops of both churches looked on, or stood indifferently aside, when in November of 1938 the synagogues in Langfuhr and Zoppot were set on fire and the shrunken Jewish community was terrorized by SA Sturm 96. At that time I was 11 years old and both a Hitler Youth and a practicing Catholic. In the Langfuhr Church of the Sacred Heart, which was 10 minutes' walk from the Langfuhr Synagogue, I never, up to the beginning of the war, heard a single prayer on behalf of the persecuted Jews, but I joined in babbling a good many prayers for the victory of the German armies and the health of... Adolf Hitler. Individual Christians and Christian groups shared the utmost bravery in resisting Nazism, but the cowardice of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany made them tacit accomplices.
"No television series says a word about that. The many-faceted moral bankruptcy of the Christian West would not lend itself to gripping, shattering, horror-inspiring action. What shall we tell our children? Take a good look at the hypocrites. Distrust their gentle smiles. Fear their blessing."
Gunter Grass, both in his fiction and in his courageous, often unpopular
politics, has done exactly this: he has consistently spoken out against the "many-faceted moral bankruptcy of the Christian West." He has not limited his speaking out to the repression of the West and the East, nor to the insidious fear-mongering of the right wing; he has also bashed the irresponsibility of the New Left. It is not surprising that he's made many enemies among those literati who are merely fashionable; among polemicists; among the politically cynical and the politically impatient. Predictably, Grass's critics have complained that his novels have become deliberately terrifying and apocalyptic. No kidding -- and no wonder. He has never been a writer who seeks to be liked. As a novelist, he is a wide-ranging moral authority; he's not supposed to be polite. In fact, he's often at his best when he's a little impolite.
That was what my former landlady in Vienna said about him. This was 1962, when I was a student at the University of Vienna. I was carrying around the German edition of Die Blech trommel, pretending my German was good enough so that I could read Grass in the original. I knew the book was terrific, but unfortunately I couldn't read it without a dictionary -- or without one or two Austrian students sitting beside me. Nevertheless, I carried the book around with me; it was a great way to meet girls. And one day my landlady saw me carrying the book around and she asked me what was taking me so long -- or was I reading Die Blechtrommel twice?
Well, I was surprised that a woman of my landlady's generation was also reading Gunter Grass -- in those days, I thought of Grass as exclusively student property -- and so I asked her what she thought of Grass, and (proper Viennese that she was) she said only: "Er ist ein bisschen unhoflich? ("He is a little impolite.")
