by John Irving
In his 21st book, The Call of the Toad, Mr. Grass is even a little impolite about such a revered subject as death -- especially concerning where we want to be buried. If Grass once described a writer's gradual progress as "the diary of a snail," now the writer has swallowed a toad; it is this creature (the toad within him) that compels him to speak. Gunter Grass's toads have a way of speaking to us even after they've been flattened in the road.
The Call of the Toad is an exquisite novel, both political and a love story. It is as bitterly comic and ironic a short novel as Mr. Grass's Cat and Mouse; it is as moving and touching a love story as Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, but it doesn't drift as far into fantasy as that novel -- as wonderful as that novel is, The Call of the Toad is better. Indeed, as in the very best of his novels, Mr. Grass is Dicken-sian -- in the sense that he combines darkly comic satire with the most earthly love, the most positively domestic affection.
In his excellent review of The Call of the Toad (on the front page of The New York Times Book Review), John Bayley observes that Grass's "fellow Germans may be inclined to say that he is becoming all too obviously a merely humorous and lightweight novelist, but they will be wrong." I agree: many of Mr. Grass's fellow Germans and critics have already been wrong about him.
Just as Gunter Grass is capable of outimagining history, he will outlast his critics -- just as snails make their own progress, and toads go on crossing the road.
In 1962, I was proceeding at less than a snail's pace through Die Blechtrommel; it was embarrassing, because I could handle my professors at the University of Vienna -- I could fake it, in German, well enough to pass my courses -- but I couldn't read German as complex as the German of Gunter Grass. Finally, a friend from the States saved me: he sent me the English translation of The Tin Drum, and from that moment I knew that all I ever wanted to do was to be like Oskar Matzerath; was to be funny and to be angry; was to stay funny and to stay angry.
Then one night -- this was easily more than 10 years ago -- Gunter and I had dinner in New York; as we were saying good-bye, I thought that he looked a little worried. Grass often looks worried, but what he said surprised me because I realized that he was worried about me. He said: "You don't seem quite as angry as you used to be." This was a good warning; I've never forgotten it.
After leaving Gunter in Frankfurt, the day after reunification, I traveled to several other German cities. I was on a book tour. I was reading largely to university students -- in Bonn, in Kiel, in Munich, in Stuttgart. About a hundred times, students asked me if I had given Owen Meany the same initials as Oskar Matzerath as a gesture of homage to Gunter Grass -- a kind of tipping the hat -- and I said Yes, Yes, Yes (of course, of course, of course) about a hundred times. But I had also been quoted in the press as agreeing with Grass about the problems of reunifying Germany too quickly; everywhere I went, although the audiences at my readings were generally friendly, there was always at least one unfriendly question from the audience -- it always concerned the matter of my agreeing with Grass.
It was Grass they were angry with. As for me, they thought I was just some fool foreigner who was going along with what Grass had said. All I did was repeat what he had said, and repeat that Gunter Grass had always made good sense to me. But this answer was unsatisfying to the students; they had already embraced the future -- they did not want to be reminded of the past.
To them, there was comfort in a mob, for a mob can drown out any single voice. It is inevitable that we writers take no comfort from a mob. A mob always wants to go too fast. Our method is moving slowly and speaking at length, like snails and toads.
That was the end of my book tour in Germany, about one week after reunification.
That night in New York, when I introduced Gunter Grass to an appreciative audience at the 92nd Street Y, I concluded my introduction by stating my opinion that Grass is "one of the truly great writers of the 20th century." It sounded monumental in German -- even in my German. "Hier ist meiner Meinung nach einer der wirklich Grossen der Weltliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts -- Gunter Grass."
And now, as I write, comes a letter from Gunter in Berlin. We will be together at the Frankfurt Book Fair again; the German translation of A Son of the Circus (in German, Zirkuskind) will be published in the fall of '95, at the same time as a new novel by Grass -- Ein weites Feld. A literal translation: A Wide Field. A novel of epic proportions.
Grass suggests that Janet and Everett and I visit him and his wife, Ute, in their house in Behlendorf in September, before the madness of the book fair. My German publisher is planning some readings for me in several German theaters -- in Kiel, in Hamburg, in Munich, in Berlin (in addition to Frankfurt). It shouldn't be difficult for me to get away from Hamburg on my first weekend in Germany -- I can take the train to Lubeck, and then a taxi, or I can drive directly to Behlendorf from Hamburg in about an hour.
In his letter, Gunter says that he hopes my shoulder surgery has been successful; he is facing some surgery on his nose, he adds -- he came down with a virus infection immediately upon completing the manuscript of his new novel. (This has happened to almost every writer I know: the body lets down after the end of a big book.)
In his letter, there are some directions to his house in Behlendorf; the house is described as "weissgetuncht," which I think means "white-tinted"-- probably "whitewashed." (Grass's English is much better than my German, yet he always writes to me in German. I write to him in English.)
I'm looking forward to seeing him -- this time especially, because I have a story to tell him. It's a true story -- about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane.
I was taking an Air France flight from Toronto to Paris. Everett and Janet were seated across the aisle from me; my seat companion was an elderly woman with a disturbingly deep cough. She had a refined German accent and a face of patrician detachment, of unending wisdom and constraint; with hindsight, this should have been all that was necessary in order for me to recognize her father in her, but I was misled by the only name that was printed on her boarding pass, which she repeatedly turned face-up and face-down, like a playing card, on the armrest between us. The name on her boarding pass was Borgese -- she was a German who'd married an Italian, I supposed.
I liked her very much, but not her cough. I drank a beer, she sipped a Scotch. She was so eloquent, but concise. I began to wish I were better dressed. I think she said her first husband was Czech; the Italian was her second -- by the brevity of her accounting for them, I presumed she'd outlived them both.
Of her children and grandchildren she spoke at length; on this trip, she told me, she would be visiting her daughter in Milan. But she had some business in France to attend to first, she said.
And what business was she in? I asked her. Oceans, she replied. She was on her way to a conference on oceans -- she was invited to conferences on oceans all over the world. Europe, Mexico, India, the Caribbean -- after all, oceans are everywhere. Was she a marine biologist? An environmentalist? An expert on fishing or fish? It was with some impatience that she dismissed my crude attempts to categorize her. Her field was "everything to do with oceans," she said.
I ordered the fish. She told the flight attendant that she was a vegetarian; she would choose the vegetables she wanted when she could see them, she said. This sounded so sensible; I felt like a cannibal for eating the fish -- her business was probably protecting the oceans from the likes of me.
Since our flight had left for Paris from Toronto, she assumed I was a Canadian. No, I was an American, I confessed. She had lived in the United States, she told me; she'd not liked it. She was a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax now; I imagined that Nova Scotia was a wise choice for someone who loved oceans -- the warm current of the Gulf Stream flowing near the cold land.
I had a glass of red wine with my fish; I can't help it -- I despise white wine. She continued to sip her one Scotch with her judicious selection of vegetables. As she talked, her elegance made me feel more and more oafish. I was en
route to France to promote the French translation of A Son of the Circus; self-engendered publicity for my own novel
Struck me as exceedingly crass in comparison to her field -- she promoted oceans. (The title in French, Un enfant de la balle, sounded slightly less crass, but I was unsure of how to pronounce it.)
It reluctantly emerged that I was a novelist; she hadn't heard of me, or read any of my novels. Frankly, I felt relieved. Novels can't compare to oceans -- not even long novels. Furthermore, I had the feeling that, when she'd been a girl in Germany, even the bankers in her family were more cultured and better educated than what traipsed among us as literary types today -- myself included.
Oh, her father had been a novelist, she said -- she didn't offer his name. Meanwhile, I had swallowed some red wine the wrong way; my eyes were watering. She even ate exquisitely. I felt I might as well throw down my knife and fork, and dig in with both hands. Finally, she had a second Scotch; she drank so little I'd begun to feel like a drunk, too.
Suddenly there was spontaneous agreement between us: I believe the topic of conversation concerned how few good books had not been belittled by the movies that had been made from them... well, who wouldn't spontaneously agree with that? And then a coughing fit overcame her. It was too terrible a seizure to ignore, but there was nothing I could do -- she coughed and coughed. It was a cough worthy of the daughter of the man who gave us Hans Castorp and The Magic Mountain, and all the rest; it was a cough that sounded ready for the sanatorium. But it was only after she quieted her cough, and dismissed it with an utter lack of concern -- she said she'd had the flu -- that I suddenly saw, in her noble profile, that haunted face of her father.
Elisabeth Mann Borgese was her name, the last surviving child of Thomas Mann. She must have made the move to Princeton and to Los Angeles -- and then to Zurich, where he died. I regret that I didn't ask her. Instead, we talked about the film of Death in Venice. Visconti's idea to make Gustave Aschenbach a composer instead of a writer -- Visconti made him Mahler -- was not at all bad for a film, she declared. But the obviousness of the sexual attraction that Aschenbach feels for Tadzio, the beautiful boy, was nothing her father had intended -- "purely Italian" was what I think Ms. Mann Borgese said of such obviousness. (Maybe I said that.)
Elisabeth Mann Borgese would go on to say that she experimented with dogs -- cheerfully comparing their intelligence to that of her grandchildren. While she loved her grandchildren, and they were doubtless very smart, her dogs were far more educable, she said. One dog could play the piano, another could type -- with their noses. At first I doubted this: dogs' noses seem too sensitive for piano playing and typing. If she'd said, with their paws ... well, possibly. I felt guilty for thinking that there was some element of her father's fiction-writing capacities in her.
I felt far worse for imagining that whatever was making her cough was terminal. It was all because of the way she'd dismissed her cough by saying that she'd had the flu -- implying that she was over it. I became worried about her; only later did I realize that I could not escape thinking of her as someone I had met in one of her father's novels.
There is that air of dismissal about the first sentence of The Magic Mountain,, too. It is one of my favorite beginnings. "An unassuming young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of
Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit." Poor Hans Castorp! From the first sentence, we know it's no "three weeks' visit" that this "unassuming young man" is taking -- it is a trip to the end of his life.
Is it any wonder that I have the hardest time trying to separate Elisabeth Mann Borgese from her cough? Even looking at a biography of Thomas Mann, and at a picture of Elisabeth -- she was a pretty little girl -- I feel afraid for her, as I have so often felt afraid for the people in a Thomas Mann story. There's no logic to this. It would be impertinent of me to write to Ms. Mann Borgese and ask her if she is truly over the flu; yet I liked her so much -- and I loved the story about her dogs. (I have since revised my first impression and convinced myself that one of them does type, and another plays the piano -- with their noses.)
Of course, I could write to her, and politely inquire as to her health. She gave me her address, because I foolishly promised to send her one of my books -- "foolishly," because who would dare send a novel to Thomas Mann's daughter? And which one of mine should I send? There's nothing about oceans in any of them, and only one of them has "water" in the title; I somehow think that The Water-Method Man would be the worst of my novels to send her -- what fool would send a story about a man who delays having urinary-tract surgery to Thomas Mann's daughter? It's becoming a dilemma.
If this were fiction, only a story, I would call it "Elisabeth's Cough." Like Hans Castorp, Elisabeth would be depicted as having already entered that final sanatorium, which she would never leave. By the way that she ate, and sipped her Scotch, and by the way that she spoke about her dogs, and absolutely because of her cough, she has already become (in my mind) one of her father's exquisitely doomed characters.
But Elisabeth Mann Borgese is real. In reality, she probably did have the flu -- and now she's long over it. That she physically resembles her father is only natural; and that her father's imagination has captured even my memory of my brief meeting with his daughter is not surprising -- her father's imagination was vast.
It was 6:40 A.M. when our Air France flight arrived in Paris. Janet and I were a little slow leaving the cabin, what with having to wake up Everett and gather together his books and toys; I saw that the regal Ms. Mann Borgese had remained in her seat while the other passengers left the plane. It was only when I took Everett's hand and we left the cabin that I saw the attendant who was waiting for her, with the wheelchair. Fittingly, a Thomas Mann detail.
"Which book of mine would you send to Elisabeth Mann?" I asked my friend Harvey Loomis.
He said, "A short one." (This was deliberately unfair; Harvey knows that all my novels are long.)
I am considering A Son of the Circus, not only because it's the most recent of my novels but because Ms. Mann Borgese told me that she'd been to ocean conferences in India. Then again, India isn't for everyone -- and A Son of the Circus is the longest of my books.
I am considering The Cider House Rules because isn't Maine a little like Nova Scotia? Also, it's a historical novel -- and sort of scientific. Then again, obstetrics and gynecological surgery aren't for everyone either.
I am considering A Prayer for Owen Meany because the narrator ends up living in Canada because he hates the United States -- and didn't Elisabeth say to me that she didn't like living in the U.S.? Then again, it's a religious novel -- religion isn't for everyone either.
And I am considering The World According to Garp because of how much I've read about it -- namely, that it is the only one of my novels that anyone actually likes (I see this in print all the time). Then again, I may be the only person who remembers that, at the time Garp was published, the reviews were very mixed; the reviews of A Son of the Circus, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany were better than the reviews of Garp. (Look who's talking about reviews!)
The matter is unresolved. The point is: I think that Gunter Grass will like my story about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane. And maybe Gunter will have his own ideas about which of my books I should send to Elisabeth. Maybe this one.
Postscript: I decided that I couldn't make Elisabeth wait for this collection; it wouldn't be published for 10 months after my meeting her on the Air France flight to Paris. Having promised to send Ms. Mann Borgese a book in April '95, it would have been entirely too cavalier of me to deliver the goods in February '96; nor could I have permitted myself the informality of beginning an accompanying letter to Elisabeth with "Hi! Remember me?" (Or words to that effect.)
No; it simply wouldn't have been proper to make her wait -- not that I presumed she was "waiting." By June, in fact, I feared that she had probably forgotten that she'd ever met me --
or else she remembered me as the liar she'd met on the airplane, the shabbily dressed man who drank red wine with fish and who claimed to be a novelist (a likely story). Nor could I bear to wait until September, until I would be with Gunter Grass, to tell him the story, which (more than a month after the Air France flight) I still thought of as a story called "Elisabeth's Cough." Instead, I wrote to Gunter in May: I told him the details of my encounter with Elisabeth Mann Borgese; he replied immediately, demanding to know which book I had sent her. It further shamed me that Grass presumed I had been enough of a gentleman to have already sent Elisabeth a book.
And so I sent her The Cider House Rules; it was as spontaneous a decision as any decision that takes two months -- I sent the novel off to Halifax in June, addressed to Professor Elisabeth Mann Borgese at the International Ocean Institute of Dalhousie University. I happened to have a handsome leather-bound edition of The Cider House Rules on hand; this lent to the novel a certain elegance that it might otherwise have lacked. Also -- and this was truly spontaneous -- I thought that the atmosphere of the orphanage hospital in St. Cloud's, Maine, owed its inspiration (in part) to the atmosphere of no escape that I remembered so powerfully from the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. At least my accompanying letter to Elisabeth said that this was the case; I may have added that I thought The Cider House Rules was among the more "atmospheric" of my novels -- if one doesn't come away from Thomas Mann with atmosphere, what does one come away with? (Or words to that effect.)
Elisabeth graciously responded, at once. She thanked me for my book and expressed her regret that she had no book of her own to send me. ('The oceans do not leave me any time, and when they release me, I'll be too old to write anything.") Instead of a book, Elisabeth sent me a tape recording. On the audio cassette, there was her photograph: she was at the piano with four or five dogs -- all English setters. I must confess that the one nosing the keyboard looked remarkably self-possessed. The pianist's name was Claudio; Elisabeth explained in her letter that what I would hear on the tape was her fingers playing the left hand and Claudio's nose playing the right.
