Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  Mouchette, Bernanos’ last novel, has just been brought out. Written in 1937, it seems still older; no automobile violates the muddy roads of its Picard village, and it comes as a surprise to learn that Mouchette, the fourteen-year-old peasant outcast who is its heroine, sometimes sees the “faces of film-stars” in newspapers. The acrid rural poverty, the rain-whipped woods, the nocturnal poaching, the harsh pedantry of her school seem at least as old as Balzac, and of course Bernanos is an old-fashioned writer, Balzacian in his melodrama and in the importance he rather feverishly insists that his characters have. This quality, of feverishness, of inflamed significance, suggests unhealth, and the characters tangent to Mouchette include her bestially alcoholic father and brothers, a mother who suffocates before her eyes, an epileptic and raving poacher, and a gentle old female necrophile. Mouchette lives “on the edge of a stagnant pool,” in a countryside whose sandy fields are “swarming with starving rabbits scarcely bigger than rats.” The novel itself feels sinisterly under-populated, as if a plague has passed. Yet these macabre circumstances are set forth in a vivid, even sprightly style constantly alert for telling natural details: “The soil, undermined by rabbits, gave way beneath her feet at almost every step, and if she kept to the edge of the wood, where the interlaced roots made the ground firmer, she was lashed by sodden branches.” Or: “Nothing remained but the tall poplar, scarcely visible in the sky, murmuring like a spring.” Gallic intelligence plays eagerly across the dismal village, scattering aphorisms on the subject of poverty:

  If the very poor could associate the various images of their poverty they would be overwhelmed by it, but their wretchedness seems to them to consist simply of an endless succession of miseries, a series of unfortunate chances.

  Lying had never seemed wrong to Mouchette, for it was the most precious—probably the only—privilege of the wretched.

  But once they have been induced to despair, the defences of the simple are irretrievably breached and their ignorance knows of no escape save suicide—the suicide of the poor, which is so like that of children.

  Bernanos, as he expresses it in his terse foreword, “watched [Mouchette] live and die” with acute tenderness. Her interlude with Arsène, the poacher who shelters her from the rain, confesses to her that he has just committed murder, makes her his accomplice, and finally rapes her, is a superb scene, lit by fire and tempest and the dumb kindling of life within the girl.

  It did not occur to her to find Arsène’s face handsome. It was simply that it seemed made for her, and seemed as easy and natural in her gaze as the handle of her old knife in her hand, the old knife which she had found on the road one evening, and had shown to no one, and which was the only thing in the world which she possessed. She would have liked to touch his face, but its golden color, as warm as that of bread, was enough to make her happy.

  The idea of bread, beautifully transposed, echoes a few sentences later: “All the pleasure in looking at [his face] came not from him, but from the depths of herself, where it had lain hidden and germinating, like a seed of wheat beneath the snow.”

  In a 19th-century novel, Mouchette’s encounter with Arsène would develop into a prolonged involvement, rich in recurrence and mutual reaction. It is Mouchette’s failure, yet also its seal of fidelity to its time, that nothing of the sort happens; the encounter leads nowhere. Arsène disappears, and Mouchette discovers that his crime was imaginary, rendering her pledge of self-sacrifice to him meaningless. Nothing connects. Moved in her extremity of misery to communicate with her mother, Mouchette confides to the deaf ear of a dead woman. The attentions of the villagers—not all of them hard-hearted—repel her exacerbated spirit; she is at last befriended by an old lady who cunningly invites her to die, to find in death the purity that the child naïvely associates with “the physical image of clear water.” The image of the poplar “murmuring like a spring” returns as a tiny pool in a sand quarry, where “the water was so clear that no fish would live there.” To this place Mouchette comes to terminate her brief story.

  Though church bells ring in the distance, as they do in all European novels, God does not break His silence. The squalor is unredeemed. There is small trace of the author’s ardent Catholicism (and where, in contemporary France, are the successors to Bernanos and Mauriac, Marcel and Maritain, Claudel and Péguy?) beyond his abrupt assurance that poverty is a “sacred sign.” Mouchette’s passage into despair yields no more of a moral than the slipping flight of a swallow across the smoky evening sky. Tragedy is dwindled to a mournful pang, a surrender, almost complacent, to universal indifference. Bernanos’ Christianity lingers merely as a tone, as the outsize intensity with which he broods upon Mouchette’s small lost soul.

  This intensity is willfully absent from Uwe Johnson’s Two Views. While Mouchette seems to belong to the past, Two Views, which takes place in the Berlin of 1961–1962, has the insubstantial quality of the future. Picardy’s sodden fields have yielded to a papery world of maps (the endpapers are maps of the Berlin Wall), newspapers, passports, neon advertisements, airplane and train schedules, flimsy automobiles, and ambiguously worded love letters. The novel’s structure is two-dimensional, switching in alternate chapters from the viewpoint of Dietbert, a young West German photographer, to that of Beate, an East Berlin nurse. The views and lives of both are transcribed, if the Winstons’ translation is to be believed, in an intelligent but somehow preoccupied prose that hastens past crises to dwell with fond flatness upon daily routines.

  Officially First Class was known as the chief’s ward so that the patients in Second Class would think of it solely as the head doctor’s private preserve, not a place where the patients enjoyed special privileges; unofficially, it was known simply as 1-b, after the traditional corridor whose rooms for a long time after the war had held four or five beds but by and by had been reduced once more to private or semiprivate setup.

  That is Beate at work; here is Dietbert:

  From a high apartment whose owner rented window places to the photographers he was able to take shots of the slender barrels which from his angle protruded over the border, with the line of battle-equipped soldiers drawn up in front of them, in the distance the conventional Soviet tanks with the white star. And if he happened to arrive when a refugee in the boundary canal had already been shot, another had already plunged to his death from a roof, he photographed the lingering crowd of onlookers, the soldiers in the cutters probing the water or the holes in the roof that the dead man had broken in the course of his fall; was able to sell these, and also the cloud of the teargas bomb that had driven the horde of photographers back from the scene. Often he felt as if he were living in a movie.

  The pouncing italics are mine. These Iron-curtained lovers move jerkily, as if on celluloid; they seem immersed in “the gray racket of the television set.” Their plight has been predigested by the voracious news media that instantly commercialize catastrophe. Furthermore, Dietbert is an indecisive blunderer, who keeps himself tranquillized with alcohol, and Beate a faintly drab prig.

  Yet through this crust of inconsequence—indeed, credible because of it—eros breaks, and the perfunctory liaison and nearly accidental reunion of Dietbert and Beate serves, at least for me, as a moving parable of human love and as a sufficient indictment of the political systems that would separate us, “the merciless countries full of greed and pride.” Johnson, a native of Pomerania who in 1959 became a West Berliner, does not weight the argument between East and West; Dietbert’s need to acquire a fancy sports car beyond his means is as debilitating as Beate’s search, in the Communist housing jungle, for a private room. The vulgar scramble of capitalism is balanced against the obstinate bureaucracy of Socialism. Beate does not wish to mingle her friends from the two Berlins, for “the former would have ridiculed the latter for their faith in the prospects of the East German state, and the latter the former for ignorance of society and the tendency under the influence of alcohol to despair loudly and tearfully of the meaning of life.”
Partition is made visible as, from a West German airplane, “the transition from the small patches of color on the ground to the large fields that marked East German territory” and, from an East Berlin tram, as “the wet glittering red of neon advertising in West Berlin.” If a political emotion is present, it is a Berliner’s frustration over the sundering of his city, which becomes, on the human level, a need to have lovers—however mediocre, vague, and ignorant of one another—reunite. Beate’s escape, whose methodical details build into a terrific cinematic suspense, is a leap of the heart, a change of angle more than of locus. From where she arrives she can see the platform from which she left. Dietbert, hastening to meet her, misses connections and winds up in a hospital, where he becomes to Beate “a patient like any other.” The ending, though not what we expect, seems happy; the author, who in Mouchette was a grieving, helpless God, ambles into the last pages as an ordinary Berlin citizen, exuding normal human warmth. The post-apocalyptic irresolution of Two Views may well be where European man, after history’s extravagant demands, is glad to settle.

  The View from the Dental Chair

  LOCAL ANAESTHETIC, by Günter Grass, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 284 pp. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

  “If you’re out to buy a pig, talk about the weather.” This “old peasant rule” is quoted in Günter Grass’s fourth novel, Local Anaesthetic, and the book illustrates the tactic. As the author talks, with manic erudition and rather lumpy explicitness, about such weather as dentistry, cement, Seneca, battles, German history, and the aquarium care of guppies, the pig nearly gets away. For the first half of the novel, there are no characters one can visualize, no action one can follow, no reason to persevere, indeed, but the faith that this quirky experiment will begin to add up. And it finally does, into a well-meditated if fliply presented dialogue on the generation gap and the revolutionary urge. “Fliply”—as when one flips the channel knob on a television set. Grass’s dominant metaphor and method derive from the medium of television, with its rapid intercuts, its numbing discontinuity, its ectoplasmic freedom from the laws of either truth or art. The framing conceit is this: Eberhard Starusch, a West Berlin schoolteacher, is having his toothache and life-long prognathic bite corrected by capping. His dentist, an omniscient prattler in tennis shoes, distracts his patients with a television screen, where old films and educational panels and lewd commercials and gauzy static flow indiscriminately on. Into this flow, Starusch, his mouth stoppered with cotton and aluminum, mentally hurls scenes supposedly from his life, many of which are mere fantasies. He several times murders, for instance, his ex-fiancée, the goatlike Sieglinde Krings, employing such special weapons as a bicycle chain and a swimming-pool wave-generating machine; the truth seems to be that she is alive and married to an electrician called Schlottau. Or was really named Monica Lindrath and has become a pediatrician. Similarly, Starusch’s career as an engineer for the Krings cement works seems a grandiose blow-up of a summer job he had, as a student, with a different company. And what of Krings, the cement-and-pumice magnate returned from prisoner-of-war captivity, the stoic ex-general who spends his dotage reconstructing old battle sites in sandboxes and refighting old defeats into victories? He, too, dissolves into shadow play. Apparitions succeed one another in segments often less than a page long. A sample:

  The soundless picture showed a clerical-looking gentleman who, it being Saturday, wished to say a word about Sunday, although this program is televised after 10 p.m. and never before the Berlin evening news: “Yes, yes, my son, I know, it hurts. But all the pain in the world is powerless to …”

  (His finely articulated fingers. When he raised an eyebrow in mockery. Or his delayed head-shaking: Scherbaum calls him Silvertongue.)

  Then the bells rang in Sunday: Bim!—And the pigeons rose up in fright. Boom!—Ah, and the little tin satellites in my head that knows it all tinkled: Bim! Poom! Pumice!

  Grass’s shuttle of scenes becomes as fatiguing and irritating as a battery of TVs manipulated by invisible children; verily, one’s teeth begin to hurt, sensitized by unsparingly dental doses of shortcircuited prose:

  (Eased, tapered off, hardly to be remembered. One more twinge—but that may have been a reflex—then silence.) Outside it was snowing from left to right on Hohenzollerndamm. (Not the TV, the street side of the office.) The screen was uninhabited. Like myself: all fuzzy and, I may as well say it, deaf. (“I’m told that anaesthetized tongues have been maimed by the experimental bites of incredulous patients.”) His voice was wrapped in tinfoil. (“And now we’ll take off the aluminum shells.…” And my question—“What do you mean, take off?”—was also muffled as it rose up to fill blubbery balloons. Not until he breathed at me from close, too close, up: “They are removed with tweezers. Kindly open wide,” did I surrender and make my big Ah.

  Grass’s artistic temperament, from The Tin Drum on, has been drawn to the gritty and mechanical; even in a nostalgic idyll like Cat and Mouse, he devotes a disproportion of words to the mechanics of getting in and out of a sunken minesweeper and to chemical substances such as flakes of rust and gull droppings. His plots snag on small operational procedures: The Tin Drum opens by specifying how a woman rotates five skirts, wearing four and washing one each week. His characterizations ponderously depend on physical deformities—dwarfishness, protuberant ears, a grotesque Adam’s apple. Whereas Starusch has a prognathic bite, his young antagonist, Scherbaum, turns out to have the opposite defect, a distal bite, and is last seen wearing a corrective labial bar. Grass’s prose is physically encumbered, chunky, resistant. Even if we allow for the losses of rhythm and penumbral connotation inevitable in any translation, we miss the plastic ease of expression and interconnection that until recently was the common property of even mediocre European writers. The ability, preëminent in Tolstoy, to move exciting spiritual currents through masses of circumstance and sensuous detail is perhaps lost, along with the instinctive belief in the dualism of matter and spirit. Strange to say, materialism in fiction seems to reduce the vitality of physical description, to make it clot into topographic (Robbe-Grillet) or professional (Grass) detail. Compared to relatively recent masters of European humanism like Proust and Mann, Grass is hard to read, hard to “get going” in. His device of aping television, however witty and timely and rigorously exploited, feels superimposed; it is a gesture of the author rather than an outgrowth of the material. Who, we wonder as we read, really retains his life in film-clip form, who but an author at his desk would project these overanimated parables of German guilt and unease?

  In an interview given a few weeks ago in New York, Grass spoke of Mief, of the stale air that envelops every group and gathering and conversation in the West. His narrative device of a televised, self-cancelling clutter does work as a metaphor for Mief, like the cement dust that grayly settles upon every leaf in Krings Park. In his obsessive sense of static, grit, and dust, this author is true to himself; he is true to himself when he moves from romantic triangles that bore him, and from echoes of the Nazi nightmare that are beginning to bore him, into political debates that, though wreathed in Mief, interest him. Grass’s role as an active campaigner and spokesman for the Social Democratic Party finds a happy correlative in Starusch’s role of schoolteacher.

  Starusch wants his pupil Scherbaum to take over the school paper and run it, working toward such liberal/reformist objectives as creating a student smokers’ corner. Scherbaum instead opts for the radical gesture of burning Max, his pet dachshund, alive, in the heart of cake-eating, dog-loving Berlin, as a protest against the Vietnam war. He is encouraged not only by his Maoist girl friend but by Starusch’s female colleague, Irmgard Seifert, who is tormented by the guilt she incurred as a “Hitler bitch” at the age of seventeen. Starusch tries to reason the boy out of it, and, failing, offers to substitute a stray from the dog pound for Max. The boy is tempted, but Starusch then denounces his own plan as “exploitation, rank imperialism.” Next, he conceives the idea of poisoning the dog, to �
��deprive Scherbaum of the object of his demonstration. React radically to a radical project.” Throughout all this maneuvering, he confers with his dentist, who speaks suavely from the melioristic center:

  “And how do you feel about napalm, Doc?”

  “Well, measured against the nuclear weapons known to us, napalm must be termed relatively harmless.”

  “And what about the living conditions of the Iranian peasants?”