Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Grass approves of children, having sired lots, but he isn’t sure the world needs any more Germans, no matter how much authorities deplore a declining birth rate that makes necessary so many Turks to do the coolie work of the republic. After being a nuisance on the Tin Drum set, Grass went off with Schlöndorff to the Orient, thinking cinematic. Maybe they’d make a movie on overpopulation. Like nuclear reactors, overpopulation’s bad for the ecology. Grass took these notes; we don’t know what Schlöndorff did. The dead friend is Nicolas Born, from Group 47.

  Meanwhile Zeus looks over his shoulder at critics who ask him to butt out of contemporary politics, as if this morning’s news weren’t a headbirth of history. At one point he makes himself ten years older than he really is in order to imagine the compromises writers of that age—Eich, Koeppeman, Kästner—must have made with Hitler. To the dead Born, he speaks out loud: “Now that you are dead I am aging more perceptibly. My courage, which was doing fine only yesterday, has furled several sails.” (Don’t believe him.) And: “I’m ashamed.” (He’s the only one.)

  Mobius on a bender gets looped. In Shanghai, among eleven million bicycles, he wonders, What if the populations of China and the two Germanys were reversed? If there were only eighty million Chinese… and a billion Germans in “the alarming process of self-discovery”? But the Germans, unlike the Chinese, are dying out. Will they end up stuffed in their own museums? On your left, Hittites, Sumerians, Aztecs; to the right, Germans who were “not mere warlike barbarians concerned only with sordid gain, mere function without spirit,” but victims of an industrial society that depended parasitically for its extravagant standard of living on a South (oil; Turks) which it exhausted. Ought those Germans to have denied themselves anything?

  Grass imagines Harm and Dorte as teachers who met at a sixties rally against the war: liberal puppy love. Harm will quote Marx on the capitalist law of accumulation through redundancy, and deplore “the lack of long-range views.” Dorte frisks among computer projections, and deplores “the lack of meaning in general.” Both feel bad about their civil-servant privileges, and vote against Franz Josef Strauss. Since Grass needs them to go to overpopulated Asia to “tabulate and classify” the squalor, he will also invent a Sisyphus Travel Agency, to arrange “destitution as a course of study.” Harm and Dorte will be booked into slums from Bangkok to Bombay.

  Grass directs: “Long shot of the Indian subcontinent. She, cut off at the waist, covering half the Bay of Bengal, all Calcutta and Bangladesh, casually takes the pill: ‘It’s safe to say that birth control… has been a failure in India.’” It’s also safe to say that Grass has more fun with his impossible screenplay than he does with Harm and Dorte, who will weary any reader. When Dorte, inside a Cave of Bats, undergoes a mystical conversion to the cult of the Mother Goddess and withholds her sexual favors from Harm till he agrees to procreate, even Grass is exasperated. With her ball of thread, can’t she knit herself a child? Only a movie could make us care about these two. And movies, Grass suggests, are a substitute for the imagination. Take that, Schlöndorff.

  But so, Grass implies, are card files and data sheets a substitute for the imagination. They furnish a “vacuum.” And the worst possible substitute for the imagination is a politics-as-usual of neglect, a headbirth metastasized. Grass fumes: What nonsense to seek disarmament through rearmament, to combat an energy shortage by stepping up production, to breed reactors instead of Germans, to pile up pork and butter mountains in a world where fifteen million children starve to death each year. If he were in charge he would abolish compulsory education and “emancipate” all civil servants by firing them. To raise the birth rate he would cut off the electric current at night and reintroduce as bedware the traditional German nightcap, to save the heat that escapes through the holes in our heads. He would mandate a switch of political systems every ten years between Germanys East and West, giving the German Democratic Republic “an opportunity to relax under capitalism,” while, under Communism, the FRG would drain off its cholesterol. More radically, he’d deal with property “as my spiritual property and that of others have been dealt with: 70 years after the author’s (that’s me) death, his (my) rights enter the public domain. I (as dictator) would extend this benefit by law to all earned or acquired possessions—house, factory, field—so that only the children and some of the grandchildren will be obliged to inherit it or hold it in usufruct. Ones born later will be exempt from this hereditary burden… they will be free to make a fresh start.”

  Ridiculous of course. Without surplus there can be no value. This is the sort of irresponsible antinovelistic “dispatch” digressiveness that so dismays an Updike he neglected to mention any of it in his review of Headbirths.

  Finally, Grass would ordain a National Endowment, a Museum without Walls in the psychic space between the two Berlins, promoting the history and, much more important, the literature—the mother tongue—of all the Germanys. Writers, he says, are the best patriots; even a “wounded” language might somehow heal the body politic. “What’s wrong with us is neither material nor social, but an emergency of the spirit.” Dorte in her sarong confesses: “I’m afraid, Harm. Of us, of everything.” Grimmelshausen would advise her: Read Holderlin. Or Trakl.

  Having kissed off the Brothers Grimm in The Flounder, in The Rat (1987) Grass kisses off fairy tales period. No more ruined towers, magic mirrors, hungry ravens, dead trees, a comb, a belt, a cherry torte and those little bones left over after Adolf ate the sleeping princess. “All hope is gone,” he says in one of the little poems that pepper the text, “for fairy tales / it shall be written here, / are dying with the forests.” The forests are dying from industrial overdevelopment and acid rain. Without forests, of course, “children can no longer get lost.”

  In one of Rat’s subplots, fairy-tale characters seize power and demand a regreening of Middle Europe. They are exterminated. In another subplot, five feminists, on a barge in the Baltic, search for a vanished matriarchal city; they’ll be vaporized. In a third subplot, Oskar the dwarf returns as a middle-aged producer of video cassettes on his way to Danzig-Gda´nsk, where he will show films he has already made about the apocalyptic future; he, too, will be vaporized. In yet a fourth subplot, an artist who counterfeits Authentic Gothic for needy cathedrals is tried and convicted… of treason!

  Where’s the Social-Democratic novelist while all of this goes on? Either dreaming or marooned in a space capsule orbiting an Earth on which everything has been obliterated except rats, wood lice, a stinging bluebottle, and a flying snail. In either case, a scholarly She-Rat explains the future and disdains the past. We are also told of new punk religions, hybrid rat-men with blue eyes and blond hair, and the posthistorical significance of Solidarity, the then-outlawed Polish labor movement. (Who knew?) An alarmist Grass is having his black fun with movies as fairy tales, with literature as lies, with art and politics as forgeries, and with rats as symbolic of all the herrenvolk wants to get rid of, from scruples to children to, of course, the Jews. This is his own sort of poisoned apple: Wake up, before all of us turn into big, bad Germans!

  Fed up with “frozen cheerfulness,” “stylized warmth behind burglarproof glass,” “Social Democratic neither/nor,” not to mention people who obsess about the “half-life of their vegetables” and take courses in How to Cope with Grief, Grass sent himself for six months in 1987 to Calcutta, where he found more shame. In Show Your Tongue (1988), he measures everything, including himself, by Calcutta: “a city damned to offer lodgings to every human misery”; a city he loves, in spite of itself, for the Bengali lyrics, sitar melancholy, moonlit courtyards; a city that plummets “as if an Expressionist had invented this rush of streets for a woodcut of epileptic collapse. Only the sleepers remain real. “In a diary, in anguished little poems and violent smudgy drawings, he limns an “acrid smoke of open fires fed with cakes of dried cow dung”; vultures, crows and “child-bundles” living in a garbage dump: old women on funeral pyres at the crematorium, “sticking out fr
om under the shrouds.”

  Even at the crematorium: “Only the rich can afford sufficient wood. The free-market economy, death as an overhead expense, like everything else.” Temple-hopping with his sick wife; reading Lichtenburg, Schopenhauer, and Elias Canetti; among Bengali poets who can’t understand a word of Tamil or Urdu, Grass is beside himself:

  If you lent (for a fee) one of these slum hovels, created from bare necessity, to the city of Frankfurt am Main and had it set down next to the Deutsche Bank highrise where the hewn granite sculpture by the artist Bill says yes, always yes to the towering bank, because as an endless loop it loves only itself, is incontrovertibly beautiful and immaculately endorses the circulation of money stamped valid for eternity—if, I say, you replaced that granite celebrating its flawless self, and set down instead one single slum hovel as authentic as want had made it right next to the glassy arrogance of the Deutsche Bank, beauty would at once be on the side of the hovel and truth, too, even the future. The mirrored art of all those palaces consecrated to money would fall to its knees, because the slum hovel belongs to tomorrow.

  Who’ll make the revolution that saves Calcutta? Not Marx, says Grass, nor Mao. He looks to Kali, goddess of destruction, “the terrible black mother” with ten arms and a sword, a spear, a shield, and a strangling noose, a necklace of skulls, and a girdle of severed hands. This is the Kali we see in the temples under layers of black enamel, palms red, eyes ringed, surrounded by women “equipped with Dracula teeth, holding child-sized men in their talons, biting off heads, hands, and cocks.” In blood-drunk ecstasy, Kali cast down her consort, Siva, and danced on his stomach. And then, because she was ashamed of herself, she stuck out her tongue. So does Grass.

  This is the good liberal, having met despair. V. S. Naipaul went to Calcutta once upon a time, and stayed a minute, holding his nose. Allen Ginsberg went there, too, for a year, and became a nurse. Supposing a Norman Mailer went to Israel? Isn’t this the sort of thing a serious writer ought to do—book himself into the nightmares of the century, the unconscious of history, after too many tours of the self? When Grass left town for Calcutta in August 1987, he was flying away

  from Germany and Germany, the way two deadly foes, armed to the teeth, grow ever more alike; from insights achieved from too close up; from my own perplexity, admitted only sotto voce, flying with me. And from the gobbledygook, the where-I’m-coming-froms, the balanced reporting, the current situations, the razor-elbowed games of self-realization. I am flying thousands of miles away from the superficial subtleties of former leftists now merely chic feuilletonists, and far, far away from myself as part or object of this public exposure.

  And now look what they’ve done: Left and Right, do-si-do, buck and wing, danse macabre. He should be embarrassed. Instead he allows to be published these unrepentant fugitives—as if a lost cause mattered. As Martin Luther may or may not have told the Diet at Worms: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”…A rhymed yearning for death.

  Now that writers can talk, what shall they say to one another: Show me the way to the next BMW? We are advised by publicists for corporate capitalism that if the nonprofit police state is now bankrupt, so too, somehow, is social democracy. To be a good liberal, a practical radical, a ferocious democrat, a self-made orphan, a citizen without portfolio, and a prophet without honor; a Bad Boy and skeptic; a holy fool instead of a court jester; incapable of simplifying yourself in the gridwork of profit-taking and self-congratulation, ashamed of your very own white-male perks—well, it’s very thick sausage. And certainly not advisable if you want a Nobel Prize.

  In some ways it would be easier to write in opposition, from a prison or a psycho ward, in one of the Koreas or Latin Americas or the new black fascisms of emergent and depressing Africa—to have been, before everything changed utterly in 1989, a Konrad or Kundera or Sinyavsky. They’d forgive you then your urgency—review your courage instead of your cleverness. You’d not be asked for more than one masterwork. Fly the black flag, and everyone salutes. But in our postindustrialized, postmodernized, post-semioticized, Post-Toastied fairy-tale West, a Grass is needed more than ever, and more than masterworks. From men of color in white societies, and from women everywhere, we expect dissent, abrasions of race and sex and class on a dominant culture, the music and sinew of the Other. But how many white male writers of the first rank are Citizens before they are Author-Gods? How many put down the pen, pick up a sword, cut through the fat, gather unto them the children and say: There are wounds that will not heal?

  Grass would hate this comparison, but look at France since the death of Sartre. Primo Levi fell down a stairwell. Amoz Oz also comes to mind, in Slopes of Lebanon: “What began with the biblical words ‘Zion shall be redeemed by law’ has come to ‘Nobody’s better than we are, so they should all shut up.’” Quoting Isaiah (“Your hands are covered with blood”) and Jeremiah (“For they had eyes but they did not see”), Oz grins: “Veteran defeatists, both of them. Troublers of Israel. Self-hating Jews.”

  Citizen Grass is stuck in both his Germanys, but he can look at himself. Now that the Wall isn’t there, I see him jumping over it with Christa Wolf to hold hands and to ban nuclear reactors. The talking turbot and Cassandra. This picture makes me smile.

  Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution

  THE FIRST THING to be said about Peggy Noonan, who rose from all-news CBS radio to the White House speechwriting staff in the first term of the Great Communicator and stuck around long enough to be lip-synched by two different presidents, is that she’s a dandy maker of phrases, often sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs. Listen to her justify her job: “A great speech,” she says, “from a leader to the people eases our isolation, breaks down the walls, includes people: It takes them inside a spinning thing and makes them part of the gravity.” Listen to her describe the people who got in the way of her doing that job: “What I mean is,” she says, “when men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane.” She can even be savage discussing hard-core conservatives on her ideological side: “Well,” she says, “what you get is a bunch of creepy little men with creepy little beards who need something to seethe on (State Dept. cookie-pushers! George Bush! the Trilateral Commission!) some hate to live on….”

  The second thing to be said about Peggy Noonan is that for the purposes of this memoir, and her deliverance from ghosting into a more agreeable career, she’s had to invent a literary persona, a sassy tone of voice, a cross circuit of Holden Caulfield and Fran Leibowitz, but right-wing smarty-pants, too, like National Review magazine, with some class animus for seasoning, a weakness for sarcasm, a bratty Irish appetite for grudge, and way too many exclamation marks. This persona works reasonably well, except it sometimes leaves her sounding dumber than she is, as if she had to apologize for her copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, as if she really believed that all liberals are rich and guilty nitwits who went to Harvard and Yale instead of Farleigh Dickinson, and all activists on behalf of the homeless are cruel manipulators of the insane, and only Republicans can talk to janitors, and Paul Johnson and Jean-Francois Revel are intellectual heavyweights, and George Gilder isn’t an idiot when he babbles about “the humane nature of the free market.” To have met Gorbachev and to tell us only that he looks like “a retired hockey goalie” is not just to miss the boat of history, but to jump off after it’s under way, thumbing your nose as you drown. Take that, you Commie pinko.

  The third thing to be said about Peggy Noonan is that, almost against her will, she does damage to the president she claims she loves. Reagan’s White House is compared to “a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there is nothing inside.” Of the president himself she says that his intellect was only “slightly superior to average”; that he didn’t hear very much of what was said around him; and that the battle for his mind, and I quote again, “was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” Noonan quotes a friend
of the president’s: “Behind those warm eyes is a lack of curiosity that is, somehow, disorienting.” And so is her memoir, however much fun, somehow disorienting. Her real gripe seems to be that they messed with her copy. That was John Reed’s real gripe with the Russian Revolution, too. It always happens to flacks, after which they write for themselves or they die.

  No Turning Back, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O’Reilly

  NO TURNING BACK is a radical book in every respect. Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, who used to be nuns, strike at the roots of the Roman Catholic Church and its attitude toward women, its relationship to those secular societies of which it is a part, and its retreat from a commitment to the social gospel of peace and justice endorsed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Ferraro, the granddaughter of Italian immigrants, and Hussey, from an Irish American family, grew up in parochial schools; entered different convents of the Sisters of Notre Dame five years apart in the 1960s; took graduate degrees in social work, family therapy, and theology at Jesuit colleges; and served their religious order and their communities in factories, parish-houses, holding pens for runaway children, and shelters for the homeless. By thinking out loud, especially on the nature of their stewardship, they began to question a patriarchal Church hierarchy. By reading, especially books like Bare Ruined Choirs by Garry Wills and The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas, they were politicized. By listening, especially to women who came to them for help, they were radicalized. These daughters of Pope John XXIII came to question the Vatican’s refusal to ordain women as priests, its exploitation of nuns as a labor pool of poorly paid coolies, its condemnation of any form of contraception, and its bitter opposition to abortion for any reason whatever. In 1984 they signed a full-page pro-choice ad in the New York Times. By 1988 they were the only nuns to have signed that ad who hadn’t recanted in the face of ugly pressure all the way from Rome. “We were the daughters of the Church,” they explain, “and they were the fathers, and we were expected to be dutiful, as always.” Ferraro and Hussey continue, I quote: “Their surprise, and discomfort, and eventually their fury as we developed different ideas was as ferocious as any husband’s was in the 1970s when he discovered that his wife was no longer interested in folding his socks.” In order to serve their God, they had to leave the Sisterhood.