The Flounder

by Günter Grass

Out, the whole lot of you.

  What smells is me!

  If only I could weep.

  The burden of an evil day

  In the sixteenth year of the war, when the Saxons were negotiating with the imperial forces and Silesia was about to fall for the second time, the eighteen-year-old Andreas Gryphius, whose native Glogau had been razed, went to Danzig, where he planned to defray the costs of his studies in history, theology, astronomy, and medicine by instructing the burghers’ children, who lived behind newly remodeled façades that, with their flutings, ledges, and inscriptions, expressed the exuberance of life and gilded it with deep meaning.

  Until recently the young man had written only heroic epics in Latin, but now, since becoming acquainted with a little book on the rules of poetics, he had taken to writing German verses, which in their first élan pushed the door so violently as to attract the notice of the author of the poetic rule book, who had settled in Danzig, where he was employed as Royal Polish court historian, by their voluptuous preoccupation with sorrow, their rage over the vanity of all things, their gushing sadness. For in a copy submitted to him by a friend, Martin Opitz von Boberfeld read:

  “What, then, is mortal man? A house of bitter grief,

  A plaything of false chance, an errant firefly,

  A theater of stark fear and cruel adversity,

  A quickly melted snow, a quickly fallen leaf”

  and through their mutual friend the mathematician Peter Grüger informed the young poet of his desire to meet him.

  At the age of thirty-eight, Opitz was shaken in health, sick to death of the interminable wars and of his unsuccessful efforts at diplomacy. Only the year before, when his father, the indestructible butcher from Bunzlau, married for the fourth time, he had taken stock of himself and written:

  “My spirit burns no more,

  No longer does it soar—

  Disgust with the servility

  Of friend and foe doth weigh

  Me down above all else—

  The burden of an evil day.”

  The meeting occurred on September 2, 1636, in the house of the Reformed preacher Nigrinius, where Opitz lived in solitude—if we choose to disregard a strange kitchenmaid by the name of Agnes who cooked half the day for him and half the day for Möller the town painter. It is recorded in a letter from Opitz to Hühnerfeld, his publisher, “Have just met a new writer, endowed with a great gift of language, though not versed in all the rules. His name is Andreas Gryph, and he comes from Glogau. Everything about him offended me.”

  Opitz and Gryphius talked until the sky darkened. Outside the windows the Baltic Indian summer lingered on. Occasional ringing of vespers bells. The kitchenmaid came and went, barefooted on green-and-yellow-glazed tiles. Both spoke with a slight Silesian accent that cannot be put into writing. And sometimes they spoke like printed matter. That can be quoted.

  Gryphius had a round, boyish face that could suddenly darken and sink as though devoured from within, and then the voice that spoke from it was that of an angry archangel. His prophet’s mouth. His horror-stricken eyes. Despite his rosy look, the young poet was of an atrabilious nature. As for the older man, who sat stiffly in the Spanish-Flemish fashion, his gaze was curtained by his eyelids, and whenever he spoke, more to himself than to his guest, he peered into every corner of the room like a beaten dog, or seemed at all events to be looking for a way out. Evidently Opitz was sensitive to noise. Outside the house barrels were being fitted with iron hoops.

  At first Gryphius seemed embarrassed and addressed studentlike quips to Agnes the kitchenmaid each time she renewed the young poet’s spiced wine and the older man’s elderberry juice, but received no reply. They talked about the noise in this seaport town and about Silesia, now lost for the second time. Gryphius told his host how the plague had carried off both sons of his Fraustadt patron Caspar Otto, whom he, Gryphius, had been tutoring in Latin. Mutual friends from Glogau and Bunzlau were named. Some irony still remained for the Fruitbearing Society, a Silesian literary club.

  After mentioning the death of Prince Raffael Leszczynski, the last protector of the Silesian refugees in Frauenburg and Polish Leszno, Opitz, perhaps a bit too offhandedly, praised the bold though sometimes undisciplined prosody of certain of Gryphius’s sonnets, but went on to deplore their immoderation: the unrestrained sorrow, the vale-of-tears tone, the condemnation of all earthly pleasure down to the most trifling as vanity and vexation of spirit. True, he, too, Opitz the restless seeker, could not help feeling personally concerned by the splendid line “How then shall man, that insubstantial bubble, endure,” since he well knew the meaning of failure and had himself written equally disheartening lines in his time, but he could not find it in his heart to disparage all human endeavor as “dust, chaff, and ashes,” waiting for the wind to blow them away. Some useful things had been done, after all. Enduring achievement often lay buried beneath ruins. The scattered seed would bear new fruit. Even unsuccessful effort bore witness to the courage of upright men. Nothing was ever lost. Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna had convinced him of the need for political action. The good could not be gathered ready at hand but had to be sifted out. And really Gryphius was too young to dispose of the whole world as a vale of tears and wish himself and his chubby-cheeked good health into the moldering grave. A life with all its weal and woe still lay ahead of him.

  Thereupon young Gryphius drained his spiced wine, stared at the cloves and mace that remained at the bottom of his cup, glowered like an Old Testament prophet, lost all his inclination to address quips to the drink-renewing kitchenmaid, and, tapping the table edge rhythmically with his right forefinger, spoke in a steady flow, as though he had prepared his speech in advance.

  First he acknowledged the debt of gratitude that he and his generation of poets owed to Opitz for his theoretical work, which had enabled them to spurn Latinizing affectation and commit themselves to German poetics. Then he held the finger, which only a moment before had been drumming, up to the lauded master’s nose. He, the great Opitz, had squandered his strength in politicking; crowned and ennobled by the emperor, he, Opitz, had given to diplomacy what was owing to Poesy; for the sake of accented and unaccented syllables, he, Opitz the rule giver, had thrown a veil of verbiage over all man’s misery; throughout the war, he, Opitz the busybody, had handled the dirty work of one prince after another, and even now, though at last in a secure haven, he could not desist, on the one hand from writing Wladislaw, king of Poland, letters of advice weighing one petty advantage against another, and on the other hand from sending Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna secret reports on the recruiting of Prussian mercenaries for the imperial armies. True, Opitz did all this out of concern for unhappy Silesia, once again under the Catholic heel, but also for the hard cash received from Poles and Swedes alike for his sinister double-dealing, his spying, and his weasel words. This is what had muffled his speech, though one would think that the all-destroying war and the crying distress of helpless mankind would lead a poet to speak out plainly and clearly. But he, the resourceful Opitz, had trimmed his sails to the winds of the day, served the Protestants but translated the Jesuits’ antiheresy manual into German. He had knelt at Catholic Masses. When Magdeburg fell, he had gone so far as to write poems in mockery of that unhappy, God-fearing city—“Who always slept alone, the chaste old maid …”—for which reason he had been cursed in the Protestant camp. On his way through Breslau he had got at least two of that city’s daughters with child, but had refused to pay alimony. And the flowery classicist hymns of praise that he, Opitz the sycophant, had penned, in strict accordance of course with the rules of poetics, for the bloodsucking Count Dohna—“Thou hast exalted me, and set me wholly free. And from the burden of arms, saved me for Poesy”—were indeed masterful, as his little book on German poetics made amply clear, but they lacked the passion, the flaming word without which there can be no true poetry; they were lukewarm to the taste. And yet he, Gryphius, could recite poems by Opitz, the early Transylvania
n ones, for instance, but also the one about the plague in Bunzlau, in which art did not posture, and the word did not conceal, but pointed inescapably to the vale of tears:

  … What suff’ring as he lay

  Sick with the awful plague, ere he could pass away

  And cast his body off! For his infected blood

  Like burning fire rose all upward to his head

  And seized upon his eyes, with raging fever bright.

  Speech had forsaken him, his throat was bounden tight.

  His lungs did heave and pant, th’ entire frame was sick

  And losing of its strength. A nauseating reek

  As of a long-dead beast from out his gullet flowed.

  His poor defenseless life upon the threshold stood

  And looked this way and that, and looked beyond to see

  If there be any balm amid such agony.

  After an interval, during which Agnes the kitchenmaid passed through the room and set pewter plates on the table and the daily life of the seaport town went on outside—barrels were rolled—the elder man said to the younger, “Yes, yes, that’s somewhere near the truth.” He had indeed wasted his energies in the tangled business of war, always in harness, always traveling from place to place with petitions, appeals for help; Breslau’s daughters had given him more fatigue than pleasure; true, he had been obliged to fear the Jesuits and curry favor with princes, and yet, like the eminently learned Grotius, with whom he had sat face to face in Paris “just as we are sitting now,” he chose to regard himself as an irenicist, a man of peace, motivated by allegiance to no one party, but by a desire for universal tolerance, and that was why, though weary of struggle, he was still writing letters in the hope of persuading Chancellor Oxenstierna, now that the emperor was weak, to reinforce the army of Marshal Banér and enable him, with the help of Torstenson’s cavalry and the Scottish regiments of Lesley and King, to prevent a junction of the imperial troops with the Saxon renegades; and indeed, seeing that the royal child was being brought up on perfectly insane principles by her mother in the castle at Stockholm, he was trying to bring about an alliance between Sweden and Wladislaw of Poland against the Habsburgs, all the more so since the king of Poland was still hoping to mount the throne of Sweden, for which reason he, Opitz, had only last year written a poem in praise of His Polish Majesty, in which to be sure he had lauded the king’s love of peace and wise suspension of hostilities—“That thou, O Wladislaw, forsakest war for peace”—and yet he would always, to the detriment of poetics, grieve over the misery of Silesia, even though he had made his home in an unscarred city in the hope that he might still turn out some worthwhile verses. For, he said as though in conclusion, that was the one thing he really cared about. And then, looking Gryphius full in the face, he favored him with a little lesson. “Every verse is either iambic or trochaic; not that we take account of specific syllabic quantities in the manner of the Greeks and Romans; rather, we recognize by the accents and the intonation which syllable is to be considered strong and which weak.”

  Then, before Gryphius could discharge his thunders, the kitchenmaid, perpetually smiling but only around the corners of her mouth, brought in a boiled codfish on a silver platter. And now Agnes spoke across the table. In God’s name, she pleaded, the young gentleman should stop quarreling and let her dear master, whose stomach was easily unsettled, enjoy the fish—which she had boiled in milk and seasoned with dill—in peace. With a little jingle, which she recited with her broad country pronunciation and misplaced accents—“To fight over cod is displeasing to God”—she obtained silence, for before falling gently off the bone, the fish, too, looked white-eyed at no one.

  That wasn’t their only reason for eating in silence. There was no more offending to be done. Only half words were left dangling. Everything had been said. Young Gryphius stuffed himself ravenously, holding his left hand under his chin, while Opitz poked about rather listlessly with a fork, the new-fangled table tool he had brought back from Paris years before. Gryphius sucked the larger bones and lapped up the jelly from the eye sockets. The two sightless orbs lay off to one side. Opitz ate none of the honeysweet millet porridge with candied elderberry blossoms, which Agnes served when nothing was left of the codfish but the clean backbone, the well-licked tail and dorsal fins, and the plundered head bones; but so early fatherless, so young and despairing, so homeless and Silesianly starved was young Gryphius that he proceeded as though braving a stupendous task, as in the fairy tale, to eat his way through the steaming mountain of millet.

  At first only the smacking lips of the poet, who would soon be famous for his eloquent death-yearning and renunciation of all earthly joys, could be heard, then other sounds, the bubbling, gurgling, belching of Opitz’s nervous and acid stomach, upset no doubt by the guest’s presence. Behind drooping eyelids Opitz bore his misery. Only from time to time did he pluck at the Swedish-style goatee designed to give strength to his weak chin.

  When the millet mountain had at last been razed, the young man injected a question into the silence: what was the master doing, what planning, what great work had he conceived, and, now that he had translated Sophocles so ably, what hopes did he nourish for a German tragedy? Opitz smiled, or, rather, he allowed the morose wrinkles of his ugliness to unfold into a grimace, and assured his visitor that his inner fire was spent and that no dense smoke could be expected. No use poking about for embers in a cold stove. He doubted if he would ever produce a well-turned essay on ancient Dacia, for that idea, conceived in his youth, was by now choked with weeds. As for a German tragedy, only someone still in his prime like Gryphius could hope to write one. He was planning, however, to translate the Psalms of David with the utmost care, for which task he would have to study the Hebrew scriptures under learned guidance. Then he thought he would render Greek and Latin epigrams “into our tongue and have them printed here.” He further harbored the intention of bringing certain Breslau treasures to light and acquainting the world once more with the long-forgotten Annolied, in order that it might endure. No more.

  As though to justify himself, Opitz waved a hand in the direction of the depleted table and said, “Surely no one will take it amiss if we devote the time that many spend in overeating, futile babbling, and bickering, to the charms of study, and close our minds to things that the poor often have and the rich cannot buy.”

  With these words he may have been tacitly enjoining the young man to say no more, but to go home and study in the quiet of his room. In any case Gryphius stood up, showing by the look of horror on his face how pitifully drained he had found the still-revered master. And when Opitz—no sooner had the strange kitchenmaid, now humming in a monotone, cleared away the empty dishes—confided with an ugly leer that Agnes’s warm flesh, though he was obliged to share it with the local town painter, had revived his affections of late, given him new life, and, belatedly to be sure and with only partial success, rekindled his desires, Gryphius, quite revolted, buttoned his jacket. He would go now. He would disturb the master no longer. He thanked the master for his instruction. He had stayed too long.

  Already in the doorway, the young poet nevertheless had a request to make. Without any hemming and hawing, he asked Opitz to find him a suitable publisher. Though well aware of the vanity of publishing books and striving for posthumous fame, he would nevertheless like to see the sonnets he had written in this city of false glitter and illusory happiness printed, precisely because they excoriated such vanity. Opitz listened, reflected for a moment, and then promised to do what he could to dispose a publisher in the young man’s favor.

  Suddenly Opitz switched to scholarly Latin and, with the help of quotations, moved into an area of humanistic remoteness (after which Gryphius, too, switched to Latin). Finally, after a Seneca quotation of some length, the older man explained that he knew an imperial councilor who for reasons of ill health had retired into contemplative seclusion and took an interest in the arts. He hoped that the imperial title would not trouble Gryphius. Not eve
ryone in the imperial party was evil. He would write a letter of introduction.

  (And so he soon did. Gryphius moved to the estate of a certain Herr Schönborner, won his favor, instructed his sons, and in the following year, financed by the imperial councilor, had his sonnets printed in Lissa, that they might live after him.)

  When, full of fish and millet but also replete with sadness, young Gryphius had finally left, Agnes the kitchenmaid lit two candles, laid out paper, and placed a freshly cut goose quill beside it. Then, within easy reach, she put down a small dish of caraway seeds, which Opitz liked to nibble while writing letters. He picked them up with a moistened fingertip. Caraway seeds were his little vice.

  He wrote to the Swedish chancellor, imploring him at long last to set Torstenson’s troops and the Scottish regiments in motion. To judge by the information he, Opitz, had gathered in this seaport town—“for Dantzik is the meeting place of all manner of agents and couriers”—it was necessary to move quickly and defeat the Saxons in Brandenburg before they could join forces with the imperial army. Both the distress of Silesia and the military situation made a decision imperative.

  (In response to which, a month later, on October 4, 1636, the imperial troops were cut off from those of Saxony, and on a battlefield between forest and marshland near Wittstock on the Dosse, a tributary of the Havel, defeated by the Swedes under Marshal Banér, an engagement in which the Scottish regiments of Lesley and King played a decisive part. After uncounted losses on both sides, captured banners, cannon, and provender were counted. No more.)

  After sealing his letter to Oxenstierna, Opitz sat quietly for a while by the candles, chewed the remaining caraway seeds, and far from all sound waited for Agnes the kitchenmaid, who soon came in and made up to him for all, or nearly all, his sorrows.

  Turnips and Gänseklein