Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (45 page)

As for the future, Grass is wisely cautious about
ours.
He even speculates that the Germans
may
be dying out. “And is it not possible that German culture (and with it literature) will come to be prized as an indivisible but manifold unity only after and because the Germans have become extinct?” Although he is
fun
to read, Grass is never so insecure as to be
polite.

(In praising the work of Celine, Kurt Vonnegut has written: “He was in the worst possible taste … he did not seem to understand that aristocratic restraints and sensibilities, whether inherited or learned, accounted for much of the splendor of literature … he discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes. Every writer is in his debt… no honest writer … will ever want to be polite again.”)

Grass also knows how to be harsh. Of his character Dörte: “Now that she wants a child — ‘This time my mind is made up!' — she has been tiptoeing on religious pathways. With Balinese women she offers up little flower-patterned bowls of rice in temples under holy trees, in each of which a white, fertility-bestowing woman is said to dwell.” On the other hand, she stops sleeping with Harm (“I haven't got to that stage yet'“).

Of the limitations of the movie art: “The cave breathes what a film cannot communicate: stink.”

Of Dörte 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 Führer 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: Fräulein 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 Dörte 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 know of him only through Volker Schlöndorff'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. Günter Grass is simply the most powerful and versatile writer alive.

Günter Grass: King of the Toy Merchants (1982)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

“Günter 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 Günter 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 für 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 über 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 Günter 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.