Picked-Up Pieces (47 page)

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:

In the whirlwind of argument and gesture that surrounds the unwitting dachshund, everybody has something to say. The schoolteacher urges his students “to try to understand the world in all its variety and contradiction.” Youth scorns “the daily capitulations characteristic of adults” and prescribes “spontaneous action” as the only way “to make room … for new foundations on which to build a pacified existence.” The dentist looks toward a day of “worldwide Sickcare” and warns that “with all its display of realism, this younger generation is looking for a new myth. Watch your step!” The terms of the debate are familiar to Americans, but not explicated so many-sidedly, with the charity of humor, and with the specifically German dimension of a disastrous “transvaluation of all values” (Nietzsche’s phrase) that did occur. Starusch, though with the dentist’s help he seduces his pupil from caninocide, is left with a vision of the violence within himself, a desire to strangle and drown Sieglinde and to bulldoze away all the suffocating junk of industrial affluence. The very tartar on his teeth, the dentist tells him, is “petrified hatred.” Seneca is the dentist’s favorite philosopher, and the last sentences have a stoic ring: “Nothing lasts. There will always be pain.” Grass himself, evidently, has complained that his final phrase in German—“
immer neue Schmerzen
” (“always new pains”)—is more active; “new pains are always coming” might be more faithful and faintly more optimistic. Yet the difficulty is inherent; the dentist, like him or not, has the best lines, and the dust jacket, designed by Grass himself, shows a finger over a candle flame—an allusion to the most primitive dental anesthetic, which was to divide the pain by holding the patient’s hand over a candle, and a symbol of all our palliations. All anesthetic is local.

F
ROM THE
D
IARY OF A
S
NAIL
, by Günter Grass, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 310 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Günter Grass addresses his newest book,
From the Diary of a Snail
, to his four children. The eldest of
my
four children once, under the illusion that she could turn pebbles into jewels, acquired a bright little machine that, loaded with gray sludge and plugged into a socket, revolved and
tumbled to a hypothetical lustre whatever bits of the material universe were put inside. That curious device (now defunct) offers the best analogy I can think of to Grass’s present authorial method. The gray sludge is
Mief
or “melancholy”—the leaden aura of staleness and inertia possessed by compromised, relative, muddled, hashed-over, snail’s-pace reality. The electricity is Grass’s phenomenal energy, not only intellectual but personal, soulful, human; however farfetched his fancies, Grass (like the not dissimilarly mustachioed Kurt Vonnegut) convinces us that his heart remains in the right place. The bits of rough matter are whatever obsessions he finds simultaneous within him: in this book, snails, children, hermaphroditism, Dürer’s print entitled
Melencolia I
, the fate of the Danzig Jews, the suicide of Manfred Augst (real), the adventures of Hermann Ott (fictional), and the 1969 West German elections, wherein Grass contributed nearly a hundred speeches to Willy Brandt’s successful campaign. While functioning, Grass’s narrative engine, like the polishing machine, seems inexhaustible and distinctly unmusical, at least in translation. Though my daughter’s polisher ran for days and weeks without stopping, the rocks and shards inside never shed, along with their incidental roughnesses, the core of obduracy that makes sea-smoothed stones so dryly disappointing when arranged on the summer cottage mantelpiece. And when
From the Diary of a Snail
stops shuddering and churning, what tumbles out, though of a certain sheen, is not a work of art.

Not that art is overtly aspired to. The snail’s diary began as a
Sudelbuch
, a scribble book, a book of jottings Grass carried with him on the campaign trail: “My entries come to me on the road.… I mean to speak to you by roundabout bypaths: sometimes offended and enraged, often withdrawn and hard to pin down, occasionally brimful of lies, until everything becomes plausible.” Some of the notations, then, deal with the incidents of the municipal hall and the hotel room; some are comments on the author’s allies in the Social Democratic Party and his enemies in the Christian Democratic Union. A portrait of Germany filters through the jottings—the Germany of the postwar economic miracle (“… and now after twenty-five years. From rubble and ashes we. From scratch. And today we are once more”), a Germany of glimpses (“… air shafts, garages, squares, warehouses, building sites, railroad tracks, the city park, the restored Old City: swans and shingled roofs as in the prospectus”),
a Germany of little cities Grass particularizes with his nice eye for local industry:

“How beautiful Germany is. So transparently impenetrable. So eerily innocent. So different and the same wherever you go,” Grass exclaims as he goes about speechifying, sitting in endless conferences, answering questions, coping with radical youths (“And I discover with what a prodigy of deception hate fosters beauty in youthful faces”), trying “to pull the weeds of German idealism, which spring up again as inexorably as rib grass.”

Upon this campaign diary Grass permits to intrude—or has imposed in two years of revision—a number of other concerns, tales, devices, and designs. The primary conceit, which wears out before the book does, is that all this is addressed to his children (Franz, Raoul, Laura, and Bruno) as a justification of their father’s long absences in what little Bruno calls the “fight with the whale” (
Walkampf
= Wahlkampf = election campaign). Four piping voices break into print, and the paternal author responds with a lecture, an evasion, a piece of self-portraiture, or a digression; his youth in Danzig, for instance, mushrooms into a considerable detailed history of Danzig’s ten thousand Jews after the free city was incorporated into Hitler’s Germany. Danzig also suggests to Grass a fictional person, a Gentile named Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt, who teaches in a Jewish school before the war and hides throughout the war in the cellar of a Kashubian bicycle dealer, Anton Stomma; Ott’s invented story is the most characteristically Grassian, and most easily followed, thread in this tangle of motifs. An academic thread is the lecture Grass has promised to give on Dürer’s dark and symbolically fraught
etching
Melencolia I;
he carries a print with him on the campaign, ruminates in his
Sudelbuch
about it, attempts to see his own efforts of “talktalktalk” in the light of an abiding opposition between Melencolia and her sister Utopia, and ends the book with the lecture itself, which is excellent and might seem even better had not its major points been several times adumbrated in the preceding pages. Another theme intrudes when, during the campaign, at an Evangelical Church congress in Stuttgart, a fifty-six-year-old man takes the microphone, delivers a jumbled harangue about fellowship, concludes, “Now I’ve got a provocation for you: I salute my comrades of the S.S.,” sits down, drinks something, and dies. His last words are wonderful; turning to the girl student beside him, he says, “That, young lady, was cyanide.” The man’s name is Manfred Augst, and, though Grass feels he knows his type well—a typical German craving “annihilation and redemption”—he cannot forget the incident, and finally interviews Augst’s widow and children. We also witness Grass interviewing Danzig Jews who now live in Israel, and see him taking a vacation with his family in Brittany, and are treated to several recipes and poems of his concoction, and to a rather opaque glorification of Willy Brandt as a kind of recessive Superman—“a man … whose loneliness draws large crowds,” a man whose “slow, steady ascent” is a “snail’s career.” Snails, of course, are meant to be the unifying metaphor and theme of this farrago. They peep in everywhere. Hermann Ott collects snails, and a lively abundance of circumstantial snail lore is given, from the “foamy crackling” they emit in even a state of rest to the “calcareous darts (known as love arrows)” that hermaphroditic Roman snails thrust into the soles of one another’s feet. The trouble is that the snail symbolizes too many things: Willy Brandt, the vagina, melancholy embodied, the human masses, moderate progressiveness, the author himself. “With my forward, inward drive, with my tendency to dwell, hesitate, and cling, with my restlessness and emotional haste, I am snaillike.” Grass is one of the “progressive mobile snails,” as opposed to the “conservative clinging snails”—though in the muddle of events and the fug of staleness and “talktalktalk” only an expert could tell the difference. And only a snail-lover could feel that the image is not overworked, overloaded, and harped upon with too much random ingenuity.

What we want from our great imaginers is not fuel but fire, not patterns but an action, not fragmented and interlaced accounts but a story. Amid all this personal and apologetical rubble one story moves, as follows:
When Hermann Ott takes refuge in the cellar of Anton Stomma, the household includes Stomma’s daughter Lisbeth. She is fair, plump, and stupefied. In the first four days of the war her Polish lover and her small son have been killed; she spends much time visiting cemeteries, and performs all her duties, which come to include sleeping with Ott, in a daze of unfeeling. “She lay mute under his thrusts, which struck the void.” Further obliging, she brings him snails from her cemeteries; one day she introduces into Ott’s cellar an unidentifiable purple-red slug. By accident, he discovers that when the slug is placed on her skin Lisbeth begins to stammer. Soon she is talking, then laughing; she ceases visiting cemeteries and goes instead to a hairdresser’s; she awakens sexually. As her cure progresses, the snail, with each application to her flesh, becomes more discolored and hideous. “It was as though the unidentified slug had sucked up Lisbeth’s melancholy, possibly her black bile.” The cure is complete; as normal femininity returns to her, she becomes a normal woman—demanding, willful, squeamish. The bloated and black “suction snail” disgusts her. On the first Sunday of Advent in 1944, she steps on it. “It burst with a full-bodied report. On the inside, too, it was black.” After the war, she and Ott marry, but he falls prey to melancholia and spends more and more of his time in cemeteries, searching for another of the melancholy-curing snails. Finally, Lisbeth commits him to an asylum. Now, this story is not patently edifying; mysterious and unpleasant and pessimistic, it does not tell us how to vote in the next election. But it draws resonance from an actuality beyond explanation; it objectifies the teller’s feelings, sensations, and convictions so that they carry into us more penetratingly than any declarative statement. The snail Grass has from his own substance produced a love arrow. The story takes place in a chilly cellar redolent of the muddy potato lands that are this author’s peculiar terrain. Imaginations seem to be as choosy as mollusks about the soil they inhabit; amid a great deal of mental travelogue, this one episode sticks fast and dankly lives.

In fairness to Grass, and with no aspersion on the efforts of Mr. Manheim, who for all I know has done the best of all possible jobs, one feels that exceptionally much has been lost in translation. The poems flung into this diary must be better than they seem. For every piece of wordplay that is explained in a footnote, there must be several too delicate to unravel. Grass’s curious trick of unpunctuated word-triplets (“bitter
tired finished,” “went stood lay”) must appear less gratuitous in German. Throughout, the skin of words feels a little raw in English, lacking its epiderm of intelligent verbal nervousness, of voiced sensitivity. And of course the many references to contemporary political figures strike chords muffled here. We do not so much read this book as overhear it: a German is speaking to Germans, intimately and urgently. For Grass, in addition to the universal duties of a writer, has the local duty, with all the German writers of his generation, of guarding and barring the path back into Hell.