Floundering With Grass
Moorcroft, Marilyn
G ilnter Grass stood amicably among his admirers, sipping Almaden wine and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. His robust laugh could be heard across the room, over the dozen murmuring voices at...
...Which brings us to some necessary questions: How seriously do we take Grass's profession of graphics artist...
...Writing, drawing, cooking, loving," he smiles...
...He does not look a half-century old-he will be fifty on October 16...
...to be caught by women--a feminist group, in fact...
...He glances at the article briefly and hands it back...
...Prometheus stealing fire from heaven...
...I recall, when I studied in Germany in the '60s, the picture of Hitler still hanging on the kitchen wall of my tutor's mother...
...Then there are the children of another girlfriend by another man...
...Yet Denes's intent in so vivid a portrayal of clinical detail is obviously to convince us that "seeing" will modify the easy acceptance of abortion and open our eyes to "the tragedy of our age that renders us unable or unwilling to acknowledge tragedy...
...He is excellent, but a new movie every few months...
...That romantic pessimism underlies her conviction that moral sensitivity about abortion will emerge from a sense of what it looks and feels like...
...You see, after four days he must go to Toronto...
...Another woman calls to him from the gallery door...
...So much more so then, when an unknown Grass novel is read aloud non-stop for 80 minutes by the author himself...
...Don't worry dear, everything is all right...
...His words are too valuable...
...The old Grimm fairy tale, "The Fisherman and His Wife," is the jumping-off point of the new work...
...In one chapter, for example, the Gernum Romantic writers Brentano, Grimm, Arnim and others are sitting around discussing greed and the fact that it is men, not women, who are never satisfied...
...Tree...
...I half-expect a snail to appear in one eye, just as in the etching over his shoulder...
...H i s t o r y . . . is a landscape inhabited by snails...
...If you are too factual with children, they miss the point: "What kind of gas was it...
...He is said to have balked at any local media coverage, including an invitation to appear on Firing Line...
...As a child, my tutor was reminded daily who Hitler was...
...He paints a verbal picture of being surrounded by women and children...
...Though one can't deny Grass's artistic talent, he is first, last and always, a writer--Germany's best living writer, a "court jester without a court," a snail with a worldwide following...
...The standing-room-only audience at the New School eagerly awaited a preview...
...To Grass, I wanted to say that perhaps it might be by neglect and not by design that German children l a ~ the facts...
...No, he changes his mind...
...All smiles, he throws up his hands in delight...
...As a former sculptor, Grass learned easily...
...Herr Grass," I begin . . . Grass looks up, startled...
...Between 1970 when the New York State law banning abortions was changed and 1973 when the Supreme Court declared the ban on abortions unconstitutional, this hospital performed several thousand abortions...
...Der Butt ("The Flounder"), Grass's to-be-published novel, is in this vein...
...His inner eye is a snail, plodding but all-seeing...
...Oh, Fassbinder...
...as a matter of fact, is an excellent (though not a wicked) cook...
...This fact, about which she informs us in the introduction, is impossible to separate from her intense search for the meaning of abortion...
...He tries to do too much too soon...
...The graphics on the wall swarm with symbolism, symbols which for the most part seem to be taken right out of Grass's literary works...
...Cumulatively one has the sense of people being pushed and pulled by forces beyond their control: doctors by money and changes in the law...
...On what the nun and the eel in the print have in common we can only speculate...
...He puts on his famous spectacles...
...Of course the Mama dies of retching...
...So is Ruis Woertendyke, director of the New York City premiere of Grass's The Plebeians Re...
...No matter...
...Grass's New York appearance was a big event...
...No, he can't be interviewed...
...But she ends up just a fisherman's wife, because the last wish, to be God, is even too much for the flounder, who has graciously granted the man's wishes up to that point, in exchange for his freedom...
...Says Dreher, he went to Grass one day "with a piece of copper in my pocket" and taught him how...
...I hesitate...
...Magda Denes is ne mere observer of that tragedy...
...Most everyone present is accounted for---except me...
...Many here were at the luncheon given for Grass earlier that day: Christoph Wecker, Goethehaus Director, is present...
...It is a painful indictment by Grass...
...A full section of Galerie Andre in Berlin is devoted to Grass's graphics...
...Hitler, of all people, should be remembered--defined, dissected, emblazoned, tattooed, if you will, on the brain-memory of every child...
...Now Grass is joking with two men next to the serving table...
...His popular following in America goes back to the 1963 appearance of The Tin Drum, predated that of Nobel-prize-winning Heinrich 15611, and overshadows that of Uwe Johnson, {vho also appeared here as part of the Berlin Now festival and who seems t o play Schiller to Grass's Goethe...
...What do you think of Fassbinder...
...Flashback: The print Engelsturz ("Fall of the Angels"), which renders a potpourri of things with wings and legs--insects and cigarette butts alike...
...questions about East and West Berlin, about Grass's friendship with ex-Chancellor Brandt for whom he campaigned, about "German-extraction" guilt, about feminism, about young German literati, about . . . It is easiest to begin by pulling a clipping from my pocket, carefully preserved from the April 7 issue of The New York Times: "West German Youth Found to be Ignorant About Hitler Period...
...Except for his middle-age Bauch, he has a rugged, handsome appearance...
...Why not...
...hearse the Uprising in New York at the Theatre for the New City...
...But yes, he, Grass, likes to cook...
...We can only surmise...
...The etching, "Return of the Doll," pictures a partially dismembered doll with an aggressive-looking fish about to gorge down an arm...
...But Grass notices a camera pointing in his direction and turns his back abruptly to mingle elsewhere...
...The English translation, by Ralph Manheim, will follow in late '78 or early '79...
...He and Grass became friends circa 1971...
...ThaFs a big Commonweal: 4$7 order for any cook...
...All these realistic objects, imaginatively juxtaposed, stuck on sticks, or regurgitating, or roaming over landscapes, are well-executed...
...Magda Denes is a psychologist who, over an unspecified but extended period of time, observed and interviewed staff, patients, and relatives of patients in a private, for-profit New York hospital...
...As in his novels, everything~ is in the print...
...The men were hardly parallel historical figures...
...He and I are suddenly standing alone...
...As Grass says in his own play's introduction, "Everything turns to theater in his (Brecht's) hands...
...Or are they, in a child's mind...
...Every child should know the Benedict Arnolds and the Nathan Hales of her country...
...We all laugh...
...He laughs...
...Allusions to cooking, meals and preparation of food abound...
...And here is one of them, a self-portrait in which Grass, wearing a snail like a monocle, eyes another snail on a table...
...Most of the prints ranged in price from $150 to $200, though there was a "boot" series of four prints going for $1065...
...The spineless husband reluctantly returns again and again to the sea and delivers the message apologetically to the flounder...
...Magda Denes explores in a compelling style and compulsive manner the thin edge of existence and its meaning in an abortion hospital...
...But, as with the profferings of a smorgasbord, it is impossible to sample it all...
...But he will answer questions now and after the reading...
...The main characters are eleven female cooks, who represent various historical periods, each speaking in the style of the period...
...It is a Jewish newspaper...
...Reading any Grass work alone, book in hand, is a voluptuous experience...
...I~,e scrawled in my notebook I MAR~YN MOORC~OFT is a ]ree-lance Writer, editor and translator living in Manhattan...
...It is Grass the politician we are presumably looking at here, who can't see the forest for the snails...
...Derivatively, the book is about women as the traditional nourishers of mankind...
...over all the land, then Emperor, then Pope, and at last, since she cannot bear the sun and moon rising against her will, to be God...
...Or should she...
...they ask...
...Besides being a history of nutrition, according to one source, the book depicts the swing from a male-dominated to a female-dominated world...
...How does Grass the etcher comoare to Grass the writer...
...I am the King," she says, "and you are nothing but my husband...
...It had been rumored that Grass was writing a cookbook...
...Grass had only done drawings up till then...
...A passage from Grass's From the Diary o~ a Snail points out an added complication...
...In Necessity and Sorrow is a subtle and intelligent confession which collapses at moments into a romantic pessimism about the human condition...
...The reader drowns in a density of words and allusions, floats in a stew, a cauldron, of metaphor...
...In one of The Tin Drum's most grotesquely memorable scenes, Oskar and his family are by the sea watching a longshoreman as he fishes a horse's head out of the water to extract eels from it...
...There is a charm about the picture, of being hungry--rather than sated-and overwhelmed by possibilities at the same time...
...He knows that he, and his social democratic ideals, are progressing, though slowly...
...The plot is famous: The workers are striking in the Berlin streets outside the theater where "The Boss" (Brecht), inside, is directing Coriolanus...
...They help mythologize the man and his literary creations...
...She speaks with embarrassed and anxious parents, uneasy husbands and boy friends...
...There is the familiar walrus moustache that echoes itself in the self-portraits hanging near him, the arched eyebrows and narrow eyes, the strong nose, the dark hair that grows just over the back collar and falls to one side of his forehead...
...We'll see how you feel about it when your humble servant does them up with all the trimmings and a little salad on the side...
...But children don't know who Eisenbower was...
...Three large breasts figure predominantly in R, and Grass's likeness is kissing one breast, his bushy moustache encircling the nipple as if hair grew out of it...
...Indiscreet wives remove the evidence of their adultery...
...A mystical force of time/spirit...
...I study him...
...The flounder, having till now guided the destinies of men and inspired them throughout their long history, now allows: ~ himself (herself...
...I plunge in...
...It is a massive work of 650 pages and took Grass four years to write...
...One is mesmerized by his strong baritone delivery...
...She wants a hut to replace her pigsty, then a castle to re'place the hut, then to be King (not Queen...
...Yes, but children know only what their parents tell them," he amwers...
...The Berlin uprising of 1953 is put down by tanks, and Brecht has not so much as lifted a finger in its behalf or interrupted his rehearsals...
...Flashback: to the stormtroopers in The Tin Drum that cut the Jewish toymaker's dolls open "and seemed disappointed each time that nothing but sawdust flowed from their limbs and bodies...
...In graphic and gory detail she describes D and C procedures, performed in busy times at the rate of six per hour, and saline abortions which provide women with 24 hours of labor and a dead baby...
...Flashback: the print of the fish eating the dolls...
...He looks the archetypal artist, except that his fame is as a novelist: he has just completed the manuscript of a new book, Der Butt ("The Flounder"), to be published in Germany in August in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair...
...The distorted doll-eyes are reminiscent of Picasso, and indeed the fish (the flounder of Der Butt?} can be likened to the unlicensed-nature symbol of Picasso's minotaur...
...Grass took a language that had been sterit lized, stultified, drained, and censored by the Nazis and reactivated it, made it rich and fertile and associative and bawdy and lively once again, a language with no verboten's, with all stops pulled...
...A godlike figure...
...What we are interested in, is how does Grass intend his version7 Is he saying that womankind, in this feminist era, is too greedy, or all humankind...
...Love between all of those: writing, love, drawing, love, cooking, love, love, love...
...Just two meters away hangs his etching, Gestillt ("Stated...
...itself...
...even in my Midwest high school, we always fell far behind and barely got to World War II in history class before summer vacation...
...His robust laugh could be heard across the room, over the dozen murmuring voices at the Weyhe Gallery, where his etchings were on display as part of the Berlin Festival...
...No one else wants to deal with history at this sedate opening...
...The compulsive manner, the hint of hysteria, the laments about cosmic injustice reveal the expiational purpose .,f the book...
...Someone asks about the cooks in his etchings...
...The fisherman's wife aspiring to deity7 The greedy artist searching his soul and daring to tell all...
...He has already said he does not want to talk about what hangs on the walls...
...No one is responsible for what is happening...
...A middle-aged mother of five weeping and incoherent expresses her inability to cope with one more...
...It is to Grass the writer that Western culture in general and German culture in particular owes a big debt...
...indiscreet husbands accompany careless mistresses...
...In this reportorial account, one quickly learns that human c a r n a g e l the sight of tiny bits and pieces of human bodies or of a perfectly formed 24-week infant--will never lead anyone at this hospital to deny the denials, to feel the suppressed revulsion that might build limits or reenforce taboos...
...I am a heel for bringing up such unsociable topics at this gem~tliche gathering...
...His answer is startling...
...But it is nevertheless a strange answer coming from one who has devoted so much of his energy to writing so that Germany would not forget--so that the world would not forget...
...The original tale concerns a cantankerous and greedy woman, who lives in a pigsty and repeatedly demands that her husband go back to the flounder in the sea, who she learns is really an enchanted prince, for more wish-fulfilling...
...Indoctrination h not education, and every generation has new villains and new heroes...
...When our publishers come home from Frankfurt in October, with the new-bound Grass volume under their arms, we will know more...
...Well, there was once a high-school dropout, his name was Grass and he wrote novels too wonderfully for words . . . (too wonderfully for pictures...
...They need the novels, but the novels don't need them...
...He had, of course, studied sculpture and stonemasonry early on, but gave it up for a literary career...
...nurses by doctors...
...If Grass refused to appear o n Firing Line, why should he want to respond to this reporter's line of fire...
...She interviews the eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds who have as little psychological and factual understanding of abortion as they have about sex...
...The glare of medical efficiency, legal permission, and women's rights blind them...
...The association has presumably proved a boon to them both...
...I speak of our propensity to deny that we hurt, at the awful cost of turning to stone...
...Lucky was the reporter who got any word with him at all...
...But what is Grass's flounder...
...I speak here of the fact that abortion is an abomination unless it is experienced as a human event of great sorrow and terrible necessity...
...Dreher, himself an artist, now has an occupation more lucrative than that of artist, and Grass has a needed outlet for his second profession...
...Even fresh ones...
...Significantly, those who heard Grass read were eager to share their ideas about the novel's content, but none wished to be identified by name...
...Grass's art publisher, Anselm Dreher, fills me in on some interesting details...
...A picture, in Orass's case, is not worth a thousand words...
...It is his agent...
...As with many highly personal books on subjects of moral controversy she wants to both explain and expiate...
...You're the one who has to read tonight...
...The young blond German woman who sat next to me that night at the reading said, "The New York Times is biased...
...There is no time...
...In "Nun with Eel"--the nun large and bulbous and looking like something out of Lewis Carroll (The church does not come off well in Grass...
...This is a liberated fisherman's wife...
...His pictures, his etchings, are, if anything, addenda to h i s novels...
...Following doctors as they move from operating room to operating room, Denes records their contempt, their cynicism, and their support for women's rights...
...it is they who have conquered territories, they who hunger for more and more...
...Grass has four children by his wife and one child by a girlfriend...
...Perhaps Roosevelt would have been a better choice...
...We have only partial answers...
...Snails, nuns, eels, dolls, crops of phallic mushrooms, cooks, shoes, fish, insects and cigarette butts--abound in Grass's etchings...
...He is tieless in a brown suit and green, open-throated shirt...
...though they didn't want to be caught --and justifiably so---misinterpreting the great cook Grass's recipe, they did enjoy guessing at the ingredients...
...I speak briefly with Director Woertendyke about his forthcoming Upris...
...About etching he knew nothing...
...The detail is fine, the ch6ice of subjects 8 July 1977:436 amusing, startling...
...cooks daily...
...Saul, we recall from The Tin Drum, is even today, in various forms, supposedly palming off the stuffed sausages of faith, hope and love on humankind) ---we are confronted with another recurring symbol, the eel...
...So is Anselm Dreher, the young German owner of Galerie Andre in Berlin, that peddles Grass's graphics...
...denial is the universal and unvarying stance...
...Till then . . . remember that most poignant and memorable chapter in The Tin Drum that begins, "There was once a musician...
...His is always rich and heady fare...
...He says his wife "wills not as I'd have her will...
...Already the snail has found its way into the engravings," we read in From the Diary o/ a Snail...
...she too has had an abortion in this hospital...
...Of course it is about greed, and that it is a woman who is the vehicle for greed in this old German tale is a whole 'nother issue...
...She is fat from too many eels, perhaps-or too many stuffed sausages...
...In spite of the flounder...
...So is Helen Wolf, Grass's Harcourt editor...
...Grass departs...
...Oddly enough, even after the reading, the content of the excerpts of the two chapters Grass read from were still hazy in the minds of many of the German listeners...
...She shrugs...
...his name was Meyn and he played the trumpet too beautifully for words...
...he asks dryly...
...Oskar's "presumptive father" Matzerath chastises Oskar's Mama for her subsequent nausea...
...You've always known how they catch eels and you've always eaten them just the same...
...The patients are terrified, frightened, ashamed, and, rarely, indifferent...
...when the man returns home, he finds his wife back in the pigsty...
...Grass looks like his pictures, though an older version...
...By implication it is about material and spiritual nourishment throughout history, the time-setting ranging from the Neolithicum to 1970...
...I wouldn't mind owning several myself...
...In answer to a question from the audience about the nature of his title symbol, Grass himself admitted he wasn't sure...
...parents by flighty daughters...
...And this is reenforced by the choruses of reassurance from doctors, nurses, orderlies, and social workers...
...They ask him for his support but, instead, he picks their minds to solve the aesthetic problems of his play...
...In part, the book is a history of "die Ern~hgung" (nourishment, nutrition...
...The snail is progress," Grass has already written...
...What more is there to say except that it is collectible Grass, digestible Grass, take-a-symbol-home Grass...
...Most of New York's German intelligentsia was there, as were representatives of German TV...
...Ruis says that over lunch Grass gave him one specific for the play's direction: "Do not make the face of The Boss look like Brecht...
...Grass's was a whirlwind visit of four days...
...Commonweal: 435 He cannot ignore my hovering pre~ence for long and turns...
...And I say so...
...His thesis is clear: the artist must be activist too, and Grassturned-campaigner is his own best example...
...If the face is not to be of Brecht, then it must be of Everyman, or Everyperson...
...BOOKS INSIDE AN ABORTION HOSPITAL MARGARET O'BRIEN 8TEINFELS In N e e e s s i t g and Sorr~v: L i f e and Death in an Abortion Hosp4tal MAGDA DENES Basic Books, $10 In Necessity and Sorrow is a powerful and gripping book...
...But can her vivid word-pictures, so 8 July 1977:438...
...Suffice it to say that the book is full of humor and ribaldry, of puns, of humorously juxtaposed dates and historical personages, that it does not limit itself to German themes but seems to encompass a great deal of history and humankind...
...Has the artist/writer spent so much time regurgitating the scrambled, unholy contents of his subconscious and collective memory that in his delirium even cigarette butts and matches take on lives of their own, and fly with everything else in his mind and pen, in the face of the gods, only to crash to earth again...
...The etchings are interesting and well-executed, and they make money...
...Is something wrong...
...In that order...
...In answer to a question that night, Grass will accuse the feminist movement, at least in Germany, of being too elitist and not taking into account the practical problems of most women...
...People should forget...
...patients by the exigencies of their lives...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
