The Mad Dog

...but the present tales and fragments are also a useful introduction to a major writer's blend of anger, love, and hope...

...Indirectly, of course, these people reject the military, economic, political solutions in the German air, and put their faith in the supernatural and in their fellowship...

...He is right on all counts: illusion can sustain one for a while, but it can also crush one...

...Following the war, Herold applied his SS leadership to a gang of killers who have now killed him...

...Herold's ambition and ability took him into the SS ranks, where he advanced rapidly and lost his faith...

...America," "The Tribe of Esau," and "The Dead No Longer Obey" are snippets put aside in the 1940s...

...The house now looks like a Faulkner manse half a century after the Civil War, and the hallway stinks of fish, onions, and fried potatoes...

...Indeed, one wonders, after reading "Youth on Fire" and later books like The Clown, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Safety Net, and Group Portrait, how Boll accounted for attraction between plain, ordinary, lean, or lumpy folks...

...Among the unpublished stories was "The Fugitive...

...Militarily, he allows another dutiful officer to blow up that bridge and to leave the Germans to be slaughtered by pursuing Russians, for the chased must provide no convenience for the pursuers...

...Reinhard, for whom war is hateful because it keeps him from his beloved wife, to whom he has remained faithful, hides in the house of an unnamed woman equally faithful to her soldier-husband...

...Joseph Hynes teaches English at the University of Oregon.e University of Oregon...

...Romanticism-in the midst of vivid Social realism-always ruled him...

...The three who love us: God, your wife, and my husband, may well forgive us...

...These posthumous pieces include the short novels A Soldier's Legacy and The Silent Angel...

...The chaplain's narrative persuades us, of course, that he is Becker and that he feels the horrible guilt of betraying Herold by judging rather than befriending him and offering him hope...

...Youth on Fire," however, is the young Boll's nonironic, almost Edenic, expression of loyalty to his Catholic roots...

...The only group they want to belong to is the church, within whose embrace six of them expect to marry, work, and live in hope...

...Finally, "Mad Dog" skillfully builds a story within a story, in Conrad's fashion...

...This is a valid observation, especially with respect to both men's war stories, but at least in "Youth on Fire" I detect the French influence of Bernanos, Bloy, Peguy, and Mauriac, the Catholic novel's heavy hitters of the early twentieth century...

...Boll had quit college soon after the war and was struggling as a writer to support his growing family...

...Joseph, the title figure, is fleeing his fellow German soldiers for "a crime against the state...

...The brief, intense, erotic encounter between these two is shown as the work of fate, circumstances, and their near-despair...

...Parts of two or three of these pieces were incorporated into other Boll works...

...These views are obviously developed at length in his later novels...

...These characters despise their need for sex, but fate controls them if only for an afternoon...

...The story adroitly gives us Boll's idea of what unqualified Christian love should be and of why Catholic institutional behavior almost inevitably betrays that ideal...

...An anonymous doctor officially pronounces that a body at the police station is dead...

...Like "Trapped in Paris," "The Rendezvous" explores sexual need as distinct from love...

...yet as Reinhard continues his flight she says that he must not "be sad...

...Joseph's fear is wonderfully conveyed, as is his savoring of the bread, coffee, and tobacco that typically sustain Boll's characters...

...The idealized Catholic Christian collectivism of this story shows up later, after it has gone institutionally rancid, in The Clown and Group Portrait...

...I find fascinating these early traces of Boll's subsequent fullblown achievement...

...Another idealist, the unnamed engineering officer in "The Tale of Berkova Bridge," also loses, but a bit more ambivalently...

...To this list we may now add the ten items that comprise The Mad Dog, including short stories and a few isolated fictional episodes derived from typescripts in various stages of completeness...

...Editorial research dates one story 1936-37 and the other items from 1946 to perhaps 1950...

...Thus the idealism and faith of "Youth on Fire" persist ten years later...

...The translator mentions the young Boll's debt-in this whole collection-to Erich Maria Remarque's social realism...

...As he waits for Maria, the soldier comes to realize-even before he meets her new husband-that illusion has crippled him, that life has inevitably gone on, and that he has lost her...

...Herold, a brilliant, abused orphan, grew to young Catholic manhood with only one friend, named Becker, who became a priest...

...Foreshadowing later protagonists, Joseph confronts a safe and comfortable priest with whom he exchanges blessings he feels they both need...

...It's an important document and a good story...

...Trapped in Paris" is the tale of another fugitive-Reinhard, a solitary German soldier running from American forces seizing Paris...

...As in "The Rendezvous," atmosphere is important...

...As we call to mind events on the River Kwai, he dutifully rebuilds a bridge-destroyed by fleeing Russians in 1941-to enable his German troops to escape the Russians in 1943...

...Joseph Hynes In 1985, the year of his death, Heinrich Boll completed his last novel, Women in a River Landscape...

...He is finally shot dead, but the story appears to be concerned not so much with this outcome as with Joseph's hatred for war and for how it affects participants...

...An unnamed soldier returns after seven years of war to claim Maria, with whom he had consummated his love before going to battle...

...Here we have Boll, only nineteen years old, before the war that fed so much of his artistic energy, laying before us, with almost none of his subsequent irony and satire, that spiritual, sexual, and cultural idealism we know from the harsher, stylistically sophisticated writing that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1972 for Group Portrait with Lady...

...In my opinion the 1936-37 story, "Youth on Fire," will be seen by Boll enthusiasts as worth the price of admission, despite the virtues of the other stories...

...Since that time, some of his earlier, unpublished works have been made available from the Boll Archives in Cologne...

...In any event, "Youth on Fire" will show many readers the Boll of nineteen still driving the Boll of fifty or sixty...

...In a setting that evokes Greene's Third Man and the cigarette butts, trash heaps, rain, and fog of Eliot's poetry, a married doctor and a woman he has picked up at a movie meet again, have a drink, consummate their passion as fatefully as do Reinhard and the Frenchwoman, and consent to release each other...

...The story neatly delivers Boll's permanent conviction that war is immoral idiocy, and delivers it with telling irony...

...Becker disapprovingly separated himself from Herold, though the chaplain emphasizes that Becker was the only person this chaste murderer had loved...

...The young people of the title include three couples and a priest, all of whom experience the personal and social evil in which they are immersed, but who nonetheless resist suicide, despair, crime, and cynicism because they love God and believe ardently in the reality and power of God's grace...

...An attendant chaplain then takes over to tell the doctor about Theodor Herold, the deceased...

...Paradise Lost," possibly the opening chapter of an unfinished novel, explores then and now, dream and reality...

...The later pieces are war-centered, each tending to focus on a single character...

...Youth on Fire," perhaps the earliest Boll fiction extant, comes out of a Germany in deep economic depression, precisely when National Socialism was gaining its sinister foothold...

...The seediness of the setting matches the morality on view...

...To that end, he produced these unattached tidbits and stories, as well as some novellas, none of which, in their stress on war and wretchedness, proved publishable...

...More specifically, his idealism turns up here as always in his presentation of sexual love as idealistically romantic-the genuine article from the first glance and forever...

...Such love overcomes any sordidness or other experience that occurred before the beloved is first glimpsed, and reminds one of medieval courtly love: consummation is fine, but somehow a little beside the point of love's permanence and emotional (not intellectual) force...