An Inept Symbolist
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING An Inept Symbolist By Stanley Edgar Hyman I missed Guenter Grass' The Tin Drum when it was published in this country last year (translated by Ralph Manheim, Pantheon, 592...
...When he is not allowed to make a speech at his old school, which had expelled him for stealing a veteran's Iron Cross, Mahlke kills himself...
...most recently he has been a commercial success as a concert drummer, enormously popular with the elderly for the regressive fantasies that his drumming produces in them...
...He starts to tell a story and breaks off with the remark: "a dismal, complicated story, which deserves to be written, but somewhere else, not by me...
...Some of the book is authentically funny, although the humor is always on the edge of the macabre...
...If the eel-fishing scene is revolting, as it truly is, why not repeat it later in the book...
...Why not...
...The reviews announced him as the German Joyce or Faulkner, but I am afraid that he is only the German Gregory Corso...
...Oskar is seduced by Maria after they make a fizz drink, from fruit-flavored powder and his saliva, in her navel...
...he believes himself to be the son of his mother's lover, and the father of his half-brother Kurt...
...A band of SA men wreck the toystore of a Jew named Markus...
...In two mad postwar vignettes, the lieutenant who ordered the machinegunning of the nuns in 1945 reappears a decade later for a military inspection of the ruined pillbox, and two German soldiers ordered to execute a Polish partisan in 1939 are seen as civilian businessmen in 1954 still obediently trying to execute him...
...There is an uproarious love affair between a sadist and a masochist, rising to passion each time he tramples her big toes and turns the nails black, ending sadly when new nails will no longer grow...
...the mercy shooting of young sailors stuck in the portholes of a burning submarine...
...It is all shapeless and random...
...Oskar does fantasies on words...
...Oskar's mother and her lover play a kind of footsie under the card table, in which his sock-clad foot gropes between her thighs...
...Ah, the reader thinks, Oskar is Thoreau's different drummer, a symbol for the Other Germans...
...Cat and Mouse, is even more disappointing than The Tin Drum...
...The most successful nightclub in Duesseldorf is the Onion Cellar, serving nothing but onions, which the patrons cut up to have a good public cry...
...Similarly, Oskar's ability to shatter glass with his voice seems at first as though it will turn out to be a meaningful symbol, perhaps for the power of art...
...the blithe machinegunning of five nuns gathering crabs on a Normandy beach in front of a German pillbox...
...He describes Oskar's conquest of one lady in a military metaphor, then switches to metaphors from poetry and music...
...a neighbor's killing of his four tomcats with a poker when he could not stand their smell...
...He wonders "who is writing this in the first place," and asks at the conclusion, "Who will supply me with a good ending...
...He betrays both his legal father and his true father to their deaths, the former in a genuinely horrifying scene...
...It is sometimes a little forced and spurious, like German jazz: Oskar coughs in church, and the cough climbs into the choir and organizes a Bach society...
...Sometimes a nasty detail becomes a political metaphor: The ghastly disintegration of an exhumed female corpse is a comment on the dismantling of industrial plants in the Ruhr and Rhineland...
...In the course of the novel Mahlke outgrows his anti-war sentiments to become a heroic tank commander...
...At one point a plaster statue of the boy Jesus miraculously drums for Oskar, and at another point Oskar calls himself "Jesus...
...A little fellow pounding on a tin drum wanders through Cat and Mouse, and seagulls emit "glasscutting screams...
...other coy metaphors add salacity to other sexual adventures...
...But Oskar denies this, and says that he similarly broke up meetings of Boy Scouts and Vegetarians...
...The chorus of praise for it, some from people whose judgment I respect, convinced me that I had been mistaken to pass it by...
...The meaninglessness of the symbols is the major defect...
...Much of Grass' style is pointless mannerism...
...A great deal is made of an identification with Jesus...
...they then go after Markus and find him slumped over his desk, a suicide...
...the inability of two drunken lesbians to copulate makes Oskar despair of the reunification of Germany...
...What is the relationship of these details to each other...
...Oskar meets a girl named Ulla at a party and helps her throw up by putting a finger down her throat...
...When a dwarf friend of Oskar's becomes Goebbels' jester, the friend describes himself as the "inward emigration...
...Cat and Mouse is about the fixation that the adolescent narrator, Pilenz, has on a schoolfellow, Joachim Mahlke...
...I do not think that this gem of bitter irony justifies almost 800 pages, but it shows that if Grass ever learns his craft, he might be quite a writer...
...Grass' second novel...
...much of it is repellent and, fatally, repellent in a boring fashion...
...Oskar has worked as a tombstone carver and a life model...
...Grass' style is even more self-conscious than it was in his first novel...
...Oskar resembles a three-year-old and often plays a child's tin drum...
...Now Grass' second novel, Cat and Mouse, has appeared (translated by Ralph Manheim, Harcourt, Brace & World, 189 pp., $3.95), and I took advantage of the event to read both books...
...The "mouse" of the title is Mahlke's Adam's apple—I do not know why, and I do not know what the "cat" stands for—and everything Mahlke does is to distract attention from it or to conceal it...
...It is all hokum, however, and Oskar is more nearly Judas...
...The other great strength of the book is its mockery of German hypocrisy...
...Iron Cross, the absurd salvaging—are again meaningless...
...A married woman who tries to take her pleasure with a live eel is bitten and maimed...
...One of the SA men with puppets on his fingers poked him with Kasperl's wooden grandmother...
...the consequent suicide of Oskar's pregnant mother, by forcing herself to eat eels and other fish and then vomit them up...
...It is as obsessed with the bladder as The Tin Drum, and merely adds an obsession with the Adam's apple...
...A kind of foreshadowing that we might call "shotgun foreshadowing" is used to foretell Mahlke's eventual suicide: The boys predict "Someday he's going to hang himself, or he'll get to be something real big, or invent something terrific...
...My original impulse appears to have been right...
...Pilenz refers to Grass as "the fellow who invented us because it's his business to invent people...
...After the War, little Kurt becomes a black market businessman, specializing in lighter flints...
...Mahlke is a loner with a protuberant Adam's apple, a wizard at diving for salvage...
...The book has a great deal of raw power, and many scenes are quite upsetting...
...Eventually the drum comes to symbolize so many things that it symbolizes nothing...
...Having dutifully listed all the things that I can find to praise, I must now confess that they do not seem to me to add up to anything...
...when Oskar feels an impulse, "hedgehogs mated under the soles of my feet...
...And so on, and so on...
...The reader soon discovers that the important feature of the drumming is hiding under the stand, as Oskar similarly hides under the family table and under his grandmother's skirts...
...But Swift in Gulliver's Travels ordered the disgusting and nauseating to produce a meaningful work of art...
...Cat and Mouse suggests Alain-Fournier's The Wanderer rescored for a German brass band...
...Oskar's tin drum, marked as central by the book's title, at first seems to have a clear significance, when Oskar hides under rostrums and breaks up Nazi meetings by turning the marches into waltzes and Charlestons...
...He switches at random from the first person to the third...
...he retells one chapter endlessly, beginning it again and again with slight changes...
...We might buy a stuffed animal to have something quiet between us...
...Some of Grass' language is eloquent and effective...
...Here is Oskar meditating on his love for his stepmother Maria: "I might have my eyes vaccinated and find tears again...
...The narrator switches pointlessly from the first person to a second-person address to Mahlke...
...The comparable details in The Tin Drum seem chosen only to produce their individual frissons...
...a card game in which a dying man is forced to participate, with a poke in the ribs every time he sags...
...WRITERS & WRITING An Inept Symbolist By Stanley Edgar Hyman I missed Guenter Grass' The Tin Drum when it was published in this country last year (translated by Ralph Manheim, Pantheon, 592 pp., $6.95...
...So with the other symbols...
...By the time Oskar sings a heart-shaped opening in a water glass, with an engraved inscription under it, as a souvenir for a girl midget, this too is hokum...
...The Tin Drum's vision of sex is not as distasteful as Naked Lunch's only because it is less sadistic...
...And so Grass does...
...At the nearest butcher shop Oskar would put his heart through the meat-grinder if you would do the same with your soul...
...later he fights with her and punches and bites her genitals...
...These include: an encounter with an eel fisherman, lovingly shown pulling his catch out of the horse's head he uses for bait...
...As everyone must know by now...
...One perfect detail in The Tin Drum convinces me that Grass has talent...
...the squeezing is described between lines of the Lord's Prayer...
...In one scene Oskar and his employer Korneff stand in a cemetery during a funeral, and Oskar squeezes the boils on Korneff's neck...
...The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a Danzig dwarf born in 1924, who narrates the first 30 years of his life while incarcerated in a mental hospital following his conviction for a murder he did not commit...
...I found The Tin Drum, despite some virtues, quite disappointing...
...The symbols—cat, mouse, Adam's apple...
...she soon joins him as a life model and they are painted surrealistically, with Ulla cut open in the middle and Oskar sitting reading between her spleen and liver...
...Oskar says of a friend that he lay in bed for days, urinating into beer bottles, when "with a little spirit of enterprise he might have urinated in the washbasin...
...he will create an eel prayer, or a loving dialogue between two radishes...
...None, except that they are equally disgusting...
...he had the power of shattering glass with his voice, but lost it and grew a hump instead...
Vol. 46 • August 1963 • No. 17
