Of Mollusks and Men
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing OF MOLLUSKS AND MEN BY PEARL K. BELL At no point of Gunter Grass' heady career as contemporary Germany's most powerful and widely read novelist has it been possible to fit this...
...Yet it is not the whirl of miscellaneous dailiness that eventually defeats the reader, and certainly not Grass' moderate, antiapocalyptic, antiextremist position on social change, which is altogether admirable in its robust sanity and responsible intelligence...
...The lecture, "On Stasis in Progress," forms the coda of this book, but the significance of the argument is murk...
...There is, however, an excess of tedium involved in plowing through everything that Grass has thrown indiscriminately into From the Diary of a Snail...
...Writers & Writing OF MOLLUSKS AND MEN BY PEARL K. BELL At no point of Gunter Grass' heady career as contemporary Germany's most powerful and widely read novelist has it been possible to fit this clowning but desperately earnest maverick into any conventional literary slot...
...There is too much of this mannered coyness, too much about snails and electioneering and food, too many cute children's questions with heavily ironic answers...
...In a rapidly shifting series of scenes-modeled on a TV screen being capriciously flipped from channel to channel by a restless viewer-he told the farcical, pathetic, often very funny story of a middle-aged schoolteacher, Eberhard Starusch, trying to dissuade his gifted radical student, Philipp Scherbaum, from immolating his dachshund in front of the most popular cafe in Berlin as a protest against the Vietnam War...
...At its liveliest, the diary has graphic vignettes of family life...
...Nothing has delighted Grass more than to turn his countrymen's passion for Ordnung upside down and let the past tumble guiltily out of the nation's pockets...
...This creeping, medium-term approach...
...But all of this "talktalktalk" pales beside those parts of the book where Grass the novelist is at work...
...Most recently, in Local Anaesthetic, a novel deliberately meant to set the reader's teeth and soul on edge, Grass turned to the smug present-day prosperity of the "economic miracle" to dramatize the generation gap between jaded, enervated liberalism and chaotic, revolutionary youth...
...A chatty, helter-skelter potpourri, From the Diary of a Snail contains an embarrassment of truncated, un-assimilated riches that do not always prove their worth...
...I don't like people who want to bend the banana straight for the benefit of mankind...
...For this Seneca-spouting tooth-plumber, the eternal cavity of life is being filled, ever more efficiently, by the march of technological progress...
...Interspersed erratically among all the miscellaneous entries is a fictional history, told at an exasperating snail's pace of starts and stops, about a Gentile schoolteacher in Danzig (the city where Grass grew up recurs like a dream in all his books...
...In addition to Novocain, the dentist provides his patients with TV to divert them from the whir of the air drill, the stab of the probe...
...During the late '30s he was a Samaritan and teacher to the beleaguered, shrinking Jewish community, and he spent the War hiding in a cellar (224 weeks, 1,568 days-facts...
...Nonetheless, the symbolic tug and pull between the tired humanist Starusch and the inflamed activist Scherbaum cannot be resolved in a dentist's chair...
...Not for him the Olympian detachment, high seriousness and smooth narration that was once the earmark of German novelists...
...Unlike most German writers of his and earlier generations, Grass has not been content merely to write about this thorny dilemma...
...What kind of gas was it...
...At the nerve-aching center of the book stands a nameless dentist who is repairing Starusch's prognathic bite...
...Yet the status quo remains essentially unchanged, for the only acceptable goals are sterility and the absence of pain...
...telling stories to his illiterate protector, falling in love with the man's daughter, and curing her of melancholy with the help of a snail...
...Doubt's story is enormously moving, related with wild beauty in Grass' exact, farcical, explosively inventive manner...
...Instead, Grass has recaptured the cruelty and remorse of 20th-century German history through a tumultuous, unsparing manipulation of fantasy, fairy-tale nightmare and the appalling reality of the grotesque: in The Tin Drum, the dwarf Oskar Matzareth's magic drum beats out the dread Nazi years in his own disruptive rhythms...
...Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt because he was always asking why, collects snails and Diirer prints...
...as well as a restatement of his familiar imperative that the Nazi years must not be hidden under the rug of memory...
...What ultimately drags him down is the book's lazy anything-goes organization, a formlessness that resembles a random-entry notebook...
...far from well-situated theories, skirting retreats and silted revolutions" ). The book is, moreover, a short history of German Socialism, with the fascinating footnote that Willy Brandt wears the pocket watch of the pre-World War I Social Democratic leader August Bebel...
...If a subtle order to his selection and arrangement of details exists, it is impossible to tell...
...Occasionally, exhausted beyond endurance, he is ready to throw the whole thing up: "What do they need me for...
...Finally, From the Diary of a Snail is a largely frustrating attempt by Grass to tell his young children about Hitler's destruction of the Jews (their chillingly matter-of-fact response to the Nazis' extermination technique: "Did it always work...
...There, more than aver, he refused to make any conventional concessions to his readers...
...It crawls, it goes into hiding but keeps on, putting down its quickly drying track on the historical landscape...
...of Scherbaum-type radicals booing Grass' patiently moderate proposals on tax and pension reform ("sons of too-good family who go into ecstasies about the proletariat, as if the Mother of God had appeared to them in person...
...In part, the work is a manual on the anatomy and mating habits of the snail-the novelist has always had a passion for facts-Submitted both as Grass' self-image ("I am the civilian snail, the snail made man . . with my tendency to dwell, hesitate, and cling") and as a symbol of true progress ("It seldom wins and then by the skin of its teeth...
...Once in a while, he delivers a flaw-less salvo, right on target: "What I don't like: people armed with the word 'trenchant.' (Those who don't think but think trenchantly also take trenchant action...
...Furthermore, Grass indulges in breathlessly incomplete sentences, to no discernible purpose: "Now Franz is banging on the partition wall because Raoul and his metal file...
...in Dog Years, the subterranean army of mechanical scarecrows waits to unleash its Grimm vengeance on the postwar world...
...In the course of this discontinuous narrative, we learn what happened to the Jews of Danzig-grass has indeed met some of the luckier ones, who survived and now live in Israel...
...No armchair socialist, he took to the road in 1969 for the Social Democratic party, covering approximately 20,000 miles up, down and across West Germany, making almost 100 campaign speeches in support of Willy Brandt's election as Chancellor...
...Sometimes, uncharacteristically didactic, he lapses into pomposity: "I am a Social Democrat because to my mind socialism is worthless without democracy...
...Scattered throughout, too, are notes for a lecture Grass has promised to give on Durer's engraving "Melencolia I," in celebration of the artist's 500th birthday...
...the teenager Mahlke, in Cat and Mouse, with his monstrous Adam's apple, desecrates the Iron Cross-to the horror of piously nationalistic German readers...
...of Brandt himself, remote and unapproachable, playing with matches...
...Otherwise there was only one bedroom where we and our parents...
...Scherbaum has argued that to burn himself would cause scarcely a ripple among the creamcake-slurping ladies but to burn his dachshund in the dog-worshipping city would start a riot...
...One's attention is forced to shift gears so frequently, and without warning, that the work becomes blurred, difficult to read, and not worth the effort-except, that is, for the too-brief novelist's story of Doubt...
...His new book, From the Diary of a Snail (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 210 pp., $7.95), is a hastily scribbled record kept on the run by a very busy but feverishly imaginative writer, meant primarily to explain the reason for the author's extended absences from home to his family...
...Drawing on Nietzsche's famous formulation of the eternal human struggle between Dionysian creativity careering toward chaos and Apollonian rationalism mired in stoical apathy, Local Anaesthetic brilliantly evokes the difficulty modern men of good will confront when they try to find a working balance between equally undesirable extremes...
...As though to punctuate the stages of the campaign, Grass beats out geographical drumrolls with savory lists of German place-names: Gladbeck, Dorsten bei Marl, Oberhausen, Kamen, Saarbriicken, Esslingen, Lohr, Nordlingen...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 21
