Tales of a Party Hack
GRAVES, TOM
Tales of a Party Hack The Frog Who Dared to Croak By Richard Sennett Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 182 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Tom Graves Contributor, "Playboy," "Southern Exposure" Novels about...
...There is not much to like about Tibor Grau...
...This overworked device is normally employed to mask a novel's lack of substance...
...Sennett uses recurring fairy tales to illustrate his themes—particularly one fable about a group of Transylvanian frogs that Grau reworks according to the circumstances of the telling...
...The tales are not as involving as, I suspect, the author intended...
...For a Western writer, the three principal hurdles are gaining a proper understanding of life in the Soviet bloc, digesting it, and presenting it in a way that is comprehensible to others on our side of the world...
...there's something wrong with [it], even though it celebrates the glory of the department's mission...
...Essentially, The Frog Who Dared to Croak is about a man coming face-to-face with himself near the end of his days...
...I think about what it was like to kiss a man who has been drinking bad brandy in order to keep warm, the smell of bad breath and brandy also transforming itself into a bouquet...
...Tibor proves a brilliant student of Marxism and becomes a leading spokesman for the shortlived Hungarian Communist regime of Bela Kun in 1919...
...Richard Sennett has overcome these obstacles in The Frog Who Dared to Croak, a slender, powerful novel that focuses searing insight on the political muck of Hungary...
...Soon he is a forgotten man, forced into retirement so that the Party ideologues will not have to hear his senile grumblings...
...The brief affairs introduce him to their plight and he develops a love for the proletariat's smells and filth: "I think of how one gradually comes to savor the odor of dried urine, and how this odor, compounded daily because my men were not allowed to bathe, gradually transforms itself into a bouquet...
...He is a moral weakling who takes pleasure in his ability to outsurvive true believers and dogmatists alike...
...Sennett succeeds in giving it an original twist by leaving long gaps between the entries, forcing us to read between the lines...
...He marries in the 1930s—we learn in retrospect from his wartime notes...
...Since Grau has repeatedly kissed the hand that feeds him while suffering a life of struggle and disappointment, by the time he finally feels secure enough in his old age to fight back his croak amounts to no more than a peep...
...Grau played it safe, waiting until he was useless to the Party before making his tiny ripple...
...Sen-nett's title (also the heading of the final chapter) is somewhat misleading...
...We see the changes in the philosopher through what is left unsaid...
...It comes fully awake during a later visit to a War-ravaged synagogue: For the first time he realizes the meaning of being a Jew, even under a government that supposedly does not persecute minorities...
...Nevertheless, their progression does poignantly allegorize the protagonist's personal metamorphoses...
...Grau skillfully renders the verses "correct," editing them into a mockery of their original intent...
...He is impotent with her and unable to cloak his preference for men...
...Eventually he leaves to serve as an interpreter on the front...
...The truth and ethicality of this statement ring hollow when we know why he survived...
...He offers money for their embraces...
...Yet, miraculously, I am still alive and well...
...The story jumps, for example, from Grau's only meeting with Joseph Stalin, during the dictator's days as a young Party chief in Minsk, to the turmoil of World War II, when Grau opts for front-line duty to avoid facing the USSR's slow decay...
...This is Richard Sennett's first novel, and it bears many signs of his extensive background in sociology and the psychology of power...
...The young bride is a former student of his who worships him...
...We'd like your help in making it more suitable...
...He is appointed Deputy Director of the Department of Cultural Propaganda...
...In a Budapest park he encounters near-starved farmboys who have grabbed at the straw of coming to the city for work...
...As a youth, Tibor enters the revolutionary movement by an unusually circuitous path—homosexuality...
...Grau's journals span roughly the years 1910-60, and the editor prefaces each segment...
...Grau remains an atheist all his life, but his Jewish consciousness is stirred after he is captured by peasants who turn him over to the Nazis in the hope of gaining favors...
...One day a fellow apparatchik hands Grau a poem by a prominent Soviet lyricist, remarking...
...The book chronicles the life of Tibor Grau, born an upper-class Budapest Jew in the late 19th century, and destined to be a sadly used Marxist philosopher and Party hack...
...Sennett tells his tale through an editor who is preparing for publication bits and pieces of Grau's personal journals, along with his official writings and letters...
...Reviewed by Tom Graves Contributor, "Playboy," "Southern Exposure" Novels about Eastern European politics too often tend to tedium as they doggedly attempt to "expose" all the countless contradictions of Communist ideology...
...After Kun's demise he moves to the Soviet Union, where his talents are soon recognized by the bureaucracy...
...He writes in clear, bold strokes, and he pointedly demonstrates totalitarianism's crippling effect on the human spirit without clubbing the reader senseless...
...In his final words, Grau boasts "I spoke out...
Vol. 65 • October 1982 • No. 19
