National Post (National Edition)
‘There were still merry tales to tell’
GUNTER GRASS’S FINAL BOOK, OF ALL THAT ENDS, IS A QUIET RAGING AGAINST THE NIGHT
Since the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Gunter Grass began his literary career as a poet, it is fitting that his last and posthumous book, Of All That Ends, is a collection of poetry and prose poems. Illustrated throughout by black and white pencil drawings by Grass, a graphic artist in addition to his other talents, it depicts forms of vegetation and dead birds — which are mildly repulsive. They can be safely ignored, unless the reader has a taste for nature morte.
What remains is the poet’s stock in trade: words forming images, images forming symbols. The author appears to be in a rare mood for this enterprise — the first poem, Free As a Bird, depicts the poet’s choice to ignore the doctor’s advice about his “pipe smoker’s heart, lung and kidneys,” and return to his studio. “I delighted in scribbling,” he proclaims, “and, fearing a relapse, began eagerly to live again.”
The poet soon feels himself in contention with the world, as if creating word symbols automatically raises opposition from various quarters. He dreams that his ink is derived from squid’s milk stored in canning jars. When moistened the squid juice reveals “streaks of a slimy substance.”
Why this dream motif of disgust? Is it a form of protest against high-tech and antiseptic forms of communication such as the Internet? “Available around the clock,” Grass writes of the web. “Never beyond reach. Trapped by a mouse click.” It’s a tyranny, all right. “When no one is looking I use a goose quill,” he says.
Or is his disgust inextricably connected with certain word symbols that somehow have meaning for the poet — the image of the snail, for example. We know from his political writing that, for Grass, the snail stands for progress. In this book, the online world’s metaphorical dismissal of postal service — “snail mail” — becomes literal in the mind of the poet, who deciphers the slimy trail of the gastropod and defends the obsolete notion of “stamped letters, each bearing a date.” Alas for the antiquated postal service! “Nowadays there’s seldom a letter among the junk mail,” Grass complains, “and almost never a handwritten one, one worth rereading.”
No matter. One continues to write. “Writing still satisfies an itch,” Grass confesses. “We swear an oath to tell each other stories till the very end.” Fortunately, the supply of the latter is inexhaustible. “There were still merry tales to tell,” Grass observes, of the sometimes gruesome past. But what of the afterlife? Grass and his wife couldn’t answer that question, of course, but they could exercise some control over the circumstances of their earthly departure, mainly by designing a place of rest. To this end they engaged the services of a carpenter to build them each a coffin. “What carpenter would build a refuge for the wandering soul, whose existence was both desired and doubted?” Grass asks rhetorically. “How might we be reborn, as worm, mushroom, or resistant bacteria? What other beings might inhabit the void?” Indeed, the possibilities are limitless. “With Nature’s all-powerful help, I’ve always hoped to be reborn as a cuckoo, drawn to the nests of strangers.”
Soon enough, the carpenter’s work was finished and he was able to show the fruits of his craftsmanship to the couple. “The look of them, the bright wood, each with its own grain, put us in a good mood,” Grass writes. Even the carpenter, a serious man, “seemed satisfied, and confirmed his mood by attempting a smile.”
The following Sunday, in a private ceremony, Grass and his wife lay down in their respective coffins. “They were the right length and shoulder width,” Grass reports. “We made no comment, so solemn was the anticipation of our laying out.” Then they climbed out of their “earth furniture,” as the Germans call it. “The boxes have been waiting ever since.”
Aside from rueful reflections on mortality and writing, Grass seems to have otherwise spent his time with politics. Well-known for his membership in the German Social Democratic Party, he has viewed with skeptical eye the fortunes of the postwar German republic. It was a place, Grass writes, that “by clearing away the ruins, the image of war, had rid itself of memory as well. New money and the newly rich were everywhere. I was terrified by the so-called miracle.”
That someone would be “terrified” of the economic miracle of the 1950s, with its attendant prosperity, might seem perverse — like wanting to be reborn as a cuckoo.
But then, Grass has seen things we have not seen, and no doubt remembers horrors of which we have no awareness. A poem entitled Xenophobia may afford a clue, referring to “millions of displaced persons” with virtually no possessions, bitterly resented as “foreigners” until, in the passage of time, other “foreigners” arrived from even more distant lands, speaking unknown languages. Grass’s conclusion: Only when the natives began to feel foreign, too, did they also begin to see their own selves.
The German hounding of Greece over its debt is a case of inhumanity toward neighbours, Grass believed — an instance all the sharper given Grass’s own German identity. A poem with the ironic title, Light at the End of the Tunnel, depicts numerous woes brought on by austerity — Greeks freezing in the wintry dark — imposed by Germany. A companion poem entitled Mutti (Mother) evokes a not very maternal figure. Rather — and no prizes for guessing who this politician is — she seems to be in the line of blood and iron chancellors. It is an unhappy thought. This is not, on the whole, a very cheerful book, but it is an informative glimpse, all the same, into the soul of a notable writer. It also gives the reader an idea of how fortunate Grass was in abandoning (at least temporarily) the art of poetry for the art of prose fiction. The latter did indeed, in a way poetry probably could not, give the young writer a clue that there were merry tales yet to tell.