Fiction

Growing up with Grass

Peter Ackroyd

From The Diary Of A Snail GUnter Grass (Secker and Warburg £2.75) Iron Earth, Copper Sky Yashar Kemal (Collins and Harvill Press £2.75) Durer's engraving, Melencolia 1, is the frontispiece to this lachrymose book;

a woman sits vacant or brooding, her hands, the origin of toil and dexterity, are illumined while the head and face are deep in shadow. A geometrical com pass is propped unused in her fingers, and in the foreground are scattered various tools. There is a ladder in the recess of the engraving and above the lady is a pair of scales. An hour-glass is prominent. Grass's lecture, which he appends to this novel, dwells upon the iconography of this fanciful scene without alluding to its proper albeit anachronistic point. The lady in view, wife or symbol, is clearly out of place among these instruments for which she could have no possible use. Why the hammer, the ladder and the nails beside the fair lady? Melancholy may dwell in that loss of self-possession which comes in the presence of alien works and plans, that sense of being lost to oneself when surrounded by the Others.

And now the words of Mr Grass himself: "Since for melancholics the world has narrowed down to something that can only be endured as an ordered whole, collecting is an active manifestation of Melancholy; in her dwellings are found complete collections

embracing all the species of some genus: all ferns, prepared; all titmice, stuffed . . ." And in her study is found Mr Grass putting the

pieces of his life into an external order, although that order seems an alien one, beyond his grasp, a series of disparate paragraphs, ready without the conscious effort of the weary will to fall into the ill-considered fragments which it truly is.

The eponymous hero of this diary engages in a melancholy symbiosis by collecting rare and lovely gastropods, just as Grass collects odd stories, recollections and conversations which strike his moonish fancy during his campaign progress through the Federal Republic. The structure of the piece is that of self-reflectiveness, a vain and necessarily in complete process which does less than justice to the tokens and ideas which swim to the surface of the ordinarily unembarrassed and unselfconscious mind. But for Grass it is the staple of his 'fiction' (it takes little effort to dramatise ourselves right off the teeming surface of the world) and he has taken yet one more step backward by creating an alter and ulterior ego, a factoid, an untruth expressly designed to behave like the truth and resurrect the prone and melancholy self.

The factoid itself is Hermann Ott or, in true pataphysical style, Dr Doubt. The events of Dr Doubt's war are folded into Mr Grass's private

wake, and we have this victim hiding in a cellar for the duration of the hostilities, disapproving of Hegel—as well he might under the tremendous circumstances — and in loving pursuit of those land molluscs who leave an inky trail through the novel as only the latest of Mr Grass's allusions from the animal kingdom. We have gone beyond Cat And Mouse, beyond Dog Years and now Grass feels constrained to draw analogies between' Helix aspersa and his own social democratic oratory during some inconsiderable election.

But his imagination loses itself within opaque allegorising, and begins to smack more of the Pilgrim than the Snail:

Since a good many listeners (and voters) had come from Upper Dawdle and Dally-in-the-Woods, a bus had been charted in Backlog. . . .

There is more to similar effect, as if life and fiction were devices too slight for the ponderous, systematic will-to-form. We read fragments of conversations with his wife and children, with political colleagues, there Is much political detail, there is even a suicide to suggest the lurid light underneath German's stolid realpolitik. And there are some absorbing descriptions of the Jewish nightmare, but they .have a factitious quality as if wheeled out as a side-show for Grass's private conscience seeking to be more capacious than it really is. For still the voice drones on, endlessly analysing, dissecting the facts of its own inadequacy. It is as if the will were seeking some kind of identity with history, an aspiration at once weighty and futile. The book is Germanic in just that sense, and it can be terribly dull.

Grass invents himself everywhere, but none of his pieces will fit into anything but the meretricious mood which would only last a moment were it not cosily esconced within the generalisations of the scholars. His political persona is no more, plausible — and it is to his credit that he seems to realise this — that any of the more imaginative personae who are dreamt and then forgotten. Even that image of. the snail as unconsidered but remorseless destiny bears

precious little meaning any more, just as the snail of dialectic can only make its way by wreaking violence and twisting the world all out of recognition. Everything becomes the figment of system, and it is only when Grass's backroom weariness emerges and the heat of :Utopia has cooled that the whole business is seen for the transparent fraud it is. It is ironic to note, of course, the publication of this swan-song in the week that Willy Brandt goes down at the hand of secret services, managers and technocrats. This must seem .another weight on Melancholy's shoulders, as Grass sits bent double over the typewriter, the ladders and globes and scales refusing to come together even for that one line which offers the promise of his wholeness, and the forgiveness for whatever private nightmare is consuming him within this book.

This second book, a Turkish delight, Iron Earth, Copper Sky has a simplicity that seems never to have been touched by the weariness and self-reflection which compound the problematic prose of the Teuton. It also has a lyricism which stays fresh just as long as it presumes that the whole, wide world is new and dreaming of things to come. A brother and sister, Hasan and Ummahan, open the book by exploring the neighbourhood oakforest. It is an apt paradigm of this world of Primitive villagers, who live among the grosser forms of superstition with as much ease as we cohabit with the automobile and the glittering cocktail shaker. We might label this antique heaven child-like, thus confirming our own worse neuroses, although a better word would be relentless. Matters of life and death assume a prominence which is all the more striking because it is so casual, and the novel is concerned with the truly implacable ways of young and old alike. When our attention wanders, in print or in flesh, from the well-made hero to the gaggle of background lives, we discover a common life far more Mysterious and complex than that of any solitary protangonist who struts and frets his Weary way. So it is in Iron Earth, Copper Sky. It is the dead of winter, and what is laughingly known as the nuclear family huddle together for warmth rather than company, 'With their own cow, one calf and three .goats. . . ."

In this musty and distant world, language itself-bears a different relation to character. It might take a Milton Parry to unravel the Periphrases and formulaic phrasing within Mr Kemal's style, but the combined effect is one which removes from language its Peculiarly solipsistic stance and returns it as the common property of the tribe. There is an identity of signifier and signified, thus asserting the brute tokenism of ordinary, primitive life. And there is a common sensibility, albeit a rough one, not unlike that of minstrel and audience.

But this is no classic and well-heeled subgenre. Mr Kemal has exercised the range of familiar speech in the service of a contemPorary and political point. The villagers owe money to the local entrepeneur, Adil Effendi, and nervously expect him to strip them of their goods and chattels. The headman of the Village, the Muhtar, is no help at all, being the agent of some very modern bribery and corruption. And so, by osmosis, their hopes and dreams latch upon poor anonymous Tashbash, a cynical villager whose cynicism is taken for proof of saintliness. Mr Kemal is a considerable ironist and lovingly details the rumours and counter-rumours, as Tashbash becomes a victim of their awed gullibility and is transformed into a holy man despite himself.As is often the case with cynics, he strives to believe in his own saintliness and goes desperately looking for a sign. So it is he falls foul of the local police-chief who, in these mythic days of moon-landings, treats the Villagers as a lot of rhubarb over nothing. Tashbash disappears, the necessary prelude to canonisation. Put as baldly as this, the novel May not sound a substantial thing in these days of skin-lifting and despair. But it has a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It is also charming. I recommend it.