Reader's Choice

THE TIN DRUM by GÜNTER GRASS (Pantheon, $6.95) hardly begins in a way to beguile the reader. Its hero, Oskar Matzerath, is recounting the story of his life from a mental home, where he is confined in a barred cell. Shortly, we learn that Oskar is only thirty-one inches tall, having chosen to remain at that height by deliberately falling downstairs at the age of three. Through the years his has been an adult mind staring out at the world from the body of a child. The toy drum has also been with him since childhood. When he taps on it now, the rhythms of things past return and he can then transfer them to paper.

Though this beginning may look like a mechanical horror out of the Grand Guignol, it does have its own appropriateness as a framework for the story Grass wants to tell. This novel, laced as it is with fantasy and nightmare, is largely autobiographical. Like his own protagonist, Oskar, Günter Grass was born in Danzig of a German father and a Polish mother—a fateful inheritance for the years after 1930. He was only six when Hitler came to power; while still a boy, he witnessed the crazy-quilt politics of Danzig, the arrival of the Nazis, the German victories and then defeats, and the final conquest by the Russians. Much of the book’s power comes from this weird flood of history surging through it. In reading it we have the impression of a montage of European newsreels since 1933, telescoped together in surrealistic frenzy, flickering by in the background. Oskar in a mental home is a narrator who matches the madness of the world he would record.

Never without his drum during the Nazi years, Oskar uses it to disturb and break up party meetings. His father, whom he rather despises, becomes a Nazi, mostly to wear a uniform. When the Russians take Danzig, the father is killed in the cellar of his own grocery shop. Oskar flees to West Germany, where he becomes involved in the operations of the black market and works variously as a nightclub performer and a tombstone engraver. (Grass himself practiced this latter craft for a while.) These last sections of the book become more nightmarish in tone and less substantial and convincing. Guilt for a murder he did not commit drives Oskar to the mental home. In the end, still unpurged by all he has been through, he is pursued by the devastating vision of the Black Witch, remembered from a nursery jingle, now perhaps the symbol of the world’s evil.

Grass’s imagination is torrential but, like all torrents, undiscriminating as it sweeps deadwood and debris along with live flora and fauna. Always vigorous and pungent, he is at times needlessly coarse. The length of the book begins to be tiring, and many of the episodes, though superficially varied, seem only to repeat each other. Yet with all its faults, this is a very powerful book, and Gunter Grass is definitely one of the more impressive talents to emerge in recent years. The German imagination has always had a special penchant for the grotesque and the Gothic, and Grass, despite his bag of modern literary tricks, belongs solidly in the mainstream of this tradition. The grotesque may not be styled to the taste of all readers, but, like every style, it has its distinctive attractions. “Exuberance is beauty,” Blake declared — almost as if to justify works, like the present one, which may shock good taste but nevertheless live in virtue of their feverishly energetic imagination.

If Grass’s narrative is murky in spots, UWE JOHNSON’S SPECULATIONS ABOUT JAKOB (Grove Press, $4.50) is as difficult to piece together as a jigsaw puzzle. The story, so far as one can make it out, has to do with Jakob Abs, a humble railroad worker in East Germany who becomes involved in a plot to recruit for Soviet espionage a girl who works for the allies in NATO. Thereafter, however, the details of the plot become as tangled as a jungle thicket. Figures enter and exit, voices speak and are silent, and we return again and again to the arresting image of Jakob slowly making his way across the elaborate sidings and intersections of the railroad yards. Despite all the comings and goings, we are left with the sense that nothing really has happened and that the novel stands still in its own labyrinth— not unlike the cold war, whose endless negotiations leave everything just about as it was.

Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, however unsure one may be of just what is taking place, one has no doubt of the talent of the author or the merit of his book. Such, too, was the experience in first reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, but with many rereadings all the details fell into place. Johnson, who is something of a scholar in English literature and has translated into German several American novels, has obviously come under the influence of Faulkner as well as of the French experimental novelists, particularly Alain Robe-Grillet. Yet his talent is his own, and markedly original.

Only twenty-nine, he has already had considerable European recognition. Last year he plucked one of the newest and most posh of literary plums—the International Publishers Prize of $10,000. Johnson is a native of East Germany, and lived most of his life under the Russian occupation, until he moved to West Berlin in 1959. Experience of the Nazi and Communist regimes seems to have left him with a very definite political disenchantment. Where political talk appears in this novel, it is usually in the form of dead tags or slogans that never quite jibe with reality. Grass and Johnson are welcome signs of a resurgence in German letters after the long night of the Nazis. Yet this new generation, if these two writers are typical, would seem to be curiously suspicious of all politics. Both these novelists now live and work in the West, not out of faith in any political ideology, but because without the Communist censor they are free to write the kind of novels they wish. There could, however, be worse reasons for taking sides in the world struggle.

THE GIFT (Putnam, $5.95), VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S first novel and the last book he was ever to write in Russian, strikes a doubly poignant note of hail and farewell. Written in the 1930s, when he was living in Russian émigré circles in Berlin, and now translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author, it reveals, perhaps more than any later work, that Mr. Nabokov was a genuine poet for whom the abandonment of his native language was a loss that has never quite been compensated for by his subsequent brilliant career as a novelist in English.

In a brief foreword the author tells us that the real protagonist of the novel is Russian literature itself. Actually, there is a flesh-and-blood hero, Fyodor, a young poet living in the émigré circles of Berlin; but his adventures, such as they are, have to do mainly with language, the assimilation of his Russian past, and his development as a literary mind. Fyodor has just published a small book of poems; and by a technique of commentary and quotation that foreshadows his last novel, Pale Fire, Mr. Nabokov evokes through these verses wonderful and disturbing memories of the Russian homeland. The most vivid character is Fyodor’s father, an entomologist and explorer, whom the young man must remember and come to understand if he himself is to grow up. And, threading his way through the émigré salons, Fyodor meets a young girl, Zina, with whom he carries on a romance as spectral and evocative as autumn mist.

Technically, this is Mr. Nabokov’s most realistic novel. Yet, in dealing with the vanished life of the Russian exiles, those wandering tribes dispersed over the earth, it creates a world as phantasmal as any in the author’s other works. As always, Mr. Nabokov’s sheer literary virtuosity is prodigious. When Fyodor writes, as part of his attempt to master his Russian past, a little book on Chernyshevsky, a liberal hero of the nineteenth century, Mr. Nabokov not only tells us about the work but gives it to us entire in one long chapter, and it turns out to be a splendid biographical sketch. However, it is not literary fireworks that hold us throughout, but the finely sustained mood of tender nostalgia, a personal warmth never again so present in Mr. Nabokov’s writings, after he had given up the love of his life, his “beautiful Russian language.”

When the first sputnik was launched in 1957, many Americans were shocked into the realization that brains and scientific knowledge might be ultimately decisive in the contest with Russia, and there began a slow and groping re-examination of our national attitudes toward intellectuals and the intellectual life. Appropriately enough, the blow fell during a decade that had also witnessed some of the most raucous public sallies against intellectuals in our recent history. It was at the height of the McCarthyite crusade, Professor RICHARD HOFSTADTER tells us, that he first got the idea of his ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE (Knopf, $6.95); and some of the juicier contemporary items with which he begins his long and careful historical study would make funny reading if they were not even now so painfully close at hand.

The word “egghead,” with all its contemptuous connotations, entered our vocabulary during the campaign of 1952 and set the tone for much that was to follow. Louis Bromfield offered a notorious definition, implying that the egghead was not only an ineffectual but possibly an effeminate character. A year later, when Maxwell H. Gluck, who had been nominated as ambassador to Ceylon, appeared before the Senate’s examining committee, he was scarcely embarrassed at not knowing the names of the Prime Ministers of India or Ceylon. In retrospect, one can only gape with admiration and awe at this sublime intellectual selfassurance (or indifference) that did not think it worthwhile to bone up for a few minutes to fix these names in mind. President Eisenhower himself got into the act when he offered his definition of the intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.”

The peak of the frenzy, however, was reached during the brief period of McCarthyism, when the nation no longer merely snickered at the intellectual as ineffectual, effeminate, or generally out of touch with reality, but thundered at him as downright subversive.

Such epidemics have been recurrent through our history. Unfortunately, they have often been mingled with good causes as expressions of genuinely democratic and egalitarian feelings. Indeed, their chief source, Mr. Hofstadter thinks, lies in the peculiar nature of our religious inheritance. Contrary to the usual cliché, the American religious tradition was not so much puritan as evangelical. The Puritans were an austere minority, deeply involved with theology, and their preachers were often as intense intellectuals as Calvin himself. Evangelical religion, on the other hand, eschewed the intricacies of theology and stressed the heart over the head; and when this attitude passed into the secular sphere, it became a disparagement of mind altogether.

In his last chapter Mr. Hofstadter finds things looking up a bit for the intellectuals, but they are still running a bit scared. They had better be, too, if they take a good look at Congress, where the old lethargy still prevails. Maybe we shall have a bill on education after every legislator is convinced that our survival in the technological race with Russia is at stake. But so long as the life of the mind is judged on so barbarously pragmatic an issue, it would seem that the land of the know-nothing and the home of the mugwump may belong to the free and the brave, but certainly not to the enlightened.

JOHN BOWEN, one of the more engaging younger English novelists, in THE BIRDCAGE (Harper & Row, S3.95) gives us an amusing satire, sharply observant and gracefully written, with a fine quality of comic understatement.

Norah Palmer and Peter Ash have been living together without benefit of clergy for nine years because the arrangement is practical from the point of view of taxes but does not imprison them in the cage of marriage. A couple in that strange border territory between vanished youth and the settling of middle age, both work in television, and both claim to be intellectuals of a sort. In those nine years they have, naturally, quarreled many times, but the quarrel that really does it is the one in which Norah lets out her carefully guarded secret — she does not take Peter’s talent seriously! Exit Peter, followed by the Furies. But away from the other, each goes from bad to worse until, in the inevitable course of things, modern living brings together those whom God and nature wished to sunder.

Norah and Peter are posturing and melodramatic bores, but Mr. Bowen is not the least bit boring as he pins them neatly down like two tarnished butterflies. While some comic writers twist your arm to get a laugh, Mr. Bowen, writing easily, lets the comedy come as and where it will. He has caught, delicately and sharply, that fringe world of culture, television programming, inhabited by the pretentiously semiliterate and semibohemian, which in England, at least to judge by this book, seems not so very different from what we have on this side of the Atlantic.

At many moments during MARK RASCOVICH’S THE BEDFORD INCIDENT (Atheneum, $5.95) the reader will wish that the author had never read Moby Dick. But since the parallel to the Melville classic is a contrivance more necessary to the author than the reader, Mr. Rascovich is to be forgiven, and this tight and exciting melodrama can be read for itself without so much as a side glance at the Pequod and its tormented crew.

The Bedford, a destroyer on duty in the North Atlantic, is engaged in hunting out Russian ships, submarines particularly, that are trying to pry into our radar defenses. Though she cannot fire on these vessels, she can dog them enough to make their spying difficult. This hunt builds up all the aggressions of warfare, but, unlike a shooting war, does not permit their release in the act of destroying the enemy. Hence, an unbearable tension builds up within the Bedford’s crew, and the captain becomes as mad as Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick — which is what the crew actually christen the Russian submarine they are pursuing. In the end the destroyer meets as drastic a fate as the Pequod’s, and only one survivor, like Ishmael, is washed up alive to tell the tale.

Mr. Rascovich, who did a hitch in the North Atlantic and also engaged in ocean towing and salvage, obviously knows ships and the sea very well, and most of the excitement in this chase has to do with the action and machinery of sailing, to which the human agents become accessories. Oddly enough, the one character who towers above all the others is an ex-Nazi U-boat commander who in his time has sunk many ships but emerges now as the sole voice of sanity and reason among the doomed crew. How fashions do change! In any popular yarn a few years back, the only good ex-Nazi would have been a dead one.

Admirers of WIRT WILLIAMS’ previous novels — and there have been many, including Ernest Hemingway — may find themselves disappointed by A PASSAGE OF HAWKS (McGrawHill, $4.95). The book, to be sure, is entertaining as a thriller, but most of the time Mr. Williams seems to have traded insight for slick sensationalism, and his characters degenerate into stereotypes or puppets.

The trouble seems to be that Mr. Williams has become mired in that imaginary swampland of the Deep South whose original proprietor was another Williams, named Tennessee. A beautiful, self-centered, and neurotic wife is set on destroying the masculinity of her husband. He finds love (and his manhood restored) in the arms of another woman, but, of course, not without complications like blackmail and murder and the gory denouement of a double shooting. Mr. Williams keeps his story moving at a brisk pace, and his writing is efficient and competent throughout, but to my mind he has slipped quite a notch below the promise of his earlier work.

A refugee from the war, HENRI FOCILLON died in the United States in 1943. His death did not create much stir; though he had an international reputation as a scholar of the fine arts, his fame was confined to a fairly small circle. Only one of his books, a small one, The Life of Forms in Art, had been brought out in English before his death. Now, at last, THE ART OF THE WEST IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Phaidon Press, New York Graphic Society, 2 vols., $7.50 each), edited by his devoted pupil Jean Bony, provides a richer sample of this great scholar’s work.

More than a specialist, Focillon was also something of a poet, whose interpretations always bring us close to the artist himself. Focillon’s father had been a well-known engraver, and he grew up in the company of artists like Monet and Rodin. Throughout his teaching career at the Sorbonne, he remained intimate with artists, visited their studios, and shared their problems, and in imagination he was able to project this vivid intimacy with art into the periods of the past.

The present work is a dense and scholarly text, but one need not be a scholar to read it with pleasure. Detailed as his discussion of the cathedrals may be, Focillon nevertheless distills a sense of the whole life of the Middle Ages. He was acutely conscious that no period in history is a simple solid block, but that it has multiple facets and strata, that traditions, influences, and experiments work together at one and the same time; and, in consequence, he communicates a sense of the past as vital and full of conflict as the life we know in the present.