Taking A Leak: Günter Grass
by and published in Edition One of Pomegranate
Last year, the novelist Günter Grass, who had for decades lectured Germany on facing up to its shameful recent history, confessed a secret of his own: he had been a member of the Waffen-SS towards the end of World War Two. The reaction was mostly unforgiving: Grass was seen as a hypocrite who had lost any moral authority. For his contemporaries and readers, this outrage is understandable. But those of us born long after his major works were written might be able to take on a more objective angle, and ask how Grass’s secret and its concealment affected his writing.
Reading poetry as autobiography is usually frowned on, especially by the authors themselves: ‘They always think the ‘I’ is you,’ R.S. Thomas once complained of his audience. And that’s reasonable, given how complex the processes behind a poem may be. Sometimes, though, a writer’s life might be the best way in to a work that looks bewildering. Imagery, poised between the literal and the figurative, is especially unclear, and here biographical pointers can be helpful, as Ted Hughes suggested:
‘Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of… The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies.’
How might these unsaid declarations subconsciously ‘leak out’? We can have a look at the second part of Grass’s poem ‘Meiner Radiergummi’ (‘My Eraser’), published in 1958. This brief section is titled ‘Abschied’ (‘Farewell’), and is here translated by Michael Hamburger:
Today for money I bought myself a new eraser.
Still I carry it in my pocket, carry it to and fro.
Still my tracks feel secure, run after me –
as a waiter did once, when I forgot to pay.
Today for money I bought myself
a new eraser.
Without trace I made myself scarce,
the waiter paid for my beer.
Even if we follow the maxim that images should be treated as literal until proven metaphorical, it’s hard to separate the presence of the eraser from the switch in the story. In the first version – the first stanza – the narrator commits a crime, though accidentally (‘I forgot to pay’); in the second, the act is effectively airbrushed – as if with an eraser – because someone else takes responsibility.
However, this simple contrast is undermined by the non-sequiturs and contradictions surrounding it. ‘Tracks’ only exist as a stationary trace: they can’t ‘run’ anywhere. And what kind of waiter timidly pays someone else’s bill? Only the kind who can be erased and rewritten at will. That ‘once’ is important, because it takes the reader out of ‘Today’. But there’s an ambiguity to the last two lines: are they occurring on the same day as the narrator buying the eraser (which would make sense grammatically), or do they refer to the earlier time s/he ‘forgot to pay’ (which would be more logical)? The point is that it doesn’t matter: whether it happened once or twice, the ‘tracks’ have disappeared, so it might as well not have happened at all. Art is here being used to obliterate, not to create.
Obliteration is written into the shape of the poem. There is a significant difference between version one of the story:
Today for money I bought myself a new eraser.
and version two:
Today for money I bought myself
a new eraser.
Enjambment is described as bringing ‘white space’ into play, which is exactly what the poet is doing here. A white space is what is left behind when an eraser has done its work – a space to be filled. But the moment of hesitation between the lines reminds us that anyone creating history can fill white space with whatever they want. Although the next line reads ‘a new eraser’, it could easily be ‘an octopus’. The gap after ‘myself’, stretching across the page, makes us feel that emptiness. It becomes even clearer in the original German, where the average line length is halved from the first stanza to the second:
Heute kaufte ich mir für Geld einen neuen Radiergummi.
Noch trage ich ihn in der Tasche, trage ihn hin und her.
Noch fühlen meine Spüren sich sicher, laufen mir nach –
wie einst ein Kellner mir nachlief, dem ich zu zahlen verga?.
Heute kaufte ich für Geld
einen neuen Radiergummi.
Spurlos verkrümmelte ich,
mein Bier bezahlte der Kellner.
Traditionalists running scared of ‘free verse’ like to allege that its only restriction is keeping the lines about the same length. But Grass shows the force of that technique here, and manipulates it brilliantly. We know something is missing in the second stanza, because it is a fictionalised account. You might say that the break between fact and fiction has its visual representation in the extra space on the page. Or, to put it another way : fewer words means the narrator’s hiding something. This may be why s/he has ‘made myself scarce’ so quickly: there are now no tracks.
The poem makes us aware of what is missing, simply by telling a very short story twice. It is a dramatisation of a non-event. To take a famous parallel:
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Silence is the most noticeable thing in the poem, and the focus is on what has been left out. There is nothing especially audacious about this interpretation; a much harder question is whether we should turn into literary Sherlock Holmeses, looking for psychobiographical clues. It may be enough to say that the poem’s subject is artistic creation and control, and on one level that’s entirely true. But there are reasons for wanting to go further.
‘My Eraser’ was published a year before Grass’s most important novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum). That book is seen as the start of Grass’s role as Germany’s conscience: it dwells on Nazi atrocities and constantly reverses Hitler’s ideology, with a disabled Pole for a narrator. This is where Günter Grass began to erase his past: an SS volunteer could hardly be raising awkward questions about the past without answering them himself.
I’ve seen the poem attacked for being nonsensical – and the section reprinted here is the least incomprehensible – but there are small clues which point us towards the ‘leaking’ theory: for example, at one point the eraser goes missing and when the narrator finds it, ‘it was helping the demolition workers’. That brings home not only the point about annihilation, but also a feeling of complicity and shared guilt. It’s an over-simplification to say that ‘My Eraser’ is about hiding your Nazi past; but we can say that it’s one important source of the imagery.
There are problems with this approach, not least that few writers have as interesting a past as Grass does. Wallace Stevens’ work is hard to understand, but he spent his life working for an insurance company: that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to engage with the poems. And it seems lazy to attach a writer’s life to what they’ve written, like thinking every Elliott Smith song is about heroin addiction. The point about ‘My Eraser’ and its apparent inspiration is that it is rare: we don’t know much about the inner lives of authors – and nor might they. But it is a chance to see that apparently unfathomable work has a human behind it, whether we can track them down or not. Which brings us to a paradox about poetry: for all its complications and ornate flourishes and intricate crafting, it’s actually a pretty bad defence against honesty.
Daniel Hitchens
Dan Hitchens was a Foyle Young Poet in 2006, and won second place in the youth category for The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation 2007.