Peeling the Onion

I just finished Gunter Grass's autobiography, Peeling the Onion. I've preferred Grass the polemicist to Grass the novelist, though I'm not sure I can give a good reason for that. Based only, really, on a long-ago reading of The Tin Drum and of this autobiography and some of his essays he's literary in a way that I feel uneasy with, entirely owing to my own education in the novel, which is strongly biased in favor of -- well, whatever you call it that unites Austen, Kleist, Trollope, Tolstoy, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pushkin, and Chekhov. I grew up into a mistrust of allegorical modes of writing, for one thing. So I always had this reservation, though I've tried to resist it.

After reading Peeling the Onion, I read rather quickly through this Timothy Garton Ash review in the New York Review of Books. He mentions that before the book came out, the media broke the story that Grass, a Nobel Prize winner, had been a member of the Waffen-SS as a young man. Garton Ash also describes some of the controversy that followed this disclosure. It’s interesting, I still found that my sympathies lay with Grass in the whole affair.

For one thing, the venality of the press’s handling of the disclosure was so very apparent. And there’s something more than venality in it. Among other things, the conflict between Grass and the press was a conflict over who has the right to tell the story. This is an issue not just for Grass, but for everybody. I mean, we are all getting so used to the idea all of a sudden that people shouldn’t speak for themselves where they can be heard by anybody else -- that doing so exposes you as “uncivil.” Civil people keep quiet and let other people do their thinking for them: “We tried to Teach You How to Think but we – er, you – failed.” And it has always been true that the person who tries to defend himself against the media starts out with a huge disadvantage. So, again: who tells Grass’s story? Does journalism tell it or does literature tell it?

It just happened that I read the book first, without having paid much attention to all the fuss. I paid just enough attention to know that I wanted to read the book first.

I think my feeling about Grass's approach to literature began to change not because of him but because of another German writer, W.G. Sebald. Somehow while I was in St. Kitts I managed to get hold of his novels and devoured them. If novels is the right word for them. What I liked was their discursiveness, a quality frowned on this side of the water. Sebald's books are literary in a high and subtle way; they are "artificial" in the sense in which, say, Andrew Marvell would have understood the term, that is, deliberately crafted to seem completely natural. They wander through a series of subjects that are connected by tenous and seemingly accidental connections, and when you get to the end you have a feeling -- but you really have that feeling, it has been so carefully defined and set off from its surroundings for you. And that feeling will be a new feeling: you will know something you didn't know before and that knowledge will be fraught with the feeling. He has brought you there, and his narrator is so strangely unassuming and solitary, and so accepting of his condition. He makes what connections he can among disparate things with a sort of scrupulous thoughtfulness, as if his life depended on it. I recognize in his work his need to see life in a literary way, his sense that insights only come from this state of immersion and concentration that is a lot like being in love.

Sebald's novels are as if The Sorrows of Young Werther were readable and interesting. But instead of some ditzy romance at the back of Sebald's novels are feelings of guilt and loss. His own personal feelings? I don't know and am less interested in that question than in how it is that his reader comes to experience those feelings by following the meandering track of the narrator’s musings. The point is to experience a very specific feeling through this level of patient, detailed reflection. The feeling is the casual byproduct of the end of these musings, when the narrator comes to a moment of self-discovery that links together all these various themes and bits of narrative. The narrator, you realize, has been seeking his place among all these things – his place in history. And he can’t assume he knows what history is; he has to figure that out too. In Auschwitz the narrator is looking for continuity, and at the end you learn that you can’t have continuity without the acknowledgment of that catastrophe. The narrator has been exploring a few of the catastrophe’s implications and consequences. He’s examining the fading marks that those events have left behind, he’s looking at absences. Auschwitz is a novel addressing history – it is a novel about ideas. Not about ideology, but the use of conceptualization, i.e., various ways of making connections and seeing relations among things, to imagine, and by imagining, perceive.

(One of the ways that you can distinguish between what Harold Rosenberg called "mass-culture" writing and the real thing is that the former takes you through a very narrow range of feelings and those feelings are always predictable.)

Anyway when I discovered Sebald I ate up his books because he was trying to use ideas to write about feelings and thereby get at something bigger than both. I became much more interested in the idea of lyrical prose if it could open up other subjects, other experiences and other feelings for the writer. This interest is not about style at all, if I haven’t made that clear. It’s about finding a way to sustain and complete a thought and give it form. It is really interested in getting from point A to point B.

Grass, too, had to work with ideas in his fiction in order to reconnect with history. His metaphor is peeling the onion, peeling away layers of tricky memory to find the young man who joined the Waffen-SS near the end of the war. Peeling the Onion tells the story of who that young man was: it ends at the beginning of the career of the writer of The Tin Drum. He spent (it's unclear just how many) months in the SS; he didn’t have much choice about which division of the armed services he was sent to, though he makes no plea for himself with respect to that. At the time that he joined, everybody had to join. The army was in retreat from the Eastern front, and was falling apart. His first mission after he completes training is to Dresden, which has already been bombed. Later, he describes finding German soldiers hanging in the woods, killed by their own side for having deserted, though in many cases their units had simply fallen apart or been killed to nearly the last man or had wandered off. Meanwhile the Russians and Americans were advancing. Grass, like a lot of these late recruits, spent most of his short war running and hiding. When he finally surrendered and was placed in an American-run POW camp, he and the others that he finds there seem relieved more than anything. The Americans allow them to set up classes and anybody who has a skill can teach it to others. The whole place turns into an adult-ed classroom; it is extraordinary. Grass took a cooking class from a chef, a class conducted entirely without food. When he was finally released he had to make his way in the world just like any other young chap starting out in life – except he had no education, the world he was setting out into had been bombed to rubble, and over it all was the shadow of this terrible, terrible national guilt and defeat. There was no money, only a black market; and everybody, everybody, was poor and uncertain of the future. He never appeals to your sympathy for this situation. He does tell you that his idea of heroism was romantico-medieval, that, is, fascist; it was what made him a patriot during the war. When he joined the army he hoped to live up to this ideal. It was youthful thoughtlessness, ignorance, and the combination of propaganda and censorship. By the time he had finished his training soldiers were fleeing back into Germany and people were still unclear about the fact that the war was lost. He describes these confusions as experience, not as an excuse. His most forceful comment on his own ignorance and thoughtlessness is his account of the young dissenter in the Labor Corps whom he calls “Wedontdothat,” a conscript, like himself, who simply refuses to handle a weapon. Grass confesses to his own stupidity in joining the others in bullying this dissenter, in not thinking much about what happened to him when he was suddenly taken away. And there he is putting his finger again on the guilt and responsibility. The guilt is negative: it’s the failure to understand, which implies that there is a duty to understand, to judge rightly in order to act rightly. In this failure, he confesses himself part of the grander failure.

You can’t come through a catastrophe like this, as a novelist, and expect to just pick up writing little entertainments as if nothing has happened. History here forces on the writer the necessity of examining those values and ideas and assumptions through which we live, because those are the ones that bit by bit brought him and everybody to that catastrophe. It forces him to write about ideas.

To understand what had happened, to understand its personal meaning, must be for a writer the work of a lifetime, if he decides to take it on. Grass had already been doing that work for more than 50 years when he wrote this autobiography. I suppose he ought to have told this particular detail earlier on. But the number of people who were adults during the war and the years immediately afterwards is dwindling. Grass is 80 years old. He is an expert on the self-justifications, excuses, and self-deceits that large numbers of Germans indulged in after the war. He made it his life’s work to pursue and put a stake through each one of these evasions, using literature and reclaiming literature in the process. He’s been waging a battle for literature, for literature’s way of telling, that demands an examination of values through experience. Unfortunately, literature has no power to alter the drives and imperatives of journalism. It never has. This would seem to have been a blind spot. Literature works on history but only through the imagination, slowly.

His battle has carried Grass straight through history into the realm of Greek tragedy. Oedipus, another shrewd leader and battler, was exposed too. In Oedipus at Colonus, though, Sophocles revisits the story and has the blind, poor, exiled Oedipus, near death, come out swinging. What a mouth the old outcast has on him! It’s all he’s got and nobody can get near him.

But this at least I know
Wittingly thou aspersest her and me;
But I unwitting wed, unwilling speak.
Nay neither in this marriage or this deed
Which thou art ever casting in my teeth--
A murdered sire--shall I be held to blame.
Come, answer me one question, if thou canst:
If one should presently attempt thy life,
Would'st thou, O man of justice, first inquire
If the assassin was perchance thy sire,
Or turn upon him? As thou lov'st thy life,
On thy aggressor thou would'st turn, no stay
Debating, if the law would bear thee out.
Such was my case, and such the pass whereto
The gods reduced me…

I find that I can forgive Grass for not telling. When he sees his guilt – however you want to measure it – being exploited, he’s right to fight against that exploitation. I can’t forgive him on behalf of anybody else, though, just for me.

Update: A few little clarifications. It's a mess, I know, but I'll come back to this maybe after I take a swing through more of Grass's novels.

Where Ignorant Armies Type By Night

A friend and fellow editor sends me a link to this Gary Kamiya piece in Salon.

My friend wants to know what I think of it. I don’t know what he thinks of it. And that makes me a bit afraid to tell him what I think of it. So I'll tell you for sure, and then I'll tell him later. It’s also shown up on two of the editors’ mailing lists that I subscribe to.

The piece is not really written in a recognizably human voice; it is written in the voice of the hive mind of the professional media person. Although it’s written in the first person, it’s impersonal, a smooth, unthreatening, steady flow of bromides. I don’t quite believe that this speaking person exists – it’s a persona. When I criticize it, therefore, I’m not making any personal criticism of Kamiya, who barely makes any appearance in the piece at all. Well, it’s journalism, it’s not supposed to be personal. And as they always said in journalism school, “Who cares what you personally think?” Well, the person out there who does care what you personally think is me.

I recognize a familiar tone, the appeal to in-group solidarity, the patronage those poor dimwits out there (readers, students, the uncredentialed, the writers who are trying to get your attention and send you all sorts of junk, the people who think you can just sit at a keyboard and write) for whom, mind you, Christ also died. The ones who don't understand or appreciate the Editor's Burden.

I used to hear this in the hallways of English departments, too. How put upon the faculty were, how hopelessly inept, callow, ignorant, and feckless the students were -- it was quite hilarious really. Indeed it was always good for a laugh. It was one thing that could make all those various intellectual factions lay down their offensive weapons and slap each other on the back. How dumb the students were, how we were all there to "Teach Them How to Think."

It always made me feel uncomfortable, and I refused to indulge in it myself. I didn't go around yukking it up with the English professors about how dumb students were. I mean, these were people who could not teach who were making fun of people who could not learn from them.

Editors, like academics, are prone to this sort of in-group frame of mind. Kamiya notes that the people formerly known as readers have started writing and publishing themselves on the Internet, without the ministrations of editors.. Predictably, it prompts him to strike the elegiac note.

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

If Flaubert were alive he’d have to add the word “blog” to his Dictionary of Received Ideas.

BLOGS: Will not ultimately stand the test of time. Written by uncivil adolescents.

In a piece like this the writer must always look to the silver lining. It turns out all is not lost: readers will still depend on editors to choose their reading for them.

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required. In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

Oh, those damned teenage lawyers, English professors, business owners, biologists, and journalists!

How much writing in print will stand the test of time? Does anybody remember the Edward Hamilton catalog? Some 32 pages or so, tabloid, every column inch packed with a brief description of books that publishers were unloading for pennies on the dollar, just to get rid of inventory. It was the best one of its kind, totally unselective, and you could find the odd treasure if you dug through it patiently, but most of the books for sale were junk. Newspapers are preserved, not because of literary interest, but because they are part of the historic record. Most newspaper writing, as writing, deserves oblivion. Here I live in the Trade Association (or “lobby” if you prefer) Newsletter Capital of the World, and I know that of all the self-serving printed dreck that is produced here by the ton, daily, and shipped out to members, the best thing that can be said about it is that it has no shelf-life.

I mean, if you are going to talk about writing that has no shelf life at all, why always look at the bloggers? I am sure Kamiya reads good bloggers and not just the crappy ones. But the intent here is to set the class of editors apart from those outsiders, those teenage yahoo movie producers and investigative journalists, and it’s much easier to point to the existence of – oh gosh, he doesn’t even give any examples of what he finds so adolescent but trust him, he knows, he’s on the inside – the bloggers (real or imaginary), that is, who are beyond the pale and shouldn’t be let in. This is the hive mind talking.

But that is how we all find ourselves with Kamiya and Matthew Arnold out on Dover Beach: it’s considerably crowded as all of us editors are out there and there are probably more editors now than ever before – we’re not an endangered species, though our status (or our status in our own wishful minds) may be endangered.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

Hush! Hark! OMG can you hear the violin?

The writers hardly fare any better.

The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up. The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile…

Sounds a lot like some editors I’ve met. Whenever I've gone to some workshop where there's a panel of editors, there's always some self-important little It Girl who, explaining her criteria for accepting work, feels compelled to say, "And if you misspell my name your manuscript goes right into the trash."

I’ve spent time working through boxes of submissions, and I’ve thrown out stories for all sorts of reasons, but in all cases the reasons had to do with the story. I wasn’t actually looking to fill the pages of the magazine with the correct spelling of my name. I don’t know if I’ll ever find myself digging through a slush pile again, but if I do, I can promise you this: if you turn in a good piece of writing and you’ve misspelled my name in your cover letter, no problem. I’ll fix it! I’m an editor!