450
JOHN SIMON
such stratagems as describing something that, it turns out, did not
happen, then blithely going on to what did; or enumerating several pos–
sibilities of how something might have been; or getting at an important
point only by way of the longest verbal retards. Add to this anticlimaxes
and non sequiturs, and you begin to have an image of Grass's style.
But then, out of nowhere, a whole prose poem, or a mere lyrical cadenza:
"Stillness, maybe a fly, the clock as usual, very softly the radio." (Which
Manheim prosifies into:
"It
was quiet, maybe the buzzing of a fly,
the clock as usual, the radio turned very low.")
What makes
The Tin Drum
spellbinding, however, is something
beyond story and style; it is the hauntedness of its author, and the
personal myths he creates, full of urgency and driving power. There
are a number of continually recurring motifs in Grass's work. Thus the
play
Ten Minutes to Buffalo
deals with a fantastic trip to Buffalo, in
which the destination is not reached. In
The Tin Drum,
Oskar's arsonist
grandfather mayor may not have escaped to Buffalo; Oskar himself tries
to escape there, but never makes it. Another play,
The Wicked Cooks,
displays a horde of viciously intriguing ladle-wielders. These same cooks
with their ladles recur in a poem in
Triangle of Rails (Gleisdreieck)
,
Grass's volume of verse. In
The Tin Drum,
the unloved and killed father
is a passionate cook, and Oskar's final bogey, the only fear he cannot
THE STRUGGLE OF THE MODERN
by
Stephen Spender
Shelley wrote that poetry should
be
both center and circum–
ference of knowledge. In his new book, Mr. Spender applies
Shelley's statement to modem literature in an attempt to
reassert the relationship of literature to modem life. He dis–
cusses, mainly in autobiographical terms, books that he has
read and pictures that he has looked at, recollecting and
commenting on the characteristics which bear some relation–
ship to the problems of a specifically modem art.
"Mr. Spender's best book of criticism. To read it carefully is,
for anyone of my generation, exceedingly helpful. I do not
see how anyone could read it without learning a great
deal."-John Wain in
The Observer.
"It is a thoughtful, provocative, and valuable
work."-The
Economist.
$5.00
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY 4
