Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

That was what my former landlady in Vienna said about him. This was 1962, when I was a student at the University of Vienna. I was carrying around the German edition of Die Blech trommel, pretending my German was good enough so that I could read Grass in the original. I knew the book was terrific, but unfortunately I couldn't read it without a dictionary -- or without one or two Austrian students sitting beside me. Nevertheless, I carried the book around with me; it was a great way to meet girls. And one day my landlady saw me carrying the book around and she asked me what was taking me so long -- or was I reading Die Blechtrommel twice?

Well, I was surprised that a woman of my landlady's generation was also reading Gunter Grass -- in those days, I thought of Grass as exclusively student property -- and so I asked her what she thought of Grass, and (proper Viennese that she was) she said only: "Er ist ein bisschen unhoflich? ("He is a little impolite.")

In his 21st book, The Call of the Toad, Mr. Grass is even a little impolite about such a revered subject as death -- especially concerning where we want to be buried. If Grass once described a writer's gradual progress as "the diary of a snail," now the writer has swallowed a toad; it is this creature (the toad within him) that compels him to speak. Gunter Grass's toads have a way of speaking to us even after they've been flattened in the road.

The Call of the Toad is an exquisite novel, both political and a love story. It is as bitterly comic and ironic a short novel as Mr. Grass's Cat and Mouse; it is as moving and touching a love story as Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, but it doesn't drift as far into fantasy as that novel -- as wonderful as that novel is, The Call of the Toad is better. Indeed, as in the very best of his novels, Mr. Grass is Dicken-sian -- in the sense that he combines darkly comic satire with the most earthly love, the most positively domestic affection.

In his excellent review of The Call of the Toad (on the front page of The New York Times Book Review), John Bayley observes that Grass's "fellow Germans may be inclined to say that he is becoming all too obviously a merely humorous and lightweight novelist, but they will be wrong." I agree: many of Mr. Grass's fellow Germans and critics have already been wrong about him.

Just as Gunter Grass is capable of outimagining history, he will outlast his critics -- just as snails make their own progress, and toads go on crossing the road.

In 1962, I was proceeding at less than a snail's pace through Die Blechtrommel; it was embarrassing, because I could handle my professors at the University of Vienna -- I could fake it, in German, well enough to pass my courses -- but I couldn't read German as complex as the German of Gunter Grass. Finally, a friend from the States saved me: he sent me the English translation of The Tin Drum, and from that moment I knew that all I ever wanted to do was to be like Oskar Matzerath; was to be funny and to be angry; was to stay funny and to stay angry.

Then one night -- this was easily more than 10 years ago -- Gunter and I had dinner in New York; as we were saying good-bye, I thought that he looked a little worried. Grass often looks worried, but what he said surprised me because I realized that he was worried about me. He said: "You don't seem quite as angry as you used to be." This was a good warning; I've never forgotten it.

After leaving Gunter in Frankfurt, the day after reunification, I traveled to several other German cities. I was on a book tour. I was reading largely to university students -- in Bonn, in Kiel, in Munich, in Stuttgart. About a hundred times, students asked me if I had given Owen Meany the same initials as Oskar Matzerath as a gesture of homage to Gunter Grass -- a kind of tipping the hat -- and I said Yes, Yes, Yes (of course, of course, of course) about a hundred times. But I had also been quoted in the press as agreeing with Grass about the problems of reunifying Germany too quickly; everywhere I went, although the audiences at my readings were generally friendly, there was always at least one unfriendly question from the audience -- it always concerned the matter of my agreeing with Grass.

It was Grass they were angry with. As for me, they thought I was just some fool foreigner who was going along with what Grass had said. All I did was repeat what he had said, and repeat that Gunter Grass had always made good sense to me. But this answer was unsatisfying to the students; they had already embraced the future -- they did not want to be reminded of the past.

To them, there was comfort in a mob, for a mob can drown out any single voice. It is inevitable that we writers take no comfort from a mob. A mob always wants to go too fast. Our method is moving slowly and speaking at length, like snails and toads.

That was the end of my book tour in Germany, about one week after reunification.

That night in New York, when I introduced Gunter Grass to an appreciative audience at the 92nd Street Y, I concluded my introduction by stating my opinion that Grass is "one of the truly great writers of the 20th century." It sounded monumental in German -- even in my German. "Hier ist meiner Meinung nach einer der wirklich Grossen der Weltliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts -- Gunter Grass."

And now, as I write, comes a letter from Gunter in Berlin. We will be together at the Frankfurt Book Fair again; the German translation of A Son of the Circus (in German, Zirkuskind) will be published in the fall of '95, at the same time as a new novel by Grass -- Ein weites Feld. A literal translation: A Wide Field. A novel of epic proportions.

Grass suggests that Janet and Everett and I visit him and his wife, Ute, in their house in Behlendorf in September, before the madness of the book fair. My German publisher is planning some readings for me in several German theaters -- in Kiel, in Hamburg, in Munich, in Berlin (in addition to Frankfurt). It shouldn't be difficult for me to get away from Hamburg on my first weekend in Germany -- I can take the train to Lubeck, and then a taxi, or I can drive directly to Behlendorf from Hamburg in about an hour.

In his letter, Gunter says that he hopes my shoulder surgery has been successful; he is facing some surgery on his nose, he adds -- he came down with a virus infection immediately upon completing the manuscript of his new novel. (This has happened to almost every writer I know: the body lets down after the end of a big book.)

In his letter, there are some directions to his house in Behlendorf; the house is described as "weissgetuncht," which I think means "white-tinted"-- probably "whitewashed." (Grass's English is much better than my German, yet he always writes to me in German. I write to him in English.)

I'm looking forward to seeing him -- this time especially, because I have a story to tell him. It's a true story -- about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane.

I was taking an Air France flight from Toronto to Paris. Everett and Janet were seated across the aisle from me; my seat companion was an elderly woman with a disturbingly deep cough. She had a refined German accent and a face of patrician detachment, of unending wisdom and constraint; with hindsight, this should have been all that was necessary in order for me to recognize her father in her, but I was misled by the only name that was printed on her boarding pass, which she repeatedly turned face-up and face-down, like a playing card, on the armrest between us. The name on her boarding pass was Borgese -- she was a German who'd married an Italian, I supposed.

I liked her very much, but not her cough. I drank a beer, she sipped a Scotch. She was so eloquent, but concise. I began to wish I were better dressed. I think she said her first husband was Czech; the Italian was her second -- by the brevity of her accounting for them, I presumed she'd outlived them both.

Of her children and grandchildren she spoke at length; on this trip, she told me, she would be visiting her daughter in Milan. But she had some business in France to attend to first, she said.

And what business was she in? I asked her. Oceans, she replied. She was on her way to a conference on oceans -- she was invited to conferences on oceans all over the world. Europe, Mexico, India, the Caribbean -- after all, oceans are everywhere. Was she a marine biologist? An environmentalist? An expert on fishing or fish? It was with some impatience that she dismissed my crude attempts to categorize her. Her field was "everything to do with oceans," she said.

I ordered the fish. She told the flight attendant that she was a vegetarian; she would choose the vegetables she wanted when she could see them, she said. This sounded so sensible; I felt like a cannibal for eating the fish -- her business was probably protecting the oceans from the likes of me.

Since our flight had left for Paris from Toronto, she assumed I was a Canadian. No, I was an American, I confessed. She had lived in the United States, she told me; she'd not liked it. She was a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax now; I imagined that Nova Scotia was a wise choice for someone who loved oceans -- the warm current of the Gulf Stream flowing near the cold land.

I had a glass of red wine with my fish; I can't help it -- I despise white wine. She continued to sip her one Scotch with her judicious selection of vegetables. As she talked, her elegance made me feel more and more oafish. I was en

route to France to promote the French translation of A Son of the Circus; self-engendered publicity for my own novel

Struck me as exceedingly crass in comparison to her field -- she promoted oceans. (The title in French, Un enfant de la balle, sounded slightly less crass, but I was unsure of how to pronounce it.)

It reluctantly emerged that I was a novelist; she hadn't heard of me, or read any of my novels. Frankly, I felt relieved. Novels can't compare to oceans -- not even long novels. Furthermore, I had the feeling that, when she'd been a girl in Germany, even the bankers in her family were more cultured and better educated than what traipsed among us as literary types today -- myself included.

Oh, her father had been a novelist, she said -- she didn't offer his name. Meanwhile, I had swallowed some red wine the wrong way; my eyes were watering. She even ate exquisitely. I felt I might as well throw down my knife and fork, and dig in with both hands. Finally, she had a second Scotch; she drank so little I'd begun to feel like a drunk, too.

Suddenly there was spontaneous agreement between us: I believe the topic of conversation concerned how few good books had not been belittled by the movies that had been made from them... well, who wouldn't spontaneously agree with that? And then a coughing fit overcame her. It was too terrible a seizure to ignore, but there was nothing I could do -- she coughed and coughed. It was a cough worthy of the daughter of the man who gave us Hans Castorp and The Magic Mountain, and all the rest; it was a cough that sounded ready for the sanatorium. But it was only after she quieted her cough, and dismissed it with an utter lack of concern -- she said she'd had the flu -- that I suddenly saw, in her noble profile, that haunted face of her father.