Hesitation Waltz

By Melvin Maddocks

FROM THE DIARY OF A SNAIL

by GUNTER GRASS

310 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95.

One drizzly March day in 1969, Germany's most powerful novelist, Guenter Grass (The Tin Drum, Local Anaesthetic), abandoned his beloved stand-up writing desk, his charming dancer-wife Anna and his four children (ages four to eleven)--for what? That least seductive of modern quests: politics. A barely tolerable necessity if one is running for office, electioneering in Grass's case was pure altruism. He was doing it on behalf of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The author campaigned across West Germany (31,000 bouncy kilometers in a Volkswagen bus) and "talktalktalked" for the Social Democrats. "A mobile, regionally dispersed, almost intangible father," Grass scribbled a sort of notebook-diary that considers why a novelist finds himself bothering with politics, and tries to answer his children's ritualistic questions: "Where are you off to again? What do you do when you get there?" Grass's answer is a sort of bedtime story on politics, featuring as hero the snail: "It seldom wins, and then by the skin of its teeth. It crawls, it goes into hiding but keeps on, putting down its quickly drying track on the historical landscape. Having lived through the schizophrenia of the 20th century--history as fanaticism and history as paralysis--Grass sees no choice but to endorse a middle philosophy of the crawl, to remain "always on the move," yet slowly, with feeling.

The progress of From the Diary of a Snail is all too consistent with the author's snail principles. On the way to almost any point, the reader is likely to get a favorite recipe from Chef Grass (simmered tripe with caraway seeds) or a growling epithet on Hegel: "Thanks to his subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary." Another snail detour documents the diaspora of the Jews of Grass's native Danzig during World War II. Here the narration seems to match the sinister creeping pace of anti-Semitism in its early stages.

Game Plan. Is the world made up of nothing but "the violent and the righteous"? Are there no other snail lovers left? Just to make sure, Grass invents one, a "Dr. Doubt," a Danzig schoolteacher, who sits out World War II in a cellar, collecting snails and falling in love, among other activities. He says: "I know more now. Hesitation comes more easily." Grass's middle-aged snail wisdom might easily be mistaken for Doubt's. At 45, Grass is too wise to be possessed by any one credo. Yet Grass cannot stay in his cellar while history's hobnailed boots march overhead.

From the Diary of a Snail is less the expression of a political platform or even a philosophy than of Grass's character.

To the little Grasses back home, watching Bonanza in German on TV (presumably along with their elders), Father knows how undramatic, how droning his snail fables must sound. No white hats, no showdown at the O.K. Corral.

Tired, sobered down, almost choking over his "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other" game plan, Grass still has more endurance, wit, sheer cantankerousness than a pair of polarized extremists half his age. "What's progress?" he asks stubbornly (and who else would have the courage and humor to use that old-fashioned word in the age of apocalypse?).

"Being a little quicker than the snail," replies Father Grass, tucking everybody snugly in, "... and never getting there, children." Holy Spaceship Earth! Leaping Electronic Village! Could this agitator for 19th century liberalism be right?

-- Melvin Maddocks

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