Literary lions

There's an event series at New York's Public Library on 42nd Street of conversations with newsworthy authors and personalities called NYPL Live, launched by the fairly new and endlessly enthusiastic Paul Holdengraeber. I've been to a few of the events, each introduced by Holdengraeber, who always reminds the audience of his ultimate goal: to make the public library's two lions, who guard the entrance, roar. Last Wednesday was the final event of the season and Holdengraeber, in his introduction to the evening with Guenter Grass and Norman Mailer, shook his fist and proclaimed that, "Tonight, we have made the lions roar!"

Indeed, I got goosebumps when Grass stepped up onto the podium to be interviewed by Paris Review editor Andrew O'Hagan. He is a living legend, and he looks just as you picture him from all his book covers. The impetus for his appearance was the recent publication of his memoirs, Peeling the Onion, in which he writes about the 3 months he spent drafted into the Waffen SS. There has been an inordinate amount of uproar about his membership - though involuntary - in Hitler's SS, in light of his oeuvre criticizing the German government and fashism/totalitarianism in general. Whatever. Grass was 17 at the time he was drafted, he was sent to fight at the front, where it didn't matter what outfit you were in, you just got shot at and were extremely lucky to survive. Unfortunately, the designated interviewer O'Hagan focussed on this brief episode in Grass's life in his first, oh, 7 questions or so. Why hadn't Grass admitted to this sooner? Well, he had. He told the public in the 1960s, but nobody cared. It wasn't a secret, though people are making it out to have been.

It was more interesting to hear about the other things that Grass had been silent about. He told the audience he'd had a cousin in his hometown Danzig, which was Polish and German at the time, who worked at a Polish post office. One day, German military rounded up all the employees of the post office and shot them. The incident was never discussed in Grass's family, and Grass never asked about his cousin. He called it "opportunistic silence"; not wanting to be associated with those less fortunate. This, I think, is far more interesting and gets to the core of how the German population during the Third Reich shared the guilt of the Nazis. It was more convenient to be silent about unpleasant things than to discuss or even confront them. This is universally true, I think.

Grass also made the fascinating point that winners never have to think about their mistakes. "This terrible defeat [in World War II] gave Germany the chance to think about itself," he said. This is the "irony of history," he explained. The U.S. has never had to question itself; it has always won. He didn't mention Vietnam.

Asked about the perception of the U.S. today, Grass sighed and said that America had always been a source of inspiration for Europe, especially in the 1960s, with its battles for civil liberties and free expression. Today, he said, America offers no more inspiration.

Norman Mailer, interviewed after Grass, seemed to agree. Bush is the worst president in U.S. history, he declared flatly, reducing Reagan to Number Two. Mailer suffered a bunch of interview questions from O'Hagan - including whether he thought that he hadn't won the Nobel Prize on account of stabbing his wife (?!) - before stopping him and stating that what he, Mailer, really wanted to talk about was his relationship to America versus Grass's relationship to Germany. "America is like a wife to me, she's my lifelong wife," pointing out that he'd also had 6 real wives. You love a wife but she can disappoint you deeply. Grass understood this when the two literary lions shared the stage in the third portion of the evening.

And Mailer refused to be baited into condemning Grass for not having written about his SS time sooner. He had thought about it, he said, and thought about what he himself hadn't written about and might never write about, and cited the stabbing of his second wife. Both authors later agreed that it has to be up to the writer to determine when to write about something. "I wasn't ready until now, I didn't have the distance" to his childhood memories, said Grass.

At the end, both authors admitted that there is no retirement for writers, they would continue to write until they were dead (though Mailer had announced earlier that due to his disappearing faculties this might be his last public appearance). And Grass confessed: "In German, and probably many other languages, there is a saying that with age one becomes wise. Well, I am not wise because I am still angry. I am still angry at politics, at the world."

gertrude