Teutonic. Nightmare

THE CANNIBAL (223 pp.)--John Hawkes --New Directions ($1.50).

Anybody with an ambition to write the strangest novel of 1950 will have to beat John Hawkes's first novel, The Cannibal. Written by Harvardman Hawkes at 23, The Cannibal is a dizzying surrealist vision of postwar Germany, in which, among other oddities, a monkey screams "Dark is life, dark, dark is death," a duke hacks a fox to death and invites his landlady to dine on the meat, and one-third of Germany is ruled by a solitary American G.I.

At first glance the story seems a freakish flight into simple lunacy, but once all expectations of a literal reading are abandoned, it has the troubling power of an undiscarded nightmare.

A Drunken Census Taker. To tiny Spitzen-on-the-Dein, which soon seems a microcosm of all Germany, the year 1945 brings desolation, misery and hunger. The town "was as shriveled in structure and decomposed as an oxen's tongue black with ants." A lonely horse nuzzled the gutters as children hung to its tail; the undertaker had no more embalming fluid for his corpses; "everyone wore grey and over their shoulders were hitched empty cartridge belts." From the old concentration camp near by, the D.P. inmates burst out to freedom to add their misery to that of the gutted town.

In this setting The Cannibal's story is told by Zizendorf, a neo-Nazi who plans to free Germany from Leevey, its American overlord. Zizendorf lives in a boarding house run by Madame Stella Snow, who symbolizes the eternal Germany of ruthless energy and strength. Among the other boarders are a hungry duke, a relic of the Kaiser-ruled past; a drunken census taker who personifies perennial German officialdom ready to serve any master; Herr Stintz, the typical "little man" whose futility is expressed in nocturnal tuba-playing, and Jutta, Zizendorf's cowlike mistress, who wants only the warmth of love.

A New Fuehrer. To blaze the way for another New Order, Zizendorf murders the unsuspecting Leevey and then beats to death harmless, helpless Herr Stintz, who had discovered the murder. As the census taker follows meekly along, as Madame Snow cheers enthusiastically and Jutta waits in bed, Zizendorf becomes Germany's new Fiihrer.

The basic idea of The Cannibal, to present German life from the nightmarish viewpoint of a new Fuehrer, is a good one, though Author Hawkes often mars it by long patches that are obscure in meaning and wild in language. Yet for all its fantasy and its irritating excesses, The Cannibal does sometimes approximate the flavor of postwar German life.

Author Hawkes picked up his impressions on the run when, at the end of World War II, he served for three months in Germany with the American Field Service. Not until he had finished The Cannibal did he realize that he had written a fantasy. Says,Hawkes: "I thought I was telling a perfectly straight story."

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