Poets in Search of Peace

By Paul Gray

THE MEETING AT TELGTE by Guenter Grass

Translated by Ralph Manheim; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 147 pages; $9.95

Historical novelists commonly cast imaginary characters in real events. Author Guenter Grass, 53, turns this standard formula on its head. The Meeting at Telgte teems with more than 20 German writers and literary figures, all of whom actually lived and worked during the 17th century. What these people did not do, how ever, is precisely the subject of Grass's novel. They did not meet together in 1647, near the end of the Thirty Years' War, nor did they sit down to discuss ways of uniting their ravaged father land through the power and the glory of the German language.

In conceiving and describing a happening that never happened, Grass is playing a sophisticated version of the what-if game. His point is not to guess how German history might have been changed if, at a crucial moment, the poets had rallied round the native tongue. Instead, he frames a long-ago analogy for recent reality. In 1947 a loose confederation of German writers and publishers did as unlike their predecessors 300 earlier. As citizens, they looked on a divided, devastated nation; artists, they found their language by the murderous rhetoric the Nazis. They argued and dis literature and the writer's ability to heal his countrymen. They read manuscripts to each other and decided to convene annually, which they did for the next 20 years. They came to be known as Group 47; Grass joined them in the middle '50s and became the most talented and distinguished alumnus of them all.

It helps to know this while reading The Meeting at Telgte, for the novel is in part Grass's allegorical tribute to Group 47. But the book is also an imaginative leap, and easily accessible as such even to those unfamiliar with the details of German life in this or the 17th century. Grass whisks himself off to one of the many times in history when the sword seemed mightier than the pen. He watches poets' gather at an obscure village inn, all of them taking risks to get there. Brigands and bands of hungry soldiers terrorize travelers; the local river yields up dead bodies. Ignorant armies have been clashing night and day for nearly 30 years. Food is scarce; there is "nothing left to cackle" in the village.

The poets' purpose amid all this car nage and chaos is noble: "Giving new force to the last remaining bond be tween all Germans, namely, the German language they held in common." Their behavior quickly proves unworthy of their unifying ideal. They begin by squabbling over the proper use of dactylic words. They fall into grim dispute "over the essence of irony and of humor." Thunderous abuse follows the reading of each manuscript. Worst of all, these noble spirits find themselves implicated in the cruelty of their age; the feast mysteriously provided them by Gelnhausen, a dashing young member of their entourage, turns out to have been tainted by violence and plunder.

Having lustily enjoyed the ill-gotten geese, pigs and sheep, the poets must swallow an unpleasant truth: moral purity is hard to maintain in an immoral world. To their credit, the writers accept and understand this lesson. Feelings of superiority begin to evaporate. The conclave that opened in smugness draws to a close with increasing humility. The participants realize that art must somehow protect its integrity while mingling in the mud and muddle of life.

To underscore this point, Grass gives the best speech in the novel to the rascally Gelnhausen. The discredited young man takes his leave, boldly promising the group that some day he will write a book: "But let no one expect mincing pastorals, conventional obituaries, complicated figure poems, sensitive soul-blubber, or well-behaved rhymes for church congregations. No, he would let every foul smell out of the bag; a chronicler, he would bring back the long war as a word-butchery, let loose gruesome laughter, and give the language license to be what it is: crude and softspoken, whole and stricken . . . but always drawn from the casks of life."

This description jibes perfectly with Grass's own fictional methods, particularly in The Tin Drum, a sprawling, picaresque vision of a later war. The Meeting at Telgte is considerably shorter and less ambitious than its famous predecessor, much more an elegy than an encyclopedia. But for all its brevity, the novel fleshes out serious old questions about the place of literature in the lives of nations. Grass allows his imaginary meeting to end on a note of ineffectuality. The inn burns down, and with it a peace proposal that the poets composed: "And so, what would in any case not have been heard, remained unsaid." Yet the writers part with good feelings all around: "After this, none of them would feel quite so isolated." They set off for then" different destinations, still harboring the dream of all poets, that they will sur vive through their words and works, that they "will mingle with eternity." Grass exposes their vanities and weaknesses, but he also, lovingly, perpetuates their hope.

-- By Paul Gray

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