Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"What, then, is mortal man? A house of bitter grief, A plaything of false chance, an errant firefly, A theater of stark fear and cruel adversity, A quickly melted snow, a quickly fallen leaf"

and through their mutual friend the mathematician Peter Griiger informed the young poet of his desire to meet him. At the age of thirty-eight, Opitz was shaken in health, sick to death of the interminable wars and of his unsuccessful efforts at diplomacy. Only the year before, when his father, the indestructible butcher from Bunzlau, married for the fourth time, he had taken stock of himself and written:

"My spirit burns no more, No longer does it soar— Disgust with the servility Of friend and foe doth weigh Me down above all else— The burden of an evil day."

The meeting occurred on September 2, 1636, in the house of the Reformed preacher Nigrinius, where Opitz lived in solitude-if we choose to disregard a strange kitchen-maid by the name of Agnes who cooked half the day for him and half the day for Moller the town painter. It is recorded in a letter from Opitz to Huhnerfeld, his publisher, "Have just met a new writer, endowed with a great gift of language, though not versed in all the rules. His name is Andreas Gryph, and he comes from Glogau. Everything about him offended me."

Opitz and Gryphius talked until the sky darkened. Outside the windows the Baltic Indian summer lingered on. Occasional ringing of vespers bells. The kitchenmaid came and went, barefooted on green-and-yellow-glazed tiles. Both spoke with a slight Silesian accent that cannot be put into writing. And sometimes they spoke like printed matter. That can be quoted.

Gryphius had a round, boyish face that could suddenly darken and sink as though devoured from within, and then the voice that spoke from it was that of an angry archangel. His prophet's mouth. His horror-stricken eyes. Despite his rosy look, the young poet was of an atrabilious nature. As for

the older man, who sat stiffly in the Spanish-Flemish fashion, his gaze was curtained by his eyelids, and whenever he spoke, more to himself than to his guest, he peered into every corner of the room like a beaten dog, or seemed at all events to be looking for a way out. Evidently Opitz was sensitive to noise. Outside the house barrels were being fitted with iron hoops.

At first Gryphius seemed embarrassed and addressed studentlike quips to Agnes the kitchenmaid each time she renewed the young poet's spiced wine and the older man's elderberry juice, but received no reply. They talked about the noise in this seaport town and about Silesia, now lost for the second time. Gryphius told his host how the plague had carried off both sons of his Fraustadt patron Caspar Otto, whom he, Gryphius, had been tutoring in Latin. Mutual friends from Glogau and Bunzlau were named. Some irony still remained for the Fruitbearing Society, a Silesian literary club.

After mentioning the death of Prince Raffael Leszczyn-ski, the last protector of the Silesian refugees in Frauenburg and Polish Leszno, Opitz, perhaps a bit too offhandedly, praised the bold though sometimes undisciplined prosody of certain of Gryphius's sonnets, but went on to deplore their immoderation: the unrestrained sorrow, the vale-of-tears tone, the condemnation of all earthly pleasure down to the most trifling as vanity and vexation of spirit. True, he, too, Opitz the restless seeker, could not help feeling personally concerned by the splendid line "How then shall man, that insubstantial bubble, endure," since he well knew the meaning of failure and had himself written equally disheartening lines in his time, but he could not find it in his heart to disparage all human endeavor as "dust, chaff, and ashes," waiting for the wind to blow them away. Some useful things had been done, after all. Enduring achievement often lay buried beneath ruins. The scattered seed would bear new fruit. Even unsuccessful effort bore witness to the courage of upright men. Nothing was ever lost. Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna had convinced him of the need for political action. The good could not be gathered ready at hand but had to be sifted out. And really Gryphius was too young to dispose of the whole world as a vale of tears and wish him-

self and his chubby-cheeked good health into the moldering grave. A life with all its weal and woe still lay ahead of him.

Thereupon young Gryphius drained his spiced wine, stared at the cloves and mace that remained at the bottom of his cup, glowered like an Old Testament prophet, lost all his inclination to address quips to the drink-renewing kitchenmaid, and, tapping the table edge rhythmically with his right forefinger, spoke in a steady flow, as though he had prepared his speech in advance.

First he acknowledged the debt of gratitude that he and his generation of poets owed to Opitz for his theoretical work, which had enabled them to spurn Latinizing affectation and commit themselves to German poetics. Then he held the finger, which only a moment before had been drumming, up to the lauded master's nose. He, the great Opitz, had squandered his strength in politicking; crowned and ennobled by the emperor, he, Opitz, had given to diplomacy what was owing to Poesy; for the sake of accented and unaccented syllables, he, Opitz the rule giver, had thrown a veil of verbiage over all man's misery; throughout the war, he, Opitz the busybody, had handled the dirty work of one prince after another, and even now, though at last in a secure haven, he could not desist, on the one hand from writing Wladislaw, king of Poland, letters of advice weighing one petty advantage against another, and on the other hand from sending Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna secret reports on the recruiting of Prussian mercenaries for the imperial armies. True, Opitz did all this out of concern for unhappy Silesia, once again under the Catholic heel, but also for the hard cash received from Poles and Swedes alike for his sinister double-dealing, his spying, and his weasel words. This is what had muffled his speech, though one would think that the all-destroying war and the crying distress of helpless mankind would lead a poet to speak out plainly and clearly. But he, the resourceful Opitz, had trimmed his sails to the winds of the day, served the Protestants but translated the Jesuits' antiheresy manual into German. He had knelt at Catholic Masses. When Magdeburg fell, he had gone so far as to write poems in mockery of that unhappy, God-fearing city—"Who always slept alone, the chaste old maid. ." — for which reason he had been cursed in the Protestant camp.

On his way through Breslau he had got at least two of that city's daughters with child, but had refused to pay alimony. And the flowery classicist hymns of praise that he, Opitz the sycophant, had penned, in strict accordance of course with the rules of poetics, for the bloodsucking Count Dohna— "Thou hast exalted me, and set me wholly free. And from the burden of arms, saved me for Poesy" — were indeed masterful, as his little book on German poetics made amply clear, but they lacked the passion, the flaming word without which there can be no true poetry; they were lukewarm to the taste. And yet he, Gryphius, could recite poems by Opitz, the early Transylvanian ones, for instance, but also the one about the plague in Bunzlau, in which art did not posture, and the word did not conceal, but pointed inescapably to the vale of tears:

. . What suffering as he lay Sick with the awful plague, ere he could pass away And cast his body off! For his infected blood Like burning fire rose all upward to his head And seized upon his eyes, with raging fever bright. Speech had forsaken him, his throat was bounden tight. His lungs did heave and pant, th' entire frame was sick And losing of its strength. A nauseating reek As of a long-dead beast from out his gullet flowed. His poor defenseless life upon the threshold stood And looked this way and that, and looked beyond to see If there be any balm amid such agony.