The Life of a Sculpture: Roderick Hudson by Henry James

Henry James is one of those authors who it is far more enjoyable to think about reading than actually to read. His reputation precedes him. He is perhaps the greatest sentence writer in the history of the English language. His novels are subtle explorations of the differences between the Old World and the New, and filled with moral murkiness. Who is not attracted by such a description? For anyone interested in writing, how can you justify not studying the sentences of a master?

When you actually read Henry James, though, it’s another story entirely. His sentences are long, and they are certainly complex. In a way, they are terribly beautiful too. But I cannot get pleasure out of reading them. In the same way, his stories, with their endless subtleties, often seem to be missing a soul to be subtle about. There are few writers who so successfully send my gaze away from the page and out towards the window.

A sculpture of a man looking at the ground
The Dying Gaul, one of the many sculptures that Roderick encounters during his time in Rome. Capitoline Museums / CC BY

Roderick Hudson is the story of a talented, perhaps even genius, American sculptor, the eponymous Hudson, who is taken to Europe by a wealthy patron, Rowland Mallet, to learn from the masters of that continent and their legacies. But Europe, specifically Rome, teaches young Roderick far more than simply how to sculpt brilliantly. In Europe Roderick encounters Christina Light, a young woman of great vitality and changeability, who makes a vivid contrast to the dreary Puritans of Roderick’s New England homeland. Roderick has left in America a fiancée, Mary Garland. Can there really be a danger in his acquaintance with Miss Light?

Roderick Hudson, Genius?

The character of Roderick Hudson is presented through the eyes of his friend Rowland. Though Roderick Hudson uses a narrator, he hangs behind Rowland’s eyes for the course of the novel. Where he comes in is to warn us of events to come, something which happens with some regularity. From early in the book we have a sense of coming tragedy, but what exactly will happen is left only as vague hints about future tears.

Roderick is a young man when we meet him. He is training to work in the legal profession, something one character wittily describes as “reading law, at the rate of a page a day”. The work is not for him. Rowland, who is not old himself and has plenty of money, decides, after seeing an example of Roderick’s work, to take him under his wing and go to Europe. His mother and cousin (soon, fiancée) are at first sceptical, but Rowland assures them that Roderick has real talent, and eventually they relent.

He does have real talent, and we are repeatedly told he is “genius”. But unfortunately, being a genius is not quite enough to be a great sculptor. What one also needs is discipline and hard work. Roderick, perhaps, is capable of these things. But Roderick Hudson is the record of his drifting away from them as other pleasures and other desires occlude his passion for work. For Roderick is a young man from a boring, Puritanical, New England world. It is a far cry from Rome, from unrestraint and luxury and excitement. Rowland worries, as he takes Roderick away, that perhaps he is making a mistake. The world they leave behind is one of “kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation”. The one they enter turns out to be anything but.

Rowland and his Responsibility

Rowland is not a particularly forceful character. He has more money than he has ideas, and no talent whatsoever, which forces him to look to Roderick for anything like success or achievement in this world. Instead of trying to get a job, he goes to a place – Europe – where it does not matter whether he has a job or not. He falls in love with Roderick’s fiancée but spends the novel trying to prevent Roderick and Mary from breaking their engagement. He takes care of Roderick, but more financially than morally. Rowland seems to have an instinctive fear of involvement, of danger, of conflict. So he watches Roderick’s decline without stopping it. It is hard not to dislike him for this, for his unwillingness to get either his own life in order, or that of Roderick. I certainly was ambivalent towards him.

Unless you are Emily Dickinson, it is hard to be a great artist without some degree of experience, of mobility. Rowland is right to take Roderick away, to give him a chance. But he is wrong to think that Europe can only offer positive developments. At the end of the first chapter in Europe, Roderick declares he wants to go off on his own, and Rowland, who bankrolls everything, lets him. The next time we meet our hero, he’s already gravely in debt. “Experience” turns out to be women and gambling. “I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman,” Roderick declares. Rowland, who forgives his protégé everything, does not admit to himself the danger of the words. Instead, he thinks that Roderick’s engagement to his cousin, Mary Garland, is a sufficient guarantee of good behaviour. How wrong he is.

The Coloseum painted.
The Colosseum, and Rome in general, form the backdrop of Roderick Hudson. Europe is dangerous, but also alluring to young Roderick. Unfortunately he is unable to resist its charms.

Christina Light

Christina Light is the woman who provides the danger at the heart of Roderick Hudson. She is an American, but has lived her twenty years of life on the Continent. Compared to the Puritans that Roderick leaves behind, Christina is a breath of fresh air. But even Roderick perceives, at least vaguely, that she might prove a problem. If “Beauty is immoral”, he says upon first seeing her, echoing the views of his family back home, then Christina is “the incarnation of evil”. He does not seem to realise that in the words of the New Englanders there may be more than just a grain of truth.

Christina is extremely beautiful, but capricious. Her mother tries to control her, with partial success, and Christina makes use of scandal and flirtation as her one source of freedom. Roderick appeals to her, and they begin a long will-they-or-won’t-they that runs the length of Roderick Hudson. Roderick thinks of the young woman as his Muse, but it doesn’t take long for his feelings of jealousy and frustration to turn his Muse into the opposite, and for his inspiration’s flow to run dry. Christina’s mother is obsessed with finding a rich prince for her daughter, and Roderick is neither of noble blood nor in possession of a positive balance at the bank. But he is unable to see the impossibility of the situation, or that in some way Christina might be using him for her own ends. Alas, his love leaves him blind to the truth.

A Backdrop of Stability: the Artists and Puritans of Roderick Hudson

Roderick and Christina have stormy emotions but also a great deal of vitality. Roderick Hudson, however, by its end seems to pronounce judgement on their style of living, and that judgement is not a positive one. In our search for positive characters we must look at the Puritans of the novel, and the artists of Rowland’s circle. Mary Garland, Roderick’s fiancée, is the main representative of the former group. She is intelligent, which we see by her constant reading and questioning, and she is also natural and unaffected in style. This is in contrast to Christina, who is always described as playing a role or being “dramatic”. Mary is honest too, which leaves her less vulnerable to her imagination. She faces the world, instead of trying to flee it like her fiancé.

Of the artists, a group made of Rowland’s friends in Rome, Sam Singleton stands out as a heroic figure. He is a painter of small talent, but of hard work. We know that he does not produce masterpieces, but whenever we see him, he is training, learning, and active. Instead of waiting idly for inspiration to come as does Roderick, Singleton goes out to hone his skills to be ready for it when it does. Roderick describes him as “a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one hears you always – tic-tic, tic-tic.” We know that if Roderick had even an ounce of Singleton’s work ethic, he would be a far better sculptor, but it is also true that he would be a better person.

Singleton is happy, calm, at peace, where Roderick is prey to the full force of his emotions. A great artist is the one who can master their emotions and set them upon the page or marble, not simply experience them. Singleton’s weakness is a lack of torrential emotions, but it is an artistic weakness, not a human one. By the end of Roderick Hudson it was clear which of the two artists I would prefer to be, however boring my choice is.

A photo of Henry James, author of Roderick Hudson
It is somewhat hard to believe that Henry James was in his early thirties when he wrote Roderick Hudson. Like everything he wrote it seems to be written by a serious old man, and is just as exciting.

Conclusion

I confess that by about the half-way point I was rather keen to get Roderick Hudson over and done with. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the book – it was thoroughly okay – but there are many other books, waiting on my shelf, which I’m quite certain I will enjoy more. By the end, reading Roderick Hudson felt like a kind of penance, a sign of deference to the Master, but certainly not an act of love or pleasure. There are various reasons for this, and in his preface James notes several of them for us.

For one, the story is rather too determined by “developments”, events that seem rather forced. The novel’s final section, in Switzerland, is particularly weak in this regard – suddenly all the characters from Rome meet again, and James simply expects us to take this on faith. When James has his characters exclaim “it’s like something in a novel” this is no excuse. In fact, this spoils the impression still further. Rather than drawing our attention to the artificiality of the structure, the structure itself ought to have been altered.

I’m also not a great fan of the characters. Perhaps the women of the late 19th century were all as flighty as Christina Light or as sombre and serious as Mary Garland, but I struggle to believe that people were that simple. Being changeable does not make for a great or believable character. And beauty is not a character trait – it is laziness. The men come off only slightly better, but overall, I found myself disliking most of the characters, which made it hard to care about any of them or their fates. Rowland is ineffectual; Roderick is just an idiot.

Roderick Hudson was James’s first serious novel. Though he revised it later, it still bears the marks of his youth. Whatever technical genius he already displays here – and there are some awe-inspiring sentences – his feeling for people still has a way to go. I had planned to read all of James’s novels one-after-another as a kind of project. Unfortunately, for now I feel like I’d rather just think about reading them all instead.

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

I was recommended Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by my friend James, who was so impressed by it that his recommendation came to me all in caps. I don’t know what exactly the book is – Holmes himself calls it a “mongrel book” – but it’s awfully good. It is both a work of biography and a work of autobiography, and because of the approach to biography that Holmes takes, it is also a book of travel too. For the “footsteps” of the title are no measly metaphor, but real tracks in the ground. Holmes sees biography not merely as the result of months and years spent absorbed in dusty tomes, but as the fruit of reliving the life of a dead, retracing their steps through the places that had once charmed them so much.

It is this approach that makes Footsteps so special. For what the book really shows is a different way of reading to the usual, casual, one of reading and moving on. Holmes’s approach is marked by a passionate relationship with the author and his or her works. It somehow turns reading from a passive activity into an active one, a tussle with the past. Reading Footsteps, I thought back to the times when I myself had felt great passion for authors – for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Conrad, Foster Wallace and Pynchon and many others – and I found myself wanting. I had not fanned the flame of my own desire, not dug deep into either the books or their authors, but rather been content to glide upon their surfaces. Most importantly, I had not slowed down. Following an artist’s footsteps forces us to stop, to breathe, to focus and enjoy.

Reading Footsteps, I saw how I should be reading. In some sense, the book and its approach are an antidote to the pressures of our time and our relentless rushing about. That’s why it’s so worth reading.

The Structure of Footsteps

Footsteps is divided into four parts, each taken from a different part of Holmes’s life and detailing his encounter with a different writer. These are: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and finally the French poet Gérard de Nerval. I can’t describe myself as “knowing” any of them well. I had read a story by Stevenson, a few poems by Shelley, and nothing by either Wollstonecraft or Nerval (the latter I’d not even heard of). But a familiarity with the writers is not a prerequisite to enjoying Footsteps, not at all. For Holmes is not offering an appraisal of their works so much as their lives. He uses their works, letters, journals, to emphasise the connection between the writers and the places they’ve been. He anchors each writer in their experience of a moment and place, rather than trying to grab hold of all of them at once.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the heroes of Footsteps. Holmes does an excellent job in making us interested in people we’d never been interested in before.

In each section of Footsteps there is a different question obsessing Holmes which he hopes to find the answer to. In Stevenson’s case, for example, Holmes soon discovers that some apparently simple travel writing about a journey in France is much more complex than it first appears. Instead of simply following Stevenson around, Holmes is forced to follow him into his heart, as the writer faces down his doubts about his love for a married American, Fanny Osbourne. In Percy Shelley’s case, Holmes wants to understand the nature of the relationship between the poet and Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife, Mary, during much of their stay in Italy. In the case of Nerval, by contrast, who went mad and committed suicide, Holmes wants to try to salvage some kind of fact from the mass of fabrication and incoherence left in the poet’s wake.

These questions and focuses keep Footsteps from getting out of hand, as is perfectly possible with biography. (Holmes’s full biography of Percy Shelley is over 800 pages). Even in these comparatively short pieces we are introduced to a bewildering array of characters, and each of them seems deserving of detailed investigation. Holmes, who absolutely has done his research, is always able to approach his problems from multiple angles, through multiple voices. Alongside his physical tramplings, this polyphonic approach makes the past come alive not just as a single reanimated authorial figure, but as a vibrant crowd. It makes us aware of just how interesting even a minor figure is, and how we all fit together into a whole.

Mr Holmes

Holmes is a wonderful guide, though not just because he knows his stuff, is passionate, and writes well. He’s also a great guide because of his own almost confessional tone. Just as in Footsteps he draws us near to the dead men and women, so too does he draw us near to himself. It is this that makes the text feel so alive. When he cracks a puzzle, like why Wollstonecraft describes herself as seeing something from her rooms in Paris that ought to have been geographically impossible (it turned out her rooms were on the roof, not the fashionable front rooms biographers expected her to have been given), we share his joy. Likewise, when he is struck with grief – for example, when finding the bridge that Stevenson had crossed “broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy” and being forced to accept that he cannot follow him forever – we share that too.

His openness about the process of biography is part of this. Before Footsteps I had read very little biography, and never thought seriously about the form, especially in respect to other genres. Holmes readily describes the challenges of producing “the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact”, and the way that unlike a novelist, “ordinariness… family intimacy, is the very thing that the biography… cannot share or re-create”. He made me aware of the genre’s limitations – for example, a happy couple will be mostly together, and less likely to write journal entries because each member will have each other, leaving a blank space where the biographer was hoping to find material. Then there is “the fatal past subjunctive” (would have), when the biographer is forced to claim what evidence cannot provide. All things I’d never considered.

Past and Present

Holmes’s active role in Footsteps is also important for another reason. It draws together the past and present (or at least, the latter 20th century). Holmes, who was in his twenties during the May 1968 protests in France, uses the experience of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley in and after the French Revolution to illustrate his own generation’s ambiguous feelings towards the protests and what they achieved and failed to. Like any historian, Holmes naturally finds connections, and because of his focus on the personal over the general, these connections seem much more fresh and relevant, even to the modern reader, whose hopes for revolution may long have turned to ashes. They make the past immediate, and remind us that reading history is more than a school exercise, but rather gives us a new lens through which to view our own time.

In seeing how writers responded to their times, Holmes also gives us a new way of looking at more modern writers. How does Pynchon’s treatment of the 1960s and disillusionment compare to Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s once the French Revolution was done and dusted? Without biography, it can be hard to ask such questions – we don’t know where to begin.

A photograph of the poet Nerval, one of the subjects of Footsteps
Gérard de Nerval, a French poet whose madness alas was more permanent and fatal than that of Holmes’s. While I found the lack of translations frustrating, Holmes’s own increasingly deranged quest to understand Nerval more than made up for it.

Nerval – journey into madness

The treatment of the character of Gérard de Nerval – for where does the man Gérard Labrunie end and Nerval begin? – was for me the unexpected highlight of Footsteps. The poet himself I can’t say I encountered in any serious way, thanks to Holmes’s unwillingness to translate French quotes. What was interesting, however, was the way that as Holmes pursued Nerval through masses of confusing and often contradictory evidence, he himself began to feel that a normal biography would not be able to make sense of Nerval. Instead, there was an “overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography”, in which Holmes began to believe that it was Tarot cards which held the key to the mystery, rather than books or facts.

In his search to “save” Nerval, Holmes finds himself “slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him”. When he finally finishes, he has seven different notebooks in seven different colours, like a kind of talisman. But he has found no answers. He has only succeeded, thankfully only temporarily, in losing himself. It is a final warning for us, that biography, like everything else, must be enjoyed in moderation. We should not seek to become our quarries, only to draw level with them. Otherwise we risk losing our very selves.

Conclusion – Following in Holmes’s Footsteps

I was recently at the museum-house of the poet and painter Max Voloshin, on the coast of the Black Sea. I had not heard of him, but at the museum we were given a detailed tour. He had built the house himself, and it is an insane mass of staircases and doors and secret passageways. One detail I loved was that the windows in Voloshin’s study were arranged so that the sunlight would get in his eyes at exactly midday, as a warning to the artist that it was time to take a break. I left that evening, determined to read him when I had the chance.

The next morning my girlfriend and I decided to visit Voloshin’s grave, which lies above the town at the top of a hill. The tradition is to bring a stone from the seashore up to him, and we both did. The walk took two hours as we fought sweltering heat and tumbling rocks to get to the top. But in the end we made it, and were met with his grave, covered with stones and pebbles, many of them signed with messages for the poet. We both added our own, then we went a little further, and sat down to enjoy the view.

The grave of Max Voloshin
The grave of Max Voloshin, covered with pebbles from the beach below. I was glad to make my own small literary pilgrimage, following in Holmes’s own footsteps.

I was glad, so soon after finishing Footsteps, to put into practice, in a small way, the ideas implicit in Holmes’s book. In climbing that hill I had made my relationship with an author, even one whose works I have not read, personal and active rather than simply passive. As I sat on the hill, looking out over the sea, I stopped, I thought, I breathed. And I felt grateful that I still have plenty of authors to love and plenty of time to love them. Read Footsteps, and then read everything else in the world!

Diving into the Past: Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse

I visited Lübeck in July 2015, a few months after Günter Grass had passed away. I was there to visit Thomas Mann’s museum as part of a trip that also took me to Husum, Theodor Storm’s hometown, but since Grass had his own museum and I had time, I decided to drop in. Walking around inside, unable to understand the German on the walls, I did at least manage to enjoy Grass’s drawings and countless photos of undersea wreckage. I gathered that this was something to do with his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, and bought a copy of it as a trophy and memento. Unlike my unread copy of The Tin Drum, I’ve actually dragged myself through Im Krebsgang twice, and will probably read it a third time. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s easier to write on what you know, and I’ve exams to prepare for.

I cheated with Cat and Mouse because I read it in translation. However, I now think this was a good decision. I was able, for the first time, to meet Grass without my faulty German acting as an untrustworthy intermediary. Grass is often considered the most important German-language writer since the Second World War, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Cat and Mouse is a short novel about the past, about Germany’s horrific past, and individual lives within it. It takes us into wartime Danzig and follows a single figure, Joachim Mahlke, through the eyes of a friend. From the warplanes above on the first page the atmosphere is ominous. All the more so because for most of the book we don’t know why we need to hear this story. But as readers, we suspect the narrator has something bothering him, something only half-acknowledged.

Grass's illustration for the first edition of Cat and Mouse, showing a cat wearing an Iron Cross medal
Grass, who was also a talented artist, did the covers for all of his books. The Cat here, with its wonky eyes and Iron Cross, is a little unnerving.

Childhood in a Time of War

Cat and Mouse begins in Danzig a short while into the Second World War – the novel is technically second in a loosely connected trilogy of works by Grass, after The Tin Drum and before Dog Years, but it can certainly be read separately from them. Our main characters are schoolchildren, rather than adults, which gives us a different perspective on the War from what’s typical. Yes, there are planes overhead, but the War’s impact on the children is indirect at best, at least at first. The children compare notes on various warships from rival powers, and they dive in a sunken Polish minesweeper to dig up trinkets.

Real violence seems far away. The opening scene describes a successful attempt by the narrator, who is suffering from toothache, to get a cat to pounce on Mahlke’s oversized Adam’s Apple, which the narrator calls Mahlke’s “mouse”. Beneath the planes, toothache and pranks are the order of the day. The principal of their school is “high party official”, but for the kids he is first and foremost a principal. The magic of childhood is not destroyed by the War so much as slightly distorted. Words like “up to” when describing time hint at later difficulties, while the knowledge of warfare is perhaps disturbing, but at least early on in Cat and Mouse we are given the impression that all is well in their world.

Two Worlds

But there are two worlds at play here, not one. Cat and Mouse as a title reflects a division between two antagonistic beings, one stronger than the other. In practice, this refers to German society at the time, and Mahlke himself. Mahlke is an oddball. He is a Catholic, like the narrator, but his Catholicism is distorted by a strange worship of the Virgin Mary beyond what is acceptable. He doesn’t fit in with his peers either. When the boys go out to the minesweeper, most of them sit on the deck and sunbathe, while Mahlke usually exception dives down alone in search of treasure.

This underwater world is Mahlke’s world. His “light-blue eyes… filled with curiosity only under water”, and Mahlke builds himself a base in part of the boat where water has not reached. Nobody else has ever reached his hideout, which requires lung capacity beyond their own. Like Mahlke’s mind – Cat and Mouse has very little direct or reported speech – the hideout remains hidden from us. In it he stores the trinkets he finds, such as a small Polish virgin and a gramophone. It is a strange hobby, Mahlke’s “fanaticism” for diving, but it provides him with “a goal in life” completely disconnected from matters above water, from the War. For even Mahlke’s perception of the world is strange – we learn that “Great events were shaking the world just then, but Mahlke’s time reckoning was Before learning to swim and After learning to swim”. 

War and the classroom

War does eventually break into the classroom, but slowly. A teacher is arrested and students are questioned. Then there is a lieutenant who returns and gives a talk, describing his experience in the air force cheerily as “some merry-go-round” and “pretty much the same as in the old days when we played handball in our good old recreation yard”. But of course, such a speech has been doctored for the schoolchildren, and only briefly do other emotions and darker thoughts break through the humour and lightness, such as when the speaker mentions “some that couldn’t take it”. And when the speech is finished, the narrator informs us casually that “he had graduated from our school in ’33 and was shot down over the Ruhr in ‘43”. The children do not notice what we, who are older and wiser, know to look out for.

Mahkle’s Other Goal

Another time a lieutenant commander comes and Mahlke, for reasons unknown, steals his medal and stows it away in his hideout while the man is supervising their gym class. Guilt then gets the better of him and he confesses the theft to the principal. He is then summarily expelled and sent to a different school. There, Mahlke develops a plan to recover his honour – he plans to come back to his initial school to give a speech, and the only way to do that is through fighting. He joins the army and disappears. The narrator is a little way behind, picking up scraps of information about his friend but little concrete information.

When they meet again, Mahlke is already a hero, but the two of them are unable to connect. Their language fails them. The narrator keeps repeating himself. And Mahlke isn’t given permission to speak at the school either – rules are rules, the principal reminds him. Mahlke, who was no patriot, learns that it was all for nothing.

Form and Structure

Cat and Mouse is interesting at least as much because of its form and structure as because of its story. From the very first words, “…and one day”, we are thrust in media res into the story, and this leaves us with more questions than answers. We do not learn, at least at first, why the narrator is writing, except obliquely, when he says he “ha[s] to write.” And he is speaking just as much as he is writing. Cat and Mouse is an oral story, which raises questions, later answered, about who is listening. When we write, we can be writing for ourselves, but when we speak, we demand something more – judgement, or perhaps support.

Cat and Mouse follows Mahlke and not the narrator. All the same, the narrator, who consciously hides himself, is just as much of an enigma as his quarry. Each chapter seems like a fragment of some longer dialogue, wrenched out of thin air, and many begin with questions, or ellipses to indicate this fragmentation. There are also, occasionally, moments where the long paragraphs split up into short, single-sentence paragraphs, such as:

“What’s the matter with him?” / “I say he’s got a tic.” / “Maybe it’s got something to do with his father’s death”.

These moments, where other characters seem to speak together, remind me of a Greek chorus. Everyone is trying to understand Mahlke, but nobody can. Cat and Mouse’s fragmentary search through the past is partially a quest to reconstruct him from the boy whose legend as “The Great Mahlke”, the amazing diver, has displaced the underlying reality. But there’s much more going on here than that.

An old photo showing the Danzig waterfront around 1900
Danzig, modern day Gdansk in Poland, was once quite the beauty. Grass grew up here, and the city is the setting for his “Danzig trilogy”, consisting of The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years.

Literature after Auschwitz – Cat and Mouse and Memory

Cat and Mouse is, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, an attempt to reformulate and re-evaluate the past so as to come to terms with it. The narrator is cagey because he feels he has a hand in Mahlke’s ultimate fate, a hand he’s unwilling to acknowledge. The odd comment, like when he says “I alone could be termed his friend”, speaks to a kind of guilt. As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes ever so slightly more open, describing “this gloomy conscience of mine” and mentioning his conversations are with a “Franciscan Father Alban” without getting to the point of ever saying what exactly hangs over him until the very end.

In truth, the narrator is obsessed by Mahlke, because he is unable to escape his guilt – but nor can he face it directly. At the very end of the novel, in the climax scene, Cat and Mouse briefly shifts into the third person – “Pilenz shouted: “Come up!””. The narrator – whose name is Pilenz – is even ready to use linguistic trickery to distance himself from his actions.

Theodor Adorno, one of the major German critical theorists of the 20th century, wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric”. Paul Celan, a German-language poet, revised that by suggesting that poetry written after Auschwitz can only be worthwhile if it is about Auschwitz, directly or indirectly. Both of these thoughts reflect a central preoccupation in German-language literature after 1945 – that of guilt, and how to deal with it in writing. Günter Grass, in his autobiographies, confessed to being an enthusiastic member of the SS, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of thinking about Cat and Mouse. Rather we should read Cat and Mouse in light of Celan’s comment. It is a book that is deliberately reflective, looking back into the past from an unspecified point in the future, and not trying to find answers so much as to atone.

It is not an easy process. The fragmentary nature of the book, as I suggested above, makes it feel like it is compiled from a much greater source. And while on a literal level, this source is the narrator’s chats with the priest, on another level Cat and Mouse records just an individual instance of a general project, that of the German people’s coming to terms with their complicity in violence and horror during the Second World War and Nazi Era more broadly. Cat and Mouse is a book of obfuscations, feints and trickery, but this is not because of the narrator’s bad conscience so much as the challenge of actually truly coming to admit responsibility when every part of you begs you to go on hiding from it.

Pilenz, the Narrator of Cat and Mouse

But questions remain, and Pilenz, the narrator of Cat and Mouse, is at their centre. I’ve avoided using his name just as he avoids it. He only tells us it halfway through the novel. Just as he consciously hides his guilt so too does he consciously hide himself: “I’m not going to speak of myself, my story is about Mahlke”. But sentences like this only further draw our attention to him.

I don’t feel I have all the answers here, or at least an interpretation I can give to what I’ve read that makes sense, but I’ll do my best. Here are the basic facts: Pilenz lives with his mother. His father is away fighting, and an older brother too. The brother, who was the favourite child, dies, and at home he daily bears witness to his mother’s infidelity. It is not a happy life. Other examples, such as a sexually abusive priest from his youth, come up in passing.

I think Pilenz is consumed by guilt, both for his responsibility in Mahlke’s fate, and for his own life’s course. He mentions travelling to Nazareth and Ukraine in search of a way to live. “I should be able to believe, to believe something, no matter what, perhaps even to believe in the resurrection of the flesh” – these are his hopes, but not the reality. After the War, after the destruction, Pilenz has no spiritual centre. He is lost and cannot find himself. In telling Mahlke’s story he is not trying to tell his own so much as save it, to give himself a chance to find the meaning he longs for. We can only guess as to whether he succeeds.

Conclusion

“Who will supply me with a good ending?” Pilenz asks in the final chapter. Reading Cat and Mouse it is obvious that there cannot be a happy ending here. The very absence of a happy ending is the motor that keeps Pilenz talking and us reading. We want to understand what ending we will get, and what Pilenz’s role in it is.

This blurry but nonetheless embarrassing photo of me is the only one I have from my time in the Grass museum.

I think I probably liked Cat and Mouse. It is short and focused, and I found its structure interesting and ideas worth thinking about. I enjoyed the connection between diving into the underwater world of Mahlke’s minesweeper and the Pilenz’s “diving” into the past to try to reconstruct their friendship. Overall, I can readily recommend the book to people who think it all sounds interesting. But I can’t say I enjoyed it on a human level. The characters weren’t endearing, and the message of guilt and atonement felt rather too closely bound with its era to be engaging on a personal, rather than intellectual level. But that’s just me.