Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales (review)

No one can accuse me of being anti-Merz (unmerzlich), as I have devoted so much of my last fifty years to its creator. I came across Kurt Schwitters in Oxford, in the Summer 1959 (the first ever) issue of New Departures, a publication that quickened the pulse of a budding Anglo-Dadaist in a manner that Oxford itself did not. I went on to found the Schwitters Institute in Keele and ran it singlehandedly for a whole year, levitating out of sight a particularly ugly university building (left over from the war) at one notably spirited session. At another, the "Sneeze Concerto" was performed. On the fiftieth anniversary of Schwitters's death in January 1998, a celebration took place in the Potteries, the like of which had never been seen before (nor has any such been seen since). It is true I have not constructed a Merzbau. It is also true, though, that my life since 1959 has been a Merzbau under construction, and it is not finished yet. Moreover, I too have tried my hand at fairy tales, the first of them about Kurt Schwitters watching Stoke City play football. So my credentials are sound (for my saying the following): the nonsense stories under review here should have been left where they were. Too much is claimed for them in Jack Zipes's introduction: they are not "darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales." They are insignificant tales, because Schwitters loathed significance: the significance of World War I, the significance of COMMERZ, the significance of anything significant. It was the insignificant leftovers of life that he nailed to boards or stuck on cardboard. These now fetch thousands of dollars because they have become commercially significant. And the nailing of words, the sticking of phrases, to the page . . . aren't we seeing them going the same route to perdition—in a handsome little university press book? It makes you want to bark like a dog, howl like a wolf, cry like a baby, sneeze like a concerto.