Brecht: The Man and His Work by Martin Esslin (review)

214 MODERN DRAMA September human awareness. In Mr. Garten's interpretation, it looks like an appeal to our dried-up proletarian tear glands. Mr. Garten's book cannot be the last word on its complex and long-neglected subject. But as a first word it claims our full appreciation and gratitude. WALTER H. SOKEL BRECHT: THE MAN AND HIS WORK, by Martin Esslin, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1960. 360 pp. Price $4.50. Within a year we have had two full books in English about Brecht-Martin Esslin's and The Theatre of BertoZt Brecht by John Willett. Both written and first published in England, apparently without correspondence between the authors, these books partly overlap and partly complement each other. One must have them both. Willett's book is particularly valuable for its marvelous collection of photographs (about 120), and it contains also a mass of data about Brecht productions and recordings of Brechtian materials and some very sprightly writing. Its text is particularly good on the formative influences and the cultural milieu of Germany in the 1920's when Brecht emerged as a playwright. Esslin's book contains no illustrations , but it is a remarkably readable essay-indeed, a magnificent job of explanation of the most vexingly complicated man of letters and theater of our time. Esslin was born in Hungary, grew up in Vienna, fled the Nazis in 1938, and for many years has lived in England. As a middle-European, a refugee from the German totalitarianism and a student of the Russian one, he is peculiarly well equipped to explain to us the riddle that is Brecht. His book is not, he assures us, a biography of Brecht, for many of the facts are not yet in, and many others, for discretionary reasons, are not yet publishable. Yet the first third of the book is by far the fullest·~etch of Brecht's life yet available to us. The section called "The Artist" deals succinctly with what can be said in English about Brecht's German language, and with Brecht's theory and practice of theater art. Much that Esslin quotes or cites to explain Epic Theater one has read before, in dabs and patches: the virtue of Esslin's essay is the cohesiveness and clarity with which he shows Brecht's effort to rationalize a theater art whose main value was supposed to be that it would do "social work," and which Brecht vainly-indeed, naively-hoped would supplant Stanislavskian illusionism as the official theater art of the Communist world. Brecht's theater is shown to be "a return to the main stream of the European classical tradition,".before the illusionist heresy afflicted us; Esslin invokes the "critical" style of Victorian melodrama, the tragic theories of Racine, and the intellectualism of Diderot (as well as the cool formalism of the Orient) in order to place Brecht's art in historical and esthetic perspective. In the sections called "Pitfalls of Commitment" and "The Real Brecht," Esslin traces learnedly, judiciously, and, above all, dispassionately, Brecht's tangled relations with the Communist Party. He analyzes the elements in Brecht's personalityhis peasant shrewdness, his rebelliousness, his sensualism, his temptation to drift down the stream of life-into-death (like one of the rotting corpses which infest his poems )-those elements which at once prohibited his usefulness as an agent of the Party and were the well-springs of his success as an artist. It is Esslin's cunning and convincing thesis that Brecht was a person very much like his own creatures called Galileo, Puntila, Mother' Courage, and Azdak-a battleground of reason versus instinct, "good" versus "evil"-and an artist in whom "intuitive insight has transcended the author's conscious understanding of what he was doing." Terrified, as it were, of the destructive impulses of his own nature, Brecht turned in a hardboiled way to rationalism as a system of self-control-to the 1960 BOOK REvIEWS 215 rationalism of Communism. "Communism was particularly suitable for this purpose. It was itself supremely tough.... It rejected all sentiment or emotion and claimed to be completely scientific. And it gave sense to a world that otherwise appeared devoid of meaning...