Bertolt Brecht: The Despair and the Polemic by Charles R. Lyons (review)

1970 BOOK REVIEWS 103 how much did Schnitzler wish to divulge? Did the social criticism of his writing have no deeper roots than the casual encounters of an upper-middle-class adolescent with the, really not unpleasant, facts of life in late-nineteenth century Vienna? Torberg assures the reader that he will know more about Schnitzler upon reading these pages. Of this, there is no doubt. But will he understand Schnitzler better? Here, I think, the nagging question remains: in the hands of a writer of Schnitzler's skill, what is autobiography? In this instance, to be sure, it is Howing narrative, graphic description, effective evocation of moods. This alone entitles Jugend in Wien to a place not only on the bookshelves of Schnitzler devotees but also in the libraries of social history. One only wishes there were more, that the memories recalled did not stop just as full adulthood is reached. Of course, the years after World War I brought much turmoil and trouble: suppression of Reigen.. failure of the marriage, the daughter's suicide; much of this, undoubtedly, grew from the seedlings of those early years. Their fond description only stresses our lack of insight into the later yeal'S. FRANCIS H. HEI..LEll University of Kansas BERTOLT BRECHT: THE DESPAIR AND THE POLEMIC, by Charles R. Lyons. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Southern Illinois Univeristy, Carbondale , 1968. 165 pp. $4.95. It is one of the many ironies surrounding the fame of Bertolt Brecht in this country that, though his epic theater is a household word in college courses and his plays are widely performed throughout the country outside the commercial theater of Broadway, practically no book-length studies on the German playwright have been produced by American scholars and critics. By and large American readers still depend on two books which were originally published in England some ten years ago: Martin Esslin's Bref;ht: The Man and His Work and John Willett's The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. It was not until 1967 that an American scholar, Frederic Ewen, remedied this deplorable situation; his rather monumental study on BB, His Life, His Art and His Times, was the first comprehensive presentation of Brecht's development and work in a decade, based on the little-explored materials in East Berlin's Brecht-Archives as well as on the ever-growing secondary literature in various languages. What was still lacking was a book for the general reader who would wish to know more about Brecht's major plays rather than about his political orientation (Esslin) or the technicalities of his stage craft (Willett) or the total range of all of his literary endeavours (Ewen). In Charles Lyons' modest new study we have for the first time an attempt at interpreting some of B's major plays at greater length within the covers of one book. There is no question that there is a demand for this kind of publication which aims at critical interpretation rather than factual information. There is also no question that a literary artist as prolific and complex as Brecht can still stand quite a number of similar attempts. This is not stated to downgrade Professor Lyons' book. Within the prevailing standards of literary interpretation as practised in most English classes (looking for symbols, seeking out metaphors, tracing motifs) he has taken a look at those plays he obviously considered to be Brecht's most significant contributions to tbe theater of our time. One would probably have to agree with his selections which are identical with Eric Bentley's Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, with the exception of the early Baal having been substituted for the better known late Good Woman of Setzuan. A first reservation may be entered here: since Lyons exclusively deals with 104 MODERN DRAMA May the dramatist BB and only incidentally touches on the poet without even mentioning the not inconsiderable prose stylist, why should Baal, more of a lyrical bombshell than a work of the theater (only rarely and never successfully produced), be singled out for treatment over Drums in the Night which won B the prestigious Kleist-Prize at the age of 24 and established him as a major playwright...