Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

Book Reviews or offer foreign-language evaluations of his work; and translations of his works divided alphabetically by country. The Introduction to the book supplements the bibliography by giving a hasty but useful history of O'Neill productions abroad. As worthwhile and important as it is, Frenz and Tuck's collection is probably more significant as a whole than in its individual parts. It is salutary to have not only the nature and extent of O'Neill's foreign reputation documented, but so many of these hitherto unavailable pieces between covers. Yet many of the pieces themselves are reviews of specific productions or journalistic articles. As such, they are often brief and lack the kind of considered critical judgments supported by quoted material from the text which characterize a good critical essay. Some were written before translations were available; others were probably prepared for deadlines. As a result, they suffer from hasty, unsupported general statements like L~on Mirlas's, in what is otherwise a very good article, that "The Great God Brown ... is ... the play in which the North American dramatist has succeeded in attaining the highest peaks ofpoetic Janguage and in which he has, from beginning to end, faithfully maintained an undiminished expressive style" (p. 108). The editors provide informative headnotes for each selection, giving biographical infonnation about the author and placing the selection in the context ofits author's work on O'Neill. They also reproduce a number of photographs of foreign producti'ons. Unfortunately, these are randomly placed throughout the collection rather than keyed to the essays, so that photographs of a Hungarian production ofAnna Christie appear in a Russian article, and the picture of a Russian production of All God's Chillull Got Willgs falls in a Czechoslovakian essay. Because so many of the selections in the volume are concerned with specific productions, a more careful placing of the illustrations would have been effective. Despite these limitations. the Frenz and Tuck gathering represents a distinct contribution to O'Neill studies by presenting the views of a new and imponant group of critics. If O'Neill is to be regarded as an imponant international playwright not just as America's first and greatest dramatist - collections such as this will be instrumental in establishing that position for him. JACKSON R. BRYER, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND JOHN Wll.LETT. Brecht in Co1l1ext: Comparative Approaches. London and New York: Methuen 1984. pp. 274· $25·95· JOHN RJEGI, GISELA BAHR, AND JOHN WILLETT, eds.; UWE HARTUNG, assoc. ed. Beyond Brecht (The Brecht Yearbook, Volume II , 1982). Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1983. Pp. 260. $22.00. Recently the grand old man of Brechtiana, Eric Bentley. published his scattered commentaries on Brecht dating back to the early forties. It is just as fitting that John Book Reviews 6<)1 Willett publish his various pieces on the German playwright. Judging from the cover of Brecht in Context, one would assume that this is what he has done. Actually. though, his latest book is considerably more than a reprint. A mixture of original essays, reworked and updated articles, as weJl as desk-drawer notes on personal encounters with Brecht and his collaborators (1956-1973) and on performances of the plays (t945-1960), Willett's work can best be described as an enriciunent ofhis flrst studyofthe playwright, The Theatre ofBertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects, published in 1959 and still very much in print. In his lifetime Brecht remained a relative unkown in the Anglo-Saxon world, despite the best efforts of an Eric Bentley. After his death he was extremely lucky in having as his fIrst propagators of consequence Martin Esslin and John Willett. (Esslin's study of Brecht, also published in 1959. is also still very much in print.) They made their impact in the marketplace because they appreciated their subject matter, evinced a keen sense of proportion, wrote extremely well, and were refreshingly unacademic in their approaches . However, they differed in two fundamental ways, and these differences account in part for the fact that in the last decade or so critics and scholars have generally been much kinder to WiI1ett than to Esslin. The latter concentrated on Brecht the writer and tried very hard to make a rigid distinction between his artistry (great) and his ideology (of little relevance to his real self as an artist). Esslin's opinion of Communism was as low as Ronald Reagan's. Willet has an unusually broad background in the fine arts (he flfSt experienced the works of Brecht as a student of the cello and of stage design in the Vienna of the thirties). He was very early in sensing just how multifaceted Brecht's artistry was and how multidimensional his interests were. Hence his eightfold approach, as reflected in the subtitle of his book, ranged from language to music to the English dimension. A British inte1ligence officer in World War II, Willett was also quick to sense not only that politics and poetry are inseparable in Brecht (subsequent research by Brechtologists has demonstrated a strong and integral commitment to MarxismLeninism ), but that he blended them in an absolutely unique way. Willett saw in Brecht a basic layer of humanism common to all men of good will who seek to reduce the sum of human suffering on the planet. He also saw in Brecht's artistry a means of reconciling East and West. In the era of the Cold Wax it took guts to conclude the section of his book dealing with Brecht's politics as follows (p. 212); ... because Brecht combined his Marxism with the modern Western experience of new aesthetic fonns, he worked out a language that conveys something to East and West alike. In this lies a hope for all art, notjust for the theatre. It is not only that a common aesthetic language can do much to close the wretched gap between Western and Eastern "intellectuals." That is obvious. It is rather that on the one hand Brecht will encourage Communists to reconsider the conceptions of "Socialist Realism" and "Fonnalism," unless a second Zhdanov supervenes. And on the other hand he has shown the Western democrats that a social, even political foundation for an artist's work is not disreputable, and need not lead him to compromise his standards so long as he believes in them himself. Which of these achievements is the more important it is hard to judge. Book Reviews It is on this "political" note that Brecht in Context begins, in Wi11ett's reply to a query from Werner Hecht of the East Berlin Brecht Centre concerning the effectiveness of the theater in thwarting the threat to peace. (Unfortunately, the reply was not published by the East Germans.) And toward the end of the book, in an essay on Brecht's politics combining succinctness with clarity and sanity, Willett closes with a practical example ofwhat only Brecht could do: write something that is at one and the same time absolutely poetical and absolutely political. A brief poem of '943 entitled ''The Fishlng~tackle" meshes Brecht's labor theory of beauty (this relates to objects humanized and beautified by toil) , the plight of the Japanese-Americans exiled to concentration camps (Brecht's attack on racism came, as Willett points out, a generation before Americans began to view it as a national disgrace), and the unsolved but soluble problems of the global community. Apart from politics, Willett treats the influence of Anglo-Sax.on literature and theater on Brecht. He does this first in a general piece which suggests strongly that there would have been no Epic Theater without the English heritage. This is followed by two essays focusing. respectively, on Kipling and Audeo. Unfortunately, much of the material discussed here has been published by James K. Lyon in his studies of KiplinglBrecht and Brecht in America (Willett is scrupulously meticulous about giving credit where credit is due), and the essay on Kipling reads more like a book review of Charles Carrington's fascinating biography of the English balladeer than anything else. In a preamble ofsorts to these three articles, entitled "An Englishman Looks at Brecht," Willett traces the history of his "love-affair" with Brecht from its beginnings to the publication of The Theatre ofBertolt Brecht. The impact felt by Willett came initially from the songs (stil1 the least resistible road to an appreciation of Brecht, he contends); then from poetry which "changed the German language" and could change the English, as well; nex.t from a political element "both revealing and realistic"; and finally from a theory and practice of drama at odds with the moribund mainstream British theater and closely allied with "such real Anglo-American achievements as the music-hall , the Christmas pantomime, jazz music, Waiting for Lefty and The Cradle Will Rock" (p. I I). The essay is supplemented by the previously mentioned notes on theater. These let us share more directly the impression the playwright made on the young critic. Happily, Willett could be very objective in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a Brecht play in performance - he comes down very hard on Mother Courage, for example, and his point that it can be a quite stodgy affair whenever the staging is less than perfect is well taken: most perfonnances I have seen tended to put me to sleep, whereas I have always enjoyed reading the play. Willett's renaissance grasp of the arts, which stems in large measure from a curiosity as insatiable as Brecht's, and his gift for collating and synthesizing a seemingly infinite number of facts, make his essays on Brecht's relation to motion pictures, the visual arts, and his musicians enjoyable, infonnative, and authoritative. These essays were expressly written for the book. A chapter on Brecht and Ex.pressionism is basically the translation of an article which appeared originally in French in 1971, and one on Brecht Book Reviews and Piscator derives from a paper delivered in 1974. The fonner ankle is somewhat dated by now; the latter is the best relatively short exposition of the subject I have come across. There is a fairly simple way of indicating how much of a good thing is being offered the reader of the pieces mentioned in this paragraph. Their author has written books on European Expressionism, the political theater of Piscator, and Weimar avant-gardism which are among the most lucid and catholic treatments of these subjects in the English language. Having said these things, I had beuerdisplay my academic credentials by doing a little nit-picking. Sometimes Willett's mania for facts gets the upper hand. and we are given too much of a good thing. Thus, after informing us that a certain James and Tania Stein made a preliminary translation ofThe Caucasian ChalkCircie for Auden, whom Brecht wanted as his chief translator, Willett continues (p. 66): James Stein, I later discovered, was an Irish-born writer descended from a Frankfurt banking family; his father was an officer in the 13th Hussars and his brother became·champion jockey of Ireland. His wife, a gymnastics teacher, was German, being the sister of the former Soviet art administrator Alfred Kurella, sometime secretary to Henri Barbusse and later chief cultural pundit of the SED. There are occasional bloopers which can easily be rectified in a second edition. I came across two slips of the pen: the implication (p. 55) that Brecht was attracted to Kipling after his conversion to Communism; the statement (p. 193) that Brecht's passage from Finland through the Soviet Union on his way to America took place in the three-month interoal between the end of the Finnish war and the invasion of the U.S.S.R. by Gennany. (The timespan was fifteen months.) The sudden introduction ofRuth Berlau (p. 196) and Otto Grotewohl (p. 207), without any background infonnation as to who they were, will be confusing to any reader not too familiar with the VIPs ofBrecht's harem orof the East Gennan establishment. Occasionally citations are not annotated; the worst of these anti-Teutonisffis occurs on p. 120, where aquotation fromZuckmayer'sA Part o/Myself is made to appear as if it comes from Brecht's Working Journal. Willett's last word is a lament that the scholars are killing Brecht with their emphases on such "secondary" or "local" concerns as alienation, provocation, dialectic, and "c1assicity." The main issue, the relevance and appeal of the poet-dramatist in the real world, is buried beneath the ongoing in·house dialogue among academicians. Perhaps this is why the first article of the 1982 edition ofThe Brecht Yearbook, of which Willett recently became an editor, is a very unmetaphysical piece on what he did in 1981-1982 to keep the name of Brecht in the public eye via the mass media: writing the screenplay for a BBC film production of Baal; being instrumental in getting the rock sensation David Bowie to play the lead and to cut a record of the songs in the play which made the charts in the U.K.• a feat previously accomplished for Brecht only by Bobby Darin and Jim Morrison of the Doors; arranging an album by the Australian singer Robyn Archer, which, according to Willett, represents the most diversified anthology of Brecht poems ever recorded in any language by an individual entenainer. Book Reviews The yearbook was the brainchild of John Fuegi, the founder of the International Brecht Society some fifteen years ago. From 1971 to 1973. it functioned as the main literary outlet for the Society. Then caned Brecht Today, it published its material in English, French, or Gennan to stress the worldwide focus of the Society. When the academic publisher (Atheniium) was unable to put out a fourth volume (because of bankruptcy or a takeover, I believe), Suhrkamp, Brecht's West German publisher, agreed to continue the series under the title Brecht~Jahrbuch. as a result of a private contractual arrangement with Fuegi, Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. In other words, the yearbook was no longer "controlled" by the Society. There were additional concessions to the profit motive of the new publisher: the fonnat was to be small soft-cover instead of large hard-cover; articles had to be published in Gennan - a stipulation which worked against the internationalism of the Society. For seven years some of the best things written about Brecht on both the theoretical and practical planes were inaccessible to those who could not read German. Apparently by 1980 sales of the Brecht-Jahrbuch had diminished to the point of unprofitability. No 1981 edition came out. The publication of the current yearbook (dated 1982 but put out in 1983) by an American university press represents an auspicious resolution of the crisis caused by the Suhrkamp pullout. Again directly in the hands of the Society (two of its editors, Gisela Bahr and Willett, are past presidents), the yearbook has reverted to its original format and is once more a trilingual publication. A welcome addition is.the inclusion of a synopsis of every contribution in English, French, and Gennan. Gone is a special section called "Polemics," introduced in the 1977 yearbook and made to order for the disputatious and often deadly pen of Reinhold Grinun. Half of the articles published under this rubric from 1977 to 1980 were his. Most of the others were written by scholastics of the New Left. As ifto drive home the change in direction signaled by the Wi1Iett article, the editors of the 1982 yearbook have included a controversial pro-West-Gennan-establishment paper questioning the relevance ofBrecht's later plays for the eighties, especially the so-called masterpieces, and suggesting that like the playwright's grasp of Marxism, his grasp of reality as reflected in his works is the simplification of a simplification. The paper, delivered by Hans-Dieter Zimmerman of the University of Frankfurt at the International Brecht Symposium of 1978, had come under heavy attack by Jan Knopf in the "Polemics" section of the 1980 yearbook. The most telling indication of a change of course is the attempt to focus on a single theme: hence the title Beyond Brecht and the inclusion of a series of articles to suggest that the influence ofBTecht is being felt in the theaters (for the most part revolutionary or political) of England, Brazil, Cyprus, India, and Poland, as well as in the Swiss documentary films of Erwin Leiser. In a number ofinstances the direct impact ofBrecht is negligible or intangible and the presence of his name serves as an excuse to treat non-Gennan political playwrights per se. Clearly the most compelling article here is Rustom Bharucba's treatment of two of the leading theater practitioners ofCalcutta, the "Bengali Brecht," Uptal Dult, and Badal Sircar, who reminds me more of the early, compassionate Gerhart Hauptmann than of Brecht. One fact adduced by Bharucha left Book Reviews me stunned: Dun's beginnings as an agitprop playwright are rooted in a Communistsupported theatrical association born of events of which the Western world remains in sheer ignorance, such as the Bengal Famine of 1943. which reduced the number of poor people in the world by five million. Half the yearbook is given over to articles not gennane to the overall topic. One of them, a study ofBreughel's influence on Brecht by Luigi Squorzina, artistic director of the Teatro di Roma, breaks new ground. Squorzina traces the transition in the character of the female protagonist of The Caucasian Chalk Circle from a saccharine Kalia to a Breughelian Grusche, and, in the process, inadvertently refutes the contention of Professor Zimmennann that the play is overly simplistic. The other flller articles are derivative. Patty Lee Parmalee's piece on the interconnection between Brecht's Americanism and his political views is a lackluster reprise of the central thesis of her book, Brecht's America (198 I), that his study of Americana was in large measure responsible for his tum to Marxism. One simply has to read the book to be fascinated by the cogent way she has presented the intricacies of her case. The best parts of David Pike's essay on Brecht and Stalin's Russia are gleaned from his highly infonnative and original book German Wrilers in Soviet Exile (198 I). For those who have not read it, one of the two biggest surprises is Pike's uncovering ofa plot hatched by the friends ofGeorg Lukacs to lure Brecht into taking a public stance in 1938 in favorof"fonnalism" and thus to make him persona non gratissima in Zhdanov's Russia. (Fuegi's intimation, in his review of the book in the same yearbook, that the ultimate intent was to have Brecht silenced by murder orotherStalinist means, strikes me as somewhat melodramatic.) The second surprise is documentary evidence that despite the "defeat" of the "promodernist " forces in the controversy over Expressionism fought out in the pages of Das Wort, the Communist-controlled literary vehicle for antifascist writers in exile, Brecht's standing in the Soviet Union in the years immediately preceding the Nazi invasion seems to have been higher than Lukacs's. James K. Lyon's scrutiny of the file the FBI kept on Brecht adds little to what is contained in his Brecht in America (1980), the best study to date of the playwright as a fallible human being. There is one novelty, however, which borders on the humanly comical. The sum of money Brecht received from his share of the sale ofthe rights ofSimone Machardto MOM, a novel Feuchtwanger based on a play they authored jointly, was somewhat more than the figure of$20,000 he recorded in his journal. Apparently he never told his wife about the additional sum of $8,500, which would account for the unconfinned report that she felt Feuchtwanger had cheated her husband (whereas he was legally under no obligation to give Brecht a single cent). Lyon speculates that Brecht used the money to support Ruth BerIau, the mistress whom Mrs. Brecht could least abide. The next two issues of the yearbook will treat the topics "Brecht and Women" (1984) and "Brecht and Socialism" (1985). One hopes the editors will be more successful in finding enough pertinent material to fill them. RALPH LEY, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY ...