Dirty Work & Savage Fun

THREEPENNY NOVEL (396 pp.)--Berfolt Brechf--Grove Press ($3.75; Paperbound, $1.75).

This is a corrosively funny novel about business chicanery. Its unlikely author: a Communist with an irrepressible sense of humor. In Threepenny Novel, the late German Playwright and Novelist Bertolt Brecht takes the position that business is crime conducted in an aura of respectability. His book is somehow engaging despite this classic Marxist idea, because of its raffishly vital characters who make all the Cash McCalls in their grey flannel suits seem as sedate, proper and wooden as the paneling of their executive suites.

In the markedly different guise of The Threepenny Opera, some of the same characters have long delighted theater audiences. Both the musical play, with a brilliant score by Brecht's friend Kurt Weill, and Brecht's novel stem from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). The novel was curiously ignored by U.S. reviewers when it appeared in translation in 1938 as A Penny for the Poor, possibly because its turn-of-the-century London setting scarcely conformed to the modish social-protest patterns of the '30s. Social protest the book certainly is, but of an unsparing misanthropy that crosses all class lines. In a dimly lit nether world of total amorality, human sharks snap at and devour each other as instinctively as do their marine cousins on the ocean floor.

Shark No. 1 is Mr. MacHeath, legendary killer and gang leader, once popularly known as "The Knife." At novel's start, Mac still has his gang, though none but his intimate henchmen know it, and while he carries a swordstick cane, he is prudent enough never to use it. Mac is a progressive crook who has come to see not the error of his ways but his means: "What is a picklock compared to a debenture share? What is the burgling of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? What is the murder of a man compared to the employment of a man?"

Crocodile Tears. In his drive toward legalized larceny, Mac founds a chain of B. (for Bargain) Shops that sell cut-rate goods to the poor. To supply them, he turns his gang into a kind of quartermaster looting corps which burgles other shops by night. In plots and counterplots of Chaplinesque strategy and Napoleonic execution, Mac reduces his competitors to satraps in his own trade empire and is elected a bank director into the bargain.

Shark No. 2 is a more bizarre sort. Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum supplies beggars with accessories for plying their trade --horribly mutilated artificial arms and legs, uniforms for phony veterans, starving dogs ("A blind man with a fat dog has very little prospect of exciting real pity"). The Boer War makes Peachum yearn to be something loftier than "the beggar's friend," and in partnership with a gifted con man, he proceeds to sell three rotting hulks to the Admiralty, which needs ships for the relief of the brave lads at Mafeking. The con man promptly tries to con Peachum, and the complicated negotiations with the avaricious partners alternately licking their chops or woefully chopfallen are among the choicest comic morsels in the book. When one of the ships sinks, scarcely out of eyeshot of the pier, with the loss of every soldier aboard, a national day of mourning is proclaimed --but Peachum has a profit of -L-150,000 to sweeten his crocodile tears. He is also the contented father-in-law of MacHeath, who has married Peachum's daughter Polly, a coquettish chippy off the old block.

Black Comedy. What is this almost obscene triumph of skulduggery supposed to mean? Brecht (who for years before his death served as a propaganda mouthpiece in East Germany) sums it up in one of those ditties that he used to spit out by the dozen:

How does Man live? By throttling, grinding, sweating

His fellows, and devouring all he can! . . .

No, gentlemen, this truth we cannot shirk:

Man lives exclusively by dirty work.

Despite its English setting, this is a bilious misanthropy more common in Germany between the two world wars, and its nearest visual equivalents are the savage cartoon pictures the German Artist George Grosz drew in the '20s of bloated industrialists, pawing seducers and corpse-faced military fanatics. Threepenny Novel is in the black-comedy genre of Ben Jonson's Volpone and Melville's The Confidence Man. Americans can and will laugh at it. Nonetheless, it is necessary to remember that not so long ago millions of people used to take this sort of monstrous caricature as the truth--and many still do.

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