Black Comedy

SEVEN PLAYS (587 pp.) -- Bertolt Brecht--Grove ($8.50).

Most major playwrights leave an unmistakable identifying mark on their work. It may be smaller than theme or plot or character; often it is apt to be a recurring vignette, a typical moment. In Greek tragedy, that moment is the hero smiting his brow, discovering a new wrinkle in Fate's design. The Shakespearean moment, in the tragedies, is the restoration of order after individual or civil turmoil; in the comedies, it is the lover's mistaken identity. In Ibsen, it is self-doubt besetting the stolid bourgeois; in Strindberg, it is a shrill cry of female hysteria; in Shaw, it is paradoxical argument overturning a pose. Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, one of the 20th century's remarkable playwrights, has his own typical moment. In play after play, through changing locales, characters and moods, the Brechtian moment is man selling his fellow man.

The formula is almost completely predictable. If a woman in a Brecht play tells a man that she loves him, the odds are overwhelming that within minutes she will turn whore or he pimp; if someone puts money in his pocket, probably stolen, someone else will steal it; if a character speaks of honor, loyalty, progress--and particularly religion--chances are that he is merely masking a corrupt and greedy deal. This kind of unrelieved, often naive cynicism, heavily tinged with Marxism, has defeated many another writer. But at his best Brecht has risen above it and fashioned a rich, varied, often hilarious dramatic world in which the sold souls do not always stay bought, the villains do not necessarily stay black, and humanity in the end--apparently against the author's will--conquers ideology.

Body German. Since his death in 1956, Brecht has become a worldwide vogue. In West Germany, he has displaced Shaw in frequency of production, and ranks after Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller. East Germany lavishly maintains his personal repertory company, the Berliner Ensemble, with its perfectionist troupe led by Brecht's widow. Paris audiences have been flocking to The Good Woman of Setzuan and Arturo Ui. London is temporarily Brechtless but saw four of his plays last season. A five-year off-Broadway run of The Threepenny Opera not long ago chalked up a New York theater record by passing the old Oklahoma! run (2,248 performances). Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities is now running in a modest but successful production at off-Broadway's Living Theatre. On the critical front, his personality and drama have been brilliantly mapped in two books: Brecht: The Man and His Work by Martin Esslin (Doubleday), and The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht by John Willett (Methuen). In these Seven Plays, Critic Eric Bentley, a longtime Brecht devotee and translator, has put together a varied sampling of the playwright's work and written an incisive preface.

Even in German, Brecht plays far better than he reads, and in translation, the language gap cannot be closed. Brecht fashioned such a personal idiom in German that his language has been called "a function of the body." The present translations need more body English. Even so, the volume is an excellent introduction to Brecht's restlessly animated evocation of life, in which his puppets--numberless versions of Everyman--dance to the Threepenny tune of Jonathan Peachum:

Doublecross your old mother, you turd!

And sell your young wife in her bed!

You think G.O.D.'s just a word?

He'll show you as soon as you're dead.

Social Chance. Brecht begins where Lear ends: the world is a rack on which mankind is tortured. A character in one of the plays is asked to recite what is called the short catechism--"it'll get worse, it'll get worse, it'll get worse." Starting thus, Brecht might have developed a tragic sense, but he apparently balked at three basic elements of tragedy--the idea of inevitability, human guilt, and the tragic hero. In Brecht's plays, G.O.D. is indeed just a word, and Fate becomes the blind workings of social chance. Men act inhumanly toward each other but are themselves victims of their social environment. It is not human nature that shapes man, argues Brecht, but his social relationships. What shapes the social relationships, if not human nature? That question Brecht, like most determinists, could not answer. But, unlike philosophers or sociologists, he did not have to. He could merely rage --or laugh.

On man as misanthrope, Brecht vented his derisive humor, the black comedy that links his work with Ben Jonson's Volpone and Melville's The Confidence Man. But Brecht sometimes seems to be laughing to keep from crying. As with most cynics, his hard words clustered around a soft core of pity. He was plagued by the defeat of goodness in the world--one of the things Brecht naively expected of Communism was a trade unionism of the good, a method for arming goodness with power--and in the majority of his works he returns to images of goodness and vulnerability.

Intimate Enmity. The earliest work in the volume, dating from 1923, is In the Swamp (alternate title: In the Jungle of Cities), which is deliberately obscure and mystifying. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a relentless but seemingly motiveless duel of wills. In typically bizarre Brechtian fashion, Shlink is a Yokohamaborn Malay who has become a lumber merchant in 1912 Chicago. Garga is a lending library clerk who refuses to sell Shlink his personal judgment of a book. Shlink decides to buy Garga's soul instead, and a peculiar campaign of mutual self-abasement develops. At first the audience is led to think that Shlink is simply a capitalist villain, but halfway through the play, in an intriguing reversal, Brecht makes clear that Shlink himself is a victim--one whose skin has been so toughened by life that he can no longer feel. In fact, he probably stages his battle with Garga only to see whether any sensation will return.

Although Brecht almost ritualistically blames environment--the jungle of the modern city--he comes close to making some general, existential points about man, strikingly anticipating Beckett and lonesco: the impossibility of communication and the paralysis of feeling. At the play's violent end, Garga and Shlink face each other with only a numbing sense of apartness to show for their fiercely intimate enmity: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice ... so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible."

Nickelodeon Sentiment. Although In the Swamp is surrealist in technique, with enigmatic central characters who are symbolic rather than human, the minor figures--rogues all--are marvelously funny and thoroughly human. From this point on, Brecht's plays fork in these two directions: the symbolic-didactic and the raffish-human.

St. Joan of the Stockyards (1929) is wholly in the first category. Pierpont Mauler is a crush-as-crush-can Chicago meat baron. When a careless worker falls into the meat machinery at Mauler's plant, he is tinned with the product. This sort of thing makes Brecht's caricature of capitalists both hopelessly dated and immensely funny to a modern American audience. Joan Dark (Jeanne d'Arc), the girl who stands up to Mauler, is a parody figure mostly modeled on Shaw's Major Barbara--a Salvation Army-type lassie who belongs to an evangelical group called "The Black Straw Hats." She tries to soften Mauler's heart toward the workers' plight, while he tries to harden her mind toward the workers' wickedness. In the end, starved and dying, she proclaims that only violence will improve the world.

But a chorus of Straw Hatters and meat packers drowns out her last words, and she is hypocritically canonized for her martyrdom. Although heavily loaded with nickelodeon sentimentality, St. Joan of the Stockyards is intriguing in the contrast of Shavian optimism and Brechtian pessimism.

Greed v. Mother Love. In Mother Courage (1939), one of his most popular plays and possibly his best, Brecht exhibits the raffish-human strain, and doctrine is relatively in abeyance. Mother Courage is an earthy female Falstaff with Falstaff's coarsely skeptical views of war, honor and courage. However, the Thirty Years' War is on, and since the profit motive is no laughing matter, Mother Courage cashes in on the troops. Trundling her wagon, a kind of mobile 17th century PX, behind the shifting battlefronts, she sells shoes, shirts and booze to the soldiers.

One of her sons becomes an army paymaster, and when his regiment is overrun by the enemy, he is too honest to turn over the cashbox. His captors are bribable, but Mother Courage haggles too long over the price, and the boy dies before the firing squad. Just before, Mother Courage has implied that she will do anything to save her son. It is characteristic Brechtian cynicism to stage a contest between greed and mother love, and have greed win.

In the end she loses her two other children, too (one of them is a symbolically mute daughter, another Brechtian figure of innocence), and Mother Courage trudges on, to one of the author's haunting pieces of doggerel:

Christians, awake! The winter's gone!

The snows depart, the dead sleep on.

And though you may not long survive

Get out of bed and look alive!

To Brecht, Mother Courage was a shameless war profiteer. He was disgusted when audiences invariably wept at play's end as Mother Courage yoked herself once more to her wagon, a mute indomitable symbol of humanity's will to endure.

How to Survive. Galileo (1938) is in some respects a companion piece to Mother Courage. Brecht made the astronomer into an opportunist and, scanting history, into a sensualist. His Galileo loves to eat (Brecht reputedly picked Charles Laughton to play the part in New York in 1947 because he liked the way the actor tore a chicken apart in the movie Henry VIII). He is not a man of scrupulous scientific integrity, but he does have a passion for knowledge, and he "cannot say no to an old wine or a new thought." He infects his student-disciples with the pure love of science, and they in turn assume that their master has a matching purity of character. When Galileo recants his heretical theories before the threat of torture by the Inquisition, it is not he but his disciples who are disillusioned. Says Galileo matter-of-factly: "I cannot afford to be smoked on a wood fire like a ham." This echoes a deep-lying sentiment of Brecht's. He was once asked what the purpose of drama was. Brecht answered: "To teach us how to survive." Peculiarly enough, Brecht goes on to argue that Galileo paid too high a price for survival and makes the absurd charge that his recantation aborted an age of reason. To an audience, however, the treason of the intellectual is less perceptible than the moving spectacle of an old man's humiliation. To spectators in East Germany, moreover, Galileo has a special double meaning; many see in the protagonist Playwright Brecht himself, disillusioned (as some suspect) with Communism but bowing--and surviving.

The Fingers of Guilt. Brecht's long battle of survival was lyrically introduced by Brecht himself in a poem about his origins :

I, Bertolt Brecht, am from the black

forests.

My mother carried me, as in her womb

I lay,

Into the cities. And the chill of the

forests

Will stay within me to my dying day.

Born in 1898 in the Bavarian town of Augsburg, son of the well-to-do manager of a paper mill, Brecht served as a medical orderly in World War I, an experience that made him ferociously pacifist and antimilitarist.* Later he became a professional bohemian, twanging a guitar and shrilling out his Legend of a Dead Soldier.

Success changed him little. When Hitler came to power, Brecht was 35, and in the next 15 years the melancholy refugee round took him to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the U.S. and finally East Germany. Despite the bizarre American settings he used in his plays (most of which he wrote before he had ever seen the U.S.), Brecht had no interest in the actual U.S. During the seven years he lived here, he holed up in Hollywood with his German fellow refugees.

After a 1947 date with the Un-American Activities Committee, he quit the country and took a highly circumspect approach to East Germany, slyly acquiring Austrian citizenship and a West German publisher. For the Reds he was a prickly celebrity who spurned the drama of social realism and was accused of "formalism." Posthumous poems show that after the East Berlin riots of 1953, Brecht was like a man living in a bad dream:

Last night I dreamed I saw fingers

pointing at me

As at a leper. They were work-gnarled

and

They were broken.

"You don't know!" I cried

Guiltily.

Ironic Significance. Part of the current vogue for Bertolt Brecht is that the whole world has bad dreams. His treatment of the great themes is not always secure. Love he customarily handles as parody, death as an animal calamity, and time as a metronome of disaster. He brings full authority perhaps only to man's inhumanity to man and to the theme of money, one of the great neglected subjects of modern fiction and drama. A hysteria of violence hovers constantly at the outskirts of his work. Today that seems timely; in time it may seem merely tedious.

But Brecht succeeded by failing. He wanted to hone his audiences to critical keenness, and he only managed to move them to tears and laughter. He wanted to make his theater a crucible of social change, and he merely convinced theatergoers of the tenacious durability of man's unchanging nature. If he had succeeded, as Biographer Martin Esslin points out, he would have been merely "a flat and boring party hack." Failing, he became a great moral puzzle, a seething controversy, and one of the most significant writers of the age.

*Critic Kenneth Tynan wonders whether Brechtian drama "is a gigantic tribute to motherhood." Brecht's men are usually drunks, cynics or compromisers, his heroines "mostly instruments of salvation . . . Did Brecht, as rumor insists, spurn his father and worship his mother? If so, it supports the old hypothesis that the men who adore their mothers lean toward the Left, while those who idolize their fathers lean toward the Right." Whether or not Tynan is correct about Brecht, he certainly has the makings of a fascinating psychological parlor game.

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