Hares in the cabbage patch

HILARY SPURLING

Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays Vol I 1918- 1923 edited by John Willett and Ralph Man- heim (Methuen 60s) Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times Frederic Ewen (Calder and Boyars 75s) Few artists in any age or country can have been placed simultaneously, and from op- posite directions, in so many false positions as Brecht, whose work was suppressed—as a menace to the very system it was designed expressly to support—for most of his life- time in Russia; who was thwarted in practice and praised in theory by the Ulbricht regime, to whom his growing reputation in the West was at best a dubious advertisement; and who was disowned meanwhile, as a tool of that regime, by the younger generation in Eastern Europe whose aims he most pas- sionately shared. Oddest of all perhaps is the fact that a playwright so rightly mis- trusted at home should have been so con- sistently misrepresented abroad: for I think it no exaggeration to say that anyone who admires the plays as we have them—in almost uniformly vile English translations —can have little understanding of, let alone imaginative sympathy with, those qualities which make Brecht a great playwright.

It is not simply that his stoutest cham- pions, being left-wing politically, have also (and the two things go together in this country quite as much as in Moscow) been aesthetically right-wing, not to say reaction- ary: so that we have. until quite recently, seen his plays produced in a style closer to the Soviet realism which Brecht abhorred than to his own exacting formality. It is rather that even his most famous plays have not been available in English. For, since the playwright's sole medium is words, and since Brecht is a rich and fastidious poet, the drab versions we have are for the most part treacherous in the extreme; it is much as though one knew Shakespeare only from the kind of banal prose paraphrase in which we have recently been given the Bible.

It is, therefore, a great pleasure to salute the formidable enterprise of Messrs Willett and Manheim for Messrs Methuen: a com- plete edition which will give us for the first time Brecht's thirty-eight plays, together with his notes and extracts from the principal alternative versions—which alone, consider- ing the multiplicity, complexity and elusive- ness of these texts, most of them still safely stashed away in East Germany, would be an heroic task—in new or substantially revised translations. This first volume contains the four plays (and five one-acters) with which Brecht established his reputiation before he moved to Berlin in 1924.

Baal was written when he was twenty, partly out of revulsion for what Brecht con- ceived to be the sentimental drama of his day, and mirrors clearly enough his grim ex- perience as a medical orderly in the First World War. Drums in the Night, which in form if not in content is perhaps the nearest Brecht ever came to a conventionally well- made play, is the only one in this volume to deal openly with the uneasy political situa- tion in Germany; In the Jungle of Cities is a scintillating attempt to explore the new megalopolis of the twentieth century, and at the same time to evolve a new theatrical form. The Life of Edward II of England, a loose adaptation from Marlowe, is the most beautiful and sombre of these early works, the one which (no doubt because it is set at the furthest distance) most sharply reflects in- cipient chaos—rehearsals for the first night in Munich were interrupted by Hitler's Beer Cellar Putsch—and the only one which affords more than an occasional foretaste of Brecht's emotional and imaginative maturity.

What is most amazing even now about all four plays—and what most intoxicated con- temporary critics—is the exuberance and variety of their language; what is perhaps most intriguing, at this distance in time, is to watch Brecht grappling here, not always successfully, with the problems which had faced Joyce or Kafka in the novel: the difficulty of revitalising threadbare nine- teenth century conventions, the search for form, the need for war on the cliché of behaviour as much as of thought or feeling.

That it was a struggle—even for Brecht, who seems to have solved it so completely in his later plays, and with so little apparent effort —is everywhere evident in this volume, in his hatred of pathos, his violent revenges on sentimentality or weakness, in the macabre

excesses of Baal as in the ambivalent bar- barity of Jungle, or in hi i later comment on

that play (a comment which, though Brecht might not have relished the thought, would apply equally to Beckett): 'The behaviour of our contemporaries . .. is no longer to be explained by the old motives (largely bor- rowed from literature) . . . This is a world,

and a kind of drama, where the philosopher can pick his way better than the psy- chologist.'

The struggle against banality may be seen as clearly in the steady technical evolution of these plays as in their language which. in Baal, still throbs and heaves in the swollen flood of late nineteenth century romanticism. And even allowing that his task cannot have been easy the present translator, Peter Tegel, seems positively to urge his text towards bathos: one may quote, unkindly but at random. Baal's remark to his friend Ekart (the relationship is based on Verlaine and Rimbaud) after a romp in the hay: 'A mad summer boy, with immortal intestines, that's what you are! A dumpling who'll leave a greasespot in the sky!' Admittedly, the Ger- man at this point is undistinguished, but it is by no means as loathly as this. And it is hard to forgive Mr Tegel for his mangling of that lovely, grave and most musical of lyrics, Baal's song for the DEowned Girl

which is so perfectly translated in H. R. Hays' Selected Poems.

It is impossible to stress too much the crispness, the gaiety, the sumptuous richness and the sudden limpid delicacy of Brecht's language in these plays: 'I made concoc-. tions of words like strong drinks, entire

scenes out of words whose texture and col-

our were specifically designed to make an impression on the senses. Cherrystone, re- volver, trouserpocket, paper god: concoc- tions of that kind.' Brecht applies words like paint, and as fiercely as Gauguin from

whom, at any rate in Jungle, he helps himself

freely. The play is set in a Chicago at once sinister, exotic and garish, and composed in a series of images as enigmatic and as powerfully charged as Gauguin's Tahitian

scenes; the language mixed on a base of Americanisms ('cocktail', 'dollar', 'Sheriff', which sound always so agreeably outlandish in Brecht and which-the translator, Gerhard Nellhaus, levels down generally to 'drink'. 'buck', 'policeman'), topped up with Kipling and laced through and through with Brecht's passion for Rimbaud at this period. The fault of Mr Nellhaus's version is that it is smooth, quite remarkably so, where the German is harsh, racy and rum.

What is distressing about both these trans- lations is not simply their insensitivity to verbal nuances but—and it is a crippling weakness—their almost perfect indifference to colloquial usage. 'I'll crack the nose of any man who says you're an old shoe [eine alte Galosche] !' is typical of Mr Nellhaus's American thugs, while Mr Tegel's characters insult each other—`Depraved swine!' Crazy hen!'—in English such as she is not, and never has been, spoke; 'accursed', for reasons beyond me, is their favourite word for 'verfluchte'. So that, what with one thing and another, it is a sharp relief to find Herr Balicke, in the very first speech of John Willett's Drums in the Night, upbraiding his wife for her 'bloody sentimentality' (ver- fluchte Sentimentalitat). Mr Willett, for one thing. recognises a cliché when he sees one which—considering that Brecht is a bold and witty handler of the cliché—one would have supposed an essential gift. But one may be fairly sure that Mr Willett's 'dog with two tails' (em n Hase im Krautacker) would, in the hands of either of his weirdly literal colleagues, have come out as 'a hare in the cabbage patch'. The example is typical of this subtle and sensitive translation, which is accurate even down to its period slang, and as dependable on the minutiae of conversa- tion as on the flamboyant tirades of this play.

It is a rendering which cruelly shows up the deficiencies of the other three. For, with Edward II, we come to a mystery: the play is translated by Jean Benedetti, who falls lamentably into every snare open to the Brecht translator; what is puzzling is that there already exists in English a recent, un- published text which brilliantly preserves both the detail and the poetic force of the original—this is the version used by the National Theatre two years ago, and it is the work of William E. Smith and Ralph Manheim. Why Mr Manheim should now settle as editor for a translation which is in every respect demonstrably inferior to his own for the rrr is a knot too hard for me to untie.

If Brecht's Edward II is a finer play than Marlowe's, it is also so different that the two have only incidentals in common: lust, powet, war are central to Brecht, and it is the tension between the confused squalor of his subject matter and his precise formal organisation which gives the play its peculiar flavour, of coldness suffused with passion.

Both content and language (a deliberately jagged blank verse) stem less from Marlowe than from the Germany of the early 'twenties. So that Mr Benedetti's decision, to restore intact the comparatively few passages lifted direct from Marlowe, lands him with count- less dubious archaisms of a kind which spelt anathema to Brecht: 'canker', 'rue' and 'rent', for instance, where the Smith/Man- heim version rightly prefers 'cancer', 'repent- ance' and 'torn in two'. His word-for-word renderings of even the simplest German, with its dependent clauses, inflected pro- nouns and inverted verbs, are literally un- speakable. No wonder if the more complex poetry of his text escapes him; Mr Benedetti's versions of, say, Gaveston's parable of the fisherman and his nets, Mortimer's of the cock and the tigerskin, or the great Trojan war speech—one of

the high points of the play, magnificently rendered in the NT version—come close to gibberish.

This is, in short, a miserable disservice to a splendid play; and one can only hope that both Mr Manheim and Mr Willett as trans- lators, so strangely sparing in this volume, are conserving their energies for the late, great plays to come in an edition which promises to be, as much for its vast scope as for its meticulous scholarship, a match- less gift to the English theatre.

Meanwhile, Frederic Ewen's Life is prob- ably the most exhaustive, certainly the fattest tome to have appeared as yet on Brecht in English. Based evidently on copious research, it is a dense account of his career, friends, foibles, travels, views, sources, themes and theatres, accompanied by convenient summaries of almost all his works. Dr Ewen is an enthusiastic if not particularly searching guide for those who enjoy the stamina as well as the occasional verbosity of American academics; his hand- book is unlikely to supersede, though it may usefully supplement, the arguments ad- vanced at half the length and twice as pungently in Martin Esslin's brilliant Brecht: A Choice of Evils.