Books The Early Brecht

Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 1 Pantheon; 448 pp., $10

IT IS TEMPTING-and far too easy-to judge Brecht by political criteria, to praise or condemn him for his Marxist perspective. Brecht himself encouraged political judgements of his work, viewing his plays as vehicles for his repudiation of the bourgeois lifestyle. He writes of his first play, "Baal is a play which could present all kinds of difficulties to those who have not learned to think dialectically." Likewise, he repudiates the popular success of Drums in the Night because he felt that it was based on a bourgeois misunderstanding of his purpose: "... the people who were so wildly anxious to shake my hand," he says, "were just the lot I would have liked to hit on the head."

Although Brecht must be studied in the light of his politics, his ultimate success rests on his skill as a playwright. It is this which has established him as far superior to his contemporaries; men like Feuchtwanger and others, who shared his political views but not his talent.

There are some immediate problems to an artistic critique of Brecht. The most difficult is his preoccupation with results and outcomes, to the exclusion of beginnings and motives, a preoccupation which separates him from the realists. This tendency is present in most of his early plays, especially Baal and In the Jungle of Cities, where the reader finds himself faced with characters and situations acting in a seemingly irrational, or at least inexplicable, manner. Brecht creates these situations to explore the possibilities they contain, not the motivations which led up to them. In the prologue to In the Jungle of Cities, he tells us:

You will witness an inexplicable wrestling match between two men and observe the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city. Don't worry your heads about the motives for the fight, keep your mind on the stakes...

In the Jungle of Cities presents yet another problem to those who would apply political criteria to Brecht. Many of his early plays were condemned by the Left for what seemed to be a conviction that a bureaucratic capitalism will, in the end, win out. Jungle is a play which does not provide clear alternatives of good vs, evil, left vs, right, but rather shows a pair of opponents both of whom are unlikable, racist, capitalist, and generally unseemly.

THE PANTHEON edition containing the first four long plays and five one-act plays, is the first volume of a projected complete English edition of all of Brecht's writings. It is based on the German Gesammelte Worke of Brecht, and contains variant readings for all the plays, as well as the author's notes on the performance, conception, and meaning of each play. The plays have been translated by a number of people, and the quality of the translations is vastly uneven. William Smith and Ralph Manheim, who translated Baal, Drums in the Night, and The Life of Edward the Second of England, have not done justice to Brecht. Their translations, although technically accurate, are not performable. They have left the Baal's monologues in a kind of stilted, Germanic English which no actor could do anything with. Their best effort is probably King Edward, which has so many stychomathies that the interaction of characters keeps it alive.

The other translation in this volume, particularly those of the one-act plays, are entirely worth reading. While maintaining fidelity to the original, they have been put into a relatively artful English, one which is both readable and, I think, performable. In any case, Pantheon is to be congratulated for finally undertaking to produce a complete critical edition of Brecht, something this country has been lacking for years.