An Unpleasant Charmer

...Such relationships appear in Brecht's work, too-between Garga and Schlink, for example, in the play In the Jungle of Cities...

...Further, Brecht: A Biography leans rather heavily on previous Brecht biographies, such as Klaus Vol-ker's, which in English bears the same title, and James K. Lyon's Bertolt Brecht in America...

...the character Andrea Sarti, in Galileo, becomes Andrea del Sarto, even though he's no painter...

...When G.W...

...Hayman is good at tracing Brecht's motley career through early successes in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany...

...and we get oratio obliqua, although there are no accents in Latin and "indirect discourse" would do fine...

...A wooden stake would have been more appropriate...

...Eventually, the two young women jointly confronted Brecht and asked him to choose between them...

...I don't like it where I come from...

...the actor-director Gustaf Grundgens becomes Gustav...

...What attracted them to this man who was homely, smelly, with dirty collars and fingernails, as well as forever surrounded by smoke clouds from his Virginia cigars...

...Politically, Brecht was equally disreputable...

...What gets shortchanged is the poetry, despite the growing sense that it may surpass the drama...

...As celebrated a line as "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommtdie Moral"'is misquoted and diluted into "Erst kommt das Essen und dann die Moral...

...I don't like it where I'm going...

...Brecht's relations with the Soviet and East German governments were occasionally strained-particularly when the Germans banned or forced him to rewrite some of his works-but he never openly rebelled...

...Worthy of Caligula...

...There are, in addition, not very detailed or profound but useful discussions of the plays, fiction and theoretical writings...

...As Brecht once reminded the critic Alfred Ken," Obviously, the basis of just about every great age in literature is the force and innocence of its plagiarism...

...His own double-dealing enabled Brecht to empathize with the rascal and the split personality, and to make him or her the kind of racy anti-hero that, much more than epic theater, is Brecht's true dramatic achievement...

...The closest he came to that was guilefully negotiating for and acquiring Austrian citizenship while maneuvering to get his own theater in East Berlin, where he lived high off the hog when most others were starving...

...and in Weigel, who looked after his interests and creature comforts in any number of self-ab-negating ways, he got himself a mother surrogate...

...Though the political thinking behind the productions was simplistic, the blending of contradictory impulses made the resultant performances subtler than any others to be seen in Berlin...

...Ultimately he did get the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where his Berliner Ensemble, under him and Weigel, became one of the world's finest theaters...

...In theory, Brecht encouraged others to take liberties with his plays...

...We read, for instance, that "Brecht wanted to avoid 'the kind of gag that endeared the audience to humanity in a generalizing way.'" Certainly, I thought, that must read "endeared humanity to the audience...

...Then there were those numerous projects, a number of them at an advanced stage, left unfinished...

...Sometimes, however, he outsmarted himself, especially during his years in America, where more than one important production fell through owing to his Machiavellianism or intransigence...

...With his conversion to Karl Marx (even the names are similar...

...the superman yielded to the supermass...

...So, too, with his women: Brecht would check up on them telephonically early in the evening and late at night...

...It is the same restlessness that made him often have two or three mistresses?and, later, a wife as well-simultaneously...

...Brecht's first full-length play, Baal, was devised, characteristically, as a revision of, or counterstatement to, a play by Hans Johst hedespised...

...And to think that I wanted to have this leaky pot, trickling with liquid efflux from various men, installed in my room...

...a sub-Shakespearian history play...

...Well, the man had insidious charm...

...the set designer Howard Bay is donkeyfied into Bray...

...Or take the poem "Changing Tires" (1953), which I translate: / sit on the shoulder of the road...

...Hayman is right to argue that in Marx, Lenin, Stalin-in short, in Communism-brecht sought and found the strong father figure that kept him from dissolving into Baal...

...Accordingly, some of his best plays, e.g., Mr...

...As a boy, he adored Karl May, whose supreme hero was Old Shatterhand, a great German hunter in America's Wild West, and a favorite of Adolf Hitler, whom Brecht, incidentally, did not oppose until he himself had to flee the Nazis...

...The only medical lectures he attended dealt with venereal disease, a constant worry...

...and, most shockingly, the by then long-dead bourgeois Stefan Zweig is resurrected as a speaker in Communist East Berlin-A confusion with his brother Arnold...

...Crude thinking is the thinking of great men...

...But he almost never showed disinterested concern for other people...

...Some plays attributed to him actually were not his work...

...Anna I is conventional and practical, even coldly opportunistic...

...He speaks of "Die Jungfrau von Orleans...

...And if you track one down, it may prove misleading...

...While the working-class audience stayed away, intellectuals from East and West flocked to his productions...

...Although the writing is mostly clean and fluent, Hayman is no stylist, nor does he of ten hit on those happy formulations that bring a subject alive and become lastingly portable in the reader's memory...

...Moreover, he radiated absolute, insane self-assurance, was unmistakably marked by genius, and was hard to get...

...Hayman shows how Brecht, practically from his birth in Augsburg in 1898, managed to dominate his family, particularly his mother and younger brother, while being a physical coward in confrontations with neighborhood boys...

...Pabst altered Threepenny Opera in the movie version, Brecht sued him and his producer...

...For the truth is-As emerges, even if not quite clearly and forcefully enough, from Ronald Hayman's study-that Brecht was always after self-aggrandizement and power and lording it over the hated bourgeoisie he stemmed from...

...Critics have generally failed to notice that the values of both Annas are made out to be contemptible...

...Sloppinesses are present in all sizes, from tiny to huge...

...The Brechtian double negative(which does not, however, make a positive) can repeatedly be found in his works...

...But Hayman does know how to quote the right things...

...A serpent becomes "she," merely because the German Schlange is feminine...

...Yet he hedged his bet with a certain ambiguity in a sentence or two, for there must always be an escape hatch in self-contradiction...

...in fact, he wanted to direct or co-direct them himself, in the latter case invariably wresting the reins from his co-director's hands...

...EdwardII, The Mother, Schweyk in the Second World War, and Coriolan are mere revisions of other people's drama or fiction...

...The driver is changing tires...

...Why did women go crazy about Brecht throughout his life, leaving husbands, homes, their countries to share his exile and?-in all ways save sexually and as literary collaborators-play second fiddle to his tough, efficient, unprepossessing wife, the actress Helene Weigel...

...in the cast oiArturo Ui we find "Ciceronian vegetable dealers," without their being particularly golden-tongued, merely inhabitants of Cicero, Illinois...

...He said he wanted both, and afterward told Paula he would marry Marianne to legitimize that baby, then secure a divorce and marry her...

...That's how a pregnant whore unloads it...

...How pricelessly revealing is this statement of Brecht's: "Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely...

...In Brecht, too, there was a dualism, but, rather unusually, both of its poles were equally reprehensible...

...otherwise, he fitfully attended literature classes...

...and many plays are full of forceful but not particularly innocent borrowings, say, from Villon in The Threepenny Opera (based, of course, on John Gay) or Kipling in Mann ist Mann...

...Brecht's riven-ness translated into action, even as so many of his characters either lead double lives (Puntila, the two Annas, the female Shen Te who is also the "male" Shui Ta) or are scoundrels and weaklings who nonetheless do good, brave, or just things (Galileo, Mother Courage, Azdak...

...He could thus maintain the role of the greedy child, playing off woman against woman, collaborator against collaborator, political allegiance against another (fake) political allegiance, the expedient lie being one of the favorite tools of this man who advocated greater truth in art...

...You can marry her again in about two years' time...

...Yet though the writer will live, there is no redeeming the man...

...Failing that, the plays had to be staged by persons he trusted, frequently his disciples or factotums...

...As Hayman demonstrates, Brecht was, in a sense, conducting through Marianne a complex and bizarre love-hate relationship with Recht...

...Baal, as Hayman puts it, "represents the apotheosis of sexual appetite," yet also mirrors a contempt for women and a latent homosexual element Hayman is good at calling attention to in Brecht's life and work...

...Typically, during the East German workers' uprising of 1953, he had no sympathy for the justly indignant strikers, and instead sent supporting letters to the heads of the government and their Russian adviser...

...What a wonderfully, almost lovably, absurd argument pro domo...

...There are grammatical lapses, e.g., "consensus of opinion," and the odd syntactical one, e.g., "Surrounded by admiring friends, he found it easy to seduce girls...

...Emboldened by sexual successes, he started evolving a style that was partly based on his mother' s beloved Lutheran Bible, partly on his rebellious urge to undermine the solemnities of Teutonic syntax...

...In New York during World War II (though Hayman doesn't quote this), Brecht amazed Klaus Mann and Frederic Prokosch by declaring Baal his favorite play because of its "deep emotional validity for me," as well as "subtlety" and "a touch of the homoerotic...

...Marianne Zoff, a minor opera singer, was capricious and willful, and involved also with a man called Recht...

...When his companions, both homosexual, asked whether he had ever been "a homoerotic," Brecht answered (if Prokosch, an unreliable source, is to be trusted), "Never in the flesh, but my mind runs riot occasionally...

...But this, too, was a form of self-assertion, if only at the expense of his former selves...

...He no more liked a scene to sit still than he liked sitting still himself while writing or thinking...

...At one extreme was the utterly self-indulgent, antirational, immoral hedonist, exemplified by the hero of his first full-length play, Baal...

...Similarly, his connections are not compelling enough, and he is better on the anecdotal and gossipy aspects of this life than on any others...

...Take the ballet with song, The Seven Deadly S/ns(1933), whose heroine is characteristically split into two women, Anna I and Anna II...

...at the other was the omnipotent commissar, exemplified by Stalin, whom Brecht often praised, only rarely and clandestinely criticized, and never repudiated...

...What Hayman offers as quotation is at best a faulty paraphrase...

...He was particularly adept at negotiating simultaneously with several producers, translators and actors for the same thing, keeping each rigorously in the dark about his dealings with the competition...

...Hayman loves to overaccentuate: Kar-in Michaelis, the Danish novelist, becomes Michaelis...

...the Swede Selma Lagerlof is called a "Norwegian writer...

...To be sure, several of Brecht's plays will remain staples of the repertoire, with others popping up intermittently...

...From the sway over his mother, who died when he was 22, Brecht learned how to boss, first schoolmates, then teachers, girls and professors at the University of Munich, where he enrolled in medicine to keep out of the Army during World War I or, if drafted, to assure his assignment to duty as a medical orderly...

...The system of bibliographical references is confusing: It is hard to figure out where a quotation comes from when several are lumped together in the same back-of-the-book note...

...Unfortunately, Hayman quotes the verse only when it serves his biographical purposes, and then in his own sometimes inaccurate, always unpoetic, translations...

...Not exactly, though, because Brecht's heroes and heroines had a way of remaining idiosyncratic individuals whom, in revisions of the plays, he tried to make less sympathetic-notably Mother Courage and Galileo...

...the one overriding need is continual change, to satiate the restlessness of this smug yet tormented man...

...If one of them so much as seemed to have had sex with another man, she was likely to be dropped...

...Into 388 pages, the author packs a wealth of biographical material, plus a tidy sum of Brecht's political, theatrical, social, and literary ideas...

...This dubious honor should by now have been transferred to Bertolt Brecht, whom, if I didn't like pigs, I would call the perfect swine...

...There you have the fundamental duplicity: simplistically crude thinking buttressed by infinitely finicky complexity in presentation...

...Anna II is romantic, unbridled, passionately self-indulgent...

...the composer Jerome Moross turns into Maross...

...Rare indeed is the blank verse that can match Shakespeare's, and a history play that can't equal Shakespeare's histories can nevertheless be pretty decent...

...Yet they continued to be quirkily likable, whereas the plays featuring collective heroes, such as Days of the Commune, proved failures...

...Paula Banholzer, whom Brecht called Paul, was gentle and pliable...

...Checking page 42 of Theater arbeit, I found that the passage, deploring the loss of social content from humor, actually reads (I translate): "The pratfall appears as something sheerly biological, as something comical among all men in all situations...

...It is the restlessness that never let him consider one of his plays finished: Mannist Mann underwent 11 major revisions and some minor alterations before it left Brecht's hands, and no play was ever safe from complete overhauling years later, so as to conform to the author's changed political views...

...as the producer's lawyer cited Brecht's borrowing and changing the Ammer translations of Villon, an enraged Brecht stormed out of the courtroom...

...Note, though, how Brecht, who didn't want babies ("there's so little one can do with children, except be photographed with them") reacted when Marianne had a miscarriage that he chose to misperceive as an abortion:" I could strangle her...

...then through the seesaw year so fexile in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the United States...

...Again, the alternatives are equally unsatisfactory...

...Still, the 10 volumes of poetry contain some of the best verse written anywhere in the first half of our century...

...Puntila and His Servant Matti and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, are based on other people's plays...

...Too bad that it is separated by 175 pages from this description of Brecht directing the Berliner Ensemble: "Both in selecting from ideas proffered by the actors and in interpolating details of his own, Brecht would work for internal variety and contradiction in each sequence...

...Why do I watch the changing of tires with impatience...

...Most artists are characterized by dualism in the form of either a split or a fluctuation between high-mindedness and egoism...

...Hayman' s basic literary sensibility is not above suspicion either...

...In various instances, his stage ideas came from sundry collaborators, several of them women he was sleeping with...

...When the aging Brecht fell for the young Isot Kilian, married to the philosopher Wolfgang Harich, among his chief protectors during the final, East Berlin years, he simply told Harich: "Divorce her now...

...the trouble is that Hayman's very wording is at times too close for comfort to that of his sources...

...While other artists were riven by duality, Brecht reveled in duplicity...

...Hegot his first journalistic job, as a critic on the Augsburg paper, by writing a disingenuous encomium of a piece of junk, and he indeed did avoid fighting at the front by getting the Army to assign him to a medic's post in Augsburg...

...he merely veered from a lawless individualism that threatened to run amok to a self-discipline imposed by Communism (without ever explicitly declaring himself), where he could hide his selfish drives behind ostensible service to the masses...

...This charming ruthlessness, or really preda-toriness, he also applied to his work...

...In a final act of cowardice, Brecht requested that he be buried in a steel coffin to keep the worms out, and that, to ensure death, his heart be pierced with a stiletto...

...This is understandable...

...though she denied it, Elisabeth Hauptmann, his mistress, wrote all of Happy End except the songs...

...There is something distasteful about this perpetual, frenzied tinkering, especially since the "definitive" versions of the plays that get printed and reprinted are in several cases markedly inferior to inaccessible earlier ones...

...lyric poetry, often sung to the guitar to tunes of his own making or borrowing, preceded drama...

...Albert Maltz observed that "the stench of [Brecht's] unwashed body made it an ordeal to sit beside him...

...Early literary influences were Villon, Bilchner, Rimbaud.Verlaine, and, above all, Wedekind...

...Mackie Messer turns into Mackie...

...and, finally, the period of ever so slightly tarnished triumph in Germany and the world up to his death from heart disease in 1956...

...written in sub-Shakespearian blank verse," and, later, of "Wallenstein...

...Meanwhile young Brecht was seriously involved with at least three women, by two of whom he was to have illegitimate children...

...What is the point of this sniping at Schiller...