9. Coppice. (VI.)
‘Low trees with faded brown leaves. Whiteish mist.’ Taken over almost unchanged in 1927, but transposed to precede the foregoing scene. The word ‘jungle’ is used instead of ‘bushes’ where Shlink speaks of Marie being like a [crazy] bitch.
10. Garga’s Attic. (Telescoped with 8 to form VII.)
‘ Yellow wallpaper. Watercolour. Evening drips down the panes like dishwater.’ Most of the rest of VII after the waiter’s exit is from the beginning of this scene: i.e. Marie’s attempt to give John Garga money. Garga’s reappearance, however, and his writing of the note to the newspaper (the police in 1927) are new.
In 1922 Shlink arrives after Marie’s exit, and accuses Garga of raising money in a bar on his cottonfield deeds. In fact Jane was responsible, but Garga is prepared to take the blame and go to prison. He threatens Shlink with a knife; Shlink challenges him to plunge it into his breast.
11. Bar. (Transposed and cut to form IX.)
Scene VIII in the 1927 text is entirely new. IX, called ‘Bar in Chinatown’ in 1927, was rechristened, as we now have it, in the 1953 Stücke volume. In 1922 the setting is not described. The characters named include The Yellow Gentleman (not listed in the 1923 programme) – he tells the G. Wishu story – and Moti Gui (Skinny). Worm is not in this scene.
After the Wishu story the Snub-nosed Man asks, ‘Do you believe in God?’
THE YELLOW GENTLEMAN: No. By no means. Not in any sense. Absolutely not. I’m an anti-semite.
Otherwise, apart from the absence of Baboon’s opening remarks (new in 1927), the beginning of the scene up to Garga’s entrance is much as in the final version. Garga, however, appears alone, without witnesses. The arrangement of his dialogues with Jane and with Marie is rather different, though their substance is much the same. Jane, on going off with Baboon, leaves the possibility of returning to Garga open. The Salvation Army man’s attempted suicide is put at the end of the scene.
Garga’s speech about the fight, the ring and the knock-out is new in 1927. Shlink’s entrance at the end of IX is taken over in very shortened form from scene 12 below.
12. Garga’s Attic. (A few lines taken into IX; otherwise cut.)
‘Night. Flying shouts from below. The partition seems to be rocking. A ship.’ Three-quarters of the scene is Shlink and Garga. Garga looks out of the window and sees ‘Black linen hanging on the balcony. No wind.’ Shlink thinks the shouting is getting louder.
GARGA: They’re looking for you. Silence. They’re going to lynch us. They might…They might lynch us. They’ve been lynching today. Niggers strung up like like dirty linen. I heard on the Milwaukee Bridge that they were looking for you, – you.
Shlink again calls it ‘the white howling’. (His lynching party, however, is only organized in scene 14.)
They leave together to go ‘down to the marshes’. Then Jane and Baboon appear and occupy the rest of the scene. She is drunk, and he makes her write a note to Garga saying she is coming to him.
13. In the Jungle. (Telescoped with scenes 14 and 15, with a good deal of transposition, to form X.)
‘Brown. Golden.’ The scene is confined to Shlink and Garga, who begin by speaking of their enmity, somewhat as at the start of X but at greater length. Shlink then gives Garga Jane’s note.
In Engel’s stage scripts the scene is cut and partly incorporated in 15.
14. Bar in the Jungle. (Almost entirely cut.)
No description of setting. Characters are The Bear, The Chair, The Ape, The Preacher, joined shortly by Garga and Moti Gui. The first three are not listed in the 1923 programme, but the stage scripts suggests that Chair and Ape are identical with Worm and Baboon.
Bear reads in his paper that a woman’s body has been found in the marshes. Garga on entering speaks of his enmity with the Malay. Asked if it is a business matter he says, ‘A physical affair. You must help me, because we’ve all been moulded from the same earth. Is this our country or not?’
THE OTHERS: It’s our country! He shall hang! They’re our trees!
Garga works them up into a lynching party. ‘Are you free?’ he calls after them. ‘Come down into the dark arena. Your knife in your hand, bare in the cold blackness…. Are you free? Your mistress, freedom, is sailing on the ships!’
15. Hut in the Jungle. (See 13, Most of X derives from this scene.)
Again Shlink and Garga talking about their fight. ‘Yes,’ says Shlink. ‘You wanted it to end, but I wanted a fight, Garga.’ He offers to lend him a horse to escape on. Then shows him the books of the timber business, where Garga finds as the final entry: ‘Twenty pounds for strangling Jane Garga in the yellow swamps.’ Garga’s speech on p. 173 beginning ‘Shlink, I’ve been listening to you now for three weeks’is new in the 1927 edition, which also adds Garga’s ‘New York’ after Shlink’s ‘Tahiti?’, thus altering the direction of Garga’s Rimbaud quotation. The words ‘in the eyes of God’ are cut where Garga, just before his exit, says that it is not important to be the stronger man.
Marie enters in black gauze. ‘A whiteish light appears around her.’ Shlink’s auto-obituary (‘I, Wang Yen’, etc.) on taking the poison is new in 1927. In 1922 the lynching party (the five characters of scene 14) propose to rape Marie, and drag her off.
16. Shlink’s Office. (Largely rewritten as XI.)
In 1922 John says ‘…march! Against the jungle’ merely, ‘of the city!’ being added in 1927. Garga is off to the south to till the soil, not to New York. The play ends with a longer speech by Garga, finishing up: ‘It was the best time. The chaos is used up: it dismissed me without a blessing. Maybe work will be a consolation. It’s certainly very late. I feel abandoned.’ Then Moti Gui’s voice, off: ‘East wind!’ Garga remains alone, grinning.
2
In the Quarry
White chalk slope. Morning. The rumbling of the Pacific trains, off. People shouting.
George Garga. The Green Man.
GARGA ragged, in shirt and trousers, hands in pockets: An average morning. Anything strike you, sir?
GREEN MAN: Let’s go and have another drink.
GARGA: What’s that noise?
GREEN MAN: The trains to Illinois.
GARGA: Yes. As usual.
GREEN MAN: Aren’t you working in a shop any longer, sir?
GARGA: It’s my time off.
GREEN MAN: Let’s have a drink.
GARGA: No, no.
GREEN MAN: How’s the seamstress?
Garga whistles.
GREEN MAN: Is she off too?
GARGA: The clouds! Like soiled swans! Do you enjoy having a boot put in your face?
GREEN MAN: No.
GARGA: What can one do about it?
The Green Man pulls out a pistol.
GARGA takes it: We’ll have a drink afterwards. It’s not pleasant having a boot put in one’s face.
GREEN MAN: What’s he really after?
GARGA shrugs his shoulders: One fine morning he spat a little cherry stone in my eye.
GREEN MAN: Unknown?
GARGA: Never saw him before.
GREEN MAN: Careful. Cold blood.
Sound of trains rumbling by above.
That’s the Pacific-New York. Will he want to dig his heels in?
GARGA: Surely.
GREEN MAN: …Have reckoned with you?
GARGA: I turned up out of the blue.
GREEN MAN: Having a drink is undoubtedly better. Sleeping with women. Smoking.
GARGA: Baring your teeth isn’t bad.
GREEN MAN: If you’ve got good ones.
The Play’s Literary Ancestry
A NOTE BY GERHARD NELLHAUS
At the start of the opening scene Brecht acknowledges, in the order of their importance, the two writers who particularly influenced his play. They were the Danish novelist Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1875-1950) and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91). In the note on pp. 438-9 he specifies the works from which, directly and indirectly, he had drawn: the novel Hjulet
(The Wheel) and the prose poem Une saison en enfer. He knew both in the German: the former in a translation by Mens published in 1908 under the title Das Rad, and Rimbaud’s writings in translations by K. L. Ammer (Karl Klammer) and Adolf Christian.
Of the two, the influence of The Wheel was the greater in every way: background and plot, characterizations, imagery, illustrations of which are given in the notes below (which are based on the German edition published by S. Fischer in 1921, since Hjulet has not been published in English). It is in the main the story of ‘a fight between two human beings, two different types of nervous organism, a relentless fight which could only end with the extermination of one of them, because one was fighting blind and with all the strength of his basic appetite while for the other it was a question of life or death’ (German edition, pp. 107-8). This was the continuation of a fight that had begun in a novel Madam d’Ora, which Jensen had written a year earlier, in 1904. In it the lay-preacher Evanston, a self-styled superman, destroyed the renowned scientist Edmund Hall by accusing him of his own murder of one Elly Johnson in London. But later in New York, Evanston is defeated by the young journalist, Lee, in a boxing match, ‘an encounter …which [Evanston] could not possibly forget…[He] came to love Lee… to long for [him], to long for [him] from the moment when [Lee] with a blow of his fist shut [Evanston’s] eyes’ (p. 182). Now Evanston, alias Cancer, has come to Chicago, for this was the hub of the world’s wheel, ‘a grand international centre …the centre of the most materialistic philosophy in the world’ (p. 165). Here Evanston starts out in a hole in the wall as a revivalist and becomes the prophet of a mass movement which he hopes to turn into a new religion. For it, Evanston wants Lee to write the new Bible because he knows Lee’s ‘God is in Chicago’ as well, since he has read Lee’s tract proclaiming Americans as the lost people of God who in America have the opportunity of creating the vital civilization Europe might have become had the Gothic and not the Gallic influence won out.
Evanston’s ‘spiritual rape’ of Lee consists not only of stealing the would-be poet’s views of life, but of seeking to possess him physically, of alienating him from his fiancée, of charging him with a murder – just as he had done Hall – in an anonymous letter. Evanston can do this because he has studied this ‘naïve young man’ and knows that he is ‘both a coward and full of self-importance’, a ‘sentimentalist’ who, ‘not being much for women’, is ‘still pure’ and yet is engaged to the daughter of Chicago’s richest man. A general strike organized by Cancer against the latter fails when Lee kills Evanston, this ‘long extinct type who existed outside of society’, in order to redeem ‘his city and all his own kind’. After fleeing Chicago, first to Japan and then around the world, Lee returns to his pregnant fiancée and, learning of her father’s death, quite ‘sensibly’ takes over the business.
By contrast, the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud now occupied Brecht less than it had done in Baal He was more concerned with Rimbaud’s literary manner, his ‘concoction of words’. The Rimbaud quotations put into the mouth of Garga are often somewhat free; hence the original French is given below wherever possible for comparison. Though in Brecht’s ‘Statement’ of 1924 (p. 433 above) he claimed also to have been quoting Verlaine, no lines comparable in style or content have been found.
1. Evanston in The Wheel (p. 84) says that ‘it happens to be a female’s pleasure to have her ears boxed by as malicious and dirty a baboon as possible’.
2. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer: ‘Je suis une béte, un négre. Mais je puis étre sauvé. Vous étes de faux négres, vous, maniaques, feroces, avares. Marchand, tu es négre; magistrat, tu es négre; general, tu es négre; empereur, vieille démangeaison, tu es négre: tu as bu d‘une liqueur non taxée, de la fabrique de Satan. – Ce peuple est inspiré par la fiévre et le cancer … Je ne comprends pas les lois; je n‘ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez.’
3. ‘Stormy the night and the sea runs high’ is a line from a sentimental and trashy song ‘Asleep in the Deep’, for which, according to information supplied by Dr Kurt Opitz, Adolf Martel wrote the text (about 1890) and H. W. Petrie the music (1897). It was very popular at the turn of the century, and Brecht heard it often as a child, so that it became for him the quintessence of Kitsch. He referred to it in Drums in the Night (p. 86 above), in scene 13 of Mahagonny, in chapter 14 of The Threepenny Novel and in an unfinished essay of the 1950s on popular poetry (‘Wo ich gelernt habe’) where he noted that it contained ‘one quatrain of great beauty’.
4. In The Wheel (p. 162) Lee says of Evanston, ‘What was one to do about a man whose nerves hardly reached his skin?’
5. Cf. The Wheel, p. 221: ‘In all the streets people began to move about, all the faithful early risers in the city, people like himself, whom he had always fully comprehended, whether they were driving in their waggons or were striding off with their tools, or were half-running along the sidewalk, a mountain of fresh newspapers on their shoulders.’ There is a similar echo in Shen Teh’s speech in scene 4 of The Good Person of Szechwan.
6. ‘L’époux infernal’ is the subheading of the first ‘Délire’ in Une saison en enfer, where the virgin exclaims, ‘Je suis esclave de l’Epoux infernal, celui qui a perdu les vierges folles.’
7. Rimbaud: ‘J’aimai le désert, les vergers brûlés, les boutiques fanées, les boissons tiédies.’
8. No such passage was found in Rimbaud, but perhaps Brecht was inspired by Rimbaud’s lines: ‘Je suis veuve… J’étais veuve…’in the first ‘Délire’ above.
9. In The Wheel, too, Evanston reproaches Lee for drinking.
10. ‘Une souffle ouvre les breches opératiques dans les cloisons’ are the opening words of ‘Nocturne Vulgaire’ in Les Illuminations.
11. These are said to have been the dying words of Frederick the Great.
12. In The Wheel Lee refuses Evanston’s love because he finds him so unappealing, because he ‘knew instinctively that Evanston was an old man’ (p. 168), ‘a worm of the past’ (p. 245), who fought ‘with the powers of an ape and mostly with the corruption of age’ (p. 297).
13. This key speech echoes both Rimbaud’s ‘J’enviais la félicité des bêtes’ and many passages from The Wheel. Note Evanston’s remark (p. 216) that ‘the only thing real in this world is sensual lust …the only proof I have of being alive is that I die of pleasure’. And several times Jensen describes how Evanston confronts Lee ‘like a beast of prey, baring his teeth’ (p. 163), and how ‘they faced each other like two wild animals’ (p. 280).
14. Towards the end of their fight, Lee in The Wheel complains of his adversary’s ‘endless babbling’ (p. 293).
15. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer: ‘Je reviendrai, avec des membres de fer, la peau sombre, l’oeil furieux; sur mon masque, on me jugera d’une race forte. J’aurai de l’or: je serai oisif et brutal. Les femmes soignent ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds. Je serai melé aux affaires politiques. Sauvé.’
16. The final scene recalls what happens at the end of The Wheel when Lee decides to devote himself to his dead father-in-law’s business: ‘The everyday had returned with its chances and ways, the everyday and the old taste for work.’
EDWARD II
ON LOOKING THROUGH MY FIRST PLAYS (iv)
Adapting Marlowe’s Edward the Second was a job which I undertook in collaboration with Lion Feuchtwanger because I had to do a production at the Munich Kammerspiele. Today it is hard for me to come to terms with it. We wanted to make possible a production which would break with the Shakespearean tradition common to German theatres: that lumpy monumental style beloved of middle-class philistines. I am reprinting it without any changes. The reader may find something to interest him in the narrative methods of the Elizabethans and in the emergence of a new stage language.
[From ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’. Foreword to Stücke I, all editions except the first. Dated March 1954.]
Editorial Note on the Text
No manusc
ript, typescript or prompt copy of the play has yet come to the notice of the Brecht Archive. Nor did Brecht write any formal notes to it. The version which he decided to print unchanged in the collected Stücke was that published by Kiepenheuer in 1924, the year of the play’s original production. (There were, in fact, some very slight editorial changes, probably not by Brecht himself.)
The version of Marlowe’s play which Brecht and Feuchtwanger used was a German translation by Alfred Walter Heymel, originally published by Insel-Verlag (Leipzig) before the First World War. It has been reprinted by Dr Reinhold Grimm in the Edition Suhrkamp volume Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England. Vorlage, Texte und Materialien (Frankfurt, 1968). Miss Louise Laboulle has calculated that they took over about one-sixth of Marlowe’s lines, but even where they did so they often changed Heymel’s wording.
In the same volume there is a reprint of the extract originally published in the Munich literary magazine Der neue Merkur in February 1924, on the eve of the premiere. This only goes up to the end of Anne’s scene with Mortimer after the (imaginary) Battle of Killingworth (p. 221), but already contains one or two major differences from the final version. In particular it follows Marlowe in having Edward sign the decree banishing Gaveston when the Archbishop threatens to ‘discharge these peers / Of duty and allegiance due to thee’. Edward then persuades Anne to seduce Mortimer as best she can (part of the dialogue was later brought forward to the catapult-showing scene) to have the decree rescinded. Gaveston, as in Marlowe, returns from Ireland and is assaulted by the peers. In the final version, of course, Edward refuses to sign, and the battle immediately follows (after a hypothetical gap of nine years).
Other differences include the swapping round of the catapult scene with that where Mortimer is discovered alone with his books, and the omission of Gaveston’s monologue when writing his will. In the opening scene a few lines are left of Gaveston’s best-known speech from the original (‘I must have wanton poets…’), which is entirely missing from the final version. Lancaster’s comment on Edward’s love for Gaveston is also perhaps worth recording: ‘Goddam!’ he says. ‘That’s what I call passion.’
Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1 Page 42