Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 7

by Bertolt Brecht

  once again i would like to do Schweyk, interspersed with scenes from [Karl Kraus’s] The Last Days of Mankind so people can see the ruling forces up top with the private soldier down below surviving all their vast plans.

  The man who actually got him to work on this project was Ernst-Josef Aufricht, the former Berlin impresario who had first staged The Threepenny Opera in 1928 and was now in New York after escaping from Unoccupied France. Partly involved in the Office of War Information German broadcasts, he was also on the lookout for a libretto to interest Kurt Weill, who had become well established on Broadway with Lady in the Dark. He helped to put on a mixed programme at Hunter College (in New York) on 3 April in which Weill and Lotte Lenya performed some of the Brecht songs, including ‘Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?’ which Weill had recently set; this finished with a turn by the Czech clowns George Voskovec and Jan Werich entitled ‘Schweik’s spirit lives on’. At some point he reintroduced the two former collaborators, and proposed that they should make a Schweik musical, quickly raising the necessary $85,000 from émigrés who remembered their previous success.

  According to the journal Brecht then spent a week staying with the Weills at New City, where he outlined a version of The Good Person of Szechwan which the composer thought of producing, the Zurich première having taken place on 4 February, just before Brecht came to New York. For $500 (so Hanns Eisler later reported) he agreed to provide the Schweik libretto, of which he wrote Weill an outline in May (it is printed on pp. 279-288). Having reread Hašek’s novel in the train back to Los Angeles, he quickly settled down to work on the play and had finished the first three scenes by 9 June and the whole thing by the end of the month. Though it is quite untrue to say as Aufricht does (in his memoirs) that ‘Brecht had copied whole pages of dialogue from the Schweik book’ the work clearly flowed very much more easily than Simone Machard, without the awkward changes and compromises that mar that work. Brecht himself thought well enough of it to term it (again, in his journal)

  a counterpart to Mother Courage. compared with the schweik which i wrote for piscator around 27 (a pure montage based on the novel) the present second world war version is a lot sharper, and corresponds to the shift from the hapsburgs’ well-ensconced tyranny to the nazis’ invasion.

  He was more doubtful about the formal arrangement proposed, and objected to the extensive rights given to Weill. ‘I’m not a librettist’, he told Ruth Berlau on 26 June:

  It has got to be my play, which it is (not just an American version, as with the Szechwan play), and it’s not only America I have to think of. What’s more, there are political considerations involved in this play; I have to have an equal voice.

  However, he and Weill met again in Hollywood to discuss things. Then at the beginning of July he sent the script to Weill, assuring him that it was not especially important that (the now differently-spelt) Schweik himself should talk as he does in the German version of the novel, where he speaks a now-defunct kind of Prague German. Paul Selver’s translation, he found, had managed to be comic without this, and without attempting to find Anglo-Saxon equivalents for the social and political setting. He recommended getting the American poet Alfred Kreymborg to do a version of the play, saying that he was known to Ruth Berlau and ‘has the right sort of opinions (liberal)’. It is not clear whether Weill agreed, though apparently he was already nervous that the script would prove too un-American for Broadway. Brecht, however, went ahead and commissioned Kreymborg, paying him out of a loan from his friend the actor Peter Lorre, who he hoped might play the name part. The translation was finished by 4 September, all except for the ‘Moldau Song’, which Brecht himself was still struggling to get right. The unavoidable effect was to infuriate Piscator, who not only regarded Schweyk almost as his own property—and indeed had spent much time in negotiations with the Hašek lawyer, who now gave the rights to Aufricht—but had been expecting Kreymborg to translate the 1928 version for the Theater Guild. On 23 September each of the collaborators got a stiff letter from him, in English, warning them that he had asked his lawyers to protect his rights.

  Whether or not Piscator’s friendship with him was a factor, the finished play never appealed to Weill. Despite assurances that the landlady’s part had been written for Lotte Lenya and that he was welcome to get in an American lyric-writer for the songs, he refused to compose a note until the production was definitely fixed, so that by September Brecht had begun discussing alternative plans with Hanns Eisler. Nor did he pursue The Good Person of Szechwan project further, though Brecht had by then completed the American version and still hoped that they might come to a formal agreement. Yet, though Aufricht too had evidently rather lost heart, Brecht none the less went carefully over Kreymborg’s translation when it arrived and sent it back to New York for him and Ruth Berlau to revise. This had been done by the time of Brecht’s return to New York in mid-November. Shortly afterwards Weill, now in California, wrote to Brecht to summarize his objections. He could only collaborate, he said, on three conditions:

  1. if the play is written by a top-class American author in the Ben Hecht category and put on by a top-class American producer.

  2. if Lenya plays the publican.

  3. if the play is written as a ‘musical play’, with more openings for music than the present version, as I do not under any circumstances wish to write incidental music.

  As it stood, he thought that it

  has no prospect of succeeding on the American stage without major altcrations, unless there is some prominent American author (in the Ben Hecht category) who can find a way of rendering the humour of your script in American terms. Nor do I think the rights position clear enough to ensure the backing for a first-class Broadway production. But these are entirely private opinions, and I’m only telling you them because I don’t want you to waste time and energy on a project which in my view hasn’t much chance.

  Similarly with The Good Person of Szechwan, where any agreement must be conditional on getting hold of an American writer. Their ‘collaboration on the present version of Szechwan’ was now at an end.

  III

  Around October, when Schweyk was still uppermost in his mind, Brecht went to visit Luise Rainer, who was living in Westwood not far from his 26th Street house, and without any personal acquaintance with him had signed the affidavit allowing him to come to the United States. She was then at the height of her fame after her performance in the film of The Good Earth, and as they were walking on the beach Brecht asked her what, of all plays, she would most like to appear in. When she named the Chalk Circle he instantly responded, for once again this was a theme which (as the editorial note will show) he had been taking up intermittently for several years previously; indeed he told her that he had suggested it in the first place to Klabund, whose adaptation had so successfully been performed by Elisabeth Bergner in Berlin in 1925. Miss Rainer in turn got in touch with a New York backer called Jules Leventhal, who was anxious to bring her to Broadway in a suitable work, and advised him that it would be worth commissioning Brecht and paying him a monthly salary till he had finished the play. This was formally arranged during Brecht’s second New York visit, which lasted from mid-November to the middle of March. But he does not seem to have given Leventhal much information about his plans for the play, so that when the actress returned from performing to the troops in the Mediterranean she saw Brecht in New York to find out what was happening. According to her, he reacted so disagreeably as to make her call off her participation. None the less Brecht got down to the writing very soon after his return to Santa Monica, finishing the play in something close to its final version by 5 June, when he sent it off to her (so he noted in his journal). She was then ill with the aftereffects of jaundice and malaria from her Mediterranean tour, and can no longer even recollect its arrival. She was, however, aware that the play had developed an extra act since Brecht started on it, and that this was connected with his wish to give his friend Oscar Homolka a good part as Azdak, something th
at had not originally been bargained for.

  In the meantime Brecht’s financial circumstances, which nine months before had been very precarious, had changed as a result of the sale of the film rights of Simone Machard to MGM in February. This seems to have been due entirely to Feuchtwanger, who when Sam Goldwyn failed to understand the play got him to read the much more conventional Simone novel, buy the rights, and then buy those of the play as well. Brecht and Feuchtwanger had $50,000 to divide, in return for which there could be no stage production without Goldwyn’s permission for the next three and a half years. Perhaps this is one reason why Brecht seemed so little discouraged by the collapse of the original Chalk Circle plan (which was not yet Caucasian when his journal first mentions it in March) as to carry his preoccupation with it right through the summer of 1944. Thus he reworked the character of Grusha, whose goodness, like Simone’s patriotism, had seemed too arbitrary, and tried to make her tougher; he rewrote the prologue; and he asked his neighbour Christopher Isherwood to make a translation. When Isherwood refused it was arranged that James and Tanya Stern should translate the play for Leventhal, with lyrics by W. H. Auden, who was sharing a house with them on Fire Island. (Part of their translation appeared in spring 1946 in the Kenyon Review, after which the script was lost, only to turn up ten years later on one of the microfilms deposited by Ruth Berlau in the New York Public Library.) By September he seems to have more or less finished the fully revised script, which was to remain virtually unchanged for the next ten years. That month his child by Ruth Berlau, called Michel like the child in the play, was born and died in Los Angeles. Coincidentally or not, he laid the play aside and by the end of the year was deeply involved instead in the Galileo project with Charles Laughton, who had recently become very taken with Brecht’s work.

  Galileo aside—and it must be remembered that for all the effort Brecht put into it over the next two and a half years this was just a revision of a previous play—the only one of his ‘American’ works to reach the professional stage was The Duchess of Malfi, a play which Brecht excluded from the German collected works; it is printed in English in volume 7 of the ‘Berlin and Frankfurt’ edition (1991) and as an appendix to the present volume. This interesting but largely frustrated adaptation was the result of Brecht’s keenness to write something for the most famous of all the exiled German actresses, Elisabeth Bergner, whom he had first met in his Munich days. Soon after his arrival in the United States he had shown her the script of The Good Person of Szechwan, which she found boring; the trouble (so he later noted in his journal) being that she could not conceive of the theatre audience as a group of people who would change the world—

  so that the basic climate of this kind of theatre is alien to her: the beginner’s enthusiasm for a new millennium, the spirit of inquiry, the urge to unshackle everybody’s productivity. in her eyes it is all a new ‘style’, a matter of fashion, something arbitrary.

  None the less she and her producer-husband, Paul Czinner, shared the Brechts’ first family Christmas in Santa Monica, entertained them in turn on New Year’s Eve, and set Brecht to work on a film story, now lost, which according to him was successfully plagiarized by some other (unidentified) writer.

  One of his projects for her was an adaptation of Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, with which he apparently thought of asking Feuchtwanger to help him. Instead, however, they tackled Simone Machard, and by the time this was finished and Brecht had set off for New York, either he or Miss Bergner had decided that another Jacobean work would suit her better, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Once in New York, Brecht got in touch with the poet H. R. Hays, a friend of Hanns Eisler’s who had already translated Mother Courage and Lucullus (the first two of his major plays to be published in the US) and also provided immigration affidavits. It was arranged with the Czinners that Hays and Brecht should adapt the play together, Hays (by his own account on p. 334) doing the actual writing while Brecht concentrated on story and structure. The work began in April 1943, and by 26 June, when Brecht was back in Santa Monica finishing Schweyk, a first script had been completed and copyrighted in both collaborators’ names. Though Brecht then showed it to Eisler and asked him to write the music nothing more seems to have been done till he returned to New York that winter, when he went back (in the words of his journal) to

  work with hays and bergner on The Duchess of Malfi. not completely finished, since bergner is short of time.

  According to Bergner herself: ‘I was delighted how well we got on, even though our views were often poles apart; I felt I had always to be on the look out in case he turned the whole play into Communist propaganda.’

  Meanwhile he asked W. H. Auden to collaborate, seemingly without mentioning or consulting Hays. ‘I have been treating Webster’s text with great care,’ he wrote on 5 December,

  but I had to add a few new scenes and verses. These are now available in English, but it seems advisable to improve them and I have told Miss Bergner that no one could do it as well as you.

  When Czinner told Hays of this proposal he walked out, leaving Auden to carry on as and when he could.

  The whole project now seems to have simmered for some eighteen months till in mid-summer of 1945 Brecht, who had come to New York a third time to help stage The Private Life of the Master Race, went to the Czinners’ summer place near Woodstock, Vermont, to finish it off ‘in the rough’. There is no more mention of it in his journal after that point, but a final Brecht-Auden script was copyrighted in April 1946, and it was at last decided to go ahead with its production. Spurred by the production of the original play at the Haymarket Theatre in London a year earlier, with Peggy Ashcroft as the Duchess and John Gielgud as Ferdinand, the Czinners engaged its director George Rylands, a friend of Auden’s and an eminent Cambridge Elizabethan scholar, but almost ludicrously out of tune with Brecht’s personality and ideas. The Duchess was of course Miss Bergner; Bosola, the black actor Canada Lee playing with a whitened face; John Carradine and Robert Speaight were also in the cast; the music was by Benjamin Britten, ‘arranged’ by Ignatz Strasfogel; Harry Bennett did the sets. Brecht’s reactions can be gauged from the ultimatum which he sent Czinner after seeing the Boston production that September (see p. 421). His criticisms were disregarded and at the Broadway opening at the Ethel Barry-more Theatre on 15 October his contribution—which no critic could have detected once Rylands had chosen mainly to return to Webster—was no longer mentioned, credit being given to Auden alone. It is not known whether he even attended, despite his strong condemnatory note. The play got a bad press and ran only till 16 November.

  Such was the one tangible result of Brecht’s four attempts to write for Broadway. As for the others, the Simone Machard film was never made, first because Theresa Wright, whom MGM had cast for the part of the adolescent girl, was inappositely expecting a baby, and then because the liberation of France in 1944 made the theme so much less topical. It remained MGM’s property, so Feuchtwanger told Brecht as late as 1956, when the latter wanted to propose it to Cavalcanti, director of the previous year’s second-rate Puntila film. Around the same time there were various inquiries about the play—from Akimov in Leningrad, from Norman Lloyd in New York, and from Jean-Marie Serreau and Benno Besson for a mixed German-French tour—and these led Brecht to stress that

  the most important thing for any production of Simone is that the title part must on no account be played by a young actress—not even one that looks like a child. It must be an eleven-year-old, and one that looks like a child.

  This principle was followed in the eventual première of the play at Frankfurt in March 1957, which Brecht of course never saw. For there Simone was played by a child who had been trained specially for the part by Ruth Berlau in Berlin. Eisler, who had started writing the music in 1943, now finished it off and the whole production was a great success. None the less Eisler himself once again did not like it. ‘The play’s too heroic for me,’ he told Hans Bunge later. It was ‘a tribute to heroism.
And that’s not right. I don’t need to tell you how utterly contrary to Brecht’s whole way of looking at things that is.’ Nor did the Berliner Ensemble ever stage it, though there was an East German television version that included a number of the Ensemble actors.

  Schweyk remained a play, which Brecht never amended so as to provide the greater musical opportunities which Weill had asked for. None the less in the autumn of 1947, when Wolfgang Langhoff at the Deutsches Theater in (East) Berlin was planning to present it, it was to Weill that Brecht turned for the incidental music. Once again Weill put him off, and there is no further record of this plan. Eighteen months later, however, when Brecht was setting up his Ensemble, he hoped to get Peter Lorre to come to Berlin to create the part. Again, it was not possible to organize a production before Brecht’s death in 1956, though in 1955 (if we are to believe Hanns Eisler’s slightly erratic recollections) he had asked Eisler to start writing the music and to give it priority over that for Simone Machard. ‘ Interesting that you can be so amusing,’ he told Eisler when he brought him the result a few weeks before he died.