A conversation on the modern Soviet novel. We have given up following it. We then turn to poetry and to the translations of Soviet lyric poetry from the most diverse languages with which Das Wort is inundated. Brecht remarks that the authors over there are having a difficult time. “It is taken as deliberate if the name Stalin does not appear in a poem.”
June 29. Brecht speaks of the epic theater; he mentions the children’s theater in which errors of presentation, functioning as alienation effects, give the performance epic features. With small companies something similar can happen. I recall the Geneva performance of Le Cid, at which the sight of the king’s crooked crown gave me the first idea for the book on tragedy I wrote nine years later. Here Brecht, on his side, quotes the moment in which the idea of epic theater is rooted. It was a rehearsal for the Munich performance of Edward 11. The battle that occurs in the play has to hold the stage for three-quarters of an hour. Brecht could not cope with the soldiers. (Nor could Asja [Lacis], his assistant director.) He finally turned to Valentin, a close friend of his at that time, who was attending the rehearsal, with the despairing question “Well, what is the matter with the soldiers?” Valentin: “They’re pale—they’re afraid.” This was the decisive remark. Brecht added, “They’re tired.” The soldiers’ faces were given a thick coat of chalk. And on that day the style was discovered.
Shortly afterward, the old theme of “logical positivism” came up. I was fairly intransigent, and the conversation threatened to take a disagreeable turn. This was prevented by Brecht’s admitting for the first time the superficiality of his formulations. He did so with the fine dictum “A deep need must be approached superficially.” Later, when we went over to his house—for the conversation had taken place in my room: “It is a good thing to be overtaken in an extreme position by a reactionary epoch. That way you reach a middle position.” This, he said, was what had happened to him; he had become benevolent.
In the evening: I should like to give someone a small present for Asja; gloves. Brecht thinks it would be difficult. The view could be taken that Jahnn* was rewarding her for espionage services with two gloves. “The worst thing is that entire directions† are always kicked out. But their arrangements will probably stay unchanged.”
July 1. Very skeptical answers are elicited whenever I touch on conditions in Russia. When I inquired recently whether Ottwald was still in prison, the answer was, “If he’s still alive, he’s in prison.” Yesterday Steffin said she doubted whether Tretiakov were still alive.
July 4. Yesterday evening. Brecht (in a conversation on Baudelaire): I’m not against the asocial—I’m against the non-social.
July 21. The publications of writers like Lukács and Kurella cause Brecht much concern. He thinks, however, that they should not be opposed in the theoretical sphere. I switch the question to the political sphere. Here, too, he does not mince his words. “The socialist economy does not need war and therefore has no stomach for it. The ‘peace-loving’ disposition of the ‘Russian people’ means no more than that. There can be no socialist economy in one country. Arms production has necessarily been a severe setback for the Russian proletariat; in some areas it has pushed them back to stages of historical development they had long since left behind. The monarchist stage, among others. In Russia a personal regime is in power. That, of course, can be denied only by blockheads.” This short conversation was soon interrupted. Furthermore, Brecht stressed in this connection that with the dissolution of the First International, Marx and Engels lost contact with the workers’ movement and henceforth sent only private advice, not intended for publication, to individual leaders. Nor was it by chance—though regrettable—that Engels finally turned to natural science.
Béla Kun was, he said, his greatest admirer in Russia. Brecht and Heine were the only German lyric poets he favored. (Brecht occasionally alluded to a certain man in the Central Committee who supported him.)
July 25. Yesterday morning Brecht came over to show me his Stalin poem, entitled “The Farmer to His Oxen.” At first I could not see the point; and when, after a moment, the thought of Stalin crossed my mind, I did not dare hold on to it. This effect corresponded roughly to Brecht’s intention. He explained it in the ensuing conversation, stressing, among other things, the positive moment in the poem. It did indeed pay tribute to Stalin—who in his view had immense merits. But he was not yet dead. Moreover he, Brecht, was not entitled to pay any other, more enthusiastic tribute; he was in exile waiting for the Red Army. He was following Russian developments, and equally the writings of Trotsky. They prove that grounds for suspicion exist; justified suspicion that called for a skeptical view of Russian affairs. Such skepticism was in the spirit of the classical writers. Should the suspicions one day be confirmed, one would have to oppose the regime—and that means publicly. But “alas, or thank God, whichever you prefer,” this suspicion was not yet a certainty. To derive a policy like Trotsky’s from it would be irresponsible. “On the other hand, the fact that certain criminal cliques are at work in Russia itself is beyond doubt. It can be seen periodically from their misdeeds.” Finally, Brecht emphasized that we were injured inwardly by this regression. “We have paid for our position; we are covered with scars. It is natural that we are also particularly sensitive.”
Toward evening Brecht found me in the garden reading Das Kapital. Brecht: “I am very pleased to see you studying Marx now—at a time when he is less and less in evidence, above all among our people.” I replied that I preferred to read much-discussed books when they were out of fashion. We went on to talk about Russian policy toward literature. “With these people,” I said, referring to Lukács, Gabor, Kurella, “you just cannot build a state.” Brecht: “Or only a state, but not a community. They are quite simply enemies of production. Production makes them uneasy. It can’t be trusted. It is the unpredictable. You never know where it will end. And they themselves do not want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and supervise others. Each of their criticisms contains a threat.” We found ourselves, I do not know how, discussing Goethe’s novels; Brecht only knows Elective Affinities. In it, he said, he had admired the elegance of the young man. When I told him that Goethe wrote the book at sixty, he was very surprised. The book was entirely without Philistinism. That was an immense achievement. He could applaud this, since German drama, even in the most important works, bore Philistine traces. I remarked that as a result Elective Affinities had had a miserable reception. Brecht: “I’m glad to hear it. The Germans are a dreadful people. It is not true that you cannot draw conclusions about the Germans from Hitler. In me, too, everything is bad that is German. What makes Germans unbearable is their narrow-minded self-sufficiency. Nothing like the free imperial cities, such as the detestable town of Augsburg, ever existed elsewhere. Lyons was never a free city; the independent cities of the Renaissance were city-states— Lukács is an adoptive German. He has almost completely run out of wind.”
In the Best Tales of the Robber Woynok by Seghers, Brecht praised the signs it gave that she had freed herself from her commission. “Seghers cannot write for a commission, just as I, without one, would have no idea how to start.” He also approved the central role given in these stories to a stubborn outsider.
July 26. Brecht yesterday evening: “There is no longer any doubt—the struggle against ideology has become a new ideology.”
July 29. Brecht reads me a number of polemical disputes with Lukács, studies for an essay that he is to publish in Das Wort. They are disguised but vehement attacks. Brecht asks my advice concerning their publication. Since he tells me at the same time that Lukács now has an important position “over there,” I say that I cannot advise him. “These are questions of power. Someone over there ought to say something. After all, you have friends there.” Brecht: “Actually I have no friends there. The Muscovites don’t have any, either—like the dead.”
August 3. On the evening of July 29, in the garden, a discussion arose on the question whether a part of
the cycle “Children’s Songs” should be included in the new volume of poems. I was not in favor, because I thought the contrast between the political and the private poem expressed the experience of exile particularly clearly; this effect should not be weakened by a disparate collection. I hinted that in his proposal Brecht’s destructive character, which calls into question what has scarcely been achieved, was once again involved. Brecht: “I know people will say of me, ‘He was a manic.’ If this age goes down to posterity, understanding for my mania will go down with it. The age will provide the background for manic tendencies. But what I should really like is for people one day to say, ‘He was a moderate manic.’” Recognition of his moderation should not be neglected in the volume of poems; that life, despite Hitler, goes on, that there will always be children. Brecht thinks of an age without history, of which his poem to sculptors gives a portrait, and about which he told me a few days later that he thought its arrival more likely than victory over fascism. But then, still as an argument for the inclusion of the “Children’s Songs” in the Poems from Exile, something else asserted itself, which Brecht expressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he seldom shows. “In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That is why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the mother’s womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the children.” While he spoke I felt a force acting on me that was equal to that of fascism; I mean a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism. It was a very curious feeling, new to me. It was matched by the direction Brecht’s thought now took. “They are planning devastation of icy proportions. That is why they cannot come to an agreement with the Church, which is also a march into millennia. They have proletarianized me as well. They have not only taken away my house, my fishpond, and my car; they have also stolen my theater and my public. From my standpoint, I cannot admit that Shakespeare was fundamentally a greater talent. But he, too, would have been unable to write from stock. He had his models in front of him. The people he portrayed were actually there. He managed with great difficulty to snatch up a few characteristics of their behavior; many equally important ones he left out.”
Beginning of August. “In Russia a dictatorship is in power over the proletariat. We must avoid disowning it for as long as this dictatorship still does practical work for the proletariat—that is, as long as it contributes to a balance between proletariat and peasantry with a preponderant regard for proletarian interests.” Some days later Brecht spoke of a “workers’ monarchy,” and I compared this organism to the grotesque jokes of nature that, in the form of a horned fish or some other monster, are extracted from the ocean.
August 25. A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.
The Author as Producer*
The task is to win over the intellectuals to the working class by making them aware of the identity of their spiritual enterprises and of their conditions as producers.
—RAMóN FERNANDEZ
You will remember how Plato, in his model state, deals with poets. He banishes them from it in the public interest. He had a high conception of the power of poetry, but he believed it harmful, superfluous—in a perfect community, of course. The question of the poet’s right to exist has not often, since then, been posed with the same emphasis; but today it poses itself. Probably it is only seldom posed in this form, but it is more or less familiar to you all as the question of the autonomy of the poet, of his freedom to write whatever he pleases. You are not disposed to grant him this autonomy. You believe that the present social situation compels him to decide in whose service he is to place his activity. The bourgeois writer of entertainment literature does not acknowledge this choice. You must prove to him that, without admitting it, he is working in the service of certain class interests. A more advanced type of writer does recognize this choice. His decision, made on the basis of a class struggle, is to side with the proletariat. That puts an end to his autonomy. His activity is now decided by what is useful to the proletariat in the class struggle. Such writing is commonly called tendentious.
There you have the catchword around which has long circled a debate familiar to you. Its familiarity tells you how unfruitful it has been, for it has not advanced beyond the monotonous reiteration of arguments for and against: on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, it is justifiable to expect his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.
This second formulation is not uninteresting, and, moreover, it is correct. I make it my own. But in doing so I abstain from asserting it dogmatically. It must be proved. And it is in order to attempt to prove it that I now claim your attention. This is, you will perhaps object, a very specialized, out-of-the-way theme. And how do I intend to promote the study of fascism with such a proof ? That is indeed my intention. For I hope to be able to show you that the concept of political tendency, in the summary form in which it usually occurs in the debate just mentioned, is a perfectly useless instrument of political literary criticism. I should like to show you that the tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That is to say, the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And, I would add straightaway, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.
This assertion—I hope I can promise you—will soon become dearer. For the moment I should like to interject that I might have chosen a different starting point for my reflections. I started from the unfruitful debate on the relationship between tendency and quality in literature. I could have started from an even older and no less unfruitful debate: what is the relationship between form and content, particularly in political poetry? This kind of question has a bad name; rightly so. It is the textbook example of the attempt to explain literary connections with undialectical clichés. Very well. But what, then, is the dialectical approach to the same question?
The dialectical approach to this question—and here I come to my central point—has absolutely no use for such rigid, isolated things as work, novel, book. It has to insert them into the living social context. You rightly declare that this has been done time and again among our friends. Certainly. Only they have often done it by launching at once into large, and therefore necessarily often vague, questions. Social conditions are, as we know, determined by conditions of production. And when a work was criticized from a materialist point of view, it was customary to ask how this work stood vis-à-vis the social relations of production of its time. This is an important question, but also a very difficult one. Its answer is not always unambiguous. And I should like now to propose to you a more immediate question, a question that is somewhat more modest, somewhat less far-reaching, but that has, it seems to me, more chance of receiving an answer. Instead of asking, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? Does it accept them, is it reactionary—or does it aim at overthrowing them, is it revolutionary?”—instead of this question, or at any rate before it, I should like to propose another. Rather than ask, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I should like to ask, “What is its position in them?” This question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly with the literary technique of wor
ks.
In bringing up technique, I have named the concept that makes literary products directly accessible to a social, and therefore a materialist analysis. At the same time, the concept of technique provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed. And furthermore, this concept of technique contains an indication of the correct determination of the relation between tendency and quality, the question raised at the outset. If, therefore, I stated earlier that the correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality, because it includes its literary tendency, I can now formulate this more precisely by saying that this literary tendency can consist either in progress or in regression in literary technique.
You will certainly approve if I now pass on, with only an appearance of arbitrariness, to very concrete literary conditions. Russian conditions. I should like to direct your attention to Sergei Tretiakov and to the type, defined and embodied by him, of the “operating” writer. This operating writer provides the most tangible example of the functional interdependency that always, and under all conditions, exists between the correct political tendency and progressive literary technique. I admit, he is only one example; I hold others in reserve. Tretiakov distinguishes the operating from the informing writer. His mission is not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively. He defines this mission in the account he gives of his own activity. When, in 1928, at the time of the total collectivization of agriculture, the slogan “Writers to the Kolkhoz !” was proclaimed, Tretiakov went to the “Communist Lighthouse” commune and there, during two lengthy stays, set about the following tasks: calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz [collective farm]; inspecting the reading rooms; creating wall newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper; reporting for Moscow newspapers; introducing radio and mobile movie houses, etc. It is not surprising that the book Commanders of the Field, which Tretiakov wrote following these stays, is said to have had considerable influence on the further development of collective agriculture.
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