Brecht Collected Plays: 7: Visions of Simone Machard; Schweyk in the Second World War; Caucasian Chalk Circle; Duchess of Malfi (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  Described as ‘The Chalk Circle. A play in five acts from the Chinese, by Klabund’, the text was published the same year (by J. M. Spaeth Verlag, Berlin). In fact it and its heroine the prostitute Haitang have a good deal more in common with The Good Person of Szechwan than with The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and almost certainly helped also to inspire the former play, which was already written by the time of Brecht’s arrival in the U.S. Even the basic situation of the chalk circle differs from Brecht’s version, in that the heroine (who naturally wins the test) is the biological mother and the false claimant a stepmother, while the symbolism of the circle is already underlined by Haitang and her princely lover in the first Act, as he draws one in white on a black wall, to represent the vaulted sky and the uniting of two hearts:

  HAITANG: Whatever lies outside this circle is nothing. Whatever lies inside this circle is everything. How are everything and nothing linked? In the circle that turns and moves (drawing spokes in the circle)—in the wheel that rolls …

  The test is conducted twice, first by the corrupt judge Tschutschu in Act 3, when Haitang loses, then again by her old lover, now become emperor, in Act 5. ‘Take a piece of chalk’, says the emperor to his master of ceremonies:

  draw a circle here on the ground before my throne, put the boy in the circle.

  MASTER OF CEREMONIES: It has been done.

  EMPEROR: And now, both you women,

  Try to draw the boy out of the circle

  At the same time. One of you take his left arm,

  The other his right. It is certain

  The right mother will have the right strength

  To draw the boy out of the circle to herself.

  The women do as he says. Haitang grips the boy gently; Mrs Ma tugs him brutally to her side. It is clear that this person indicating Haitang cannot be the mother. Otherwise she would have managed to draw the boy out of the circle. Let the women repeat the experiment. Mrs Ma once again pulls the boy to her side. Haitang, I see that you do not make the slightest effort to draw the boy out of the circle to you. What’s the meaning of that?

  Haitang explains that, having brought the child up, she knows that his arms are too delicate to stand tugging:

  If the only way I can get my child is by pulling off his arms, then let somebody who has never known a mother’s sufferings for her child pull him out of the circle.

  EMPEROR standing up: Behold the mighty power locked in the chalk circle! This woman indicating Mrs Ma aimed to get control of all Mr Ma’s fortune and to that end seized the child. Now that the real mother has been acknowledged it will be possible to find the real murderer …

  for Mrs Ma had murdered their joint husband and accused Haitang of the crime. She now confesses, and together with the judge is pardoned by Haitang, who is left alone with her son and her imperial lover as the curtain falls.

  At the time this slightly sugary play provoked Brecht to parody it, making Jackie Pall in The Elephant Calf of 1926 (Vol. 2 of the Collected Plays) pull his mother out of a ‘doubtless most incompetently drawn circle’ in order to prove contrariwise that he, the elephant child, is her son or alternatively her daughter. It also stimulated Friedrich Wolf to write the counterplay Tai-yang erwacht, originally to be called Haitang wakes up. Roughly twelve years later, however, when Brecht was living in Svendborg, he took up the theme again and must have wondered whether to give it a Chinese or a European setting. The title The Odense Chalk Circle (Odense being the principal city of Fünen Island, where Svendborg is situated) seems to suggest the latter, but only a few fragmentary notes under this heading are left, e.g.:

  the governor who has to act like a poor man. he pretends to eat too crudely and is sharply rebuked.

  —and:

  the gentry are scared because the governor has been driven out. they flee, fully expecting the peasantry to institute a bloodbath.

  but the peasants don’t come and there is no bloodbath.

  by an oversight the judge appointed by the rebels is confirmed by the governor.

  he pronounces judgement in the case of the two mothers.

  There was to be a character called Hieronymus Dan, while another note suggests accompaniment by ‘old and austere music (fifes, drums, organs)’. There is also however a more coherent scheme headed simply The Chalk Circle, and this is full of Chinese names. It appears to go thus:

  I

  how schao-fan gets to be a judge, he hides a hunted man. this upsets his wedding. the bride’s family withdraws.

  the peasants propose schao-fan for the judge’s post. laughter all round.

  the governor returns to power and sends a messenger appointing a judge: schao-fan.

  the wedding takes place. ([what] was taken out is brought back in before the scene starts, silently or to a song: love is an irresistible force, etc.) the new judge gives judgement in a long lawsuit between the village and the bride’s family. the judge finds for the village by sticking to the letter of the law.

  II

  the judge’s pranks. he gets drunk in a case involving property and makes everything depend on what shape one of the litigants’ nose is, etc.

  he is put in gaol. his house is destroyed as if by a tornado.

  the maid’s wanderings with the child. through the dangers of the blizzard, through the worse dangers of the slums.

  she rejects good food for the child and exposes it to hunger.

  III

  the mother denies the child. by acknowledging him she would be acknowledging that she is the judge’s wife.

  the maid adopts it, mutely, behind her own back, like a jackdaw whose thieving is hereditary.

  IV

  the judge gets his post back by mistake.

  he bribes witnesses, he fails to examine them once bribed, he muddles everything, proposes marriage to a lady witness in open court and so on.

  Section III was later shifted to precede Section 1.

  A single sample of the dialogue (BBA 128/05-06) shows how Brecht’s interest was already centring on the disreputable judge, and goes on to outline a ‘second part’ in which the heroine is again called Haitang:

  PEOPLE: he’s a very bad judge. he breaks the law—no, he’s never read it—ay, it was pure accident he got the job. he used to be a rice planter. one night an old man broke into his paddy-fields and begged him to have mercy: soldiers were after him. tao schun was sorry for him and hid him in his hut under some old baskets. that old man was the governor of the province, and after the foiling of the plot against him that night thanks to his flight and the planter’s sympathy he quickly smote down his enemies. he had the planter trained and made him a judge. but tao schun was a great disappointment to him. he said quite openly in a bar that it just hadn’t occurred to him to ask the old man what level of society he came from. and so he had treated him as a fugitive not as a governor. but for that he’d no doubt have handed him over to the soldiers. he regretted having saved one of the oppressors. ‘for some time they’ve only been giving cases to tao schun when the senior judge is ill, like today.

  PARTY WAITING jump up appalled: is it really tao schun on the bench today? if so we must have an adjournment. to one another: he won’t accept a thing. we’re sunk.

  PARTY OPPOSITE: tao schun’s in charge! hear that? it’s all up, then. he won’t accept a thing.

  PARTY OF THE FIRST PART: hey, you! we’ve just been told one of our family’s seriously ill. so we’d like to go home. would it make any difference to you if we held the case some other day? in an undertone: you dirty lot of vultures!

  PARTY OF THE SECOND PART: it’s all the same to us so long as the truth comes out.

  THE FIRST FAMILY: you’re right there. better lose our field tomorrow than today. let’s go. exeunt.

  THE FAMILY OPPOSITE as they leave: those crooks. wait till judge tai’s recovered, that’ll put paid to their claims even if it costs us 50 taels.

  THE JUDGE, TAO SCHUN sings:

  the judge is unwell, his thumb’s feeling sore—


  he pretends to count money

  —so today there’s a healthier look to the law.

  but what d’you imagine a verdict is for?

  eat your fill; then you’ll stink all the more.

  The few notes headed ‘second part’ follow:

  haitang is caught in the civil war. together with the child, she is forced to take risks for the sake of the cause. she exposes the child to many dangers. their journey through the blizzard. cheerful song. their journey through the slums. (more dangerous.)

  L:

  in face of a snowstorm

  i once was full of courage

  but in face of people

  i now am cowardly.

  the snowstorm will not destroy us.

  the earthquake is not avid for us.

  but the coal merchant wants money

  and the shipowner must be paid for the voyage.

  Even before leaving Denmark however Brecht had begun work on The Good Person of Szechwan, for which this last ‘aria’ could easily have been written, and around the same time he seems to have set aside the oriental version of the story and started to see the judge figure in German garb. Thus Mother Courage, in the 1939 script of that play, recalls a corrupt judge in Franconia who sounds very like him (Collected Plays, Vol. 5) while the following year Brecht wrote the short story ‘The Augsburg Chalk Circle’ which appeared in the June 1941 issue of the Moscow Internationale Literatur and later in Collected Short Stories. This develops the theme a lot further in the direction of our play, at the same time shifting it bodily to Brecht’s own home town and the period of the Thirty Years War. Here the child’s mother, fleeing before the invading Catholics, spends too long packing her clothes and runs off without it. Instead Anna the maid takes charge, watching by it much as does Grusha at the end of scene 2:

  When she had spent some time, an hour perhaps, watching how the child breathed and sucked at its little fist, she realized that she had sat too long and seen too much to be able to leave without the child. Clumsily she stood up, wrapped it in its linen coverlet, took it on her arm and went out of the courtyard with it, looking shyly around like someone with a bad conscience, a thief [cf. p. 165].

  She takes it off to her brother’s in the country; he then makes her marry a dying cottager with the same results as in the eventual play. When the child’s mother arrives ‘several years’ later and removes it she sues for her boy’s return. The judge is one Ignaz Dollinger, who is described as ‘a short but extremely meaty old man’, famous for ‘his homely hearings, with their cutting remarks and proverbs’ and accordingly ‘praised by the lower orders in a lengthy ballad’. ‘Is he yours?’ he bellows at her, accusing her of being after the dead father’s property. ‘Yes’, she replies, ‘… If I can just keep him till he knows all the words. He only knows seven’ (cf. p. 235). So he hears the case, concludes that both mothers are lying, and makes the test of the chalk circle, in which Anna lets the boy go, so that he is jerked to his mother’s side.

  Old Dollinger got to his feet.

  ‘And that shows us’, he announced in a loud voice, ‘who the right mother is. Take the child away from that slut. She’d tear him cold-bloodedly in two.’

  Three or four years later, when Jules Leventhal commissioned him to write the play for Broadway (which may seem inconsistent with his professed ‘revulsion’ but was not wholly so), the main structure and principal characters were ready in Brecht’s mind, and the only remaining problems were setting and framework: what period and country to pick for it and how to relate it to the present day. The choice of medieval Georgia and of a contemporary Soviet framework must already have been made before he left New York in mid-March 1944 to return to Santa Monica and work on the script, for there is no sign of hesitation. Certainly the resulting first script is written with great sureness and an unusual scarcity of amendments and afterthoughts, while there are far fewer drafts and alternative versions than for some of the less complex or elaborately developed plays. The dating of the framework was to change; in the first script the prologue is set in 1934, without reference to the war. So were most of the names of the characters, which started by being mainly Russian and were Georgianized later; thus Grusha Vachnadze was originally Katya Grusha (or at one point Katya Kirshon), her soldier Volodya Surki, her brother Piotr and the lesser characters Petrov Petrovitch, Maxim Maximovitch and the like, while the princes were Boyars and Grusinia Georgia throughout.

  Just when the various alterations were made is impossible to say. A journal entry of 8 May shows that Brecht was held up for a fortnight while he evolved social reasons for the judge’s shabby eccentricities, grounding these ultimately in

  his disappointment that the fall of the old rulers had not introduced a new era but merely an era of new ones. hence he goes on practising bourgeois justice, but in a disreputable, sabotaged version which has been made to serve the total self-interest of the judge. this explanation of course mustn’t modify what i had in mind, and is for instance to be no excuse for azdak.

  But this hitch is not reflected in the script. Nor, other than very marginally, is the remodelling of the heroine which another entry of 8 August says has taken him three weeks; he may have found Katya in the first script ‘nicer’ and not enough like Brueghel’s Dulle Griet (who is glued on the title-pages of the three earliest scripts), but he does not seem to have altered her much, or provided those practical motives for her goodness which Feuchtwanger (who thought her ‘too holy’) had asked for. Altogether the changes to his first conception were surprisingly slight.

  The first script bears a note by Brecht, ‘first version’ and is dated ‘Santa Monica 5.6.44’, the day when he posted it off to Luise Rainer. By August James and Tania Stern had embarked on a rough translation and Auden was prepared to do the verse. Brecht’s second script, which contains the new version of the prologue and an ad lib epilogue, is similarly headed ‘second version’; it must have been finished early in September, and consists very largely of carbons of the first, with some retyped pages. Its title-page gives the names of Eisler and Winge as ‘collaborators’ as well as that of [Ruth] Berlau who figures alone in the published version; John Hans Winge was an Austrian who had been working in a Los Angeles factory. Both scripts were bound for Brecht, and he seems to have made his amendments, e.g. of names, indifferently in one or the other. These were then taken into a third, undated script of 1944, which would appear to be the version photographed and put into the New York Public Library by Ruth Berlau early in 1945. Like the first two, it was typed by Brecht, but this time using upper- and lower-case letters. The play was first actually published in English, not in the Sterns’ version, with Auden’s lyrics, but in a new translation by Eric and Maja Bentley which appeared as one of Two Parables for the Theatre in 1948. The first German publication was in the special Brecht issue of Sinn und Form (Potsdam) the following year. This in turn was amended by Brecht for publication in the Versuche series in 1954.

  2. SCENE-BY-SCENE ACCOUNT

  The following are scene-by-scene notes on the main differences:

  1. The Struggle for the Valley

  In all three scripts and the Sinn und Form version this was called ‘Prologue’, and perhaps as a result many critics and directors have taken it as not forming an integral part of the play. However, as Brecht pointed out in his letter to his publisher Suhrkamp (p. 304), it forms the beginning of the first script and, though altered, was never thereafter omitted. In that first version, which sets the episode on Sunday, 7 June 1934, there are no references to war damage and the scene is nearly two pages shorter. We reproduce it in full on pp. 324-28. Another early note, which may even have preceded it, specifies:

  scene: in the background a school with posters and a soviet flag. a few dusty trees.

  meeting: the folklore not to be overdone. those present are in their sunday best, no traditional costumes. among them a soldier on leave. a woman has a child on her lap. some of the men have very short haircuts.

&n
bsp; the singer wears european garb. very comfortable; like all suits, his is somewhat crumpled. his musicians wear russian shirts; one of them has a georgian cap.

  the tone of the discussion is very relaxed; a general delight in argument is evident. now and again one of the young people shoots a paper dart at a girl opposite and is told to shut up.

  Within three months the scene had been rewritten virtually in its final form. Only its ending was different, being taken from the first version, from its last stage direction (‘While they begin to move off’, etc.) to the Voice’s closing announcement. This was altered in 1954, after the Sinn und Form publication. Another minor point involved the switching of the names of the two collective farms, which was done on the second script but inadvertently overlooked in the Sinn und Form version. Here Hanns Eisler performed what he ironically called ‘one of my great services to German literature’ by telling Brecht that, given the insulting use of the term ‘goat’ for a woman in Germany (cf. the English ‘cow’), he should not identify a goat farm with the name of Rosa Luxemburg.