Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Good Person of Szechwan; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  Puntila himself was to marry ‘Aunt Hanna’, the owner of the house where he arrives drunk early in the story (and where he also confronts his village ‘fiancées’).

  How far the play The Sawdust Princess was complete when Brecht first saw it is not entirely clear. Some commentators think that it was, but Brecht himself referred to it as a draft and in his journal (entry for September 2) describes it thus:

  hw’s half-finished play is a comedy, a conversation piece. (puntila sober is puntila drunk plus a hangover, hence in a bad temper, the stereotype of a drinker. his chauffeur is a gentleman who had applied for the chauffeur’s job after having seen a photograph of puntila’s daughter, etc.) but there is also a film of hers which yields some useful epic elements (the mountain climb and the trip for legal alcohol). it is my job to bring out the underlying farce, dismantle the psychologically-orientated conversations, make room for opinions and for stories from finnish popular life, find scenic terms for the master/servant antithesis, and restore the poetry and comedy proper to this theme.

  This was not, of course, the job as Hella Wuolijoki herself saw it, but in Brecht’s view she was handicapped by a hopelessly conventional dramatic technique. A fortnight before, he had already tried to give her an idea of ‘non-Aristotelian’ dramaturgy while discussing a plan of hers to write a play about the early Finnish nationalist J. V. Snellman, a work which she never completed. Now he took over The Sawdust Princess and within three weeks had turned it into something very different from what he had found.

  He started with a German translation which Wuolijoki, an excellent linguist, dictated to Margarete Steffin. From this orthodox four-act play he took the characters of Puntila, Eva (the Sawdust Princess of the title), the Attache, the doctor, Fina the maid, and all the village women apart from the chemist’s assistant. Initially he also took Kalle the pseudo-chauffeur, whom he turned into a genuine chauffeur and later renamed Matti, while from the treatment he took Aunt Hanna, first turning her into Puntila’s housekeeper, then banishing her from the play altogether except in the shadowy form of the unseen Mrs Klinckmann. The setting and the Swedish-style place names – Tavastland or Häne in southwest Finland, Kurgela, Lammi, Tammerfors (Tampere), Mount Hatelma (Hattelmala near Tavasthus) and so on – are likewise taken from Wuolijoki, Kurgela indeed being the nearest sizeable town to her own Marlebáck estate.

  A succession of plans shows Brecht isolating the crucial incidents in her story, switching them and building on them until he had the framework of a ten-scene play. One of the earliest gives Puntila the aristocratic ‘Von’ and goes thus:

  1. Mr von P. gets engaged to the churchgoers.

  2. The league of Mr von P.’s fiancées.

  3. Playing with fire (those who pretend to be in love fall in love).

  4. Driving out the materialists.

  5. Mr von P. sits in judgement.

  6.

  7. Climbing the mountain.

  8. Mr von P.’s funeral speech.

  Thereafter (it would seem) two new scenes were added at the start (the first being described as ‘gethsemane/a chauffeur with dignity/the engagement’), while the centre of the play was left undetermined. According as to whether Puntila was to be mainly drunk or sober, Brecht now started marking the scenes ‘d’ or ‘s’ – that is, in German ‘b’ or ‘n’, b(esoffen) or n(üchtern). Kalle’s new role became clearer and something like the final play began to take shape:

  1. puntila finds a human being and hires him as his chauffeur (d).

  2.

  3. puntila finds legal alcohol and gets engaged to the early risers. (d).

  4. p engages his daughter to a human being/in the sauna/the league of mr von p’s fiancées/kalle and eva conduct a test. (d and s).

  5. p engages his daughter to an attaché/the attache is uncongenial to him/k refuses to marry eva/puntila rejects her. (s and d).

  6. judgement on kalle/kalle says goodbye to e/the mountain climb.

  7. k leaves p and makes a speech about him.

  Next the two main events of this scene 4, the engagement and the league of fiancées, are separated, the former being shifted to a separate scene immediately before or after scene 5. One scheme introduces ‘p gets engaged to his housekeeper’ as the theme of the last scene but one. Finally there is a characteristic big working plan in columns, such as Brecht used to pin up before starting to write in earnest:

  1. p finds a human being.

  2. p and his daughter.

  3. p gets engaged to the early risers.

  4. p engages his daughter to an attache.

  5. p at the hiring market.

  6. kalle goes on strike.

  7. the league of p’s fiancées.

  8. p engages his daughter to a human being.

  9. p sits in judgement and climbs mount hatelma.

  10. kalle turns his back on p.

  Though two further scenes were to be added, initially as 7a and 8a, while 9 and 10 became run together, the above is in effect the play as Brecht first wrote it. He also kept before him three examples of what he called ‘Puntila’s way of speaking’ (the passage starting ‘I’d be ashamed’, p. 254), ‘Kalle’s way of speaking’ (a passage in scene 6 starting ‘Your father’s acting all for your best’, p. 263), and ‘the gentry’s way of speaking’ (the judge’s passage in the same scene starting ‘All those paternity cases’, p. 259). Once these tones of voice had been fixed ‘the work went very smoothly,’ he noted, even though the tone was not original:

  it is hasek’s way of speaking in schweik, as already used by me in courage. the plan for the scenes was quickly settled. their length was predetermined and fairly closely kept to. the visit to the hiring fair was an afterthought; it took place a few days ago near here.

  So he wrote in his journal on September 19, the day when he had finished the play and handed it to Hella Wuolijoki to read.

  At first her reactions were far from favourable. ‘She seems extremely alarmed’, says a journal entry five days later:

  it is undramatic, unfunny, etc. all the characters speak alike, not differently as they do in real life and in hw’s plays. passages like the conversation between judge and lawyer in the kitchen are boring (something the finns are not unused to) and do nothing to further the plot. Kalle is not a finnish chauffeur. the landowner’s daughter cannot attempt to borrow money from the chauffeur (but can presumably attempt to marry him, as in hw’s play): it’s all so epic as to be undramatic.

  Brecht tried to encourage her, not least because she still had to produce a Finnish text for submission to the jury. Though she accepted something of what he said,

  the point i could not get across was that my scenes’ gait and garb corresponded to the gait and garb of puntila himself, with all his aimlessness, looseness, his detours and delays, his repetitions and improprieties. she wants to bring on the women of kurgela earlier, immediately they have been invited, so as to make sure the audience has not forgotten them. she fails to see the beauty of having them virtually forgotten, not only by the audience but by puntila too, then making them pop up long after the morning of the invitation.

  None the less she did embark on the translation, and only ten days later seemed very happy about the whole undertaking. She told Brecht (who again noted it in his journal) that the play was full of riches and Puntila himself on the way to becoming ‘a national figure’.

  In the Finnish version published in 1946 (by Tammi of Helsinki) the name Puntila is changed to Iso-Heikkilä and the title of the play to The Landowner Iso-Heikkilä and His Servant Kalle, subtitled ‘A comic tale of Tavastland drunkenness in nine scenes’ by Hella Wuolijoki and Bertolt Brecht. An introductory note stresses this aspect:

  Iso-Heikkilä’s intoxication is in the nature of a divine dionysiac drunkenness. As a steadfast man of Tavastland, he never falters – an inner radiance like the brightness of early morning and an always human kindness and strength shine forth from his face. Alcohol is only the magic potion which releases all the
sources of kindness in the man, the landowner, Iso-Heikkilä.

  ‘The structure,’ she wrote, ‘is entirely Brecht’s. The idea of including epic tales in the scenes with the women was Brecht’s. The stories themselves are entirely mine.’ The change of name apart, this version is very close to Brecht’s own first typescript dated ‘2.9.40–19.9.40 (Marlebäck)’, though the latter also seems to include some later amendments. Then entitled simply Puntila, it was retyped by Margarete Steffin and given its final title; mimeographed copies were thereafter made and sent out by Reiss of Basel. Up to this point there were no songs embodied in the play, though those of Red Surkkala and Emma have been appended to the retyped copy, the former as an alternative to ‘The wolf asked the rooster’ (pp. 417–18 below). Then it was revised again after the Zurich première in 1948, when changes were made for Brecht’s own production with Erich Engel for the Berliner Ensemble, the Puntila Song being written as late as 1949. Around that time the Munich publisher Kurt Desch acquired the stage rights, but at first he too simply duplicated the nine-scene version, which was described as ‘after Hella Wuolijoki’s stories’ with no mention of her play; she is not named as co-author in any of the German texts, though Brecht in 1949 told Desch that she was to get half the royalties.

  By 1950, when Suhrkamp first published the text (as Versuche 10), the play had expanded from the nine scenes of the early versions – or ten in those scripts where the epilogue was counted separately – to the present twelve. From the first, however, it included the scene with the hiring fair which had only figured in the last of the plans. The character of Surkkala introduced there was subsequently built up, being alluded to at various points and making a notable appearance also in scene 11. Like the village women’s accounts of their lives in scene 3, their ‘Finnish tales’ in scene 8 were an evident afterthought on Brecht’s first script, those now given to Emma being omitted from the 1946 Finnish version, possibly because of the censorship. As Aunt Hanna’s role diminished from landowner to housekeeper (shedding the ‘Aunt’) and finally to nothing at all, around the end of the 1940s the shadowy Mrs Klinckmann was introduced to perform some of her original functions, and various references to Puntila’s marrying her or selling the forest worked in. Meanwhile in the joint Finnish version Hella Wuolijoki had given the Attache an uncle to be the owner of Kurgela and speak some of the lines now given to the lawyer. The Kurgela location still survives in the play, even though without the aunt or uncle most of its raison d‘être disappeared, its main bath-hut episode being shifted to Puntila Hall and run together with the sobering-up operation to form the present scene 5. Finally there was a change of balance in the relationship between Eva and Matti (Kalle), which Wuolijoki seems to have wanted still to treat as a conventional love story destined for a happy ending (see the last scene of the 1946 Finnish version). Something of her interpretation can be detected even in the first Brecht scripts (as in the detailed account of scene 9 below), a greater element of ambiguity and coolness being introduced later. Throughout, the unchanging pillars of the play were the first half of scene 1, scene 3, the bath-hut episode in scene 5, Matti’s dialogue with Eva in scene 6, scenes 7 and 9, and the mountain-climbing episode in scene 11.

  The detailed notes which follow are based on comparison of Brecht’s first script (1940), the fair copy (1940–41), the joint Wuolijoki-Brecht version (published 1946), the Versuche text (1950), and the final text as we have it. Changes made for the Zurich production of 1948 are separately dealt with in Brecht’s own note on pp. 385–9.

  2. SCENE-BY-SCENE ACCOUNT

  Cast

  The first script includes the housekeeper Hanna and a doctor, has a peasant woman in lieu of Emma, and omits Surkkala and his children. The chauffeur is still Kalle, but becomes Matti on the fair copy. In the Wuolijoki-Brecht version of 1946 (which we will call the W-B version) Puntila is Johannes Iso-Heikkilä and his housekeeper is called Alina. There is an ‘Agronomist Kurgela, a relative of Iso-Heikkilä’s, owner of the Kurgela estate’, while the attache is ‘Ilmari Silakkala, Kurgela’s nephew, a foreign ministry official’. A note to the W-B version says: ‘This all took place when Tavastland was still a cheerful place without a single war refugee.’

  Prologue

  In the first script this is spoken by Kalle and omits eight lines in the middle. The W-B version has it delivered before the curtain by the whole cast and considerably alters the general sense. This is to the effect that a bad time can be expected in Finland, but one has to be able to laugh all the same. So the audience is invited to appreciate human character and take part in the wild excursions of master and man: never mind if the humour is broad and the element of mockery strong; the actors’ work is only play. ‘This drama was written in praise of Tavastland and its people.’

  In the 1950 text the opening couplet went ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the times are bad / When worry’s sane and not to worry mad.’ The present, slightly more optimistic version first appeared in 1952.

  Scene 1

  Brecht’s original idea, which he amended in the first script, was to set the scene in a village tavern, with a landlord rather than a waiter. In the W-B version Iso-Heikkilä (whom we shall call Puntila for simplicity’s sake) is discovered drinking with Mr Kurgela, at whose house Eva has been awaiting them for the past three days. It is he rather than the judge whom Puntila harangues and tells to ‘Wake up, weakling’ (p. 219), continuing ‘I realise you’re only drinking with me because I’ve got a mortgage on your estate.’ The judge, by his own account, is more abstemious because of his job. The passage about walking on the aquavit is not in the first script or the W-B version; the latter, incidentally, has them drinking cognac.

  After Puntila has described his attacks, ending ‘Look at the lack of consideration I’ve shown you’ (p. 222), Kalle asks what sort of state he is in when signing his highly profitable timber contracts. A state of senseless sobriety, answers Puntila:

  When I’m a human being and having a drink then I only discuss art. If a timber merchant came along asking ‘Can’t you bring the price down?’ I’d say ‘No, you rascal, today I’m only discussing art. Today I like nice people, whoever they are.’

  Matti’s long speech about seeing ghosts, which ensues, underwent some reworking, while after ‘Mr Pappmann yelled and screamed at me’ (p. 222) it originally went on: – saying he’d tell the police about me, and that I should go to the Pferdeberg and have a good look at the piles of Reds who were shot there because it was what they asked for.

  PUNTILA: I’ve got nothing against socialists [originally: Marxists] so long as they drive my tractor…

  and so on as on p. 223.

  In the fair copy the speech ends with a much longer excursion about the Reds before going on to Puntila’s ‘So the only reason you lost your job’ (p. 223) as at present. In the W-B version much of the speech is like a paraphrase of the present text, relating not to Mr Pappmann’s estate but to ‘the agronomist’s at Kortesoja’ where the trouble was not so much the food as the clock-watching and general stinginess. Probably the whole speech derived from one of Hella Wuolijoki’s stories.

  In Puntila’s speech the reference to Mrs Klinckmann (p. 223) is not in the three early versions, which have him saying ‘and I’ve got woods’ rather than ‘I shan’t give up my forest.’ The first script made him allude to the day when he ‘married a papermill and a sawmill’ in explanation of his evident prosperity. All three early versions then cut straight from Matti’s ‘no gulf’ (p. 224) to Puntila’s instruction ‘Here, take my wallet’ (p. 225), the intervening dialogue about Mrs Klinckmann and the sale of the forest only being introduced in the 1950 text. At the end of the scene the W-B version has the two men wake the comatose Kurgela, who says he won’t drive home as he is frightened of Hanna. Puntila responds ‘Down with all Hannas’ and gets Kalle to echo this.

  Scene 2

  The title of this scene on the first script, followed by W-B, was ‘Puntila and his daughter Eva’, on the fair copy ‘Puntil
a is ill-treated’, and in the 1950 text ‘Eva’ as now. Originally Eva was discovered reading, not munching chocolates, and the Attache entered left, not from an upper level.

  The opening allusions to Mrs Klinckmann were added to the first script, which originally started with the Attache’s ‘I have telephoned again.’ His next speech, after ‘it’s got to be father’ (p. 226) was

  ATTACHE: Regrettable, yes.

  EVA: Aunt Hanna is in such a bad mood. Imagine Father leading Uncle Kurgela astray.

  ATTACHE: Aunt Hanna will forgive him. What disturbs me is the scandal.

  – suggesting that, despite her changed role, Hanna is still being seen as part of the Attache’s family. Then on as on p. 226, up to Puntila’s entrance. In all except the final text the latter ‘bursts through the door in his Studebaker [or Buick in the W-B version] with a great crash and drives into the hall’; he also gets into the car again when preparing to leave. The allusions to Mrs Klinckmann on pp. 228–9 were to Aunt Hanna in the W-B version, where after ‘And not getting a woman!’ (p. 229) Puntila tells Eva ‘I’m going, and Kalle’s going to be your fiancé!’

  After Eva’s ‘I won’t have you speaking about your master like that’ (p. 229) both the first script and W-B have Kalle saying that he is on the contrary sticking up for Puntila against Eva. He then asks Eva if she wants to get away, and is told he is being inquisitive. This leads him to discuss inquisitiveness, saying ‘it was pure inquisitiveness that led to the invention of electricity. The Russians were inquisitive too.’ Eva continues ‘And don’t take what he said’ etc., as now, up to the present end of the scene. The W-B version prolongs this by making Eva reply to Kalle’s last remark, ‘You forget you’re a servant.’

  KALLE: After midnight I’m not a servant, I’m a man. (Eva runs off) Don’t be afraid.

  ATTACHÉ (entering): Who are you, fellow?

  KALLE: Mr Iso-Heikkilä’s chauffeur, sir.