Another Reading Update

Brecht--Die Dreigroeschenoper (I cannot resist a good untranslated title in a semi-recognizable foreign language. Sorry.)

Plays make up a significant portion of the readings on my list, quite possibly 20% or 25%. I am not much of a theatergoer, especially when it comes to anything serious, and at this point almost probably will never become one. I have in the first place some slight jealousy and irritation issues when confronted at close range with actors and theater people generally, mainly because they don't recognize me as one of their kind, i.e. a fellow artist and intellectual--not that anyone else does either, but in the privacy of home or a large library one is not confronted with the contrast between himself and real people so starkly. In small theaters with fairly high status actors and an audience that one can presume to be rich, educated, expensively and carefully dressed, and to have some claim of current possession of the literary canon, such as the Folger in Washington, the almost pornographic physical and intimacy and intellectual competition of the whole environment is too much for me. The one time I was there some years ago, ostensibly to see Romeo and Juliet I was possessed throughout the performance with a strong desire to run up on the stage and yell "Look at me! Look at me! I am serious! I have read Shakespeare! I have read a lot of books! I have a high IQ too!" Of course I restrained myself, but I am always much less agitated when the show is finally over and I am safely ensconed at the bar with a mug of beer and a plate of fries and don't have to pay attention to other people any longer.

My issues with actual theater attendance aside however, I generally enjoy reading plays--most of the older ones were originally intended to be entertainments after all--though having been raised, so to speak, on the triple decker novel, the comparatively skeletal frame and scope, the brevity and swiftness of most plays when read is something I have never quite adjusted to, and as a result I often have especial trouble remembering the details and plots of them. They do not, for whatever reason, impress themselves much upon my mind, except perhaps after one has read a lot of a certain author or of a certain epoch, and then mainly as a composite of the types.

Bertolt Brecht promised strongly to be an author that I was not going to get the point of, as I am exactly the sort of man that he pointedly set out not to write for. He was moreover born in Germany in 1898, the same year as Jacob Klein and 1 before Leo Strauss, the exact contemporary to numerous other formidable, formidable minds, among whom he stood out as one of the very most important. The circa-1955 blurbs on the dust jacket of my copy of his book are also strong signals that I should probably not be attempting to read this material: "...every other living playwright seems more or less trivial." Whenever they say this you know you are not going to win. Goodness, once the totality of creative talent in the theater world of 1950 with the exception of one figure is established as more or less trivial, that more or less indicts everyone else with any connection to it not involved in a Brecht production as similarly frivolous, including the audiences, for supporting and subsiziding such a cultural desert; and having done this, what in God's name hope is there for the likes of me or one of my non-German speaking, American public school and liberal arts college-bred contemporaries to penetrate through to whatever it is that is so essential in the plays of Bertolt Brecht? The prospects are not very promising. Another blurb assures that "at last, we have Brecht...translated into a language that resembles the Queen's English rather than German-American." Oh my. This also reminds me of another author out of one of my favorite categories of modern literature, the super-serious-white-African-Communist-woman who really detests the United States for being politically unconscionable, shamelessly materialistic and intellectually frivolous, Doris Lessing, who took a moment in The Golden Notebook to ridicule the stupid Americans for turning "Mack the Knife" (which is originally a song from this serious and intellectually demanding play I am gradually getting around to talking about, for anybody who might be confused) into a swinging pop song for teenagers to dance to at the malt shop. Personally, I think this was a rare stroke of brilliance on the part of the Americans--would we could do more such stylistic pilfering and watering down of European, or any high culture, Indian, Chinese, whatever, if that is something we have a talent for--but I am both a biased and culturally blinded observer, in this instance.

Now the Threepenny Opera is modeled upon Gay's Beggar's Opera, which I have read once, and which I took, as far as I was able to take it, to be a comedy based on the hilarious idea that the moral codes, behaviors, institutions, etc of the lower orders of society bear in certain broad details resemblances--fleeting ones anyway--to those of more substantial people. While in Gay and 18th-century England the mirror showing us how repulsive we really are is played for laughs, carries little more sting than a light rebuke and seems to assume we could even improve our characters if we weren't so lazy and actually wanted to, in Brecht and Weimar Germany the laughs, while still sought, are certainly not meant to be light, the rebukes are meant to reverberate harshly through the mind of a sentient being at least, and the attitude regarding people's abilities to substantially improve their vile characters is pessimistic at best. Given the time and the place it is easy to say that such an assessment of the human condition was prescient and necessary. The whole Zeitgeist of that generation of Germans is exceedingly difficult to get one's mind past when dealing with the products of its intellectuals, even those many who emigrated and denounced Nazism and earned for themselves a place of some honor in history. I think the problem is that the general darkness that pervaded that generation's outlook upon everything, however rightly, was of an intensity that is not really common in human cultural history, yet because these people were so influential both in Europe and in the United States where so many took positions in universities and wrote for publications and directed research and set the intellectual tone in many of these for 30 years, many smart people have become convinced that this is the attitude towards humanity and its prospects that a serious person has to take, at least in the modern world, as long as certain conditions and problems persist. I don't think this is quite right; but I have a lot of diffidence when it comes to try to argue the point.

Much of this is because the German emigres were so technically and incontestably smart. When they arrived in the United States, whether they went to Hollywood or New York or Los Alamos or the University of Chicago, the natives did not have much to offer them apart from money and security, towards which many of the emigres appear to have had mixed and/or guilty feelings towards to boot, and they (the natives) seemed to have been able to offer little resistance to the newcomers' intellectual force overwhelming their own whenever representatives of the two groups collided. While this had indisputably many positive effects upon the quality of learning and culture available in America, I have always had a very ambivalent relationship to such of the emigres as survived to my own day that I encountered, and especially with those of their chosen proteges. I do not quite want to say that I have a different 'spirit', or that I have a 'more' Anglo-Saxon/Irish sort of intellect, but I do distrust the German method of categorizing and systematizing their ideas of truth, which seem to have a stronger inclination to obliterate such as are even slightly incompatible with them.

In doing some research on Brecht I discovered that he was a big proponent of the idea of "Epic Theatre" in which the ideas of the play would be more important than the story being acted out and the individual characters portrayed. Either there is more to it than this that I missed or he was extremely successful in his goal, because I have certain had it drummed into my skull for 30 years that anything serious is always about ideas first and the story and characters are handy conventions in which to dress them. It had not occurred to me that people may not have consciously subordinated plot and characterization to greater themes on a broad until the 1920s, but I suppose it is plausible.

My genuinely excellent edition of Brecht's plays has 11 pages of notes on the Threepenny Opera written as far as I can tell by the author himself under such headings as "The Reading of Dramas", "Tips for Actors", and so forth. He is an exceedingly mistrustful author. The bourgeois of course deservedly take the biggest beating, but this extends to the theater itself, as a bourgeois institution serving bourgeois audiences and bourgeois economic interests. He sees the theater as resisting his attempts to transform it, which I suppose it would do; impatience with the stubbornness and disgraceful behholdenness to the bourgeois of the institutions one is attempting to transform however is a common complaint in all the arts during that period. The great sin of the bourgeois and the art that is made for him, as far as I can make out, is that he prefers to be flattered with lies than to be confronted with truth, and the fascinating thing of course is that we are to suppose this is unique to the bourgeois, and that truth and constant moral self-criticism are subjects of intense concern to all people who have not been infected with this state. The crux of the argument I suppose is that the bourgeois is so compromised that he is neither morally good nor morally free, but unlike the slave or the wretched pickpocket, he frequently imagines himself to be both, which is disgusting to a real artist or philosopher, or any other uncompromised human being. This is probably true, but I don't think Brecht is the right artist to convince me of it thoroughly.

I have more to review, butI will put them on another posting.