THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409240153
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY STAN FEDYSZYN
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
BRECHT & COMPANY
Sex, Politics, and the Makings of the Modern Drama
JOHN FUEGI
Grove Press. 732 pp. $32.50.
Avant-garde theater buffs, take cover! An icon is about to explode! No less an authority than director Peter Brook names Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) the central force in 20th century drama and theater (drama being the text and theater being the activity that brings it to life). And John Fuegi, film producer, University of Maryland literature professor and longtime Brecht aficionado, agrees that Brecht was the outstanding talent of his generation.
But he also accuses him in Brecht & Company: Sex, Politics, and the Makings of the Modern Drama of being a monstrous manipulator, cheat, satyriasist, misogynist and, worst of all to his memory, a plagiarist and literary thief.
This from the longtime leader of the International Brecht Society!
Fuegi's work is meticulously researched. It is so crammed with chronology that it seems to have been excerpted from Brecht's diary, had he bothered to keep one. The early chapters detail Eugen Brecht's - he adopted the sobriquet Bertolt as his career began to develop - youth as the cause of his propensity for the vulgar and perverse.
From his earliest days in Munich, Brecht admired and emulated Frank Wedekind, whose play ``The Awakening of Spring'' may be the most sexually explicit one prior to the 1960s. Brecht established a reputation for writing cynical poetry, frequenting the off-color transsexual bars of pre-WWII Germany, siring children and hustling better writers to rework his scribblings into salable commodities.
To understand Brecht, one must recognize his need to dominate everyone in his cosmos, the depths to which he stooped to maintain control and his amoral willingness to exploit the domination. He was one of the great egotists of all time.
The meat of the book deals with Brecht's relationships with a series of women who are credited with writing major portions (or all) of his most notable plays. Coincidentally, they all died tragically.
Elizabeth Hauptmann, half-English and half-German, met him in 1920. Fuegi credits her with being indispensable to the creation of ``Baal,'' Brecht's Rimbaudian manifesto to degeneracy. Eventually ``Baal'' became a pastiche of verses, songs, dialogues, etc., that was first produced with assistance from the Rhinehart Theatre. More important is the fact that Hauptmann is credited with 85 percent of ``The Threepenny Opera,'' which earned extraordinary royalties in the West with nary a Grosze going to Hauptmann. Fuegi also asserts that ``St. Joan of the Stockyards'' was entirely written by Hauptmann. She was soon replaced in bed and at typewriter by Ruth Berlau, who ended her days as an alcoholic victim of cancer.
Berlau, a Swedish actress, is credited with a major role in the creation of ``The Caucasian Chalk Circle'' and ``Visions of Simone Machard.'' She subsequently helped Brecht get his plays published and performed. Her contributions have never been recognized by East Germany; and Fuegi accuses East German authorities of collusion in hiding them. After shock treatments for depression, she died in a nursing home fire.
Hella Wuolijoki, a Finnish writer, subsequently provided Brecht with her bed and important material for ``Work Diary.'' After being condemned to death for assisting the Communists during WWII, Wuolijoki had her sentence commuted, and she followed Brecht to the United States to try to collect her overdue royalties.
The most important and longest lasting contributor was Margarete Steffin. Fuegi claims that ``Mother Courage and Her Children'' and ``The Good Woman of Setzuan'' were largely her creations, Brecht being supposedly incapable of writing believable female characters. Her death in 1941, while Brecht was in California, coincidentally marked the beginning of the end of his career as a playwright.
Brecht & Company is a marvelous profile of one of the most original scoundrels of the century. Never once does the author question Brecht's abilities as producer-director and impresario. Brecht created the energy and the ambience that pulled the theater mewling and puking out of the tear-stained realistic paradigm that had not only outlived its value but had been antiquated by film and television.
But questioning whether Brecht wrote Brecht's plays is as counterproductive as arguing the same about Shakespeare's. The bottom line is that Brecht made them happen. It is improbable that anyone who was not a two-faced, double-dealing, egocentric scoundrel could have pulled off the revolution. Through the centuries artists have always had a parasitic side that included behavior a few standard deviations off the norm. That Brecht chose to feed off women, whose creative as well as sexual talents augmented his own, should be added to his credit. Few artists are that practical. MEMO: Stan Fedyszyn is the former artistic director of the Norfolk Theater
Center. by CNB