INTRODUCTION

Brecht's poetry is remarkable for two things. In a writer who is best known for his plays and his theatre theory, the sheer volume of his output as a poet is surprising. There are some one thousand pages of poetry in volume iv of the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), most of which has been translated in Manheim and Willett's Poems 1913-1956. To this one must add the many poems that have come to light since the publication of the Collected Works in 1967 and have appeared in a supplementary volume and in Gedichteüber die Liebe (Poems About Love). Second, though Brecht maintained that his poetry was a second string to his bow, the quality and range of his verse rank him among the handful of great German poets of the twentieth century. From the beginning, he was an extraordinarily diverse writer, and his poetry reflects this. He began early: if we set aside the juvenilia, Brecht started writing poetry of the highest quality around 1918, when he was only twenty years old. Poetry accompanied all phases of his life and career, right up to his death.

Beyond How it is Samuel Beckett's prose fiction is marked by a series of techniques or strategies brought to bear upon the work in order to perpetuate it. That is, the processes of self-reduction which are formally evident in the late prose texts become the very subject of the texts themselves. This reductionist tendency is not, however, simply a condensing of stylistic detail, but may be observed within the motivation of the prose's content. The late prose texts become increasingly interconnected and self-referential. One text literally generates another. A text may 'defeat' another, in the manner of Enough's opening exhortation, '[a]ll that goes before forget' (GSP, 139), or the torn sheet of writing in As the story was told (AST, 196). Conversely (but amounting to much the same thing) the text may compulsively repeat what has already been written. One might suggest, for example, that Imagination dead imagine evolved, or devolved, from All strange away. Resorting to manuscript materials may support this, but the evidence lies embedded within the texts themselves. The latter text even opens with the title of the former. Again, it is important to emphasize that this is not simply a stylistic resonance, but a re-negotiation of something altogether more solid. It is as if the written has become three dimensional, and must be assimilated from all sides. A return to the text, therefore, will always be a complex repetition, taken at tangents to the original narrative.

Beckett once asserted: 'I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern [...] I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my own works.' Furthermore, whenever directors and critics asked for explanations of Godot, he both side-stepped their questions and revealed his distrust of any kind of exegesis. Two examples will suffice here. To Alan Schneider's question 'Who or what does Godot mean?', he replied, 'If I knew, I would have said so in the play'; when Colin Duckworth suggested that the characters existed in a modern version of Dante's Purgatory, he responded to the 'proofs' offered to him with a dismissive, if generous 'Quite alien to me, but you're welcome.' As is now clearly established, allusions to Dante are present throughout his novels and plays, but Beckett's position remained resolute; he wanted no part in the process of decoding that haunts critical work, preferring to cling to his belief that: 'The key word in my plays is “perhaps”.'

INTRODUCTION: DIALECTICS

The most damaging yet most common error in discussions of Brecht's theory has been to see it as fixed and unchanging, and to view it therefore as either dogmatic, communist-inspired abstraction or revered holy writ. Behind these views lie different perceptions of Marxism and the rights and wrongs of political art. Brecht began to think through the ideas with which he is most commonly associated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His emphasis and terminology changed in these years, as well as subsequently, and many see in his later remarks and essays (especially A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948) a belated acceptance of the conventions of realism and the realities of emotional experience suppressed by the supposed sterile intellectualism of his earlier years. In this way Brecht has often come to be admired as a great writer, particularly in the West, in spite of his theory: as at once reconciled with his own youthful hedonism and with the forms and verities of an art above theory and politics. In fact, this is simply to read Brecht in terms of one favoured aesthetic ideology rather than another, and to compromise his art and ideas as much, though in another direction, as a protective state socialism ever did.

One of Brecht's favourite sayings was: 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Although his essays, poems and plays tell us a great deal about both his aesthetics and his dramatic theories, it is to his practice (and to that of others engaged in performing his work) that we must turn for meaningful insight into Brechtian performance. The aim of this essay is to examine the implications of Brechtian theory and practice for the performer. This will be done by means of a brief discussion of Brecht's ideas on acting, followed by a fuller consideration of the views and experiences of actors who have played major roles in Brecht's plays.

Brecht was first and foremost a man of the theatre, a playwright who also directed, so that one might well suppose that without his sixteen years in exile, during which time the practice of his directorial skills was necessarily limited, the world would have received many fewer words about his dramatic theory. Certainly as a director Brecht seems to have referred very little even to the most famous of his theoretical ideas.

Written between 1941 and 1944 during Brecht's exile in the United States, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is made up of two stories, Grusha's, which starts in Scene 2, and Azdak's, which does not begin until Scene 5, the penultimate scene of the play. These two stories converge in Scene 6 where the problems that had been posed at the outset and highlighted throughout the sequences involving Grusha are resolved, thus bringing the whole action to a more or less 'happy' end. Since happy endings are not characteristic of Brecht's drama, this particular example of harmonious conclusion to anything but harmonious events (and to anything but a transparent argument) has prompted a number of commentators to draw special attention to the 'liberating, life-enhancing quality' of the play or its 'unified understanding'. The scholars who emphasise the joyful, morally affirmative and/or politically optimistic outlook provided by the play's denouement are usually also the ones who believe its two stories are organically linked. Their opinion runs counter to the authoritative view of John Willett and Ralph Manheim for whom the work is an 'awkward combination of two largely unrelated stories', despite which it is nevertheless 'a truly epic work embodying many of Brecht's special ideas, tastes, and talents'.

Bertolt Brecht anno 1928 (as encountered by Elias Canetti): the son of the provincial middle classes with the airs of a big-city proletarian, the enemy of capitalism transfixed by the best and worst of American culture, the pioneer of a revolutionary aesthetic who claimed he wrote only for money, the man who treated fast cars like women and women like cars, and yet contributed through his work to the movement for women's reproductive freedom. In his contradictory character, a character to a large extent self-created, Brecht epitomised the ambivalences of a Germany which, during his first thirty-five years, made the move from the provincial margins of European culture to become the capital of the twentieth century.

In a famous Brecht poem, the question is asked: 'Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?' (Poems, pp. 252-3). Curiously, the question is one that has never seriously been put in the case of Brecht himself. In the essay that follows, I will set forth some preliminary findings on a question that has received remarkably little attention in more than half a century of Brecht studies: who wrote what and what was the cost of that writing to others? Though a few scholars have identified various individual works as written by someone other than Brecht, no scholar has stepped back to ask, if many of the trees were planted by someone else, what of the Brecht forest remains? The question is a vast and inordinately complex one. I will limit my detailed observations to the contributions made by Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973), and will only generally note the strikingly similar cases of Margarete Steffin (1908-41) and Ruth Berlau (1906-74).

Whilst it is easy to see where Beckett's discursive writing begins, it is difficult to see where, or how, it ends. It is possible to outline the loose assemblage of aesthetic theories and philosophical ideas that form their point of departure, but it is extremely difficult to see what happens to these ideas and where they end up. Beckett's two major early essays, 'Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce' (1929) and Proust (1931) are founded upon fairly coherent systems of philosophy and aesthetics. The rest of his pre-war discursive writing, which consists mainly of short literary reviews, can with care be unpicked to reveal developments of the same ideas. After the war, Beckett's critical attention switched to painting. Despite their highly stylized manner and ironic tone, his first two essays are in many respects logical extensions of his pre-war ideas, and they can readily be labelled 'discursive'. Yet these pieces represent the start of a deconstructive process whose logical conclusion is not to be found in recognizably discursive writing at all, but in dramatized dialogue and in the condensed lyricism of the temoignages and later prose.

That fierce endeavour to bring the intellectual and the emotional into focus which characterizes Beckett's work is reflected in his poetry as much as in his theatre and prose. The differences are partly generic, though to a lesser extent than might at first appear, and partly chronological. On the one hand, the generic continuum of preoccupation and manner means that not only must all of Beckett's writings be considered as directly relevant to the understanding of the poetry but also that all Beckett criticism is potentially so. On the other hand, the poetry was produced predominantly in the 1930s, with a further substantial foray in the late 1940s but only occasional ones thereafter, notably in the mid-1970s. Novels and drama made demands on Beckett's creative energies and relegated the forms of verse while simultaneously diverting the essential poetic thrust into other channels. In investigating Beckett's poems, the reader is drawn to explore the limits of poetry.

Beckett could hardly perhaps have more perfectly exemplified Malone's dictum - 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness' - than by choosing both French and English as expressive mediums, and then translating from one to the other. In so strikingly hybridized a context even to speak of 'the English fiction' runs the risk of seeming simply a convenient construct ill-adapted to what is in reality, if not a confused, then at least a potentially confusing state of affairs. But even Beckett's extraordinary writing career began with due deference to the compromise of composing in his mother tongue, so that for all practical purposes there is a kind of logic in reserving 'the English fiction' for the body of work he produced before turning forty. The work in question comprises three novels - Murphy', Watt, and Dream of fair to middling women (the last to surface but the first to be written); three stories - Assumption, A case in a thousand and Echo's bones (none of them strictly part of the corpus as Beckett came to conceive it); a book of prose fiction that is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories - More pricks than kicks; and a scatter of non-fictional items more or less ancillary to his narrative enterprises.

Belacqua, in Beckett's first collection of stories. The throwaway remark, directed towards a briefly appearing Scottish nurse, seems at first glance unimportant. Yet it stands as a prophetic exclamation about the creature's creator, Beckett himself. It also marks the only time in more than sixty years of publication that the word 'bilingual' appears in his writing. The creature was bilingual, like Belacqua, who dreamed in French, and Beckett made them so. Bilingualism does much to distinguish this most distinct of artists. To have two tongues, two modes of speech, two ways of responding to the world, is to be necessarily outside the security of a unified single viewpoint. The more bilingual he became, the less he spoke or wrote of it openly; the less he drew attention to it, the more it shaped his mature vision. Far from being a mere curiosity, bilingualism works at the heart of Beckett's aesthetic activity, releasing waves of innovative energy decade after decade.