Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) (61 page)

There were three friends that buried the fourth,

The mould in his mouth and the dust in his eyes,

And they went south and east and north -

The strong man fights but the sick man dies.

There were three friends that spoke of the dead -

The strong man fights and the sick man dies -

‘And would he were here with us now,’ they said -

‘The sun in our face and the wind in our eyes.’

In 1927 Manky is named in the opening stage direction, but has nothing to say.

Between Shlink’s entry and Jane’s description of the wedding about 130 lines are cut. Shlink announces that Marie has left
Manky, then the landlord appears demanding the rent and complaining of the accordion. Shlink produces the title deeds to some southern cotton fields and hands them to Garga, thus saving the family. A reference by Garga to the ‘chalky light’ is changed in 1927 to ‘a cold light’.

The mention of the Broost timber swindle and of Garga’s intention to go to gaol is new in 1927. The scene ends with Mae’s disappearance and the entry of the waiter with John’s farewell drink.

9.
Coppice
. (VI.)

‘
Low trees with faded brown leaves. Whiteish mist.’
Taken over almost unchanged in 1927, but transposed to precede the foregoing scene. The word ‘jungle’ is used instead of ‘bushes’ where Shlink speaks of Marie being like a [crazy] bitch.

10.
Garga’s Attic
. (Telescoped with 8 to form VII.)

‘
Yellow wallpaper. Watercolour. Evening drips down the panes like dishwater
.’ Most of the rest of VII after the waiter’s exit is from the beginning of this scene: i.e. Marie’s attempt to give John Garga money. Garga’s reappearance, however, and his writing of the note to the newspaper (the police in 1927) are new.

In 1922 Shlink arrives after Marie’s exit, and accuses Garga of raising money in a bar on his cottonfield deeds. In fact Jane was responsible, but Garga is prepared to take the blame and go to prison. He threatens Shlink with a knife; Shlink challenges him to plunge it into his breast.

11.
Bar
. (Transposed and cut to form IX.)

Scene VIII in the 1927 text is entirely new. IX, called ‘Bar in Chinatown’ in 1927, was rechristened, as we now have it, in the 1953
Stücke
volume. In 1922 the setting is not described. The characters named include The Yellow Gentleman (not listed in the 1923 programme) – he tells the G. Wishu story – and Moti Gui (Skinny). Worm is not in this scene.

After the Wishu story the Snub-nosed Man asks, ‘Do you believe in God?’

THE YELLOW GENTLEMAN:
No. By no means. Not in any sense. Absolutely not. I’m an anti-semite.

Otherwise, apart from the absence of Baboon’s opening remarks (new in 1927), the beginning of the scene up to Garga’s entrance is
much as in the final version. Garga, however, appears alone, without witnesses. The arrangement of his dialogues with Jane and with Marie is rather different, though their substance is much the same. Jane, on going off with Baboon, leaves the possibility of returning to Garga open. The Salvation Army man’s attempted suicide is put at the end of the scene.

Garga’s speech about the fight, the ring and the knock-out is new in 1927. Shlink’s entrance at the end of IX is taken over in very shortened form from scene 12 below.

12.
Garga’s Attic
. (A few lines taken into IX; otherwise cut.)

‘
Night. Flying shouts from below. The partition seems to be rocking. A ship.’
Three-quarters of the scene is Shlink and Garga. Garga looks out of the window and sees ‘Black linen hanging on the balcony. No wind.’ Shlink thinks the shouting is getting louder.

GARGA
: They’re looking for you.
Silence
. They’re going to lynch us. They might…They might lynch us. They’ve been lynching today. Niggers strung up like like dirty linen. I heard on the Milwaukee Bridge that they were looking for you, – you.

Shlink again calls it ‘the white howling’.
(His
lynching party, however, is only organized in scene 14.)

They leave together to go ‘down to the marshes’. Then Jane and Baboon appear and occupy the rest of the scene. She is drunk, and he makes her write a note to Garga saying she is coming to him.

13.
In the Jungle
. (Telescoped with scenes 14 and 15, with a good deal of transposition, to form X.)

‘
Brown. Golden
.’ The scene is confined to Shlink and Garga, who begin by speaking of their enmity, somewhat as at the start of X but at greater length. Shlink then gives Garga Jane’s note.

In Engel’s stage scripts the scene is cut and partly incorporated in 15.

14.
Bar in the Jungle
. (Almost entirely cut.)

No description of setting. Characters are The Bear, The Chair, The Ape, The Preacher, joined shortly by Garga and Moti Gui. The first three are not listed in the 1923 programme, but the stage scripts suggests that Chair and Ape are identical with Worm and Baboon.

Bear reads in his paper that a woman’s body has been found in
the marshes. Garga on entering speaks of his enmity with the Malay. Asked if it is a business matter he says, ‘A physical affair. You must help me, because we’ve all been moulded from the same earth. Is this our country or not?’

THE OTHERS
: It’s our country! He shall hang! They’re our trees!

Garga works them up into a lynching party. ‘Are you free?’ he calls after them. ‘Come down into the dark arena. Your knife in your hand, bare in the cold blackness…. Are you free? Your mistress, freedom, is sailing on the ships!’

15.
Hut in the Jungle
. (See 13, Most of X derives from this scene.)

Again Shlink and Garga talking about their fight. ‘Yes,’ says Shlink. ‘You wanted it to end, but I wanted a fight, Garga.’ He offers to lend him a horse to escape on. Then shows him the books of the timber business, where Garga finds as the final entry: ‘Twenty pounds for strangling Jane Garga in the yellow swamps.’ Garga’s speech on p. 173 beginning ‘Shlink, I’ve been listening to you now for three weeks’is new in the 1927 edition, which also adds Garga’s ‘New York’ after Shlink’s ‘Tahiti?’, thus altering the direction of Garga’s Rimbaud quotation. The words ‘in the eyes of God’ are cut where Garga, just before his exit, says that it is not important to be the stronger man.

Marie enters in black gauze. ‘
A whiteish light appears around her
.’ Shlink’s auto-obituary (‘I, Wang Yen’, etc.) on taking the poison is new in 1927. In 1922 the lynching party (the five characters of scene 14) propose to rape Marie, and drag her off.

16.
Shlink’s Office
. (Largely rewritten as XI.)

In 1922 John says ‘…march! Against the jungle’ merely, ‘of the city!’ being added in 1927. Garga is off to the south to till the soil, not to New York. The play ends with a longer speech by Garga, finishing up: ‘It was the best time. The chaos is used up: it dismissed me without a blessing. Maybe work will be a consolation. It’s certainly very late. I feel abandoned.’ Then Moti Gui’s voice, off: ‘East wind!’ Garga remains alone, grinning.

2

In the Quarry

White chalk slope. Morning. The rumbling of the Pacific trains, off. People shouting
.

George Garga. The Green Man
.

GARGA
ragged, in shirt and trousers, hands in pockets
: An average morning. Anything strike you, sir?

GREEN MAN
: Let’s go and have another drink.

GARGA
: What’s that noise?

GREEN MAN
: The trains to Illinois.

GARGA
: Yes. As usual.

GREEN MAN
: Aren’t you working in a shop any longer, sir?

GARGA
: It’s my time off.

GREEN MAN
: Let’s have a drink.

GARGA
: No, no.

GREEN MAN
: How’s the seamstress?

Garga whistles
.

GREEN MAN
: Is she off too?

GARGA
: The clouds! Like soiled swans! Do you enjoy having a boot put in your face?

GREEN MAN
: No.

GARGA
: What can one do about it?

The Green Man pulls out a pistol
.

GARGA
takes it
: We’ll have a drink afterwards. It’s not pleasant having a boot put in one’s face.

GREEN MAN
: What’s he really after?

GARGA
shrugs his shoulders
: One fine morning he spat a little cherry stone in my eye.

GREEN MAN
: Unknown?

GARGA
: Never saw him before.

GREEN MAN
: Careful. Cold blood.

Sound of trains rumbling by above
.

That’s the Pacific-New York. Will he want to dig his heels in?

GARGA
: Surely.

GREEN MAN
: …Have reckoned with you?

GARGA
: I turned up out of the blue.

GREEN MAN
: Having a drink is undoubtedly better. Sleeping with women. Smoking.

GARGA
: Baring your teeth isn’t bad.

GREEN MAN
: If you’ve got good ones.

A NOTE BY GERHARD NELLHAUS

At the start of the opening scene Brecht acknowledges, in the order of their importance, the two writers who particularly influenced his play. They were the Danish novelist Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1875-1950) and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91). In the note on pp. 438-9 he specifies the works from which, directly and indirectly, he had drawn: the novel
Hjulet (The Wheel)
and the prose poem
Une saison en enfer
. He knew both in the German: the former in a translation by Mens published in 1908 under the title
Das Rad
, and Rimbaud’s writings in translations by K. L. Ammer (Karl Klammer) and Adolf Christian.

Of the two, the influence of
The Wheel
was the greater in every way: background and plot, characterizations, imagery, illustrations of which are given in the notes below (which are based on the German edition published by S. Fischer in 1921, since
Hjulet
has not been published in English). It is in the main the story of ‘a fight between two human beings, two different types of nervous organism, a relentless fight which could only end with the extermination of one of them, because one was fighting blind and with all the strength of his basic appetite while for the other it was a question of life or death’ (German edition, pp. 107-8). This was the continuation of a fight that had begun in a novel
Madam d’Ora
, which Jensen had written a year earlier, in 1904. In it the lay-preacher Evanston, a self-styled superman, destroyed the renowned scientist Edmund Hall by accusing him of his own murder of one Elly Johnson in London. But later in New York, Evanston is defeated by the young journalist, Lee, in a boxing match, ‘an encounter …which [Evanston] could not possibly forget…[He] came to love Lee… to long for [him], to long for [him] from the moment when [Lee] with a blow of his fist shut [Evanston’s] eyes’ (p. 182). Now Evanston, alias Cancer, has come to Chicago, for this was the hub of the world’s wheel, ‘a grand international centre …the centre of the most materialistic philosophy in the world’ (p. 165). Here Evanston starts out in a hole in the wall as a revivalist and becomes the prophet of a mass movement which he hopes to turn into a new religion. For it, Evanston wants Lee to write the new Bible because he knows
Lee’s ‘God is in Chicago’ as well, since he has read Lee’s tract proclaiming Americans as the lost people of God who in America have the opportunity of creating the vital civilization Europe might have become had the Gothic and not the Gallic influence won out.

Evanston’s ‘spiritual rape’ of Lee consists not only of stealing the would-be poet’s views of life, but of seeking to possess him physically, of alienating him from his fiancée, of charging him with a murder – just as he had done Hall – in an anonymous letter. Evanston can do this because he has studied this ‘naïve young man’ and knows that he is ‘both a coward and full of self-importance’, a ‘sentimentalist’ who, ‘not being much for women’, is ‘still pure’ and yet is engaged to the daughter of Chicago’s richest man. A general strike organized by Cancer against the latter fails when Lee kills Evanston, this ‘long extinct type who existed outside of society’, in order to redeem ‘his city and all his own kind’. After fleeing Chicago, first to Japan and then around the world, Lee returns to his pregnant fiancée and, learning of her father’s death, quite ‘sensibly’ takes over the business.

By contrast, the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud now occupied Brecht less than it had done in
Baal
He was more concerned with Rimbaud’s literary manner, his ‘concoction of words’. The Rimbaud quotations put into the mouth of Garga are often somewhat free; hence the original French is given below wherever possible for comparison. Though in Brecht’s ‘Statement’ of 1924 (p. 433 above) he claimed also to have been quoting Verlaine, no lines comparable in style or content have been found.

1. Evanston in
The Wheel
(p. 84) says that ‘it happens to be a female’s pleasure to have her ears boxed by as malicious and dirty a baboon as possible’.

2. Rimbaud,
Une saison en enfer
: ‘Je suis une béte, un négre. Mais je puis étre sauvé. Vous étes de faux négres, vous, maniaques, feroces, avares. Marchand, tu es négre; magistrat, tu es négre; general, tu es négre; empereur, vieille démangeaison, tu es négre: tu as bu d‘une liqueur non taxée, de la fabrique de Satan. – Ce peuple est inspiré par la fiévre et le cancer … Je ne comprends pas les lois; je n‘ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez.’

3. ‘Stormy the night and the sea runs high’ is a line from a sentimental and trashy song ‘Asleep in the Deep’, for which, according to information supplied by Dr Kurt Opitz, Adolf Martel wrote
the text (about 1890) and H. W. Petrie the music (1897). It was very popular at the turn of the century, and Brecht heard it often as a child, so that it became for him the quintessence of
Kitsch
. He referred to it in
Drums in the Night
(p. 86 above), in scene 13 of
Mahagonny
, in
chapter 14
of
The Threepenny Novel
and in an unfinished essay of the 1950s on popular poetry (‘Wo ich gelernt habe’) where he noted that it contained ‘one quatrain of great beauty’.