Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (2 page)

This original
Galileo
, revised with some minor changes in the first few weeks of 1939, was initially called
The Earth Moves
. Its full German text was first published under its subsequent title
Leben des Galilei
by Suhrkamp in 1988. In February Reyher wrote from Hollywood to say that while he would discuss its screen possibilities with the director William Dieterle – himself an old acquaintance of Brecht’s from the early 1920s – he felt some measure of adaptation was needed to fit it for the American stage. With Brecht’s permission,
accordingly, he proposed not just to do a straight translation but to introduce a little more speed’:

a sharpened drive, because our mode of thinking and our interests are gaited to a more nervous tempo, and what induces us to think in this country is not ideas, but action.

Brecht never seems to have agreed to this; nor do we know how Dieterle reacted to the film idea. Meantime, however, copies of the script were going to a number of other recipients: among them Piscator, Hanns Eisler and Fritz Lang in the United States, Brecht’s publisher Wieland Herzfelde in Prague, his translator Desmond Vesey in London, the main German-language theatres in Basle and Zurich, and Pierre Abraham and Walter Benjamin in Paris. Not long before leaving Denmark that spring he began writing his
Messingkauf Dialogues
on the model of Galileo’s
Discorsi
dialogues. Characteristically, he had already become dissatisfied with the play, which he saw as ‘far too opportunist’ and conventionally atmospheric, like the deliberately Aristotelian ‘empathy drama’
Señora Carrafs Rifles
, for which he was still praised by the Party aestheticians. He even thought of remodelling the whole thing in a more didactic form, based on the example of the big unfinished
Fatzer
and
Breadshop
schemes of the late 1920s. However, there is no evidence that he did this except a rough outline for a ‘version for workers’; and instead the project slumbered while he wrote the next four of the major plays. Only in Moscow was there a review of the play in
Sovietski Isskusstvo
(18 August 1939) and some suggestion of an illustrated edition for which his new friend Hans Tombrock was to make the etchings. This too never materialised, though it prompted the vivid description of Galileo’s appearance which we cite on p. 193.

* * *

The Brechts eventually moved to the United States in the summer of 1941, leaving via Moscow and Vladivostock a matter of days before the German invasion of the USSR. By then France, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece had all fallen to
Hitler; Benjamin had committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish frontier; Margarete Steffin was left in Moscow to die of tuberculosis. Settling in California in the hope of finding work in the film industry, Brecht was soon seeing both Dieterle and Reyher, who had by now evidently completed a straight translation of the play. The idea of a film version seems not to have been resumed. That autumn he discussed the script with the physicist Hans Reichenbach, a pupil of Einstein’s then teaching in Los Angeles at the University of California, who congratulated him on the accuracy of its scientific and historical aspects. Then at the end of the year he tried to interest his old friend Oskar Homolka, and for a time Homolka toyed with the idea of playing the part: something that made Brecht feel

as if I were recalling a strange sunken theatre of a bygone age on continents that had been submerged.

A similar sense of unreality must have seized him in September 1943, when the Zurich Schauspielhaus finally gave the play its world premiere some two and a half years after that of
Mother Courage
. How he reacted to the news of the production – or when, indeed, he heard it – remains unclear; he never even alludes to it in his diary. Soberly interpreted by Leonard Steckel, who not only played Galileo but was also the director, it was greatly applauded despite its lack of dramatic effects: ‘a Lehrstück or a play for reading’, one critic called it. What was not clear, however, in a generally clear performance, was whether Galileo recanted out of cowardice or as part of a deliberate plan to complete his life’s work on behalf of human reason and smuggle it out to the free world. This ambiguity (which led so experienced a critic as Bernhard Diebold to favour the second, more topically anti-Nazi interpretation) is of course built into the first version of the play, where Galileo has already been conspiring with the stove-fitter (symbol of the workers) to send his manuscript abroad in the penultimate scene even before Andrea appears. (In Zurich this was in fact the last scene, that at the frontier being, as usual, cut.)

It was only in the spring of 1944 that the play seems once
more to have become a reality to Brecht. Wintering in New York, he had discussed the possibility of a production with Jed Harris, the backer of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, and on getting back to Santa Monica he looked at
Galileo
with a fresh eye, re-checking its moral content, so he noted in his journal,

since it had always worried me. just because i was trying to follow the historical story, without being morally concerned, a moral content emerged and i’m not happy about it. g. can no more resist stating the truth than eating an appetising dish; to him it’s a matter of sensual enjoyment, and he constructs his own personality as wisely and passionately as he does his image of the world, actually he falls twice, the first time is when he suppresses or recants the truth because he is in mortal danger, the second when despite the mortal danger he once again seeks out the truth and disseminates it. he is destroyed by his own productivity, and it upsets me to be told that i approve of his publicly recanting so as to be able to carry on his work in secret, that’s too banal and too cheap, g., after all, destroyed not only himself as a person but also the most valuable part of his scientific work, the church (i.e. the authorities) defended the teachings of the bible purely as a way of defending itself, its authority and its power of oppression and exploitation, the sole reason why the people became interested in g.’s ideas about the planets was that they were chafing under church domination, g. threw all real progress to the wolves when he recanted, he abandoned the people, and astronomy once again became an affair for specialists, the exclusive concern of scholars, unpolitical, cut off. the church made a distinction between these celestial ‘problems’ and those of the earth, consolidated its rule and then cheerfully went on to acknowledge the new solutions.

It was during that March that Brecht first met Charles Laughton, who was then living within walking distance in a street called Corona del Mar above the Pacific Coast Highway.
Both men were friends of Berthold Viertel’s wife Salka (best known perhaps as Greta Garbo’s preferred script writer), and it seems to have been through her that they learnt to appreciate one another’s company. As Laughton’s biographer Charles Higham has put it, they found they had certain likes and dislikes in common:

They both shared a sympathy and concern for ordinary people, a dislike of pomp and circumstance and the attitudes and actions of the European ruling class. They both disliked elaborate artifice in the theatre, as exemplified by the spangles-and-tinsel of Max Reinhardt’s stage and film productions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
…

Laughton had last acted in the theatre in 1934, and since playing Rembrandt in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of that name (for which Brecht’s old friend Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script) he had had a surfeit of supporting roles in second- and third-rate Hollywood films. During the spring and summer of 1944 he read the rough translation of Brecht’s
Schweik in the Second World War
and greatly enjoyed it, while Brecht for his part wrote the long poem ‘Garden in Progress’ to commemorate, not without irony, the landslide which sent part of the Laughtons’ beautifully tended garden sliding down the cliff face to the road below. By then the actor had evidently learnt enough about
Galileo
, whether through Brecht’s description or from the Vesey and Reyher translations, to decide that it might well be the masterpiece to carry him back to the live stage. With Brecht’s agreement h^ now commissioned a fresh translation by a young writer called Brainerd Duffield, who had been working with Alfred Dóblin and other German exiles employed by MGM. By the end of November Duffield and his contemporary Emerson Crocker had once again translated Brecht’s original script and produced a third text which both Laughton and the Brechts evidently approved. A fortnight later actor and playwright together were getting down to what the former terms ‘systematic work on the translation and stage
version of the
Life of the Physicist Galileo
’. Whatever the original intention, it was in effect to be a new play.

* * *

Brecht later called the work with Laughton a ‘zweijáhriger Spass’, a two-year escapade, and undoubtedly it covers more paper than did any other of his writings, so that altogether it represents a prodigal expenditure of both men’s time. But he also saw it as the classic collaboration between a great dramatist and a great actor, and the loving account which he gives in ‘Building up a part’ (p. 206 ff.) seems to have been filtered through a warm Californian haze rather than the wintry greys of Berlin. Inevitably there were long interruptions before a first script was ready. From February to May 1945 Laughton was off playing in the pirate film
Captain Kidd
(Brecht meantime consoling himself by trying to put the
Communist Manifesto
into Lucretian hexameters); then in June and July Brecht was in New York for a none too successful production of
The Private Life of the Master Race
in Eric Bentley’s translation, directed initially by Piscator and finally by Viertel on Brecht’s intervention. Generally however they worked as described by Brecht, with him reshaping the play in a mixture of German and English – his typescript drafts contain many instances of this, of which one is cited on p. 237 – and both men then trying to get the English working right. This reshaping often followed Laughton’s suggestions, which went much further than the basic cutting and streamlining which were his most obvious contribution. Thus it was he who proposed the elimination of the Doppone character (see p. 239), the ‘positive entry’ of the iron founder in scene 2, the argument between Ludovico and Galileo in the sunspot scene and the shifting of the handing-over of the
Discorsi
so that Galileo’s great speech of self-abasement should come after it and offset it. Brecht too worked to make this self-abasement seem more of a piece with Galileo’s concern for his own comforts, which were now to include thinking. In this, as in the new emphasis on Galileo’s sensuality, he was aided by Laugh-ton’s character, of which Eric Bentley has written that

It is unlikely that anyone again will combine as he did every appearance of intellectual brilliance with every appearance of physical self-indulgence.

If the 1938 version derived its political relevance from the need to smuggle the truth out of Nazi Germany, this new version was given an extra edge of topicality by the dropping of the first atomic bomb on
6
August 1945. Not that any significant change was needed apart from the addition of the passage about ‘a universal cry of fear’ in the penultimate scene. The notion of a Hippocratic oath for scientists had still to be worked in. So before leaving the US Brecht drafted the relevant passage (see p. 270), which could indeed have been in his mind from the inception of the play, the idea itself having been put forward by Lancelot Law White in
Nature
in 1938 and discussed at the time in an editorial in the
New York Times
.

On 1 December 1945 the new, ‘American’ text was complete enough for Laughton to read it to the Brechts, Eisler, Reichen-bach, Salka Viertel and other friends. About a week later he also read it to Orson Welles, whom both he and Brecht seem already to have had in mind for some while as the right director for the production towards which they were working. Welles instantly accepted the job, and a few days after that the three men saw Laughton’s agents Berg-Allenberg to discuss whether to open in the spring or the summer. This question was bound up with their choice of producer, which seems to have veered initially between Welles himself, the film impresario Mike Todd and Elisabeth Bergner’s husband Paul Czinner, for whom Brecht was already working on the
Duchess of Malfi
adaptation. Czinner was not congenial to Laughton, and once the idea of a spring production was abandoned he dropped out. Welles for his part apparently disliked Brecht; nevertheless for a time the intention was that he and Todd should combine forces; then a mixture of uncertainty about dates and dislike of the kind of teamwork proposed by Laughton and Brecht made Welles drop out after the middle of 1946, leaving Todd as sole producer. After that various directors were suggested: Elia Kazan, who had a particular appeal for Brecht
because he did not claim to know all the answers; Harold Clurman, whom Brecht respected as ‘an intelligent critic and interested in theoretical issues’ but saw primarily as a ‘Stanislavsky man’ unlikely to let him have any say. He even inquired about Alfred Lunt. Meantime a great deal of detailed revision of the new Brecht—Laughton text went on, with Brecht and Reyher totally overhauling it in New York, then Laughton and Brecht again reworking it in California. Versions of the ballad-singer’s song were made by Reyher and by Abe Burrows (of
Guys and Dolls
fame) while the inter-scene verses seem to have involved a whole host of collaborators including Brecht himself and his daughter Barbara; the only programme credit, however, for the ‘lyrics’ went to a Santa Monica poet called Albert Brush. The eventual director chosen was Joseph Losey, who had met Brecht in Moscow in 1935 and thereafter made his name with the Living Newspaper programmes of the Federal Theatre. Finally Todd too dropped out after offering (in Losey’s words) to ‘dress the production in Renaissance furniture from the Hollywood warehouses’, an idea that was unacceptable to Brecht, Laughton and Losey alike. With this the hope of any kind of production in 1946 disappeared.