Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (35 page)

Galileo’s crime can be regarded as the ‘original sin’ of modern natural sciences. From the new astronomy, which deeply interested a new class – the bourgeoisie – since it gave an impetus to the revolutionary social current of the time, he made a sharply defined special science which – admittedly through its very ‘purity’, i.e., its indifference to modes of production – was able to develop comparatively undisturbed.

The atom bomb is, both as a technical and as a social phenomenon, the classical end-product of his contribution to science and his failure to contribute to society.

Thus the ‘hero’ of this work is not Galileo but the people, as Walter Benjamin has said. This seems to me to be rather too briefly expressed. I hope this work shows how society extorts from its individuals what it needs from them. The urge to research, a social phenomenon no less delightful or compulsive than the urge to reproduce, steers Galileo into that most dangerous territory, drives him into agonising conflict with his violent desires for other pleasures. He raises his telescope to the stars and delivers himself to the rack. In the end he indulges his science like a vice, secretly, and probably with pangs of conscience. Confronted with such a situation, one can scarcely wish only to praise or only to condemn Galileo.

[Dated 1947. From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., pp. 12 f.]

Respected public of the way called Broad-

Tonight we invite you to step on board

A world of curves and measurements, where you’ll descry

The newborn physics in their infancy.

Here you will see the life of the great Galileo Galilei,

The law of falling bodies versus the
GRATIAS DEI

Science’s fight versus the rulers, which we stage

At the beginning of a brand-new age.

Here you’ll see science in its blooming youth

Also its first compromises with the truth.

It too must eat, and quickly gets prostrated

Takes the wrong road, is violated –

Once Nature’s master, now it is no more

Than just another cheap commercial whore.

The Good, so far, has not been turned to goods

But already there’s something nasty in the woods

Which cuts it off from reaching the majority

So it won’t relieve, but aggravate their poverty.

We think such sights are relevant today

The new age is so quick to pass away.

We hope you’ll lend a charitable ear

To what we say, since otherwise we fear

If you won’t learn from Galileo’s experience

The Bomb might make a personal appearance.

[From Brecht’s
Arbeitsjournal
, entry for 1 December 1945.]

And the lamp his work ignited

We have tried to keep alight

Stooping low, and yet high-minded

Unrestrained, yet laced up tight.

Making moon and stars obey us

Grovelling at our rulers’ feet

We sell our brains for what they’ll pay us

To satisfy our bodies’ need.

So, despised by those above us

Ridiculed by those below

We have found out the laws that move us

Keep this planet on the go.

Knowledge grows too large for nitwits

Servitude expands as well

Truth becomes so many titbits

Liberators give us hell.

Riding in new railway coaches

To the new ships on the waves

Who is it that now approaches?

Only slave-owners and slaves.

Only slaves and slave-owners

Leave the trains

Taking new aeroplanes

Through the heaven’s age-old blueness.

Till the last device arrives

Astronomic

White, atomic

Obliterating all our lives.

[From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., pp. 38 f.]

[
Scene 11
]

This scene gives ample reasons for Galileo’s hesitation about escaping from Florence and seeking asylum in the North Italian cities. None the less the audience can imagine him putting himself in the hands of Matti the ironfounder, and discover various tendencies in his character and situation which would support this.

The actor Laughton showed Galileo in a state of great inner agitation during his talk with the ironfounder. He played it as a moment of decision – the wrong one. (Connoisseurs of dialectics will find Galileo’s possibilities further clarified in the ensuing scene ‘The Pope’, where the inquisitor insists that Galileo must be forced to recant his theory because the Italian maritime cities need his star charts, which derive from it and of which it would not be possible to deprive them.)

An objectivist approach is not permissible here.
*

[
Scene 14
]

His crime has made a criminal of him. When he reflects on the
scale
of his crime he is pleased with himself. He defends himself against the outside world’s impertinent expectations of its geniuses. What has Andrea done to oppose the Inquisition? Galileo applies his intellect to solving the problems of the clergy, which these blockheads have overlooked. His mind functions automatically, like a motor in neutral. His appetite for knowledge feels to him like the impetus that makes him twitch. Scholarly activity, for him, is a sin: mortally dangerous, but impossible to do without. He has a fanatical hatred for humanity. Andrea’s readiness to revise his damning verdict as soon as he sees the book means that he has been corrupted. As to a lame and starving wolf, Galileo tosses him a crust, the logical scientific analysis of the Galileo phenomenon. Behind this lies his rejection of the moral demands of a humanity which does nothing to relieve the deadliness of that morality and those demands.

[…]

Once Galileo knows that his book has set out on its journey towards publication he changes his attitude again. He proposes that the book should be prefaced by an introduction sharply condemning the author’s treachery. Andrea passionately refuses to pass on such a request, pointing out that everything is different now; that Galileo’s recantation gave him the chance to finish this immensely significant work. What needs to be altered is the popular concept of heroism, ethical precepts and so on. The one thing that counts is one’s contribution to science, and so forth.

At first Galileo listens in silence to Andrea’s speech, which builds a golden bridge for his return to the esteem of his fellow scientists, then contemptuously and cuttingly contradicts him, accusing Andrea of squalidly recanting every principle of science. Starting with a denunciation of ‘bad thinking’ which seems designed as a brilliant demonstration of how the trained scientist ought to analyse a case like his own, he proves to Andrea that no achievement is valuable enough to make up for the damage caused by a betrayal of mankind.

The fact that the author is known to all and sundry as an opponent of the church might lead a theatre to give the play’s performance a primarily anticlerical slant. The church, however, is mainly being
treated here as a secular establishment. Its specific ideology is being looked at in the light of its function as a prop to practical rule. The old cardinal (in scene 6) can be turned into a Tory or a Louisiana Democrat without much adjustment. Galileo’s illusions concerning a ‘scientist in the chair of St. Peter’ have more than one parallel in contemporary history, and these are scarcely related to the church. In scene 13 Galileo is not returning ‘to the bosom of the church’; as we know, he never left it. He is simply trying to make his peace with those in power. One can judge his demoralisation by his social attitude; he buys his comfort (even his scientific activity having degenerated to the status of a comfort) by means of hackwork, unashamedly prostituting his intellect. (His use of clerical quotations is thus sheer blasphemy.) On no account should the actor make use of his self-analysis to endear the hero to the audience by his self-reproaches. All it does is to show that his brain is unimpaired, never mind what area he directs it to. Andrea Sarti’s final remark in no sense represents the playwright’s own view of Galileo, merely his opinion of Andrea Sarti. The playwright was not out to have the last word.

Galileo is a measure of the standard of Italian intellectuals in the first third of the seventeenth century, when they were defeated by the feudal nobility. Northern countries like Holland and England developed productive forces further by means of what is called the Industrial Revolution. In a sense Galileo was responsible both for its technical creation and for its social betrayal.

The first version of the play ended differently. Galileo had written the
Discorsi
in the utmost secrecy. He uses the visit of his favourite pupil Andrea to get him to smuggle the book across the frontier. His recantation had given him the chance to create a seminal work. He had been wise.

In the Californian version […] Galileo interrupts his pupil’s hymns of praise to prove to him that his recantation had been a crime, and was not to be compensated by this work, important as it might be.

In case anybody is interested, this is also the opinion of the playwright.

[Shortened from Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., pp. 32–37. These notes were written at various times, those on scene 14 mainly during Brecht’s work on the Berliner Ensemble production. The reference to a new critical introduction to the
Discorsi
must relate to a
proposed change which Brecht never made; it is not to be found in our text.]

In describing Laughton’s Galileo Galilei the playwright is setting out not so much to try and give a little more permanence to one of those fleeting works of art that actors create, as to pay tribute to the pains a great actor is prepared to take over a fleeting work of this sort. This is no longer at all common. It is not just that the under-rehearsing in our hopelessly commercialised theatre is to blame for lifeless and stereotyped portraits – give the average actor more time, and he would hardly do better. Nor is it simply that this century has very few outstanding individualists with rich characteristics and rounded contours – if that were all, care could be devoted to the portrayal of lesser figures. Above all it is that we seem to have lost any understanding and appreciation of what we may call a
theatrical conception:
what Garrick did when, as Hamlet, he met his father’s ghost; Sorel when, as Phèdre, she knew that she was going to die; Bassermann when, as Philip, he had finished listening to Posa. It is a question of inventiveness.

The spectator could isolate and detach such theatrical conceptions, but they combined to form a single rich texture. Odd insights into men’s nature, glimpses of their particular way of living together, were brought about by the ingenious contrivance of the actors.

With works of art, even more than with philosophical systems, it is impossible to find out how they are made. Those who make them work hard to give the impression that everything just happens, as it were of its own accord, as though an image were forming in a clear mirror that is itself inert. Of course this is a deception, and apparently the idea is that if it comes off it will increase the spectator’s pleasure. In fact it does not. What the spectator – anyway the experienced spectator – enjoys about art is the making of art, the active creative element. In art we view nature herself as if she were an artist.

The ensuing account deals with this aspect, with the process of manufacture rather than with the result. It is less a matter of the artist’s
temperament than of the notion of reality which he has
and communicates
; less a matter of his vitality than of the observations which underlie his portraits and can be derived from them. This means neglecting much that seemed to us to be ‘inimitable’ in Laughton’s achievement, and going on rather to what can be learned from it. For we cannot create talent; we can only set it tasks.

It is unnecessary here to examine how the artists of the past used to astonish their public. Asked why he acted, L. answered: ‘Because people don’t know what they are like, and I think I can show them.’ His collaboration in the rewriting of the play showed that he had all sorts of ideas which were begging to be disseminated, about how people
really
live together, about the motive forces that need to be taken into account here. L.’s attitude seemed to the playwright to be that of a realistic artist of our time. For whereas in relatively stationary (’quiet’) periods artists may find it possible to merge wholly with their public and to be a faithful ‘embodiment’ of the general conception, our profoundly unsettled time forces them to take special measures to penetrate to the truth. Our society will not admit of its own accord what makes it move. It can even be said to exist purely through the secrecy with which it surrounds itself. What attracted L. about
Life of Galileo
was not only one or two formal points but also the subject matter; he thought this might become what he called a contribution. And so great was his anxiety to show things as they really are that despite all his indifference (indeed timidity) in political matters he suggested and even demanded that not a few of the play’s points should be made sharper, on the simple ground that such passages seemed ‘somehow weak’ to him, by which he meant that they did not do justice to things as they are.

We usually met in L.’s big house above the Pacific, as the dictionaries of synonyms were too bulky to lug about. He had continual and inexhaustibly patient recourse to these tomes, and used in addition to fish out the most varied literary texts in order to examine this or that gest, or some particular mode of speech: Aesop, the Bible, Moliere, Shakespeare. In my house he gave readings of Shakespeare’s works to which he would devote perhaps a fortnight’s preparation. In this way he read
The Tempest
and
King Lear
, simply for me and one or two guests who happened to have dropped in. Afterward we would briefly discuss what seemed relevant, an ‘aria’ perhaps or an effective scene opening. These were exercises and he would pursue them in various directions, assimilating them in the rest of his work. If he had to give a reading on the radio he would get me to hammer out the syncopated
rhythms of Whitman’s poems (which he found somewhat strange) on a table with my fists, and once he hired a studio where we recorded half a dozen ways of telling the story of the creation, in which he was an African planter telling the Negroes how he had created the world, or an English butler ascribing it to His Lordship. We needed such broadly ramified studies, because he spoke no German whatever and we had to decide the gest of dialogue by my acting it all in bad English or even in German and his then acting it back in proper English in a variety of ways until I could say: That’s it. The result he would write down sentence by sentence in longhand. Some sentences, indeed many, he carried around for days, changing them continually. This system of performance-and-repetition had one immense advantage in that psychological discussions were almost entirely avoided. Even the most fundamental gests, such as Galileo’s way of observing, or his showmanship, or his craze for pleasure, were established in three dimensions by actual performance. Our first concern throughout was for the smallest fragments, for sentences, even for exclamations – each treated separately, each needing to be given the simplest, freshly fitted form, giving so much away, hiding so much or leaving it more. More radical changes in the structure of entire scenes or of the work itself were meant to help the story to move and to bring our fairly general conclusions about people’s attitudes to the great physicist. But this reluctance to tinker with the psychological aspect remained with L. all through our long period of collaboration, even when a rough draft of the play was ready and he was giving various readings in order to test reactions, and even during the rehearsals.