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<i>Bertolt Brecht in America</i> by James K. Lyon, and: <i>Brecht's America</i> by Patty Lee Parmalee (review)

1982; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mdr.1982.0031

1712-5286

Ralph Ley,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Book Reviews 571 surely we shall find it not in aesthetic refuge. imagined future, metaphorical heaven, submarine 10ft, or timeless past, but in the richly dialogical and contrapuntal play that we share from moment to moment as we act and witness the tragicomic predicaments ofthe dramatis personae. It seems strange to argue that we owe this nourishing result to some failure of the playwright's essentially nondramatic or supradramatic quest. Because the romantic dream must have in the theatre much the same value as the "impossible" has always had there, Realms of the Self is most illuminating when it abandons talk: of "special and separate realms" and examines in detail some present action in that social realm which constitutes the only selves we know. After all, even Sam Shepard has no great interest in following the hero, Kent, into some wild and woolly hut offstage heaven. He knows that only if we remain committed to a "theatrical 'reality,'" can we reflect upon the meaning of Kent's leap and his empty silhouette. THOMAS R. WHITAKER, YALE UNIVERSITY JAMES K. LYON. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. pp. xiv, 408, illustrated. $19.75. PATTY LEE PARMALEE. Brecht's America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1981. pp.xix, 306. $25· To those of us in the "Brecht industry" who read James R. Lyon's Bertolt Brecht's American Cicerone back in 1978, his most recent book on Brecht in America comes as a very pleasant shock. The former publication details the relationship between Brecht and Ferdinand Reyher, an obscure American screenwriter whose bigheartedness the playwright turned to account. Reyher became one of Brecht's closer friends during his American exile and seems to have been his chief mentor in Americana. Otherwise Reyher's influence on Brecht was negligible and in no way seriously altered the Jauer's devastating view of the United States as the most advanced and therefore the most uncivilized and inhuman bastion of capitalism. The book was largely an exercise in academic overkill. Not so Bertolt Brecht in America. In fact, anything but. Here the enormous pedantic diligence of Professor Lyon has paid off. Some ten years in the making, Lyon's book is replete with innumerable facts based on any and every discernible trace Brecht left behind in America, from unpublished letters to FBI documents to the impressions of a not inconsiderable number of people, some very famous, some not so famous, who came into contact with him. It is the closest thing we have to a full-fledged treatment of Brecht as a fallible human being - the stated purpose of Brecht in America. As such it is an utterly fascinating work and a major contribution to Brecbt studies. Not the least ofLyon's achievements is the marshaling ofthe wealth of material he dug up into a coherent and readable whole. This was accomplished rather neatly by dividing the book according to topics (e.g., Brecht and Hollywood, Brecht and the American Theater, Brecht and Feelings), and by arranging these topics in as chronological an order as possible: a straight positivistic approach ofendless particulars would have overwhelmed and confused the reader.True, there is a certain (unavoidable) repetitiveness, but in his methodological gamble the author clearly succeeded. Generally, the people who had dealings with Brecht in America found him to be one or (usually) more of the following: rude, arrogant, dictatorial, utterly opinionated, 572 Book Reviews selfish and self-centered to the point of egomania, exploitative, unfeeling, lascivious, male-chauvinistic, parsimonious, shrewd, duplicitous, envious and mean-spirited. The only capital sins on which he did not seem to have alease were gluttony and sloth. He ate frugally and drank sparingly, nothing stronger than an occasional glass of beer - hence one of the most humorous and therefore most human moments in the book comes when a depressed Brecht, reeling from the unpleasantries and professional disappointments of his initial encounter with New York and America in 1935, resorted to carrying a flask of whiskey on his person at all times. "I can't stand it here without whiskey," he complained to his fellow exile Hanns Eisler. He was as fastidious and regular and bourgeois about his working...