Brecht Collected Plays: 7: Visions of Simone Machard; Schweyk in the Second World War; Caucasian Chalk Circle; Duchess of Malfi (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  TWO CHARACTERS

  Scene 1

  SIMONE

  All this being ordered hither and thither remains characteristic of the little maid-of-all-work so long as the hither and the thither are still undefined, and the hither and thither is not contrasted with something else. This would be the case were she, for instance, to be rent apart between the wishes of those above her and the needs of those below—for she is exploited from on top and from underneath—and if, to form the contrast, there were something at some particularly rending moment to be observed about TANKS that was of special worry and concern to her.

  Scene 6

  [our scene 3b]

  THE PATRON

  The patron can only develop into a character if he acquires an evolution of his own in this scene. His confrontation with the staff becomes manly as a result of the invasion. The invasion offers him the opportunity to score a ‘victory’, but he shouldn’t be too eager to pick up this particular laurel wreath. It is essential that he should fall into a rage on hearing that his brickworks has been destroyed; this is not the kind of war he wants to wage. Waging it in such a way destroys the point of war. Patriotic feelings raise their head later, as inhibitions. How is it going to look if he hands a French citizen over to the Germans? That would be setting a bad example.

  [BBA 1190/50. For the renumbering of scenes, see the Editorial Note.]

  Editorial Note

  1. GENERAL

  When Brecht and Feuchtwanger discussed collaborating on a play at the end of October 1942 they considered various possibilities before settling on a St Joan story:

  A confused person has dreams in which the characters of the patriotic legend take on features of her superiors, and she learns how and why those superiors are waging their war, and how long for.

  Thus the note in Brecht’s journal, which calls the project Saint Joan of Vitry (The Voices). According to Feuchtwanger’s recollection many years later the heroine was originally to be called Odette, but in what must be one of the earliest plans she is Jeanne Gotard. This was for a play of eleven scenes, starting:

  1. the germans attack france. Jeanne gotard is given an old book with the story of Jeanne d’arc.

  2. joan of arc calls on the king.

  3. jeanne gotard hides the petrol stocks from the advancing german tanks.

  —and finishing:

  7. incendiarism of jeanne gotard.

  8. respectable frenchmen talk to respectable englishmen.

  9. arrest of jeanne gotard.

  10. initiation of proceedings against joan of arc.

  11. condemnation of jeanne gotard by a french court.

  What seems like the beginning of a treatment in Brecht’s typing is headed Saint Joan of Vitry and goes as follows:

  In Vitry, a small town in Champagne, during the German invasion of 1940, a young girl by the name of Jeanne Gotard dreamt a strange dream lasting five consecutive nights. By day she worked her father’s petrol pump, he being a soldier serving in the Maginot Line. The schoolmaster across the way had lent her an old book with the illustrated story of Joan of Arc, and so at night she dreamt she was Joan. In her dreams however the historical events reported in the book were intermingled with memories of certain incidents at the petrol station, so that the story of the saint displayed strange variations which not only made a profound impression on those listeners to whom she recounted her nightly experiences but would also certainly have interested an historian, if such a person had been present. In her dreams she appeared armed with bayonet and steel helmet, but the rest of her clothes were those that she wore every day, while the historical personalities with whom she had to deal—king, marshals, cardinals and ordinary people—bore the faces of familiar personalities of the town of Vitry, such as visited the petrol station in the daytime. Coulonge the banker merely wore a plumed hat, the mayor of the town simply a flowing cloak over his grey suit …

  A nine-scene version of the plan eliminates the missing scenes 4-6 of the scheme given above, and renames the heroine Michèle. Thus:

  1. the germans attack france. michèle gotard reads a patriotic legend.

  2. joan of arc, summoned by divine voices, crowns the king in rheims and unites all frenchmen against the hereditary foe.

  3. michèle saves stocks from the advancing german tanks.

  4. joan of arc, rewarded by the mighty and dismissed in her native village, is moved by the divine voices to continue the struggle.

  5. michèle’s incendiarism.

  6. highly-placed frenchmen talk to highly-placed englishmen.

  7. michèle is betrayed and is arrested by the germans; however, certain circles arrange for her to come before a french court.

  8. joan is perturbed by the angel’s failure to appear, the high court meets and questions her about the voices.

  9. condemnation of michèle gotard by a french court.

  With the much more elaborately worked out plan given above on pp. 244-8 Michèle Gotard finally became Simone Machard, but the English decision to hand Joan of Arc over for trial by her own people—which Feuchtwanger saw as the pivotal point of the play—got swallowed in the next scene. None the less this eight-scene version seems to have served as the basis for the actual writing of the play.

  Brecht’s first typescript is in eight scenes, bearing the dates 28.12.42 at scene 5 and Jan 43 near the end; a note in his handwriting calls it ‘first script, written in California’. An almost entirely rewritten script follows, which is not in Brecht’s typing and bears corrections by his and other hands; it was among his collaborator Ruth Berlau’s papers and is headed ‘a play in two acts by Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger’ with three suggested English titles: Simone Hears Voices, St Joan in Vichy and The Nights of St Joan. Feuchtwanger seems to have used a copy of this, lacking Brecht’s last revisions, for a third, slightly modified version which he headed ‘a play in eight scenes by Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger’ and sent to Elisabeth Hauptmann in Berlin a year before Brecht’s death; it bears no marks by Brecht. The fourth and final script derives likewise from the rewritten version; it dates from 1946 and contains none of Feuchtwanger’s modifications, but is heavily corrected by Brecht, who at some points went back to the first version. This is the script which was used for the German collected edition and accordingly is the basis of our own text. We shall refer to them respectively as the first version, the Berlau script, the Feuchtwanger script and the 1946 or final version.

  For Brecht there were two principal points of uncertainty in the writing of it. The first was the question of Simone’s age; he found himself wanting to make her younger and younger (‘mainly because i cannot give a motive for her patriotism’, he noted in his journal), yet by doing so he destroyed her interest as a character. ‘The difficulty is’, he noted on 8 December 1942 of his struggle with the ‘Handshake’ scene,

  i’m writing the scene with no picture of the principal part, simone. originally i saw her as a somewhat ungainly, mentally retarded and inhibited person; then it seemed more practical to use a child, so i’m left with the bare functions and nothing to offset them with in the way of individuality.

  The other problem was the ending, which is unresolved in the first script and may well have been left in some confusion when Brecht went off to New York on 8 February. As will be seen from the detailed analysis that follows, he envisaged two alternative solutions, arguing (in the journal entry for 5 January) that

  the correct version is unperformable. in reality of course the wendells [i.e. the De Wendels of the Schneider arms firm] and pétains made use of the defeat and the foreign occupation to do down their social opponents. simone accordingly would need to be released by the germans (following false evidence by the staff of the hostellerie) then handed over to the corrective institution by madame mere and captain fétain for subversive activities. in the performable version this would have to be blurred over; condemning simone for incendiarism due to her hatred of the patron means at the same time saving h
er from execution by the germans.

  It was only in the final version that he seems to have settled for the less blurred alternative.

  But besides these a number of other important variables can be observed in the scripts, though Brecht himself had nothing to say about them. They are:

  (a) The identification of the angel with Simone’s brother. At the beginning of the first version it is the Archangel Michael, while there is also a note saying ‘the angel’s voice is [? the voice] of the people’.

  (b) The characters of Maurice and Robert, who in the first version are brothers. There they are shown shirking the call-up, and Maurice has evidently refused to help move the refugees (as is made explicit in the Berlau script). However at the end of the Berlau (ii) and Feuchtwanger scripts they turn against the Patron. Not so in the final script.

  (c) The character of Père Gustave. He seems much more unpleasant in the earlier versions, bootlicking the Patron and giving evidence against Simone.

  (d) The role of the mayor, who compromises at a different stage in each version. Thus in the Feuchtwanger and Berlau (ii) versions of the Fourth Dream (i.e. our scene 4a) he is still defending Simone, whereas in the final text he is one of her judges.

  (e) The Patron’s journey with the two truck drivers. In our version it is not explained how they came back, nor why they brought back the china and not the wines (initially the Captain’s) nor what happened to such refugees as they found room for. In the other texts the party runs into the Germans and/or breaks down, but again it is far from clear what is really supposed to have happened.

  (f) The role of the refugees is heavily stressed in the final text, which brings in the notion of their being a ‘mob’ quartered in the village hall.

  (g) Simone’s escape is exclusive to the last version, though she half-tries in the Berlau and Feuchtwanger scripts.

  (h) The placing of the Daydream varies. This was the section of the play which Feuchtwanger in a letter of 27 March 1943 told Brecht had displeased all with whom he had discussed it (William Dieterle, Hanns Eisler, Oskar Homolka and Berthold Viertel) and should therefore be cut.

  Such points reflect a good deal of uncertainty in the authors’ minds, and the effect is visible even in the final version, where the definition of the characters is further smudged by the occasional reallocation of lines. Besides this there is not only the altering of names—thus in the first script the mayor was Phillip [sic] Duclos, the Patron Henri Champon, his mother ‘Madame Mère’ and the captain Captain Bellair—but a basic insecurity about places and dates. In the earlier scripts the scope of the action embraced Saint-Nazaire, Tours and Lyons—places several hundred kilometres apart and all of them far from the Champagne country where the previous scheme of the play was laid. Again, where the final text puts Simone’s village on one of the main roads from Paris to the South, the Berlau script puts it on the Paris-Bordeaux road. The cumulative effect of all these hesitations and improbabilities helps to weaken the play.

  2. SCENE-BY-SCENE ACCOUNT

  The following is a scene-by-scene account of the main changes. It uses the numbering of the final text with, in brackets, the numbers and titles of the corresponding eight-scene arrangement. It is followed by a short account of Feuchtwanger’s novel Simone, which was a product of the play but, so far as we know, involved no collaboration by Brecht.

  1. The Book (1)

  The first version had Simone on stage from the start, reading her book; her present moves and business come from the Berlau script, which also changes the provenance of the book from ‘the nuns’ (first version) to ‘the schoolmistress’ and then, in Brecht’s hand, to ‘the Patron’, as now. The soldier Georges’s dialogue with Simone about the beauties of France was reworked more than once, and is altogether missing in the Feuchtwanger script. An addition to the Berlau script reads, in lieu of the lines from ‘Is that what it says in the book?’ to ‘Do you have to go down to the village hall again…’:

  Simone nods

  GEORGES: Perhaps they mean the cafés with their orange awnings or the Halles in the early morning, full of meat and vegetables.

  SIMONE: What do you like best?

  GEORGES: They say one’s own fish, white bread and wine are best.

  SIMONE: What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen?

  GEORGES: I don’t know. In Saint-Malo, for instance, I saw the launching of the Intrépide, a big blue box for catching cod. We went to a bistro and drank so much framboise that my cousin Jean fell out of his swing-boat.

  SIMONE: Was he hurt?

  GEORGES: No, he fell on the fat proprietress. What do you like best?

  SIMONE: When they give us milk rolls at school.

  GEORGES: Yes, that’s something that could stay the way it is. Same with playing bowls in the shade outside the mairie, wouldn’t you say? And the women would be all right, particularly the girls in Lyons or Arles, say, pleasant ways they’ve got, but then you’re not interested in that. Yes, there’s quite a lot one could put up with.

  SIMONE: And our hostellerie?

  GEORGES: Just like France. Certain people spoil the whole picture so to speak.

  The reference to the sappers which follows (with the mention of Simone’s brother) derives from the same script, as does the dialogue between Père Gustave and the Patron (up to his exit on p. 8) and most of the ensuing detail about ‘the gentleman with the trout’ and his meal. Only part of this is in the Feuchtwanger script, while the first script goes almost straight from Georges’s attempt to take away Simone’s book to the sappers’ actual entry on p. 8 (though it does make the point that Simone is holding down her brother’s job while he is at the front). The fact that the brother is Saint-Martin’s only volunteer comes from the Berlau script; the phrase ‘And the people are the enemy’ (p. 9) is from an addition to the 1946 version. Virtually everything from the Colonel’s exit (p. 11) to the Mayor’s entry (p. 12) is new in the Berlau script; in the first version the Mayor arrives before the Colonel leaves, and is bawled out for permitting the confusion on the roads; the Colonel threatening to report him to the Préfecture at Lyons.

  Thereafter the first version moves straight from the Mayor’s request for the lorries to his formal requisitioning of them (p. 13). It is at this point that the Patron states his prior obligation to the Captain and his wines, provoking the Mayor to speak of his duty to France.

  PATRON: Don’t talk about France. You’re just using an opportunity to score off the Captain because he cut your wife at the Préfet’s ball in return for your taking Simone out of his service so she might go to school…

  This leads quickly into the Mayor’s demand for the petrol too. From there down to Maurice’s statement (p. 14) that they know nothing about the petrol the first version is like a draft of the final text. Thereafter:

  MAYOR: So that’s your answer? I see. Only a miracle can save France; it’s rotten from top to bottom. To Simone: You’ve got a brother at the front; in the south, isn’t he? Do you imagine he’ll have any petrol for his tank? Jammed in the endless stream of refugees, he’s no doubt waiting for a mortal attack by enemy dive-bombers. But I don’t suppose you’re any more likely than the others to tell me where I can get him some petrol, eh, Simone?

  Simone stands motionless, then gives a dry sob and rushes away. Sighing, the Mayor turns and leaves.

  Neither the Berlau nor the Feuchtwanger script has any mention of the petrol in this scene or the Dream which follows. The former has the final text from the Mayor’s entry to the Patron’s ‘We must talk in private’ (p. 13); whereupon the Mayor replies:

  No, Henri, we will no longer talk in private. I may be a bad mayor, I suppose, and have done wrong to shut an eye so often. But unless I can organize those twenty lorries for the refugees I don’t know how I’ll be able to look my son in the face when he gets back from the front. He notices Simone. Sending some of your food parcels to the village hall? You only filled the soldiers’ dixie half full. I ought to have confiscated your stocks
long ago.

  PATRON threateningly: Try it and see.

  MAYOR: How can the refugees get anywhere if they’re robbed of their last sou all along the line?

  PATRON: This is a restaurant, not a charitable institution. You can go, Simone.

  Simone starts to go.

  MAYOR stops her. Calmly: Any news from your brother?

  Simone shakes her head.

  MAYOR: I’ve not heard from my son either. Quietly and bitterly to the others: At this moment her brother can see the German tanks advancing towards him, Stukas above him, blocked roads behind him so that no reinforcements can get through to him; and here she is being expected to help exploit Frenchmen who are in trouble.

  The Patron claims that this is undermining her respect for her employer, to which the Mayor replies ‘I see’, and so on to the end as in the final version.

  First Dream of Simone Machard (2)

  The Angel’s opening speech in verse is in the first version, but not the brief dialogue between him and Simone which follows and identifies him with her brother André; a preliminary version of this is in the Berlau script. Simone’s song, which had Saint-Nazaire in the first version, had Saint-Omer in the Berlau script and Rocamer in both the Feuchtwanger and the final scripts till Brecht restored Saint-Nazaire once again on the latter. Three of the four ‘dream language’ phrases on pp. 16, 18 and 21 are pen additions by Brecht to the final script, which already contained ‘Okler greischt Burlapp’ (p. 21). Two other nonsense remarks referred to in the stage directions were spelt out in the Berlau script; thus Simone’s unintelligible reply on p. 18 is (‘Allekiwist, Maurice’) and Robert’s remark (below) is (‘Wihilirichi’). In the first version the whole scene is shorter. Thus after Simone’s offer to clean Père Gustave’s guns for him the Patron enters and Simone almost instantly beats her drum to summon the king with a version of her long speech on pp. 20–21. He thereupon enters, asks after her brother, confiscates the lorries and inquires about the petrol (which is not mentioned in the Berlau script). Why are the drivers lying, he asks.