Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Good Person of Szechwan; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  ‘So help me God,’ said Mr Punttila, ‘did I never tell you what happened to that landowner from Joensuu in Tavasthus when he celebrated his name day with Judge Tengbom? He left his coachman waiting for him outside the Park Hotel. The man was served his food and drink out there and slept with the hood over him. A week later they moved on to the City Hotel, where the landowner finally went to bed. Next morning his wife came to collect him. Didn’t she look angry and hideous, and did she let him have it, hell! She sat down by his bedside with her tongue going like a millrace for hours on end. The old boy lay under the bedclothes quiet as a mouse, and when he finally got a chance to open his mouth he just whispered: “I say, Maria, fetch my cap from the Park Hotel and all your sins will be forgiven.” You know old Tengbom, judge, don’t you? A very good health to you Englishmen! My God, d’you know what Tengbom did then? Phew, what pretty girls that man had! What about giving the girls a bit of a song? At the tops of our voices now! Life’s not all that bad under prohibition, is it? Do you Englishmen really know how to drink? Cheers to you, then!’ A fresh bottle made its appearance on the table. Punttila and the judge struck up a resounding song.

  Suddenly the smoking-room door sprang open, and there stood Aunt Hanna, a living reminder of life’s blacker aspects. ‘Come here, my girl, and sit on my lap,’ called Punttila, stretching out a hand towards her. ‘I suggest Johannes moderates his voice a bit,’ said Miss Hanna, whereupon a marked silence descended. The banking gentlemen got politely to their feet, looked at their watches and were amazed at the lateness of the hour. And although Miss Hanna was offered a chair and sat down, one guest after another took his leave and the host went with them. Finally all that was left in the smoking-room was Punttila’s group of drinkers. Then the brandy ran out.

  ‘Bloody temperance home,’ exclaimed the outraged Punttila. ‘Markus’s guests get treated no better than sawdust in this place. Have a heart, Hanna, and get us something to drink! We feel an exceptional urge to sing.’

  ‘It is high time Johannes went to bed like the others, and he knows perfectly well that in this house all the alcohol is in my charge. The booze-up is over.’

  Punttila thumped the table with his fist, but the rest of them drifted away. Aunt Hanna visited the card-playing chauffeurs with the same blistering success. Finally the whole house was quiet. The lights were put out, and the perpetual summer twilight revealed the solitary figure of farmer Punttila hunched over the empty glasses and bottles in the smoking-room.

  ‘Bloody house, where they hang up the visitors’ guts to dry like underwear!’ Punttila’s drunkenness was boosting his fiendish energy. He started feeling his way stumblingly through the darkened rooms till he found the door of Aunt Hanna’s bedroom. Grabbing a chair he treated Aunt Hanna to a veritable serenade.

  ‘Listen to me, you old squirrel, you old viper, don’t you realise that farmer Punttila can get some aquavit into this temperance hotel if he wants to? Damme, Hanna, I’ll show you how I can get liquor, and legal liquor at that!’

  Punttila slammed the big front door behind him.

  ‘Where is Punttila’s chauffeur?’

  But the yard was deserted. Dark and empty, the windows of the main house and its neighbouring buildings gazed down at the raging farmer. Nobody answered.

  ‘Damn that for a lark, Punttila can find his own wagon.’

  The doors of the garage where the guests’ cars were slumbering were bolted. Punttila inspected the lock. ‘Call that a lock? … God’s sakes, I’ll smash the whole place in!’ A few resounding blows and the doors gaped open. Right at the front stood Punttila’s Buick.

  Firm foot on the accelerator, that’s what it takes. A mudguard hits the door. Out, damned mudguard! What does one wretched mudguard cost? Johannes Punttila can get new ones any time he wants. Let’s go!

  The car followed a zigzag course from side to side of the road. ‘I’ll straighten out those curves, just watch me!’

  In this way farmer Punttila pursued his narrow road to Heaven and rejoiced over each telegraph pole he managed to miss. ‘Get out of my way!’ he yelled at the telegraph pole at the entrance to the village, and lo! the pole evaded the car of so powerful a farmer.

  The village was a fair size. How could one get hold of a prescription for alcohol?

  But Punttila knew his way around. He stopped his car at the first hut he came to and started banging on the door⁏as hard as he could.

  ‘Haven’t you a cow doctor in this village?’ he yelled.

  A sleepy old woman opened her window. ‘What do you mean going round breaking down decent people’s front doors, you drunken lout?’

  ‘I’m just looking for the vet, my little dove,’ said Punttila. ‘I am farmer Punttila from Lammi, and all my thirty cows have scarlet fever. So I need legal alcohol.’

  ‘You sodden disgrace! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘Hush, hush, my sweetheart, none of those nasty remarks or I shall smash up your dirty little hovel.’

  After which farmer Punttila drove from end to end of the village promising to smash up their hovels, until he found the vet’s house. There he leant on the horn of his Buick until the vet’s grumpy and loud-mouthed wife opened an upper window. ‘Go away! What do you mean by going round drunk, waking people up?’

  ‘Please don’t be cross, my darling. I am farmer Punttila from Tavastland, and back home my thirty cows have all got scarlet fever. I need legal alcohol.’

  ‘My husband’s asleep. Be off with you!’

  ‘Is that the doctor’s wife in person I’m addressing? I wish you a very good day. Kotkotkot, how pretty you are. Please tell the doctor right away that, back in his village, whenever farmer Punttila requires legal alcohol every vet in the place instantly prescribes him the correct dosage.’

  The window slammed with a bang.

  A renewed barrage on the door.

  ‘Get out, man, I tell you!’ and the angry face of the vet appeared at the window above.

  ‘Why, there’s the doctor himself. I am farmer Punttila from Tavastland, and my thirty cows have got scarlet fever. What’s more I am the biggest bruiser in the whole of Tavastland, and when I want legal alcohol I get some.’

  The vet understood his customer exactly and laughed. ‘Ah well, if you are such a powerful gentleman then you’ll have to have your prescription, I suppose.’

  Punttila was most gratified. ‘That’s it. You are a true vet, ha ha. Come over to us some time and we’ll celebrate in style.’

  Punttila’s car now headed for the chemist’s. With one hand Punttila tended the steering wheel, with the other he brandished his prescription for legal alcohol.

  The car halted outside the chemist’s door. Then Punttila rattled the door violently till two furious women’s faces appeared at the upstairs window.

  ‘A very good morning to you. I am farmer Punttila from Tavastland and I’ve got thirty cows with scarlet fever and I urgently need alcohol.’

  The chemist’s assistant called down. ‘You’d better clear off, an old soak like you disturbing folks’ sleep.’

  ‘The summer night was warm/As quiet slept the farm,’ sang Punttila. ‘Come down and open the door, my little turtledoves! Punttila wishes alcohol. Punttila is well aware that every second house in your village shelters an illegal still. But Punttila insists on having legal alcohol for his beloved cows. If I said my thirty cows had got glanders that, my darlings, would be a vulgar lie, but when I say that Johannes Punttila’s cows are down with scarlet fever then it’s as good as proven.’

  The farmer went on arguing with the chemist’s assistant till she opened up and got his alcohol. Back drove Punttila in the direction of the Consular estate.

  Glug, glug, glug, went the schnapps bottle in his pocket, and Punttila’s drunkenness was on the increase. The telegraph poles got more and more insolent and the road grew narrower and narrower.

  ‘What a problem it is to get through,’ sighed Punttila.

  But he reached the estat
e with his honour unimpaired. Glug, glug, glug sang the congenial bottle as farmer Punttila reached Aunt Hanna’s door, bottle held high.

  ‘Do you know what I’m carrying in my belly, you miserable old maid? Legal alcohol, glug, glug, d’you hear the lovely music? Fancy thinking Johannes Punttila wasn’t going to get his legal alcohol! Now we’ve something to lace our coffee with!’

  The smoking-room was empty and the coffee cold. Punttila took a coffee with schnapps, but in the absence of company it didn’t taste as it should. So Punttila went off to find some.

  With some difficulty he located the judge’s room. ‘Hey, judge, look what I’ve brought you. Come on, just look,’ said Punttila, and the judge looked blearily from his bed.

  ‘You’ve got a bottle, so you have. And now good night.’

  ‘I’m telling you it’s a schnapps bottle, judge! Look at the official label, that means legal alcohol.’

  The judge turned his face to the wall. ‘The court will take a recess,’ he murmured and promptly went back to sleep.

  Punttila stood there wrapped in thought, observing the judge so prettily asleep between the white bedclothes.

  ‘Too bad you aren’t a woman,’ sighed Punttila as he felt his way once more through the house. This time he and his bottle managed to locate the kitchen, from which sounds of early morning activity could already be heard.

  * * *

  The mistress of the house was accustomed to waking very early. Today she was fifty. She saw that it was a fine summer morning, thought a little about her life to date, and decided that thinking about it wasn’t worth the trouble. She started listening to the sounds of the house. The silence had something menacing about it. She recalled the serenade and the company the previous evening, with Punttila’s throaty and compellingly joyous voice following its own erratic path high above all the rest. She was aware of sinister premonitions and could feel the gnawings of conscience.

  Madam Maria dressed rapidly and went downstairs. Familiar voices could be heard from the farm kitchen. There sat farmer Punttila with his fortified coffee. Across the table from him three beady-eyed ladies were sitting in judgement on him with severe expressions: Punttila’s own two daughters with their golden hair and milk-white complexions, and grumpy Aunt Hanna. The three had gone through the entire litany of all Punttila’s sins, from the first bottle to the last, but quite without success. Punttila sat there, his powerful body still buoyed up by the booze, with beaming face and rampant hair. Those fearsome females had caught him in that room, where he had been flirting with the cook and kissing the maid; for he had even been courting old Fina. ‘Anyway, Fina, you’re better than nothing.’

  Punttila had told the story of his nocturnal adventures at least ten times over: how he had driven off to look for legal alcohol and threatened to smash the hovels in. He was overjoyed to see Madam Maria, and started telling it all over again. He was delighted to find that he made her laugh. Then some of the chauffeurs came into the kitchen, so the farmer had to repeat it all once more. The women took the opportunity to move into the dining-room for a council of war.

  Maria’s daughter-in-law Toini started sobbing: ‘What are we to do with him?’ ‘Chuck him in the lake and drown him where it’s deepest,’ suggested Aunt Hanna. ‘Then Auntie will have to winkle him out of the kitchen before she drowns him,’ sighed the other daughter. The mistress of the house laughed: ‘If only we could confine him to the kitchen.’

  ‘You asked for it, Maria. Mind out for your dining-room when the guests come down to breakfast. How do you think it’s going to look?’ hissed Aunt Hanna.

  Madam Maria looked out of the window: ‘Keep your hair on, children. Let him be his own self, even if it’s only when he’s drunk.’

  Aunt Hanna raised her hands to heaven. ‘I wish you joy of whatever happens. Come along, girls.’

  Meanwhile farmer Punttila was sitting in the kitchen, an arm round each of the two chauffeurs. ‘Shut the door so those women don’t disturb us again. Drink up, my boys, farmer Punttila has got legal alcohol. Punttila doesn’t give a damn whether you’re communists or socialists, so long as you do your job like clockwork. Yes, boys, chopping down the forests and ploughing the fields and digging out stones! That’s proper work for a human being. In Punttila’s young days there wasn’t a bull that he hadn’t wrestled on to its back. But don’t imagine for one minute, boys, that they’d have let me go on working like that. I married my sawmill and my cornmill and got a couple of respectable daughters, and it’s not done for Daddy to plough. It’s not done for Daddy to tickle the girls and it’s not done for Daddy to lie in the fields with his workers and eat the same meal. Damn it all, boys, nothing’s done any longer as far as I’m concerned. But with you I can let my hair down. Listen, Jussi, here’s a hundred marks for you. And one for you too, Kalle! And now we’ll celebrate till the windows rattle. There’ll be something for you, of course there’s always something for you. There was that bathroom maid came and asked me to raise her wages because there wasn’t enough for the kids. Of course I let her have it. Do you want more wages, boys, do you? But all they do at the sawmill is laugh and say I’ve had a drop too much. What business is that of theirs? Farmer Punttila gives and gives, because everybody must have it good, socialists, communists and the bourgeoisie. There’s such a variety of us, we’ve got to get along together. Everyone can get along with Punttila.’ And Punttila sang: ‘“Dear child, why sue me when you said/We always felt so close in bed?”

  ‘You know, boys, why Punttila loves the entire world? The whole of humanity is good and nice. Have another coffee and schnapps. I shan’t be able to take my sawmill and my steam mill and the estate into the grave with me, shall I? It’s all got to stay here. Drink up, Jussi, drink, Kalle! We’re all brothers in drink. There was a time when we fought to beat each other, and life was ugly, really ugly. But now it’s possible to live again. The world is big enough, and there’ll be enough for you and enough for farmer Punttila too. Cheers, Kalle!’

  They went on cheerfully toping till the old housekeeper beckoned Kalle and Jussi into the back kitchen, after which Punttila again started mooching around, this time in the direction of the dining-room, which is two daughters at once left to dry their tears upstairs while Aunt Hanna went to the master of the house to ask for help.

  In the dining-room Madam Maria waited for her guests, inwardly praying that they would sleep on until the Punttila problem had been painlessly deflected. To no effect. The English bank representative arrived first, since he was in the habit of getting up early despite the late night and the brandy.

  When Aunt Hanna and her acolytes arrived back downstairs a strange performance greeted them. Beside the Englishman sat farmer Punttila, his hair unkempt, his face flushed by an inner dawn. He was alternately embracing the banker and embracing his bottle. At the end of the table sat Madam Maria telling the enchanged Englishman the story of Punttila’s nocturnal escapades and how he had managed to get hold of his legal alcohol. Punttila patted the Englishman on the back and enthusiastically told him: ‘You’re just like a proper Finn, mate.’

  The Englishman gave Punttila a friendly nod and laughed: ‘A Finnish Bacchus!’

  But Punttila thumped his barrel chest and asked: ‘Did Maria go on to tell you that I threatened to smash all their hovels?’

  In the golden morning light the silver shone, the cups clinked and old Fina in her snowy white apron poured coffee for Punttila and the bank director, while the village girl Selma handed round golden honey, jam and fragrant Finnish bread.

  The Englishman approved heartily of what he saw of Fina, and said he couldn’t stand those starchy English maids and menservants whom you had to address by their surnames. He envied his hostess.

  * * *

  In their bedroom that evening, when the celebrations were all over, the young engineer was talking to his wife, Punttila’s daughter: ‘Did you notice the way Mother, the Englishmen, Fina and your father were winking at one another? I have a feeling,
Toini, that it was a conspiracy of the more tolerant and civilised element against ourselves.’

  Madam Toini gave a yawn: ‘Rubbish. I could have sunk into the floor when I saw that schnapps bottle glinting on the table. You can’t imagine what embarrassments my sister Martha and I have always had to undergo when in society.’

  Toini was overwhelmed by self-pity.

  In the next room slept farmer Punttila, who towards evening had grown sober and silent. He lay there on his own, full of resentment against Aunt Hanna, who had taken their hundred mark notes away from Jussi and Kalle. Next time Punttila was planning to give the lads two hundred marks apiece, and to do so under Aunt Hanna’s nose.

  [From Brecht-Jahrbuch 1978, edited by John Fuegi, Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1978, pp. 96 – 106). Translated into German from the original Finnish by Margareta N. Deschner]

  Texts by Brecht

  A NOTE OF 1940

  The reader and, more important, the actor may be inclined to skim over passages such as the short dialogue between judge and lawyer (about the Finnish summer) in the sixth scene, because they use a homely way of speaking. However, the actor will not be performing the passage effectively unless he treats it as a prose poem, since it is one. Whether it is a good or a bad poem is not at this point relevant; the reader or actor can make up his own mind about that. The relevant thing is that it has to be treated as a poem, i.e., in a special manner, ‘presented on a silver platter.’ Matti’s hymn of praise to the herring in scene 9 is an even better instance, perhaps. There is more than one situation in Puntila which would undoubtedly seem crude in a naturalistic play; for instance, any actor who plays the episode where Matti and Eva stage a compromising incident (scene 4) as if it were an episode from a farce will entirely fail to bring it off. This is exactly the kind of scene that calls for real virtuosity, as again do the tests to which Matti subjects his betrothed in scene 8. To cite the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice is not to propose any kind of qualitative comparison; though the scene may fall a long way short of Shakespeare’s it can still only be made fully effective if one finds a way of acting something like that demanded by a verse play. Admittedly it is hard to speak of artistic simplicity rather than primitiveness when a play is written in prose and deals with ‘ordinary’ people. All the same the expulsion of the four village women (in scene 7) is not a primitive episode but a simple one, and as with the third scene (quest for legal alcohol and fiancées) it has to be played poetically; in other words the beauty of the episode (once again, be it big or be it small) must come across in the set, the movements, the verbal expression. The characters too have to be portrayed with a certain grandeur, and this again is something that will be none too easy for the actor who has only learnt to act naturalistically or fails to see that naturalistic acting is not enough in this case. It will help him if he realizes that it is his job to create a national character, and that this is going to call for all his sensitivity, daring, and knowledge of humanity. One last point: Puntila is far from being a play with a message. The Puntila part therefore must not for an instant be in any way deprived of its natural attractiveness, while particular artistry will be needed to make the drunk scenes delicate and poetic, with the maximum of variety, and the sober scenes as ungrotesque and unbrutal as possible. To put it in practical terms: Puntila has if possible to be staged in a style combining elements of the old commedia dell’ arte and of the realistic play of mores.