BOOKS
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obsessing theme than any he himself could invent at the time. When he
adopted the legend for his own opera his new-found adherence to com–
munism was not yet sufficiently clarified to prevent him from exploiting it
in the direction of his old nihilism. Thus, while the underworld is repre–
sented
as
the truest and frankest expression of the society whose hypocritical
rules it disregards, its hero MacHeath, who kings it in this quintessential
milieu of capitalism, is celebrated not only for his frankness, but also for
his
opposition.
This unconscious contradiction, given piquancy by Brecht's
talent as a poet and accompanied by Weill's ambiguous music, was respon–
sible in no small measure for the opera's success, which came at a time of
deflation in political attitudes, when the rejection of bourgeois standards
went hand in hand with the acceptance of the concrete bourgeois world. But
this was in 1929.
In 1934, when he came to write a novel on the basis of the legend,
Brecht's communism had sunk deeper roots and taken more complete pos–
session of his consciousness. The object of attack is more clearly defined now
as capitalist society in the specific. The underworld is no longer cut off clean–
ly from the remainder of society as its illegal expression, but merges with it
imperceptibly behind the veil of public hypocrisy; and the action now takes
place in a shadowy transitional milieu peopled by lumpenproletariat, racket–
eers, shady speculators, coney-catchers, future criminals, beggars, bohemians
without pretensions-in short, the refuse of all the better organized areas of
society. The scene is London during the Boer War--chosen perhaps because
in time and place it is the historical apogee of capitalism-yet in so far as
faithfulness to background is concerned, it might- just
as
well be capitalism
among the Yahoos. MacHeath is no longer a cute desperado, but a grim
racketeer who operates a chain of stores with stolen goods and succeeds so
well in crushing competition that he is able to force his way into respectable
financial institutions and pose as a pillar of society in the manner of
F.
Don–
ald Coster, of whom he is the necessary archetype. Peachum, the best-drawn
character in the book, remains the bourgeois bonhomme, the timid and ra–
pacious family father whose most intense emotional and physical sensations
are caused by money. The action unrolls in a long drawn and detailed com–
plication of knavery involving MacHeath's grandiose schemes for power and
position, and the struggles for survival of his victims, who are equally vil–
lainous, but lack his daring and frankness. In spite of the machinery of
commercial transactions with all their faithful details, the novel makes little
attempt to be realistic in the common sense of the word, for Brecht intends,
DOt
to draw a picture, but to give a dramatic definition of capitalist society,
showing it as it is
ideally,
not as it appears or as it is experienced.
For this, as well
as
for other reasons, the novel constitutes an experi–
ment. Brecht, like many other contemporary poets who feel that they have to
prove themselves in a novel, has approached the form with restlessness
an~
dissatisfaction and has attempted to fill it with a new content. He brea!Cs
away from the premise most basic to the novel as we have come to know it,
llllllely, that it shall deal with actual experience, and instead transfers atten–
tion
from the real to the ideal, from actual behavior to the operative pat–
lans
or formulas of behavior. What we are to read is not a sample of life
IDCler capitalism, but the paradigm, the non-allegorical parable, of all life
111der capitalism. An intention such as this can be fulfilled in literature only
