122
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the form of the morality play or tale--"Pilgrim's Progress" is the best
example-and a !JlOrality tale is exactly what
A Pmny for the Poor
is.
But Brecht also wants to make propaganda in more emphatic terms, he
wants to
~~ock
the reader in order to make sure his point is not missed; and
so he satlnzes what he exposes. He will show the unrelieved viciousness of
a world in which the fundamental assumptions of bourgeois society are
driven to their final conclusions. The result, however, must be an absurd
world, its absurdity following from the strictness of its logic. The action,
therefore, proceeds, not in accordance with the internal necessities of char–
acter and verisimilitude, but in obedience to the external logic of a set
scheme that overrides the former. This is well and good in a play or in
some other short form, but in a longer form like the novel it is unendurable,
for an absurd world can only contain absurd characters, and absurd charac–
ters produce nothing but farce, whether it
is
grim farce, as in the present
case, or merry farce. And farce palls. After a hundred pages or so, by which
time the reader has grasped his point, Brecht's novel becomes something
like a stage farce from which the voices and gestures of actors have been
excluded, or like a succession of subtitles from a silent movie, which we re–
fuse to believe until we see. Continued the length of four hundred ·pages in
a manner that strains at every point to make its gratuitous irony dear-pre–
sumably for the benefit of the untutored reader whom Brecht wants to at–
tract to serious literature-the book ends by becoming nerve-wracking.
In its original German, at least, the novel is to some extent redeemed
by Brecht's virtuosity as a master of language. Scattered through the book
are splendidly executed passages of irony in a prose which for its firmness
and sensitivity might serve as ·a model to any writer of German. The Eng–
lish translation, much too literal, has caught almost nothing of this, and
very little more of Brecht's "collage" compositions in cliche and cant phrase,
for which he has an extraordinary ear. Isherwood's versions of Brecht's own
poems which are set at the chapter heads are brave efforts, but inadequate
since they coarsen Brecht's colloquialisms to the point of banality, some–
thing which is entirely absent from the German.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
LIGHT VERSE OMNIBUS
THE OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE. Chosen
by
W . H. Auden.
Oxford.
$3.00.
This is in some respects an excellent anthology. Auden's definition of
"light verse" is so wide that it permits him to include "serious light verse,"
and he uses the term so that it means merely all verse which is not obscure.
However, most of the poems in the book are characterized by the inten!ion
~f
creating mirth, and the poems by Blake and Yeats which are hardly hght m
any sense are too good to make one concerned abo_ut
defi~itions. Th~
book
is also rather weak on American verse and contams a d,luted versiOn of
"Frankie and Johnny," not the one _in E. E. Cummings'
"J:Iim,"
which
among its other virtues concludes wtth a stupendous castration scene at
