BOOKS
WAITING FOR LEFTY
THE THEATRE OF REVOLT: STUDIES IN MODERN DRAMA FROM
IBSEN TO GENET. By Robert Brust,ein. Atlantic-Little, Brown and Co. $7.50.
My only serious complaint about this book is its title and its
first chapter. Mr. Brustein, I imagine, had already written his studies- all
of them good, three or four of them excellent-of eight notable dramatists
of the last hundred years, when he, or his publishers, suddenly thought
that the essays ought to be bound together by a uniting concept. The
concept of revolt is an intrinsically vague one, though not vacuous.
Albert Camus gives it the sense of a gesture against the absurd conditions
of existence; Nietzsche (who crops up frequently in this book) gave it
more the sense of an attempt to break free from stock responses, received
ideas, and to transcend the limitations of the ,self. I think that, in its
literary uses, it is an individualistic rather than a social or political con–
cept. (You can
be
splendidly in revolt without really working to change
effectively anything going on around you, and without changing much
more perhaps than attitudes or postures in the self.) Revolt, Mr. Bru–
stein notes, can be negative or messianic, but it seems to me that we
admire the dramatists he writes about for other more obvious qualities.
Only about three of them, anyway, are by Mr. Brustein's own
standards genuine dramatists of revolt, early and late (but not middle)
Ibsen, early but not late Strindberg, and Jean Genet. Shaw, as Mr.
Bmstein notes, is a reformer not a rebel, ineradicably a late Victorian
gentleman-radical in his basic attitudes. Real revolt comes from a deep
division in the self, and Shaw was too pleased with himself all through.
Brecht is a revolutionary writer, no doubt, but he does not express
deep revolt, except in his earlier, less satisfactory plays: the plays one
likes best, like
The Good Woman of Sezchuan
(not dealt with by Mr.
Brustein) or
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
are moral fables, like Tolstoy's
How Much Land Does a Man Need?
Their slyness and simplicity make
them pleasing to children and wise old men. Chekhov, one of Mr.
