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PARTISAN REVIEW
has scarcely been achieved, was once again involved. Brecht: "I know
people will say of me 'he was a manic'.
If
this age goes down to
posterity, understanding for my mania will go down with it. The age
will provide the background for manic
tend~ncies.
But what I should
really like is that people should one day say: he was a
moderate
manic."
Recognition of his moderation should not be neglected in the volume
of poems: that life, despite Hitler, goes on, that there will always be
children. Brecht thinks of an age without history, of which his poem to
sculptors gives a portrait, and of which he told me a few days later that
he thought its arrival more likely than victory over fascism. But then,
still as an argument for the inclusion of the "Children's Songs" in the
"Poems from Exile," something else asserted itself, that Brecht ex–
pressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he seldom
shows. "In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their
intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty
thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing.
They hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That
is why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the
mother's womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the
children." While he spoke I felt a force acting on me which was equal
to that of Fascism; I mean a power that has its source. no less deep in
history than Fascism. It was a very curious feeling, new to me.
It
was
matched by the direction Brecht's thought now took. "They are
planning devastation of icy proportions. That is why they cannot come
to an agreement with the Church, which is also a march into millen–
nia. They have proletarianized me as well. They have not only taken
away my house, my fishpond and my car, they have stolen my theater
and my public. From my standpoint I cannot admit that Shakespeare
was fundamentally a greater talent. But he too would have been unable
to write from stock. He had his models in front of him. The people he
portrayed were actually there. He managed with great difficulty to
snatch up a few characteristics of their behavior; many equally impor–
tant ones he left out."
Beginning of August.
" In Russia a dictatorship is in power
over
the proletariat. We must avoid disowning it for as long as this
dictatorship still does practical work for the proletariat; that is, as long
as it contributes to a balance between proletariat and peasantry with a
preponderant regard for proletarian interests." Some days later Brecht
spoke of a "workers' monarchy" and I compared this organism to the
grotesque jokes of nature which, in the form of a horned fish or some
other monster, are extracted from the ocean.
25th August.
A Brechtian maxim: Do not build on the good old
days, but on the bad new ones.
