RONALD HAYMAN
425
The habit of manipulating people had begun in childhood. "His
nature," wrote a classmate, "was always to boss others about, to im–
pose his will on them ." But except with his brother, who was two
years younger, he could not get his own way by force. He was often
beaten up by boys of his own age, and he did not fight bravely.
Under pressure, he would run indoors, calling for his mother, who
had formed the impression that he had a special quality and deserved
preferential treatment. He soon succeeded in ousting his brother
from the attic room they shared. Their mother's health was poor,
which gave her an extra affinity for her older son, a frail, nervous,
difficult child, who took little pleasure in eating. Before he was nine,
cardiac trouble had asserted itself, confirming her notion that he
needed special treatment.
He was dreamy, thoughtful, and temperamentally disinclined
from the beginning to invest effort in activities such as washing,
which brought no gratification. He could quickly learn a new tech–
nique - playing an instrument or playing a game - but he was im–
mune to the bourgeois mania for self-improvement, and he dis–
covered that grownups had only limited means at their disposal for
imposing their will on him. Soon after starting at the Royal Bavarian
Gymnasium when he was ten, he began to pit his wits against those
of his teachers. A form master who enjoyed defeating the class with
his questions was defeated by the silence which greeted him when a
school inspector was sitting in on the lesson. A higher mark was ex–
tricated from the French master after the young Brecht had drawn
red lines under sentences that had no mistakes in them and then
complained that he couldn't sec what was wrong. Nothing he learned
at school seemed more instructional than the power games he played
with those in authority.
For mos tyro writers, the excitement of writing is the excite–
ment of telling the truth; from the beginning, the main pleasure for
Brecht seems to have been in the power that writing gained for him.
He was just sixteen when he got himself commissioned to write for
the local newspaper. His first job was to review a book of poems .
Knowing that the editor of the paper had been corresponding with
the poet, he wrote an insincerely enthusiastic review, comparing the
rhythm with Verlaine's, and after war broke out in 1914, he secured
his foothold on journalism by writing jingoistically, "All of us, all
Germans, fear God and nothing else in the world." While writing for
the school magazine, he had denuded his prose of rhetorical
appas–
sionato,
but he was not going to waste his opportunity of exciting a
large audience. Nothing was to be gained by writing well or by
