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PARTISAN REVIEW
revealing ambivalence. He understood that both sides of an am–
bivalence can be exploited, either separately or together.
While precocious success as a journalist boosted his local
prestige, the original poems and ballads he sang, accompanying
himself on the guitar, boosted his popularity with both boys and
girls. According to one boy who was at school with him, "An ir–
resistible force emanated from the slight, restless figure of the young
Brecht.... He didn't sing well but with infectious passion, drunk on
his own verse, ideas, and images as other people are on wine, and
intoxicating his listeners as only youth can." The one-act comedy
He's Driving Out a Devil
is the play that tells us most about his tech–
nique of seducing: a peasant-boy's self-confidence appears to be un–
shakeable. He behaves as though he is so certain of getting what he
wants that resistance only amuses him. When Brecht was making
passes, he may have been feeling fundamentally insecure and un–
loved, but he wore a mask of total self-possession so often that his
features began to shape themselves to it.
At first his appetite was big enough to match his skill as a
hunter: "I go around wanting the entire world to be handed over to
me. I want every single thing to be in
my
possession, together with
power over the animals, and the basis of my claim is that I can exist
only once." This is the Brecht who identified with Baal and imitated
Rimbaud: "When you embrace virginal hips, warm life pulses in
your hands, and in the fear and bliss of the creature you become a
god." "Summer sings out of me with a soft and resonant voice . . . I
hate romantic reverie ... Music gushes out of me. I can't stop it." In
his diary Brecht had written, "To be happy, function well , take time
for being lazy; to be committed, only one thing is needed: intensity
... to do everything with all one's body and soul."
If
he couldn't entirely eliminate scruples and feelings of guilt, it
was important to make sure that they did not impede him and to
conceal them from other people and, ideally, from himself too. This
was not easy at first, and the 1918 version of
Baal
contains moments
of remorse. In the face of his mother's remonstrations, this Baal is
sometimes on the point of repenting, and Paula Banholzer was told
she would find evidence in the play that Brecht loved her very much.
But the habit of duplicity was deeply ingrained, and with his
skill at manipulating strangers into behaving like friends and friends
into forgiving treachery, Brecht could afford to behave badly. When
his friend Arnolt Bronnen was awarded the Kleist Prize for his play
Patricide,
he loyally asked Herbert Ihering, the judge, to consider two
