In a recent post about our recording of the HUAC testimony of Hallie Flanagan, Director of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, I noted the passing of critic, translator and playwright Eric Bentley. Several years ago,at one of the UW Library book sales, I stumbled across a volume entitled Thirty Years of Treason – it was Bentley’s thousand page compilation of the HUAC testimony of writers, actors and directors. First, of course, was Hallie Flanagan, but also that of Bertolt Brecht, who thoroughly befuddled the committee and flew to Europe the next day. It was the best $2 I have ever spent!
I thought Bentley’s life and work deserved more detail and so I asked UW Prof Emeritus (and internationally known Brecht scholar) Marc Silberman to say a bit more about the person who brought Brecht to the English speaking world. His notes are below:
When he died on August 5, 2020, in New York City, not a few people were surprised that Eric Bentley, at 103 going on 104, was even still alive! Born in England in 1916, he studied first piano and later at the University of Oxford history, and then completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University in 1941, becoming an American citizen in 1948 and living out his life in New York City as an openly gay public intellectual.
Best known for having introduced Bertolt Brecht to the American public, Bentley met him for the first time in 1942 while teaching freshman English at UCLA. This led to a friendship and collaboration that lasted until Brecht died in 1956, a story that Bentley told in The Brecht Commentaries (1981) and in Bentley on Brecht (1985). He also edited the Grove Press edition of Brecht’s plays, which – in contrast to the British edition assembled by John Willett and Ralph Manheim – aimed at adapting Brecht’s language to the American vernacular. Trained in music, Bentley also performed and recorded Brecht’s lyrics in English translation, especially those with settings by Hanns Eisler (see Folkway Records and The Brecht-Eisler Songbook, 1967).
Yet Bentley was not only the translator and promoter of Brecht in the USA, he was also a theater critic and historian, teacher, stage director, and playwright. He translated other German playwrights, including Frank Wedekind, Heinrich von Kleist, and Arthur Schnitzler, becoming an important mediator for German theater in the USA. Ironically, he is less known for his own plays, including those treating Brecht (Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? and The Recantation of Galileo Galilei, both 1972), than those he translated, especially those by Brecht.
Oracle Theatre of Chicago is sadly no more (they were also a free theatre) but their production of Brecht’s The Mother lives in part on Youtube. I regret that I did not see this staging but strongly recommend you check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHXNkpUogrY
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The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.—Bertolt Brecht
Brecht’s poetry is often overshadowed (and less well known) than his plays, but he wrote poems all his life and they deserve more attention. We’ll be adding some as our Brecht Project continues.
To Those Born Later
I
Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.
What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I’ve been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost.)
They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times.
II
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned there.
I came among men in a time of revolt
And I rebelled with them.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
My food I ate between battles
To sleep I lay down among murderers
Love I practised carelessly
And nature I looked at without patience.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Sat safer without me: that was my hope.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
III
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped.
Changing countries more often than our shoes,
We went through the class wars, despairing
When there was only injustice, no outrage.
And yet we realized: Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. O,
We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendship
Could not ourselves be friendly
But you, when the time comes at last
When man is helper to man
Think of us With forbearance.
