Theater into fiction, and vice versa

Theater into fiction is the genre that comes to mind while reading the German writer Bertolt Brecht’s Collected Short Stories (Minerva), Brecht being one of the prime movers of the European stage that straddled the last two centuries (19th into 20th).

In college literature class whenever the syllabus tackled the play, an important subhead would be Brechtian theater, which teachers said was that particular school wherein the audience would get so involved with the unfolding events on stage as to be direct participants, even on-the-spot actors in the drama.

Brecht, aside from having been primarily known as a playwright, was also a poet who spent many years in exile while evading the Nazi fascism prevalent in his homeland during the years leading to World War II.

In Collected Stories, Brecht comes out with a surprising and refreshingly varied cache of fiction written anywhere from Berlin to Bavaria, to assorted places of exile in America and beyond the free world as we know it.

As it happens, stories like Bargan Gives Up, The Unseemly Old Lady, Java Meier, Socrates Wounded, The Soldier at La Ciotat at times read like studies waiting to be played out on stage or on film, so strong is the visual element in Brecht’s prose, for which we have to thank the skillful translators of his work.

There is too something of the elemental storyteller in the German author, who ranks among his country’s best writers like Rilke, Goethe, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl and Gunter Grass. This we suspect has something to do with his obsession with narrative, the story carried to its fruition or denouement.

His characters are on the whole memorable and able to peel themselves away from being mere sketches, which they are threatened to be reduced to when Brecht, as typical of a playwright, seems to get impatient with his exposition and in a kind of reverse deus ex machina – in this case with the author playing god – abandons them in mid-plot.

This unusual style can be seen in the story Barbara, a woman who appears only in the beginning but whose brief presence is the spark plug for the entire narrative.

Not without an absurd humor that may be European in flavor do Brecht’s stories, told in an almost rambling, ribald and informal style, endear themselves to the reader.

In Bargan Gives Up, we get a hint on the workings of a mind of a plunderer who after all has a tender side for his cohort, down to sharing a woman taken as war booty from an unfortunate village. Here Brecht’s plot is linear, almost like we are going on a journey from point A to point B.

But even if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, this doesn’t prevent the playwright in Brecht from delving and dabbling in tangentials and loops to get where he’s going without sacrificing brevity, as can be read in the tragicomic tales A Mean Bastard and The Monster.

There is in the author a natural philosophic temperament that infects the accidental reader with the same life and death reflections, even if he or she may not be so predisposed.

In Life Story of the Boxer Samson Korner, Brecht displays that a long prose work was not alien to him; it can in fact qualify as the playwright’s unfinished novel. Or, an abbreviated novel that wound up as a novella.

The chronicle itself is so plainly written that its seeming artlessness is what makes it credible, that we wonder less if this is fiction than if a boxer named Samson Korner really did exist early in the last century.

In this manner Brecht precludes the works of many major writers who wrote reams of copy on the psychology of boxing, but the German obviously beat them to it, and in the first person no less.

He peoples his stories with the very low life that in rare moments can have hearts of gold, and so become the stuff and excuse of literature: sailors and drunkards, boxers and women of questionable repute.

All told Brecht was a writer who never gave a second thought about his vocation. He wrote and that was it – plays, poetry, stories. To him it was a calling, and what better way to heed it than to have been constantly on the run from Hitler and his minions, a stray ray of light that glimmered during Germany’s darkest age.

In another life he might have been Eric Gamalinda following the advice of Franz Arcellana, that in order for him to mature as a writer he must get as far away from home as possible.