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Search - Threepenny Novel

Threepenny Novel
Author: Bertolt Brecht

Threepenny Novel — by Bertolt Brecht — (translated by Desmond I. Vesey with verses translated by Christopher Isherwood) — Dear Grove Press: — I am glad you are publishing THREEPENNY NOVEL. The "background" you ask me about is something like this. — In 1954 and 1955, Bertolt Brecht took Paris by storm ("en France la gloire da Brecht commence") with hi... more »s own productions of Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle respectively. Soon afterwards he was discovered by The Times Literary Supplement ("every other living playwright seems more or less trivial"), and now suddenly all the New York publishers who have been rejecting him for decades are asking themselves if they haven't heard the name somewhere before...

Well, actually, The Threepenny Opera was produced here--and on Broadway at that--as early as 1933; in the same year, Lehman Engel did He Who Says Yes at the Henry St. Settlement; and in 1935 followed Mother, produced by the Theater Union. Meanwhile Brecht's ideas were discussed in the left-wing magazines of the thirties, and all but dominated the book in which Mordecai Gorelik, the Broadway designer, surveyed all of modern theatre (New Theatres for Old, 1940). In the next decade, Brecht spent six years in this country, where one of the things he did was to put on his Galileo, starring Charles Laughton, in Los Angeles. (New York saw only a foolishly hustled imitation of this show with nearly every actor changed except Mr. Laughton.)

I myself entered the field with an English version of The Private Life of the Master Race, which received a miserable, if professional, production in the City College Auditorium in 1945. Shortly afterwards Desmond Vesey sent me his version of The Threepenny Opera, and I was able to arrange for its performance at the University of Illinois (1946) and Northwestern University (1948); later Vesey and I collaborated, and it is our joint version that is currently in print (Doubleday Anchor Books). Meanwhile Marc Blitzstein's very different version of an Off Broadway Hit (1954-6)...

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was first performed in 1728, and already during the 18th century took on all sorts of strange guises. Machaeth was sometimes played by a woman. George Colman had all the men's parts played by women, and vice versa...In our century, a friend of Brecht's made a German translation of Gay's masterpiece, and from this sprang The Threepenny Opera (1928). In the wake of the play came two films, one German, one French, both directed by G.W. Pabst, and the book you are publishing: THREEPENNY NOVEL. The original German of this last was published in Amsterdam in 1934, Mr. Vesey's English translation, under the title A Penny for the Poor, in London (1937) and New York (1938). It is the only long piece of fiction Brecht has yet published (with the exception of an unfinished story about Julius Caesar), and I hope your readers will be relieved to discover that it is not simply a rehash of The Threepenny Opera.

Sincerely yours,

Eric Bentley

Cover design by Roy Kuhlman

ISBN: 176739
Publication Date: 1958
Pages: 396
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Grove Press Inc.
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Genre Fiction

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