Intoxicated by His Aloofness : BERTOLT BRECHT: Journals, 1934-1955, <i> Translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison, Edited by John Willett (Routledge: $39.95, cloth; 556 pp.)</i>

Thesis-antithesis, chugs the Hegelian pump--up-down, up-down--and synthesis gushes out. So goes the dialectic, the pulsing of opposites by which history and thought, according to Hegel and Marx, make their advances.

Bertolt Brecht was ostensibly a Marxist playwright, but that is a bit like saying that George Bernard Shaw was a vegetarian playwright. Brecht--like Shaw, in fact--juggled ideas like flaming torches while trying to keep his distance--less successfully than Shaw--from the heat. In his theater the ideas are primarily characters; their role is far more dramatic than intellectual.

This profoundly contradictory man--thank goodness for the switchbacks because his straight-aways could be repellent--was a believer in dialectic, and more than a believer. It gave him energy, as love traditionally gave poets energy. No genius, though, can inhabit another genius’ scheme without breaking it, and Brecht quite thoroughly disarranged the Hegelian-Marxist theory of progress through contradictions. Thesis and antithesis were his heartbeat, but he couldn’t stomach synthesis.

This put him at cautiously simmering odds with his fellow Communists--at least from the mid-1930s, when Stalin decided it was synthesis-time and began to shoot intellectuals by the thousands. “Cautiously” is the key. Brecht stayed out of Moscow and when he returned from exile to East Germany after the war, it was in a complicated balance of convenience, acquiescence and disagreement. Allergic to synthesis, he could no more abide the anti-Stalinist than the Stalinist variety.

There are those who regarded him as an opportunist, with an all-too-convenient ability to temporize. This may be partly true, but if so it is part of the contradictions. The power and brilliance of his theater of opposites has no temporizing whatsoever about it; it is a seeking of the wind, as a sailboat seeks the wind by tacking against it. Brecht’s deliberately antiheroic art, standing against the grandiloquence and sentimentality of both Socialist and Nazi “realism,” is all sardonic courage.

After Hitler came to power in 1933 Brecht left Germany and settled in Denmark with his wife, the actress Helen Weigel, and their two children, Stefan and Barbara. In 1939, after the fall of Czechoslovakia, they moved to Sweden; in 1940, after the invasion of Norway, to Finland; and in 1941, to California. War was a synthesis he tried to stay one or two countries ahead of. After the Allied victory they moved to Switzerland and then to East Germany, where he remained until his death in 1956.

Translated by Hugh Rorrison, the journals Brecht kept irregularly between 1934 and 1955 are a new volume in the mammoth collection of his writing, edited and annotated by John Willett and, until his death, by Ralph Manheim. They are a record of both human and artistic contradiction, a frozen surface punctuated by steam geysers or, more frequently and movingly, by a volcanic rumbling that doesn’t quite break through. Their silences and the laconic formulations that signal what they conceal have a power that we have come to think of, in fact, as Brechtian.

As the exponent of distanced or non-Aristotelian drama--no pity, no terror and, above all, no purgation, or you fall into sentimentality--he stood against what he regarded as the empathetic squashiness of the Stanislav-skians. He would have liked actors to remain so aloof from their roles that they would add “he said” or “she said” at the end of each speech. He treated his feelings the same way.

When his longtime collaborator and friend, Margrethe Steffin, dies in a Moscow hospital as they are all preparing to travel across Siberia to catch a ship to California, he merely notes the fact, adding that he had taken her a toy elephant “which gave her great joy.” But over the years, the silence periodically breaks. He recalls how in their successive forced flights she always carried a small box of keepsakes and 15 pounds. “I loved her dearly when I heard that.” One night in California he stays up thinking of her and drinking whiskey. “Death is no good for anything. All is not necessarily for the best.”

Although he wrote much of his best work in exile--”The Good Woman of Szechwan,” “Galileo,” “Puntila,” “Mother Courage”--there is relatively little account of the writing, apart from a discussion of how difficult it is to make the final detailed decisions in a play he has not seen staged. Though much of his theoretical discussion is dry, there are gems. Accused of coldness, of divorcing ideas from emotions, he turns the accusation back on the Stanislavskians. They work endlessly on hunting for an emotion and then having it; he, on the contrary, works in the faith that “every thought that is necessary has its emotional correlative, every feeling its intellectual one.”

From Scandinavia he followed the course of the war, pasting photographs and news accounts into the journals. He uses absurdist irony. Hitler, he remarks, is simply a late-capitalist free-trader. “The borders that goods cannot cross will be crossed by tanks which, in turn, are goods.” There are glimpses of emotion, though. Following accounts of the massive Allied bombings he writes that “one can see no end to the war, just the end of Germany.”

He continues his battle with the German national character. “We Germans have materialism without sensuality,” he writes, complaining that his countrymen divorce spirit and intellect from the body. “Our heroes cultivate sociability but they don’t eat; our women have feelings but no backsides. To compensate for which our old men talk as if they still had all their teeth.”

Assisted by the German exiles who were already there, Brecht settled with his family in the Hollywood area. He struggled to write film scripts, with not much success. Fritz Lang gave him a job helping to write “Hangmen Also Die,” but he hated the work. “The client takes the brush and smears the picture so that nobody will ever know what it really looked like,” he writes, adding that it was ruining his handwriting. He socialized with his fellow exiles but complained that their intellectual horizons had shrunk. When one writer makes fun of the Italian poet, fascist and adventurer Gabriele d’Annunzio, he retorts: “His aim in life after all was not just a weekly check from L. B. Mayer. He conquered Fiume, Eleonora Duse and a villa on Lake Garda, not just a movie credit.”

Deeper than all this was his sense that he and the other German artist-refugees who had played such a role in the political and aesthetic battles of the ‘20s and ‘30s had taken refuge from history in an urban Tahiti. “I felt an exile from my era,” he writes, and when Pearl Harbor is bombed he notes, “We are in the world again.”

Remarking on Hollywood’s obsession with visible signs of success and fear of contamination by failure, he describes Charles Laughton’s calling in distress when a landslide dumped part of his estate into the Pacific Ocean. “He knows his misfortune will harm his professional career.” There is a glimpse of the sublime Jean Renoir lamenting the destruction of Naples. It could never be rebuilt because “it had no style at all; it just grew up among civilized people.” Modern architecture could never make anything like it now that “the age of the hand has given way to the age of the brain.”

Among the inwardnesses that do not appear in the journal are Brecht’s complicated relationship with Weigel and details of his numerous other entanglements. There is a wintry note at the end. He comes upon one of his young lovers in a semi-compromising position with a fellow actor. For the next few days the young woman is assiduously attentive to Brecht in the fashion to which he is most vulnerable: asking him for advice. “Advice is something I can neither refuse nor keep to myself,” he notes dourly.

This takes place in the last years in East Germany. The entries diminish and grow more distanced than ever. Brecht produced theater for the regime, and tried to be as positive as possible. He had powerful friends and his prestige protected him, but he had to endure the official campaign for socialist realism. He gave initial public support to the suppression of the workers’ revolt in 1953; the journals only hint about his other feelings. At one point he reads Garcia Lorca and asks himself, in ironic parody of the official line, whether his passionate poetry would be suitable for the workers “in the phase we are in.” He invents an officially correct slogan: “No drunken orgies on mountaineering tours”--a reference to the need to mobilize to build Communism. Then, dialectically, he reverses it: “But mountaineering tours cause their own type of intoxication.”