TRAGEDIES OF SEX

TRAGEDIES OF SEX

BY

FRANK WEDEKIND

Translation and Introduction by

SAMUEL A ELIOT, Jr.

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

Publishers : : : : New York

Copyright, 1914 Copyright, 1921 Copyright, 1923

By

Boni & Liveright, Inc.

CAUTION.—All persons are hereby warned that the plays published in this volume are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States and all foreign countries, and are subject to royalty, and any one presenting any of said plays without the consent of the Author or his recognized agents, will be liable to the penalties by law provided.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Frank Wedekind’s name is widely, if vaguely, known by now, outside of Germany, and at least five of his plays have been available in English form for quite some years, yet a résumé of biographical facts and critical opinions seems necessary as introduction to this—I will not say authoritative, but more careful—book. The task is genial, since Wedekind was my special study at Munich in 1913, and I translated his two Lulu tragedies the year after. The timidity or disapprobation betrayed in this respect by our professional critics of foreign drama makes my duty the more imperative. James Huneker merely called him “a naughty boy!” Percival Pollard tiptoed around him, pointing out a trait here and a trait there, like a menagerie-keeper with a prize tiger. Viereck once waxed rapturous over Reinhardt’s production of Spring’s Awakening (that gave me my own first inkling of what Wedekind might mean for me), but my friend Moderwell tossed him off in less than a page of The Theatre of Today as an immoral joker out of Simplicissimus. It is true that Wedekind is by no means easy to grasp or tabulate, true that greater men, such as Strindberg, have suffered from similar slighting and ill-considered estimates here, before they were suitably interpreted; but Wedekind has been dead five years, and the time for a fair and thoughtful, if very inexhaustive, judgment of him has surely come.

Although he was of the same generation as the naturalistic dramatists who everywhere came to the fore in the 1890’s—Hauptmann, Chekov, Brieux, etc.—Frank Wedekind was not of them, but far ahead of them. They are now all but out-moded; his influence has barely begun. He did not fit his time: the first twenty years of his active life, in fact, were spent in continuous friction with the contemporary world. He experienced the rancor and contempt, the smart of injustice and the hopeless hatred, of most outcasts from society. Hostility toward bourgeois civilization is the keynote of many of his works. He is—against, I think, his natural tendency—a pessimist—all the blacker for the flame of strange, Utopian ideals still flaring up in his most savage scenes. The wrestle of contradictory wills within him is what gives his writing its abnormal tensity, what drives him often to overstrain each dramatic idea till its analogy to life is so distorted most people find it morbid. He yearns to annihilate the crude, the coarse, the ugly and the weak. He has declared, “The reunion of holiness and beauty as the divine object of pious devotion is the purpose to which I offer my life: toward which, indeed, I have striven since earliest childhood.” Physical beauty, he means: a sort of Pagan worship of the body—its lowest impulses and its highest development.... But in every direction he found that reunion obstructed by his all-too-well regulated German civilization. Like his own Marquis of Keith he feverishly pursued the joy of life and could never enjoy his life: when about to strike a splendid blow for his Promised Land he would see a spike-helmeted angel with a police-club sentinel at Eden’s gate. Only in the present century—only, indeed, after the Great War had determined, for the Continent, what the outstanding characteristics of the twentieth century were to be—did Wedekind, the Expressionist, who despised literature and thrust raw life upon the stage, arrive at his present commanding position and win the admiration and discipleship of many of his countrymen.

Though he died in March, 1918, he had incorporated in many a play before then both the sensational content and the free, direct, spasmodic form which German literature, especially German drama, was to show in the post-War turmoil and distress. Georg Kaiser and the other Expressionists so prized to-day can make no secret of their debt to him, and the wild rush they represent and play to—to contemplate man’s lowest impulses, the roots of will and feeling, the instincts, not the ideals that actuate confused and drifting peoples, and having studied them in crude, disordered life to set them down in baldest, swiftest speech, in rank but penetrating truth—this rush that is observed in all the Continental countries but most among the Germans did there alone possess a guide and prophet in the dead author, analyzer, wry and bitter thinker, Wedekind.

Less than a twelvemonth after his decease, a desperate, revolutionary era found suddenly in this perverse and pessimistic man, in his harsh world of whores and swindlers, ruthless materialists and broken poets, its own true shape and pressure. At the same time the former standards of good taste, and theatre-censorships, were swept away; the ban which had lain heavily on Wedekind throughout his stormy life, the legal ban and the far more significant disfavor of the “good citizens,” arbiters of general opinion, whom he had outraged so in their smug goodness, their virtuous ideals, their bourgeois self-esteem,—these now were lifted from his works: Pandora’s Box became—imagine it—a popular attraction; from him who had so foreseen the breakdown of conventional formulæ and unreal modes of thought all men now feverishly sought some intimation of what society, dazzled with commotion, must yet look forward to.

For us in America, confirmed, not shattered, in our previous illusions and conceit by the war’s outcome, there is less reason to embrace this scornful soothsayer, this emissary (one is tempted to believe) from Mephistopheles himself,—now cold and condescending, and again intent with hectic hate. For all the foolish outcry over the freer manners, perhaps the looser morals, of our youth, we are still certain in America of our subjective health, of some objective verities at least, of “progress,” of “ideals,” of many metaphysical abstractions which Wedekind distrusts, shows up, derides. Ambassador Gerard, innately, sensibly, was most American. In his Four Years in Germany he mentions shudderingly our author’s name, points to the fact that Berlin still was going, over and over, to performances of Earth-Spirit as but one more indictment of a degenerate, odious nation, and plainly shows us what must be the straight American’s reaction to this volume—if such “straight,” normal readers should ever take it up. But none the less it is important for America to question and to try, to root, if need be, hog-like, to the bottom of our civilization’s pile, and recognize the gross and primitive, the basely human, that underlies each separate soul of us and all our deeds. Naturalism of one type or another—nineteenth-century literalness or twentieth-century explosiveness—is for us the necessary form our Art must take; for only through the pitiless representing of home truth can the easy sentimentalism, so hostile to real literature, be combated, and America given self-knowledge and real grounds for spiritual leaps in after-years. O’Neil in drama, Masters in poetry, Anderson, Lewis, Frank and many more in fiction, these undeflected observers of our seamier sides, prepare the way for the full appreciation due to Wedekind. They are more literary, more artfully self-conscious than he in his best work. Technique concerns them more. But it is not merely for the light his drama throws on dominant European interests of the moment, it is also for the impulse he may give to further, similar probing and expression here at home that these four plays have been prepared—revised or newly now translated—for eager and earnest readers and (who knows?) it may be, for the stage.

They are linked together, these four culled from the score of Wedekind’s writing, not solely in theme (for though they are recognized in their own land as the Geschlechtstragödien par excellence, there are other tragedies of sex from Wedekind’s later years), but in sequence too, chronological, philosophic. What an echo, for instance, of the freshness and the fervor of Spring’s Awakening we hear in the scenes where Hugenberg, the schoolboy of Earth-Spirit, Act IV, and Pandora’s Box, Act I, reveals his virginal, enthusiastic, adventurous, devoted flush of life. How subtly is Lulu foreshadowed in the vivid sketch of Ilse in Spring’s Awakening: buoyant, unmoral,—simple in her acceptance of life complete, more likable than Lulu in her pity, too, for those not so full-blooded. How keenly Casti-Piani piques our interest, in Pandora’s Box, Act II; how satisfyingly his life is summed and closed in Tod und Teufel—verily Damnation! The four plays hang together, and present compactly Wedekind’s own growth of mind—from ardor, almost missionary zeal, instilling his own subjective sympathy into his youngsters, girls as well as boys, of Spring’s Awakening (and his own hate, as well, of teachers, parents, all their dry repressive world), to the objective but still passionate building of full-formed characters, solid plot, unswerving tragedy (no Muffled Gentleman here!) in Earth-Spirit, and then to the less contained, extravagant riot, repulsively cold or hotly ugly, perverse, verbose, derisive of his audience and even of his art, that he so rightly named Pandora’s Box; and lastly to the frank self-revelation, unrealistic preaching, unmotivated, unartful, yet superbly confident theatricality of his Damnation!

What a life of disillusionment, self-questioning and pain must lie behind these changes! Its externals Wedekind sketched himself, in 1901; but its real import can only be deduced from close, fond study of his many plays, his stories and his poems. His father, a physician, lived—it may be interesting to us Americans to know—in San Francisco from the beginning of the gold rush in 1849 till 1864. His mother was an actress in the German theater there when the elder Wedekind, at 46, met her and married her, a girl just half his age. Her father, an inventor, manufacturer and gifted musician, had died some years before in a German insane asylum. One child was born to the couple in America, but they returned to Germany in 1864 and there, in Hanover, Frank (note the American, quite un-German form of the name) was born, on the 24th of July.

In 1872 the family moved to Switzerland, where Frank grew up, one of six children, amid scenery that he praises but which, to judge by the absence of any response to the beauties of nature from most of his work, had little effect upon him. At 19 he began to earn his living, at first as a journalist, at 22 as a press-agent, at 24 as a private secretary, traveling extensively with his employers (notably the painters Rudinoff and Willy Grétor) in France and England. In 1895-96 he was a public reader of Ibsen plays in Switzerland; in ’96-97, political editor of Simplicissimus in Munich; in ’97-98, an actor and producer in a theatrical company which toured North Germany in Ibsen plays and first presented on the stage his Earth-Spirit, written in ’93, published in ’95. In ’98-99 he held a similar important post with the resident company of the Schauspielhaus in Munich and wrote his great, though local, comedy The Marquis of Keith.

Save for a term in prison as a result of the prosecution of the editors of Simplicissimus for lèse-majesté,—a term enriched by the composition of his long story of Utopian education—physical education—for young girls, named Minne-haha (again the influence of America), which to my ears is the most pure and limpid piece of German prose one is ever likely to find,—he continued to reside in Munich, active in this or that playhouse or cabaret, for the rest of his life. He composed many Brettl-lieder, rhymes and music, and sang them in Bohemian restaurants. Every June, after Max Reinhardt became a theatrical power in Berlin, he appeared there as an actor in a series of his own plays, hastily prepared but persistently repeated to a slowly growing, grudgingly appreciative public. As an actor he was a paradox: more natural than Naturalistic, but more Expressionistic than expressive. I saw him act several times in his Franziska, his new play in 1912-13, and marveled at the almost inarticulate strain, the rigid body, popping eyes, deep-lined and taut-drawn face, that marked him then. Sartorially he was something of a dude: to be correct was a requirement he forced upon his mettlesome temperament. His inheritance, derived from a mixture of middle-aged, scientific, abstract-minded, cold North German and young, sensuous, emotional, artistic Austrian, resulted in a conflict that could be seen by anyone: he possessed thesis and antithesis but never synthesis. His face expressed by turns his fluctuant, opposing sides, Jesuit and ironic actor, tragedy and vice, now gray, sharp-eyed, superior,—suddenly warm and deep. He was no artist on the boards—too stiff, too choked with his own earnestness, too genuinely intense,—but he was vastly interesting as a man, a sufferer, a moralist and preacher inured to being scoffed at and returning the too normal world hot scorn for scorn.

Extravagances and overemphasis, unmotivated, violent decisions and spasmodic super-vitality in his characters, all these his vividest traits, are explicable on this score of his own clashing disharmony within. But he himself explains them as an artistic revolt, merely, against the repressed and colorless dramaturgy which conquered Germany in the wake of Ibsen. These bookish plays that stood in the way of his own starkly abundant theatric art both angered him to protest and augmented his own trend toward free unnaturalness. He has in his time, he says (in Schauspielkunst, a collection of critical notes published in 1910), played many parts by Sudermann, Hauptmann, Max Halbe, etc., and he is sure that actors trained in their literary technique are unequal to his fierce, full-blooded characters. He demands acting that shall be like hurdle-racing—bold, bounding creativeness—but the lesser actors blue-pencil their hurdles out of the way, while the greater ones make long “dramatic pauses” before them and deprive them so of conviction. Certainly, Wedekind’s jerky stage-style requires a rushing performance to give even the semblance of smooth truth to the preposterous, but, when rightly played, thrilling theatric stories he often tells. Short-of-breath, dry and uninspired, with voice untrained for emotional seizures and outbursts, the ordinary cup-and-saucer actor must of course mar Wedekind’s plays.

In the field of ethics, however, lay his sharpest cleavage from his own generation, and his most dangerous pitfall. The mighty influence of Ibsen had perverted, when Wedekind began to write, not merely stagecraft, but all German drama, and turned it to the contemplation not of life and action, but of principles: guilt, duty, and atonement. Underrunning all the enthusiasm for exact representation and thorough character-delineation that reigned in 1890 was an anæmic current of literary preconceptions, second-hand ideals, and prime attention to externals, either mere incidental questions of technique or moral, philosophic conclusions (most often suicidal) to problems of responsibility and conduct prearranged for meek and docile characters. In the Prologue to Earth-Spirit, Wedekind specifically mocks the pale and will-less heroes of Hauptmann’s Lonely Lives and Before Sunrise, and by implication all the conscientious weakness of the then new Naturalism. He for his part had a sharp hunger for life, irrespective of its moral aims and effects,—life boisterous, physical and energizing. It is reflected in Melchior in Spring’s Awakening, with keenest sympathy. He had also a theory, expressed by Alva, his self-portrait in Pandora’s Box, that the place to find compelling drama was in the changeful lives of people who never read a book, who lived by instinct and expressed themselves, words and deeds, in total ignorance of cultured ethics. The Paris and the London scenes of Pandora’s Box may indicate that in those cities the young dramatist plunged into this demimonde in person, experienced much, and actually undermined, instead of strengthening, his artistic creative power.

In ’90-91, when he wrote Spring’s Awakening, the 26-year-old pioneer playwright was still close to adolescent tumult, doubt and rapture. He writes a fluent, subtly interconnected, almost musical suite of scenes utterly real when dealing with the children and youthfully satirical when caricaturing the adults. He has no literary by-end, no preoccupation with form or naturalism as such, and while he has a moral, or rather an anti-moral, purpose, and evidently seeks to include in his play the ontogeny of all the more common sex-perversions, his chief interest is in Melchior, Moritz and Wendla—the vividness and promise of the life awakening in them, the cruelty and tragedy of its extinguishment, for which the adult world must take full blame. Whether the play was produced at all in the 1890’s I do not know. Reinhardt, who had had marked success with Earth-Spirit among his very first independent productions, in 1902-03, gave a very notable interpretation of Spring’s Awakening in 1906 which attained 390 performances; and it has been widely acted since then, and in book form has far outstripped the popularity of any other Wedekind work. A very imperfect translation appeared in this country about 1909, and a private production was later attempted in New York, with ludicrous inartistry. The “lesson” of the play—“Parents, respect the possibilities of puberty, and give it enlightenment and guidance”—is an old story with us now. We must not forget the date on Wendla’s tombstone: the play transpires in 1892. But the multifarious, teeming life, the lovableness and universal naturalness of the chief characters, and the free, ardent expression of the young author,—these are of no specific time, and will keep Wedekind’s name alive for generations of adolescent readers.

His foreign experiences seem to have taken place between the writing of this play and that of Earth-Spirit. The author is quite out of sight in Earth-Spirit; he is the animal-tamer of the Prologue, the showman putting his performers through their acts. There is a grim objectiveness about this study of clashing wills and fatal weaknesses. No moral is in sight, and if the technique is consciously more conventional and studied (note Alva’s soliloquy in Act III), the matter is far removed from the Ibsen-Hauptmann fashion of its day. The dialogue is so idiomatic, so carefully fitted to each speaker’s character, that this play is by far the hardest of the four to put in English. Wedekind has dramatized the attractions and repulsions of sex among mature people very variously endowed with strength and courage. He has created Lulu, the embodiment of primitive, natural, instinctive femininity, and watched her drive men mad. He offers no judgments, he indulges in no retrospects or explanations: this is the fundamental stuff of life as he has lived it and observed it. It takes a naturally theatric shape: it is violently dramatic just because it is real and living.

To these powerful, objective ’90’s of Wedekind belong also the one-act play Der Kammersänger or The Tenor, acted in New York in 1916 and published in Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays; and The Marquis of Keith, in which the struggle for success and money is as turbulently dramatized as the sex-conflict was in Earth-Spirit. But there is a moralizing character in The Marquis, a foil for the conscienceless hero and also a mouthpiece for Wedekind. As he found himself and his message disregarded, bitterness overcame him, and more and more he scolds or preaches directly at his public. He worked over Pandora’s Box, off and on, throughout this decade, and the impulse to expound himself ever and again peeps through its three distorted pictures of low life. Here and there it is deliberately disgusting. When it was published, in 1901 or ’02, most of Act II was in bad French, much of Act III in worse English: author or publisher or both were self-conscious about it: and promptly it was banned. There ensued appeals through various courts, and finally the ban was lifted, an all-German text prepared, and occasional productions ventured. My translation, published in New York in 1914, has never roused objection; why should it?—the bare speeches without the accompanying action which I have heard vividly described by friends lately in Germany, can scarcely be shocking to readers in 1923. Later, Wedekind published the two Lulu plays together under her name, omitting Earth-Spirit, Act III (which seems to me indispensable, none the less), and Pandora’s Box, Act I—a commendable compression, because the whole cholera episode is morbid and nearly incredible, and a swift flight to France after Schön’s murder is quite thinkable without the long, mostly undramatic speeches that overload the present commencement of Pandora’s Box.