Sandy McIntosh
H.R. Hays: The Theater of Disappointment
from A Hole In the Ocean: A Writing Apprenticeship in the Hamptons
In 1966 I enrolled at Southampton College. It was then a branch of Long Island University, since dissolved. Its mission was to serve local students, the children of farmers and shopkeepers who served the wealthy summer residents living near the Atlantic Ocean. Most students attending the college had practical career objectives. Few had any interest in the humanities, especially in painting, creative writing, sculpture or serious music. The college, having failed to lure established academics from metropolitan universities to what was for nine months of the year a desolate rural environment, had to resort to hiring locals with uncertain academic certifications to teach those students who might be interested in the arts. But the Hamptons being the Hamptons, the local artists and writers included in the faculty at that time came immediately to resemble the quietly shimmering artist-teachers of the innovative, short-lived, experimental Black Mountain College, at which some of them had actually taught. For instance, Willem de Kooning lectured on painting; Ilya Bolotowsky, the neo-plasticist painter with a thick Russian accent, taught Freshman English. Among poets teaching were the Bollingen Prize winner David Ignatow, and the pioneering performance poet Charles Matz. The playwright and poet H. R. Hays headed the Theater Department.
Why did a group of distinguished artists and writers congregate at a new, undistinguished college? "You see," de Kooning told me after we'd become acquainted. "They're here in the wintertime all alone. They work in their studios all day and then want to get together at night, usually at Bobby Van's, or some other bar. Then they get into a fight--Jim Jones likes to throw punches--or get drunk and the police take them to jail. Its either that or they meet at the college and have a good time without getting into too much trouble." "The truth is," Ilya Bolotowsky added. "We're all exiles."
Hays, Ignatow, Matz and Bolotowsky became my mentors and friends during college and for many years after. A Hole In the Ocean is a consideration of the personal and professional lives of these writers by their student, an attempt to answer persisting questions about the practice of art in the Hamptons and significance of the place and the time in their lives.
1. Meeting H. R. Hays
H. R. Hays was a poet, translator, novelist and playwright, an historian of anthropology and zoology. His twenty-two books, reflecting the diversity of his interests, were the pioneering works in their fields. His The Dangerous Sex: the Myth of Feminine Evil, served as respected source material for Feminist writers. Sir Julian Huxley regarded Hays’ popular history of zoology, Birds, Beasts and Men, as a classic of its genre. His translations of the poetry of Brecht, Vallejo, Borges, Neruda, and many others were among the first to bring these major twentieth century writers to the attention of the English-speaking world. His plays, such as The Ballad of Davy Crockett, were performed on Broadway. More than twenty of his shorter works appeared on television during its early days.
The slip of paper inside the interoffice envelope in my student mailbox told me that Professor Hays, head of the drama department, had been assigned as my freshman advisor. I did not plan to take drama courses, so the assignment was mysterious. But since everything about college was a mystery, I headed out to keep my appointment.
Hays' office, the note told me, was backstage in the Fine Arts building. I arrived but there didn't seem to be any offices, only a few classrooms. Thinking that I was in the wrong part of the theatre, I turned toward the exit and almost ran into a tall man with thick glasses who had suddenly stepped out of what appeared to be a closet and rushed past me. A girl was sitting at a table nearby and I asked her who that had been. She told me it was Professor Hays. I asked where his office was and she told me that it was there, in that closet.
I caught up with him in the parking lot where he was fumbling with his keys. I introduced myself as his advisee and told him I'd arrived for our appointment.
"Ah," he said, fuming. "That was the last straw! Did you know the janitor has now been authorized to store his buckets, mops and brooms in my office? They promised me a real office when the new building was finished. Now they say I just have to 'make do', whatever that means. Next they'll have me working out of a stall in the men's room!"
"Should we make another appointment, when it's more convenient for you?" I asked, because I didn't know what else to say.
"Well, we can talk here for a few minutes. What are you?"
"What am I?"
"I mean, are you a playwright, a director, a scenic designer? What?"
"Actually, I'll probably be an English major."
"You don't want to write plays?"
"Well, I would like to write plays. Mostly I write poetry. Sometimes short stories."
"What poets do you like?"
I had discovered Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrok," and though I didn't quite understand it, I loved the way it sounded when I'd read it aloud. I'd read it so many times that I'd memorized it. I told Hays about this and he ordered me to recite. I gave him the first few stanzas.
"That's enough. You're like a lot of the modern poets: you just mumble the words into your beard or down your shirt. I teach a Public Speaking class next semester. Why don't you sign up for it? You'll learn to declaim properly."
He found the correct car key. "Come and see me again and bring some of your poetry. I write poetry myself."
The campus, as it was every Friday, was abandoned, students and professors having gone off to more populous areas. The streets were deserted, as usual. That afternoon, H. R. Hays had seemed an angry, forlorn figure in that lonely landscape. Few students I'd spoken with had met him or even heard of him, though he taught a full course load. To those who acknowledged knowing him, Hays remained a mystery, an odd duck, an almost-invisible man.
2. Hays: Communist
The Hays family--six brothers and their families--had landed in New York City in the first quarter of the 18th century. They were Sephardic Jews who, after exile from Spain, lived for several generations in Holland. Arrived in New York, they became active parts of the burgeoning city, helping to establish Congregation Shearith Israel temple, taking part in the government and the cultural life. Hays' great-grandfather Jacob became the city's first High Constable, noted for breaking up riots by slamming perpetrators over the head with his helmet. The family, along with the Ochs and Sulzbergers, established The New York Times. Hays' grandfather, W. J. Hays, was a noted painter of the Old West. His grandmother wrote children's' books. His father was also a painter.
“There were too many painters in my family. I decided to become a poet,” Hays told me.[1] He had published poetry during his undergraduate years at Cornell and while he completed his Masters of Arts at Columbia University with a scholarly thesis, "Middle English Holly and Ivy Christmas Carols." By 1929 he had written enough finished poetry to publish a collection (Strange City, Boston: Four Seas).
He remained at Columbia working toward his PhD. while also teaching English at City College (CCNY). But by the time he reached the exams he had about had it with traditional academic fare, which he considered unresponsive to the urgent practical needs of society following the business collapse and the country’s entrance into what would soon be called The Great Depression. He walked out on one of his professors. “He wanted dates, but I wanted to discuss the meaning of events. Finally, I said to hell with it,” and left the examination room, wishing the professor evil. (According to Hays's son, Dan Hays, Hays got his wish: That afternoon the professor was run down by a taxi crossing Cathedral Avenue.)
Hays wanted a radical change in his life. He was 25 years old and he complained of being weighted down by America. “I hear the nasal voices of my countrymen around me,” he was to write the next year, “and the old contempt comes back…. [Our American] materialism is a prison.” [2]
Abruptly, he left Columbia and New York, taking work as a horse groomer aboard a ship sailing for Holland. In Europe he took drama classes in Belgium, visited museums and kept up with literary trends while pursuing a romance with a young actress.
After a solitary year in Europe, Hays believed he could articulate the seminal psychological and aesthetic questions he had in mind, and his return to the U.S. would help focus his sense of direction. The undeniable starkness of the Great Depression, the social tragedy that confronted his return, provoked him to question the Capitalist methods of the U.S. economy. Like intellectuals and artists of his generation, he was drawn to Socialism and finally to Communism.
“We were all Communists back then,” Hays told me. “All the writers and artists. It was the only thing to be in the 1930’s. When you witnessed the mistreatment of the workers, the minorities—and anyone else who wasn’t a wealthy white man—there was really no other choice.”
He noticed my silence. “Well, don’t look so shocked. Besides, I suppose yesterday’s Communists are today’s Democrats; there’s really little difference.”
Of course, that is exactly what my father used to tell me, but he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way.
I'd grown up in the 1950s and ‘60s during the Cold War, and to me the idea that anyone would declare himself a Communist was unthinkable. I recalled my father watching the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, in thrall at the crazed and mouth-foaming Senator Joseph McCarthy, poking his damning finger at the Senate chamber, terrified that he would turn his face to the camera—turn to my father and me—to accuse us of being horrible Communists.
“Did they ever put you in jail?”
“No. Somehow they missed me, even though I gave them plenty of ammunition.”
Some of this ammunition included:
* Membership in the Artists' Union
In 1934, Hays joined the Artists' Union, which had just been formed. It's mission was to find work for unemployed artists—an ideal, if not practical undertaking at the time since the union had no leverage. However, the next year, President Roosevelt supplied it. He issued an Executive Order, later funded by Congress, establishing the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. From this, the Works Project Administration was created. Among its mandates, the WPA was tasked with supporting the public works of artists. The Artists’ Union immediately set itself up as the artists’ advocate, lobbying for more jobs within the Works Progress Administration, better pay and working conditions, and against proposed cutbacks. Essentially, the Artists’ Union became the mediators between artists and WPA, settling grievances between workers and bosses and threatening to take direct action if needed.
At the time, Hays considered himself now definitely a writer, and was at work on a novel. He had made friends with Harold Rosenberg and his wife, May. Rosenberg, who would later famously characterize the methods of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and others as "action painting," had trained as a lawyer but, after an illness that forced him to walk with a cane for the rest of his life, gave up the law for a Bohemian lifestyle and a devotion to writing poetry. May Rosenberg, a teacher and social worker, introduced Hays to a university art student named Juliette Levine. They got on, and married in New York City Hall in 1934.
Hays, Rosenberg and their writer and painter friends, such as de Kooning--and an often reluctant Mark Rothko--joined the union.
Juliette Hays has described a typical artist-union action of the time:
Well, word went out through all the projects--dancers, writers, artists—that there would be the sit-in. After the performance, they
would ask the audience would they sit with them. And outside all the other people from the different projects would assemble.
Well, we came there to be available as soon as the theater was emptying out, and it was definitely determined by all people
coming after should not attempt to go into the theater. So mostly there were writers and some dancers outside and we were
marching back and forth. Naturally, there must have been some slogans, but we were just people. I would say by this time
we had several hundred people out there. We looked back (at least I did) to Broadway. And suddenly coming around
the corner, these banners appeared. They were Artist Union banners and Marcus [Mark Rothko] was carrying a banner and
he was on the line.[1]
* Writing and Translating Marxist Poetry
Aside from sit-ins and marches, Hays' Marxism was mostly ideological and his actions in the Cause more literary than street-revolutionary, though nonetheless dedicated. But intellectuals and artists had a recognized place in the social reform movement of that time[3], and Hays contributed regularly to such magazines as The New Masses.
Hays has described Bertolt Brecht's significance in German and world literature as arising "from the fact that his philosophy has molded his style and dictates the forms in which he works."[4] In the history of art and literature, this scheme has had uneven results. In early 20th century music, for example, the employment of the rigid 12-Tone system of composition by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, probably produced more aesthetic failures than successes. Later, the Soviet composers' attempts at "factory music"--music that imitates the repetitious sounds of factory machines--merely produced headaches in the listener. Hays' attempts at poetry for the Marxist cause employed the familiar vocabulary and ideas of working class solidarity with muted Imagist or Surrealist shadings. For example, here are some lines from "Parade": "Thinking of May Day, / Of parades / Moving like history, / Those in back / Must run to keep up [...]" and "Big value here, / Cash them / In your strength, / Workers! / Thinking of May Day and / "The most beautiful subway / In the world.'”[5]
Hays' own conclusion about the quality of this poetry is evident from his later collections, which didn't reproduce any.
In 1943 Yale University Press published Hays' 12 Spanish American Poets, the first collection of translations that focused on the major Spanish American writers of the time, including Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and others. Of those included in the anthology, Neruda often loudly declared himself a Communist, not only painting himself with the red brand but potentially his translator, as well (although nothing seemed to have come of this).
* Writings For the Theatre
In his theatre work, Hays collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, who were passionate Communists, both investigated by the U. S. Congress and forced into exile. Kurt Weill, with whom Hays worked on The Ballad of Davy Crockett, was also a Marxist, but his successful attempts to "rehabilitate" himself by nestling into mainstream American theatre, worked and saved him from disgrace.
Hays' work for the Federal Theatre Project, especially as author and administrator of the Living Newspaper series, might have brought him to the attention of the Dies Committee, a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose purpose was to permanently end subversive public works, such as the Theatre project. During the four years of the project's existence, the government harassed several productions. One play, Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, was famously closed down on opening night by armed federal troops. It was inevitable that the Dies Committee should step in and initiate an enquiry. Despite the ignorance of Committee members leading the enquiry (much time was wasted trying to ascertain whether authors, such as the 16th century British playwright Christopher Marlowe, were now or had ever been Communists), the government finally brought the Federal Theatre program to its end.[6]
Still, the government hadn't noticed Hays. And that didn't change until the 1938 production in Madison Square Garden, of Hays' and Hanns Eisler's A Song About America. "They got a real file on me," Hays said. The play, text and song lyrics by Hays, music by Eisler, was commissioned by the Communist Party for the commemoration of Lenin and the 20th anniversary of the October revolution.
One of the songs from the play, "Sweet Liberty Land," became very popular and was for some time the unofficial national anthem of the Communist Party of America. "It almost replaced the 'Internationale'," Hays recalled.[7]
Eisler, fearing deportation, had written his music under the pseudonym "John Garden." Despite this precaution, Eisler was eventually deported. Despite Hays' proclamation without pseudonym of his authorship of this radical play, he was never called before the Committee.
("They ignored me," he sniffed.)
3. The Living Newspaper and the Theatre of Brecht
The inspiration for the Living Newspaper series produced by the Federal Theatre in the 1930s, as well as the experiments of the director Erwin Piscator in 1924 that created what Bertolt Brecht would refer to as Epic theatre, originated in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. The strategy of both the Living Newspaper and Piscator was to utilize not only the actors, but also the props--billboards with images or ideological texts, music, projections, and swift scene changes--not only to tell a story, but the background and ramifications of the story, at the same time.
Harry Hopkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, first proposed the Federal Theater project in 1934. Hopkins was a major figure in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that Roosevelt’s government had set up as a means of countering the financial devastation of the Great Depression. Hopkins eventually headed the Civil Works Administration, the Federal Surplus Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration. It was Hopkins’ intention that opportunities to produce jobs rather than the doling-out of direct financial relief should be the goals of his agencies. Because of his personal interest in theatre and his awareness of the vast numbers of theatre people put out of work by the Depression he got in touch with Hallie Flanagan, the director of Vassar’s “Experimental Theatre” program, and a former schoolmate. Flanagan agreed to run the program, which eventually employed eight thousand people, and put on productions of classical and modern plays in forty states, once Hopkins had guaranteed that the government would never step in to censor any of her productions. This turned out to be a promise Hopkins couldn’t keep. The Living Newspaper, with its concern for the troubles of minority, farm and other low- or no-income workers, brought worried industrialists in protest to the government.
Flanagan described the project's aims: "…the [Living Newspaper] seeks to dramatize a new struggle – the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world; to dramatize his struggle to turn the great natural and economic forces of our time toward a better life for more people."[8]
Hays elaborated on this:
Now that nineteenth-century laissez-faire economy has patently broken down, leaving doubt and confusion in its wake,
all values are being challenged; and since automatically the state is encroaching more and more upon private life, the
position of the individual is indeed perilous. Even our cultural individualism, dating from the Renaissance civilization,
is on trial. While it would be hazardous to prophesy just what modification may take place in our concept of the individual,
there is no doubt that contemporary thinking is in a state of flux. [9]
With production titles such as Triple-A Plowed Under, Injunction Granted, One-Third of a Nation, Power, and Spirochete, controversy over the political ideology of the Living Newspapers contributed to the disbanding of the Federal Theatre Project.
One of the final Living Newspaper productions was Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and Hays, with incidental music by Hanns Eisler. The productions was directed by Jules Dassin. It opened at the New York Theatre on April 12, 1940. The stark, simple stage setting and the presentation of the characters more as ideotypes than individuals is typical of the form.
The play opened to good reviews but lasted only thirty-five performances. On opening night, Germany had invaded Norway. The shock of the front-page headlines overshadowed the play's good notices and it soon closed.
Hays saw this closing as somehow in line with his ill-fortune in the theater generally.
“History is not on my side,” Hays told me dryly.[10]
The term Epic Theater was used by Brecht for the first time in 1926. Many playwrights and composers produced plays and musical compositions in the 1920s which have since been labeled Epic (Stravinisky, Pirandello, Claudel), and others have followed in their footsteps (Wilder, Miller, Beckett).
Brecht explained that Epic Theater, as he conceived it, could have only come to be after the invention of various technologies that enhanced the theater's ability to shake the irreconcilability of the epic and the dramatic, such as slide projections in front of and from behind the scenery, the greater flexibility of the stage and its sets due to mechanization, the incorporation of narrative film, and so on. This did so," wrote Brecht, "at a point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers."
Because of these enhancements, the environments in which his characters lived could stand by themselves, as a motive presence on the stage and independent of the central figure's point of view. "The stage," wrote Brecht, "began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall."
Brecht asserted that the power of a drama in which both actors and the stage itself demanded the audience's attention no longer allowed the spectator to remain uncritical and lulled by the story. Brecht continued that the force of Epic Theater created an alienation in the spectator that was essential to a full understanding of the event. "When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world,'" wrote Brecht, "it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up."[11]
While Hays recognized that the Living Newspaper approach and Brecht's were similar, he also understood that Brecht's ideas were more ideologically rigorous--at least on paper. For its short existence, the Living Newspaper had been less doctrinaire, more opportunistic and spontaneous. But, in any case, the experience probably prepared Hays for the opportunities he would later have to collaborate with Brecht.
4. "Brecht Was a Son of a Bitch"
Bertolt Brecht fled Germany on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, convinced that he was about to be remanded to a Nazi death camp. He travelled through Prague and Vienna, Switzerland and Paris, before arriving in Denmark, where he remained for six years.
His plays were banned in Germany, the Nazis having burned manuscripts and books, and also what they believed to be all the film negatives of The Three Penny Opera directed by G. W. Pabst. However, during those years, a few of his plays were produced sporadically in Europe and in the U.S. with indifferent results, closing to bad notices and often after only a few days' run. Brecht was convinced that his work only stood a chance in New York, on Broadway, with him in exclusive control. He began plotting how this could be done.
The opportunity came when the composer Hanns Eisler urged the Executive Board of the New York Theatre Union to take on the production of Brecht's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's novel The Mother. Eisler was known to the theatre's executive board, which consisted of Trotskyites, Stalinists, socialists and liberals, as someone enthusiastic about social causes. His previous collaborations with Brecht were also acknowledged, if vaguely. They decided to do the play and both Eisler and the theatre board contacted Brecht in Denmark. He agreed to the production. A translation of Brecht's script was made by Paul Peters of the Theatre Union and mailed to Brecht, who reacted to it with great anger. Brecht's concept of Epic Theatre depended on the depersonalization of the characters of a play, so that they were not the sentimental representations of persons who could be alive, but were vehicles of whichever ideas Brecht was promoting. However, Brecht raged, the Peters translation turned his ideological drama into the "hypnotic theatre" he abhorred, in which the audience was distracted by the human foibles and triumphs of the play's characters.
Brecht demanded that the Theatre Union pay his passage to America, which they agreed to do, but only after he had signed a contract giving them the performing rights to the play. Apparently, they calculated that, once Brecht was in America, they could convince him that their take on his play was the correct one for an American audience.
They were wrong. Brecht and Eisler arrived at the theatre in mid-production, and Brecht, after watching what was going on on stage, immediately demanded a meeting with the director and cast. In a voice "that would have humiliated the fight announcer at Madison Square Garden" Brecht declared "Das ist Schiesse! Das ist Dreck!" "This is shit! This is crap!" He then proceeded to demand that fundamental changes be made in the script and in the cast and crew.
He was allowed to continue his intrusions for several weeks. When he was not in the theatre militating against the production he was writing letters threatening legal action if his demands weren't met. Finally, after he had angered a burly pianist, who then threatened to "break every bone in his body," the management threw Brecht and Eisler into the street.[12]
After The Mother ended its short and critically discredited run, Brecht remained in America for some weeks and saw several Broadway plays, including the Federal Theater Project's Living Newspaper productions. Joseph Losey, the director of many Living Newspaper productions (including Hays and Eisler's Medicine Show) reports that Brecht loved the productions because he saw the similarity to his own Epic Theatre ideas in them.[13] Brecht attended at least one conference, attempting to meet powerful theatre people who would help him get established once he was able to return to the U. S. for an extended period. Not much came of these efforts, and the only legacy left by Brecht's short but bombastic visit to New York was a great number of people who despised him.
Members of the Theatre Union, such as Manuel Gomez, considered Brecht to be "enormously vain...enormously energetic, enormously stubborn, enormously sarcastic, enormously difficult." Albert Maltz came to loathe him. Brecht disliked bathing and avoided it when possible, but, as Maltz recalls, sitting next to him and being forced to endure his nimbus of stench made Brecht's presence an ordeal.
Brecht returned to Denmark. but continued his correspondence with Eisler, whom he believed was a key to his eventual return to America and Broadway.
In the summer of 1939 Eisler and H. R. Hays were in Mexico together working on a play with music. Hays knew something of Brecht's work, if not of his temperament. He had seen the Theatre Union production of The Mother but "the 'adaptation' and treatment had so taken the edge off the play that I acquired no feeling for Brecht's special tone and stagecraft." Eisler gave Hays mimeographed copies of Brecht's plays in German: Mother Courage, The Trial of Lucullus and The Horatians and the Curiations.
They excited me and seemed to me a milestone in the theatre.... Eisler had described to me the horrors of that production
[of The Mother] during which he and Brecht were locked out of the theatre because the directors were quite sure they knew
what was right for an American audience. He urged me to translate the new plays and promised to aid me in getting the
publication rights from Brecht, which he subsequently did. Hanns also introduced me to the collected plays in German,
which further stimulated my interest in the epic theatre.[14]
Just as Brecht had recognized the similarity between his theatrical ideas and those he'd seen demonstrated in Living Newspaper productions, Hays, who had worked on several of those, found an ideological kinship with Brecht's plays.
For several years after his return to Denmark and the summer of 1939, Brecht had moved repeatedly, "changing countries more often than shoes,"[15] trying to keep several steps ahead of the Nazi conquest and his own certain incarceration, since he had earlier been stripped of his German citizenship "for behavior in violation of the obligation of loyalty toward Reich and people." He decided to find a way to return to America.
Several old colleagues from the German theater offered help. Fritz Lang, living in Hollywood, offered to assist by selling a Brecht story to the movies. Erwin Piscator, known as the founder of "political theatre" to which Brecht owed his formative theatrical ideas, was leading the Theatre Workshop at the new School for Social Research in New York City. Piscator secured a position for Brecht in his program if Brecht could make the crossing. And in Mexico, Hans Eisler asked Hays if he would sign an affidavit of support backing Brecht's immigration, which Hays did.
During the winter of 1940 Hays and Eisler were preoccupied with the production of their Living Newspaper, Medicine Show. After the show closed, Hays went to work translating Brecht's plays.
Hays went ahead and translated Mother Courage and Lucullus (and also The Horatians) and contacted James Laughlin of New Directions in March of 1941. Laughlin wrote, referring to Brecht: "His is a name which has been forcing itself into my ken without my ever getting the lowdown on him." Hays briefed him on Brecht and sent some translations. Laughlin decided that Brecht was "something pretty O.K." During the next few months they arranged that Mother Courage should appear in the New Directions 1941, Laughlin's yearbook of new writing, and Lucullus in a Poet of the Month pamphlet early in 1941.[16]
In early 1941, Hays wrote to Brecht offering to be his American translator and enclosing copies of the translations he'd made. Brecht expressed gratitude and admiration for Hays' work. In a letter to Hays in March of that year, Brecht wrote: "Many thanks for the fine translations ... I am very happy about this. This is the first time that anything has been done about my work in the USA, for the stage can scarcely provide a start."
Hays continues:
He went on to explain that he wished to get out of Finland and needed an affidavit for one of his party, Ruth Berlau. I eventually
provided affidavits for two of the people with him. He arrived in California in July of 1941 hoping to find work in Hollywood.
That winter he visited New York, staying with Ruth Berlau, who was already living in the city. This was when I first met him
and we talked about various translation possibilities. I did a few scenes from The Private Life of the Master Race after he
returned to Hollywood, only to discover that someone else was translating it in Hollywood.[17]
Hays explained to me that this was his first indication of Brecht's duplicitous modus operandi:[18]
Brecht was a son of a bitch. He had the most annoying habit of granting exclusive world rights to the translation of his plays
to several people at once, and of course he never let any of them know he was doing it. Then, as always happened, one of them
would catch on, and some ridiculous fiasco would ensue.
At one point that year, Brecht commissioned Eric Bentley to do a translation of Master Race, while Hays was working on his. Later in the same year, Clifford Odets, encouraged by Brecht, was considering a screenplay for Master Race. Simultaneously, Brecht asked Ferdinand Rehyer to translate the play for Broadway (camouflaging it under the title The Devil's Sunday).
Hays wrote "a pretty strong letter" to Brecht about this and about Brecht's general failure to communicate. In January of 1941, several months after Hays' remonstrance, Brecht responded, somewhat meekly: "i don't quite know how to explain why i have not written you long before this.... I don't know whether you can pardon my neglect of you, no matter how much i should like you to. " Unfortunately, Brecht continued, he must in this case once more beg Hays to work out some system for their collaboration, which, he acknowledged, was very important to his equilibrium. "You have done so much for me. we must go through everything. ... i know this is asking a lot but i do hope that you will not consider my peculiar behavior as mere ingratitude and temperament."[19]
Despite his whimpering contrition, Brecht would continue playing what Erwin Piscator described as Brecht'sche Schweinerei ("swinish Brechtian tricks") throughout their collaboration on the plays and poetry, and especially before, during and after the "ridiculous fiasco" of The Duchess of Malfi.
5. Ridiculous Fiasco: The Duchess of Malfi
A friend of Brecht's, the actress Elisabeth Bergner, and her husband, producer-director Paul Czinner, asked Brecht to make an adaptation of the 17th century English play, The Duchess of Malfi, in which she wanted to play the title role. In its original version written by John Webster, the play has been described as macabre and tragic--qualities that Bergner probably thought would entice Brecht to take it on. They proposed that they'd bring his version to the Broadway stage, a happening he'd been hoping for.
Erwin Piscator and Hanns Eisler recommended Hays as translator-collaborator. Piscator had told Brecht that Hays' translation of Mother Courage and Her Children was "very good." However, in the previous year, he had circulated the translation in New York theatre circles and had received unenthusiastic responses, not because the translation was faulty, but because Brecht's stagecraft, which Hays preserved, was foreign to Broadway. In any case, Brecht may have taken that rejection as a negative comment on Hays' abilities. In a letter to Piscator, Brecht details his worries:
Here again the problem is the translation. It would be best if I could be there, because the translation has to be free and I could
help the translator a good deal (choosing different images, explaining the jokes, etc.) In any case, I must absolutely see a
few pages before the translation is definitely commissioned.... I don't know if Hoffman Hays would be able to translate the blank
verse. What do you think?[20]
Nevertheless, their collaboration on Malfi began on an upbeat note. Hays had introduced Brecht to his literary agent, Ann Elmo, and they had signed a Dramatists Guild contract with a small advance on the play. In the following month, working at a Manhattan apartment, they cut down the play's sprawling plot lines and anticlimactic deaths.[21]
Hays recalled:
I did all the writing, in the style of Webster, though Brecht and I discussed the scenes to be eliminated or added, the content
of scenes, and he sometimes contributed images. Brecht was very much at home in English literature and could speak
English quite well.[22]
Brecht also contributed a number of scenes, which he asked Hays to translate.
By May they had completed two drafts and a finished version. Hays copyrighted this under the title The Duchess of Malfi, An Adaptation for The Modern Stage. Eisler read this version and liked it, promising to write the incidental music.
Brecht spent the next half year in Hollywood, returning to New York in November 1943. Hays was surprised when Brecht asked him to begin another round of work on the play. Hays had assumed they had done the job; Brecht, on the other hand, never considered any work finished.
While they worked, and without Hays' knowledge, Brecht again perpetrated a Brecht'sche Schweinerei by writing to the British poet W. H. Auden and inviting him to step in as his collaborator: "I dealt very gently with Webster's text, but was obliged to insert a few new scenes and lines. These exist in English, but I believe they should be improved, and I have told Miss Bergner that no one could do this as well as you."[23]
In December, Brecht, Czinner and Hays met at Ann Elmo's office, where Czinner announced that they needed "an English" poet's voice for the play, and had decided to bring Auden in to provide it. Hays was understandably upset and, despite his contract, quit the project. For his part, Brecht henceforth downplayed Hays' significant contributions.
Auden had seen the Berlin production of Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroshenoper in the late 1920s. At that time, Auden did not speak German, so his memory of the play was only of a "wonderful German cabaret," and he always denied any influence it might have had on his own theatrical writing. On a longer stay in Germany, Auden learned the language, and admired Brecht's plays, which he could now understand. But during their collaboration, he developed a deep antipathy to Brecht's character, and described him as an "odious person." (To be fair, Brecht was also irritated by Auden's infamous personal sloppiness.) [24]
The work on the play, now with Auden collaborating, continued for three years. When it was finally scheduled for a Broadway premiere, George Rylands, who had produced The Duchess successfully in London, was retained to direct the Brecht-Auden version. Arrived, he read it for the first time, and refused to stage it. Instead, he rewrote it, bringing back more of the original John Webster dialogue. Brecht found this newest version objectionable and refused to have his name credited with the writing. For this version, Benjamin Britten, not Hanns Eisler, provided incidental music. Even so, the production proved to be a complete failure. Auden himself called it "terrible," and protested that "I only did it for the money." [25]
During this time, Hays, perhaps inexplicably, continued to work on Brecht's translation projects, not only the plays but also translating Brecht's poems.
While working for James Laughlin on what would be Hays' pioneering translation of Spanish American poets, he pressed Laughlin to publish a collection of Brecht's poems that Hays would translate. Laughlin protested that the work of Brecht he'd already published didn't sell, that no matter how hard he promoted it, he just couldn't seem to move Brecht. Perhaps, Laughlin suggested, there was some sort of jinx on him. The stores would not work up an interest. And the fact that Brecht apparently didn't give a damn about sales and never answered letters was discouraging.
Laughlin eventually agreed to publish this collection and Brecht responded by thanking Hays for his efforts.
Hays envisioned the book as a sampling of Brecht's various periods. He also included lyrics from the plays because "they were invariably butchered in American stage productions." They eventually worked over the poems together in New York. Brecht was very pleased with them and suggested only a few line changes. Hays published some of the translations in Poetry Magazine, Accent and The Kenyon Review. The book was published in 1947 and was well reviewed, continuing in print through several editions and publishers.
Despite this success, Brecht could still carp behind his collaborator's back. Writing in 1946 to Elisabeth Hauptmann about a new staging of Hays' translation of Mother Courage, he says: "Courage in Hays's translation also needs a lot of work; will he do it? There are many things that he didn't understand. And now, after the disaster with the poems!"[26]
***
Why did Hays continue to work with him, even after Brecht's perfidy had been exposed? Hays could be a fervent social critic and advocate in his own theatre work, plainly in the Living Newspapers and more subtly in Davy Crockett. He saw in Brecht a most successful practitioner of that art. Hays writes in his introduction to his translation of Brecht's poems:
Bertolt Brecht, a figure of great influence in German literature, has become the apostle of a reaction against individualism.
His significance arises from the fact that his philosophy has molded his style and dictates the forms in which he works.
In the editor's opinion he is almost the only social poet writing today, the only social poet whose form and matter coincide,
the only political poet in the proper sense of the word.[27]
From the beginning, when he helped Brecht and his family leave Europe, Hays took him on as a cause. Hays was ready to be persistent in promoting Brecht's literary work and he resolved to endure Brecht's bad behavior for the sake of the cause.
Hays also recognized that Brecht's cut-throat and swinish behaviors, while they mostly resulted in misery and chaos for those working with him, were also the mechanisms by which Brecht realized his genius. When, for example, after the success of The Three Penny Opera in 1929, Warner Bros., through their German agents, proposed a film of the play, Brecht got to thinking about the possibilities that film offered him which live theatre did not.
During the summer of 1931, Brecht wrote a treatment of the play for film, which he titled "Die Beule," "The Bruise." It ignored the original plot of The Beggar's Opera, on which Brecht's theatrical version had been based, "an opera for beggars," which focused on the shop of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum. As the boss of London's beggars, Peachum runs a rather unusual business. He equips them with pathetic costumes guaranteed to illicit coins from the pitying public, and trains his beggars in the best methods to succeed in that business. In return, he takes a cut of whatever they bring in.
Brecht, who loved film and had a fondness for comic chases, ala The Keystone Kops, saw a larger cinematic possibility for the play:
Everything now is on a larger scale--the gang is 110 strong, Peachum heads a Begging Trust--and a higher social level, with peers,
a general and a magistrate at Macheath's wedding in the dual ménage." The slum streets have been repainted. Peachum interviews
Brown with seven lawyers behind him, and secures Macheath's arrest. Under Polly's direction the gang has taken over the National
Deposit Bank and converted itself into a group of solemn financiers. "The social facades are maintained as Macheath joins the
reunited bourgeoisie awaiting the arrival of their Queen.[28]
Had G. W. Pabst, the director, yielded to Brecht's demands that he accept the new version, we might now have a film that is truly cinematic. However, Pabst and the producers pushed Brecht off the set, and, instead, hired three writers to transplant the theatre version to film. It is a distinctly theatrical presentation, with Expressionist elements, but with the original Brecht and Weill songs. The scenes with dialogue drag, but the songs, as they did on stage, make the film memorable, in any case.[29]
But beyond his commanding ruthlessness, Brecht must have had some quality that compelled his collaborators, such as Hays, to stay with him. James K. Lyon, in Bertolt Brecht in America, suggests that:
Hays experienced something which outside observers might consider exploitation or, at the very least, thoughtlessness on
Brecht's part. Joseph Losey, who collaborated with Brecht in 1947, remembers that he "used people like mad, as most artists
do." Yet Losey, Hays, and virtually all other collaborators had no sense of being "used" by Brecht. Theirs was rather a sense of
un-ironic privilege for stimulating collaboration with a man they greatly admired. Perhaps the reason was that Brecht treated
them as equals when his own genius was so obvious.
***
Of the theatrical productions that Hays wrote or supervised between 1931 and 1941, most had great reviews but short runs, if any--some, such as the Living Theater productions, by design, and others, such as his work with Brecht and earlier with Kurt Weill--by artistic misadventure. "All in all," Hays said, speaking of his time in the theatre, "history was not been very kind to me."
[1] This and other miscellaneous quotations are from taped interviews I made with him circa 1978.
[2] Undated letter to Cara von Wersch from 1931
[3] It is difficult for me to imagine such a movement that harmoniously included people of words and of action. The protest movement against the Vietnam War, in which I was immersed during my college years, had its theoreticians and artists, but in my memory they were mostly angry, more willing to denounce than to reason, as if the enemy were unstoppable and all you could do was shake your fist. The recent Occupy movement seems not to have any intellectual component at all.
[4] H. R. Hays. "Brecht, Anti-individualist." Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems. New Directions. 1947. p. 3
[5] The New Masses, May 10, 1938
[6] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom. 1940
[7] “Discovering Neruda: An Interview with H. R. Hays.” By Jonathan Cohen. Translation Review 6 (1980): 29-33.
[8]Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The history of the Federal Theatre. B. Blom-- Ex-Library edition. 1965
[9] H.R. Hays, "Brecht Anti-Individualist." Introduction to The Selected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, edited and translated by H.R. Hays. Reynal & Hitchcock. 1947
[10]Also see: The Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment. Tim Robbins, Theresa Burns. Newmarket Press Pictorial Movie Book. 1995
[11] Bertolt Brecht. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. 1964.
[12] James K. Lyon. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press. 1980.
[13] "The Individual Eye." Encore (March 1961. p.11
[14] H. R. Hays. "The Story of Selected Poems." Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956. John Willett, Ralph Manheim, eds. Methuen London Ltd. 1979
[15] Lyon, p. 21
[16] H. R. Hays. "The Story of Selected Poems." Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956. John Willett, Ralph Manheim, eds. Methuen London Ltd. 1979
[17] ibid.
[18] video. 1972
[19] ibid.
[20] Bertolt Brecht. Letters. trans. Ralph Manheim. Ed. John Willett. New York: Routledge. 1990. #435. ppgs. 340-341
[21] James K. Lyon. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press. 1980.
[22] Lee Baxandall. "Brecht in America, 1935. " The Drama Review. (Fall, 1967). p. 74
[23] Letters. # 478. p. 375
[24] Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Faber
[25] ibid.
[26] Letters. #515. p.
[27] H. R. Hays. "Brecht, Anti-Individualist." Selected Poems. New York: New Directions. 1947.
[28] Bertolt Brecht. "Introduction." The Threepenny Opera. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. New York: Arcade Publishing. 1994.
[29] Die Dreigroshcenoper (Threepenny Opera). Georg Wilheim Pabst, director. Nero-film/Berlin. 1931.
H.R. Hays: The Theater of Disappointment
from A Hole In the Ocean: A Writing Apprenticeship in the Hamptons
In 1966 I enrolled at Southampton College. It was then a branch of Long Island University, since dissolved. Its mission was to serve local students, the children of farmers and shopkeepers who served the wealthy summer residents living near the Atlantic Ocean. Most students attending the college had practical career objectives. Few had any interest in the humanities, especially in painting, creative writing, sculpture or serious music. The college, having failed to lure established academics from metropolitan universities to what was for nine months of the year a desolate rural environment, had to resort to hiring locals with uncertain academic certifications to teach those students who might be interested in the arts. But the Hamptons being the Hamptons, the local artists and writers included in the faculty at that time came immediately to resemble the quietly shimmering artist-teachers of the innovative, short-lived, experimental Black Mountain College, at which some of them had actually taught. For instance, Willem de Kooning lectured on painting; Ilya Bolotowsky, the neo-plasticist painter with a thick Russian accent, taught Freshman English. Among poets teaching were the Bollingen Prize winner David Ignatow, and the pioneering performance poet Charles Matz. The playwright and poet H. R. Hays headed the Theater Department.
Why did a group of distinguished artists and writers congregate at a new, undistinguished college? "You see," de Kooning told me after we'd become acquainted. "They're here in the wintertime all alone. They work in their studios all day and then want to get together at night, usually at Bobby Van's, or some other bar. Then they get into a fight--Jim Jones likes to throw punches--or get drunk and the police take them to jail. Its either that or they meet at the college and have a good time without getting into too much trouble." "The truth is," Ilya Bolotowsky added. "We're all exiles."
Hays, Ignatow, Matz and Bolotowsky became my mentors and friends during college and for many years after. A Hole In the Ocean is a consideration of the personal and professional lives of these writers by their student, an attempt to answer persisting questions about the practice of art in the Hamptons and significance of the place and the time in their lives.
1. Meeting H. R. Hays
H. R. Hays was a poet, translator, novelist and playwright, an historian of anthropology and zoology. His twenty-two books, reflecting the diversity of his interests, were the pioneering works in their fields. His The Dangerous Sex: the Myth of Feminine Evil, served as respected source material for Feminist writers. Sir Julian Huxley regarded Hays’ popular history of zoology, Birds, Beasts and Men, as a classic of its genre. His translations of the poetry of Brecht, Vallejo, Borges, Neruda, and many others were among the first to bring these major twentieth century writers to the attention of the English-speaking world. His plays, such as The Ballad of Davy Crockett, were performed on Broadway. More than twenty of his shorter works appeared on television during its early days.
The slip of paper inside the interoffice envelope in my student mailbox told me that Professor Hays, head of the drama department, had been assigned as my freshman advisor. I did not plan to take drama courses, so the assignment was mysterious. But since everything about college was a mystery, I headed out to keep my appointment.
Hays' office, the note told me, was backstage in the Fine Arts building. I arrived but there didn't seem to be any offices, only a few classrooms. Thinking that I was in the wrong part of the theatre, I turned toward the exit and almost ran into a tall man with thick glasses who had suddenly stepped out of what appeared to be a closet and rushed past me. A girl was sitting at a table nearby and I asked her who that had been. She told me it was Professor Hays. I asked where his office was and she told me that it was there, in that closet.
I caught up with him in the parking lot where he was fumbling with his keys. I introduced myself as his advisee and told him I'd arrived for our appointment.
"Ah," he said, fuming. "That was the last straw! Did you know the janitor has now been authorized to store his buckets, mops and brooms in my office? They promised me a real office when the new building was finished. Now they say I just have to 'make do', whatever that means. Next they'll have me working out of a stall in the men's room!"
"Should we make another appointment, when it's more convenient for you?" I asked, because I didn't know what else to say.
"Well, we can talk here for a few minutes. What are you?"
"What am I?"
"I mean, are you a playwright, a director, a scenic designer? What?"
"Actually, I'll probably be an English major."
"You don't want to write plays?"
"Well, I would like to write plays. Mostly I write poetry. Sometimes short stories."
"What poets do you like?"
I had discovered Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrok," and though I didn't quite understand it, I loved the way it sounded when I'd read it aloud. I'd read it so many times that I'd memorized it. I told Hays about this and he ordered me to recite. I gave him the first few stanzas.
"That's enough. You're like a lot of the modern poets: you just mumble the words into your beard or down your shirt. I teach a Public Speaking class next semester. Why don't you sign up for it? You'll learn to declaim properly."
He found the correct car key. "Come and see me again and bring some of your poetry. I write poetry myself."
The campus, as it was every Friday, was abandoned, students and professors having gone off to more populous areas. The streets were deserted, as usual. That afternoon, H. R. Hays had seemed an angry, forlorn figure in that lonely landscape. Few students I'd spoken with had met him or even heard of him, though he taught a full course load. To those who acknowledged knowing him, Hays remained a mystery, an odd duck, an almost-invisible man.
2. Hays: Communist
The Hays family--six brothers and their families--had landed in New York City in the first quarter of the 18th century. They were Sephardic Jews who, after exile from Spain, lived for several generations in Holland. Arrived in New York, they became active parts of the burgeoning city, helping to establish Congregation Shearith Israel temple, taking part in the government and the cultural life. Hays' great-grandfather Jacob became the city's first High Constable, noted for breaking up riots by slamming perpetrators over the head with his helmet. The family, along with the Ochs and Sulzbergers, established The New York Times. Hays' grandfather, W. J. Hays, was a noted painter of the Old West. His grandmother wrote children's' books. His father was also a painter.
“There were too many painters in my family. I decided to become a poet,” Hays told me.[1] He had published poetry during his undergraduate years at Cornell and while he completed his Masters of Arts at Columbia University with a scholarly thesis, "Middle English Holly and Ivy Christmas Carols." By 1929 he had written enough finished poetry to publish a collection (Strange City, Boston: Four Seas).
He remained at Columbia working toward his PhD. while also teaching English at City College (CCNY). But by the time he reached the exams he had about had it with traditional academic fare, which he considered unresponsive to the urgent practical needs of society following the business collapse and the country’s entrance into what would soon be called The Great Depression. He walked out on one of his professors. “He wanted dates, but I wanted to discuss the meaning of events. Finally, I said to hell with it,” and left the examination room, wishing the professor evil. (According to Hays's son, Dan Hays, Hays got his wish: That afternoon the professor was run down by a taxi crossing Cathedral Avenue.)
Hays wanted a radical change in his life. He was 25 years old and he complained of being weighted down by America. “I hear the nasal voices of my countrymen around me,” he was to write the next year, “and the old contempt comes back…. [Our American] materialism is a prison.” [2]
Abruptly, he left Columbia and New York, taking work as a horse groomer aboard a ship sailing for Holland. In Europe he took drama classes in Belgium, visited museums and kept up with literary trends while pursuing a romance with a young actress.
After a solitary year in Europe, Hays believed he could articulate the seminal psychological and aesthetic questions he had in mind, and his return to the U.S. would help focus his sense of direction. The undeniable starkness of the Great Depression, the social tragedy that confronted his return, provoked him to question the Capitalist methods of the U.S. economy. Like intellectuals and artists of his generation, he was drawn to Socialism and finally to Communism.
“We were all Communists back then,” Hays told me. “All the writers and artists. It was the only thing to be in the 1930’s. When you witnessed the mistreatment of the workers, the minorities—and anyone else who wasn’t a wealthy white man—there was really no other choice.”
He noticed my silence. “Well, don’t look so shocked. Besides, I suppose yesterday’s Communists are today’s Democrats; there’s really little difference.”
Of course, that is exactly what my father used to tell me, but he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way.
I'd grown up in the 1950s and ‘60s during the Cold War, and to me the idea that anyone would declare himself a Communist was unthinkable. I recalled my father watching the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, in thrall at the crazed and mouth-foaming Senator Joseph McCarthy, poking his damning finger at the Senate chamber, terrified that he would turn his face to the camera—turn to my father and me—to accuse us of being horrible Communists.
“Did they ever put you in jail?”
“No. Somehow they missed me, even though I gave them plenty of ammunition.”
Some of this ammunition included:
* Membership in the Artists' Union
In 1934, Hays joined the Artists' Union, which had just been formed. It's mission was to find work for unemployed artists—an ideal, if not practical undertaking at the time since the union had no leverage. However, the next year, President Roosevelt supplied it. He issued an Executive Order, later funded by Congress, establishing the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. From this, the Works Project Administration was created. Among its mandates, the WPA was tasked with supporting the public works of artists. The Artists’ Union immediately set itself up as the artists’ advocate, lobbying for more jobs within the Works Progress Administration, better pay and working conditions, and against proposed cutbacks. Essentially, the Artists’ Union became the mediators between artists and WPA, settling grievances between workers and bosses and threatening to take direct action if needed.
At the time, Hays considered himself now definitely a writer, and was at work on a novel. He had made friends with Harold Rosenberg and his wife, May. Rosenberg, who would later famously characterize the methods of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and others as "action painting," had trained as a lawyer but, after an illness that forced him to walk with a cane for the rest of his life, gave up the law for a Bohemian lifestyle and a devotion to writing poetry. May Rosenberg, a teacher and social worker, introduced Hays to a university art student named Juliette Levine. They got on, and married in New York City Hall in 1934.
Hays, Rosenberg and their writer and painter friends, such as de Kooning--and an often reluctant Mark Rothko--joined the union.
Juliette Hays has described a typical artist-union action of the time:
Well, word went out through all the projects--dancers, writers, artists—that there would be the sit-in. After the performance, they
would ask the audience would they sit with them. And outside all the other people from the different projects would assemble.
Well, we came there to be available as soon as the theater was emptying out, and it was definitely determined by all people
coming after should not attempt to go into the theater. So mostly there were writers and some dancers outside and we were
marching back and forth. Naturally, there must have been some slogans, but we were just people. I would say by this time
we had several hundred people out there. We looked back (at least I did) to Broadway. And suddenly coming around
the corner, these banners appeared. They were Artist Union banners and Marcus [Mark Rothko] was carrying a banner and
he was on the line.[1]
* Writing and Translating Marxist Poetry
Aside from sit-ins and marches, Hays' Marxism was mostly ideological and his actions in the Cause more literary than street-revolutionary, though nonetheless dedicated. But intellectuals and artists had a recognized place in the social reform movement of that time[3], and Hays contributed regularly to such magazines as The New Masses.
Hays has described Bertolt Brecht's significance in German and world literature as arising "from the fact that his philosophy has molded his style and dictates the forms in which he works."[4] In the history of art and literature, this scheme has had uneven results. In early 20th century music, for example, the employment of the rigid 12-Tone system of composition by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, probably produced more aesthetic failures than successes. Later, the Soviet composers' attempts at "factory music"--music that imitates the repetitious sounds of factory machines--merely produced headaches in the listener. Hays' attempts at poetry for the Marxist cause employed the familiar vocabulary and ideas of working class solidarity with muted Imagist or Surrealist shadings. For example, here are some lines from "Parade": "Thinking of May Day, / Of parades / Moving like history, / Those in back / Must run to keep up [...]" and "Big value here, / Cash them / In your strength, / Workers! / Thinking of May Day and / "The most beautiful subway / In the world.'”[5]
Hays' own conclusion about the quality of this poetry is evident from his later collections, which didn't reproduce any.
In 1943 Yale University Press published Hays' 12 Spanish American Poets, the first collection of translations that focused on the major Spanish American writers of the time, including Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and others. Of those included in the anthology, Neruda often loudly declared himself a Communist, not only painting himself with the red brand but potentially his translator, as well (although nothing seemed to have come of this).
* Writings For the Theatre
In his theatre work, Hays collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, who were passionate Communists, both investigated by the U. S. Congress and forced into exile. Kurt Weill, with whom Hays worked on The Ballad of Davy Crockett, was also a Marxist, but his successful attempts to "rehabilitate" himself by nestling into mainstream American theatre, worked and saved him from disgrace.
Hays' work for the Federal Theatre Project, especially as author and administrator of the Living Newspaper series, might have brought him to the attention of the Dies Committee, a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose purpose was to permanently end subversive public works, such as the Theatre project. During the four years of the project's existence, the government harassed several productions. One play, Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, was famously closed down on opening night by armed federal troops. It was inevitable that the Dies Committee should step in and initiate an enquiry. Despite the ignorance of Committee members leading the enquiry (much time was wasted trying to ascertain whether authors, such as the 16th century British playwright Christopher Marlowe, were now or had ever been Communists), the government finally brought the Federal Theatre program to its end.[6]
Still, the government hadn't noticed Hays. And that didn't change until the 1938 production in Madison Square Garden, of Hays' and Hanns Eisler's A Song About America. "They got a real file on me," Hays said. The play, text and song lyrics by Hays, music by Eisler, was commissioned by the Communist Party for the commemoration of Lenin and the 20th anniversary of the October revolution.
One of the songs from the play, "Sweet Liberty Land," became very popular and was for some time the unofficial national anthem of the Communist Party of America. "It almost replaced the 'Internationale'," Hays recalled.[7]
Eisler, fearing deportation, had written his music under the pseudonym "John Garden." Despite this precaution, Eisler was eventually deported. Despite Hays' proclamation without pseudonym of his authorship of this radical play, he was never called before the Committee.
("They ignored me," he sniffed.)
3. The Living Newspaper and the Theatre of Brecht
The inspiration for the Living Newspaper series produced by the Federal Theatre in the 1930s, as well as the experiments of the director Erwin Piscator in 1924 that created what Bertolt Brecht would refer to as Epic theatre, originated in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. The strategy of both the Living Newspaper and Piscator was to utilize not only the actors, but also the props--billboards with images or ideological texts, music, projections, and swift scene changes--not only to tell a story, but the background and ramifications of the story, at the same time.
Harry Hopkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, first proposed the Federal Theater project in 1934. Hopkins was a major figure in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that Roosevelt’s government had set up as a means of countering the financial devastation of the Great Depression. Hopkins eventually headed the Civil Works Administration, the Federal Surplus Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration. It was Hopkins’ intention that opportunities to produce jobs rather than the doling-out of direct financial relief should be the goals of his agencies. Because of his personal interest in theatre and his awareness of the vast numbers of theatre people put out of work by the Depression he got in touch with Hallie Flanagan, the director of Vassar’s “Experimental Theatre” program, and a former schoolmate. Flanagan agreed to run the program, which eventually employed eight thousand people, and put on productions of classical and modern plays in forty states, once Hopkins had guaranteed that the government would never step in to censor any of her productions. This turned out to be a promise Hopkins couldn’t keep. The Living Newspaper, with its concern for the troubles of minority, farm and other low- or no-income workers, brought worried industrialists in protest to the government.
Flanagan described the project's aims: "…the [Living Newspaper] seeks to dramatize a new struggle – the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world; to dramatize his struggle to turn the great natural and economic forces of our time toward a better life for more people."[8]
Hays elaborated on this:
Now that nineteenth-century laissez-faire economy has patently broken down, leaving doubt and confusion in its wake,
all values are being challenged; and since automatically the state is encroaching more and more upon private life, the
position of the individual is indeed perilous. Even our cultural individualism, dating from the Renaissance civilization,
is on trial. While it would be hazardous to prophesy just what modification may take place in our concept of the individual,
there is no doubt that contemporary thinking is in a state of flux. [9]
With production titles such as Triple-A Plowed Under, Injunction Granted, One-Third of a Nation, Power, and Spirochete, controversy over the political ideology of the Living Newspapers contributed to the disbanding of the Federal Theatre Project.
One of the final Living Newspaper productions was Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and Hays, with incidental music by Hanns Eisler. The productions was directed by Jules Dassin. It opened at the New York Theatre on April 12, 1940. The stark, simple stage setting and the presentation of the characters more as ideotypes than individuals is typical of the form.
The play opened to good reviews but lasted only thirty-five performances. On opening night, Germany had invaded Norway. The shock of the front-page headlines overshadowed the play's good notices and it soon closed.
Hays saw this closing as somehow in line with his ill-fortune in the theater generally.
“History is not on my side,” Hays told me dryly.[10]
The term Epic Theater was used by Brecht for the first time in 1926. Many playwrights and composers produced plays and musical compositions in the 1920s which have since been labeled Epic (Stravinisky, Pirandello, Claudel), and others have followed in their footsteps (Wilder, Miller, Beckett).
Brecht explained that Epic Theater, as he conceived it, could have only come to be after the invention of various technologies that enhanced the theater's ability to shake the irreconcilability of the epic and the dramatic, such as slide projections in front of and from behind the scenery, the greater flexibility of the stage and its sets due to mechanization, the incorporation of narrative film, and so on. This did so," wrote Brecht, "at a point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers."
Because of these enhancements, the environments in which his characters lived could stand by themselves, as a motive presence on the stage and independent of the central figure's point of view. "The stage," wrote Brecht, "began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall."
Brecht asserted that the power of a drama in which both actors and the stage itself demanded the audience's attention no longer allowed the spectator to remain uncritical and lulled by the story. Brecht continued that the force of Epic Theater created an alienation in the spectator that was essential to a full understanding of the event. "When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world,'" wrote Brecht, "it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up."[11]
While Hays recognized that the Living Newspaper approach and Brecht's were similar, he also understood that Brecht's ideas were more ideologically rigorous--at least on paper. For its short existence, the Living Newspaper had been less doctrinaire, more opportunistic and spontaneous. But, in any case, the experience probably prepared Hays for the opportunities he would later have to collaborate with Brecht.
4. "Brecht Was a Son of a Bitch"
Bertolt Brecht fled Germany on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, convinced that he was about to be remanded to a Nazi death camp. He travelled through Prague and Vienna, Switzerland and Paris, before arriving in Denmark, where he remained for six years.
His plays were banned in Germany, the Nazis having burned manuscripts and books, and also what they believed to be all the film negatives of The Three Penny Opera directed by G. W. Pabst. However, during those years, a few of his plays were produced sporadically in Europe and in the U.S. with indifferent results, closing to bad notices and often after only a few days' run. Brecht was convinced that his work only stood a chance in New York, on Broadway, with him in exclusive control. He began plotting how this could be done.
The opportunity came when the composer Hanns Eisler urged the Executive Board of the New York Theatre Union to take on the production of Brecht's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's novel The Mother. Eisler was known to the theatre's executive board, which consisted of Trotskyites, Stalinists, socialists and liberals, as someone enthusiastic about social causes. His previous collaborations with Brecht were also acknowledged, if vaguely. They decided to do the play and both Eisler and the theatre board contacted Brecht in Denmark. He agreed to the production. A translation of Brecht's script was made by Paul Peters of the Theatre Union and mailed to Brecht, who reacted to it with great anger. Brecht's concept of Epic Theatre depended on the depersonalization of the characters of a play, so that they were not the sentimental representations of persons who could be alive, but were vehicles of whichever ideas Brecht was promoting. However, Brecht raged, the Peters translation turned his ideological drama into the "hypnotic theatre" he abhorred, in which the audience was distracted by the human foibles and triumphs of the play's characters.
Brecht demanded that the Theatre Union pay his passage to America, which they agreed to do, but only after he had signed a contract giving them the performing rights to the play. Apparently, they calculated that, once Brecht was in America, they could convince him that their take on his play was the correct one for an American audience.
They were wrong. Brecht and Eisler arrived at the theatre in mid-production, and Brecht, after watching what was going on on stage, immediately demanded a meeting with the director and cast. In a voice "that would have humiliated the fight announcer at Madison Square Garden" Brecht declared "Das ist Schiesse! Das ist Dreck!" "This is shit! This is crap!" He then proceeded to demand that fundamental changes be made in the script and in the cast and crew.
He was allowed to continue his intrusions for several weeks. When he was not in the theatre militating against the production he was writing letters threatening legal action if his demands weren't met. Finally, after he had angered a burly pianist, who then threatened to "break every bone in his body," the management threw Brecht and Eisler into the street.[12]
After The Mother ended its short and critically discredited run, Brecht remained in America for some weeks and saw several Broadway plays, including the Federal Theater Project's Living Newspaper productions. Joseph Losey, the director of many Living Newspaper productions (including Hays and Eisler's Medicine Show) reports that Brecht loved the productions because he saw the similarity to his own Epic Theatre ideas in them.[13] Brecht attended at least one conference, attempting to meet powerful theatre people who would help him get established once he was able to return to the U. S. for an extended period. Not much came of these efforts, and the only legacy left by Brecht's short but bombastic visit to New York was a great number of people who despised him.
Members of the Theatre Union, such as Manuel Gomez, considered Brecht to be "enormously vain...enormously energetic, enormously stubborn, enormously sarcastic, enormously difficult." Albert Maltz came to loathe him. Brecht disliked bathing and avoided it when possible, but, as Maltz recalls, sitting next to him and being forced to endure his nimbus of stench made Brecht's presence an ordeal.
Brecht returned to Denmark. but continued his correspondence with Eisler, whom he believed was a key to his eventual return to America and Broadway.
In the summer of 1939 Eisler and H. R. Hays were in Mexico together working on a play with music. Hays knew something of Brecht's work, if not of his temperament. He had seen the Theatre Union production of The Mother but "the 'adaptation' and treatment had so taken the edge off the play that I acquired no feeling for Brecht's special tone and stagecraft." Eisler gave Hays mimeographed copies of Brecht's plays in German: Mother Courage, The Trial of Lucullus and The Horatians and the Curiations.
They excited me and seemed to me a milestone in the theatre.... Eisler had described to me the horrors of that production
[of The Mother] during which he and Brecht were locked out of the theatre because the directors were quite sure they knew
what was right for an American audience. He urged me to translate the new plays and promised to aid me in getting the
publication rights from Brecht, which he subsequently did. Hanns also introduced me to the collected plays in German,
which further stimulated my interest in the epic theatre.[14]
Just as Brecht had recognized the similarity between his theatrical ideas and those he'd seen demonstrated in Living Newspaper productions, Hays, who had worked on several of those, found an ideological kinship with Brecht's plays.
For several years after his return to Denmark and the summer of 1939, Brecht had moved repeatedly, "changing countries more often than shoes,"[15] trying to keep several steps ahead of the Nazi conquest and his own certain incarceration, since he had earlier been stripped of his German citizenship "for behavior in violation of the obligation of loyalty toward Reich and people." He decided to find a way to return to America.
Several old colleagues from the German theater offered help. Fritz Lang, living in Hollywood, offered to assist by selling a Brecht story to the movies. Erwin Piscator, known as the founder of "political theatre" to which Brecht owed his formative theatrical ideas, was leading the Theatre Workshop at the new School for Social Research in New York City. Piscator secured a position for Brecht in his program if Brecht could make the crossing. And in Mexico, Hans Eisler asked Hays if he would sign an affidavit of support backing Brecht's immigration, which Hays did.
During the winter of 1940 Hays and Eisler were preoccupied with the production of their Living Newspaper, Medicine Show. After the show closed, Hays went to work translating Brecht's plays.
Hays went ahead and translated Mother Courage and Lucullus (and also The Horatians) and contacted James Laughlin of New Directions in March of 1941. Laughlin wrote, referring to Brecht: "His is a name which has been forcing itself into my ken without my ever getting the lowdown on him." Hays briefed him on Brecht and sent some translations. Laughlin decided that Brecht was "something pretty O.K." During the next few months they arranged that Mother Courage should appear in the New Directions 1941, Laughlin's yearbook of new writing, and Lucullus in a Poet of the Month pamphlet early in 1941.[16]
In early 1941, Hays wrote to Brecht offering to be his American translator and enclosing copies of the translations he'd made. Brecht expressed gratitude and admiration for Hays' work. In a letter to Hays in March of that year, Brecht wrote: "Many thanks for the fine translations ... I am very happy about this. This is the first time that anything has been done about my work in the USA, for the stage can scarcely provide a start."
Hays continues:
He went on to explain that he wished to get out of Finland and needed an affidavit for one of his party, Ruth Berlau. I eventually
provided affidavits for two of the people with him. He arrived in California in July of 1941 hoping to find work in Hollywood.
That winter he visited New York, staying with Ruth Berlau, who was already living in the city. This was when I first met him
and we talked about various translation possibilities. I did a few scenes from The Private Life of the Master Race after he
returned to Hollywood, only to discover that someone else was translating it in Hollywood.[17]
Hays explained to me that this was his first indication of Brecht's duplicitous modus operandi:[18]
Brecht was a son of a bitch. He had the most annoying habit of granting exclusive world rights to the translation of his plays
to several people at once, and of course he never let any of them know he was doing it. Then, as always happened, one of them
would catch on, and some ridiculous fiasco would ensue.
At one point that year, Brecht commissioned Eric Bentley to do a translation of Master Race, while Hays was working on his. Later in the same year, Clifford Odets, encouraged by Brecht, was considering a screenplay for Master Race. Simultaneously, Brecht asked Ferdinand Rehyer to translate the play for Broadway (camouflaging it under the title The Devil's Sunday).
Hays wrote "a pretty strong letter" to Brecht about this and about Brecht's general failure to communicate. In January of 1941, several months after Hays' remonstrance, Brecht responded, somewhat meekly: "i don't quite know how to explain why i have not written you long before this.... I don't know whether you can pardon my neglect of you, no matter how much i should like you to. " Unfortunately, Brecht continued, he must in this case once more beg Hays to work out some system for their collaboration, which, he acknowledged, was very important to his equilibrium. "You have done so much for me. we must go through everything. ... i know this is asking a lot but i do hope that you will not consider my peculiar behavior as mere ingratitude and temperament."[19]
Despite his whimpering contrition, Brecht would continue playing what Erwin Piscator described as Brecht'sche Schweinerei ("swinish Brechtian tricks") throughout their collaboration on the plays and poetry, and especially before, during and after the "ridiculous fiasco" of The Duchess of Malfi.
5. Ridiculous Fiasco: The Duchess of Malfi
A friend of Brecht's, the actress Elisabeth Bergner, and her husband, producer-director Paul Czinner, asked Brecht to make an adaptation of the 17th century English play, The Duchess of Malfi, in which she wanted to play the title role. In its original version written by John Webster, the play has been described as macabre and tragic--qualities that Bergner probably thought would entice Brecht to take it on. They proposed that they'd bring his version to the Broadway stage, a happening he'd been hoping for.
Erwin Piscator and Hanns Eisler recommended Hays as translator-collaborator. Piscator had told Brecht that Hays' translation of Mother Courage and Her Children was "very good." However, in the previous year, he had circulated the translation in New York theatre circles and had received unenthusiastic responses, not because the translation was faulty, but because Brecht's stagecraft, which Hays preserved, was foreign to Broadway. In any case, Brecht may have taken that rejection as a negative comment on Hays' abilities. In a letter to Piscator, Brecht details his worries:
Here again the problem is the translation. It would be best if I could be there, because the translation has to be free and I could
help the translator a good deal (choosing different images, explaining the jokes, etc.) In any case, I must absolutely see a
few pages before the translation is definitely commissioned.... I don't know if Hoffman Hays would be able to translate the blank
verse. What do you think?[20]
Nevertheless, their collaboration on Malfi began on an upbeat note. Hays had introduced Brecht to his literary agent, Ann Elmo, and they had signed a Dramatists Guild contract with a small advance on the play. In the following month, working at a Manhattan apartment, they cut down the play's sprawling plot lines and anticlimactic deaths.[21]
Hays recalled:
I did all the writing, in the style of Webster, though Brecht and I discussed the scenes to be eliminated or added, the content
of scenes, and he sometimes contributed images. Brecht was very much at home in English literature and could speak
English quite well.[22]
Brecht also contributed a number of scenes, which he asked Hays to translate.
By May they had completed two drafts and a finished version. Hays copyrighted this under the title The Duchess of Malfi, An Adaptation for The Modern Stage. Eisler read this version and liked it, promising to write the incidental music.
Brecht spent the next half year in Hollywood, returning to New York in November 1943. Hays was surprised when Brecht asked him to begin another round of work on the play. Hays had assumed they had done the job; Brecht, on the other hand, never considered any work finished.
While they worked, and without Hays' knowledge, Brecht again perpetrated a Brecht'sche Schweinerei by writing to the British poet W. H. Auden and inviting him to step in as his collaborator: "I dealt very gently with Webster's text, but was obliged to insert a few new scenes and lines. These exist in English, but I believe they should be improved, and I have told Miss Bergner that no one could do this as well as you."[23]
In December, Brecht, Czinner and Hays met at Ann Elmo's office, where Czinner announced that they needed "an English" poet's voice for the play, and had decided to bring Auden in to provide it. Hays was understandably upset and, despite his contract, quit the project. For his part, Brecht henceforth downplayed Hays' significant contributions.
Auden had seen the Berlin production of Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroshenoper in the late 1920s. At that time, Auden did not speak German, so his memory of the play was only of a "wonderful German cabaret," and he always denied any influence it might have had on his own theatrical writing. On a longer stay in Germany, Auden learned the language, and admired Brecht's plays, which he could now understand. But during their collaboration, he developed a deep antipathy to Brecht's character, and described him as an "odious person." (To be fair, Brecht was also irritated by Auden's infamous personal sloppiness.) [24]
The work on the play, now with Auden collaborating, continued for three years. When it was finally scheduled for a Broadway premiere, George Rylands, who had produced The Duchess successfully in London, was retained to direct the Brecht-Auden version. Arrived, he read it for the first time, and refused to stage it. Instead, he rewrote it, bringing back more of the original John Webster dialogue. Brecht found this newest version objectionable and refused to have his name credited with the writing. For this version, Benjamin Britten, not Hanns Eisler, provided incidental music. Even so, the production proved to be a complete failure. Auden himself called it "terrible," and protested that "I only did it for the money." [25]
During this time, Hays, perhaps inexplicably, continued to work on Brecht's translation projects, not only the plays but also translating Brecht's poems.
While working for James Laughlin on what would be Hays' pioneering translation of Spanish American poets, he pressed Laughlin to publish a collection of Brecht's poems that Hays would translate. Laughlin protested that the work of Brecht he'd already published didn't sell, that no matter how hard he promoted it, he just couldn't seem to move Brecht. Perhaps, Laughlin suggested, there was some sort of jinx on him. The stores would not work up an interest. And the fact that Brecht apparently didn't give a damn about sales and never answered letters was discouraging.
Laughlin eventually agreed to publish this collection and Brecht responded by thanking Hays for his efforts.
Hays envisioned the book as a sampling of Brecht's various periods. He also included lyrics from the plays because "they were invariably butchered in American stage productions." They eventually worked over the poems together in New York. Brecht was very pleased with them and suggested only a few line changes. Hays published some of the translations in Poetry Magazine, Accent and The Kenyon Review. The book was published in 1947 and was well reviewed, continuing in print through several editions and publishers.
Despite this success, Brecht could still carp behind his collaborator's back. Writing in 1946 to Elisabeth Hauptmann about a new staging of Hays' translation of Mother Courage, he says: "Courage in Hays's translation also needs a lot of work; will he do it? There are many things that he didn't understand. And now, after the disaster with the poems!"[26]
***
Why did Hays continue to work with him, even after Brecht's perfidy had been exposed? Hays could be a fervent social critic and advocate in his own theatre work, plainly in the Living Newspapers and more subtly in Davy Crockett. He saw in Brecht a most successful practitioner of that art. Hays writes in his introduction to his translation of Brecht's poems:
Bertolt Brecht, a figure of great influence in German literature, has become the apostle of a reaction against individualism.
His significance arises from the fact that his philosophy has molded his style and dictates the forms in which he works.
In the editor's opinion he is almost the only social poet writing today, the only social poet whose form and matter coincide,
the only political poet in the proper sense of the word.[27]
From the beginning, when he helped Brecht and his family leave Europe, Hays took him on as a cause. Hays was ready to be persistent in promoting Brecht's literary work and he resolved to endure Brecht's bad behavior for the sake of the cause.
Hays also recognized that Brecht's cut-throat and swinish behaviors, while they mostly resulted in misery and chaos for those working with him, were also the mechanisms by which Brecht realized his genius. When, for example, after the success of The Three Penny Opera in 1929, Warner Bros., through their German agents, proposed a film of the play, Brecht got to thinking about the possibilities that film offered him which live theatre did not.
During the summer of 1931, Brecht wrote a treatment of the play for film, which he titled "Die Beule," "The Bruise." It ignored the original plot of The Beggar's Opera, on which Brecht's theatrical version had been based, "an opera for beggars," which focused on the shop of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum. As the boss of London's beggars, Peachum runs a rather unusual business. He equips them with pathetic costumes guaranteed to illicit coins from the pitying public, and trains his beggars in the best methods to succeed in that business. In return, he takes a cut of whatever they bring in.
Brecht, who loved film and had a fondness for comic chases, ala The Keystone Kops, saw a larger cinematic possibility for the play:
Everything now is on a larger scale--the gang is 110 strong, Peachum heads a Begging Trust--and a higher social level, with peers,
a general and a magistrate at Macheath's wedding in the dual ménage." The slum streets have been repainted. Peachum interviews
Brown with seven lawyers behind him, and secures Macheath's arrest. Under Polly's direction the gang has taken over the National
Deposit Bank and converted itself into a group of solemn financiers. "The social facades are maintained as Macheath joins the
reunited bourgeoisie awaiting the arrival of their Queen.[28]
Had G. W. Pabst, the director, yielded to Brecht's demands that he accept the new version, we might now have a film that is truly cinematic. However, Pabst and the producers pushed Brecht off the set, and, instead, hired three writers to transplant the theatre version to film. It is a distinctly theatrical presentation, with Expressionist elements, but with the original Brecht and Weill songs. The scenes with dialogue drag, but the songs, as they did on stage, make the film memorable, in any case.[29]
But beyond his commanding ruthlessness, Brecht must have had some quality that compelled his collaborators, such as Hays, to stay with him. James K. Lyon, in Bertolt Brecht in America, suggests that:
Hays experienced something which outside observers might consider exploitation or, at the very least, thoughtlessness on
Brecht's part. Joseph Losey, who collaborated with Brecht in 1947, remembers that he "used people like mad, as most artists
do." Yet Losey, Hays, and virtually all other collaborators had no sense of being "used" by Brecht. Theirs was rather a sense of
un-ironic privilege for stimulating collaboration with a man they greatly admired. Perhaps the reason was that Brecht treated
them as equals when his own genius was so obvious.
***
Of the theatrical productions that Hays wrote or supervised between 1931 and 1941, most had great reviews but short runs, if any--some, such as the Living Theater productions, by design, and others, such as his work with Brecht and earlier with Kurt Weill--by artistic misadventure. "All in all," Hays said, speaking of his time in the theatre, "history was not been very kind to me."
[1] This and other miscellaneous quotations are from taped interviews I made with him circa 1978.
[2] Undated letter to Cara von Wersch from 1931
[3] It is difficult for me to imagine such a movement that harmoniously included people of words and of action. The protest movement against the Vietnam War, in which I was immersed during my college years, had its theoreticians and artists, but in my memory they were mostly angry, more willing to denounce than to reason, as if the enemy were unstoppable and all you could do was shake your fist. The recent Occupy movement seems not to have any intellectual component at all.
[4] H. R. Hays. "Brecht, Anti-individualist." Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems. New Directions. 1947. p. 3
[5] The New Masses, May 10, 1938
[6] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom. 1940
[7] “Discovering Neruda: An Interview with H. R. Hays.” By Jonathan Cohen. Translation Review 6 (1980): 29-33.
[8]Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The history of the Federal Theatre. B. Blom-- Ex-Library edition. 1965
[9] H.R. Hays, "Brecht Anti-Individualist." Introduction to The Selected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, edited and translated by H.R. Hays. Reynal & Hitchcock. 1947
[10]Also see: The Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment. Tim Robbins, Theresa Burns. Newmarket Press Pictorial Movie Book. 1995
[11] Bertolt Brecht. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. 1964.
[12] James K. Lyon. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press. 1980.
[13] "The Individual Eye." Encore (March 1961. p.11
[14] H. R. Hays. "The Story of Selected Poems." Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956. John Willett, Ralph Manheim, eds. Methuen London Ltd. 1979
[15] Lyon, p. 21
[16] H. R. Hays. "The Story of Selected Poems." Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956. John Willett, Ralph Manheim, eds. Methuen London Ltd. 1979
[17] ibid.
[18] video. 1972
[19] ibid.
[20] Bertolt Brecht. Letters. trans. Ralph Manheim. Ed. John Willett. New York: Routledge. 1990. #435. ppgs. 340-341
[21] James K. Lyon. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press. 1980.
[22] Lee Baxandall. "Brecht in America, 1935. " The Drama Review. (Fall, 1967). p. 74
[23] Letters. # 478. p. 375
[24] Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Faber
[25] ibid.
[26] Letters. #515. p.
[27] H. R. Hays. "Brecht, Anti-Individualist." Selected Poems. New York: New Directions. 1947.
[28] Bertolt Brecht. "Introduction." The Threepenny Opera. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. New York: Arcade Publishing. 1994.
[29] Die Dreigroshcenoper (Threepenny Opera). Georg Wilheim Pabst, director. Nero-film/Berlin. 1931.