Books: Dirty Work & Savage Fun

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THREEPENNY NOVEL (396 pp.)—Berfolt Brechf—Grove Press ($3.75; Paperbound, $1.75).

This is a corrosively funny novel about business chicanery. Its unlikely author: a Communist with an irrepressible sense of humor. In Threepenny Novel, the late German Playwright and Novelist Bertolt Brecht takes the position that business is crime conducted in an aura of respectability. His book is somehow engaging despite this classic Marxist idea, because of its raffishly vital characters who make all the Cash McCalls in their grey flannel suits seem as sedate, proper and wooden as the paneling of their executive suites.

In the markedly different guise of The Threepenny Opera, some of the same characters have long delighted theater audiences. Both the musical play, with a brilliant score by Brecht's friend Kurt Weill, and Brecht's novel stem from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). The novel was curiously ignored by U.S. reviewers when it appeared in translation in 1938 as A Penny for the Poor, possibly because its turn-of-the-century London setting scarcely conformed to the modish social-protest patterns of the '30s. Social protest the book certainly is, but of an unsparing misanthropy that crosses all class lines. In a dimly lit nether world of total amorality, human sharks snap at and devour each other as instinctively as do their marine cousins on the ocean floor.

Shark No. 1 is Mr. MacHeath, legendary killer and gang leader, once popularly known as "The Knife." At novel's start, Mac still has his gang, though none but his intimate henchmen know it, and while he carries a swordstick cane, he is prudent enough never to use it. Mac is a progressive crook who has come to see not the error of his ways but his means: "What is a picklock compared to a debenture share? What is the burgling of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? What is the murder of a man compared to the employment of a man?"

Crocodile Tears. In his drive toward legalized larceny, Mac founds a chain of B. (for Bargain) Shops that sell cut-rate goods to the poor. To supply them, he turns his gang into a kind of quartermaster looting corps which burgles other shops by night. In plots and counterplots of Chaplinesque strategy and Napoleonic execution, Mac reduces his competitors to satraps in his own trade empire and is elected a bank director into the bargain.