Eugene Ionesco

BY CURTIS CATE

THERE are many stories about the strange kinship between the haphazard logic of Eugene Ionesco’s life and the studied illogic of his art, but the one I like best is told by the French writer Rene de Obaldia. Ionesco had been invited to the Château de Ccrisy, in Normandy, to take part in one of those pastoral reunions of intellectuals of which the French are so fond. Seven days had already been consumed in feverish arguments, dissertations, and hairsplitting dialectics when, at the last moment, Ionesco turned up, with the furtive look of a wayward tramp, trailing behind him, as his sole piece of luggage, an implausible Tyrolean rucksack. The hostess did her best to make the late arrival feel at home, but at dinner that evening he refused to touch a morsel and sat in mournful silence, his Grock-like face visibly harrowed by the prospect of the communication he was expected to deliver the following day to the assembled company of writers and critics. The next morning he failed to appear at breakfast, and Obaldia, when he went upstairs to see what was amiss, found him sprawled out on his bed, fully clothed, amid a welter of papers which he had spent the whole night scribbling on. By lunchtime his sleepless pallor had taken on a faintly greenish hue, and he remained as uncommunicative as ever, though he finally felt forced, out of sheer civility, to ask the lady seated next to him what was the fish which had been placed before them.

“C’est du hâ,” she answered dryly.

“Ah, du ha,” echoed Ionesco, the fatuous phrase sticking in his throat like a fishbone, as though he were choking on one of those excruciating wordplays with which he has mined his plays.

By the time his speech was due Ionesco was in a state of near-panic. He could not find his text. He felt in his pockets, turned them inside out, extracted a wallet, a handkerchief, a necktie; he got up, examined the crevices of his armchair, rolled up his trouser legs, all to no avail. Someone was sent upstairs to his bedroom, the night table drawer was searched, the wardrobe ransacked. No sign of any papers. And then suddenly, like a hidden spring, the papers gushed forth from an overlooked inner pocket in such profusion that, escaping from Ionesco’s hands, they flew all over the room, even fluttering under the chairs and the piano, where the playwright Arthur Adamov got down on his knees to retrieve them.

With the papers collected and sorted out, Ionesco could at last begin. He braced himself and began in a strangled voice:

“What I have to say is that I have absolutely nothing to say.”

He never got beyond this sentence, like the hero of his own play, Amédée, who, when the curtain rises, has spent fifteen years writing the same play at the rate of one line a year. The hostess was so taken aback that she interrupted her knitting and had Ionesco repeat this solemn enunciation several times. How curious, she exploded, how original to meet someone who had nothing at all to say ! A critic rushed to the tongue-tied playwright’s rescue with a brilliant improvisation on the nature of silence; some silences being sacred, others profane, Mallarmé’s silences differing from Claudel’s, and so on. This led to a lively free-forall, which reached a crescendo when Adarnov remarked to a German lady present: ”Ja, es ist ganz seltsam!” (“Yes, it is very strange!”) Only a little later was it noticed that the speaker was oddly silent. He had fallen asleep in his armchair, his lids seraphically closed and his pudgy little fingers still clutching the papers on his lap.

HUMOR, like poetry, springs from the unexpected and, more specifically, the incongruous juxtaposition of ideas. The incongruous, however, is not the same as the capricious, and if we look carefully at Ionesco’s plays, it becomes apparent that the seeming madness of his world obeys an inner logic of its own, a logic as precise as that governing Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world or the pictorial metaphors of the cartoonist Saul Steinberg.

“The fabulous,” Pasternak declared in Doctor Zhivago, “is never anything but the commonplace touched by the hand of genius.” So close to the commonplace has Ionesco always stuck that there is not one of his plays which is not set in the immediate here and now. Whereas Montherlant has gone back to the Spanish Siglo de Oro, Sartre to the Thirty Years’ War, Camus to Caligula, and jean Anouilh to the twelfth-century Thomas à Becket, Ionesco alone has kept unswervingly to the modest rut of present-day bourgeois life.

Yet. within these confines, he has fashioned something uniquely rich and strange. From the gray silt bed of the commonplace he has dredged up a thousand new pearls. Here, as in the fairytale zoo of Marc Chagall or the luminous aquarium of Joan Miro, material objects are wondrouslv unchained from the leaden gravity of everyday realism. The grandfather clock strikes not twelve but twenty-nine times; the telephone rings, and the architect pulls the receiver out of his coal pocket; the bride, when unveiled, reveals two noses, only to be rejected by the hard-to-please bridegroom because she doesn’t have three; a fifteen-year-old corpse grows by frightening jerks right across the living room stage; and a recalcitrant son lays eggs at his parents’ behest.

Fifteen years ago, when Ionesco’s first play, La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano), was put on at the Left Bank theater of Les Noctambules, few in the audience were aware that they were witnessing a radically new kind of theater. There were catcalls and boos. What did the author mean by writing a play in which no bald-headed singer appears, into which a fireman strays when there isn’t the whiff of a fire, and in which the dialogue, from the first line to the last, seems bent on defying every canon of rational speech? The reception was so hostile that Ionesco had to be restrained by his friends from climbing onto the stage to defend his pilloried work.

What a change! When Jean-Louis Barrault unveiled Le Rhinocéros at the Theatre de France in 1961, there were no tumultuous catcalls, but the applause was polite rather than sincere. The almost universal criticism was that this time the author had betrayed himself, had gone conservative. “Instead of achieving that ‘Ionesco to the power of two’ which we were dreaming of,” Le Monde’s theater critic wrote, “he has copied himself and even yielded to a kind of apologia, like Chaplin disfiguring his once brilliant pantomime with speeches.” Ionesco was tried and found guilty of not being lonescoan enough.

There is an odd irony in this, just as there is in the fact that it was precisely this play, assuredly far from his best, which established his popularity in England and the United States. Joseph Anthony could be forgiven for wanting to introduce a play to Broadway which Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles had already successfully offered to the theatergoers of Drury Lane. What was less pardonable was the transformation of a play which, at the most sanguine interpretation, is a tragicomedy into what one New York reviewer could describe as a “cleverly crazy” farce. The misunderstanding, which Ionesco himself terms a “catastrophe,” stemmed, I suspect, from roughly the same causes which prompted the producers to jazz up Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a few years ago to make it pleasing to the Manhattan public. The nightmarish universe of Kafka, the tortured world of Sartre, the listless limbo of Beckett may be palatable fare for campus intellectuals or off-Broadway aesthetes, but for the Broadway public the pill must be sugar-coated.

There is no denying that the deliberate illogicality of Ionesco’s plays is typical of the revolt against form and symmetry which is characteristic of so much contemporary art, but it is a good deal more; for his quarrel from the beginning was not just with that deceptively logical Cartesian brand of thought which nostalgic Frenchmen still like to claim as a kind of national monopoly; it was, more specifically, a quarrel with the tendentious and ideologically oriented literature which enjoyed such a vogue in the early post-war years.

In 1950, when La Cantatrice Chauve was first put on in Paris, the post-war existentialist tide was at lull Hood and the French literary marketplace was waist-deep in a porridge of ideological dialectics and metaphysical jargon. Jean-Paul Sartre, its high priest, had been riding the crest of the wave with La Pa tain Respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) and Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands — inanely translated into English as Red Gloves), two mili(antly didactic, antibourgeois plays.

It was at this point that Ionesco launched his Raid Soprano. A less socially committed play could hardly be imagined. It contained no political message, nor even the semblance of a plot. The hero and heroine, if such they can be called, are two staid citizens called Mr. and Mrs. Smith, whose middle-class respectability is emphasized by their nationality — the English being the most stolidly “uncommitted” people in Europe — and by their residing in a London suburb. Their preoccupations, far from being existentially anguished, could not be more banal: Mrs. Smith, when the curtain rises, is knitting socks, and Mr. Smith has his nose buried in the evening paper.

Nothing could be more tranquil, more serene, more commonplace; yet before the next half hour is over, the rational universe has been stood on its head. The clock starts the confusion by striking seventeen strokes, whereupon Mrs. Smith remarks brightly: “Hah, it’s nine o’clock.” She follows this up with a stirring monologue on the corner grocer’s salad oil, which is better than that of the grocer just opposite, and a good deal better than that of the grocer down at the bottom of the hill. The conversation is full of exchanges like this:

MRS. SMITH. Yoghurt is excellent for the stomach, the kidneys, appendicitis, and apotheosis. So I’ve been told by Dr. Mackenzie-King, who takes care of our neighbors’, the Joneses’, children. He’s a good, trustworthy doctor. He never recommends medicines he hasn’t tried out himself. Before operating on Parker, he had his own liver operated on, though he wasn’t ill in the least.

MR. SMITH. Then how is it that the doctor pulled through, whereas Parker died?

MRS. SMITH. Because the operation was a success with the doctor, but a failure with Parker. MR. SMITH. Then Mackenzie’s not a good doctor. The operation should have worked for both of them or both should have succumbed.

MRS. SMITH. Why?

MR. SMITH. A conscientious doctor should die with his patient if both can’t recover. The captain of a ship goes down with the ship. He doesn’t survive. MRS. SMITH. You can’t compare a patient to a ship. MR. SMITH. Why not? A ship has its breakdowns too: besides, your doctor is as sound as a tub, and that’s another reason why he should have perished with his patient like the captain and his ship. MRS. SMITH. Ah! I hadn’t thought of it. . . . You may be right.

The conversation gets progressively zanier. A couple called the Martins turn up for a dinner which is never served, an intruding fireman is suddenly embraced by the maid, who recites an incendiary poem in his honor, and the play ends with the dialogue growing steadily more meaningless and monosyllabic, with the sentences, as though disintegrated by a kind of linguistic atom smasher, dissolving into senseless streams of words like “Bazar, Balzac, Bazaine . . . bizarre, BeauxArts, baisers,” in a crazy sequence echoing the “hie. haec, hoc” recitation of a Latin class.

LA CANTATRICE CHAUVE may one day be regarded as an event as revolutionary for the postwar French stage as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was for painting in the early years of this century. If anything, it was more revolutionary, for this “anti-play,” as Ionesco dubbed it, set out to disarticulate all rational discourse into a senseless game of conversational scrabble. It was the first and last of a genre which was too self-defeating, too suicidal to be capable of reproduction.

It was with Les Chaises (The Chairs), written in 1951 and first staged the following year, that Ionesco really came into his own. Jean Anouilh did not hesitate to praise it as “better than Strindberg” and to place it alongside Marcel Ayme’s Clerambard and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as one of the most interesting plays to have appeared since Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. In Les Chaises, Ionesco transplanted his experimentation with contradictions, hitherto limited to the domain of language, to the realm of action. The main protagonists here, as in most Ionesco plays, are a married couple, in this case an elderly husband and wife, aged 95 and 94, who have been married for 75 years. The husband is a frustrated ex-cavalry corporal who has been reduced to the status of concierge in a house which, like some Maeterlinck castle, is surrounded by water. The Old Man and Old Woman (who are never named) are expecting some guests who have been invited to a lecture, at which the Old Man’s long-delayed “message” will finally be communicated to the world. The guests begin to turn up, announced by the offstage splashing of oars, but, strangely enough, they are both invisible and mute. Only the chairs they are to sit on are real, and only the remarks made by the Old Man and Old Woman are actually heard.

The invisible guests keep arriving, and to seat them the harassed Old Man and Old Woman have to drag in more and more chairs, the stage growing so cluttered that they are finally reduced to creeping along the sides of the room, like ushers moving up crowded aisles, and to shouting at each other above the unheard tumult of an unseen audience. The grotesque impression is heightened by the unexpected arrival of the Emperor — obviously a belated wish fulfillment of the ex-corporal’s adolescent dreams — whose solemn but invisible entrance is indicated by a sharp intensification ol the klieg lights. The climax is reached when the longawaited Speaker makes a real flesh-and-blood appearance. but he turns out to be a deaf-mute who vainly tries to communicate the Old Man’s message through incomprehensible grunts.

Les Chaises marks one of the peaks ol Ionesco s dramatic art. Just as Henry Moore in his sculpture has given the void plastic meaning and expression, so here Ionesco has used the invisible to suggest the gulf of human incommunicability, the dreamlike unreality of stilled aspirations, the vanity of pompous rhetoric.

LES CHAISES, and the plays which immediately follow it, betray a systematic effort to depict the frustrations and anguish of much of modern life. In Victimes du Devoir (Victims of Duty), the play in which Kafka’s influence is most evident, the iron heartlessness of the modern bureaucratic police state is plastically symbolized by the loaf of bread which the police inspector draws trom his briefcase and has the hero, Choubert, eat “to stop up the holes of the memory.” Momentarily rescued by a friend called Nicholas d’Eu, who drops in and kills the inspector in a fit of rage, Choubert promptly succumbs to the new tyranny of his savior, who, seizing the loaf of bread, thrusts it back into the hapless Choubcrt’s mouth. “We are all victims ol duty,”wails the wife, as the three begin intoning a frenzied, mind-numbing chant: “Swallow, chew! Swallow, chew! Swallow, chew!” which continues as the curtain falls.

Victimes du Devon offers a new treatment of a classic theme. At the start of his inquisition, for example, the inspector has Choubert remove his belt, tie, and shoelaces, as though he were a jailbird, and Choubert, feeling immediate relief, thanks his “jailer” — in a conscious echo of Dostoevsky’s thesis, as expounded in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, that the one thing men cannot endure is freedom. The play is in fact a restatement of one of the major themes in Pasternak’s Zhivago. Here the karma-like cycle or implacable repetitiveness of events is symbolized by the perennial return of tyranny in human affairs. The revolutionary of one moment — whom Ionesco has paradoxically named Nicolas d Eu (Nicolas II, as it is pronounced in French) — becomes the tyrant, the czar of the next.

In Amédée, on Comment s’en Débarrasser (Amédée, or How To Get Rid of It) an anguishing predicament is again given plastic symbolization — this time by a corpse with which Amédée Buccinioni and his wife, Madeleine, have been condemned to live for the past fifteen years. The corpse is that of a man whom Amedee one day killed in a fit of jealousy; but the procrastinating husband has cringed from avowing the crime, which, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, has now visibly begun to fester. When the curtain rises, tiny mushrooms have sprung up in one corner of the living room, while the corpse has started a mysterious and disconcerting growth. By the beginning of the second act, the mushrooms have grown into giants and hideously multiplied, while the corpse’s legs have started expanding at a furious pace, marked by visible and audible jerks, each sounding like the trump of doom. Soon the legs, pushing in from the neighboring room, stretch right across the living room floor. Driven to action out of sheer despair, the husband finally opens the window and drags out the corpse with the intention of dumping it into the Seine, whereupon the body miraculously loses substance and the trouser legs turn into an immensely long shroud. The husband’s psychic liberation is consummated in a delightful piece of third-act vaudeville which takes place in a little square outside a cafe-brothel frequented by American GI’s, and it ends with Amédée sailing up and away into the fire worksspangled night on his kitelike shroud above the vain whistle-blowing and truncheon-waving of two irate gendarmes.

In Amédée, Ionesco successfully reversed the technique employed in Les Chaises: and whereas in the earlier play the intervening void was used to convey a feeling of incommunicability and Irustration. here an ever more encumbering mass graphically symbolizes the stifling omnipresence of a love which has died.

Ionesco’s is a symbolic universe in which the symbols are used to express the tragicomic nature of the human condition. His plays are allegories, and both the miniature dimensions of most of them and the stylized mode of speech which he has perfected for them place them closer to the conventions of the puppet stage than to the canons of contemporary dramatic realism.

Ionesco, indeed, has a right to be regarded as the existentialist playwright of our times, tor his vision of the theater as a vehicle for expressing the sadness inherent in the human condition adheres more closely to the older and more authentic lineage of Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life than do the Marx-distorted works of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, though ideologically a revolutionary, has always been a conservative in questions of form, and his plays have never got beyond the staid canons of bourgeois realism; it is Ionesco, ideologically a conservative, who has been the real revolutionary of ihe contemporary stage. His contempt for Sartre, who is his particular bête noire, is so withering, indeed, that one day in Rio de Janeiro he dumbfounded the Brazilian journalists who pestered him with the inevitable question, “What do you think of Jean-Paul Sartre?” by answering with a perfectly straight face, “Who? Jean-Paul Sartre? Jean-Paul Sartre? Never heard of him.”

“No society has been able to abolish human sorrow, no political system can free us from the sadness of living, or the fear of death, or our thirst for the absolute,” Ionesco wrote some years ago. “It is the human condition which governs the social, not the other way around.” Ionesco’s antididacticism, as opposed to Sartre’s didacticism, is thus impregnated with a humanistic message of its own, and in this scheme of things it is Society, with a capital s, the ever more invasive leviathan of modern collective life, which is the villain, and the individual, with a small i, who is the victim.

The two plays in which this message is most clearly conveyed arc Tueur sans gages (The Killer) and Rhinoceros. Both share the same hero, Bcrenger, the prototype of the twentieth century’s “little man,” and the same theme, contemporary man’s pathetic submission to the seemingly irresistible weight of collective tyranny and dread.

Of the two the first, though it has failed to acquire the immense international fame of the second, is doubtless the greater play. It is Ionesco’s most ambitious, and some (including the author) would be willing to say his finest, effort. Kenneth Tynan, who is not particularly sympathetic to Ionesco’s ideas, ranks the central part of The Killer alongside Aristophanes and Molière as a masterpiece of tragicomedy.

I t can be argued that here, as in others of his plays, Ionesco succeeded only too well, the sheer exuberance of his comic invention serving to mask the grimness of the predicament he was seeking to portray. Tueur à gages in French means a hired or paid assassin, but the “Tueur sans gages” of Ionesco is an unpaid assassin, a seemingly motiveless murderer, endlessly repeating what André Gide liked to call the gratuitous crime. His anonymity is at the root of the terror he inspires, a terror so great that it has emptied the Cité Radieuse, which, as the curtain rises, an architect is proudly showing off to Berenger.

This Radiant City — which the audience never sees except in its imagination, in keeping with Keats’s conviction that “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” — is conjured up before Bérenger’s marveling eyes in all its magic carpet splendor: neat, clean streets lined with flowers which, though it never rains, are always miraculously in bloom; radiant houses beneath a sun which is never obscured by a cloud.

The title bequeathed on this paradisiacal housing development — Cité Radieuse — is an ironical reference to the concrete behemoth of an apartment building which Le Corbusier built after the war in Marseilles; but the irony, as so often with Ionesco, is only a mask for the deeper truth he is suggesting. For if the Radiant City seems so lifeless, it is because it is too perfect, too minutely and comprehensively planned. The gleaming hull is there, but it is empty: the life within has fled.

When The Killer was first put on in 1959 at the Seven Arts Theater in New York, this deeper meaning escaped the reviewers, who do not seem to have realized that the Radiant City symbolizes the futuristic utopianism of this century’s ideologies, like Hitler’s Neue Ordnung or the “Workers’ Paradise” of the Marxists. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times dismissed the play as a mere “satire on the impotence of a technological civilization,” and Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune announced in a weary voice that he was tired of Ionesco’s “schoolboy outrages that have brought him, willy-nilly, to attention.”

In The Rhinoceros the tyrannical spread of a totalitarian cast of mind is symbolized by the gradual metamorphosis of the inhabitants of a peaceful provincial community into stampeding rhinoceroses. Ionesco first toyed with the idea of using sheep as the symbol of this transformation, but they struck him as too mild for the kind of terrifying quadruped he had in mind; for this play symbolically re-enacts the appalling transmutations he himself witnessed in Rumania from 1934 to 1938, when acquaintances who only yesterday had seemed the sanest of men were converted, through the black magic of a fanatical ideology, into monsters with one-track minds.

WHILE Rhinoceros is the only one ol Ionesco’s plays which owes an obvious debt to the land of his fathers, all his plays betray a perhaps not altogether conscious atavism in at least one respect — their obsession with the theme of tyranny. Rumania is a land which has seldom known any other kind of rule, from the tyranny of the Turks in the past to the tyranny of the Red Army and its lingering commissars today. The Rumanian’s reaction to this perennial situation has been the traditional response of softer, weaker, and more civilized peoples the world over, an attitude of helpless submission. This is precisely the response offered by Ionesco’s victimized protagonist in virtually every one of his plays. For the browbeaten student in The Lesson there is no escape from the tyranny of facts and figures, just as in The Bald Soprano and The Chairs there is no escaping the tyranny of domestic tedium; no escaping the tyranny of family pressure in Jack, or The Submission, nor the tyranny of collective conformity in The Killer and Rhinoceros; no way out of the furniture-clogged trap woven around the hero of The New Tenant, a brilliant one-act allegory on the tyranny of contemporary spacelessness.

The pattern could easily be extended to include Ionesco’s three most recent plays. In Le Piéton de l’Air (The Airborne Pedestrian), which dates from 1962, the Daedalus-like attempt to soar up and away from the leaden gravitation of our humdrum life ends in catastrophe when the air-glimpsed Elysium of Bérenger’s dreams turns out to his horror and dismay to be no more than a hideous replica of the sad life of our planet. No more successful is King Berenger I in Le Roi se Meurt rather inelegantly translated as Exit the King. This is Ionesco’s Apology, his own poetic hand-to-hand with the looming specter of Death, but one which is mercilessly bereft of those accents of Stoic fortitude which ring through Plato’s great dialogue. Bérenger’s kingdom, when the curtain rises, has shrunk to the dimensions of a few pockmarked acres and a palace which, though it boasts a throne, is more like a peasant’s hut; his once proud retinue is now reduced to one guard, a Royal Doctor who is also surgeon, bacteriologist, astrologist, and executioner, and a charwomannurse who has to run out and milk the cow. To such in their final hours are both the great and the humble of this world reduced!

The longish extracts from Ionesco’s journal which were published last autumn in the French review Preuves reveal a man haunted by the fear of death and the meaninglessness of life —a testament, if such it can be called, almost as harrowing as anything one can find in Kierkegaard or Unamuno, both of whom were in their own ways believers, which Ionesco is not. But the actual origin of Exit the King is probably also to be found in a short story called “La Vase” (“The Slime”), which Ionesco wrote at a time when his liver began to give him trouble. Here the author, wracked by a feeling of corporal malaise, rises from his bed, leaves his room, and walking out over a long country road, ends up subsiding into a muddy ditch, where he watches his liver swell to a monstrous size while first one and then the other of his arms detach themselves from his bloated trunk and sink into the mire.

I happened to call on Ionesco one day when he was writing this story, and a friend of his who was present could not conceal her surprise at the extraordinary coincidence involved; the day before, she had read an announcement about a forthcoming work by Beckett which likewise portrayed the last hours of a half-buried individual. The work announced (of which Ionesco knew nothing) was O Happy Days!, in which the chief protagonist, a woman, appears in the first act waist-deep in sand, and in the second act buried up to her neck.

The coincidence was only that. For though the names of Ionesco and Beckett have often been linked as high priests of the theater of the absurd, the association is deceptive. If Beckett can be called the Braque of contemporary drama, then Ionesco has been its Picasso. Beckett’s field of vision, steadily narrowing to an obsession, has concentrated more and more on the “still life,” life reduced to immobility, to a paralysis which would be total if men were born without tongues. O Happy Days! may be the penultimate slop on a road leading to the inevitable terminus, the total disappearance of the actor’s body. He has written a television play in which all one sees is the actor’s head; the lips do not move, and the voice comes from offstage. It remains only to remove the head, and the terminus will be reached. In the end, as in the beginning, was the Word.

Ionesco, when asked what he thinks of Beckett, is wont to say that he considers him a great writer but not a great dramatist. Why? Here Ionesco grows embarrassed, a childishly helpless grin puckering his pudgy cheeks. He takes refuge behind a screen of fluttering gestures: “Well — how shall I say — ? What shall I say? What should I say?” Pause. “There are certain principles in the theater which — which cannot be transgressed —But please, don’t ask me to define them . . .”

Ionesco doesn’t have to, for his plays all beatwitness in the same sense. What distinguishes them from Beckett’s is the kernel of action, often rising to a feverish paroxysm, around which each of them is built. The world he portrays is often hellish, but it is never a limbo. Things happen, people change, sometimes startlingly. I ime, the slow passage of mortal time, is condensed and accelerated. And as in the world of Picasso, familiar forms undergo weird metamorphoses.

Phis may be one explanation for the frustration one senses in Ionesco’s Journal; for none knows better the crippling limitations of the stage. He might have fared better in the world of the film, subjecting characters and scenery to the magic transmutations of a restless fancy: the bureaucrat taking wing and turning into a butterfly (one of his characters, named Papillon, actually turns into a rhinoceros), the pig-tailed girl getting down on all fours and hopping away like a frog, the logician disappearing into a clump of thistles — which can only happen in the world of Hans Christian Andersen or Max Ernst.

Beyond death, at any rate for believers, lies the realm of purgatory. This may offer the key to the latest, and in many ways the most enigmatic, of all Ionesco’s plays, La Soif et la Faim (Hunger and Thirst). After seeing its Düsseldorf premiere, the German critic Joachim Kaiser remarked in Der Manat that so far as he could judge, “the only thing Ionesco hates more than death is Bertolt Brecht.” Here the Promised Land —O shades of Karl Marx! — turns out to be a trap in which the prisoners, Tripp and Brechtoll, are brainwashed into swearing the opposite of what they believe. Ionesco, here, has gone Beckett one better. In the end, as in the beginning, was not the Word, but the Illusion.

In this play the laughter is macabre. It is as though Ionesco had suddenly been seized by a kind of twilight remorse at his past outbursts of levity and now wished to atone for these backslidings by tearing off his harlequin’s mask and offering himself to his audience as the unrouged, unpainted tragedian which all along he was. “We are laughable creatures,” he sighs in his Journal. “We are comic. It is in this guise that we should see ourselves. Nothing but humor, rosy or black or cruel, but only humor can give us back our serenity.”

WE ARE far removed here from purely national influences, which Ionesco is the first to belittle. Though his wife is Rumanian, and though he himself taught literature in Bucharest between the two wars, he owes more to the land of his mother, who was French, than to that of his Rumanian father. He was a year and a half old when he first came to France, and it is there that he has spent all but thirteen of his fifty-three years.

Last November the tiny Left Bank theater of La Huchette (which has just eighty-six seats) celebrated the three thousandth performance of La Cantatrice Chauve, which is now well into its tenth year. This, as much as the formal consecration of the Comedie Franchise, is the measure of the extraordinary success Ionesco has achieved. An older generation of Frenchmen may remain faithful to the frivolous traditions of the théâtre de boulevard, but the young who flock to see The Lesson or The Bald Soprano understand instinctively that here is someone who is trying to do for the stage what Kafka did for the novel, the difference separating them being roughly equal to the distance between Gallic esprit and Teutonic Weltschmerz. The anxiety and perplexity his plays express are profoundly European, and they help explain the phenomenal success he has long enjoyed in Germany and is beginning to enjoy, despite the censors’ frowns, behind the Iron Curtain.

“For me, the antitheater,” he has said, “is the theater of ideological demonstration or of elementary photographic realism.” Against this realism, in all its forms, he has launched a crusade, bent on doing for the stage what abstract painters, sculptors, and composers have done in the plastic arts and music. Just what this makes Ionesco, no one seems quite sure. He is neither a symbolist nor an expressionist nor a surrealist, though there are traces of all three in his work.

In New York, which he visited for the opening of Rhinoceros in December, 1960, lie was told that he was an anticonformist, and the thought of il is still disturbing to him. “In the United States an anticonformist is a Communist, and I’m an antitotalitarian,” he protests. “In New York they couldn’t understand it. I was taken one night to an off-Broadway theater. They were all wearing open shirts, beards, and sandals. I was the only man in the theater, with the exception of Taubman [the New York Times drama critic], who was wearing a tie, and it wasn’t even red. How can I be an anticonformist?”

He smiles, with that disarming childlike innocence which shines through in certain of his characters, and gently shakes his balding head, which, with a dark tuft of hair above each ear, gives him a faintly Japanese, Kabuki-dancer look. “Well, if you wish,” he adds, wagging a roguish finger, “you can call me an anti-nonconformist or, let’s say, a non-anticonformist.”

A non-anticonformist he remains, resignedly accepting to be washed on the tide of success out of the humble flat he used to inhabit in the populous Marais to a posher apartment on the more conventional Boulevard Montparnasse. But even here Reality, refusing to be upstaged by Art, dogs him as remorselessly as ever. A few months ago, after dining in a Rumanian restaurant, we took the elevator to the fifth floor and were confronted by an unmistakably Ionescoan dilemma. The double doors had no less than four different locks, and Ionesco’s key would open none of them. During the next anguished hour Ionesco climbed the back staircase at least three times to see if he could break into his own kitchen. There was even talk of summoning the pompiers and hoisting a fireman’s ladder. We were finally bailed out by a determined-looking rescuer lugging a formidable chest of safecracking tools who turned up simultaneously with Ionesco’s nineteen-year-old daughter. She gave her father a cross look, as much as to say: “This would happen to you!”