Four Playwrights and a Postscript: Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet by David I. Grossvogel (review)

220 MODERN DRAMA September skinflint. He was incapable, Miss Alexander notes, of sticking to the truth when he talked about himself and his early experiences. She finds semi-Freudian reasons for his hatred of his father, but does not try to account for his failure to give his own two sons the love that he felt had been withheld from him. He hated children, to be sure; but why he hated them remains a mystery. An embittered egotist, he made his parents, his wives, and his children as unhappy as he was himself. O'Neill's vow to be true to the best that was in him merely meant that he intended to project himself and his Weltanschauung into his plays with all the artistic integrity he could muster regardless of where the box office chips might fall. This he succeeded in doing; and the more we learn about him from Miss Alexander and other recent biographers, the clearer it is that self-revelations permeate everything he wrote. His neurotic young protagonists, for example, are all essentially self-portraits (Robert Mayo, Eben Cabot, Dion Anthony, Reuben Light, Orin Mannon, John Loving, et alii). Paradoxical questions inevitably arise concerning the causal relationship between his failure as a man and his success as a dramatist: questions that are easier to ask than to answer. Unfortunately for the success of Miss Alexander's book, she brought it out only two or three months before the publication of Mr. and Mrs. Gelb's massive O'Neill, the first half of which covers the same ground that she does, but with even more ample details and a cert~n margin of stylistiC superiority. CYRUS DAY University of Delaware FOUR PLAYWRIGHTS AND A POSTSCRIPT: BRECHT, lONESCO, BECKETT, GENET, by David I. Grossvogel, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1962, 209 pp. Price $4.00. The turgid and pretentious prose of Mr. Grossvogel's new book is almost suicidal for a work which supposedly undertakes to make things clear. His diagnosis of the limitations of Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, and Genet develops into a debatable argument-that avant-garde theater necessarily disturbs the esthetic distance between spectator and stage and thereby weakens the theater experience. He is led to this conclusion by what seems to be over-simplified concepts of the spectator, of esthetic distance, and of the functions of drama. Much of the book is taken up with basic exposition of avant-garde plays which is already accessible in current scholarship. None the less Mr. Grossvogel shows his happiest talent when he is summarizing a concrete play without too much reference to formal esthetic. He manages to convey not only the literal action but the animating outlook and the poetic overtones. His explication of Beckett's plays is especially luminous. RICHARD M. EASTMAN North Central College ...