Fragments of a Journal by Eugène Ionesco (review)

340 MODERN DRAMA December of a political tract. It is among the most topical of O'Casey's plays, however, and therefore merits detailed discussion in the consideration of his use of soci.aI and political material." Ergo, the play may be relatively unimportant~ but look at all that topical material waiting to become grist for the political-sociological mill. So Malone upstages O'Casey for endless pages of giddy research on the Munich Crisis, the Sudetenland, the Nazi Party and the derivation of the Gestapo, the Battle of Britain, Roosevelt's lend-lease, Dunkirk, Operation Sea Lion, the Irish ports, the attack on Catterick, Lord Haw-Haw, the A.R.P., the O_G.P.U., the Anderson shelter, the National Health Scheme-so much, and more, until the final pages of the chapter when, with little room left for the poor play, we encounter this anti-climactic sentence; "Such, then, is the historical setting of the play." By now industry has annihilated imagination, and not for the first time Malone has triumphed over O'Casey. The better part of 18 pages has been devoted to the historical setting, yet by comparison one of the most important later plays, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, is dispensed with in about three and a half summary pages. The reason for such an incredible disproportion? It should be fairly obvious by now that there simply isn't that much political and social material in Cock to be dug up and sorted and catalogued; plenty of artistic material languishing in the foreground, but not enough historical material hovering in the Irish background! A final comment on the one isolated attempt in this book to employ what might be called some of the enlightening apparatus of modern psychology. Writing about O'Casey's admiration for his mother and his working-class sympathies, Mrs. Malone is reminded of "an interesting speculation by Kenneth Tynan, writing in Time on the plays of Brecht, where he ponders the theory that men who adore their mothers lean toward the Left, whereas those who idolize their fathers lean toward the Right. Wild as this speculation seems to be, it fits in with O'Casey's admiration of his mother and his Socialist principles." Not half as wild and wooly as Mrs. Malone's gullibility in putting O'Casey into that Tynan-Time bed of pseudo-Oedipal socialism. The lamentable state of the commercial theater in the 1940's provoked Eric Bentley to make an urgent call for the Playwright as Thinker. The lamentable state of acdemic research in the 1960's compels me to make a desperate call for the Playwright as Entertainer. DAVID KRAUSE Dublin FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL, by Eugene Ionesco, trans. by Jean Stewart. Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1969. 150 pp. $1.95. In a day when training techniques are presented as performance, preliminary studies as finished works of art, it is perhaps not surprising to find published a Journal which has apparently undergone no rigorous editing by the author. But then, Ionesco told us long ago that even when he writes plays his method is to sit down and begin to write without knowing exactly what is going to happen. This is all too apparent in these random thoughts and meanderings; one must love Ionesco well indeed to get through the volume. Works of this intimate nature have two possible raisons d'etre: either the author is so profound in his insights and so broad in his grasp of things, so original in expression, that we delight in reading his ideas however disorganized or Ulldigested ; or else the author is of such interest himself as a public figure that we are eager to know him more intimately no matter how lackluster his expression 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 341 of private thoughts .may be. Ionesco's Fragments of a Journal must find their excuse, if any, in this latter. Unfortunately, there is little that is new. Most of the horrors, fears, and unhappiness described on every page have already been more than adequately documented in Ionesco's successful earlier essays and in his plays-particularly the unsuccessful later ones which on occasion turn into essays themselves. One constantly...