Arthur Adamov by John H. Reilly (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 397 ARTHUR ADAMOV, by John H. Reilly. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974. 177 pp. $7.95. Arthur Adamov brings to the English-speaking world a meticulous study of the least known member of a group of foreigners writing in French who in the 1950's produced what has come to be known as "The Theatre of the Absurd." Two of the others, Irish-born Samuel Beckett, and Roumanian-born Eugene Ionesco, have attained world-wide prominence. Arthur Adamov's work has generated few translations and little critical material. When he died in 1970, only a few students of the theatre were familiar with his work. It is time he was made better known, and John Reilly's book does so, presenting both the writer and his work clearly and fairly. As Dr. Reilly indicates, the Russian-born Adamov is "a substantial figure in the history of the French theatre" whose "work is oftentimes stunning in its honest and direct communication of the torture of living." He is interesting not only as a man who felt passionately his own alienation in the modern world, but also as a writer who sought the reasons for that alienation both within himself and within his society. And his society was the entire western world for this Russian, educated in Germany and Switzerland, who wrote and lived in France, and whom I came to know in Ithaca, New York when he was teaching at Cornell. He was a perfect spokesman for the new breed which wars, revolutions - and, let's be honest - Fulbright Scholarships have produced in the twentieth century. Arthur Adamov contains a literary analysis of all the major writings of the author, centering principally on his theatrical efforts. The book is divided into six sections: a biography, which presents the major facts of his life, especially as they pertain to his development as a writer; a selective bibliography; and a conclusion which is an evaluation of Adamov's position in French literature. The critical portion of Dr. Reilly's study is divided, as Adamov himself divided his own work, into his early efforts which dealt with his neurosis and obsessions, his middle period in which he turned to the economic, political and historic factors which he came to see as the causes of his personal anguish, and his final phase during which he merged the personal and the political. Dr. Reilly examines more than seventeen of Adamov's plays, as well as his essays, memoirs, and self-criticism. If I have any fault to find with his book, it is that he has tended to be swayed by Adamov's self-evaluation. Adamov rejected much of his early work when he began to believe that the "incurable evils" which he had thought to be inherent in the human condition, were, in fact, "curable" and the product of an iniquitous social order. Reilly, like Adamov, tends to classify such plays as L'!nvasion and La Grande et fa Petite Manoeuvre as mere experiments in theatrical technique and case studies of the author's struggles with his own neuroses. I believe these plays to be theatrically effective representations of the clash between individual needs and societal demands. As such, they mirror for the spectator his own world, in which the same clash is experienced; but as in all good theatre, the mirror image is ordered, clarified, open to interpretation. These plays are neither hermetic nor mere formal exercises, but complex, finished , coherent drama. Nor do I agree that Adamov's best work is non-theatrical, and that "the 398 BOOK REVIEWS strange oblique personality of the dramatist ... did not find its proper outlet on the stage." He often did rise above the personal to the universal in his plays, and did so in ways which enriched the theatre and its possibilities. One is, however, grateful to John Reilly for making this dramatist known to a wider public. Adamov deserves, albiet belatedly, this attention. MARGARET DIETEMANN lona College TOWARD A MODERN THEATRE: KISHIDA KUNIO, by J. Thomas Rimer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. xi & 306 pp. $14.50. Kishida Kunio was an intellectual active in the theatre world of Japan in the mid-twenties and...