Light Between the Shadows: A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco

by Barbara Kraft

Today more than ever, the sentiments expressed by Ionesco in Barbara Kraft’s ‘Conversation’ with him, are as important, if not more so, than when he spoke to her many years ago. As he said to Kraft, “We know very well that Western humanism is bankrupt. We also know very well that the leaders of the Eastern countries no longer believe in Marxism. Absolute cynicism and a great biological vitality are all that remain of the East’s revolutionary faith and all that keeps its leaders in power — active in the struggle for power and world supremacy…. Life has become, then, a deadly combat without scruple, since all ideologies and moralities have vanished — a combat for the conquest of the planet and its material riches.”
For Ionesco politics lie; art, true art, cannot lie. “Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.”
Staged all over the world during the 1960s and 1970s, Ionesco’s plays were once among the most performed works in the theatrical repertoire. With his plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chair he helped inaugurate a new type of theater, which came to be known as “theater of the absurd.” Ionesco’s ‘theater,’ which included Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, was a theater that posed a problem; it was not a theater of entertainment. The problem these writers dealt with was “the existential condition of man, his despair, the tragedy of his destiny, the ridiculousness of his destiny, the absurdity of his destiny, the existence of God.”
Ionesco maintained that the king of the Theatre of the Absurd was Shakespeare citing Macbeth as its ‘pure’ definition… The world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Kraft’s conversation explores the totality of Ionesco’s vision, which informs all aspects of his theater. A cornerstone of that vision is that culture cannot be separated from politics. “The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society. But, in our time, politics have overtaken all other manifestations of the human spirit… Developing as they have by trampling on man’s other activities, they have made men mad.”
Other topics covered in this rare interview include Ionesco’s thoughts on ethics and morality, which are based in his opinion on fear rather than on religion; another topic is guilt. With his ironic wit Ionesco states that while guilt is a nasty feeling, it is also useful; without it we might just kill each other.

47 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 28, 2014

About the author

Barbara Kraft is the author of Henry Miller: The Last Days (2016 – Sky Blue Press). Her book is based on her essay “The Last Days of Henry Miller” which will be included in Literary Awakenings: Personal Essays from The Hudson Review, Syracuse University Press, Fall of 2016. Literary Awakenings is an anthology of essays from the past thirty years of “the best literary essayists and reviewers to couch their criticism in a highly personal manner as opposed to the theoretical work being produced in many literary and academic venues.”

Other books include Anais Nin: The Last Days (Pegasus Books, 2013), Light Between the Shadows: A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco (Kindle) 2014, The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini (1976), with a preface by Nin and laudatory comment by the late Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker. Her work has also appeared in the Michigan Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, Columbia Magazine, et al.

Kraft has written opera libretti and several radio plays; her play on Maud Gonne, the muse of William Butler Yeats, won an Ohio State Award as an "Outstanding example of original radio drama." She is currently working on a stage play The Politics of Abortion: An American Entertainment.

Kraft is a Registered Reader at the Huntington Library in San Marino and lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.

Henry Miller: The Last Days is is available from Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, et al.

PUBLISHED WORKS:
When Kraft published The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini, recounting her struggles to achieve individual freedom "as an artist who is a woman in a wealthy, sophisticated society," Carlos Baker, definitive biographer of Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story), wrote, "In the annals of confessional literature, Barbara Kraft's book stands out strongly because of her intelligence, her sharp perceptiveness, the power of her prose and the enthralling personal story she has to tell."

A review in the LA Times said, "There can be no question that this extraordinary journal is a work of excellence. Its poetic merit alone places it beyond the routine categories of thought and art...The Restless Spirit will undoubtedly be "a valuable document in the history of woman's evolution." So Anaïs Nin, the ultimate woman diarist and the author's own mentor and teacher predicts."

SELECTED PUBLISHED ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS:

“The Last Days of Henry Miller,” Literary Awakenings: Personal Essays from The Hudson Review, Syracuse University Press, 2016.
“Great Russian Women Poets of the 20th Century,” Cultural Weekly, 2016
“Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy: An Unlikely Friendship?” Cultural Weekly, 2015
“The Politics of Abortion.” Cultural Weekly 2015
“Henry Miller: The Last Days.” Huffington Post, 2013
“A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco.”, Huffington Post, 2013
“The Politics of Abortion” Huffington Post, 2012
“Anais Nin: The Last Days.” Huffington Post, 2012
"Recollections of Anais Nin by her Contemporaries," Ohio University Press, 1996
"Anais Nin A Biography" by Deidre Bair reviewed for Los Angeles Times Book Review, 1995
"An Edited Life: The Death of Anais Nin (an exerpt) Anais Nin: A Book of Mirrors, Sky Blue Press, Michigan, 1996
"The Last Days of Henry Miller," Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, Standish Books, 1994
"The Last Days of Henry Miller," The Hudson Review, New York, Fall 1993
"Historic Houses: Anais Nin's House of Light - The Diary comes to Fruition in Los Angeles," Architectural Digest, January 1984
"Art is What Artists Do," on John Baldessari, for Articles, a Publication of Cal Arts, 1984-85 issue
"The Universe of Sidney Sheinberg," Columbia, the Magazine of Columbia University, 1984
"A Conversation with Henry Miller," Michigan Quarterly Review, The University of Michigan, 1981
"Interview: Eugene Ionesco," Canadian Theatre Review, York University, Downsview, Ontario, 1