Stand Still Like the Hummingbird by Henry Miller

Author:Henry Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2403-1
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1962-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

3

If the reader is not already fed up with Ionesco I should like to add a few more words on the subject, this time about The Bald Soprano, which was only cursorily touched on in my previous letters. The reason for this imposition is that a few days ago I received from one of the readers of the Herald the second number of a French revue devoted to theater arts—Spectâcles—in which the leading article is by Ionesco himself. It is entitled “The Tragedy of Language, or how a manual for learning English became my first play.”

“In 1948,” he begins, “before writing my first play, ‘The Bald Soprano,’ I had no thought of becoming a dramatic author. I had simply an ambition to learn English. Learning English does not necessarily lead to the ah of the playwright. On the contrary, it’s because I failed to learn English that I became a dramatic author.”

He goes on to explain that, in order to learn English he made use of a beginner’s French-English conversation manual which he had bought some eight or nine years before. Conscientiously he copied the phrases given into his notebook, in order to learn them by heart.

Rereading them attentively, he learned not English but the most surprising truths—for example, that there are seven days to the week, which he already knew; that the floor is below and the ceiling above, which he knew equally well, but which he had never seriously reflected upon or had forgotten, and which now suddenly appeared to him as being astonishingly and indisputably true. From universal truths he progressed, via the manual, to more specific truths, all expressed by means of dialogue. With the third lesson two personages made their appearance, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, an English couple. (Says Ionesco: “To this day I am not sure whether they were real or invented.”)

After citing a few bits of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Smith, between the Smiths and the Martins, their friends, between Mr. and Mrs. Martin, all sheer nonsense torn direct from the English-French manual, he goes on to remark about the indubitable, the perfectly axiomatic character of Mr. Smith’s affirmations.

At this point in his study of English he had an illumination. He no longer cared about perfecting his knowledge of English. No, his ambition had assumed greater proportions. It was nothing less than to communicate to his contemporaries the essential verities of which the conversational lessons had made him aware. He had come to the realization that these asinine conversations between the Smiths and the Martins belonged peculiarly to the theater, the theater being dialogue, as he says.

It was thus he began writing The Bald Soprano, a specifically “didactic” theatrical work. (He had been tempted to call the piece English without Effort or The English Hour but chose the present tide precisely because no soprano, bald or hirsute, has any part in the play. Nice reasoning, what!)

He then goes on to tell how The Bald Soprano, which began as an English exercise and a bit of plagiarism, got out of hand.

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