A look at: Eugene Ionesco

"A writer never has a vacation.

For a writer, life consists of

either writing

or thinking about writing."

Eugène Ionesco, born as Eugen Ionescu on 26 November 1909, changed his name after getting to France. He died on 28 March 1994, with more than 30 well-acclaimed plays and a flourishing career in criticizing the absurdities of life. He was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French after settling there, and was one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre.

Though he became a very influential playwright, he started writing poetry and criticism, publishing in several Romanian journals, for example Nu (a book criticizing many other writers), Hugoliade, or The grotesque and tragic life of Victor Hugo (a satirical biography mocking Victor Hugo's status as a great figure in French literature).

Like Samuel Beckett, Ionesco began his theatre career late; he did not write his first play, La Cantatrice chauve, until 1948 and even so, its first performance was in 1950, with the English title The Bald Soprano. At the age of 40, he decided to learn English using the Assimil method: he conscientiously copied whole sentences in order to memorize them.

With this formula, he found some astonishing truths, introduced in later lessons of the characters known as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. To her husband's astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed him that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, and that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, Ionesco thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth.

"A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.”