Michel de Ghelderode can be compared to those novelists who have concentrated on the creation of a fictional world of their own. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Charles Dickens with his nineteenth century London, or James Joyce with his Dublin, Ghelderode has created a microcosm which reflects and comments upon our larger world. Ghelderode's medieval Flanders is savagely grotesque. His sadistic caricatures are shot through with a ribald scatological humor which reminds one of the pictures of his countrymen, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel. So close is this relationship, indeed, that Ghelderode has specifically set some of his plays in a fictitious “Breughellande” where the painter's creations come to life. In all of his plays, with the exception of those written on specifically Biblical themes and set in the Holy Land, there is this quality of the frozen grimace on the canvas suddenly animated.

Although the idea of publishing the letters Michel de Ghelderode wrote to me during a correspondence lasting some years is very attractive, it is an idea I strongly resist. The time I would need to translate and annotate the letters could be made available, but the pressing claims of tact and modesty would still prevail. Publication must wait until the years have afforded a perspective that no amount of present-day explanation can provide. Nevertheless, it seems to me that some of Ghelderode's comments in these letters would be of interest to those who are aware of his plays and stories, and I have assembled a small selection of such statements which I feel are not liable to misinterpretation when removed from their contexts.

The masks Ghelderode wore for the world were in many ways unfortunate because they alienated him from his contemporaries. His weird poses frightened many admirers away, denying them the happiness of knowing Ghelderode personally. That Ghelderode's art has a secure place in modern dramatic literature is almost universally agreed. That he was an affectionate, exemplary friend, a lovable man, that he possessed a droll sense of humor, incarnated hard work and literary discipline à la Voltaire and Balzac without being spoiled by worldly success, and that he was a pauper most of his life—all this is known only to a small group of friends. They include several Belgians, a few Frenchmen, one or two Englishmen, and a couple of Americans. I, one of the Americans, had the privilege of knowing Ghelderode during 1959 and 1960 when I spent a year in Brussels expressly to study his life and drama.

The recent death of Ghelderode has awakened renewed interest in his drama. One of the most astounding figures in the contemporary theatre (a theatre full of astounding figures), his work is characterized by such bizarre aspects as fetishism, living dead men, leaps through time, devils, sorcerers, ghosts, grinning buffoons, legendary heroes stubbornly destroying their legend, historical characters denying the facts of their history, philosophical drunkards, and death as a character in farce.

Obsessed by a universe of dark forces in endless ferment, he saw evil and damnation everywhere. Plagued by them, it did not occur to him to attack them with righteous wrath, as did Calderón and Tirso de Molina, the priest-playwrights of the Golden Age of Spanish drama. In Ghelderode's works the devil is alive and active. Moreover, if one probes beneath his anxiety, one finds a certain satisfaction, a feeling of tenderness and amusement.

I am of the opinion that exaggerated estimates of an author often work against a continuing interest in him; thus I cannot but be sympathetic to certain of the criticisms M. Auréliu Weiss has made of Michel de Ghelderode. I want people to be interested in Ghelderode and in his plays; and I should like their interest to be lasting. So I shall not dispute M. Weiss's pejorative judgments of some of the dramatist's lesser works: Le Soleil Se Couche, La Mori du Docteur Faust, Don Juan, Sortie de L'Acteur, and Pantagleize, all of which have been overrated by Ghelderode's admirers. It is true to say, as M. Weiss does, that in these plays, as in others by the Belgian playwright, there are precious bits along with “capricious inventions, exaggerations, absurdities … platitudinous meditations, extravagances, esoteric obscurities.”

Today every actor understands what is meant by “subtext.” But it is a new word. It is not listed in The New English Dictionary or its Supplement of 1939. It comes from the Moscow Art Theatre and is associated with the “Method.” When we use the word, we are usually talking about twentieth century acting, an art distinguished by its conscious attempt to portray the subconscious nature of man, its “psychological” truth. For Stanislavsky, “subtext” was:

He used the word as a means of talking about the “inner truth” of a play, its “inner action,” “inner images,” “inner motives,” “inner line,” “inner tempo.” And all these concepts were particularly applicable to the revolutionary plays of Chekhov.

Beneath a hot roof, on an oppressive summer's day, in a roasting room, Brick and Margaret Pollitt face each other. Brick, heated and hardening in this oven-like bedroom, turns his thoughts toward the liquor cabinet. Margaret, wanting a child by her husband (“in the oven,” as father-in-law Big Daddy would say), and tense (as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof) because of enforced continence, turns her thoughts toward the bed.

Indeed, the two most prominent scenic elements of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—elements which fulfill the needs both of the world on stage and the box office in the lobby—are a liquor cabinet and a bed. The former is a “monument,” and the latter is “slightly raked to make figures on it seen more easily….”

When Betti's Time of Vengeance was given its off-Broadway production, Harold Clurman wrote (The Nation, Jan. 2, 1960) that the central theme of the play is “evil as a means to satisfy a need for good of which the besmirched mortal does not seem capable.” This is true not only of this particular play but of all the “serious” plays Betti wrote. There is still, however, the task of clarifying the paradox contained in such a statement—a task which until now has been shirked by Betti's critics both in his native Italy and abroad.

The paradox is a faithful reflection of Betti's notion of life's absurdity, or “incongruity.“ In fact, he revealed his own awareness of this paradox and suggested that it stands at the core of his drama:

In the autumn of 1958, Lee Strasberg told the members of The Actors’ Studio that he was feeling worried and belligerent about the emphasis on individual excellence that seemed to have become the entire raison d'etre of the Studio, an emphasis which he considered to be taken at the expense of the concept of the ensemble. “We lose the sense,” he said, “of serving the theatre.” His worry, seen then or now, could be easily understood by the most casual observer of the American theatrical scene. His belligerence, then and now, can not be so easily understood, since it is not readily apparent to the naked—or should I say hungry?—eye.

Belligerence implies the will to change, and in the case of those who would lead American theatre, the will to do more than change a way of work. The word belongs to the vocabulary of war.