VIII

EUGENE O’NEILL

As some of the dust begins to settle over the controversial reputation of Eugene O’Neill, and our interest shifts from the man to art, it becomes increasingly clear that O’Neill will be primarily remembered for his last plays. The earlier ones are not all without value, though none is thoroughly satisfying. Some contain powerful scenes; some have interesting themes; and some are sustained by the sheer force of the author’s will. Still, the bulk of O’Neill dramatic writings before Ah Wilderness! are like the groping preparatory sketches of one who had to write badly in order to write well; and in comparison with the late O’Neill even intermittently effective dramas like The Hairy Ape, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms are riddled with fakery, incoherence, and clumsy experimental devices. No major dramatist, with the possible exception of Shaw, has written so many second-rate plays.

An important task of the O’Neill critic, therefore, is to account for the extraordinary disparity in style and quality between the earlier and later work; and one might well begin by exploring the external conditions in which O’Neill’s talents began to bud. For if the playwright’s early blossoms were sere, the cultural climate which helped to nurture them was (and is) peculiarly uncongenial to the development of a serious artist. O’Neill came to prominence in the second and third decades of the century, when America was just beginning to relinquish its philistinism in order to genuflect before the shrine of Culture. The American culture craze was largely directed towards the outsides of the literature, which is to say towards the personality of the artist rather than the content of his art; and the novelists and poets inducted into this hollow ritual found themselves engaged in an activity more priestly than creative. O’Neill’s role was especially hieratic, however, since he had the misfortune to be the first dramatist with serious aspirations to appear on the national scene. As George Jean Nathan noted, O’Neill “singlehanded waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.” That the water lily sometimes resembled a cauliflower, Mr. Nathan was occasionally willing to concede. But to a large body of hungry critics and cultural consumers, who were indifferent to the quality of the product so long as it was Big, O’Neill was a homegrown dramatic champion to be enlisted not only against Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, but against Aeschylus, Euripides, and Shakespeare as well.

In every superficial way, O’Neill certainly looked the role he was expected to fill. A dark, brooding figure with a strain of misfortune in his life, he combined the delicate constitution of a sensitive poet with the robust pugnacity of a barroom Achilles; and his youthful adventures as a seaman, gold prospector, and tramp had a rotogravure appeal to a nation already convinced by the Sunday supplements that an artist needed Vast Experience in order to write about Real Life. O’Neill, in addition, possessed the kind of aspiring mind which F. Scott Fitzgerald assigned to Jay Gatsby; he “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” Afflicted with the American disease of gigantism, O’Neill developed ambitions which were not only large, they were monstrous; he was determined to be nothing if not a world-historical figure of fantastic proportion. Trying to compress within his own career the whole development of dramatic literature since the Greeks, he set himself to imitate the most ambitious writers who ever lived — and the more epic their scope, the more they stimulated his competitive instinct. The scope of his own intentions is suggested by the growing length of his plays and the presumptuousness of his public utterances. Mourning Becomes Electra, which took three days to perform, he called “an idea and a dramatic conception that has the possibilities of being the biggest thing modern drama has attempted — by far the biggest!” And his unfinished eleven-play “Big Grand Opus,” as he called it, was designed to have “greater scope than any novel I know of . . . something in the style of War and Peace.” At this point in his career, O’Neill, like his public, is attracted to the outsides of literature, and he wrestles with the reputation of another writer in order to boost his own. But to O’Neill’s public, ambitions were almost indistinguishable from achievements; and the playwright was ranked with the world’s greatest dramatists before he had had an opportunity to master his craft or sophisticate his art.

It was inevitable, therefore, that the next generation of critics — Francis Fergusson, Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley — should harp on O’Neill’s substantial failings as a thinker, artist, and Broadway hero. Subjected to closer scrutiny, the very qualities which had inspired so much enthusiasm in O’Neill’s partisans now seemed the marks of a pretentious writer and a second-rate mind. Pushed about by this critical storm, the winds of literary fashion shifted, and O’Neill’s reputation was blown out to sea. Although the playwright was awarded the Nobel prize in 1936, obscurity had already settled in upon him, and it deepened more and more until his death in 1953. During these dark years, ironically, O’Neill’s real development began. Before, he had prided himself on having “the guts to shoot at something big and risk failure”; now, he had the guts not to bother himself about questions of success and failure at all. Maturing in silence, stimulated only by an obsessive urge to write and a profound artistic honesty, he commenced to create plays which were genuine masterpieces of the modern theatre. Most of these were not published or produced until after his death, some by the playwright’s order. In proscribing A Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill was trying to hide his family’s secrets from the public eye; but O’Neill’s desire to keep his works off the stage was undoubtedly influenced, too, by the hostile reception accorded to The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten, the first of which failed on Broadway, the second, before even reaching New York. The public and the reviewers, having found new idols to worship (the Critic’s prize the year of The Iceman Cometh went to a conventional social protest play by Arthur Miller called All My Sons), began to treat O’Neill with condescension — when they thought of him at all. And he was not to be seriously reconsidered until 1956, when a successful revival of The Iceman Cometh and the first Broadway production of A Long Day’s Journey brought him so much posthumous recognition that his inferior work was soon dragged out of storage for some more unthinking praise.

O’Neill’s career, then, can be split into two distinct stages, which are separated not only by his changing position in the official culture, but by changes in style, subject matter, form, and posture as well. The first stage, beginning with the S.S. Glencairn plays (1913-1916) and ending with Days Without End (1932-1933) is of historical rather than artistic interest: I shall discuss these plays in a general way, as illustrations of O’Neill’s early links with the theatre of revolt. The second stage is preceded by a transitional play, Ah Wilderness! (1932), and contains A Touch of the Poet (1935-1942) the unfinished More Stately Mansions (1935-1941), both from the cycle, The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939-1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). All of these works have artistic interest, but The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey are, in my opinion, great works of art; these two I shall examine in some detail, as examples of the highly personal revolt which O’Neill pulled out of his own suffering. By contrasting the two stages in O’Neill’s drama, I hope to illustrate O’Neill’s development from a self-conscious and imitative pseudo-artist into a genuine tragic dramatist with a uniquely probing vision.

Aside from the one-act sea plays, which are modest in scope and relatively conventional in form, O’Neill’s early drama tends to be Expressionist in its symbolic structure and messianic in its artistic stance. Both O’Neill’s Expressionism and messianism, I hasten to add, are borrowed, ill-fitting robes. By the time O’Neill begins to write, the theatre of revolt is an established movement in every country except America, where the theatre has produced nothing more exhilarating than the fabricated fantasies of Fitch, Boucicault, and Belasco. Thus, the drama of the continent constitutes an untapped mine of material, and O’Neill, recognizing its potentialities, becomes the first dramatist to exploit it; with the aid of the Provincetown Players, he does for the American awareness of European drama what Shaw and the Independent Theatre did for the English.

Although O’Neill is originally considered a wild, untutored genius, therefore, his early work is clearly the offshoot of a very intellectualistic mind, attuned more to literature than to life. Aligning himself with the more radical of the rebel dramatists, he is soon impersonating their postures, imitating their doctrines, and copying their techniques. One can detect the influence of Ibsen, Toller, Shaw, Gorky, Pirandello, Wedekind, Synge, Andreyev, and others in the early plays of O’Neill, but chief among his dramatic models in this period is August Strindberg, whom O’Neill, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, called “the greatest of all modern dramatists.” Nor is he reluctant to acknowledge Strindberg as his master:

It was reading his plays when I first started to write, back in the winter of 1913-1914, that, above all, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then — to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.

If the rebel dramatists are inclined to revolt against each other as well as against the external world, O’Neill is similar only to Shaw in his willingness to set himself to school in the composition of his plays.

O’Neill’s partiality for Strindberg (like Shaw’s partiality for Ibsen) can be partly explained by similarities of temperament: the lives of the two dramatists, as well as their careers, move along closely parallel lines. Like Strindberg, O’Neill was deeply involved with his mother, as an object both of love and hate, and similarly ambivalent towards his father.¹ And he was — again like Strindberg — married three times to domineering women, and perpetually rebellious towards authority. O’Neill’s relation to his plays, furthermore, is very Strindbergian: he is almost always the hero of his work, trying to work out his personal difficulties through the medium of his art.

In their biography of O’Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb have observed that his plays contain a “long gallery of conscious and unconscious portraits,”

ranging from the land-locked dreamer, Robert Mayo, in Beyond the Horizon, through the tubercular newspaper reporter, Stephen Murray, in The Straw, the semi-incestuous Eben Cabot, in Desire Under the Elms, the possessive Michael Cape in Welded, and the defeated idealist, Dion Anthony, in The Great God Brown, the suicidal Reuben Light in Dynamo, the rebellious adolescent, Richard Miller, in Ah Wilderness! to the religion-seeking John Loving in Days Without End.

And O’Neill’s early self-portraits usually show him striking histrionic attitudes of pride, cynicism, or sensitivity — “sardonic,” “mocking,” “sneering,” and “Mephistophelean,” are the adjectives by which he describes the speeches and deportment of his autobiographical characters, when they are not “dark,” “spiritual,” “poetic,” and “suffering.” In his later plays, O’Neill will turn back on his past life, honestly remembered, ruthlessly examined, rigorously presented; but in his earlier ones, he is posing for immortality, and rushing his current problems onto the stage before they have had a chance to cool — which may explain why Hugo von Hofmannsthal complained that “O’Neill’s characters are not sufficiently fixed in the past.” This preoccupation with satanic stances, melodramatic suffering, and immediate emotions can again be partially ascribed to O’Neill’s fondness for Strindberg. In fact, his identification with the Swedish dramatist is so strong that it sometimes ushers him into crass imitation. Welded, for example, is a feeble representation of the sex war, a slavish exercise in the embattled mode of Comrades, The Father, and The Dance of Death; and Days Without End recapitulates, in a very fumbling manner, the spiritual questing of The Road to Damascus.

As an experimental dramatist, O’Neill would naturally be attracted to the greatest innovator in the modern theatre; and O’Neill’s Expressionism is certainly indebted to Strindberg’s dream techniques. The difference is that Strindberg’s formal experiments grow out of his material, while O’Neill’s seem grafted onto his, and thus give the impression of being gratuitous and excessive. As a British critic correctly observes, “Anything that might be called Expressionism encourages in O’Neill all his faults.” Strindberg, in his dream plays, is attempting to evoke the forces behind life, which are essentially nonverbal and nonconceptual. But O’Neill, who at this stage remains on the surface of life, is obsessed with concepts, and defines Expressionism as something which “strives to get the author talking directly to the audience,” or, at best, puts “an idea . . . over to an audience . . . through characters.” Thus, O’Neill uses Expressionistic devices to communicate ideas which he is either too inarticulate or too undisciplined to express through speech and action. And his masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like are really substitutes for dramatic writing (most of these conventions are borrowed from the novel), provoked not by a new vision but rather by a need to disguise the banality of the original material. Thus, instead of opening up uncharted territory, O’Neill’s devices invariably fog up already familiar ground, as for example the interminable soliloquizing of Strange Interlude which, instead of going deeper into the unconscious mind, merely compounds the verbalized trivialities of the characters with their trivial unspoken thoughts. Moving from monodramas to miracle plays to historical dramas to mob plays to Greek tragedies, O’Neill appears to experiment largely for the sake of novelty without ever staying with a form long enough to perfect it. As Ludwig Lewisohn puts it, he “gives the impression not so much of developing as of making a series of excursions into various provinces of the drama’s domain and of returning from each of these excursions a little dissatisfied, a little disillusioned, and a little hopeful that his next experiment will result in something not quite so fragmentary and unfinished from within.”

Still, O’Neill is very much like Strindberg in giving us a sense of constant process arising out of perpetual dissatisfaction; and this is reflected in another quality they share in common — their restless quest for new absolutes. Throughout the first stage of his career, O’Neill is a Romantic in love with the very notion of rebellion, and the face of his revolt is forever changing. For a short time, during his youth, it takes a social-political form. In a poem printed in 1917, O’Neill imagines his soul to be a submarine and his aspirations as torpedoes directed towards “the grimy galleons of commerce”; and his boss on the New London Telegraph remembers him, during his Socialist-Anarchist days, as “the most stubborn and irreconcilable social rebel that I had ever met.” O’Neill, however, soon loses interest in social-political programs, and by 1922, he is looking back on this period of his life with ironic bemusement: “Time was when I was an active socialist, and after that, a philosophical anarchist. But today I can’t feel anything like that really matters.” Later he adds, in something like the apocalyptic tone of Ibsen, “The one reform worth cheering for is the Second Flood. . . .”² Lionel Trilling has observed how the political aspect of O’Neill’s revolt continues to assert itself dramatically in the recurrent conflict between the creative and the possessive instinct as embodied in the Poet and the Businessman. But O’Neill’s Socialism is a youthful phase, which is soon replaced by more extreme forms of rebellion, structured in religious-philosophical terms, and embodied in messianic plays like The Hairy Ape, The Great God Brown, Dynamo, Lazarus Laughed, and Days Without End.

O’Neill’s messianic revolt centers on the dilemma of modern man in a world without God; and it is informed by the spirit of a philosopher who was also important in Strindberg’s life — Frederick Nietzsche. O’Neill’s concept of tragedy is obviously influenced by The Birth of Tragedy, and his religious ideas are almost all culled from Thus Spake Zarathustra, a work which O’Neill discovered when he was eighteen and which, twenty years later, he said “has influenced me more than any book I’ve ever read.” Reared in a relatively orthodox Irish-Catholic household, O’Neill is early persuaded by his readings in Zarathustra to reject the God of his parents;³ but throughout his life, he is seeking some new orthodoxy to which to attach his remaining oceanic feelings. Indeed, he eventually declares his own loss of faith to be the primary subject of modern dramatic art: “The playwright today,” he writes in a famous letter to George Jean Nathan, “must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it — the death of the Old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new One for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning of life in, and to comfort his fears of death with.” Less clumsily stated, this could be the definitive credo of the messianic dramatist. It is merely one step further to the formulation of a positive messianic doctrine. By the time of Days Without End, O’Neill is calling for “a new Savior . . . who will reveal to us how we can be saved from ourselves”; and though by this time O’Neill has developed a little more humility, the plays that precede this work show O’Neill applying for the position himself. In Lazarus Laughed, for example, O’Neill is solving the problem of death through the Laughter of his biblical Superman. The resurrected Lazarus, functioning as O’Neill’s lifeless megaphone, affirms: “It is my pride as God to become Man. Then let it be my pride as Man to recreate the God in me!” And again: “The greatness of Man is that no god can save him — until he becomes a god!” In announcing the coming of the messianic Man-God, however, the playwright is never quite certain whether to put Man (man) or God (god) into upper case.

For O’Neill’s messianism is an uneasy compound of pride and guilt. Like Strindberg’s, his readings in Nietzsche sit on his stomach like rich food on a man with chronic ulcers. As a salvationist, O’Neill is an extremely timid and tentative figure, and the heady Dionysian wind he offers is invariably diluted with conventional Christian soda water. Consequently, as the doctrinal element becomes more central in his drama, the plays become more and more garbled, until O’Neill’s messianic works can compete with any as the most confused writings in dramatic literature. What O’Neill seems to get all mixed up is the fierce, amoral toughness of the pagan tradition and the moralism and compassion of Christianity: rapturous amoral cries alternate with pleas for universal brotherhood. In The Great God Brown, for example, the hero is a compound of Dionysius and Saint Anthony, with Mephistopheles and Christ thrown into the bargain (his compassionate, maternal confidante, a prostitute, is called by the name of the cruel Phrygian Aphrodite, Cybel). In Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill announces that “Death is dead. . . . There is only life! There is only laughter”; but these tongue-tied Zarathustrian ravings, in which the yea-saying is all about Life and Laughter, are contradicted by other affirmations to the effect that “Love is man’s hope — hope for his life on earth, a noble love above suspicion and distrust!”

O’Neill is similarly confused about the face of God in the modern world. In Dynamo, God is whirring machinery. In Strange Interlude, He presents himself through an “electrical display.” In The Fountain, God is in the biological inheritance passed on through the family. In Marco Millions, He is “an infinite, insane energy which creates and destroys.”⁴ This constant redefinition of God, O’Neill finds to be his primary function as a dramatist: “Most modern plays,” he explains to Joseph Wood Krutch, “are concerned with the relation of man to man, but this does not concern me at all. I am interested only in the relation of man and God.” The purpose is Miltonic — but it is difficult to follow Milton’s path when you have already declared the death of God, and postulated a purely mechanistic universe. O’Neill’s problem is the problem of the modern drama as a whole: how to bring a religious vision to bear on a totally secular world. But instead of working this problem out, O’Neill merely repeats, with almost automatic regularity, that the problem exists — that is, when he is not trying to close the gap between the human and the divine through gaseous assertions. Thus, O’Neill’s doctrinal dramas grow increasingly verbose and generalized until the art is finally suffocated in a cloud of abstract vapors.

O’Neill’s messianic phase culminates in the last play of this period, Days Without End, a semiautobiographical account of the author’s spiritual confusions. Like all of O’Neill’s messianic plays, Days Without End is without literary value, but it is more interesting than the plays which precede it because it exposes the author’s growing doubts about his own capacities as a modern Evangelist. The central character — or characters, since John Loving is John and Loving, a split personality like Dion Anthony — is another portrait of the artist, showing him torn between Nietzschean mockery and Christian compassion. In this play, however, O’Neill attempts to heal the breach by uniting John and Loving at the foot of the cross, as “Life laughs with God’s love again!” Fortunately, O’Neill does not elaborate further on this unlikely union of paganism and Christianity;⁵ but in the course of the play, he does reflect on the fickle religiosity of his past, when he embraced a series of salvationist doctrines in a whirlwind journey through the philosophies of the world. As one character, a priest, ironically describes Loving’s (O’Neill’s) spiritual Odyssey:

First it was Atheism unadorned. Then it was Atheism wedded to Socialism. But Socialism proved too weak-kneed a mate, and the next I heard Atheism was living in free love with Anarchism, with a curse by Nietzsche to bless the union. And then came the Bolshevik dawn, and he greeted that with unholy howls of glee and wrote me he’d found a congenial home at last in the bosom of Karl Marx. . . . Soon his letters became full of pessimism, and disgust with all sociological nostrums. Then followed a long silence. And what do you think was his next hiding place? Religion, no less — but as far away as he could run from home — in the defeatist mysticism of the East. . . . I enjoyed a long interval of peace from his missionary zeal, until finally he wrote me he was married. That letter was full of more ardent hymns for a mere living woman than he’d ever written before about any of his great spiritual discoveries. . . . The only constant faith I’ve found in him before was his proud belief in himself as a bold Anti-Christ.

This might be a description of Strindberg, the “world incendiary,” seeking ever new forms for his revolt; and the passage certainly sounds like a paraphrase of Inferno where Strindberg chides the powers for their cruel manipulation of his destiny.⁶ John Loving, pursued by the Hound of Heaven, eventually finds sanctuary in Christianity — a conversion which led Lionel Trilling to conclude that O’Neill had crawled “into the dark womb of Mother Church and pulled the universe in with him.” But for O’Neill, as for Strindberg, organized religion is only a way station on a continuing journey, and, within a few months after the play is completed, O’Neill is already regretting the ending and preparing to revise it. The revision never took place, but if it had, O’Neill might very well have echoed the concluding lines of Strindberg’s anguished statement: “And supposing I again become religious, I am certain that in another ten years, you will reduce religion to an absurdity. Do not the gods play games with us poor mortals!”

Thus, O’Neill exposes the philosophical incertitude of the Strindbergian rebel — the pain, the doubts, the confusion. But although there are undoubtedly genuine feelings beneath all this, O’Neill’s spiritual crises seem very literary, and his expression of them comes to him secondhand. Furthermore, one is never convinced that O’Neill has read very deeply in those philosophies that he affirms and rejects; his works display the intellectual attitudinizing of the self-conscious autodidact. It is this aspect of the early O’Neill, in fact, which most arouses the spleen of the second generation of his critics. “Mr. O’Neill is not a thinker,” asserts Francis Fergusson, while Eric Bentley adds, “He is so little a thinker, it is dangerous for him to think.” Both critics go on to demonstrate how O’Neill’s superficial treatment of fashionable ideas was his main appeal to a superficial and fashionable audience; and both have shown how emotion and thought fail to cohere in his drama. Certainly, O’Neill, at this stage, is utterly incapable of synthesizing his plots and his themes; to quote from Fergusson again, he “is more interested in affirming his ideas than in representing the experience in which they are implied.” O’Neill’s failure, I would suggest, is not a failure of mind so much as a failure of feeling. It is not that he is incapable of thought but rather that he is incapable of thinking like a dramatist, communicating his ideas through significant action. And this may be because all of his ideas, in this period, are borrowed rather than experienced. Thus, we find notions of Tragedy out of Nietzsche, of the Puritan Booboisie out of Mencken and Nathan, of the Racial Unconscious out of Jung, of the Oedipus Complex out of Freud, and of Hereditary Guilt out of Aeschylus and Ibsen — all grafted onto plots which are largely unconvincing, irrelevant, or inconsequential.

In fact, the major components of his plots, in this particular phase, are romantic love and swashbuckling adventure, both treated in a manner more appropriate to the melodramatic stage of his father, James O’Neill, than to the theatre of revolt. Ironically, O’Neill always thinks he is defining himself against this kind of theatre: “My early experience with the theatre through my father really made me revolt against it,” he once observed. “As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial romantic stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theatre.”⁷ O’Neill’s attempt to introduce large themes into his work is a sign of his rebellion against the mindless nineteenth-century stage, but he has assimilated more of “the old, ranting, artificial romantic stuff” than he knows. The Fountain (1921), for example, is presumably about the conflict between the lust for gain and the contemplation of Beauty, Love, and Life — but it is filled with flashing swords, rodomontade, and the kind of bombast that the man who played Monte Cristo would have adored. In Marco Millions (1923-1925) — a play which reads less as if it were written in English than translated from some foreign tongue — O’Neill attempts again to satirize American materialism by contrasting Marco’s love of money with his attraction to Kublai Khan’s granddaughter, Kukachin. Kukachin, like most of O’Neill’s chaste female figures, is a model of incredible virtue and patience; at the climax of a play which indulges in Douglas Fairbanks heroics and bloated praises of the wisdom of the inscrutable East, she pines away and dies for love (Peace!” says her grandfather, in a typical prose passage, “She does not need your prayers. She was a prayer!”). Lazarus Laughed (1925-1926) is supposed to be an imaginative philosophical drama with no concessions to popular taste, but its atmosphere is very similar to those silent biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, full of frenzied mob scenes and Central Casting Emperors called Tiberius and Caligula.

Even when O’Neill’s early plays avoid the devices of melodrama, they fall into the clichés of pulp fiction. Strange Interlude (1926-1927) is designed to probe the dark recesses of its characters; but its most profound psychological revelation is that one character has a mother fixation, and what keep the plot going are the barren sexual adventures of its neurotic soap-opera heroine, Nina Leeds. Desire Under the Elms (1924) is presumably fashioned to the dimensions of the Tristan myth; but the myth is self-conscious and external; and for all the symbolic setting (the maternal elms), the phoney elementalism (“Nature — makin’ thin’s grow — bigger ’n’ bigger — burnin’ inside ye”), and the staccato New England dialect (“Purty,” “Ay-eh”), it is a conventional love triangle, resolved through an outrageously unbelievable plot device. As for Mourning Becomes Electra (1929-1931) — a tabloid version of the Oresteia in a stereotyped “Puritan” setting — this is a longwinded, overwritten tale of sexual jealousy, each killing motivated not by the will of the gods or by a family curse but rather by romantic love. In O’Neill, everything seems to render down to romance or sex, despite the fact that the author has an extremely naive conception of sexuality. One has only to note his puerile sentimentalization of whores,⁸ his Romantic idealization of chaste women — or still worse, his laughable ideas about extramarital affairs, exposed in that fantastic Strange Interlude scene where Darrell and Nine cold-bloodedly decide to mate only to produce a child, and discuss the liaison in the third person for the sake of scientific impartiality.

Allied to O’Neill’s treatment of sex is his treatment of incest, which is also romanticized in the pulsing accents of True Confessions magazine. In Mourning Becomes Electra, for example, incest becomes as common as weeds, and equally inevitable. Christine Mannon loves her husband’s cousin, Adam Brant; Lavinia Mannon loves her father, Ezra, and also her second cousin, Adam; Orin Mannon loves his mother, Christine, who adores him in return; and when Orin and Lavinia begin, in the final act, to take on the physical characteristics of their father and mother, brother and sister fall in love too! The hero of Dynamo identifies the machine with his dead mother, and electrocutes himself with “a moan that is a mingling of pain and loving consummation.” And in Desire Under the Elms, Eben falls in love with his father’s wife, Abbie, because she has begun to remind him of his mother:

ABBIE: . . . Tell me about yer Maw, Eben.

EBEN: They hain’t nothin’ much. She was kind. She was good.

ABBIE: . . . I’ll be kind an’ good t’ye!

EBEN: Sometimes she used t’sing fur me.

ABBIE: I’ll sing fur ye!

EBEN: This was her hum. This was her farm.

ABBIE: This is my hum. This is my farm! . . .

EBEN: . . . An’ I love yew, Abbie; — now I kin say it! I been dyin’ fur want o’ ye — every hour since ye come! I love ye! (Their lips meet in a fierce, bruising kiss)

“Fierce, bruising kisses” are called for in almost every one of O’Neill’s earlier plays — the more fierce and bruising when they are incestuously motivated — accompanied by bathetic odes to Beauty and jerky apostrophes to Nature. But sex in O’Neill remains without complexity, darkness, or genuine passion, the mentalized fantasy of an adolescent temperament, and totally incompatible with the portentous philosophical attitudes it is meant to support.

In Ah Wilderness!, romanticized sex and half-baked philosophy, finally, are the enthusiasms of a character who is an adolescent himself; and, as a result, the play marks a turning point in O’Neill’s relation to his material. If Days Without End suggests a new detachment towards his religious questing, Ah Wilderness! prefigures his transformation into an objective dramatic artist. As his self-awareness grows, O’Neill is beginning to distance himself from dogma and opinions. In the mouth of the seventeen-year-old Romantic, Richard Miller, the author’s familiar paeans to Beauty, Love, and Life seem perfectly acceptable, since O’Neill is treating these affirmations with gentle satire and indulgent whimsey. It is the character, not the author, who is now identified with fin de siècle pessimism, culled from Swinburne, Nietzsche, and Omar Khayyam, just as it is the character, not the author, who is inclined to sentimentalize prostitutes. The play, in short, has finally become more important than the theme — ideas are effectively subordinated to “the experience in which they are implied.” By projecting his literary self-consciousness onto an earlier Self, O’Neill is beginning to free himself from it. And in Ah Wilderness!, he exposes previously suppressed talents for depicting the habitual and commonplace side of existence, along with unsuspected gifts for portraying the humorous side of Irish family life.

Ah Wilderness!, to be sure, is an exercise for the left hand — a sentimental piece of Americana written in a holiday mood — but it is less important in itself than for what it portends: O’Neill is preparing to strike out along new paths. The author himself seems perfectly conscious of a new departure in this play, because, in a letter to Lawrence Langner, he couples it with Days Without End as evidence of his growing self-understanding: “For, after all, this play [Days Without End], like Ah Wilderness! but in a much deeper sense, is the paying of an old debt on my part — a gesture toward more comprehensive, unembittered understanding and inner freedom — the breaking away from an old formula that I had enslaved myself with. . . .” What the “old formula” is we have already seen; O’Neill’s new approach is to leave all formulae behind, and relax into the role of the artist. Psychologically, O’Neill’s bitterness towards authority seems to have left him, along with his restless quest for absolutes; philosophically, he has begun to perceive the hollowness of his messianic pretensions, and to turn towards material which he has pulled out of his being rather than self-consciously adopted; thematically, he has abandoned myths of incest and romantic love for deeper probes of character; formally, he is learning to combine the solipsistic subjectivity of Strindberg with the more detached, ordered, and indirectly biographical approach of Ibsen. Instead of writing about his unassimilated present, O’Neill is beginning to root about in the experiences of his past, and to do so with patience and care. After producing at least one play a year from 1913 to 1933 (in 1920, he wrote four), O’Neill considerably slows his output, completing only four full-length works and one short play in the next twenty years.

Ah Wilderness! is like all the plays which are to follow in being a work of recollection — nostalgic and retrospective. And significantly, it does not contain a trace of Expressionism, being surprisingly conventional in technique and structure. Later, O’Neill is to develop a different kind of realism all his own, built on a centripetal pattern in which a series of repetitions bring us closer and closer to the explosion at the center; but Ah Wilderness! is typical of O’Neill’s late plays in its avoidance of conspicuous formal experimentation. Masks, split characters, and choruses are gone forever. As a result, O’Neill abandons those ponderous abstractions and inflated generalizations which Expressionism invariably dragged into his plays. If the author once complained, about The Hairy Ape, that “the public saw just the stoker, not the symbol, and the symbol makes the play either important or just another play,” then he is now able to subordinate symbolism, and sometimes suppress it entirely for the sake of penetrating studies of character.

O’Neill, in short, has finally discovered where his true talents lie. In 1924, in the act of eulogizing Strindberg, he had called Ibsen a “lesser man,” attacking Ibsenite realism in these terms: “It represents our Fathers’ daring aspirations towards self-recognition by holding the family kodak up to ill-nature . . . we have endured too much from the banality of surfaces.” Less embittered towards “our Fathers” nine years later, O’Neill is beginning to create a drama of surface banality himself — beneath which the forces of destruction will proceed with Ibsenite inevitability — and it is precisely the “family kodak” which will be O’Neill’s artistic instrument. As John Henry Raleigh has observed about one of these late plays, “Everything pales beside the fact of the family, which is the macro-microcosm that blots out the universe. . . .” The family becomes the nucleus of every major work that follows, except the The Iceman Cometh, and even there, the characters are thrown together into a kind of accidental family group. As for the unfinished cycle, this was inspired by O’Neill’s desire to follow his family further and further into the past: “The Cycle is primarily that,” he writes to Langner, “the history of a family. What larger significance I can give my people as extraordinary examples and symbols in the drama of American possessiveness and materialism is something else again.” In Ah Wilderness!, O’Neill develops a hazy daguerrotype of Irish family life at the turn of the century; but before long, the family kodak will focus on the author’s most painful early memories, seen with consuming power and ruthless honesty, yet with compassion, understanding, and love.

O’Neill’s retrospective technique is admirably illustrated in The Iceman Cometh (1939), where O’Neill closes the door forever on his messianic ambitions, and the suffering artist becomes completely identified with the structured art. “The Iceman is a denial of any other experience of faith in my plays,” he remarks, soon after completing the play. “In writing it, I felt I had locked myself in with my memories.” At first glance, the author’s place in these memories is obscure, for the play does not look very autobiographical. Harry Hope’s saloon is based on Jimmy-the-Priest’s, a West-Side rooming bar that O’Neill used to frequent in his youth — (“Gorky’s Night Lodgings,” he was later to remark, “was an ice cream parlor in comparison,” and the influence of Gorky is certainly evident in the seedy, peeled, splotched setting, and the dissipated characters)⁹ and the play contains thinly veiled portraits of some of the derelicts the author used to know there and at another saloon called the Hell Hole. But although the work is set in 1912, the same climacteric year as A Long Day’s Journey, the author himself is simply a lens through which the characters are seen. Still, if O’Neill is not the central character of the play, romanticized as a mocking, sardonic rebel, he is still present in disguise — partly in two characters, as we shall see, but mostly as a guide through the caverns of his deepest perceptions. O’Neill here is using his “memories” not for personal autobiography in the manner of Strindberg, but in the manner of Ibsen, for spiritual and psychological autobiography. As the author himself says, The Iceman Cometh is a repudiation of “any other experience of faith in my plays.” In denying his previous philosophical affirmations, he permits a terrible sense of reality to rise to consciousness.

In its repudiation of past faith, The Iceman Cometh occupies much the same place in O’Neill’s work as The Wild Duck does in Ibsen’s; and, indeed, the two plays have more in common even than this positioning. The theme of The Iceman — that men cannot live without illusions — is so close to the theme of The Wild Duck¹⁰ that some critics have been inclined to dismiss the later play as a mere recapitulation of the earlier one. This is a mistake. O’Neill’s play, to my mind, is a greater achievement than Ibsen’s, and it certainly has a different emphasis. In The Wild Duck, it is morally wrong to rob people of their life-lies; in The Iceman Cometh, it is tragic. Gregers Werle is a satire on pseudo-Ibsenites who meddle in the lives of others, urging the claim of some impossible ideal, but Theodore Hickman is not a vicarious idealist but a realist, and one who believes he has pragmatically tested the kind of salvation he is pressing on his friends. Although Gregers is misguided, and Hjalmar Ekdal is inadequate to his demands, Ibsen still believes there are heroic individuals (Brand and Stockman, for example) with the courage to face the unclothed truth. But the whole world is inadequate to Hickey’s demands, for the truth he offers is a naked, blinding light which kills. Thus, The Wild Duck is a savage indictment of some men; The Iceman Cometh is a compassionate insight into all. O’Neill is reflecting not ethically, on Right Action or Right Thought, but metaphysically, on the very quality of existence. And, as a result, he is finally working through experientially to that tragic mood so self-consciously imposed on his earlier work.

Because he is universalizing Ibsen’s theme, O’Neill has created instead of one antagonist a whole catalogue of them — the deadbeats, alcoholics, pimps, whores, bartenders, and illusionists who inhabit Harry Hope’s premises. The proliferation of characters adds greatly to the length of the play, which is bulky and unwieldy in the extreme; and since each character is identified by a single obsession which he continually restates, the play is extremely repetitious as well. Thus, despite the naturalistic setting, the play is much too schematic to qualify as a convincing evocation of reality. Each act offers a single variation on the theme of illusion; the action never bursts into spontaneous life; and the characters rarely transcend their particular functions. A thematic realism rather than an atmospheric realism prevails; O’Neill seems reluctant to let the play escape his rigid control. One must concede that there is some justice in Eric Bentley’s objection: “There are ideas in the play, and we have the impression that what should be the real substance of it is mere (not always deft) contrivance to illustrate the ideas.” Still, O’Neill’s ideas, for once, proceed logically from the action, and, for once, they are totally convincing. I do not think Professor Bentley properly appreciates the depth, sincerity, and relevance of O’Neill’s dramatic insights in this play.

Professor Bentley detects padding and recommends cuts; O’Neill’s Broadway director, Paul Crabtree, also suggested cuts on the basis that O’Neill has made the same point eighteen times — “I intended to be repeated eighteen times,” the playwright said, and refused to tamper with the play. O’Neill was right; cutting would undoubtedly diminish the impact of the work. For once, an O’Neill play is long not because the author knows too little but rather because he knows too much; even the repetitions are an intricate aspect of the total design. O’Neill has multiplied his antagonists in order to illuminate every aspect of his theme, just as he has drawn them from the humblest condition of life in order to show mankind at the extremity of its fate. Dazed by alcohol, isolated from human society, O’Neill’s derelicts are stripped of every pretension except the single “pipe dream” that keeps them going, and the sum of these pipe dreams is meant to represent the total content of human illusion.

Thus, Hugo’s aristocratic will to power through pretended love of the proleteriat reflects on political illusions; Joe’s pugnacious demand for equality with the whites, on racial illusions; Chuck and Cora’s fantasy of marriage and a farm, on domestic illusions; the prostitutes’ mysterious distinction between “tarts” and “whores,” on status illusions; Parritt’s false motives for having betrayed his mother, on psychological illusions; Willie Oban’s excuse for having discontinued law school, on intellectual illusions; Larry Slade’s pretense at disillusionment and detachment, on philosophical illusions — and Hickey’s belief that he has found salvation, on religious illusions. All of these dreamers represent a family of men, inextricably bound up with each other. Each is able to see the lie of the other without being able to admit his own, but in this community, the price of mutual toleration is mutual silence. Actually, the community is almost Utopian. Before Hickey comes, the men live in relative harmony together by adhering to a single doctrine — the doctrine of Tomorrow — keeping hope alive through the anticipation of significant action on a day which never comes.

Against the Tomorrow doctrine, Hickey counterposes his doctrine of Today, forcing the derelicts to execute their dreams — and fail them — on the assumption that a life without illusions is a life without guilt. In this conflict of ideologies, Hickey’s main antagonist is Larry Slade, the intellectual champion of the Tomorrowmen, who is brought into the lists against his conscious will. Playing the part of the “Old Grandstand Foolosopher,” pretending indifference to the fate of his companions, Larry has adopted a mask of total alienation. For him, the essence of mankind is excrement, and life on earth is doomed: “The material the ideal society must be constructed from is men themselves,” he observes, explaining his apostasy from Anarchism, “and you can’t build a marble temple out of mud and manure.” “Old Cemetery,” as he is called, is aroused only by the thought of death, and affects to contemplate his own with pleasurable anticipation. But although he pretends “a bitter, cynic philosophy,” as Jimmy Tomorrow observes, “in your heart, you are the kindest man among us.” Actually, Larry is doomed to inaction by a reflective intelligence which always sees both sides of a question, and he is forever trying to suppress his instinctive compassion. O’Neill describes him as “a pitying but weary old priest.” He has heard all the secrets of the confessional, and out of his secret kindness is desperately trying to protect these secrets, including his own, from Hickey’s remorseless efforts to bring them into light. Harry Hope’s may be “Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe, The Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller,” but it has “a beautiful calm in the atmosphere” which can only be preserved if it is not touched by truth.

Hickey, however, finds this a false calm, and desires to introduce a genuine spiritual peace: “All I want,” he says, using a word which ironically concludes every act but the last, “is to see you happy” But while Hickey is convinced that only truth brings peace, Larry knows that happiness is based exclusively on mutual deception: “To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. . . . The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.” This tension between truth and illusion reflects, in much stronger dramatic terms, O’Neill’s former antithesis of Nietzschean heroism and Christian compassion. But instead of forcing a synthesis, as he does in his messianic plays, O’Neill rejects the heroic teachings of Nietzsche, repudiating superhuman salvation while affirming humanity, pity, and love. Together, Hickey and Larry function in somewhat the same way as the split characters of O’Neill’s earlier work; but having relinquished his messianic claims, O’Neill is able to treat both aspects of his personality with a good deal more balance and equanimity. Thus, Larry’s facile pessimism, his cynicism, and his fascination with death are all qualities found in O’Neill’s earlier “sardonic” heroes, but these are now exposed as mere attitudinizing. And Hickey’s evangelism represents the messianic impulse in O’Neill turned back on itself, for his gospel of truth is revealed as the greatest illusion of all.

The Iceman Cometh, then, is about the impossibility of salvation in a world without God, an expression of existential revolt structured in quasi-religious terms. And beneath the realistic surface, O’Neill is developing an ironic Christian parable, in a surprisingly subtle manner. For one thing, Hickey’s entrance is delayed so long that — like another long-awaited figure, Beckett’s Godot — he begins to accumulate supernatural qualities. “Would that Hickey or Death would come,” moans one impatient character — an anticipatory irony, since Hickey will soon be identified with Death. Hickey finally does arrive, but the amiable jester has undergone a startling transformation. “I’m damned sure he’s brought death with him,” remarks Larry. “I feel the cold touch of it on him.” The recurrent iceman motif intensifies these associations. On each of his annual visits, Hickey has joked that his chaste wife, Evelyn, was in the hay with the iceman; and as the derelicts grow more and more tormented by Hickey’s penetrating thrusts, their one hope is that the joke has come to roost. And indeed it has, though not in the manner they think. Evelyn is now being held in a frigid embrace; Hickey, we finally learn, has murdered her; “Death was the Iceman Hickey called to his home.” Thus, Hickey, Death, and the Iceman are one. The truth doesn’t set you free, it kills you dead; the peace which Hickey brings to Harry Hope’s saloon is the peace of the grave. Hickey, therefore, is the false Messiah — not the Resurrection and the Life, but the “great Nihilist,” starting “a movement which will blow up the world.”

To emphasize his anti-messianic point, O’Neill has hidden parallels with another great world movement, Christianity, throughout the play. And Cyrus Day has done us the service of uncovering most of them in his article, “The Iceman and the Bridegroom”:

Hickey as savior has twelve disciples. They drink wine at Hope’s supper party, and their grouping on the stage, according to O’Neill’s directions, is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. Hickey leaves the party, as Christ does, aware that he is about to be executed. The three whores correspond in number to the three Marys, and sympathize with Hickey as the three Marys sympathize with Christ. . . . One of the derelicts, Parritt, resembles Judas Iscariot in several ways. He is twelfth in the list of dramatis personae; Judas is twelfth in the New Testament of the Disciples. He has betrayed his anarchist mother for a paltry $200; Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver. . . .

To this list of striking resemblances, we might add another interesting one. Larry Slade becomes the only real convert to Hickey’s religion of Death — he is, like Saint Peter, the rock on which Hickey builds his Church.

The symbolic aspect of the play, however, is not very obtrusive, if indeed it is noticeable at all without the aid of a commentator. On a purely denotative level, the work is still very rich. O’Neill has carefully combined Hickey’s symbolic role as a false Messiah with his family background and psychological history, so that Hickey stands as a full-bodied character on his own, and a much more convincing salesman figure than Miller’s Willy Loman (at least we know what Hickey sells — hardware). The son of a minister, Hickey has brought an evangelical fervor to the drummer’s trade, and the techniques of salesmanship to his evangelism. In a country where everything is bought and sold, O’Neill is suggesting, even a religious vision must be peddled. Bruce Barton’s observation that Jesus was a super-salesman may be in the back of O’Neill’s mind; Billy Graham’s religious “crusades” come immediately to ours. Hickey certainly employs the “hard sell” — cheery, good-humored, loud, brash, and pitiless — bearing down on his victim like Major Barbara bringing God to Bill Walker, or a psychoanalyst unearthing the source of a patient’s neurosis. He has an instinctual eye for human weakness, partly because of his own experience (“I’ve had hell inside me. I can spot it in others”), but partly because he is “The Great Salesman” and can detect the vulnerability of a client in an instant.

As a result of this native shrewdness, Hickey has, by the end of the second act, transformed all the derelicts into caged animals, snarling at each other in their agony: each is beginning to open the other’s wounds in order to protect his own, and even the goodnatured Harry Hope has developed an uncharacteristic pugnacity. Torn from the security of their dreams, the derelicts must now confront their Tomorrow, each performing the deed which terrifies him most. The third act takes place in cold, daylight horror. The derelicts are afflicted with the “katzenjammers,” their withdrawal symptoms aggravated by a growing apprehensiveness. Harry Hope, symbolizing the communal predicament, prepares at last to walk around the ward — but is unable even to cross the street. His illusion exposed, Harry’s hope vanishes, and with it the hope of all his companions: only blank, unstructured reality remains. Having abandoned hope, the men are dwelling in hell; even the alcohol has lost its punch; all escape routes are closed. What results is death-in-life: “Vhat’s matter, Harry?” asks Hugo. “You look funny. You look dead.” Hugo’s babbling, and the growling of the derelicts, turns the atmosphere funereal. Hickey’s salvation is failing, and so is Hickey’s confidence: “That’s what worries me about you, Governor,” he says to Harry, as the expected peace fails to come. “It’s time you began to feel happy —”

In the last act, the derelicts have turned to stone, their spirits calcified by the death ray of truth. Motivated by growing nervousness over their behavior, Hickey begins his long speech of confession — a confession which is also a discovery — paralleled by an antiphonal speech from Parritt. Both have destroyed a woman; both for reasons that they cannot face. Parritt has informed on his mother not out of patriotism or penury but rather out of hatred; and Hickey has killed Evelyn because she killed his joy of life, filling him with guilt through constant forgiveness of his sins. Thus, Hickey’s act was an act of revenge and not of love; he not only hated her illusion, he detested her. As he blurts out, in the unconsidered slip which gives him away, “You know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch.”

Hickey can admit this feeling to his consciousness only for a moment; then, he immediately pleads insanity. “Good God, I couldn’t have said that! If I did, I’d gone insane! Why, I loved Evelyn better than anything in life.” It is this plea which leads Eric Bentley to say that “O’Neill’s eye was off the subject”:

Not being clearly seen, the man is unclearly presented to the audience; O’Neill misleads them for several hours, then asks them to reach back into their memory and re-interpret all Hickey’s actions and attitudes from the beginning. Is Hickey the character O’Neill needed as the man who tries to deprive the gang of their illusions? He (as it turns out) is a maniac. But if the attempt to disillude the gang is itself mad, it would have more dramatic point made by a sane idealist (as in The Wild Duck).

I cite this passage because it contains a widely shared misunderstanding of the play which has obscured its real profundity. For the fact is, of course, that O’Neill’s eye remained steadfastly on the subject: Hickey, consistent in conception from first to last, is not a maniac at all. Actually, he only claims to have been insane at the time of the murder, but even this is a self-deception which he adopts so as not to face his real feelings towards his wife. Such a conclusion is clear enough from the context, and Parritt suggests it even more bluntly in the course of his own confession: “And I’m not putting up any bluff either, that I was crazy afterwards when I laughed to myself and thought, ‘You know what you can do with your freedom pipe dream now, don’t you, you damned old bitch!’ ” [My emphasis]. Hickey’s plea of insanity, in short, is a bluff — not to escape the chair (he wants to die now) but to escape the truth: he cannot admit that he hated his wife. In a context like this, as a matter of fact, Hickey’s mental state is totally irrelevant, since even madness is an escape from an unpleasant reality; the point is that Hickey, who thought he was living the truth, was living another pipe dream. As for the derelicts, they are willing to believe that Hickey was mad, because this means he told them lies; if he will agree to let them have their illusions, they will agree to let him have his. Hickey hesitates because he knows he told them the truth, but for the sake of his own peace, he must agree to the trade. Thus, he enters their community at last: mutual toleration through mutual silence.

Hickey’s brand of salvation, in short, has proved of false manufacture: the happiness he discovered after Evelyn’s death was merely the happiness of another illusion. Thus, his attempt to “disillude the gang” is not “itself mad,” it is simply based on a terrible error; and since his own illusions are directly implicated in the action, Hickey has a good deal more dramatic point than Gregers Werle. Hickey, in fact, has some of the dimension of a tragic protagonist, and is brought right up to the brink of a tragic perception; if he does not look over, then Larry Slade does, and what he sees is the bottomless abyss of a totally divested reality:

Be God, there’s no hope. I’ll never be a success in the grandstand — or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I’ll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die! (With an intense bitter sincerity) May that day come soon! (He pauses startledly, surprised himself — then with a sardonic grin) Be God, I’m the only real convert to death Hickey made here. From the bottom of my coward’s heart I mean that now!

Hickey has escaped reality by pleading insanity; Parritt by committing suicide; the derelicts by returning to their illusions. But for Larry, too truthful to lie and too cowardly to die, the abyss is constantly before his eyes. Out of compassion for the Judas, Parritt, he has told him to put an end to his miserable existence; and now he must bear responsibility for this and every act until his own life ends: “May that day come soon!” His desire for death is like that of Othello: “For, in my sense, ’tis happiness to die.” The play ends in laughter, song, and the drunken babble of Hugo, as Larry stares straight ahead of him, a living corpse, swathed in the winding sheet of truth. Like O’Neill’s, his tragic posturing has developed finally into a deeply experienced tragic sense of life.

This extraordinary play, then, is a chronicle of O’Neill’s own spiritual metamorphosis from a messianic into an existential rebel, the shallow yea-saying salvationist of the earlier plays having been transformed into a penetrating analyst of human motive rejecting even the pose of disillusionment. O’Neill’s “denial of any other experience of faith in my plays” has left him alone, at last, with existence itself; and he has looked at it with a courage which only the greatest tragic dramatists have been able to muster. The Iceman Cometh, despite its prosaic language, recreates that existential groan which is heard in Shakespeare’s tragedies and in the third choral poem of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, as O’Neill makes reality bearable through the metaphysical consolations of art. O’Neill has rejected Hickey’s brand of salvation as a way to human happiness, but truth has, nevertheless, become the cornerstone of his drama, truth combined with the compassionate understanding of Larry Slade. Expunging everything false and literary from his work, O’Neill has finally reconciled himself to being the man he really is.

This kind of reconciliation could only have come about through penetrating self-analysis; and it is inevitable, therefore, that the process of self-analysis itself should form the material of one of his plays: A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939-1941). Here, combining the retrospective techniques of Ibsen with the exorcistic attack of Strindberg, O’Neill compresses the psychological history of his. family into the events of a single day, and the economy of the work, for all its length, is magnificent. Within this Classical structure, where O’Neill even observes the unities, the play begins to approach a kind of formal perfection. Like most Classical works, A Long Day’s Journey is set in the past — the summer of 1912, when O’Neill, then twenty-four, was stricken with tuberculosis, a disease which sent him to the sanitarium where he first decided to become a dramatist. And like most Classical works, its impact derives less from physical action (the play has hardly any plot, and only the first act has any suspense) than from psychological revelation, as the characters dredge up their painful memories and half-considered thoughts. O’Neill’s model is probably Ibsen’s Ghosts (even Ibsen’s title is singularly appropriate to the later play), because he employs that technique of exhumation which Ibsen borrowed from Sophocles — inching forward and moving backward simultaneously by means of a highly functional dialogue.

O’Neill, however, is not only the author of the play but also a character in it; like Strindberg, he has written “a poem of desperation,” composed in rhythms of pain. The author’s relation to his material is poignantly suggested in his dedication of the work to his wife, Carlotta, on the occasion of their twelfth anniversary: “I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play — write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” O’Neill includes himself in the general amnesty; he has certainly earned the right. The play, written as he tells us “in tears and blood,” was composed in a cold sweat, sometimes fifteen hours at a stretch: O’Neill, like all his characters, is confronting his most harrowing memories, and putting his ghosts to rest in a memorial reenactment of their mutual suffering and responsibility.

Because his purpose is partially therapeutic, O’Neill has hardly fictionalized this autobiography at all. The O’Neills have become the Tyrones, his mother Ella is now called Mary, and Eugene takes on the name of his dead brother Edmund (the dead child is called Eugene),¹¹ but his father and brother retain their own Christian names, and all the dramatic events (with a few minor changes) are true, including the story about the pigs of Tyrone’s tenant farmer and the ice pond of the Standard Oil millionaire, an episode to be treated again in A Moon for the Misbegotten.

In view of this fidelity to fact, it is a wonder that O’Neill was able to write the play at all, but he is in astonishing control of his material — the work is a masterpiece. While The Iceman Cometh has fewer arid stretches and deeper implications, A Long Day’s Journey contains the finest writing O’Neill ever did — and the fourth act is among the most powerful scenes in all dramatic literature. O’Neill has created a personal play which bears on the condition of all mankind; a bourgeois family drama with universal implications. A Long Day’s Journey is a study of hereditary guilt which does not even make recourse to arbitrary metaphors, like Ibsen’s use of disease in Ghosts. Edmund’s consumption, unlike Oswald’s syphilis, has a bacterial rather than a symbolic source. It is no longer necessary for O’Neill to invent a modern equivalent of Fate, for now he feels it working in his very bones. Thus, O’Neill’s characters are suffering from spiritual and psychological ailments rather than biological and social ones (society, for O’Neill, hardly seems to exist), but they are just as deeply ravaged as Oswald and Mrs. Alving. O’Neill’s achievement is all the more stunning when we remember that his previous efforts to write this kind of play were dreadfully bungled. In Mourning Becomes Electra, for example, the sins of the father are also visited on the sons, but this is illustrated through physical transformations — Orin begins to look like Ezra, Lavinia like Christine — a purely mechanical application of the theme. And the same sort of self-conscious contrivance is apparent in Desire Under the Elms, where endless argumentation occurs over whether Eben is more like his “Maw” or his “Paw.”

In A Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill has dismissed such superficial concerns to concentrate on the deeper implications of his theme: what is visited on the sons is a strain of blank misfortune. Here is a family living in a close symbiotic relationship, a single organism with four branches, where a twitch in one creates a spasm in another. O’Neill was beginning to explore this kind of relationship in The Iceman Cometh, where the derelicts aggravate each other’s agony and hell is other people, but here he has worked out the nightmare of family relations with relentless precision. No individual character trait is revealed which does not have a bearing on the lives of the entire family; the play is nothing but the truth, but there is nothing irrelevant in the play. Thus, the two major characteristics which define James Tyrone, Sr. — his miserliness and his career as an actor — are directly related to the misery of his wife and children. Tyrone’s niggardliness has caused Mary’s addiction, because it was a cut-rate quack doctor who first introduced her to drugs; and Tyrone’s inability to provide her with a proper home, because he was always on the road, has intensified her bitterness and sense of loss. The miser in Tyrone is also the source of Edmund’s resentment, since Tyrone is preparing to send him to a State Farm for treatment instead of to a more expensive rest home. Edmund’s tuberculosis, in turn, partially accounts for Mary’s resumption of her habit, because she cannot face the fact of his bad health; and Edmund’s birth caused the illness which eventually introduced his mother to drugs. Jamie is affected by the very existence of Edmund, since his brother’s literary gifts fill him with envy and a sense of failure; and his mother’s inability to shake her habit has made him lose faith in his own capacity for regeneration. Even the comic touches are structured along causal lines: Tyrone is too cheap to burn the lights in the parlor, so Edmund bangs his knee on a hatstand, and Jamie stumbles on the steps. Every action has a radiating effect, and characters interlock in the manner which evoked the anguished cry from Strindberg: “Earth, earth is hell. . . . in which I cannot move without injuring the happiness of others, in which others cannot remain happy without hurting me.”

The family, in brief, is chained together by resentment, guilt, recrimination; yet, the chains that hold it are those of love as well as hate. Each makes the other suffer through some unwitting act, a breach of love or faith, and reproaches follow furiously in the wake of every revelation. But even at the moment that the truth is being blurted out, an apologetic retraction is being formed. Nobody really desires to hurt. Compassion and understanding alternate with anger and rancor. Even Jamie, who is “forever making sneering fun of somebody” and who calls his mother a “hophead,” hates his own bitterness and mockery, and is filled with self-contempt. The four members of the family react to each other with bewildering ambivalence — exposing illusions and sustaining them, striking a blow and hating the hand that strikes. Every torment is self-inflicted, every angry word reverberating in the conscience of the speaker. It is as if the characters existed only to torture each other, while protecting each other, too, against their own resentful tongues.

There is a curse on the blighted house of the Tyrones, and the origin of the curse lies elsewhere, with existence itself. As Mary says, “None of us can help the things life has done to us.” In tracing down the origin of this curse, O’Neill has returned to the year 1912; but as the play proceeds, he brings us even further into the past. Implicated in the misfortunes of the house are not only the two generations of Tyrones, but a previous generation as well; Edmund’s attempted suicide, before the action begins, is linked to the suicide of Tyrone’s father, and Edmund’s consumption is the disease by which Mary’s father died. Though O’Neill does not mention this, the tainted legacy reaches into the future, too: the playwright’s elder son, Eugene Jr., is also to commit suicide, and his younger son, Shane, is to become, like his grandmother, a narcotics addict. The generations merge, and so does Time. “The past is the present, isn’t it?” cries Mary. “It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

O’Neill, the probing artist, seeks in the past for the origination of guilt and blame; but his characters seek happiness and dreams. All four Tyrones share an intense hatred of the present and its morbid, inescapable reality. All four seek solace from the shocks of life in nostalgic memories, which they reach through different paths. For Mary, the key that turns the lock of the past is morphine. “It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real.” The pain she speaks of is in her crippled hands, the constant reminder of her failed dream to be a concert pianist, but even more it is in her crippled, guilty soul. Mary has betrayed all her hopes and dreams. Even her marriage is a betrayal, since she longed to be a nun, wholly dedicated to her namesake, the Blessed Virgin; but her addiction betrays her religion, family, and home. She cannot pray; she is in a state of despair; and the accusations of her family only aggravate her guilt. Mary is subject to a number of illusions — among them, the belief that she married beneath her — but unlike the derelicts of The Iceman, who dream of the future, she only dreams of the past. Throughout the action, she is trying to escape the pain of the present entirely; and at the end, with the aid of drugs, she has finally returned to the purity, innocence, and hope of her girlhood. Although the title of the play suggests a progress, therefore, the work moves always backwards. The long journey is a journey into the past.

O’Neill suggests this in many ways, partly through ambiguous images of light and dark, sun and mist. The play begins at 8:30 in the morning with a trace of fog in the air, and concludes sometime after midnight, with the house fogbound — the mood changing from sunny cheer over Mary’s apparent recovery to gloomy despair over her new descent into hell. The nighttime scenes occur logically at the end of the day; but subjectively, the night precedes the day, for the play closes on a phantasmagoria of past time. Under the influence of Mary’s drugs — and, to some extent, the alcohol of the men — time evaporates and hovers, and disappears: past, present, future become one. Mary drifts blissfully into illusions under cover of the night, which functions like a shroud against the harsh, daylight reality. And so does that fog that Mary loves: “It hides you from the world and the world from you,” she says. “You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.” Her love for her husband and children neutralized by her terrible sense of guilt, Mary withdraws more and more into herself. And this, in turn, intensifies the unhappiness of the men: “The hardest thing to take,” says Edmund, “is the blank wall she builds around herself. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. . . . It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us.”

Mary, however, is not alone among the “fog people” — the three men also have their reasons for withdrawing into night. Although less shrouded in illusion than Mary, each, nevertheless, haunts the past like a ghost, seeking consolation for a wasted life. For Tyrone, his youth was a period of artistic promise when he had the potential to be a great actor instead of a commercial hack; his favorite memory is of Booth’s praising his Othello, words which he has written down and lost. For Jamie, who might have borne the Tyrone name “in honor and dignity, who showed such brilliant promise,” the present is without possibility; he is now a hopeless ne’er-do-well, pursuing oblivion in drink and the arms of fat whores while mocking his own failure in bathetic, self-hating accents: “My name is Might-Have-Been,” he remarks, quoting from Rossetti, “I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.” For Edmund, who is more like his mother than the others, night and fog are a refuge from the curse of living:

The fog was where I wanted to be. . . . That’s what I wanted — to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. . . . It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

Reality, truth, and life plague him like a disease. Ashamed of being human, he finds existence itself detestable: “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It’s the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and die. Or it’s Pan. You see him and die — that is, inside you — and have to go on living as a ghost.”

“We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it” — like Strindberg, who developed a similar excremental view of humankind, the young Edmund has elected to withdraw from Time by whatever means available, and one of these is alcohol. Edmund, whose taste in poetry is usually execrable, finally quotes a good poet, Baudelaire, on the subject of drunkenness:¹² “Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.” And in order to avoid being enslaved by Time, Edmund contemplates other forms of drunkenness as well. In his fine fourth-act speech, he tells of his experiences at sea, when he discovered Nirvana for a moment, pulling out of Time and dissolving into the infinite:

I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. . . . For a second you see — and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere, for no good reason.

The ecstatic vision of wholeness is only momentary, and Edmund, who “would have been more successful as a sea-gull or a fish,” must once again endure the melancholy fate of living in reality: “As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” In love with death since death is the ultimate escape from Time, the total descent into night and fog.

There is a fifth Tyrone involved in the play — the older Eugene O’Neill. And although he has superimposed his later on his earlier self (Edmund, described as a socialist and atheist, has many religious-existential attitudes), the author and the character are really separable. Edmund wishes to deny Time, but O’Neill has elected to return to it once again — reliving the past and mingling with his ghosts — in order to find the secret and meaning of their suffering. For the playwright has discovered another escape besides alcohol, Nirvana, or death from the terrible chaos of life: the escape of art where chaos is ordered and the meaningless made meaningful. The play itself is an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, the artist’s lifelong resentment disintegrated through complete understanding of the past and total self-honesty.

These qualities dominate the last act, which proceeds through a sequence of confessions and revelations to a harrowing climax. Structurally, the act consists of two long colloquies — the first between Tyrone and Edmund, the second between Edmund and Jamie — followed by a long soliloquy from Mary who, indeed, concludes every act. Tyrone’s confession of failure as an actor finally makes him understandable to Edmund who thereupon forgives him all his faults; and Jamie’s confession of his ambivalent feelings towards his brother, and his half-conscious desire to make him fail too, is the deepest psychological moment in the play.¹³ But the most honest moment of self-revelation occurs at the end of Edmund’s speech, after he has tried to explain the origin of his bitterness and despair. Tyrone, as usual, finds his son’s musings “morbid,” but he has to admit that Edmund has “the makings of a poet.” Edmund replies:

The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. . . . Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

In describing his own limitations as a dramatist, O’Neill here rises to real eloquence; speaking the truth has given him a tongue. Having accepted these limitations, and dedicated himself to a “faithful realism” seen through the lens of the “family kodak,” he has turned into a dramatist of the very first rank.

Mary’s last speech is the triumph of his new dramatic method, poetically evoking all the themes of the play; and it is marvelously prepared for. The men are drunk, sleepy, and exhausted after all the wrangling; the lights are very low; the night and fog very thick. Suddenly, a coup de théâtre. All the bulbs in the front parlor chandelier are illuminated, and the opening bars of a Chopin waltz are haltingly played, “as if an awkward schoolgirl were practising it for the first time.” The men are shocked into consciousness as Mary enters, absentmindedly trailing her wedding dress. She is so completely in the past that even her features have been transfigured: “the uncanny thing is that her face now appears so youthful.” What follows is a scene remarkably like Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, or, as Jamie cruelly suggests, Ophelia’s mad scene — an audaciously theatrical and, at the same time, profoundly moving expression from the depths of a tormented soul.

While the men look on in horror, Mary reenacts the dreams of her youth, oblivious of her surroundings; and her speeches sum up the utter hopelessness of the entire family. Shy and polite, like a young schoolgirl, astonished at her swollen hands and at the elderly gentleman who gently takes the wedding dress from her grasp, Mary is back in the convent, preparing to become a nun. She is looking for something, “something I need terribly,” something that protected her from loneliness and fear: “I can’t have lost it forever. I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.” It is her life, and, even more, her faith. She has had a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who had “smiled and blessed me with her consent.” But the Mother Superior has asked her to live like other girls before deciding to take her vows, and she reluctantly has agreed:

I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time. After I left her, I felt all mixed up, so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her.

But the faith has turned yellow, like her wedding dress, and harm has indeed come. On the threshold of the later horror, Mary grows uneasy; then puts one foot over into the vacancy which is to come: “That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the springtime something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

Her mournful speech, which concludes on the key word of the play, spans the years and breaks them, recapitulating all the blighted hopes, the persistent illusions, the emotional ambivalence, and the sense of imprisonment in the fate of others that the family shares. It leaves the central character enveloped in fog, and the others encased in misery, the night deepening around their shameful secrets. But it signalizes O’Neill’s journey out of the night and into the daylight — into a perception of his true role as a man and an artist — exorcising his ghosts and “facing my dead at last.”

In the plays that follow, O’Neill continues to work the vein he had mined in The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey: examining, through the medium of a faithful realism, the people of the fog and their illusionary lives. And in writing these plays, he stammers no more. In the lilting speech of predominantly Irish-Catholic characters, O’Neill finally discovers a language congenial to him, and he even begins to create a music very much like Synge’s, while his humor bubbles more and more to the surface. Despite effective comic passages, however, O’Neill’s plays remain dark. In A Touch of the Poet, for example, he deals with a nineteenth-century Irish-American tavernkeeper, Con Melody, who deludes himself that he is a heroic Byronic aristocrat, proudly isolated from the Yankee merchants and the democratic mob. Cold and imperious towards his wife but full of dash and style, Melody undergoes a startling change when his illusions are exposed, groveling like a cunning and mean-spirited peasant. Poor but proud before, he will now advance himself through any form of chicanery; but he survives as a spiritually dead man, another of O’Neill’s living corpses.

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill follows Jamie O’Neill, the living corpse of A Long Day’s Journey, into a later stage of his life, after the death of his mother. Whiskey-logged and lacerated by self-hatred, he confesses to an enormous but kindly girl (a virgin pretending to be promiscuous) how he stayed with a whore on the train carrying his mother’s corpse back East. Sleeping all night on the ample bosom of this symbolic mother, like Jesus in the Pietà, he earns from her the forgiveness and peace that the dead mother can no longer provide.

These two works are minor masterpieces; The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey major ones. And in all four plays,¹⁴ O’Neill concentrates a fierce, bullish power into fables of illusion and reality, shot through with flashes of humor, but pervaded by a sense of melancholy over the condition of being human. Like Strindberg, therefore, O’Neill develops from messianic rebellion into existential rebellion, thus demonstrating that beneath his Nietzschean yea-saying and affirmation of life was a profound discontent with the very nature of existence. O’Neill’s experiments with form, his flirtations with various philosophies and religions, his attitudinizing and fake poeticizing represent the means by which he tried to smother this perception; but it would not be smothered, and when he finally found the courage to face it through realistic probes of his own past experience, he discovered the only artistic role that really fit him. In power and insight, O’Neill remains unsurpassed among American dramatists, and, of course, it is doubtful if, without him, there would have been an American drama at all. But it is for his last plays that he will be remembered — those extraordinary dramas of revolt which he pulled out of himself in pain and suffering, a sick and tired man in a shuttered room, unable to bear much light.

¹ In their biography O’Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb quote a psychoanalyst friend of the dramatist who had concluded that O’Neill’s plays “all show an antagonism toward women, which indicated to me that he had a deep antagonism toward his mother. I believe that O’Neill hated his mother and loved his father. He duplicated his father’s profession, the theatre, which is one indication. . . . His antagonism toward his mother carried over to his relationships with women; because his mother had failed him, all women would fail him, and he had to take revenge on them. . . . . ” Like most vestpocket analyses, this one seems very glib, and fails to take into account the obvious incestuous aspects of the plays. O’Neill’s feelings toward both parents were divided between love and hate.

² O’Neill’s frame of mind was often cataclysmic. To Barrett Clark, he wrote: “I am sure that Man has definitely decided to destroy himself, and this seems to me the only truly wise decision he has ever made”; and O’Neill remarked to Lawrence Langner that the atomic bomb was a wonderful invention because it might annihilate the whole human race. See Gelb, O’Neill, pp. 824, 861.

³ This development is perfectly clear in A Long Day’s Journey into Night, where Edmund’s (Eugene’s) conflict with his father partially stems from their divergent religious views: “Then Nietzsche must be right,” shouts Edmund in Act I, “God is dead: of his pity for man hath God died.”

⁴ For a good discussion of O’Neill’s changing religious views, see Edd Winfield Parks, “Eugene O’Neill’s Quest,” Tulane Drama Review, Spring 1960.

⁵ O’Neill’s attempt to synthesize paganism and Christianity, by the way, recalls Ibsen’s concept of the Third Empire in Emperor and Galilean, a play which O’Neill most certainly read. In an unpublished play of his own called Servitude, O’Neill even cites some of Ibsen’s terms when a character announces, “Logos in Pan, Pan in Logos! That is the great secret. . . .” Needless to say, O’Neill — unlike Ibsen — had a very shaky idea about the content of paganism.

⁶ See Chapter III above, p. 93.

⁷ At another time O’Neill remarked, “I suppose if one accepts the song and dance complete of the psychoanalysts, it is perfectly natural that having been brought up around the old conventional theatre, and having identified it with my father, I should rebel and go in a new direction.” Had O’Neill really understood the “song and dance complete of the psychoanalysts,” he might have realized that there was a good deal more of the conventional father in the rebellious son than he cared to admit.

⁸ The Gelbs are very understanding of O’Neill’s lifelong attitudes toward whores, observing that “at sixty-three he was still defending the honor of prostitutes” (O’Neill, p. 127).

⁹ For an analysis of Gorky’s influence on the play, see Helen Muchnic’s article, “The Irrelevancy of Belief: The Iceman and the Lower Depths,” in O’Neill and His Plays, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher.

¹⁰ It is also very close to the theme of Pirandello’s plays, though O’Neill differs from the Italian dramatist in believing that objective reality can still be reached through the human mind.

¹¹ The Gelbs conclude, quite correctly I think, that this exchanging of names indicates a profound death wish on the part of O’Neill. See O’Neill, p. 188.

¹² Edmund, like O’Neill, is much too fond of the Yellow Book poets; even the quotation from Baudelaire is in the overly fruity translation of Arthur Symons. O’Neill’s literary sources and influences are all enumerated in the stage directions to the play which list the books in the Tyrone library: Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Kipling, and Dowson, among many others.

¹³ This particular scene provides us with interesting insights into the origination of many of O’Neill’s early attitudes. It was Jamie, we learn, who “made getting drunk romantic,” and it was Jamie who “made whores fascinating vampires instead of the poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are.” There is even some possibility that O’Neill assumed his brother’s identity when he appeared as the sneering, sardonic hero of the earlier plays.

¹⁴ I have neglected to discuss More Stately Mansions because the play is sadly marred and incomplete. Its tedious soliloquies, mother-wife confusions, and Poet-Businessman conflicts suggest that it is a regression, a throwback to an earlier stage of O’Neill’s development. O’Neill made notes for completely revising the play in 1941, and, failing this, left instructions for it to be destroyed at his death; it would have been no loss if his instructions had been heeded.