The romantic
qualities of the play were not lost on the audiences. Burns Mantle
commented that the play “is not for the ‘Anna Christie’ branch
of the Eugene O’Neill alumni. It is rather for ‘The Emperor
Jones,’—’Where the Cross Is Made’ group. It is such a poetic
romance as any true dreamer might write for the pleasure of writing
it, and with little thought of selling it to the theatre.”9
O’Neill’s
program note for the play’s production stresses the romanticism
inherent in the story:
The idea
of writing The Fountain came
originally from my interest in the recurrence in folk-lore of the
beautiful legend of a healing spring of eternal youth. The play is
only incidentally concerned with the Era of Discovery in America. It
has sought merely to express the urging spirit of the period without
pretending to any too-educational accuracy in the matter of dates
and facts in general. The characters, with the exception of
Columbus, are fictitious. Juan Ponce de Leon, in so far as I have
been able to make him a human being, is wholly imaginary. I have
simply filled in the bare outline of his career, as briefly reported
in the Who’s Who of the histories, with a conception of what could
have been the truth behind his “life-sketch” if lie had been the
man it was romantically—and religiously—moving to me to believe
he might have been! Therefore, I wish to take solemn oath right here
and now, that The Fountain is
not morbid realism.*
Not only in its
romantic re-telling of history and in its fluidity of form but also in
its language, the play attempted to ally itself with the new
theatrical movement. Both Magowan and Cheney had asked for a poetic
drama. Macgowan, more specifically, had expressed his dislike of
Shakespearean imitations in dead iambic pentameter, and he had felt it
sufficient if a dramatist were to achieve the rhythmic prose of Synge
or of O’Neill in The Emperor
Jones.11 Nevertheless, O’Neill in the early drafts of
The Fountain framed the
dialogue in language close to blank verse, a loosely cadenced iambic
measure, which he later restructured as prose. His aim, as he stated
it to George Jean Nathan, was “to gain a naturalistic effect of the
quality of the people and speech of those times . . . with little care
for original poetic beauty save in the few instances where that is
called for.”12 The comment is a little defensive, for
many viewers took the play sharply to task for its language.13 O’Neill’s
statement that he was creating a “naturalistic” language,
realistically appropriate to his historical figures is, in the face of
his evident striving for poetic effect, unconvincing. Rather, it
appears that he sought through the verse to move “behind life,”
releasing in the play the power of poetry to present inner reality by
imagery and rhythm. To a limited extent, the original verse patterns
can be reapproximated from the prose text.
Pentameter ghosts
haunt such speeches as Maria’s:
If you
are still my friend you will not wish it.
It was my final penance that you should know.
And, having told you, I am free, for my heart is dead.
There is only my soul left that knows the love of God.
Which blesses and does not torture. Farewell once more, Juan. (381)
Without reliable
evidence as to the extent of O’Neill’s revisions of the verse when
he printed it as prose, the fact is clear that had he left the
dialogue in verse form, what he would have written would have been
only a somewhat heightened poetic prose, similar to that of Lazarus
Laughed which could serve him as the idiom of his questing central
character.
The potential gain
of such an idiom was the opportunity to speak of God and of man’s
quest for God directly in a way his realistic plays had not permitted.
In The Fountain, O’Neill
writes for the first time of the Catholic faith from which he had
turned in early manhood. Yet it is probably not true to say as the
Gelbs do that here “O’Neill tried, for the first time on a large
scale, to dramatize his private and never-ending struggle with his
Catholic conscience.”14 Catholic faith is treated in this
play as a part of the historical background. Luis’s final statement
that the dead hero “lives in God” is appropriate to Luis’s
character, not to any generally held Catholic position. Juan’s sense
as he dies is that he will be “resolved into the thousand moods of
beauty that make up happiness.” In dying he has re-entered the
Fountain of Eternity, which is the Fountain of eternal youth. God in
this play is a force of eternal nature, not the Catholic deity.
Together with the image of man as a seeker who desires to be possessed
by the eternal life forces that move around and through him, this view
of God has characterized all of O’Neill’s religious thinking from
his first plays forward. The importance of The
Fountain and its poetry is that O’Neill can now deal explicitly
with the thought that had been implicit in so many of his dramas up to
1921.
In his research for
the play, among the books Macgowan had provided for him, he read
Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The
anthropological concerns which had marked many of his earlier works,
including The Emperor Jones and
the recently completed The
First
Man,
and which were to reappear in The
Hairy Ape written later in the same year, were perhaps confirmed
and strengthened by Frazer’s work, for Juan Ponce de Leon follows
the route taken by many of O’Neill’s earlier heroes, back to his
origins in a natural, life-giving source.
In the beginning,
however, Juan is not the questing poet. He bears a strong resemblance
to Andrew Mayo, whose journey to foreign lands is characterized by a
materialistic desire for possession, but who remains blind to the
mystery of the exotic worlds about him. He is introduced as a man of
war, speaking war-mongering slogans, and, bent on an expedition of
plunder with Columbus, he lives with “disciplined ability and
confident self-mastery.” Only when his love for Beatriz leads him to
seek the source of life in the eternal spring does he change. Then,
predictably, he becomes O’Neill’s poetic hero, questing God. The
change has been slightly anticipated by a stage direction when Juan is
introduced in the first scene. O’Neill calls him “a
romantic dreamer governed by the ambitious thinker in him.” O’Neill
has combined in Juan the opposites that he first set forth as Robert
and Andrew Mayo.
The story of The
Fountain is characteristic. The hero, capable of sensitive and
idealistic vision, is transformed by his materialism into an enfeebled
monster, moving soullessly through a corrupt society, far from his
natural world. In The Fountain, however,
following his “romantic and religious” inclinations, O’Neill
reverses
the usual course of his narrative—which would normally end with the
hero’s destruction—and causes the dreamer to emerge from the man
of iron, and, in death, to triumph. It is an important change, and it
comes about because through the demands of the expressionist theatre
he is empowered, if not forced, to be explicit about the nature of the
God with which he had earlier dealt only by implication. Now, with the
symbol of God on the stage in the vision of the Fountain of Youth,
O’Neill must show God not as implacable, revengeful or, for that
matter, even aware of man. God is,
as Nature is, and man need only recognize his presence to be caught up in the
force of life at its most profound. Once the force is known, once the
vision is made real, man is in harmony with his world.
The harmony is
expressed in the play at the outset by Don Luis’s translation of a
Moorish song:
There is in some far
country of the East—Cathay, Cipango, who knows—a spot that Nature
has set apart from men and blessed with peace. It is a sacred grove
where all things live in the old harmony they knew before men came.
Beauty resides there and is articulate. Each sound is music, and every
sight a vision. (386)
The image of the old
harmony, born of sacred, primordial peace is a vision of Eden, of
Paradise, even, in the context of this play, of America. Juan at the
outset rejects the vision, crying “There is no profit in staking
life for dreams”; yet out of his despair in failing to gain riches
in the New World, there is born in him a dream of something other than
golden cities, and he comes at last to a quest for the essence of the
vision of the song.
As Juan moves into
the forests to seek the fountain, O’Neill returns to the technical
scenic devices of The Emperor
Jones. The walls of the forest are close in around the spring, and
Juan, wounded and alone, speaks as Brutus Jones had done, in
soliloquy, calling for a vision of “what I am that I should have
lived and died!” The vision comes, a masked figure of a woman who is
Death, followed by a second vision of his beloved, Beatriz, who is
“the personified spirit of the fountain” and who sings its song:
Life is a fountain
Forever leaping
Upward to catch the
golden sunlight
Upward to reach the
azure heaven
Failing, falling,
Ever returning,
To kiss the earth
that the flower may live. (439)
Other visions come:
a Chinese poet and the Moorish minstrel who sang the tale of the
sacred grove. Juan curses them because he feels they have damned him.
Yet, as the phantoms disappear, he calls out to them, “Have you no
vision for the graspers of the earth?” The vision he is granted is
one of all the faiths of the earth passing into the fountain. Beatriz
reappears, this time masked as an aged crone. He realizes that age and
youth are the same “rhythm of eternal life,” and that death is
nothing. The figure of Death unmasks, and becomes Beatriz, soaring
upward in the heart of the fountain which he now senses is “That
from which all life springs and to which it must
return—God! Are all dreams of you but one dream?” (441)
The final scene of
the play, in which Juan discovers himself reborn in his nephew who
loves the young Beatriz, daughter of Juan’s former mistress, is a
somewhat too literal proof of the capacity of life to renew itself,
but it is enough to confirm the truth of his vision to Juan. He dies
crying, “One must accept, absorb, give back, become oneself a
symbol.” As he dies, his reincarnated self sings the song of the
fountain.
The ecstatic rush of
feeling at the end of the play was unquestionably the kind of
outpouring that those who wrote of the need for spirituality in the
theatre cherished. Yet, although O’Neill was excited as he wrote,
neither he nor his critics liked it much when it appeared on the
stage** O’Neill classed The
Fountain with Gold and The First Man as “too painfully bungled in their present form to
be worth producing at all.”15
Notably in each of
the “bungled” plays, production was long deferred, and O’Neill
was forced to accept compromises in casting and staging. While
waiting, he wrote other plays that were more immediately important to
him. In September, 1925, more than four years after he had written The
Fountain, and after it had made the rounds of several producers,
including Arthur Hopkins and the Theatre Guild, he complained to
Macgowan that the work which the Experimental Theatre was putting in
on the production of The
Fountain was interfering with the production of The
Great God Brown. “Brown,” he wrote, “needs much more careful
casting, more time, and more careful preparation than ‘The
Fountain.’ To me it is worth a dozen Fountains.”
Clearly, by the time The
Fountain appeared on stage, O’Neill had no further interest in
it. The style was forced, the romantic theatricality of little
interest, and the play’s reliance on elaborate stage devices and
expensive production created a mechanical core to the fervor that
falsifies the lyric impulse. Moreover, the relatively explicit
analysis of the nature of God may have seemed in the retrospect of
four years less effective than the treatment of the theology of the
“graspers of the earth” in
Desire
Under the Elms, which had been written and produced in 1924.
He may also have felt
that in giving his tragic fable a new, positive ending, he had lost the
essential drama of suffering that had marked such early successes as Beyond
the Horizon, The Emperor Jones and certain of the Glencairn plays. Juan’s story, so long as he persists in an
essentially false pursuit for materialistic gain, is not dramatic. In
the first scenes of the play, he is capricious, mercurial,
antagonistic to most of his fellows, but all conflict in which he is
involved is based on superficies of character, especially his “Spanish”
hot-headedness. Although he occupies the center of attention, he does
nothing.*** All occasions when he seems to act, as in the scenes
displaying his hostility to Columbus and, later, to the nobility and
the natives of the New World, are contrived. This is not to say that
there are not scenes of interest****; nevertheless, they do not dramatize
Juan as a religious quester. Commenting on the failure of the play,
O’Neill said that he thought the critics were right in saying that
it had no action.10 The judgment, at least of the first eight
scenes of the play, is valid. Juan’s true action begins only when the
dreamer in him overthrows the “ambitious thinker,” when, two-thirds
through the play, Juan “stakes his life for a dream” and follows
what has before seemed to him only a cursed life-lie. Then, the dream of
golden cities becomes a vision of God, and, significantly, at this
point, the lyric qualities of the dialogue begin to justify their
presence and become more like poetry and less an awkward attempt to
recreate the “naturalistic speech” of the people of times past.
*
Perhaps an impulse that led to the writing of The
Fountain came from a play by George Cram Cook entitled The Spring. It was produced by the Provincetown Players in January,
1921, the same season as The
Emperor Jones, shortly before O’Neill began to write The Fountain. Cook’s play was one in which he took pride, and its
failure in the aftermath of the success of The
Emperor Jones led him to leave his theatre in bitterness. The
Spring is a story of modern and primitive times, dealing with an
Indian legend of reincarnation and of a magical spring in which a vision
of the unity of all souls, all nature can be seen. The vision leads its
holder toward new horizons: “Do you know what this means? It means
that you and I, before we die, may turn the thought of the world as
sharply as Darwin did—but inward. This is a voyage greater than that
of Columbus!—for what we seek is—the unknown hemisphere of the
soul—You and I are going to set sail into ourselves; for there, in the
ocean of the unconscious, is the shore of our new world.”10
The resemblance between O’Neill’s and Cook’s themes is marked and
the use of American Indian subject matter suggests that O’Neill may
have been led to the story of Ponce de Leon by Cook’s work. In detail,
however, there is little resemblance.
** The similarity
between the expression of religious ecstasy at the end of The
Fountain to passages at the end of Welded
and All God’s Chillun Got
Wings is not coincidental. Each represents an attempt by O’Neill
to shape the dramatic action so that it ends on a moment of
significant religious experience.
*** At one point, Juan
is so slightly involved that O’Neill writes a desperate stage
direction:
“Juan
paces back and forth, humming to himself,”
(378) apparently on the
theory that the character has to look busy even if he is not.
**** Scene ii on Columbus’s flagship is the first indication of
O’Neill’s power as a historical dramatist. He has re-created the
moodiness and the tensions of the voyage with sensitivity, and has
caught in his sketch of Columbus something of the almost messianic
quality of the man.
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