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Lacking
significant complexity in design and leading to no important insights
into man’s nature, The Web has
at least the virtue of containing the elements with which O’Neill will
work to create his tragic patterns. However crudely, the design is
shaped. In the other minor works of 1914, the pattern is sketched less
completely.
Recklessness
and Abortion, both set on
a higher social level than The
Web, are in all ways less effective. Recklessness,
together with The Web, was
sent to the producer Holbrook Blinn, who at the Princess Theatre in New
York was offering bills of one-act plays, including some Grand-Guignol,
to what he hoped would be an elite audience. The sophisticates failed to
support the venture and it disappeared before O’Neill’s efforts
could be considered for production.6 Recklessness,
however, brought a minor dividend later in O’Neill’s career. The
script was sold to Hollywood where in 1933 it served as the basis for a
film entitled The Constant Woman with
Leila Hyams and Conrad Nagle.*
Viewed
without reference to O’Neill’s other work, Recklessness
is an outrageous marital melodrama in which a sneering husband,
having discovered that his wife loves his chauffeur, first arranges that
the chauffeur shall be killed in an automobile accident, and then
comfortably accepts as inevitable the suicide of his wife. In the
context of the companion works, O’Neill can be seen to be weaving
another web of ironic fate in which circumstances defeat the thrust for
happiness. It was not worth the effort. In spite of a suggestion that
the wife and chauffeur are trying to find greater freedom and dignity
through love, the mechanics of the plot defeat them without providing
them love with a vestige of significance.
Abortion
is more ambitious. O’Neill worked over the theme in several
versions,7 and created a play worthy at least of rudimentary
concern. The scene is an unnamed eastern university, resembling
Princeton which O’Neill had briefly attended in 1906, and the play
possibly reflects some of his concern over the pregnancy of Kathleen
Jenkins, whom he had married in 1909. It is not, however, an
autobiographical play. Jack Townsend, the star baseball player, has
seduced a poor girl from the “wrong” side of town. Her pregnancy has
necessitated an abortion, and she has died following the operation. This
news is conveyed to Jack on the evening of his greatest triumph on the
baseball field. Faced by the tubercular brother of the dead girl, Jack
admits his guilt. While the undergraduates chant his praises beneath his
dormitory window, he expiates his guilt by suicide.
Jack’s
explanation of his role as seducer is rudimentary, yet with it,
O’Neill appears to attribute the operation of fate to something more
than such social circumstances as crushed Tim and Rose. Drawing a
distinction between his love for his fiancée and for the dead girl,
Jack exclaims,
Do
you suppose it was the same man who loves Evelyn who did this other
thing? No, a thousand times no, such an idea is abhorrent. It was
the male beast who ran gibbering through the forest after its female
thousands of years ago. (154)
Jack’s
primitive chromosomes have left him powerless to guide his destiny,
much as the diseased condition of society in The
Web leads to Rose’s downfall. Jack’s fate, however, is
determined in his blood, in the primitive inheritance that has soiled
his essentially noble nature.
The
conception of male beasts on the Princeton campus, having no
foundation in visible reality, is probably to be attributed to the
reverence for the primitive that O’Neill had found in Jack
London’s writings on the atavistic nature of men and dogs in such
novels as The Call of the Wild and Before
Adam. Yet London’s Buck heeded the call of the wild for more
convincing reasons than did Jack Townsend, and, as if he were
bolstering a not very convincing ethnological thesis, O’Neill
attempts to view his action in a frame of social reference similar to
that which he could have found in Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie. O’Neill, however, is unable to approximate Dreiser’s
massive analysis of social problems and their effect on his
characters’ conduct and fate. His effort is confined to a contrast
between Jack and the dead girl’s brother, Joe Murray, who comes
menacingly from the slums to confront Jack with his guilt. The brother
is whining and weak; that he has tuberculosis indicates that he is
doomed. His contrast with the golden boy is sharp, but O’Neill
intended to show that both are bound for the same depressing destiny.
The comparison made, however, O’Neill drops it. He does not approach
social protest, nor does he suggest any remedy for the inequities of
class. In the end, withdrawing from any large view of the social
opposition he has sketched, O’Neill makes Jack’s suicide a matter
of merely private expiation.
The
inward turn of the final moments is reminiscent of The
Web. Jack’s death, like Rose’s blind silence, is an acquiescence
to fate. It differs only in that it is not preceded by the confessional
moment of understanding. Lacking a partner to serve as priest, Jack’s
confession becomes a mere acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and his pain,
such as it is, is unalleviated by understanding. With a certain courage
that lifts the play slightly from the merely pathetic, Jack goes alone
to his death. Much later, Lavinia in Mourning
Becomes Electra will move into the Mannon house to face her dead.
Jack takes the first tentative step in that lonely direction.
*
According to the New York Times, February
12, 1933, Recklessness was the
basis of a film first titled Auction
in Souls. In a letter to Robert Sisk, dated July 4, 1932, O’Neill
reported that he received $5000 for the rights to the play. To Sisk in
March, 1933, he refers to The
Constant Woman, noting that this title is not so senseless as the other.
The film was produced by World Wide and released in May, 1933.
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