AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN HENRY RALEIGH

dear JHR-­

I’m writing in public, as it were, to ask you some public questions. First about your review of my book, Ritual and Pathos--the Theater of O’Neill, and then, further along the same path, about the nature of O’Neill criticism generally.

About your review in American Literature (March 1977, p. 132), how could a man of your fine understanding--it grieves me to ask this--have understood me so crudely? Was it a case of careless reading or, as I suspect, an inner resistance to what I was saying?

You see, you failed to get what I was saying straight. In fact, you failed to get my main point at all, which is perhaps why you casually disparaged the book as “traversing some familiar territory,” as being another of those “studies of influences,” even though from an angle of its own.

My main point, or thesis if you like, is not that the “ritual elements in O’Neill were what constituted his power.” That’s only part of my thesis, and to make it out to be the whole thing is to make the whole thing seem of little consequence. After all, even if ritual elements were the source of O’Neill’s power--or “much of O’Neill’s power,” as you rather grudgingly admit--so what? Power of what kind, toward what end? Unless that larger concern is dealt with, the point about ritual is of limited value and easily dismissed as “trying to explain too much with too little.”

But the book does deal with that larger concern. My thesis goes beyond ritual, and also beyond pathos, to the religious experience O’Neill meant his plays to give audiences in the theater. His power, especially when he was complete master of it, was the power to evoke religious emotions. And ritual was the chief technical means of his mastery. I said it clearly and often enough. How could you fail to take it in?

If you had taken it in, you would also have taken in my point about The Iceman being a reworking of Lazarus. You would have seen that I did come to terms with the fundamental disparity between the two plays. Precisely because Lazarus was “a failure of dialogue,” as you put it, O’Neill cast the same materials in a more contemporary idiom. The Iceman was to be sure a triumph of dialogue, but by the same token it was a triumph of the ritual elements that, however unwieldy in Lazarus, were necessary for providing a celebratory experience in the theater. And Nietzsche did have something to do with that, though Buddha didn’t. I never said or implied that Buddha did.

Further, if you had taken in my main point, you would probably have understood better what I meant by tragic pathos. I defined it more than once as a feeling of suffering on the part of the audience, not mere pity for suffering. And I described the tragic effect more than once as a communal release of that feeling, i.e., as a religious sharing of suffering that was also an overcoming. Long Day’s Journey, depending on the production, evokes such a feeling of suffering, and it does this despite its comic moments. Or it does this partly by way of its comic moments, which help set up the tragic effect.

Other aspects of your review call for rebuttal, but let me just ask you again--how could you understand me so crudely? Strange to say, I don’t think the answer lies with you alone. I think it lies with O’Neill scholars, with American drama and literature scholars all over the place, and with the nature of O’Neill criticism generally. I think it lies with the literary prejudices that have been dominant in the country since the thirties, if not before--prejudices that confine O’Neill’s achievement to the bounds of realism with its social emphasis.