The new maturity was, in fact, at hand, but one more debt remained to be paid to the theory and practice of the Art Theatre. Not that Days Without End was written with Macgowan’s principles in mind. By 1933, when he sent the script to Langner, he had already turned toward other subjects and was writing in a substantially different style, which, although it continued bold and direct, rooted out any obvious experimentation. Nevertheless, Days Without End is something of a throwback to the earlier experimental manner, and like the others, uses expressionistic techniques to explore the nature of man’s quest for God. Although the question is important, it is impossible to determine whether O’Neill wrote his series of theological dramas because of some inner quest of his own, or whether he was led to these themes because the departure from realism showed him that they were there to be explored. Certainly all of his biographers make much of his being a renegade Catholic, and there can be little doubt that the Hound of Heaven pursued him at many times during his life. From the beginning, in his writing, there is revealed a sense of what George Herbert in The Collar termed “repining restlessness,” in O’Neill’s attempt to find for his heroes a point of faith in which they may rest. The faith rarely has significant ethical necessities. It is bred, rather, of the weariness of which Herbert spoke—the fatigue men feel far from their source, as they seek to return to what has created them. O’Neill’s departure from the Catholic faith caused some of his personal restlessness, but he had left the Church early, as a boy, and thereafter, found in the sea something of the qualities he recognized as God. In Dynamo, Reuben speaks of the life in the sea, as he leans wearily against Mrs. Fife’s shoulder:

Die! I tell you that our blood plasm is the same right now as the sea was when life came out of it? We’ve got the sea in our blood still! It’s what makes our hearts live! And it’s the sea rising up in clouds, falling on the earth in rain, made that river that drives the turbines that drive Dynamo! The sea makes her heart beat, too! (477)

The sea was no surrogate faith, and while he wrote of it, O’Neill’s plays were simple and direct and lyric. With the new style, the presentation is no longer of men guarded in spite of themselves by the Sea-Mother. The techniques of expressionism demanded fuller awareness from his heroes; the plays of the experimental period show men roused to a greater consciousness of loss. The quest motif enters and with it emerges the agony of the search, the despair and the queer, torturous naming of a variety of manifestations of divinity to which the questers might belong. But the specifically religious themes come only as his theatrical style moves toward expressionism. For O’Neill, once he had gone “behind life,” it was essential to find the life source.

Inevitably, the Catholic faith which he had known as a boy was one to be explored, but it is important to remember that shortly before he began serious work on Days Without End, he was sketching the autobiographical Sea-Mother’s Son. Both the sea and Catholicism were, at the end of the 1920’s, possible points of return. Both plays were filled with directly autobiographical material, and mark the first steps beyond the quasi-narcissism of the self-portraits toward direct autobiography. What perhaps conditioned his completion of Days Without End rather than Sea-Mother’s Son was, first, that he had written Dynamo, to which Days Without End was an intended sequel, and second, that he had found Carlotta Monterey.

O’Neill’s third marriage was for him a haven, embodying much of the relationship he had hoped for and tried to describe in so early a work as Servitude and more fully in Welded. The inscriptions of his plays, together with the letters to his wife that have been published in the volume Inscriptions, set forth this idealism fully. There, it is clear, that O’Neill tried many times to fulfill her request to write a poem. His inevitable theme was the perfection of their love and his own sense of fulfillment in it. Serena Royle, who played Elsa in the Guild production of Days Without End, felt that the play was O’Neill’s poem to Carlotta.¹² Philip Moeller noted that both husband and wife acknowledged the play to be more hers than his, and that Carlotta hoped that someday O’Neill would return to the Catholic faith.¹³ At the same time, however, as O’Neill’s relationship with Carlotta deepened, he found it increasingly necessary to turn away from the world, toward himself and her for any real emotional and spiritual sustenance. The divorce from Agnes O’Neill was not a simple process, and O’Neill had become news. He fled with Carlotta and hid from the world until they could be married. He received his mail through intermediaries and refused to return to the United States. They set out on a world tour, which ended in a debacle in Shanghai when the press tracked him down and reported wild stories of his death. Not until July, 1929, when he finally was free to marry Carlotta, could he come safely from hiding, and even in the years thereafter he proved increasingly reclusive. At this stage in his life, as he moved into his forties, the tendency to introspection which he had always displayed dominated his behavior. All he now needed as a human being was his own life, peculiarly enclosed within the protective walls of his third marriage. He was not, at this juncture, far from autobiography. Days Without End takes an important autobiographical step at the same time as it attempts to hymn the marriage in which he found peace.*

It did not begin that way. In its earliest sketches, it was a close companion piece to Dynamo, duplicating in its narrative the action of a man for whom God is dead. O’Neill wrote,

Mother worship, repressed and turned morbid, ends by becoming Death-love and longing—thus it is statue of Virgin and child, identification of mother and Elsa with Her, himself with child, longing for reunion with them through Mother Goddess than really drives him to suicide before statue of Virgin—while at the same time it is his old resentment against mother, against Elsa as mother substitute (infidelity) that keeps him from giving in to Catholicism— longing, confession. . . .¹⁴

Just as Reuben Light was alienated from his mother and sought in Ada and in Mrs. Fife substitutes which finally came to fulfillment in his self-sacrifice to the dynamo, so the hero of the sequel was to follow a similar course to his death, sacrificing himself to the Virgin in whom Mother and Wife become divinity. Henry Adams had taken the dynamo as a modern symbol paralleling the symbol of the Virgin in medieval life. Operating within the frame of reference that Adams provided, but shaping his action so that the new play’s meaning would be closely related to that of Dynamo, it is probable that the hero’s sacrifice would have provided a testimony similar to that provided by Reuben’s death: to the death of God in modern society, but also more positively to the hero’s reunion with God the Mother embodied in the statue of the Virgin. Probably, as was the case with Dynamo, Days Without End would have confounded itself between negative and positive implications.

The external forces operating on O’Neill’s creation of the play perhaps made such an artificial, somewhat sterile conclusion impossible. The way to end the work remained a problem to the last. Through eight draft versions, the work was altered and no satisfactory conclusion reached. The heroine, Elsa, lived and died as did the hero, John Loving, who in the fifth draft of the play was split into two characters, John and his demonic alter ego, Loving. No other play O’Neill wrote proceeded with such uncertainty or remained in the final version so much a matter of trial and error. Even the title changed wildly from moment to moment, shifting from Without Endings of Days to Without Ending of Days, Endings of Days, Ending of Days and On to Hercules before O’Neill settled on Days Without End, calling to mind the phrase “World without End” from the Book of Common Prayer. The final title maintains an ambiguity in the pun: “Without End” means without ultimate spiritual goal, “endless” and “eternal.” The alternative title, On to Hercules, was intended to suggest man as an eternal and heroic quester for a goal that was not to be found. “Days Without End” implies that a goal may exist, but the point is not made with conviction in the title nor in the play. Although O’Neill finally saves both John and Elsa and their marriage, and exorcises the doppelganger, Loving, thus restoring John to his lost faith, the conclusion is without the force of truth.

That the ending remained unsatisfactory is perhaps because O’Neill did not function as a dramatist at all in the scenes leading to that point. The problem of how to end the play, of finding what meaning he really meant, obscured the fact that the ending arises from nothing and is not the climax of any significant development of character or narrative. Based on what precedes it, any conclusion would inevitably have been fully as arbitrary.

In developing the play, O’Neill transferred to his hero much of the artistic as well as the spiritual indecision which he felt at the time of its writing. No play of O’Neill’s is so lacking in action, so wasteful in construction, so filled with needless changes of scene and undeveloped and uninteresting characters. The first act in John Loving’s office and the second in his apartment do nothing but present straight exposition. The dialogue among John and Loving and the supernumerary partner, Eliot, and finally Father Baird is entirely devoted to what John has been in the past. The second act repeats the process for John’s wife, Elsa, and her friend Lucy who has been John’s mistress. The expository progression is carried on into the first scene of the third act, up to the point where Elsa belatedly realizes from John’s description of the novel he is writing that the book is her husband’s thinly disguised autobiography and that he has been unfaithful to her. When she walks from the house, the first—almost the play’s only—significant action is taken. By Act III, scene ii, however, John is again discussing his spiritual struggle in the guise of telling the plot for his novel. In short, very nearly three-quarters of the play is consumed with a discussion of the spiritual condition of the hero and none of it is dramatized until John, in remorse that he has been the cause of his wife’s crucial illness, turns to the Church and leaps toward faith. That it is not much of a leap is to be explained by the lack of life in the springboard.

John Mason Brown in reviewing the play in production noted that all the characters except John are “feeders,” brought on stage to provide an opportunity¹⁵ for some ‘dialogue to occur, but having no dramatic function. Certainly the charge is just, as it relates to Eliot, the partner, Stillwell, the doctor, the maid, the nurse and John’s inamorata, Lucy. Father Baird, John’s uncle, has somewhat more to do as John’s early Catholic mentor, but he plays no finally significant part in John’s decision. The play’s only action, setting aside a brief encounter between John and Elsa—who thereafter is hors de combat in a condition of delirium—comes at the end of Act III. In essence, the play is a four-act monologue by a man at a crisis of religious doubt. To make it possible for the theatre, O’Neill employs two tricks—splitting his character into a Jekyll and Hyde duality so that Faustian John and Mephistophelian Loving can debate the spiritual issue; and by having John write the autobiographical novel whose plot he narrates endlessly. If the contents of the novel sound a little like O’Neill’s own rough notes for his plays, the point may be made that this is what they essentially are—character and situations for a play unwritten. O’Neill, dropping back to older theatrical times when the acts of plays were given titles, calls Acts I to III “Plot for a Novel,” remembering perhaps the novelistic ambitions of Strange Interlude. Yet it seems clear that the real drama was O’Neill’s attempt to write the play, a problem he transferred without much change or objectification to his hero.

The vapid dramaturgy is testimony that the play was written without real inspiration, and the details bear this out. The script is a compendium of ideas which derive from earlier plays. The questing hero, once again, is a modified self-portrait. The crude exposition of John’s career   (520) recalls a similar scene at the opening of The First Man. (554) Elsa in words clearly derived from Nina Leeds, describes John as her child, father, husband and lover, (518) and Nina is again recalled by Lucy’s description of the overly deliberate way she seduced John which has some of the clinical tone of Nina’s proposition to Darrell: “And I picked out this man—yes, deliberately! It was all deliberate and crazy! And I had to do all the seducing. . . .“ (521) Elsa, although she has been married before, demands perfection of her marriage and particularly requires that her husband be faithful to her in words that recall Emma Crosby in Diff’rent: “I know he never had a single affair in his life before he met me. . . . I wouldn’t have believed it of another man in the world, but with John I felt it was absolutely true to what I knew he was like inside him . . . It was what made me love him, more than anything else—the feeling that he would be mine, only mine, that I wouldn’t have to share him even with the past.” (522) Her ideal of marriage is virtually identical with that set forth in Welded:

He said no matter if every other marriage on earth were rotten and a lie, our love could make ours into a true sacrament—sacrament was the word he used—a sacrament of faith in which each of us would find the completest self-expression in making our union a beautiful thing. . . . You see, all this was what I had longed to hear the man I loved say about the spiritual depth of his love for me . . . And I think we’ve lived up to that ideal ever since. I hope I have. I know he has. It was his creation, you see. (523)

Elsa’s miraculous resurrection from the brink of death weakly echoes the return of Miriam from the grave in Lazarus Laughed, just as the duality of John and Loving brings to mind the opposition between Dion and Brown and the poet and nay-sayer who have occupied many of O’Neill’s stages. Toward the end of the play, the concept of a controlling fate, reminiscent of the fate of the Mannons in Mourning Becomes Electra emerges, (560) and the laughter of Lazarus is dragged in in such language as “Life laughs with God’s love again! Life laughs with love!” (567)—words that provide O’Neill with a sufficient rhetorical thrust for his curtain line.

Days Without End, written without real craftsmanship or imagination, thematically arbitrary, if not confused, rephrasing old concepts and forcing them into the Catholic mold is the end of a line. It is true that a sort of life moves occasionally in the play and, when it does, the germ of new works can, in retrospect, be perceived. For example, at one point, John describes a moment of conflict in his novel in these words:

That is, he saw clearly that this situation was the climax of a long death struggle between his wife and him. The woman with him counted only as a means. He saw that underneath all his hypocritical pretense he really hated love. He wanted to deliver himself from its power and be free again. He wanted to kill it! (538)

It is a long journey from this to Hickey’s monologue in The Iceman Cometh and to the portrait of Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet, but the idea is there, and it is new to O’Neill. Similarly, at the beginning of Act III, scene ii, as John talks about the Depression period in America, he does so in words that anticipate the central theme of the historical cycle, whose shape is even then coming to mind: “(Americans) explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead—and stinking!” (542) But such moments are few and the play remains without life. It was, perhaps, O’Neill’s most deserved failure,** and although it raised critical controversy especially as to O’Neill’s apparent embracement of Catholicism, the commentary amounted finally to little. It was not so much a question of spiritual salvation that mattered. The most profound question the play raises is one of the salvation of O’Neill’s artistry which with this work seemed deeply in trouble.