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How
to see clearly the struggle within the work requires a methodology that,
first of all, advances structure over subject matter. O’Neill’s
literary pruning colludes with autobiography to obscure full-scale view of
his remarkable accomplishments. As his career grew in stature, O’Neill
concerned himself much more with his reputation and legacy. He did not
begin with such vigilance as a fledgling playwright. His start shows a
cavalier attitude epitomized by his friend Terry Carlin’s legendary
response to the query from the Provincetown Players: “Mr. O’Neill’s
got a whole trunk full of plays” (Glaspell 195). O’Neill evidently
later wanted to hide much in that trunk from the light of day. He
destroyed many manuscripts of unfinished plays and tried to suppress
publication of plays he didn’t like or didn’t feel represented his
best work. Even “Anna Christie,”1
his second Pulitzer Prize winner, became in his own mind a play he
detested, and he later refused to publish it in an edition of his selected
works. O’Neill published fewer and fewer plays as he matured, but he
wrote longer and longer works and with greater discipline than in his
early career. Preparing Strange
Interlude in 1927, he confided to Kenneth Macgowan that his work had
become much deeper and that he had to make sure that there was more in it
than in earlier efforts (SL 209). During the thirties, O’Neill sheltered
himself with his elaborate cycle plays on American history. That project
ballooned from as few as three plays to as many as eleven, yet O’Neill
completed only one, A Touch of the
Poet (1939). More Stately
Mansions, the following play in the cycle, survived in draft form only
because O’Neill inadvertently placed it among his completed works
instead of destroying it along with drafts of other unfinished works. The
loss of these manuscripts fosters an illusion of Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, his most autobiographical play, as the
summation of his career. O’Neill did not intend for that play to be
published until twenty-five years after his death and he stipulated that
it should never be produced. When Carlotta Monterey, his literary executor
and widow, violated this wish and allowed Yale University Press to publish
the manuscript and the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden to produce the
play only three years after O’Neill’s death, the illusion transformed
into a powerful myth and legend.
Similarly,
a series of dramatic self-portraits throughout O’Neill’s works also
leads inevitably to Long Day’s Journey Into Night and the autobiographical figure of
Edmund Tyrone. Stage directions in early plays such as Bread and Butter (1914), Servitude
(1914), Beyond the Horizon (1918),
and The Straw (1919) physically
describe male protagonists very much like the author. The description of
novelist David Royleston in Servitude
represents features found in all of O’Neill’s fictional artists: “a
tall, slender, dark-haired man of thirty-five with large handsome
features, a strong, ironical mouth half-hidden by a black mustache, and
keenly-intelligent dark eyes” (CP1 237). Judging from photographs of
O’Neill as a young man, he created these characters by looking at
himself in a mirror. Obviously, Edmund Tyrone is Eugene O’Neill. When I
teach O’Neill in class, I begin with Long
Day’s Journey Into Night in order to impart expeditiously (and
dramatically) important biographical information about the playwright.
This entertaining and economical strategy sets up convenient readings,
too, for all the preceding plays. All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923), a play about a black man named
Jim who marries a white woman named Ella, becomes a play about
O’Neill’s parents’ (James and Ella) unfortunate marriage of opposite
sensibilities. Desire Under the Elms
(1924), a play which O’Neill said that he had dreamed one night, becomes
a play mourning the recent death of his mother. Strange
Interlude dramatizes the guilt surrounding O’Neill’s crumbling
marriage and the slick motto “Be happy” provides license for O’Neill
to abandon his second wife, Agnes Boulton, and their children and to
escape to Europe with Carlotta Monterey. Ah,
Wilderness! (1933) is a fantasy for the family the author wished that
he had had, and Long Day’s Journey
Into Night shows the authentic picture of family life. Quite simply,
this practice blurs the distinction between life and
art. Seeing the plays through the author’s life blinds the
critical eye to the technical merits of the writing and legitimates
personal experience as artistic truth.
O’Neill,
who did lead a fascinating life, emerges in his self-portraits as a
tortured artist. His dedication of Long
Day’s Journey Into Night to his third wife, Carlotta, offers
evidence that this play finally expiated his demons: “Dearest: I give
you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and
blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating
happiness (their 12th wedding anniversary). But you will understand. 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” (CP3 714). What further proof of this great
play as emotional and artistic breakthrough could one desire beyond a
statement from the author? The Gelb biography paints an incredibly
romantic portrait of the suffering artist who finally frees himself by
confronting his past: “He worked every morning, many afternoons, and
sometimes evenings as well. Often he wept as he wrote. He slept badly, and
occasionally in the night he rose from the converted Chinese opium couch
that served as his bed to go to his wife’s room and talk of the play and
of his anguish” (6). The effect of all this is to see O’Neill’s
entire career leading naturally up to this particular effort. The
inescapable conclusion, then, is to spin a rich narrative that culminates
in the Great American Play.
More
importantly, the focus upon the subject matter (autobiography) deflects
attention away from the necessary artistic skill to write the play.
Granted, O’Neill is an autobiographical writer, perhaps more than any
other. But the force of seeing the plays through the prism of his life
focuses interpretation in one direction at the expense of other
possibilities. You can’t see the paint and the picture at the same time.
O’Neill’s paint includes dramatic form, use of language, the creation
of roles for actors, and manipulations of scenic space and time.
Collectively, these elements make up the dramatic illusion. Studied
independently, they highlight the distinguishing characteristics and
artistic techniques of O’Neill’s dramaturgy. The portrait that emerges
is of an accomplished playwright, who also happens to have been a
compelling and complicated man.
Emphasis
upon dramatic technique maintains a focus upon the surface of the text as
opposed to the depth of the representation within the text. The struggle
of characters within the plays reflects the analogous struggles of the
writer to compose the drama. In Beyond
the Horizon, for example, Robert Mayo longs to escape from his farm
and to see what’s on the other side of the hills. That desire set
against the stultifying atmosphere and frustration of daily toil creates
tension in the play. Edmund Tyrone, in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, speaks of fleeting moments of
seeing the meaning of life before an unseen hand drops a veil. While
critics have identified transcendent desire in these characters and
others, this same struggle is evident in the writing of the plays, too. At
the outset of his playwriting career, immediately after the early success
of Beyond the Horizon, which won him his first Pulitzer Prize at the
age of 32, O’Neill wrote a letter to critic George Jean Nathan thanking
him for his kind words of support. O’Neill explicitly refused to think
of himself as more than a “beginner, with prospects.” He went on to
elaborate his artistic credo: “And in this faith I live: That if I have
the ‘guts’ to ignore the megaphone men and what goes with them, to
follow the dream and live for that alone, then my real significant bit of
truth, and the ability to express it, will be conquered in time—not
tomorrow nor the next day nor any near, easily-attained period, but after
the struggle has been long enough and hard enough to merit victory” (SL
130). The concept of struggle confirming human value, borrowed from
Nietzsche, applies to O’Neill’s estimate of himself as playwright as
well as to his characters. His unique tragic vision sees the two as one,
as his own words make clear: “The only success is in failure. Any man
who has a big enough dream must be a failure and must accept this as one
of the conditions of being alive. If he ever thinks for a moment that he
is a success, then he is finished” (Gelb 337).
Recognized
as the only American playwright to win the Nobel, O’Neill persevered to
write his best plays after receiving the award. How many writers produce their finest
work at the very end of long careers? Which ones have written their best
efforts after winning the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award?
Still, Long Day’s Journey Into
Night should not be interpreted as the grail at the end of years of
struggle. O’Neill continued to write, continued to plan future dramas,
long after this play. Virginia Floyd has discovered in O’Neill’s
private notebooks that he had plans for much more work including The
Last Conquest, Blind Alley Guy,
The Visit of Malatesta, and a series of eight one-acts under the
title, By Way of Obit.5
Based upon fragments of text, Floyd makes an extraordinary claim: “Long
Day’s Journey Into Night has rightfully been hailed America’s
finest tragedy; The Visit of
Malatesta would have been its richest comedy—conceived as it was in
the same last period of great creative maturity” (Eugene
O’Neill at Work 301). While knowledge of plans and manuscripts of
succeeding plays disrupts the notion of the autobiographical family plays
as final statement, no evidence suggests that these plays would be
superior to the earlier ones. It does imply, however, that O’Neill
remained faithful to his dramatic quest throughout his career. Ultimately,
failing health curtailed his career. He completed no plays during the last
ten years of his life. A debilitating tremor prevented him from even
holding a pencil and he was unable to write using any other means.
Nevertheless, he aspired to continue. A typical literary curve of
development, based upon a biological model, suggests a pattern of early
promise, maturity, repetition and decline. Jaques puts it more bluntly in As
You Like It:
The
story of O’Neill describes a Faustian playwright whose boundless
aspiration and tragic vision sustain a remarkable career in which poetic
titles and sometimes prosaic contents clash to do that which cannot be
done. The plays themselves offer the most compelling argument for a tragic
theory of drama. On the one hand, titles evoke vivid imagery: Bound
East for Cardiff, The Moon of
the Caribbees, Beyond the
Horizon, Desire Under the Elms, Strange
Interlude, Mourning Becomes
Electra, A Touch of the Poet,
More Stately Mansions, The
Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A
Moon for the Misbegotten. On the other hand, critics routinely carp on
the failure of O’Neill’s language to rise to the dramatic occasion and
resonate poetically. An aesthetics of failure emerges as the governing
principle of struggle between visionary desire and artistic limitation. In
the minds of many O’Neill’s greatness does not rest in his having
achieved the goal of writing a great play, but in his aspirations to reach
that goal. Jean Chothia observes: “It is the promise latent in the plays
that is valued rather than the plays themselves, the aspiration and
enterprise of the writer rather than the writings” (93). O’Neill
longed to be a poet; he was not a good one. In Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, after Edmund’s disclosure about the
mystery of life, Tyrone tells him that he has the makings of a poet, to
which his son responds: “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. I mean, if I live. Well, it
will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of
us fog people” (CP3 812–813).
Harold
Clurman concluded his review of the American premiere of Long
Day’s Journey Into Night with this summation: “O’Neill’s work
is more than realism. And if it is stammering—it is still the most
eloquent and significant stammer of the American theatre. We have not yet
developed a cultivated speech that is either superior to it or as good”
(Cargill 216). The following pages attempt to show what “more than
realism” means and what it looks like. A stammer captures the best image
of O’Neill’s drama: a struggle to get the words out, constantly
repeating itself, always striving for something more and settling for
something less than desired.
The
site of this struggle resides in the relationship between the literary act
of writing the play and the theatrical spectacle of staging it for public
performance. Tension exists between the act of writing/reading and the act
of seeing/listening. That a drama is written to be performed speaks to its
radical of presentation defined by Northrop Frye: “Words may be acted in
front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a listener; they may
be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a reader. … For all the
loving care that is rightfully expended on the printed texts of
Shakespeare’s plays, they are still radically acting scripts, and belong
to the genre of drama” (247). A performance may take place in the
theatre of the mind as well as on stage, but the reference is always to a
theatrical space rather than the mundane world. O’Neill writes for a
proscenium space with an acute awareness of all visual elements, including
spatial relationships of the actors on stage. It is irrelevant to
distinguish between an imaginary and a physical theatre; drama depends
upon, in Timo Tiusanen’s words, the “presence of the idea of the
stage” (4). In order to read a play, one must consider the fluid images
of actors moving in time within a theatrical space. Theatrical demands to
make elements of performance visually appealing diminish the sole
authority of the playwright.
A
director mediates the relationship between drama and theatre. The writer
is to the play what the director is to the production, an “artist of
occasions” to borrow vocabulary from Robert Edmond Jones, in the literal
sense of the phrase. A director stages a material/visual event in space
and time, a physical production which models literary interpretation. In
terms of production choices, the director ponders historical and cultural
forces at work during the time of composition and those which inform the
represented period of the play, as well as the prevailing conditions of
the day. This triadic matrix includes particular staging practices that
forged the drama into being. At the same time, subsequent performances
reveal different working conditions, values, staging conventions, and
points of view. Shifting and changing values bring classical texts into
and out of favorable performance conditions. Technological advances bring
about new practices that shed new light and new possibilities for staging
old plays. Computerized lighting systems and hydraulic turntables, to name
only two obvious and omnipresent examples from the current professional
theatre, provide efficient means to solve scenic problems. Production
strategies mapped by directors impact meaning and interpretation and lead
to, in the end, a version of the play. Different directors, different
actors, different designers, produce different results. The relative
permeability of the dramatic text to various interpretations determines
viability in the theatre repertory. New interpretations keep old plays
alive.
Son
of one of the most famous actors of the nineteenth century, O’Neill
rebelled against his father’s old-fashioned school of performance and
exhibited a vehement prejudice against actors and the theatre throughout
his life. He valued the published drama much more than live performance of
his plays on Broadway. Ironically, theatrical production salvaged
O’Neill’s sagging reputation. Posthumous productions of Long
Day’s Journey Into Night in Sweden, New York and all over the world
secured O’Neill’s international and domestic elite standing among
dramatists. In the United States, the Off-Broadway revival of The
Iceman Cometh in 1956 by the Circle in the Square Theatre, located
only a couple of blocks from the old Provincetown Playhouse, flashed new
light on O’Neill and established José Quintero as the foremost
interpreter of O’Neill’s plays. Thereafter Quintero gained rights to Long
Day’s Journey Into Night from Mrs. O’Neill and directed the
American premiere of that play on Broadway. A
Moon for the Misbegotten followed these successes and finally appeared
on Broadway in May 1957. Harold Clurman directed A
Touch of the Poet in October 1958. Several years after O’Neill’s
death, three of his major plays ran simultaneously in New York and a
fourth lagged not far behind. These last plays, along with Hughie
and the lone comedy, Ah, Wilderness!
form the core of the O’Neill repertory that sustains his legacy today.
While
the ability of a play to hold multiple interpretations tests its enduring
quality, the task of the director is simply to pursue one choice among
many possibilities. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the director to
understand and comprehend fully the ramifications of particular decisions.
Directorial vision at its best, then, always partial and provisional, is
analogous to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche warns fellow philosophers that
there is no pure objectivity in which the viewer of a particular thing
sees all sides of that object simultaneously. The will of the observer
must recognize the challenge of limitations: “There is only a perspective seeing, only
a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more
affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more
complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’
be” (119). In Twilight of the
Idols, Nietzsche addresses the first task for which educators are
required. It is applicable to the challenge of the stage director as well:
“Learning to see—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting
things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp
each individual case from all sides” (Portable
Nietzsche 511). Is this not analogous to the director who, after
imagining a production in the mind, opens the rehearsal period up to
actors and designers who know the play far less well? The director allows
the cast to learn the play during rehearsal, a process of starting,
stopping, revising, and trying new things. It is not performance, but it
represents a possibility out of which final production emerges. The
director watches rehearsal in order to monitor the progress of a future
event. During rehearsal the director moves around the hall in order to see
rehearsal from every angle. Later, in the theatre, the director
anticipates what the audience will see from particular vantage points,
reconciling conflicts of perspective in order to build a complex yet
coherent interpretation. In his article about Nietzsche and vision, Gary
Shapiro writes: “It is the task of the artist as explorer to look into
the abyss and to prevent the facile acceptance of simplified visions”
(137). “Abyss,” a favorite Nietzschean word, signifies the inability
to know all things. One cannot readily peek into the abyss and see the
bottom. Perspectival seeing warns the viewer not to accept what is readily
apprehensible. It encourages exploration and attempts to see as others see
and to compare vision from different positions. It issues caution to go
slow, to see from every angle, to mull over the significance of things.
Just
as each member of the audience sees a different production, each
production offers only a perspective of the drama. There is no such thing
as a definitive production. Such a designation would forever end the need
to produce a particular play again. Each moment in the dramatic text
implies immanent structure which every production must build in material
terms. The process of selection determines the originality and creativity
of a particular production but it by no means exhausts the possibilities of
a text. Material choices establish originality and individuate the
production from the drama. The task of the director is not to be right,
but to be interesting, to add to an understanding of the text. To stick
with a visual analogy, the text is a three dimensional object around which
the director must move in order to see it and appreciate it from as many
sides as possible. It is not a matter of getting more out of the text, but
seeing more of it.
Each
of the following chapters examines visual conflict in O’Neill’s plays
from a different formal perspective. Chapter 1, Writing
a Novel Drama, traces the narrative impulse in the plays that results
from O’Neill’s profound antitheatrical prejudice. O’Neill routinely
disparaged the theatre as the Show Shop. It is distinctly odd that
America’s greatest dramatist considered actual production of his plays
as an inevitable disappointment. Actors rarely portrayed
roles as he conceived them. It would be a mistake, however, to
chalk his attitude up to either personal idiosyncrasy or to the tawdry
theatrical practices of the day. I believe that the visual spectacle of
the theatre threatened to usurp the writer’s pre-eminence, and
stimulated him to find new means of dramatic expression to assert
authorial control. O’Neill’s attempt to master the drama results in a
number of innovative techniques which borrow from the novel form. A recent
lampoon in The New Yorker,
“Unspoken O’Neill,” highlights the author’s penchant for literary
stage directions and descriptions at the expense of dialogue. An emphasis
upon monologue further affords him the luxury of narrative speech.
Ultimately, he extends the monologue to the inner monologue, or thought
aside, in which characters speak their “inner” thoughts in addition
and in conjunction with their “external” speech. Novelizing the drama,
through copious stage directions, elaborate character descriptions,
theatrical tricks such as the thought asides in Strange
Interlude, and lengthy monologues, resists the theatre’s explicit
visual imperative in favor of storytelling. O’Neill’s plays, then,
stage a revolt against the very medium which conveys them.
The
drama between showing and telling, dramatic and narrative, plays extremely
well in Hughie (1942), a one-act
comprised almost exclusively of monologues, spoken by gambler Erie Smith,
or described in the silent monologues of the hotel night clerk. Dialogue,
the main signifier of drama, is virtually absent. Instead, the two-bit
hustler tells stories out of the past and describes the recently deceased
Hughie. A novelistic urge to describe fully past events and relationships
belies the emptiness of life on stage. Tension in this short play stems
from the need to establish intimate contact by Smith and refusal to engage
on the part of the hotel clerk. The action ends, however, with the two men
sharing a conversation and mutually passing the remainder of the early
morning hours in company, away from the silent terrors of the night
outside or the loneliness of Room 492 upstairs. As Smith once did with
Hughie, he again sees himself as he wants to be seen in the eyes of the
new night clerk. The action details the restorative human powers of
dialogue. Emphasis upon narrative in the play ultimately reveals the
triumph and importance of theatre. O’Neill’s novelistic retreat from
dialogue refreshes the drama.
Other
than monologue, masks serve as a prominent device in O’Neill’s
dramaturgy. Chapter 2, Masks and
Mirrors, examines masks as means to reveal character and to probe the
question of identity: loneliness and sensitivity; dividedness and
multiplicity. O’Neill advocated their use in his only published
contribution to dramatic theory, Memoranda
on Masks (1932-1933). The Great
God Brown (1925), in which characters wear masks, take them off, even
trade them, serves as the apotheosis of mask technique. The barrier
between the actor’s face and the viewer provides tension between
revelation and concealment. The mask graphically solves the problem of how
to present the struggle between the inside and the outside; it reveals the
public face but hides the private one. Perceived difference between the
two creates the illusion of character. While O’Neill employed masks for
the last time in Days Without End
(1933), metaphorical masks provide the essence of character in all of his
works. The gradual stripping away of uniformed finery in The
Emperor Jones (1920) corresponds to the unmasking of character. The
same action recurs in the naturalistic A
Touch of the Poet, in which Melody’s soiled and torn military
uniform signifies that his aristocratic demeanor has also been removed.
The presence of the mask demonstrates O’Neill’s prevalent theme of the
need for illusion or the pipe dream. Major Melody constantly poses in
front of the mirror in order to see if his mask is in place. Mirrors,
sometimes nothing more than another character’s eyes, rebuke or sustain
the illusions which make life bearable.
Energy
devoted to creating a mask is means for protection, and the action of
every play moves toward unmasking. What’s at stake, what lies underneath
the mask, is human vulnerability. Although no masks are used literally,
nowhere is the concept of the mask more apparent than in A
Moon for the Misbegotten. The three principal characters are all
actors whose individual masks peel away as the action unfolds to reveal a
tender love story. Action builds toward revelation and concludes after the
masks totally disappear and tension no longer exists between exterior
presentation and interior identity. Exposed vulnerability reveals depth of
character, depth of sorrow, joy, and human feeling. Love as sacrifice,
verbalized in early plays, including the end of Beyond the Horizon, receives visual expression with the image of
Josie Hogan holding Tyrone’s body through the moonlight until dawn. She
expresses the magnitude of her sacrifice with a simple valuation of the
gesture: “…because it costs so much” (CP3 927). Shedding her mask as
a wanton woman and exposing herself as a virgin signals the end of the
play. Tension between the two roles sustains the drama and leads to final
revelation, after which nothing remains to see.
Chapter
3, Beyond the Proscenium, traces
the oscillation between here and there, presence and absence, between
inside the frame (proscenium) of representation and outside the frame.
This movement creates compelling visual interest and alters the perception
of O’Neill’s realism. That style becomes the context, or rather, the
confinement, of the action against which the play rebels. The act of
rebellion forces the drama to turn out beyond the proscenium and gives it
visual stature that it would not otherwise possess. The opposition between
land and sea, for example, continually finds the characters searching for
what they do not have. If they are from the sea, they want to be on land.
If on land, they long for the sea. The Blessed Isles, another Nietzschean
phrase, return again and again as safe havens, escapes, places of freedom,
far away from the confined land and morality of New England. Unseen
characters, talked about but never directly represented, fill in the
action of the plays at crucial moments. Doors separating one space from
another, seen and unseen, govern action in which the outside poses a
threat to the inside. At the same time, characters aspire to leave the
environment which constrains them. Visual diffusion occurs in the drama in
which what’s outside displaces what’s inside.
The
realistic detail of Harry Hope’s saloon, a combination of three watering
holes O’Neill frequented in New York, contrasts with the nebulous void
of the Great City outside and creates tension in The
Iceman Cometh. What begins in a kind of Plato’s Cave, according to
John Henry Raleigh, transforms into the only reality available to the
inhabitants of the saloon at the end (Plays
165–167). Larry Slade’s declaration voiced early in the play that
the bums who live in the bar have no further to slide is a lie. The option
to go outside represents an even more dangerous and degrading step for the
men than remaining paralyzed at the table. By never going outside,
characters indulge in pipe dreams that insist upon a glorious life “out
there.” Hickey’s sermon of salvation turns the bums out of the bar to
face their pipe dreams on the streets. Hickey’s truth eliminates the
dualism between inside and outside. By opening the door and throwing down
the gauntlet, Hickey makes the men face the emptiness of their lives in
the terror of the streets. An outsider, Hickey, displaces the bums. But
that action only enforces the fact that the outside world is “dead” to
them. As they exit on parade and return soon thereafter it is clear that
there is nothing outside for them. The world gets smaller as the play
progresses. The large cast of this play is notable for the lack of female
characters (none, other than the three tarts). Absent women, referred to
but never seen, nonetheless play an extremely important role in the
events. Male characters invent Evelyn Hickman, Bessie Hope, and Rosa
Parritt, but invoking them calls attention to an absence which indicates
the failure of intimate relationships. If Hughie is about the need for intimacy and engagement, The
Iceman Cometh examines the cost of intimacy and flight from its
demands. The iceman, death, finds a group of damaged men huddled around a
bottle as if it were a campfire in the wilderness. The booze provides the
only warmth against the blast of cold air coming from the frightening
outside.
Chapter
4, Plays Without End, deals with
repetition and the question of how plays end. Suicides, murders,
incestuous desires and clandestine affairs that fuel early plays give way
to tidy Aristotelian depictions of everyday life in the final ones. Epic
adventures mutate into episodic representations. Yet, as less and less
happens, tragic resonance increases, due in part to O’Neill’s
masterful use of repetition. A famous anecdote survives about The Iceman Cometh, in which a phrase about pipe dreams is repeated
18 times. Lawrence Langner pointed this out to O’Neill, who responded by
saying that he meant it to occur 18 times (Langner 405). Repeating a
particular image magnifies it and also creates a pattern. Critics harp
upon the excessive length of O’Neill’s plays and what they deem as
needless repetition within them, but repetition is fundamental to the
essential action in all of them. Tension always exists between the
narrative drive of the plot to end in closure (e.g., suicide), and the
competing desire for the play to repeat itself and form part of what
O’Neill might call, with echoes of Nietzsche, the recurring life force.
O’Neill’s plays can be seen as musical compositions in which
developing themes recur and transmute over time. The effect of time upon
character is the theme for a novel that O’Neill tried to explore in
early experimental plays. He adopted a traditional form in his final plays
but the action became entirely retrospective and time, in a novel way,
became the definitive and tragic subject at last.
Backward
movement to the past in the plays rubs against forward drive in the
present. Mary Tyrone recognizes the equation between the two temporal
modes when she says, “The past is the present. It’s the future, too”
(CP3 765). Repetition is the force of the past claiming its victims in the
present, victims who try in vain to break free. Action in Long
Day’s Journey Into Night picks up at the precise moment in which the
Tyrones have begun to hope again that Mary has licked her crippling drug
habit. Subsequently, they learn that an old pattern has resumed and they
anticipate the familiar ritual of addiction. The supposed happy ending of
a much earlier play, “Anna Christie,” failed to balance momentary happiness in the
present with future tragic necessity. Long
Day’s Journey Into Night brilliantly reverses the temporal flow in a
final image. No better curtain line exists than the quotidian brilliance
of Mary’s final words: “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so
happy for a time” (CP3 828). The drunken Tyrone men, trying to forget
what has happened to them, gaze upon Mary, whose pigtails recall lost
adolescence. She carries her wedding dress but she speaks of the convent.
Instead of projecting a future of uncertain happiness as in “Anna
Christie,” the final image in Long
Day’s Journey Into Night eulogizes the passing of time and the
poignancy of regret despite the presence and persistence of love.
The
final chapter, Tragic Vision, looks at the question of genre and the ongoing debate
between melodrama and tragedy. Historically, critical opinion of O’Neill
weighs on one side or the other and ranges from the artist as longwinded
melodramatist to sublime tragedian. Although he received the Nobel Prize
for “dramatic works of vital energy, sincerity, and intensity of
feeling, stamped with an original conception of tragedy” (Hallström),
Francis Fergusson, never an admirer of O’Neill, wrote unflatteringly of
his plays in 1930: “I take it that the essence of melodrama is to accept
emotions uncritically; which, in the writing amounts to assuming or
suggesting emotions that are never realized either in language or action.
Melodrama in this sense is a constant quality of Mr. O’Neill’s work”
(Cargill 272–273). Eric Bentley, perhaps the most ardent O’Neill
critic, allowed in The Life of the
Drama that O’Neill succeeds with melodrama where he fails with
tragedy (214). While Fergusson and Bentley invoke melodrama to cast
aspersions upon O’Neill’s work, Robert Benchley compliments O’Neill
for “thrilling the bejeezus” out of his audience in Mourning
Becomes Electra. His review of that play in The New Yorker cites aspects of melodrama as a source of great
appeal in O’Neill’s plays.
My
interest does not lie in the search for adequate definitions of terms.
O’Neill, of course, thought that he was writing tragedy which he
regarded as ennobling. He particularly admired Greek tragedy and Mourning
Becomes Electra attempted to scale tragic heights, in the vein of the
Greeks, even to the point of borrowing their myths, but without resort to
gods and with only a modern psychology of fate. Sticking to the concrete,
I draw a visual analogy to the genres of tragedy and melodrama. Melodrama
embodies visual clarity in terms of the size of gesture, clash of
opposites, contrast of colors, and purity of values that are readily
readable. To say that melodrama goes “over the top” is to appreciate
the excessive theatricality that defines the genre and makes it enjoyable.
If struggle is the operative word in O’Neill’s sense of the tragic,
the visual aspect of the struggle is that characters cannot see where they
are going and cannot foretell consequences of what they do. Fog is the
principal motif in O’Neill which visually defines tragic experience.
Characters cannot see, and the inability to see functions as the essence
of O’Neill’s tragic vision. The desire to see and failure to do so
creates a context for tragic events to occur. If melodrama represents a
kind of wish-fulfillment in which everything is clear and visible, tragedy
represents recognition that dreams don’t come true. Looking at genre in
this way eliminates discussion of melodrama and tragedy as discrete
categories. Tension between them, always present, sustains visual interest
in the plays.
From
the perspective of genre, O’Neill’s tragic vision derives from
Nietzsche’s view of the world as unfathomable. In the Nietzschean
landscape, the black abyss threatens to swallow human endeavor. Just as
Socrates and intelligibility foil Nietzschean tragedy, melodrama, with its
high contrast and visual clarity opposes O’Neill’s tragic fog of
anxiety and ambiguity. In Mourning
Becomes Electra, for example, O’Neill, himself, hoped that his
audience would see past the surface melodrama to the real drama underneath
(SL 379). The surface and depth paradigm asks that the diligent
interpreter excavate the work in order to discover riches buried within
the play. O’Neill places melodrama and tragedy in two separate places.
My project aligns the terms and recognizes that these tendencies, while
polar opposites, are not mutually exclusive in O’Neill’s dramatic
universe. Examination of a grand play such as Mourning
Becomes Electra reveals the codependent relationship of melodramatic
and tragic elements. The plot, a thrilling melodrama of lust, revenge,
murder and incestuous desire, provides an excuse for a spectacle of
watching. Beginning with the entrance of the town chorus at the start of
the play, the audience observes characters watching each other perform a
melodrama. Only Lavinia refuses ultimately to play. She refuses to publish
her brother’s lurid history of the Mannons, a generational melodrama.
Her final act, self-entombment, pulls down the curtain on melodrama;
opaqueness, inability to see, raises the possibility of tragedy.
My
method appears to stack a series of binary oppositions against each other:
narrative and dramatic; revelation and concealment; here and there; past
and present; melodrama and tragedy. Indeed, these tensions sustain the
drama, but I don’t suggest that there is an Hegelian synthesis to the
dialectic that I’m putting forward as a basic structuring principle in
O’Neill’s drama. I believe that the failure of the plays (that phrase
again) to resolve these conflicts accounts for their enduring
presentations. This claim may seem counter-intuitive given familiarity
with O’Neill’s works. One of the habits that he adopted in Professor
Baker’s English 47 playwriting class was the discipline of writing a
detailed scenario of a play before he wrote it. It is impossible not to
see the direction in which a particular O’Neill play travels. Even
O’Neill’s better plays, such as A Touch of the Poet, The
Iceman Cometh, and A Moon for
the Misbegotten chug through their respective plots along a formulaic
track. O’Neill railroads the illusion/reality theme (a classic Western
literature theme and the subject of many undergraduate essays) to the
extent that his meaning seems inescapable, if not depressing: humanity
cannot bear to face the truth. The highly architected plays seem to lead
to a definitive and inevitable conclusion, but I don’t think that they
are as straightforward as they seem. The oppositions end in stalemates
which don’t provide answers but ask questions of the audience who
witnesses the event. My critical project drives a wedge in this site of
failure to open up space for interpretation to fill.
Problems,
not plays, provide the organizational structure for all the chapters.
Focus upon pervasive tendencies that appear throughout the entire canon
replaces any need to deal with the plays in chronological order. The range
of examples is limited to O’Neill’s Complete
Plays, edited by Travis Bogard, the three volume edition of 50 plays
published by the Library
of America in 1988 to mark the centennial of O’Neill’s birth.
Even among this group of plays, however, emphasis remains upon those plays
which form part of an enduring repertory. Thus, Lazarus
Laughed (1926), a play O’Neill always admired for containing some of
his best writing (that’s what he thought), gets short shrift because it
has never been produced professionally. Technical and artistic demands of
that text make any future production highly problematic. The “lost”
plays, early unproduced work, find little representation in these pages,
nor does the very lengthy draft of More
Stately Mansions (1939).12
The creative license that an unfinished manuscript offers to a production
team often invites production, and successful stagings of this play credit
the skillful editing and vision of a director. That said, there is no way
to anticipate what changes O’Neill, himself, would have made to his
manuscript, and thus, the text resists the kind of analysis that I’m
employing in this study. In general, examples show preference to the late
masterpieces. The reader will discover far more references to Long
Day’s Journey Into Night than to, say, The
First Man (1921). The former play is one of the greatest plays in all
of modern drama and a play that the reader will likely have an opportunity
to see, or has seen, at some point. The
First Man, on the other hand, appeals only to the most earnest
O’Neill scholar and enthusiast. The weaknesses of that play, however,
and others such as Diff’rent (1920),
Dynamo (1928), and Days
Without End (1933) often address particular problems more effectively
than the strengths of better plays and bear inclusion for that reason.
O’Neill frequently integrates obvious techniques in inferior plays into
more subtle representations in superior efforts. The first part of each
chapter lays the groundwork for a particular theoretical claim and
concludes with extended analysis of a single play or plays in order to
ground the argument within a sustained context. While the problems remain
discrete in each chapter, the force of my project implies interchangeable
examples. I use A Moon for the
Misbegotten, for instance, to talk at length about character and
unmasking as a principal action. This is doubtless a convenient pairing,
but if there is any profound truth to my overall approach, then another
play, say, Hughie, must also fit
within the schema that I develop. The tensions that I see within the plays
regarding genre, dialogue, character, scene, and action operate on all of
the plays all of the time.
By
way of example, Bound East for Cardiff (1914) shows how perspectives outlined in
each chapter combine to form a composite picture of the drama. This early
play, the first of O’Neill’s to receive production, authentically
represents all the later plays to come, according to Eugene M. Waith:
“The movement of its action is the characteristic movement of an
O’Neill play—a movement toward discovery or revelation or both—a
kind of unmasking” (33). O’Neill recognized the importance of this
play in a letter correcting dates for his plays in 1934 to Richard Dana
Skinner, who was then writing a book on O’Neill’s drama: “In it can
be seen—or felt—the germ of the spirit, life-attitude, etc. of all my
significant future work—and it was written practically within my first
half-year as a playwright, before I went to Baker, under whose influence
the following year I did nothing 1/10 as original. Remember in these U. S.
in 1914 Bound East for Cardiff
was a daring innovation both in form & content” (SL 438).
Beginning
with the title, the play evokes tragic aspirations, despite the low class
characters represented in the action and the mundane events portrayed. The
play takes place in the crewmen’s quarters of the S.S. Glencairn,
a tramp steamer en route from New York to Cardiff. Action picks up in medias res, somewhere between the two ports on the Atlantic
Ocean. Previous to the start, one seaman, Yank, fell from a ladder and
mortally injured himself. The action of the play consists of his friend,
Driscoll, comforting him during his dying moments. On a foggy night, fog
remains as the dominant motif in the play (see Chapter 5). The titular
word “bound” evokes a sense of fate in the play, a destination over
which the sailors in the ship have no control. Days away from port, the
ship strands them alone at sea, along with the fog, which prevents them
from seeing.
At
the outset of this short play, members of the crew, including a Swede and
an Irishman, talk among themselves and smoke in the seamen’s forecastle.
A Norwegian plays a battered accordion from the top deck. Talk of the
rotten weather and foul working conditions halts at the sound of a groan
from the rear bunk. Only then do they realize that Yank lies with them,
badly injured and slowly dying. The crew respectfully muffles their speech
and leaves to relieve the watch. One group goes out, another comes in.
Only Driscoll remains to tend to Yank. In the second section, the captain
and first mate enter to take stock of the situation. Social divisions
between officers and sailors manifest themselves in uniforms, titles, and
the fact that the officers “come down” to see about Yank. One of the
sailors, Davis, describes the relationship between haves and have nots in
this way: “Plenty o’ work and no food—and the owners ridin’ around
in carriages!” (CP1 190). Significantly, owners are not present in the
action. Ship’s officers, including the captain, function as their
surrogates. Cocky, confident that the captain can do nothing for Yank,
expresses the contempt of the working men for their superiors: “That
silly ol’ josser! Wot the ’ell would ’e know abaht anythink?”
(189). When the captain and mate do appear, expected antagonisms vanish in
the humanity of the moment. The captain is genuinely interested in
Yank’s health. He expresses true sorrow that he cannot help Yank, but
instructs Driscoll to stay with him and not to let him move. He captures
the futility and fateful moment of the play with his lament: “I can’t
do anything else for him. It’s too serious for me. If this had only
happened a week later we’d be in Cardiff in time to—” (194). Use of
the subjunctive indicates a grammar of fate. There is no doctor and no
facility to help Yank. There is no hope, even though all the men pretend
and hope that he won’t die. The hopeless hope, or the need for illusion,
surfaces in this play as a major theme.
Yank
knows and feels that he’s going to die. Monologue supplants dialogue in
the form of confessions of the dying man to his best friend in the final
part of the play (see Chapter 1). The monologue fulfills a narrative
function and supplies a history of the mens’ lives in terms of where
they’ve been and what they want. Driscoll, the friend, becomes a silent
auditor, whose bunkside presence gives Yank license to speak at length.
Yank speaks of the repetition of life and tries to justify death as relief
from it: “This sailor life ain’t much to cry about leavin’—just
one ship after another, hard work, small pay, and bum grub; and when we
git into port, just a drunk endin’ up in a fight, and all your money
gone, and then ship away again. Never meetin’ no nice people; never
gittin’ outa sailor town, hardly, in any port; travelin’ all over the
world and never seein’ none of it; without no one to care whether
you’re alive or dead. (with a
bitter smile) There ain’t much in all that that’d make yuh sorry
to lose it, Drisc” (195).
The
reality of the sailor’s lot is juxtaposed by Yank’s dream of being
buried on land and owning a farm. Driscoll joins in enthusiastically to
say that he’s had the same dream and that they’ll live it together as
soon as Yank gets better. Expression of the dream breathes life into the
drama. The land/sea opposition transports the action of the play beyond
the proscenium as the characters paint a picture of life away from the
tiny quarters of the forecastle (see Chapter 3). Yank reveals his dream to
Driscoll only when he knows that he’s going to die. He says that he was
always afraid that his friend would laugh at him if he spoke of his
heartfelt dreams. Only with death upon him, can he unburden himself. The
dire situation, however, forces Driscoll to agree with Yank and drop his
tough pose. The unmasking of the characters reaches poignancy in their
last scene together (see Chapter 2). They describe a brutal world in which
they have played a part. Yank gives voice to his fear that he will be
damned because he once stabbed a man. Driscoll eases his conscience by
absolving him of the crime by asserting that it was self-defense. At last,
Yank, who has no relations, asks Driscoll to buy a box of candy for Fanny
the barmaid, who once “tried to lend me half a crown” (198). The
tenderness and intimacy of the two sailors, beneath hard and coarse
exteriors, engenders an empathetic response.
The
image of the dying sailor flirts with melodrama. Near the end, Yank sees
fog within the cabin. It is the fog of death, “a pretty lady dressed in
black” come to take Yank away (198). The atmosphere of the Glencairn
undercuts Yank’s dying in the arms of his best friend. Repetition of the
ship’s routine, the change in the watch, the sound of the ship’s
bells, offsets the finality of death (see Chapter 4). While Yank lies
dying, other sailors snore in their bunks, resting before their next
watch. Snoring and sleeping effectively drain melodrama from the death
scene. In fact, the routine of the ship heightens the impact of the dying
sailor. According to Alan S. Downer, Yank’s “dying against a
background of his quarreling, disinterested mates, is an image of the
loneliness and frustration of man” (469). Ironically, a sailor returns
to the cabin at play’s end to report that the fog has lifted. Clarity
returns only after Yank has died. The drama expands from the cramped
quarters of the seamen’s forecastle, the represented scene of the dying
sailor, to show the ship as part of a much larger scene, one tiny ship floating
on an immense ocean. The sea as fate, a wild and untamed presence which
surrounds and dwarfs the represented scene, potentially diminishes the
importance of human action. The relative insignificance of Yank’s death
gives it dignity and tragic stature. Loss of his friend greatly impacts
Driscoll. The fact that life goes on proffers a tough reminder of an
undying reality.
The
following chapters emphasize the technical means of expression in order to
see the plays in a new way. Rather than exploring conflict between
characters within the representation, this way of seeing explores tensions
or conflict between the very elements that make up the drama.
Foregrounding dramatic technique separates the representation from
reality. By looking at O’Neill’s plays, not as reflections of personal
experience, but as works of art, they begin to appear as strange and
wondrous as opposed to old and familiar. It is indisputable that the late
plays surpass all of O’Neill’s previous efforts. Abandoning
classifications such as expressionistic and realistic, however, creates an
opportunity to discover principles which bind all of O’Neill’s dramas
together. This approach reverses the traditional order of how to view a
play: seeing the picture first and then trying to explain how it got that
way. I look at the techniques first, and build an interpretation on the
basis of pervasive tendencies. This strategy tries to liberate O’Neill
from the shackles of autobiography and highlight the extraordinary
achievements of a remarkable American playwright.
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