John W. Presley, President for Academic Affairs
and Provost, Professor of English
Illinois State University
Abstract
In Eugene O'Neill's less successful plays, religion and man's* cosmic place are discussed by his
characters in long discursive speeches and with brutally overt symbols
to imbue with significance the frequently melodramatic action. In
later, more critically acclaimed plays O'Neill's skepticism and criticism
of are presented more philosophically, and the symbols and images
are much more subtle. Whether overt or subtle, O'Neill's treatment
of religion is always pessimistic: in the face of the cosmos, man
is finite; all his faiths and systems and religions are in response
to that sense of finitude, and flawed by their origin in that finitude.
[1] Live theatre, which does not profit from the economies of scale
associated with films, must always at least draw audiences in order
to survive. That truism, reflecting the nature of production and consumption
of the genre, leads many critics to assume that, as one of the most
"communal" of media, popular drama - that is, professional,
commercially-based theatre - must reflect the interests of its audience
more closely than film or novels or, certainly, poetry. The dramatist,
no matter what may be his or her aspirations to the role of "high
artist," must have an eye on the ticket receipts. Does this mean
that the dramatist must treat popular ideas, such as criticism of
religion, in overt, easily accessible fashion? Or does a work become
more successful - both at the ticket booth and in the critics' eyes
- as this sort of criticism becomes more covert?
[2] At a time just after World War I, when many cultural and historical
currents combined to make skepticism about religion almost an orthodoxy
in itself with writers, artists, and intellectuals, Eugene O'Neill
began writing his early plays. In The Hairy Ape, an early play
(1922) that was considered by many contemporary reviewers to be flawed,
puzzling, or even irritating, O'Neill takes religion and man's cosmic
place as a theme and uses his characters to discuss the theme.
Later, in Dynamo, brutally overt symbols and long discursive
speeches attempt to imbue with significance the very dated, melodramatic
and overtly violent action. But in more critically admired plays like
The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Desire Under the Elms (1924),
the skepticism and criticism of religion take a philosophical turn,
and the symbols, images, and speeches that reinforce the presence
of a religious-philosophical theme are much less overt. This dramatic
treatment of man's inability to generate a faith - this skepticism
and this critique of religion - is discursively, almost didactically,
a presence in O'Neill's plays, and sometimes nearly embarrassingly
so.
[3] One of Eugene O'Neill's most insistent concerns is the role of
religion in the life of modern man, a concern underscored in O'Neill's
public statements. Joseph Wood Krutch in 1954 reported a conversation
in which O'Neill said, "Most modern plays are concerned with
the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at
all. I am interested only in the relation between man and God"
(Nine Plays, xvii). In a letter to George Jean Nathan, O'Neill
emphasized the religious obligations of the modern playwright:
The playwright of today must dig at the roots of the sickness of
today as he feels it - the death of the old god, and the failure
of science and materialism to give any satisfactory new one for
the surviving primitive, religious instinct to find a meaning for
life in, and to comfort its fears of death with (quoted by Krutch,
1954).
The religion O'Neill presents in his plays is sometimes as specific
as the Protestantism in Dynamo and the Catholicism in Long
Day's Journey Into Night; but in a larger sense, it is religion
as a concern with transcendent phenomena, "the great inscrutable
forces," which creates the unique O'Neill dramatic world. As
we see in The Hairy Ape, Dynamo, The Iceman Cometh,
and Desire Under the Elms, no faith is possible for the major
or central O'Neill character: religion is an ideal, and ideals betray
man; modern psychology and despair over the human situation preclude
faith in any abstract ideal.
[4] Most students of O'Neill are familiar with the process that led
to his rejection of Christianity in general, and with the Catholicism
of his youth in particular. As related in the Gelbs' classic O'Neill
biography, Eugene learned during the summer of 1903 that his mother
was a morphine addict, and he decided God had failed Ella. In his
later life, O'Neill would tell his wife, his doctor, and the interviewer
Elizabeth Sergeant "that the discovery of his mother's addiction
had marked the spiritual turning point in his life." Still, as
the Gelbs point out, even thirty years later, in Days Without
End, O'Neill "expounded upon the loss of his faith and conceded
his yearning to confess and receive forgiveness." Indeed, O'Neill
grew into what Sergeant called "an agnostic in search of redemption"
and, as the Gelbs maintain, "no matter how far behind he left
his Catholic orthodoxy, and however anticlerical his stance, he never
lost his awe of religious mystery" (Gelb and Gelb, 174, 175,
170).
[5] The account of the same events is considerably more nuanced in
Stephen A. Black's Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy.
Black adds details of O'Neill's early reading of Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, for example, and narrates O'Neill's adolescent iconoclasm
in more detail. But it is in his psychoanalytic judgments that Black
adds most to our understanding. O'Neill felt guilty, responsible for
his mother's addiction, and needed desperately to find a way of "detaching
morality from the idea of a deity . . . to contemplate responsibility
as an idea not always identical with guilt" (Black, 90). Black
convincingly shows that the tragic view of life, as constructed by
O'Neill from Greek mythology, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, filled this
need for a world view. But even this world view does not resolve the
psychological dynamic Black finds at work in all of O'Neill's Canon
- the unresolved work of mourning all the dead in O'Neill's life.
[6] I would argue that whatever the truth of Black's thesis - and
it seems a very elegant, unifying source for O'Neill's ideas - that
for the adult O'Neill his religion was at all times a loss that he
was quite conscious of mourning. In his best plays, certainly, he
never stopped looking for a "substitute religion," just
as he never stopped discovering that none was satisfactory.
[7] Edward L. Shaughnessy, in Down the Nights and Down the Days
(1996) places all of O'Neill's religious themes within the context
of what he calls "a Catholic sensibility." I hope it is
not oversimplifying to summarize Shaughnessy's very complex and nuanced
study by saying its essence is to see O'Neill as (in the words used
as title for Part One) a "reluctant apostate." Again, giving
analytic power to Shaughnessy's choice of title, he believes that
one key to O'Neill's relation to religion is signified by O'Neill's
fondness for Francis Thompson's poem of the sinner fleeing God while
transfixed by his pursuer, "The Hound of Heaven." O'Neill
had the whole of the poem by heart and could hold listeners spellbound
with his dramatic recitation. As do most O'Neill critics considering
his religious themes, Shaughnessy emphasizes O'Neill's "substitute-God
search," positing that O'Neill was robbed of God by his understanding
of modernism, yet also still very much longing for God. In his production
interview for The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill said, "In all
my plays sin is punished and redemption takes place" (quoted
in Shaughnessy, 149). But when asked, late in life, by a Catholic
correspondent if he had returned to the faith, his reply was "unfortunately,
no." Shaughnessy tracks the evolving reputation of O'Neill in
the Catholic Press, in Commonweal, diocesan weeklies, and journals
of opinion. In the 1920s and 30s, O'Neill "met with disapproval,
even rancor" (57), a reception that became only slightly more
approving, in a few quarters of the Catholic press, even after his
Pulitzer prizes in the 1920s and the Nobel prize awarded in 1936.
While O'Neill could not have expected, nor did he seek, approval as
a "Catholic writer" O'Shaughnessy infers from O'Neill's
long-planned Days Without End that O'Neill "probably felt
the chill of Catholic disregard. He would have taken pleasure in being
honored" (63-64).
[8] In The Hairy Ape, O'Neill presents his early and basic
view of the human situation. As Arthur Quinn maintained in one very
early piece on O'Neill, Yank is man "struggling for his place
in creation," (Quinn, 1926, 369) faced with an intolerable via
media between abysmal brutality and agonizing thought. Thought
is agonizing to Yank because he can find no meaning for his existence.
Yank attempts several times to find an abstract meaning or definition
for his life and himself, but none is finally complete or satisfactory.
[9] The dominant verbal symbol in The Hairy Ape is the cage.
The fireman's forecastle is "a cramped space in the bowels of
a ship, imprisoned by white steel. The lines of bunks, the uprights
supporting them, cross each other like the steel framework of a cage"
(Nine Plays. All references are to this edition of The Hairy
Ape and Desire Under the Elms). The likeness to the later
scene's cells in the prison and the cages at the zoo is obvious. The
cage image embodies Yank's finitude, his "struggle with his own
fate" as O'Neill describes the play's central action. In Lazarus
Laughed, a later version of the cage image may be clarified: "Life
is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors."
[10] His finitude is the major force confining Yank to the present.
As he speaks to the gorilla in the eighth scene, he says,
It's dis way, what I'm drivin' at. Youse can sit and dope dream
in de past, green woods, de jungle and de rest of it. Den yuh belong
and dey don't. Den yuh kin laugh at 'em, see? Yuh'>re de champ of
de woild. But me - I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nothin' dat's
comin', on'y what's now - and dat don't belong (86).
Abstracting his finitude, his "presentness" and lack of
a future even further, he screams at the Fifth Avenue habitues and
strollers, "Force, dat's me!" Later, when Yank realizes
that material objects may sometimes be evil, he rather dimly changes
his symbol of identification, but he does specify from "force"
to "fire":
Sure - her old man - president of de Steel Trustƒsteel - where
I tought I belonged . . . He made dis - dis cage! Steel! It don't
belong, dat's what . . . Fire, dat melts it! I'll be fire - under
de heap - fire dat never goes out (77).
Neither faith, whatever its symbol, is satisfactory; Yank only "belongs"
in death, where he no longer has to think. Limited in intellect, this
version of modern man cannot conceive of an idealism, a faith, to
give meaning to his finite, caged existence.
[11] The Hairy Ape was written in less than two weeks. Despite
the fact that the play drove the final wedge between O'Neill and Jig
Cook, with Cook leaving the Provincetown Players and O'Neill taking
over direction of the production, the play remained one of O'Neill's
favorites. Perhaps the reason for his fondness was that Louis Wolheim
managed such a perfect evocation of Yank. O'Neill had offered the
Provincetown Players The Hairy Ape "with the hope that,
like The Emperor Jones, it would move uptown, a hope most of
the company shared, and they had accepted the terms" (Black,
275).
[12] But contemporary critics were confused by the play. Reviews
focused on the stark staging (made necessary in party by the lack
of fly space at the Provincetown Players' tiny theatre) and the shocking
language. There is little mention of the play's theme - that man is
caged by, and failed by, religion, by capitalism, by revolution, by
materialism. Alexander Woollcott, in a March 10, 1922, review, called
The Hairy Ape "a bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play
of nightmare hue and nightmare distortion," and "a monstrously
uneven piece, now flamingly eloquent, now choked and thwarted and
inarticulate." He felt compelled to warn potential audiences
of "speech more squalid than ever an American audience heard
before in an American theatre" (Miller, 31). In a petty review
that focused in the main on the unrealistic staging, Patterson James,
writing for Billboard in 1922, complained that The Hairy
Ape "smells like the monkey house in the zoo, where the last
act takes place and where the play should have been produced"
(Miller, 35).
[13] Of contemporary reviewers, Walter Pritchard Eaton gets closest
to the point when he says The Hairy Ape "might almost
be called an expressionistic tragi-comedy of modern industrial unrest"
(Miller, 33). But Eaton, too, focuses more on the social dimensions
of Yank's realization than on the religious dimensions. Despite this
lack of clear appreciation - or maybe because of the shocking staging
and the even more shocking language - The Hairy Ape, which
Travis Bogard calls the most derivative of O'Neill's plays of the
1920s (Bogard, 242), was a commercial success. The play opened at
the Provincetown Playhouse on March 9, 1922, and within five weeks
it moved uptown for a successful Broadway production, followed by
an equally successful tour. Still, artistically, the play is at odds
with itself, with elements of realism warring with an expressionistic
staging, a "duality of style . . . its elements work [ing] in
diametrically opposed ways to achieve their end" (Bogard, 248,
241).
[14] Like The Hairy Ape, both Marco Millions (1931)
and The Great God Brown (1926) are plays designed to explore
and denounce materialism as a possible faith for modern man, and both
plays involve, as Lionel Trilling said, "the familiar pulpit
confusion of philosophical materialism and 'crass' materialism, that
is, with the preference of physical to moral well-being" (Trilling,
179). Dynamo, however, explores three "isms" - of
its time - Protestantism, atheism and philosophical materialism -
and the confusion with "crass" materialism is only vestigially
present and is no real distraction from the theme.
[15] Opening night reviews of Dynamo were arch and cutting
in tone. The Telegram reviewer, Robert Garland, quoted at some
length from O'Neill's "lengthy and lugubrious letter to George
Jean Nathan, Mr. O'Neill's father confessor" regarding the aims
of the play, to "dig at the roots of the sickness of today,"
in "a symbolic and factual biography of what is happening in
a large section of the American soul." This straightforward explanation
of the play's theme did not help its critical reception. O'Neill hoped
the play would explore man's need to "comfort our fears of death"
and examine "the death of an old god and the failure of science
and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive
religious instinct to find a meaning for life in." Garland found
the play "so self-consciously profound, so Provincetownian, so
phoney . . ." Garland's most devastating critique is a sort of
"so what?" reaction:
Nothing crops up that is either interesting or new. Nothing crops
up that your nephew at Exeter would not settle by asking "What
difference does it make whether you speak of God as God, Electricity,
The First Cause, Big Boy or Dynamo?" (Miller, 63).
[16] The Herald Tribune critic was kinder in regard to the acting,
production, and direction, but very critical - and specifically so -
of what he considered O'Neill's overuse of "asides" (or "interludisms,"
as he calls them earlier in the review). In a review that is otherwise
a tight summary of the action of Dynamo, Perry Hammond also is
very specific regarding the aims of the play - and he is just as cutting
as was Garland:
It is the probable intention of Mr. O'Neill's "Dynamo"
to demolish not only the Old Time Religion but its substitutes,
atheism and science, as answers to this riddle of atom of the universe.
As seen by him the three of them fail in their endeavor to unlock
the secret, and he leaves us at 11:10 p.m. as much in the dark as
we were at 8:50. All the popular solutions are futile in "Dynamo,"
from Holy Writ to Electricity. The Powerhouse is as unsatisfactory
a source of knowledge, according to Mr. O'Neill, as is the fundamentalist
chapel, or the bench of the fool who saith in his heart that there
is no God (Miller, 64).
[17] Dynamo opened on February 11, 1929, and played for only
50 performances. After the play failed in the theatre, O'Neill actually
blamed its failure on the critics' overemphasizing its religious explorations,
and revised the play for its publication. In March of 1929, he told
Lawrence Langner that the printed version would emphasize "the
human story of Reuben's psychological mess over his father and mother's
betrayal and how he at last deifies and finds her again (the real plot
of the play which no one seems to have seen in any of its implications
but which I thought was obvious)." Perhaps the letter to Nathan,
or the note in the playbill regarding the projected trilogy of plays
on these religious questions is at fault here, directing viewers to
the religious themes, but few readers of even the published version
see Reuben in purely psychological terms. Still, O'Neill, perhaps in
self-defense, later insisted it was his intention to emphasize the psychological:
No one seems to have gotten the real human relationship story,
what his mother does to the boy and what that leads to in his sacrifice
of the girl to a maternal deity in the end - the girl the mother
hated and was jealous of - that all that was the boy's real God
struggle, or prompted it. This all fits in with the general themes
of American life in back of the play, America being the land of
the mother complex . . . Not a damn one mentions it. They were so
damned hot on the general religious themes that they couldn't see
the human psychological struggle (quoted in Floyd, 356).Nor could
O'Neill see the effect of his own diction, in the note above - "dirty,"
"sacrifice," "God struggle" - just as he apparently
could not understand the effect of Dynamo's overt religious
speeches.
[18] The hero of Dynamo, Reuben Light, rejects
the bigoted Protestantism preached by his father, Reverend Hutchins
Light. Hutchins Light attempts to punish (by beating) his son because
Reuben has been courting Ada Fife, the daughter of the electrical
engineer - the atheist - next door. Fife has used his daughter to
perpetrate a boorish practical joke on the Lights, and the joke and
its aftermath show the low, mean character of both the Protestant
and the atheist. Both men are motivated by a desire for revenge and
by an evangelical zeal; the only difference between their moral codes
and their disdain for all other belief systems is Fife's inability
to feel guilt.
[19] Reuben sees only his father's meanness, however. And, after
watching his father flinch repeatedly during a storm, Reuben realizes
that the Reverend is superstitiously afraid of electricity! Reuben
proclaims his freedom and rebellion from his father, but almost completely
in religious terms, rejecting the very idea of a God.
You'll never touch me again, you old fool! I'm not scared of you
or your God any more - shoot away, Old Bozo! I'm not scared of you!
. . . If there is his God let Him strike me dead this second! I
dare Him! There is no God! No God but Electricity! I'll never be
scared again! I'm through with the lot of you! (O'Neill, Dynamo,
78-80).
That this renunciation comes after a beating underscores the fact
that Reuben's change in faith is due in part at least to his pathological
relationship to his father and is therefore psychological in origin.
His is not a reliable judgment; Reuben could have denounced Fife and
atheism equally easily.
[20] Reuben leaves for fifteen months. During his exile he studies
electricity and takes odd jobs around powerhouses. He returns full
of confidence, but is unaware that in his absence his mother has died;
he wants "to convert her over from that old God stuff."
Reuben has, in his new faith, become as evangelical as the atheist
and Rev. Light. But simple philosophical materialism is not enough;
as the play progresses, Reuben's new electric God becomes increasingly
similar to the old God, particularly after Reuben begins to identify
the image of the Dynamo with his dead mother:
It's like a great dark idol . . . that part on top is like a head
with eyes that see you without seeing you . . . and below it's like
a body . . . not a man's... round like a woman's... as if it had
breasts. ., but not like a girl . . . not like . . . Ada . . . no,
like a woman . . . like her mother, . . . or mine. . . a great,
dark mother . . . [He gets down, on his knees and prays aloud
to the dynamo] Oh, Mother of Life, my mother is dead,
she has passed back into you, tell her to forgive me, and to help
me find your truth! (126-127).
[21] Reuben has not escaped his finite, psychological "cage";
his guilt over his mother's death twisting and distorting his faith,
he rapidly comes full circle, back to what he formerly labeled "superstition."
His long speech at the beginning of Act III (132-134) shows his new
evangelistic feeling clearly, and he interprets Ada's entry into the
powerhouse as "the will of Dynamo" (141), surely just another
example of the superstition he had tried earlier to reject. Reuben
rapes Ada after a long struggle with his "impure desires,"
then follows his "Mother's" command to kill Ada and commit
suicide. His last speech indicates how badly his "faith"
has deluded him, and how far his mother-fixation has progressed:
Mother! . . . where are you? . . . I did it for your sake! . .
.Why don't you call to me? . . . don't leave me alone! . . . [Pleading
to the dynamo like a little boy] I don't want any miracle, Mother!
I don't want to know the truth! I only want you to hide me, Mother!
Never let me go from you again! Please, Mother (157-158).
Dynamo vividly demonstrates O'Neill's conviction of the destructive
capability of any ideal that may be conceived by a human "caged"
by psychology.
[22] O'Neill knew that he had released the play too soon. Virginia
Floyd believes that the play is a failure because O'Neill had no emotional
distance from the autobiographical base, the idea of betrayal by the
mother. Floyd lists a number of revisions the play needed: tightened
dialogue, fewer asides, revision of the "tediously long soliloquy"
in Act 2, de-emphasis of "the intricacy of the machines"
in the power house scenes that "cannot make up for the deficiency
of conception," and deleting the "melodramatic" feud
of the fathers. O'Neill was in France during the rehearsals, and could
not assist in the details of production; though he assumed partial
responsibility for the failure of Dynamo, he remained optimistic
about salvaging the play. As late as 1935, he still intended to rewrite
Dynamo (Floyd, 366-367) for a second time.
[23] Even the first revision was severe: O'Neill apparently reordered
the scenes, eliminated one character entirely, and shortened the dialogue
by huge measures, all in the effort to
re-emphasize the psychological plot-line (Bogard, 317-320). Travis
Bogard sums up Dynamo as a sort of collection of the sweepings
of O'Neill's studio, as his last bit of experimentation, and as a
play that belonged, really, to the period of The Hairy Ape,
produced five years earlier. O'Neill continued to write scenes (in
Days Without End, for example) of electricity as a sort of
"God-substitute," and he continued in his correspondence
to attempt to clarify his intentions in Dynamo (Bogard, 321-325).
[24] Desire Under the Elms exploits the Phaedra myth, the
Oedipal myth, and the division of human consciousness into Apollonian
and Dionysian elements (or ego/id, if one prefers). But the religious
element most explicit in the play and most obvious to audiences is
the critique of the failed strain of American Puritanism. Virginia
Floyd, in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment, shows
the strong parallels between the Irish Catholicism that O'Neill had
known as a child and the New England Puritanism that is almost a part
of the stage setting in Desire. Relying on the work of Perry
Miller, in The New England Mind, Floyd notes that the thought
of Augustine was possibly even more influential than the thought of
Calvin in forming the three essentials of the Puritan "point
of view," God, sin, and regeneration.
[25] Of course, Augustinian thought is also central to Catholicism
- and even more central to Irish Catholicism. "The young Irishmen
who were sent to France to study for the priesthood in the seventeenth
century were often exposed to the teachings of Jansenius, which were
based on Augustinian principles . . . both [Jansenistic Irish Catholicism
and traditional Puritanism] preached the same Augustinian doctrines
on absolute predestination, original sin, and irresistible grace"
(Floyd, 273-274). And over the generations the "deeply spiritual"
Puritans, who settled New England, with their emphasis on religious
and moral principles, had been replaced by a people placing enormous
emphasis on prosperity. "Wealth was viewed as a manifestation
of God's blessing and an indication of a man's goodness; failure was
reserved for the wicked" (Floyd, 274). O'Neill represents this
reliance on external prosperity as a gauge of salvation in Ephraim
Cabot, "materially blessed but morally dissolute," blinded
by a cage of greed.
[26] Desire Under the Elms presents a search for a viable
faith, but more subtly than Dynamo and The Hairy Ape.
Critics have remarked upon the play's saturation with allusions to
the Bible, classical mythology, and psychology, but none of these
allusions fully explain the action of the play. The love affair between
Abbie and Eben, while beginning as a classical Oedipal relationship,
actually grows into a mature relationship, in which each lover is
totally loyal to the other. The analogy between the Phaedra myth and
Desire Under the Elms is not very close; the myth does not
really pervade the structure of the play. Here, O'Neill seems to have
found a less overt, less discursive way to present his discussions
of faith: this later play certainly presents a more sophisticated
rhetoric regarding religion than do other O'Neill plays.
[27] Ephraim Cabot, while he may seem a tyrant and hypocrite, is
in his own mind the instrument of an Old Testament God:
I could o' been a rich man - but somethin' in me fit
me an' fit me - the voice o' God sayin': 'This hain't wuth nothin'
t' Me. Git ye back t' hum!' . . . God's hard, not easy! God's in
the stones! Build my church on a rock - out o' stones an' I'll be
in them!...It wa'nt easy. It was hard and He made me hard fur it
(Nine Plays, 172).
This unquestioning faith gives Ephraim an authority that Frederick
Carpenter argues is lacked by the other characters in Desire Under
the Elms:
His New England theodicy - both historically and psychologically
true - gives Ephraim a towering stature and an inward reality far
greater than that of his sons or relations. It is an embodiment of
the hubris of Greek tragedy, but it is also an embodiment of the highest
heroism of modern man, Milton's courage "never to submit or yield/and
what is else not to be overcome" (108).
However, Ephraim's faith is coupled with an obsessive greed - and
it is here that the impotence of his faith is clearly shown. Ephraim's
desire for an heir to his farm is of central importance to him; indeed,
almost every time the old man mentions his God, it is in connection
with keeping the farm. It is ironic that Ephraim's name means "the
fruitful," for the son he supposes is his own is actually Eben's.
Ephraim's faith is another delusion: the object of his whole being
is to keep the farm, but, as Abbie tells him, "Ye can't take
it with ye." The mystery of death will eventually defeat even
Ephraim's materialistic God.
[28] If there is any abiding absolute in Desire Under the Elms,
it is nature (Carpenter, 109). When Abbie tells Eben, "Nature'll
beat ye, Eben," she is voicing the dominant theme of the play.
Desire is a cyclic play, beginning and ending with someone
admiring the farm; the stage is dominated by nature, by the elms that
tower over the humans and their desires. Repeatedly, the characters
in the play remark on the beauty of the sky, and the characters feel
the presence of unseen forces: Eben can feel his dead mother's presence,
and Ephraim is driven into the barn by the "somethin'" he
feels "droppin' off the elums, climbin' up the roof, sneakin'
down the chimney, pokin' in the corners" (180). Man is dominated
by these "great inscrutable forces," as the Freudian love
affair and its aftermath, the murder, so dramatically illustrate.
In the face of this mutable, incomprehensible universe - one in which
human beings are dwarfed and overpowered - O'Neill and his characters
quest for their absolutes.
[29] Desire Under the Elms opened 11 November 1924 in the
Greenwich Village Theatre. Completed quickly, earlier in the year,
the play had come to O'Neill as he was sleeping, as did Ah Wilderness
- "I simply awakened with these plays in mind," O'Neill
said. The critical reception was very mixed. In the Morning Telegraph
review, Fred Niblo, Jr. called Desire Under the Elms the "most
morbid plumbing of the depths to which human nature can sink,"
comparing the play to a sewer. "This piece will possibly make
money, but it is impossible for anyone who cares anything about the
theatre at all to approve of it . . ." (Miller, 40-41). The New
York Times reviewer, Stark Young, compared the new play to Beyond
the Horizon and found it "a fine progress . . . less sentiment
than this older piece and more passion . . . better written throughout;
it has as much tragic gloom and irony but a more mature conception
and a more imaginative austerity. Both critics found the play well
acted, especially Walter Houston as Ephraim Cabot, but while Niblo
focused on the crime and incest, Young understands the role of the
harsh New England God in thwarting men's dreams. Perhaps not surprisingly,
the most perceptive contemporary review was by Joseph Wood Krutch,
for The Nation, tellingly titled "The God of Stumps."
Krutch finds the meaning of the play to reside in the fact that only
Ephraim, of all the characters in the play, has a specific
religious commitment:
Unlike the others, he has a God, the hard God who hates the easy
gold of California or the easy crops of the West, the God who loves
stumps and stones and looks with His stern favour upon such as wring
a dour life without softness and without love from a soil barren
like their souls. And this God comforts him: "I am hard,"
he says, when he learns that the baby, murdered by its mother is
not his but his son's: "I am a hard man and I am alone - but
so is God" (Miller, 43-44).
Possibly the strong acting of Walter Huston focused Krutch on the
character of Ephraim - but the old man is but a tragic condition
in the story of Eben, the tragic O'Neill hero who suffers from the
lack of "substitute religion." It is Ephraim's self-delusions
that drive his family each to their tragic ends. Nonetheless, Krutch
was emphatically positive about the play: "Desire Under the
Elms will be, with one exception, the most moving play seen during
the current season" (Miller, 44).
[30] By January 2 of the following year, Desire Under the Elms
had moved to the Earl Carroll Theater, and District Attorney Joab
Banton began a month-long attempt, with heavy newspaper coverage,
to shut the play down, until a nonjudicial forum found the play fit
for public showing. The publicity was good for ticket sales, and even
as Banton continued his public pronouncements, the play began to gross
as much as $13,500 per week. O'Neill himself made nearly $8,000 in
February-March of 1925 (Black, 317). The same controversy delayed
the production of Desire in England, until 1931 (at a private
club) and 1940 (for a public audience). In fact, as O'Neill feared,
the play's reputation was damaged by its sensationalistic reputation
- though not in critical terms. It is viewed as one of O'Neill's masterpieces,
by critics as varied as Stephen Bogard, in Contours in Time
(213-218) and Margaret Ronald, in The Eugene O'Neill Companion
(174-177). Bogard is especially insistent that the play is among O'Neill's
mature successes:
At the end, O'Neill's God-oriented tragedy comes to focus on man.
The shift is made without a jar, and the play achieves a fullness
of statement and form which no earlier work of his had attained.
It is a major work of art prepared by a playwright who in mastering
his craft and completely understanding the implications of his theme
had finally come of age (225).
Even as Freudian a critic as Stephen Black acknowledges the success
of Desire, if for different reasons: "To a psychoanalytic
biographer, the play constitutes a providential compromise that O'Neill
happened on in his struggle to acquire and disown his personal oedipal
knowledge." (The oedipal theme continues to shadow the "God-orientation"
of the play, apparently.)
[31] In the ending of Desire, "we find a logic that derives
from an understanding that was formed by faith in a deity" (Shaughnessy,
101). O'Neill was raised in a puritanical Irish Catholicism; the Cabots
in New England Calvinism. Abbie and Eben "acknowledge the gravity
of their sin and therewith accept their punishment as just. Their
sensibilities are not so different from Ephraim's" (101) - nor
from O'Neill's. In their final speeches, the two lovers come "to
see the efficacy of suffering." Each wants to pay for
sin. They are led off by the sheriff just as Hickey is led away by
police detectives. In these scenes "we hear echoes of Greek tragedy,
but we also recognize familiar Christian strains" (101). Echoing
O'Neill's words, Shaughnessy summarizes the final scene:
Redemption is still understood in terms of an act of suffering
accepted in good grace . . . Their willingness to atone confirms
their value as human beings. Redemption takes place (101).
[32] The Iceman Cometh was written in 1939, finished on November
26. This was the year of the German invasion of Poland, and of Britain
and France's declaration of war. O'Neill had been working on his projected
Cycle plays, narrating "the decline and fall of the United States,"
but the war had made this writing seem impossible. He retreated farther
from the world at Tao House, and farther into himself, focusing on
his "memory play" of Hope's saloon. As Travis Bogard sums
up his shift in theme as World War Two loomed, "In the midst
of Armageddon, one does not bother to prophesy" (Bogard, 413).
[33] The insufficiency of ideals created by men is, again, the central
theme of The Iceman Cometh. Twelve besotted losers wait in
Harry Hope's saloon for Hickey, who, they expect, will show them a
good time. Hickey surprises them by his changed character; he has
turned over a new leaf, and he hopes to bring his good news to his
friends. Hickey wants to rid the group of their "pipe dreams,"
to force them to face reality and recognize their real condition.
The pipe dreams prove to be necessary, however; none of the gang at
Hope's saloon can face reality without his pipe dream.
[34] There are many obvious similarities between Hickey and Christ:
Hickey has twelve followers who drink wine at Hope's party, and the
placement on the stage is similar to DaVinci's painting of the Last
Supper. Hickey is unaware, when he leaves the party, that his enemies
await him. The three Marys are present in The Iceman Cometh
in the three whores, who sympathize with Hickey, as did the women
with Christ. Parritt, the twelfth character to be listed, has betrayed
his faith, as did Judas, the twelfth disciple.
[35] Hickey, however, is a very false Messiah; his gospel, like those
of Yank and Reuben Light, is limited and is distorted by his own pipe
dream. Hickey has killed his wife, and he lies to himself about his
motives. When the police inevitably arrive, he suddenly begins to
plead insanity. "You know I must have been insane, don't you,
Governor?" After experiencing the failure of their pipe dreams,
the gang at Hope's immediately takes up Hickey's insanity, seizing
upon it as an excuse for their earlier actions, salvaging for themselves
their original delusions:
We only did them because - (He hesitates-then defiantly)
Because we hoped he'd come out of it if we kidded him along and
humored him, . . . Ain't that right fellers? (They burst into
a chorus of eager assent . . .) (The Iceman Cometh,
244).
[36] Eventually most of the gang at Hope's returns to the condition
they demonstrated at the beginning of the play. Rosamond Gilder draws
the ironic point of this circular movement: "The greatest illusion
of all is to believe that disillusionment - the unaided process of
the intellect - can solve man's dilemma" (Gilder, 30). The self-limiting,
ontological prison of the human mind is no longer a mere cage; now
it is the whole stage, the inescapable walls of (ironically) Hope's
saloon.
[37] After Parritt's suicide, only Larry Slade is left without a
pipe dream. When he tells Parritt to "go ahead", Slade performs
the only meaningful moral action in the play; he is, as Doris Falk
summarizes his role, "projecting moral value in a world devoid
of absolutes" (91). Yet Slade knows he cannot project this value
by faith in any arbitrary system:
Life is too much for me! I'll be a weak fool looking with pity
at the two sides of everything till the day I die (258).
Like O'Neill's strong female character, Lavinia Mannon, Slade knows
he is left with only himself to decide every issue, and he knows he
cannot trust these judgments to his mind alone.
[38] The Theatre Guild first asked O'Neill for production rights
to The Iceman Cometh in 1942, but O'Neill did not want any
of his plays produced during World War II. After the fighting stops,
with the war won, "reaction to the realities behind the surface
of the peace sets in," O'Neill told Theresa Helburn. "Then
there will again be an audience able to feel the inner meanings of
plays dealing with the everlasting mystery and irony and tragedy of
men's lies and dreams" (quoted in Floyd, 530).
[39] Despite the fact that this theme - "humanity's desperate
need for a life-sustaining illusion to lessen the naked despair of
soul-destroying reality" (Floyd, 512) - is by no means new to
O'Neill's work, despite the positive reviews, and despite the fact
that critics were grateful that O'Neill's 12 years of silence were
broken, post-war audiences apparently worked hard to enjoy the play.
Perhaps the American public's immediate post-war euphoria and optimism
could not be pierced. And, again, O'Neill may have miscalculated his
emphasis as he had done with Dynamo: while every critic and
most audiences saw the play as deeply, religiously pessimistic,
he insisted that it was, especially in its last scene, an optimistic
play. When each character narrates his "face-saving version of
his experience when he went out to confront his pipe dream,"
O'Neill wrote in a letter to Kenneth Macgowan, "they must
tell these lies as a first step in taking up life again" (quoted
in Floyd, 531). More common is the judgment of Travis Bogard. Despite
the similarities to the Last Supper, despite Hickey's superficial
resemblance to a long-awaited Messiah, The Iceman Cometh may
be O'Neill's most fully evolved Nietzschean statement. "After
the long, poetically oriented quest which he had conducted through
the plays of the 1920s, seeking a God to which men could belong, O'Neill
at last has come to agree with Nietzsche that men live in a godless
world" (Bogard, 420).
[40] The Iceman Cometh opened October 9, 1946, at the Martin
Beck Theatre, and was an immediate if modest success, despite its
four-hour running time. Audiences and critics seemed eager for an
O'Neill play after an absence from Broadway of 12 years. Some opening
night critics were enthusiastic about the set, the acting, and the
ideas of the play. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing for the Times,
had only a few negative comments (mainly about the running time) in
a review beginning with "acted with rare vitality and insight"
and ending with a "final salute to a notable drama by a man who
writes with the heart and wonder of a poet." Robert Coleman,
writing for the Mirror, ended by exhorting his readers to "rush
to the Martin Beck immediately. 'The Iceman Cometh' will be a terrific
hit, the 'top ticket' at the brokers" (Miller, 122-125). Both
opening night reviewers communicated O'Neill's theme of pipe dreams
and illusions succinctly and directly: "They [the characters
in Hope's saloon] cannot face the hollowness of themselves without
the opium of illusions," Atkinson summarizes (Miller, 123). The
language, the surface diversity of the characters, all delighted the
critics.
[41] The play was even subject to immediate literary analysis. Eric
Bentley reviewed the script itself for the November 1946 Atlantic
Monthly. He begins by noting the mature O'Neill's bona fides as
a Pulitzer and Nobel winner. He notes the offstage sex and violence
of O'Neill's material next, but quickly, while narrating the action
of the play, begins comparing O'Neill's methods of slow revelation
to the analytic exposition of Ibsen. Of particular interest are side
comments about O'Neill's audience and their growing sophistication
with his materials and methods:
. . . the political disillusionment of Larry Slade and young Parritt,
not to mention one of the minor characters who is a hostile portrait
of a power-mad radical, will mean something to a generation that
knows Arthur Koestler and George Orwell (Bentley, 65).
And, further, after pointedly and ironically (one assumes) assuring
readers that "The Iceman Cometh, for all its length, is
not an experimental play" (Bentley, 66); he deals O'Neill one
criticism:
I allude to the effect of the Ibsenic technic, to the concealment
from the audience of the play's starting point - the fact that Hickey
has killed his wife and the fact that he too has his pipe dream.
Of course the modern audience, inured to the thriller, is used to
historic concealment. And, as a thriller, the value of The
Iceman is not impaired by mystery so long undispelled. On the
melodramatic level, this play, like all of O'Neill's, is grandly
successful (Bentley, 66).
Nonetheless, Bentley continues worrying about the concealment and
finds it an error not to let the audience appreciate the irony earlier.
"Possibly Mr. O'Neill has damaged his drama to save his melodrama"
(Bentley, 65). But Bentley finally places O'Neill "above the
standards of Broadway," predicting that Iceman belongs
among the works of Sartre, Camus, and Brecht.
[42] The critical praise tended to be one-dimensional though, and
even frequently superficial; many critics, most notably Mary McCarthy,
were entirely negative about the play. The original production ran
a disappointing 136 performances, and it was to be eight years before
the next new O'Neill play was staged in New York. With the much later
Jos³ Quintero-Jason Robards production of The Iceman Cometh,
and its superior direction and casting, the play began to be seen
finally as a theatrical mile-post. This production ran for 565 performances
in the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village.
[43] In 1985, Robards revived the role of Hickey, but most critics
(and audiences) preferred the earlier version. More successful were
two productions by the Abbey Theatre, first in 1972 with Sean Cotter
directing Vincent Dowling in Hickey, and in 1992 with Brian Dennehy
in the role of Hickey.
[44] Probably most Americans, or speakers of English, who have seen
Iceman saw only the 1974 film directed by John Frankenheimer.
Lee Marvin took the role of Hickey, and critical reception was very
mixed. In all, though, the film was successful because, as Shaughnessy
summarizes, "the cast was quite brilliant: Frederick March as
Harry Hope, Robert Ryan as Slade, Jeff Bridges as Parritt, and Bradford
Dillman as Willie Oban" (214n).
[45] O'Neill was very aware that modern American audiences had seemingly
lost both the sense of seriousness and the attention demanded by serious
theatre-going. But his reaction to critics complaining about the length
of The Iceman Cometh is precisely focused. Dudley Nichols'
memory of the reaction is detailed:
I use the phrase which Gene used in telling me, years ago, why
he was reluctant to have the play produced even the first time.
He said we have been conditioned by radio, TV, the movies, advertising,
capsule news and a nervous brevity in everything we do, to a point
where we have lost the power of sustained attention, which full-bodied
works of art demand.
Unless something moves and jerks, we turn away from it. If it doesn't
chatter or talk like a machine gun, we don't listen for long. [Walter]
Winchell knows this perfectly - he adopted a style which can hold
anyone's attention for fifteen minutes and make what he says sound
important no matter how trivial it may be. Winchell is a master
of the modern style. He is its arch-creator. Joshua Logan catches
this style in the theatre; he makes things happen for the eye all
the time, no matter whether the play is saying anything or not.
Now, a trivial play can be all movement, but a great play cannot
. . . (quoted in Gelb, and in Shaughnessy, 48).
As Edward Shaughnessy continues this thought, "It has only gotten
worse in a world where sound bytes [sic] and 'factoids' are taken
for truth" (49).
[46] Partly since he read and absorbed Nietzsche, but more probably,
concludes James P. Pettygrove, as a result of simple intellectual
mistrust, "O'Neill never ceases to suspect and resent anything
like 'eternal verities' . . . like Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg,
and Chekhov, O'Neill's approach to truth was artistic or mystical
rather than rational" (617-618). In these four plays - The
Hairy Ape, Dynamo, The Iceman Cometh, and Desire
Under the Elms - O'Neill indicates one reason for his mistrust:
all faiths are of human origin, or at least human interpretation,
and therefore not only fallible, but destructive. Moreover, these
four plays illustrate the difficulty of presenting great religious
themes in dramatic works: it is tempting to conclude that the more
overt and discursive, the more the modern audience feels that the
religious theme is consciously presented, the less likely the drama
will be a critical or financial success.
[47] But even a sample of only four O'Neill plays shows that the
dynamic is not quite that simple. Dynamo is discursive in form
and its religious themes are presently very overtly and it was, in
fact, both a popular and critical failure. Desire Under the Elms,
a popular and critical success, dealt with religious themes only slightly
less discursively - how much of its soaring ticket sales were due
to the publicity surrounding the attempt to ban the play, and what
role did its notoriety play in making Desire a financial success?
[48] Similar questions might surround our consideration of The
Hairy Ape, a popular success despite the critical reaction. Just
as some audience members must have bought tickets to Desire Under
the Elms to be titillated rather than to be taught, did the shock
of the language and scenes and the novelty of the staging draw audiences
to The Hairy Ape in 1922? Shock value is entertainment,
after all, and can be enjoyed without attending to theme or message.
[49[ And, consider the long history of The Iceman Cometh.
O'Neill's complaints about modern, media-trained audiences and their
inability to stay focused on great literature or serious ideas in
the theatre is an insightful explanation of the play's early middling
success. (Bentley's praise of Iceman as a literary sort of
play that keeps its sex and violence offstage and avoids experimentalism
may actually be a parallel explanation of the play's fate.) But The
Iceman Cometh had great success in a Broadway revival and as a
film. The explanation may well be that in The Iceman Cometh,
O'Neill successfully combined psychological depth of character and
a realistic style that make the play a very attractive vehicle for
strong actors looking to do "a star turn" on Broadway or
on film (where the strong production values can easily be made very
obvious to the widest of audiences).
[50] One final rhetorical question, the answer to which will bring
us back to the - possible - validity of the simple dynamic between
overt and subtle treatments of religion in popular media such as drama:
is the successful combination of psychological depth, "method"
acting, production values, and "star turns" created at the
expense of the religious message O'Neill originally wanted to convey
in The Iceman Cometh?
Works Cited
Bentley, Eric. "The Return of Eugene O'Neill," Atlantic
Monthly, 178 (November 1946), 64-66.
Black, Stephen A. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill.
Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Carpenter, Frederic I. Eugene O'Neill. New York: Twayne, 1964.
Falk, Doris. "The Iceman Cometh." In Twentieth
Century Interpretations of the Iceman Cometh, edited by John Henry
Raleigh, 87-91. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment.
New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.
Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo.
Revised edition. New York: Applause, 2000.
Gilder, Rosamond. "The Iceman Cometh." In
Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Iceman Cometh: A
Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Henry Raleigh, 29-31.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Nine Plays. New York: Modern Library,
1954.
Miller, Jordan Y. Playwright's Progress: O'Neill and the Critics.
Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965.
O'Neill, Eugene. Dynamo. New York: Liveright. 1929.
O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. New York: Random, 1946.
Pettegrove, James P. "O'Neill as Thinker." Maske und
Kothurn, 10, 617-618.
Quinn, Athur Hobson. "Eugene O'Neill, Poet and Mystic."
Scribner's Magazine, December. 1926, 369-381.
Shaughnessy, Edward L. Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene
O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1996.
Trilling, Lionel. "Eugene O'Neill." The New Republic
88 (September 23, 1936), 175-179.
* Throughout the text
of this article I use nouns such as "man" and pronouns such
as "his" and "he" rather than more contemporary
gender-inclusive language. While one might prefer the latter, the
older usages might be more appropriate in an article on O'Neill or
indeed any dramatist of the early twentieth century; I would wish
neither to correct or edit O'Neill and his contemporary critics nor
to use a pointedly contrasting style in the text surrounding quotations
from their works.
