The Theater: The Ordeal of Eugene O’Neill

Twelve years ago, the most exalted playwright in the history of the U.S. theater formally bowed off his worldwide stage. Eugene O’Neill intended to devote himself exclusively to one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken: the writing of a cycle of nine plays. Purpose: to dramatize the fate of a U.S. family and of the U.S. itself during a period of some 180 years (1754 to 1932).

One afternoon last week, for reasons best known to himself, O’Neill was back on Broadway with a mysterious play, mysteriously titled The Iceman Cometh, which would run for four and a quarter hours, with a 75-minute break for supper.

Towards 4:30* on that “first night” afternoon, some 1,200 people made the Martin Beck Theater resonant with that exhilarating precurtain buzz, like leaves before a storm, which has been familiar to theatergoers for 2,500 years. There was plenty to buzz about. There was the exciting fact that The Iceman Cometh was the first new O’Neill play to be produced since Days without End (1934). There was its cryptic title, clumsily poetic, naively sardonic and intensely O’Neillian, which caused one foreboding wag to suggest that a better name would be The Ice Tray Always Sticks Twice. The play had been rehearsed under heavy wrappings of secrecy. Almost nobody in the audience was sure what it was about, though some had paid $25 a seat to find out. But some people were already buying seats for February. For, whether the play was good or bad, theatergoers knew that the return of Eugene O’Neill was a .major event in the theater. Then, as the lights went faint, the buzz of excitement dissolved into silence. In the dimness, like the opening of a vast mouth, the curtain rose.

The Play. It rose on something harshly picturesque, something that through four long acts was to keep its soiled color and fuddled humanity, but that did not seem really impressive when it was over.

The opening scene was pure George Bellows—a seedy Bowery-type bar in the year 1912, littered with slumped and sleeping drunken bums.* Soaks of all descriptions—a Harvard man, a British infantry captain, a Boer War correspondent, a Negro gambler, an unbadged police lieutenant, a disillusioned anarchist—they had been reduced by rotgut to creatures of one baggy shape. What kept them hanging by a claw to life was the kindness of the drunken-bum saloonkeeper (finely played by Dudley Digges), and their pipe dreams, their mumbling that tomorrow would turn up a winning card or bring forth a better man.

This morning, however—while tarts forked over to the barkeep pimp, and a young anarchist stool pigeon crawled in to hide away—the bums were waiting for a highflying drummer named Hickey, who once a year threw them a big party and got as drunk as they did. But when * Outstanding in the Theatre Guild’s generally good production were Robert Edmond Jones’s sets.

Hickey (James Barton) finally came, he was not the fellow they knew; the party was to go on, he said, but he was not drinking. Something had happened to him, he had found peace by facing “reality”; and he jabbed away at them to do likewise.

Sullenly, hostilely, they try; they swear off the bottle and go looking for jobs, only to be thrown back on themselves, knowing that they are done for and that Hickey has sown a despair that means death. For the Iceman (in the sense that the loss of illusion means the end for those who have nothing else to lose) is Death.

Then they learn Hickey’s own story: he had murdered his wife because her constant forgiveness of his misdeeds had made him feel unbearably guilty. He had faced reality only because he had already resigned himself to death. As the cops snap their handcuffs on Hickey, the bums, reprieved to live a lie once more, go happily back to their drinking.

Slice of Life. It was as a thick (though much too fatty) slice of life—a somber, sardonic, year-long comic strip with a comic strip’s microscopic variations—that The Iceman Cometh was most telling. O’Neill’s bums were presented flat, with a few mannerisms, a few memories; they repeated their little specialty acts; they never grew more complex, they only grew incredibly familiar, like chickens seen turning over & over on a spit. But collectively they seemed more real and redolent, for O’Neill knew them from his younger days and really cared about them, mingling gusto with his compassion. In the bleary squalor of The Iceman there was none of the piped-in knowledge or condescension of the Ivory Sewer school of writers; in fellow-feeling, though never in intensity, O’Neill might be saying with Walt Whitman, I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

But this often static, enormously protracted play lacked the depth to match its length. That heavy dramatic undertow which often redeems long plays, and can count for much more than surface swell, was not there. Hickey, who might be a powerfully dramatic figure, wound up a merely theatrical one, peeling off a human skin to serve as a symbol of blight, disgorging in an interminable final speech too much and too lucid self-knowledge. And all that O’Neill seemed to be saying in The Iceman was that men cannot go on living without illusions—a truism that never took on the ring of nascent truth. As theater, much of the play was first-rate O’Neill. But as drama, for all its honest brooding, The Iceman was scarcely deeper than a puddle.

Bright Beginning. But behind the drama on the stage was the greater drama of one of literature’s great human ordeals.

Eugene O’Neill was born (1888) in a respectable Manhattan family hotel, but much of his early boyhood was spent in the wings of theaters all over the U.S. His father, James O’Neill Sr., was famed for his role of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (he sometimes earned $50,000 a year). Hence Eugene knew little of actors’ boardinghouse hardships. But he came to hate the constant moving around, long, dirty train rides, hotels, living out of trunks, the general rootlessness. He longed for security and stability.

In 1907, he flunked out of Princeton (he now holds an honorary degree of Litt. D. from Yale). In a mood of youthful truculence, he prospected for gold in Honduras, married his first wife (whom he later divorced), repeatedly went to sea taking any job he could get, finally wound up as an able-bodied seaman. For O’Neill the discovery of the sea was almost a religious experience. Later in Manhattan, he bummed around at a saloon called Jimmy the Priest’s (Jimmy was the prototype of the saloon keeper in The Iceman Cometh). Later he acted in his father’s stock company.

In 1912, O’Neill entered a tuberculosis sanatorium, spent his time there reading Ibsen and Strindberg. Cured, he took a course (paid for by O’Neill Sr.) at Professor George Pierce Baker’s famed playwriting laboratory at Harvard. Next summer, the Provincetown Players, a little group of earnest amateurs, put on O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff.

The O’Neill career had begun. Before The Iceman Cometh, it had yielded such theater milestones as The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, Mourning becomes Electro, and Ah, Wilderness!

When, at the crest of his fame, Eugene O’Neill forsook profitable playwriting for the delights of uncommercial creation, he committed himself to a predicament that many writers eagerly dream of. The idea worked well for a while. Then it stopped working well. Then it stopped working at all.

O’Neill had no reason to worry about money. His plays had netted him some $2,000,000; he could hope for a steadier income only if he had also written the Bible and a cookbook. His third marriage, with lovely Actress Carlotta Monterey, who had played opposite Louis Wolheim in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (see cut), was an eminently happy one. After an all but mythically swift rise to fame, with 37 plays, he was still relatively young. In experience, he was a brilliant, confident professional, at the height of his hopes and powers. He was a hard, resourceful worker, who loved his work. He had a backlog of themes, better, in his opinion, than any he had ever dramatized before. They would keep him busy and happy for years to come. He was ready to get down to the most serious work of his life.

Bright Prospects. But there was no particular hurry. On a 160-acre tract of deep country near Oakland, Calif., O’Neill and his wife spent their first years of liberty designing and building a big house as beautiful as their prospects. They christened it Tao House. * In 1935, O’Neill began to block out his massive cycle of plays. Every day he worked from about 8 in the morning until about 1 :30, writing as a rule quite freely and surely, in his elegant, complex, microscopic hand. Carlotta, often with the help of a magnifying glass, typed up each day’s work as it came along.

With six servants to care for their establishment, the O’Neills lived with the guarded, exquisite frugality possible to the rich: quietly idling, reading or playing records in the evenings, occasionally entertaining one or another of their few close friends, less often putting up people like Publisher Bennett Cerf, never giving parties. It was a fertile, happy life, for people who knew how to use it, and in their early middle age the O’Neills knew very well how to use it.

During those first years, according to O’Neill’s great friend, George Jean Nathan (in the October American Mercury), the playwright:

¶ Outlined “in minute detail” the cycle of plays (which had grown to eleven) to be called (according to rumor) A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

¶ “Definitely completed seven of them, including the three double-length ones, and got pretty well into the eighth.”

¶ Completed three other plays: A Moon for the Misbegotten (which will be produced in December), A Touch of the Poet (which will be produced next year), Long Day’s Journey into Night, which, for reasons unspecified, cannot be produced until 25 years after the author’s death.

¶ “Completed the first play of a much shorter and entirely different cycle. . . .”

¶ “Gradually convinced himself . . . that his dramaturgical plan [for the cycle] was faulty”—the cycle should tell of one family, not two—and “without further ado . . . destroyed two of the double-length or four of the plays he had written. . . .” (In his time, O’Neill has ruthlessly scrapped several other plays.)

¶ Conceived “an exciting idea for another play which bears no relation to the cycle.”

¶ “Made copious notes on at least three or four” other plays.

The Coming of Catastrophe. O’Neill’s idyllic quiet, which was ultimately to be destroyed by illness, was first invaded by something more sinister. By 1938 the sickening geologic slipping and faulting of world affairs had so profoundly disturbed him that he had gone stale on his cycle. By 1939 he turned, for relief, to The Iceman Cometh. By 1940, his whole scheme of work began to fall apart. His financial and personal relationships were untouched; his leisure for work was still unlimited. But some subtle, insidious things (and some brutally simple ones) destroyed the apparent perfection of his life.

O’Neill loved and venerated France as holy ground; when the Germans moved in, O’Neill says, he felt as though they had moved on to the next ranch. Thenceforth he found it all but impossible to keep on writing at all. When their servants left to do war work, the O’Neills in their big establishment were stranded as literally as a beached vessel. (Neither of them has ever learned to drive a car.)

So they sold their house, stored most of their belongings, and moved into a three-room apartment on San Francisco’s California Street. There O’Neill suffered a paralytic stroke and for six months required constant nursing. The stroke was followed by an increasing (and incurable) palsy so severe that it made writing as physically impossible for O’Neill as it already was mentally. (To shave himself he still has to grip the razor with both hands and, even so, the act is nerve-racking.) For five years the O’Neills lived in their little apartment. During those years, O’Neill had neither the heart nor the hand for creative work. But those years of silence and suffering may yet prove the most formative and productive years of his life. For there is no chemistry to equal that which works in the marriage of catastrophe with a courageous heart.

The Return. Why did O’Neill decide to return to Manhattan? Some people whisper about money difficulties, but that seems unlikely. Others suggest that after five years of infirmity, unproductiveness and cramped quarters the thought of having a new play produced might amount to a rebirth.

Whatever O’Neill’s motives, he and his wife went to Manhattan last year, taking little except their toothbrushes and their big, indispensable collections of books and records (which jam two of the six rooms of their present apartment).

The Man. According to Iceman’s Director Eddie Dowling, the actors, who at first were as shy as O’Neill, “warmed up to him after the first ten minutes; they knew he belongs in the theater.” They “adored” him because his response was so keen, because he was so gentle and appreciative, and so quick to smile when anyone did something well. When he arrived late for a rehearsal, which rarely happened, they kept asking about him. Says Dowling: “They miss him when he’s not there.”

There is nothing upstage about O’Neill. The mass interview he gave the press, early last month, and his more intimate conversation after the conference, left an impression of the man which, in many respects, was much more affecting and revealing than the play with which he broke his long silence as an artist.

Newshawks had been warned that they were going to meet a man in poor health. They met a man as thin, brittle and white as a stick of chalk, who at the age of 58 looked 70. He shuddered with palsy. His face was shrunken tightly against his fine skull. His cheeks drooped wearily below his mouth. It was not until he had walked swiftly, but shakily, towards them and had taken his seat, that newsmen noticed much about him that was still youthful and perhaps more impressive than even before: the graceful, aquiline head; the quality of finality, of definitive-ness—and his eyes, which one of O’Neill’s friends calls “the crow’s-nest of his soul.”

His paralysis agitans involved his whole emaciated body in one miserable stammer. Sometimes he could scarcely project his palsied voice past his lips. Sometimes, uncontrollably, it filled the whole room with its blurting bass boom. What gave him great dignity was the complete purity of his manner in its courtesy, diffidence, simplicity, and the pungency of his expression. Since, to avoid the fatigue of unnecessary speech, he edits his thoughts, his conversation has some of the finish of literature.

Enraged Resignation. O’Neill said that he regarded his illness with “enraged resignation. Outwardly, I might blame it on the war. . . . But inwardly . . . the war helped me realize that I was putting my faith in the old values, and they’re gone. . . . It’s very sad, but there are no values to live by today. . . . Anything is permissible if you know the angles.

“I feel, in that sense, that America is the greatest failure in history. It was given everything, more than any other country in history, but we’ve squandered our soul by trying to possess something outside it, and we’ll end as that game usually does, by losing our soul and the thing outside it too. But why go on—the Bible said it much better: ‘For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’

“There is a feeling around, or I’m mistaken, of fate. Kismet, the negative fate; not in the Greek sense. . . . It’s struck me as time goes on, how something funny, even farcical, can suddenly without any apparent reason, break up into something gloomy and tragic. … A sort of unfair non sequitur, as though events, as though life, were being manipulated just to confuse us. I think I’m aware of comedy more than I ever was before; a big kind of comedy that doesn’t stay funny very long. I’ve made some use of it in The Iceman. The first act is hilarious comedy, think, but then some people may not even laugh. At any rate, the comedy breaks up and the tragedy comes on. . . .”

Then he added: “I’m happier now than

I’ve ever been—I couldn’t ever be negative about life. On that score, you’ve got to decide YES or NO. And I’ll always say YES. Yes, I’m happy.”

The Artist. Both his new play and his return raised an inevitable question: Is Eugene O’Neill the great dramatist many people have long considered him? The harder-minded critics generally agreed: a master craftsman of the theater—yes; a great dramatist—no.

O’Neill does not seem, to be a man of great, searching or original intelligence. And however vivid his emotions and intuitions as a dramatic poet, he generally lacks the ability to stand aside from them and give them final hardness, clearness, earthiness, eloquence. Instead, he swims the crests of their waves; and, sometimes, he drowns in them. He is a wonderful contriver of moods. But the moods are never reflected against a firm intelligence; they seem, rather, to move and expand for their own sakes, and characters and ideas, used as mere colorings for mood, shift for themselves as best they can.

That O’Neill is a poet is evident in almost any line he has written. That he lacks the ultimate (and primary) requirement of a great poet (to arrange words in eloquent and unimprovable order and beauty) is equally evident in the same lines. Lacking deep perception of real people, O’Neill constantly scores his points, and gets his effects, by external tricks.

But as a playwright, O’Neill remains the greatest master of theater the U.S. has ever produced. He is a marvelous craftsman, and one of the most high-minded who has ever worked. If he often undertakes too much, that is far better than undertaking too little. This habitual exorbitance goes far towards accounting for the compelling tone which resounds through all of O’Neill’s work like the ringing of red iron on an anvil. This magnificent — Ruth Gilbert, Dudley Digges, Jeanne Cagney. cent tone is the best and most constant quality in O’Neill’s writing. It is the voice of the spirit of the man himself; and nobody who hears that voice can question the ardent nobility of the spirit.

* Thenceforth the curtain would rise on The Iceman at 5:30. The purpose of the earlier curtain: to give reviewers more time to collect their dazed impressions.

The Chinese character Tao symbolizes The Right Way of Life.

Outstanding in the Theatre Guild’s generallygood production were Robert Edmond Jones’s sets.