Books: Lament for the Loveless

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN (177 pp.)—Eugene O’Neill—Random House ($2.75).

Though his pen has been still for the better part of twelve years, Eugene O’Neill, ill with Parkinson’s disease, has twice dipped into his backlog of unproduced plays. In 1946 Broadway saw The Iceman Cometh, which O’Neill had completed in 1939; A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1940, got its premiere in Columbus, Ohio in 1947. Moon for the Misbegotten opened to what the trade calls mixed notices, but played to good houses in Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit, although Detroit demanded that such key terms as “whore,” “bastard,” “son of a bitch” and “blonde pig” be censored out. Dissatisfied with its casting, O’Neill refused to let the play be produced on Broadway.

Though it is scarcely the play to add to )’Neill’s lofty prestige of the ’20s and ’30s, Moon does read better than The Iceman Cometh. Iceman hacked at its one point—that man cannot live without illusions—with an icepick. Moon switches from the disenchanted mind to the undernourished heart. At core, its lament for the loveless is a gentle and moving one.

Shotgun Plot. Yet only in its core is it a gentle play. Coarse comic moods ripple its surface, and its three leading characters are emotional cripples. Pig-eyed Phil

Hogan is “misbegotten” because his spirit is as mean and hard as the rocky Connecticut land he farms. His daughter Josie is “misbegotten” because she weighs 180 Ibs. and stands 5 ft. n, “a big, rough, ugly cow of a woman.” Landlord Jim Tyrone is “misbegotten” in the catalogue of Sigmund Freud; he has an Oedipus complex.

O’Neill stretches them taut with manias —Hogan’s is for money, Josie’s for sex, Jim’s for liquor—then lets them slack with remorse. Hogan tells Josie that their landlord is going to sell the farm out from under them, and makes her agree to a shotgun plot: she will get Jim drunk, lure him to bed, and keep him there till her father appears with witnesses. Josie reneges on the scheme when she finds 1) that her father has lied about the farm, 2) that in Jim’s life there is room for only one woman, his dead mother.

Foreclosed Horizons. When Hogan arrives, maudlin-drunk and without witnesses, he swears that he had schemed only for Josie’s happiness. As Jim stirs and strides away, father & daughter get a glimpse of permanently foreclosed horizons, and Jim knows that he can never find peace of soul.

O’Neill is more prolix than profound in handling his melancholy theme. But he has enlivened it with Irish brogue and blague. And even when its dramatic light is half-hidden under a bushel of theatrics, A Moon for the Misbegotten casts a brighter gleam than any new play which the past season brought to Manhattan’s Grey White Way.