O'Neill: The Power of Daring

O'NEILL: THE POWER OF DARING TIm PLACE was a wide, bare, dimly-lit rehearsal hall on the fifth floor of the old Theatre Guild building. The year was 1953. There was a platfonu , a small reading desk facing several rising rows of seats, and Lawrence Langner was speaking: "I can now see Gene entering through that door," he said, and pointed at a narrow lateral door, "walking shyly and sitting in the back of this hall as rehearsals were being started for...." And the illusion was so strong that my eyes veered to the door and for a moment I distinctly saw the young shy man walking in and sitting among us. But he had died a few days before, and he wasn't a young man then. Lawrence Langner continued, and then Clifford Odets spoke, and an actress who had appeared in a play of his that had closed out of town. Those were his difficult years. In fact, when he died scant attention was paid in the papers. And even at this memorial meeting the attendance was rather poor in spite of the fact that it was meant exclusively for actors and other theater practitioners. The place was the Actors' Studio. Odets read from an early diary to reveal how O'Neill had inspired him. He read for a long time entries that had absolutely nothing to do with O'Neill, although they must have had significance for Odets. I remember one: the Dempsey-Firpo fight. Finaliy, after pages and pages, O'Neill's name cropped up, a slight mention. Jimmy Light spoke too. He had been a good friend of O'Neill's from the old times, the beginnings with the Provincetown Players.... They ali told good things about him, unexpected things. Like the fact recalled by Langner that he was proud of his body and physical prowess, and claimed to swim better than his own son-I don't recall which one -even though he was over forty at the time and almost twice the boy's age. And as thefigure of O'Neill was being drawn by those who had known him well over the years or had worked in parallel paths through his triumph and his rather short eclipse, I kept wondering what had made possible this extraordinary career-extraordinary even then, although he was still to perfonu, from his grave, the unheard-of feat of fascinating us again, spellbinding us once more-on his tenus. Because this was certainly an American phenomenon, and yet one that goes against what some people consider the grain of materialistic, indifferent America. Who knows what is the true grain of America? Maybe he knew best of all. He certainly managed the impossible: being an 231 232 MODERN DRAMA December artist and making a million dollars, not really compromising and yet succeeding on this world's terms. At one time, we were told, he owned a house here, and another in France, and a third one, I don't remember where. And a fourth one too. He had a splendid study built in the manner of a ship's cabin. And the Nobel Prize. He really achieved the American dream: he had his cake, and ate it, too. "Don't sell your soul for nothing," advised the prostitute to Marco Millions after discovering 6neof his early poems. ''That's bad business." O'Neill didn't sell it for nothing; he made it pay. He was both the Great God Brown and Dian Anthony. There was only one flaw. Nature somehow compensates. It couldn't allow perhaps so much bounty. And so O'Neill died of a horrible disease, that martyrized him to the end, and crippled all the parts of his body of which he was so proud, especially his hands, and he liked to write his plays in longhand. O'Neill was made to pay in another sense, too. Life being whatit is, this also might have been expected. It lavished its material rewards on one man who really didn't consider them the mark of his success, who didn't do it "just for money," as Parritt pretended to in order to justify his betrayal...