The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey

The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey LAURIN R. PORTER Family is a key theme linking Eugene O'Neill's historical cycle, written in the mid-I 930s, with the autobiographical dramas which followed: The Iceman Cometh , Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moonfor the Misbegotten, and the one-act Hughie.I For approximately five years before writing Iceman in 1939, O'Neill's time and energy were almost totally devoted to the cycle, a series of plays he entitled A Tale ofPossessors Self-Dispossessed, which was to trace the development of America from 1755 to 1932, a span of almost two hundred years. His objective was to define the American experience by focusing upon a single family, the Melody-Harford clan, which he modelled indirectly after his own family. On June 5, 1939, having grown stale on the cycle (extant plays include A Touch ofthe Poet, More Stately Mansions, and, in scenario form, The Calms of Capricorn), he decided to put it aside temporarily and work on a play which had "nothing to do with" the cycle. The next day he noted in his Work Diary that he would do outlines of two new works, the "Jimmy-the-Pries!'s, Hell-Hole, Garden idea and the New London family one,,,2 pointing in this briefnotation to the plays which were to become his major achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. It is ironic, in retrospect, that O'Neill thought of these plays as unrelated to those he had been working on so feverishly up to this point, since in all of them the theme of family is the pivot on which both action and meaning revolve. Indeed, one can see the cycle plays as preparation for the more obviously autobiographical Iceman, which in tum clears the way for what could finally be a direct confrontation with his biological family in Long Day's Journey Into Night and its coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten. Long Day's Journey and Iceman are linked in more than their simultaneous conception.3 Both, for instance, are set in 1912, a watershed year in O'Neill's life. The winter of that year saw his attempted suicide at Jimmy-the-Priest's, a The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey 53 New York waterfront dive where he had been living with burns and outcasts he later called his best friends. The summer saw him living with his family in a rare period of relative harmony at the New London Monte Cristo cottage; shortly thereafter he learned of his consumption and left for the sanitorium, where he made his famous resolution to become a playwright. Thus both personally and artistically, O'Neill's life turned around that year; Iceman and Long Day's Journey tell the story of his two "families" at that critical juncture. The use ofhis own family members as models for the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey is well known, as are the biographical sources for nearly all the characters in Iceman 4 What has not been brought into focus is the fact that Iceman, like Journey, is structured around the concept offamily. While at first glance this seems incongruous, given the all-male society at Harry Hope's saloon (the tarts are treated as members of the club), there are actually two "families" in this play: the family of the boarders, over which Hope presides in fatherly fashion, and a unit comprised of the three central characters, Larry Slade, Theodore Hickman (Hickey), and Don Parritt, which also functions as a family in several significant ways. It is this latter group which is of particular interest, since it reflects both O'Neill's own family (considerably displaced) as well as conflicting components in the playwright's personal experience and self-concept. As he approaches autobiography with increasing directness in this crucial play, O'Neill moves from oblique exploration of his family in the MelodyHarfords ' to a less disguised treatment of people he actually knew in The Iceman Cometh. At the same time, as I will argue in this article, his own family appears - still disguised, but...