O'Neill and the Tragedy of Culture

O'Neill and the Tragedy of Culture ERNEST G . GRIFFIN In 1888 two writers of genius were born in America, one a great playwright with "a toucb of tbe poet" and the otber a great poet witb - perbaps it is not too unfair to say - a touch oftbe playwrigbt. In·this same year that Eugene O'Neill and T.S. Eliot were born, a greatly influential ifnot "great" English poet-critic, Matthew Arnold, died. From a critical viewpoint there is, I think, some advantage in linking these tbree names togetber. To begin with, they were all involved with a basic problem of the age, a problem tbat might be .roughly summarised in the question, how does one live meaningfully in a world of dying gods - or, if not dying, at least (to borrow from J. Hillis Miller) "disappearing" gods? Arnold's answer was most clearly expressed in his famous essay "Culture and Anarchy." At fIrst glance, the essay's title could be used to distinguish the respective attitudes of Eliot and O'Neill, Eliot advancing, as Arnold would wish, towards what used to be known as "high culture," and O'Neill, sympathetic to Emma Goldman and other anarchists, depicting literate cbaracters like Larry Slade and James Tyrone sinking to an irresponsible subculture. However, as with the troublesome word "culture" itself, there are many complications. For example, in his poetry, Arnold occasionally explored a world tbat was remarkably similar to O'Neill's. "The Forsaken Merman" could almost have been dedicated to the playwright. O'Neill seriously considered writing "an autobiographical novel in play form" entitled "The Sea-Mother's Son"; echoes of this intention occur in several of the completed plays, notably in Long Day's Joum ey into Night, in whicb the young "Edmund" declares, "It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would always have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fIsh. ,,1 Also like the merman - except that personal resolve replaced supernatural edict - O'Neill remained outside the Church; there was a notoriously "dramatic" scene when , at age fifteen, he refused to accompany his father to Sunday mass. At the same time he couldn't 2 ERNEST G. GRIFFIN quite leave the church grounds; somewhat like the merman who looked through the church window to catch glimpses of the children's mother, so O'Neill seems to be intermittently aware of the figure of the Virgin Mother. Symbolic associations with her and her transcendently forgiving nature reverberate through a number of his otherwise "fallen" female characters. It is interesting that, although "The Forsaken Merman" was in large measure a modem interpretation of an old Scandinavian legend, Eliot dismissed it as a "charade."2 In a sense he was right, but it was a charade based on a myth. This characterisation - "a charade based on a myth" - might be applied, with some justice, to several ofO'Neill's plays, especially his later ones. Allowing for the extravagance of her satirical barbs, I think that Mary McCarthy struck the right note in her review of A Moonfor the Misbegotten.3 She makes fun of the plot (it's "a sort of Olympian knockdown comedy"), but ends the review with the comment, "Nevertheless . . . despite the tone of barber shop harmony that enters into all O'Neill's work, this play exacts homage for its mythic powers." O'Neill, like Faulkner, was powerfully mythopoeic, and he frequently used a form ofmythopoeic irony to achieve his purpose; by making a comic masque of our rituals, he causes us to feel again some of the power out of which the rituals grew. He takes us literally into the world of the profane, the world just outside the temple or fanum where, within earshot, one might say, of the Last Supper, we participate in the obverse Feast of Fools, the basic scene of The Iceman Cometh (the title itself being not just an amusing pun but almost a theme statement: the promise of new life because "the Bridegroom cometh" is simultaneously offset by the approach of "the iceman" Death, all within the purlieus of a salesman's profane joke). O'Neill - like Eliot in this respect could...