The Mysticism of Eugene O'Neill

THE MYSTICISM OF EUGENE O'NEILL ALTHOUGH KRUTCH, QUINN, AND DORIS ALEXANDER have called O'Neill a mystic,1 and Trilling, Baker, Barrett Clark, and others have mentioned the mysticism of particular plays,2 no critic has yet analyzed the recurrence of mystical thought throughout O'Neill's career. Perhaps scholars have been embarrassed by the importance of mysticism in an author who often shows the hallmarks of realism and naturalism ; sophisticated modern man is expected to be a materialist or a neo-orthodox Christian or a sceptic-but a mystic? Indeed, critics have often found O'Neill's mysticism a distinct weakness: Doris Falk, for example, holds that "the plays with weakest conclusions end in paeans of praise for tragic struggle, and the paean usually expresses a mystical insight . . . [-] an explanation to the audience of the positive value of the struggle, which the audience should feel in the action itself:'3 There are, of course, firm statements by O'Neill inconsistent with mysticism. Yet when a reporter charged him with being full of paradoxes , O'Neill asked, "What did Walt Whitman say? ... 'Do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself.'''4 As Sinclair Lewis recognized, O'Neill saw "life as not to be neatly arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible thing akin to the tornado, the earthquake, the devastating fire."G Therefore it is difficult to be certain of O'Neill's total attitude towards the world, though one part of that total was a suprarational mysticism at odds with the gloom so often apparent in the plays. Early evidence of mysticism in O'Neill himself appears most clearly from Agnes Boulton's account of the first years of their marriage. 1Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since I9IB (New York, 1939), pp. 80, 118; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of The American Drama (New York, 1927), II, 165; Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (New York, 1962), p. 261. 2 Lionel Trilling, "Eugene O'Neill," The New Republic, LXXVIII (September 23, 1936), 177: George P. Baker, "O'Neill's First Decade," The Ya·le RevIew, XV Guly, 1926), 792; Barrett Clark, Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York, 1947), p. 103. S Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick, N. J., 1958), p. 197; John Mason Brown, "Intermission," Theatre Arts Monthly, XII (April, 1928), 239. 4 Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten (New York, 195.9), p. 311. GSinclair Lewis, The Man from Main Street, ed. H. E. Maule and M. H. Cane (New York, 1953), p. 8. 26 1966 MYSTICISM OF O'NEILL 27 Sometimes, as she saw her husband watching the sea gulls of Cape Cod, she thought "that he envied them their oneness with the wind." There was always in him a persistent sense of the reality that lies behind what is, what seems to be. He could find nothing of that in the God he knew and whom he had outgrown; nor could he find it elsewhere-either in love or in idea•..• At times, however, Gene must have achieved briefly a sense of that expanded consciousness in which the self, forgotten, becomes one with whatever is behind the veil; he speaks of it in a prose poem ... which he gave me as a gift. It was during their first summer at Peaked Hill (1919) that Gene meditated most, and was most alone with and even sometimes absorbed into that reality which for him lay behind outer appearances-and which he was always, perhaps even later, seeking.6 In the mid '.2OS O'Neill wrote of himself as a most confirmed mystic, . . . always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character. I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind- (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it-Mystery certainly).1 A year or two later, O'Neill wrote for Benjamin DeCasseres' Anathema! Litanies of Negation, words that might well apply to his own work: [The book] is the torment and ecstacy of a mystic's questioning of life. The answer comes...