Eugene O'Neill's Critics: Voices from Abroad ed. by Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck (review)

Book Reviews HORST FRENZ AND SUSAN TUCK, eds. Eugene O'Neill's Critics: VoicesJrom Abroad. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1984. pp. xxii, 225. illustrated. $22.50. Despite t.he recent fiuny ofposthumous acclaim accorded Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill's position as our greatest dramatist probably remains secure. He is certainly AIDerica's most important playwright historically. As Brooks Atkinson. in Broadway, has noted, O'Neill's Beyond {he Horizon marks "the great divide between the provincial theater of ready-made plays and the modem American drama concerned directly with human life." Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd, in Masters ofModern Drama, observe how. "with a single-mindedness rare in contemporary letters, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill reduced America's usual cultural lag behind Europe and brought the main currents of modem drama into the American theatre." These two statements imply something important about the nature ofO'Neill's critical reception at home and abroad. American reviewers and critics in the 1920Soften were so bored by "the provincial theater of ready-made plays" that O'Neill's work came as a blessed relief of imagination and innovation, a relief that was so welcome that it caused them to overvalue that work. Evidence of this reaction is amply available in two earlier collections ofcontemporary criticism: Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher's O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism (1961), and Jordan Y. Miller's Playwright's Progress: O'Neill and the Critics (1965). There we find comments like Ludwig Lewisohn's about All God's Chillun Got Wings (t924): "I have seen nothing that so deeply gave me an emotion comparable to what the Greeks must have felt at the dark and dreadful actions set forth by the older Attic dramatists"; or Benjamin de Casseres' about Ltzzarus Ltzughed (1928): "In sheer power, daring and allegorical implications I rank [it] ... with the Faust of Goethe, The Temptations ofSt. Anthony of Flaubert and Nietzsche's Zarathustra." These early domestic evaluations also lack awareness of the fact that O'Neill's plays, Book Reviews however fresh they were in the context of American drama, were in many respects simply bringing into our theater "the main currents of modem drama" as it had been practiced abroad for several years. Apparently. most American commentators were either relatively ignorant of European drama or too chauvinistic to mention it in their writing about O'Neill. What is striking about this frrst collection of foreign responses to O'Neill's plays gathered by Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck is that the critics represented here. for the most part, measure him not against his American predecessors, but rather in the context of world theater. This comparison produces two major results. The first is that, not surprisingly. these commentators tend to judge him more harshly; and the second is that they often locate his work in a wider context, an enlargement which seems only logical in that O'Neill was certainly aware of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and many others of his contemporaries. The harsherjudgments are exemplified by Gennan novelist and publisher Erik Reger. who concludes in a 1929 article significantly titled."The Georg Kaiser of America": "One can hardly say that O'Neill has copied his European models: he has undergirded them with a completely original feeling , and has transfonned the stimulations he received from Europe. He does not, however, discover new themes; he moves within those already known, taking his substance from them" (p. 32). And Irish critic St. John Irvine, in what is surely one of the bitterest indictments of O'Neill ever written, contends: "The most obvious difference between Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Mr. O'Neill is that the two fonner loved mankind, but the last feels only contemptuous pity for it. The strongest passion animating his characters is hate" (p. 83). But the felicitous nature of this enlargement of the critical context can also be seen in Hungarian critic B, Nagy Laszlo's good analysis of the differences between the Oresteia and Mourning Becomes Electra (pp. 127-128); in Gennan director Oscar Fritz Schuh's suggestive comments about the "Moliere-like quality" of A Touch of the Poet (pp...