Conversations with Eugene O'Neill ed. by Mark W. Estrin, and: Songs of American Experience: The Vision of O'Neill and Melville by Marc Maufort (review)

Book Reviews MARK W. ESTRIN, ed. Conversations with Eugene O'Neill. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1990. Pp. XXXV, 242, illuslrated. $29··95, $14.95 (PB). MARC MAUFQRT. Songs ofAmerican Experience: The Vision of O'Neill alld Melville. American University Studies, Vol. 24. New York: Peter Lang 1990. Pp. xiv, 224. illustrated. $42.95. In a 1925 conversation with Flora Merrill, Eugene O'Neill early on revealed the fier~e honesty of his existential quest, The tragedy of life is what makes it worth while. I think that any life which merits living lies in the effort to realize some dream, and the higher that dream is the harder it is to realize .... If onc hasn't them, one might as well be dead .... The only success is in failure. Any man who has a big enough dream must be a failure and must accept that as one of the conditions of being alive. If he ever thinks for a moment that he is a success then he is finished. He stops. Mark Estrin's collection of O'Neill interviews and profiles, a volume in Mississippi 's Literary Conversations Series, well represents the dramatist's views on tragedy, . American drama, American sOCiety, his own literary influences, film, his own plays, actors and acting, and his arrest as a German spy on Cape Cod just before the United States entered the First World War. The volume presents interviews beyond those offered in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher (1961), Miller (1965), and Bogard's Unknown 0'Neill (1988), and also makes widely available some material in a collection difficult to obtain in North American (though in an English edition), Ulrich Halfmann's source book, Eugene O'Neill: CommelJlS all the Drama and the Theater (Ttlbingen: Gunter Narr, 1987). Estrin's well-written introduction usefully categorizes (as does the thorough index) topics of O'Neill's concern, while reminding the reader that the verbose dramatist could be extraordinarily reserved as an interview subject, this reserve providing a further revelation concerning his "fog people." Thus Kyle Crichton writes in I 946, "There was no difficully in getting him to talk; the trouble was in knowing when he had stopped ... he would start off in his quiet, hesitant way and gradually seem to disappear into a haze. Words would come out of the mist, to be followed by long periods of silence. If I broke in with another question, [ invariably found that the silence was merely a pause and O'Neill had taken up the narrative again ...." Estrin provides a comprehensive chronology of O'Neill's life, a bibliography of works by the dramatist, and offers insights aOOm O'Neill and his writing processes by Malcolm Cowley and Montiville Morris Hansford, as well as an account of the Guild-arranged "mass" press interview in 193 I. from which, when questioners veered from Electra to Carlotta, O'Neill exited via the roof to an adjacent building, thereafter to be wary of the press. In a 1946 interview wlth James Agee, O'Neill said, "America is the greatest failure in history. It was given everything, more than any olher country in history, but we've squandered our soul by trying to possess something outside it, and we'll end as that 170 Book Reviews game usually does, by losing our soul and the thing outside it too." Marc Maufort's fully researched Songs ofAmerican Experience treats O'Neill's tragic themes in tenns of his concern with his American literary heritage, particularly the dramatist's thematic correspondences with Melville. Applying comparatist methodology, Maufort, in the tradition of RW.B. Lewis, sees O'Neill in a literary line contrary to Whitman rediscovering for his contemporaries the irony of man's inevitable fall in the new world. The Belgian scholar notes especially O'Neill's realism as rooted in the nineteenthcentury American tradition and indicates interesting confluences between O'Neill's and Melville's polar vision, and their satirizing of American Puritanism and materialism. Maufort shows influences upon Electra from Typee, while revealing thematic confluences in Thirst, Diffrent, Cardiff, /le, and The Hairy Ape. While the book features insightful arguments on identity themes in The Confidence Mall and The Great...