Evangelism and Anarchy in The Iceman Cometh

EVANGELISM AND ANARCHY IN THE ICEMAN COMETH WITH O'NEILL ONE MUST ALWAYS GO BACK TO The Iceman Cometh, for it is both his culmination and his demise. Long Day's Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten follow it, but more for personal purgation than art. Long Day's Journey sums up O'Neill's life, while Iceman sums up all life. "The Iceman is a denial of any other experience of faith in my plays,"! O'Neill said in 1946. Earlier, in 1940, he had said, "There are moments in it that suddenly strip the secret soul of a man stark naked."2 As always, that naked soul was O'Neill himself. For all its over-criticized length, Iceman is a play that has yielded but slowly. Perhaps its sledgehammer nihilism has acted to block, indeed confuse, understanding. There has been, for instance, fairly widespread carping because the drunks in Harry Hope's saloon do not get drunk in any normal way. Similarly, it has sometimes been bruited about that the spiritual hardware salesman, Hickey, goes Inad at the end of the play. Eric Bentley, without question the leading detractor of Iceman,3 has mitigated his attacks in recent years, but not by passing through the maze that Iceman is. In his introduction to the play in Major Writers of America, Bentley surmises that the play "ought to have been about Hickey'S unresolved Oedipus complex," but it could not because "O'Neill's Oedipus complex was unresolved. That at least is the interpretation which I wish to submit for discussion ."4 Bentley's former colleague at Columbia, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt, concludes his discussion by saying, "The Iceman Cometh, then, is about the impossibility of salvation in a world without God."5 If so, then what of love, that other fundamental impossibility in the O'Neillean world of icemen? The play could be worked through O'Neill's life; that too has been tried. John Mason Brown even conjectured that Hickey symbolizes "Mr. O'Neill's subconscious protest against those who have chaperoned and tidied-up his own recent living."6 No doubt remains ! Croswell Bowen, "The Black Irishman," in O'Neill and His Plays, ed. Oscar Cargill, et al. (New York. 1961). p. 84. 2 Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York, 1951), p. 398. 3 See his widely reprinted essay, "Trying to Like O'Neill," originally in Kenyon Review, 14 (Summer, 1952), 476-92. 4 "Eugene O'Neill," Major Writers, II (New York, 1962), p. 575. 5 Boston, 1964, p. 343. 6 "All O'Neilling," Saturday Review of Literature (Oct. 19, 1946), 28. 173 174 MODERN DRAMA September that O'Neill was at the end of his emotional tether in 1939. The onset of the war in Europe threw him into a depression from which he never wholely recovered: ideal romantic love failed him, his God remained dead (or died again), and his family past haunted him increasingly . O'Neill admitted as much, and more, himself. In a letter to Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild just after finishing Iceman he said: "To tell the truth, like anyone else with any imagination , I have been absolutely sunk by this damned world debacle. The Cycle [of plays] is on the shelf, and God knows if I can ever take it up again because I cannot foresee any future in this country or anywhere else to which it could spiritually belong."7 O'Neill's biography is crudal, of course, but not in the way it is to Long Day's Journey. The latter could not have been written by anyone else, but Iceman could. Its affinity to both The Lower Depths and The Wild Duck has been clearly established. Indeed, it is in some ways easier to relate the literary stream to Iceman than it is to relate Iceman to O'Neill's own work, particularly his earlier plays. The imminent loss of faith and love, often seen as the same thing, is at the heart of all O'Neill plays, but that link does not tell us why Hickey hated his selfless wife Evelyn enough to kill her, nor why...