The Iceman and the Bridegroom

THE ICEMAN AND THE BRIDEGROOM SOME OBSERVATIONS ON TIm DEATH OF O 'NEn..LS SALESMAN While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. ADd at midnight there was a cry made. Behold, the bridegroom cometh. -Matthew 25;iHl The Iceman Cometh is a play about the death of a salesman; its central theme is the relationship between men's illusions and their will to live. The salesman, Theodore Hiclanan, or Hickey, as he is called, is a more complex character than Arthur Miller's Willie Loman, and O'Neill's diagnosis of the spiritual malaise of the twentieth century is more profound than Miller's. Loman is depicted from the outside: he is the victim of a false and wbolly eA1:emal conception of what constitutes success. He wants, in a worldly sense, to solve the riddle of life, but the questions be asks are superficial and relatively easy for an audience or a reader to answer. Hickey is depicted from the inside. He is more successful as a salesman than Loman, but he is the victim of a far more insidious disease. He is not versed at first hand (as O'Neill was) in philosophic nihilism , but he has somehow become aware, presumably,through a sort of intellectual osmosis, that modem man no longer believes in objective reality and truth. Loman is adrift in'contemporary American society; Hickey is adrift in the universe. The difference is a measure of the difference between O'Neill's aims and the aims of almost all other modem dramatists. A few days before The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway in 1946, O'Neill told a reporter that he had tried to express its "deeper" meaning in its title, and in an interview with S. J. Woolf he said that the verb form "cometh" was a "deliberate reference to biblical language ." The play itself, he gave Woolf to understand, had religious Significance. It is difficult to see what he can have meant by these hints, for The Iceman Cometh has few readily discernible connections either with religion or with the 'Bible. However, since O'Neill was not in the habit of talking at random about his own work, we would do well, if we want to come to terms with the "deeper" meaning of The Iceman Cometh, to assume that he had something specific and important in mind, and to try to discover what it was. O'Neilliooked upon himself, we must remember, as a spiritual physician , and he thought that his mission as a dramatist was to "dig at the 3 4 CYRus DAY May roots of the sicrness of today," which he defined as the death of the old God (echoing Nietzsche) and the failure of science and materialism to provide a new one satisfactory to the remnants of man's primitive religious instincts. Most dramatists write about the relationship between man and man, but he was more interested, he said, in the relationship between man and God. His plays, accordingly, often have a metaphysical basis, but since he had lost his faith in God at an early period in his life, and since he thought that it would take a million years of evolution for man "to grow up and obtain a soul," they are seldom religious in any generally accepted sense of the word. Days without End, which preceded Tlw Iceman Cometh, is an exception . Written in 1934, du:.:ing a brief period of personal happiness, it is a Christian play. The protagonist, a young man very much like O'Neill himself, is tom by religious doubts, but in the final act he enters a Catholic church, prostrates himself before an image of the crucified Jesus, and becomes at last an integrated personality, at peace with himself and with God. O'Neill, in 1934, appeared to have come to the end of his spiritual pilgrimage. Actually, Days without End was a "mere interlude," as he admitted later, and did not reflect his personal religious convictions. For the moment he may have supposed that he could return to the Christian fold, 'but by 1939, when he wrote Tlw Iceman Cometh, his mood had changed from tentative hope to unqualified despair...