Eugene O’Neill, The Unfinished Plays: Notes for The Visit of Malatesta, The Last Conquest, Blind Alley Guy, ed. by Virginia Floyd (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 117 tastes, Fried's analysis will appear as either brilliantly-nuanced or terribly simplistic, intently absorbing or insipidly theatrical. Perhaps it is all of these. GeorgeCotkin Department of History California Polytechnic State University Virginia Floyd, ed. Eugene O'Neill, The Unfinished Plays:Notes for The Visit of Malatesta, The Last Conquest, Blind Alley Guy. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1988. xxviii + 213 pp. An appropriate addition to the 1988 centenary celebration of O'Neill's birth, these unfinished plays are a comedy about the anarchist Enrico Malatesta, a mythic tale of the last confrontation of Christ and the Anti-Christ, and a family story that eventually makes overt Hitlerian connections. They chronicle the playwright's attempts from 1940 to 1943 to cope with the totalitarian environment he was experiencing both in his own home and on the world scene. Floyd indicates that these unfinished plays give us a more rounded picture of O'Neill, show him as someone who can break free of the autobiographical mode and speak tellingly of contemporary social problems. What she apparently misses is the home atmosphere in which these scenarios were sketched. Though these plays appear to be linked to Hitler and Mussolini, they really are commentaries on O'Neill's own spiritual state. During the time O'Neill was struggling with the material, he and Carlotta were resident in their California mountain-top fortress, Tao House. There, Carlotta monitored visitors, mail and O'Neill's every waking thought. There, too, he suffered increasing bouts of illness that eventually totally prevented him from writing. His inability to finish his proposed comedy The Visit of Malatesta, which in character and setting reminds one of the then completed play The Iceman Cometh, is an indication that his spirits were low. Another indication is the changes that took place in the notes for Blind Alley Guy. The central figure, Harvey White/Howard Black/Blackie is, as Floyd points out, much like the typical O'Neill solitary hero. Conceived several months after Long Day's Journey Into Night was completed in 1940, the proposed play has echoes of Joumey and other O'Neill family plays, such as All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Great God Brown. The duality of personality and the need to be discovered (while hidden) is common to Dion Brown and Blackie, who has neglected to cover his face during a robbery. Floyd seems puzzled that O'Neill changes the play's setting "from a farm outside Albany to a home in California," but there is no puzzle if we see the 118 Shorter Book Reviews link between the tortured sociopathic "Blackie"and the imprisoned O'Neill of Tao House (125). The Last Conquest appears to be O'Neill's fmal attempt to exorcise his Catholic demons. Days Without End, an earlier attempt, had ended with John Loving's conversion to the old Faith, but O'Neill knew that that conclusion was not true. Apparently, his mountain-top retreat became the scene of one last dramatic struggle between "The Man" and ''The Magician." If O'Neill could have finished this play, it might have been the catharsis he had been looking for, because he seemed on the verge of marrying heaven and hell in his demonic figure, "The Magician"--a character who really wants Jesus Christ to win and who tries to goad humans into action by his cynical putdowns of "The Man" (53ft). But O'Neill was not able to finish the play. Therefore, Floyd's statements that "these plays would have made strong social statements," and that they are "devoid of any autobiographical references, indicating that O'Neill could write worthwhile material without an emotional/psychological crutch" seem incorrect on two counts (xiii). First, only the finished plays would tell us if he were capable of making "a strong social statement"; and second, the autobiographical nature of the drafts actually prevented him from finishing them. Long Day's Joumey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, on the other hand, are the best O'Neill and the closest he was able to come dramatically to forgiving himself, his family and God, for life. Joyce Deveau Kennedy Department of...