That Paradox, O'Neill

THAT PARADOX, O'NEILL EUGENE O'NEILL'S ACTIVE WRITING CAREER coincided almost perfectly with the span of time from World War I to World War II. In letters and interviews he showed a decent concern with these events, but simply included them in his general disgust with the self-destructive antics of the ape called man. His plays reflect little interest in contemporary history: the first World War provided a situation for the one-act play, In the Zone, and for the loss of Nina Leeds' lover in Strange Interlude, but any other war at any time would have done as well. In most of the plays O'Neill looked back at the past-either at his own or that of history. But in the very act of ignoring or rebelling against his own time, he represented it. His least successful plays are now clearly period pieces of the twenties and thirties whether he set them there or not, and others may yet come to seem so. The flood of recent biographies, however, indicates that O'Neill, the man, is very much in the present-day consciousness, and the play closest to him, Long Day's Journey into Night, seems to be the one most likely to remain with us in the future. From the early comments on O'Neill's epoch-making entry into the American theater ~o-I would venture-some critical essay in progress at this moment, he has been described as a titanic, Promethean figure. The analogy has always seemed especially apt not only because of his stature in comparison to other American playwrights, but because of the violent, rebellious, and tortured nature of his work. Having been one of those to employ this unoriginal image, I confess that I was a bit disconcerted to discover in the recent biographies that O'Neill himself accepted the comparison as an appropriate one. Benjamin De Casseres had referred to O'Neill's "vultures" which would "feed off his fame and corrupt him."i O'Neill answered that the vultures that tormented him were not the demands of fame; they were "birds that fly from the great dark behind and inside and not from the bright lights without." He added that he looked forward to a time when the vultures' wings "will blot out the sky and they'll wrench the last of my liver out; and then, I predict, they'll turn out to be angels of some God or other who have given me, in exchange, the germ of a soul."2 O'Neill took himself and his work with overwhelming seriousness; 1 Crosswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten (New York, 1959), p. 173. 2 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York, 1962), pp. 637-638. 221 222 MODERN DRAMA December nevertheless, he WAS Promethean not only in his rebellion against whatever god tormented him-and there were many-but in the fact that he brought fire to the American theater. The fire may have generated more heat than light, but its flame was life-giving at the time. And this is perhaps the one point of agreement among the hordes of critics who have had their voluminous say on the subject, and are still trying to analyze the fire that singed them--or left them cold. One reason that O'Neill's work is tantalizing to the scholar, critic, or theatrical director, is that there always seems to be more in it than meets the eye. Since it is the business of the theater to fool the eye, we are justly suspicious; we know that the dramatist will use every device at his disposal to play on our susceptibilities. As the son of Monte Cristo, O'Neill knew how to stir the senses or tug at heartstrings . He had a wry respect for all the old tricks, equalled only by his scorn for an audience who would fall for them. But the puzzling quality of many of O'Neill's plays has further dimension than this, for it was often intentional. O'Neill's love of the mask was the dominant theme of his personal life and of his plays. At one time...