An O'Neill Concordance by J. Russell Reaver (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AN O'NEILL CONCORDANCE, compiled by J. Russell Reaver, Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1969, 3 vols., 1846 pp. Price $87.50. J. Russell Reaver spent "months of tedious experiment" to turn out a first concordance -by means of computer-of the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Its appearance should be an occasion for cheers, happy predictions, and gratitude for the hard work that went into it. But a close glance at the actual product destroys all enthusiasm . The first and mildest disappointment is the discovery that it is not complete. Of course, no one can blame J. Russell Reaver for excluding the early apprentice work, or even the one-act plays, Before Breakfast and The Dreamy Kid, although it is not clear why these, rather than others, are out. One can even accept the exclusion of Gold, The First Man, and The Fountain, for these are three of the four plays that O'Neill himself wanted to cut from the body of his works. But the exclusion of The Straw is disturbing. O'Neill thought it the best of all his early "naturalistic" plays. And the exclusion of All God's Chillun Got Wings is shocking. O'Neill placed it among his best plays, and he felt that its triumph in Europe vindicated his faith. Of course, its original New York run was not long because racists denounced it. (The play deals with the marriage of a Negro to a white woman, and treats race prejudice as a tragic error.) But it was not excluded on the basis of its run, for Welded had a shorter run and it is in. There are more serious flaws in the Concordance. All the human work went into the initial editing. From there, the book came directly out of the computer. (It appears in the rather unreadable print of the Florida State University computer with a dollar sign substituted for the question mark as it was not a philosophical machine.) There could be no final proofreading, and the computer must have been fed strange food, for it turned out an enormous number of errors. There are odd misprints like "af," "agraid," "astonsihment," "Confuciusnfucius," "Chirst," "Kptain." There are run-together words like "ableedin'," "aboy," "angleof," "all'count," "all'lone." Other errors are less obvious. The advertising for the Concordance invites scholars to examine linguistic variants in O'Neill. It cites both '''avin'' and '"avin''' in Long Voyage Home (pP. 504, 505) and asks, "Was this due to carelessness or to keen-eared perceptiveness of nuances of speech?" No great study is needed to answer, "Neither!" The advertiser was simply the first victim of a mistake in the Concordance. Other variants are also concordance-created, as, for example, Hain'st" and "aint," "affeered," "begger," "calc'clate," "Confucious." It would take another computer to list all of them. A more serious defect appears when one tries to use the Concordance. If one turns to the listings of "aquiline,' in order to learn how many O'Neill characters have aquiline noses, one finds that Nat's "large aquiline nose" in Where the Cross Is Made is missing. It is not listed under "nose" either. Surely a computer can count noses. Yet many of the listings for words are incomplete. Some of these have an innocent cause. They represent an unsuccessful effort to edit out certain words. This is strikingly evident in the muddled attempt to cut out the names of the dramatis personae. Many refused to stay out. There are listings of "Annie," "David," and their last name "Keeney," so Ile must have been entirely overlooked. "CorneHus Melody" has been edited out, but he sneaks in for a full listing under his nickname "Con." Some names came in by combining with a contracted verb or appearing in possessive case. There is no "Ada," but there are listings of "Ada'd" and "Ada'll." There is no "Abner," but there is "Abner's." 226 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 227 The same confusion reigns in the effort to cut out "insignificant words" such as prepositions and conjunctions. When one comes on a list of sixteen instances of "although" for Strange Interlude and not one for any other play...