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240 BOOK REVIEWS the reader a loosely connected series of biographical notes and plot outlines, covering the span of drama from Pirandello to Mrozek. His "survey" is a rather pedestrian one which has little to offer to the professional student of drama. Nor, frankly, do I think that undergraduates would find his book very helpful, because its strong biases, imprecise language, sporadic lack of understanding and arbitrariness create confusion. Lumley does not like "pessimistic" drama, but never clearly defines what he means by "pessimism." Thus he uses this catch-all term to characterize the work of dramatists as diverse as Sartre, Anouilh, and Beckett. On the other hand, he warms to the plays of "optimists" such as Giraudoux and Claudel. He goes so far as to chide Sartre for despising the church and plunging man into darkness. After a bit of this the reader is able to predict with surprising accuracy which playwrights Lumley will be negatively disposed towards - we know as we approach the discussion of the state of drama in Germany that Hochhuth does not stand a chance. A second set of blinders is revealed in Lumley's propensity towards criticizing "Communists." He takes Peter Weiss to task for having the audacity to move to East Germany, and censures Arnold Wesker for trying "to impose ... his political and sociological hotchpotch on the audience." Claudel's mysticism, of course, is not "hotchpotch": "Claudel's plays are intensely rewarding for those who wish to explore them." Lumley's book is also flawed by arbitrariness. Frisch's Don Juan, for instance, is dismissed in half a sentence: "After an unimportant work Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie ... where Don Juan was not at all what legend made of him, but actually a woman only interested in geometry, we come to what is Frisch's most important play to date, Biedermann und die Brandstifter. ... " Lumley frequently gives shortest shrift to dramatists who are among the most challenging; Genet, for instance, is disposed of in two pages. Furthermore, he misses the point of a good number of plays. For example, in discussing the end of Sartre's Dirty Hands Lumley sees Hugo as having renounced his idealism, whereas in fact the opposite is true. Because of these and related problems, Lumley's book is neither an objective nor an accurate "survey" of 20th century drama. And, if one does not believe that a successful survey can be made up of biographical snippets and plot outlines - that there must be a more intelligent ordering principle then it is not even an unsuccessful survey: it is a hotchpotch. PHILIP M. ARMATO Northern Illinois University CONTOUR IN TIME: THE PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL, by Travis Bogard. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. xx & 491 pp. $15.00 It seems likely that Travis Bogard chose this rather obscure title as a caption for the splendid picture on his dust jacket. It shows O'Neill's home at Peaked Hill Bars, Cape Cod - a former Coast Guard station which was a gift from James O'Neill - blown down the steep curve of a cliff into the sea. This BOOK REVIEWS 241 happened in 1931, the year of Mourning Becomes Electra, when O'Neill began the plunge into introversion which produced his last great, autobiographical plays. And it conveys, much better than "Contour in Time," Professor Bogard's concern with the doomed nature of his author's struggle against "drift" and chance (p. xii), his tragic search for patterns behind life. The study is full, judicious, and very illuminating. Professor Bogard divides O'Neill's work into ten periods, prefacing each section with a list of plays written during that period, a summary of the relevant events in the playwright's life, and a photograph of O'Neill himself, chosen with the same imaginative flair as the picture on the dust jacket. In each section Professor Bogard is careful to relate the plays not only to biography but also to the theatrical and intellectual climate in which they were produced. He is good on sources, and, to the expected names of Conrad, Jack London, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Jung, and Freud, adds not only contemporary American playwrights like Edward Sheldon...

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