Dialogue in the Plays Of Eugene O'Neill

DIALOGUE IN THE PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL 'WHEN ye kin make com sprout out 0' stones, God's livin' in yew!" says flinty old Ephraim Cabot, the father in Desire Under the Elms (1924). Nina in the nine-act trilogy, Strange Interlude (1926, 1927) says, "Strange Interlude! Yes, our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father!" These two quotations might be taken as samples of the difference between O'Neill's natural idiomatic dialogue of the early plays and the. grandiose rhetoric that became habitual in the later ones. Ephraim Cabot's line comes out of his own experience and belongs to him, whereas Nina is only the mouthpiece of the playwright. It is ironic that perhaps Eugene O'Neill's greatest tragedy was his own inability to assess his real talent and his limitations. When his aims were modest, he achieved his best work. When he exceeded himself, he resorted to self-defense such as this: But where I feel myself most neglected is just where I set most store bymyself-as a bit of a poet, who has labored with the spoken word to evolve original rhythms of beauty where beauty apparently isn't -Jones, Ape, Goas Chillun, Desire, etc.-and to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy, in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it, in seemingly the most confirmed mystic, too, for I'm always, always, trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character.1 . O'Neill's work has been called "the most Cyclopean dramatic enterprise in the English language"2 though some of it will appal the discriminating reader who first meets it on the printed page. O'Neill was inspired by the poetic spirit which was often obscured by excesses of one kind or another. Perhaps O'Neill was a victim of his own spectacular suc~ess. From 1916 when the Provincetown Players produced Bound East for Cardiff until 1946 with the production of The Iceman Cometh, he was never entirely neglected. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in 1920, 1922, and 1928, he received in 1936 the Nobel Prize for literature. His greatness lies in his many-sidedness: the dramatist; the technician and innovator; the philosopher and mystic; the Freudian and the reader in science; the symbolist; the revolutionary in themes and subjects; the 1. A. H. Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day (New York, 1927), II:199. Repnnted in Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study (New York, 1934), pp. 219-220. 2. John Gassner, A TrelUJury of the Theatre from Henrik Ibsen to Eugene lonesco, Third College Edition (New York, 1960), p. 788. 314 1960 DIALOGUE IN O'NEILL 315 critic of the social order.. A dramatist prodigal of his talents, he was a man who was too impatient or too lacking in self-criticism to care about discriminating detail, too undisciplined in the exacting work of finding the right phrase, the precise idiom. A study of O'Neill's plays raises a number of questions about his dialogue , his use of the spoken word to delineate character, to fill in the necessary background, to suggest the true quality of dramatic moments. Although he professes to have "labored with the spoken word to evolve original rhythms of beauty," he often has failed to allow characters to speak for themselves, has obtruded his own feelings and thoughts, and has allowed himself to repeat over and again certain general speech habits that have little relation to natural speech. One might consider two phases of his dialogue, the natural, in which he seemed to turn his inner ear to the speech of his characters, and the literary, or rhetorical, in which he spoke, in often rather fulsome extravagance, for the characters he created. The S.S. Glencairn one-act plays are still among the most distinguished of American short plays. His first produced play, for example, Bound East for Cardiff (1916), suggests the sorry life of a motley crew, briefly sketches the story of real friendship between two homeless seamen , and portrays...