Miss Julie and O'Neill

Miss Julie and O'Neill EGIL TORNQVIST • STRINDBERG'S IMPORTANCE for Eugene O'Neill has often been pointed out, not least by O'Neill himself. His best known statement on the matter is his Nobel Prize speech in 1936. About half the speech was devoted to Strindberg: It was reading his plays when I first started to write back in the winter of 1913-14 that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then - to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose. Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see. Neither will it be news for anyone who has ever known me, for I have always stressed it myself .... No, I am only too proud of my debt to Strindberg, only too happy to have this opportunity of proclaiming him to his people. For me, he remains , as Nietzsche remains in his sphere, the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year's Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.! Before the speech was sent away to Stockholm, O'Neill read it to his friend, the critic Sophus Keith Winther. As he was reading, he suddenly 351 352 EGIL TORNQVIST interrupted himself with the comment: "I wish immortality were a fact, for then some day I would meet Strindberg." When Winther replied that "that would scarcely be enough to justify immortality," O'Neill answered quickly and firmly: "It would be enough for me."2 Already in the mid-twenties O'Neill had lauded the Swedish playwright in a program note for the Provincetown Players' production of The Spook Sonata. He then declared that Strindberg was "the precursor of all modernity in our present theater" and "the greatest interpreter in the theater of the characteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama - the blood - of our lives today."3 At about the same time he told a newspaper reporter that he considered Strindberg "the last undeniably great playwright."4 His first acquaintance with Strindberg's work took place in the spring of 1913 (if we are to believe his statement to a reporter in the 1940s5). O'Neill was then a patient at the Gaylord sanatorium in Connecticut . The six months he spent there meant, he has said, a spiritual awakening.6 It was either during his stay at the san, or shortly after he had left it, that he composed his first play, A Wife for a Life,7 which does not, however, show any traces of his reading of Strindberg. It was apparently when he stayed with a certain Rippin family in New London - from Steptember 1913 to March 19148 - that O'Neill seriously began to devote himself to the Swedish dramatist; about his time with the Rippins he has said: "I read about everything I could lay hands on: the Greeks, the Elizabethans - practically all the classics - and of course all the moderns. Ibsen and Strindberg, especially Strindberg."9 It is likely that he was stimulated in his interest in Strindberg by Clayton Hamilton, drama editor of The Bookman and Vogue and lecturer in playwriting at Columbia.IO Hamilton had written an article on Strindberg a year earlier.11 He was a friend both of the O'Neills and the Rippins and he often met the young Eugene around this time. In several ways he influenced the fledging playwright. It was Hamilton who advised O'Neill to write dramas about the life he...