Forgiveness in O'Neill

Forgiveness in O'Neill DONALD P. COSTELLO On 22 July I94I, in Tao House, Eugene O'Neill inscribed to his wife Carlotta, on their twelfth wedding anniversary, his dedication to the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night. "I give you the original script ofthis play ofold sorrow," he wrote, "written in tears and blood." "You will understand," he continued, "I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play - write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones" (p. 7).' He italicized the word "all" so as to make it clear that he included himself, along with father, mother, and brother, arnong those who needed pity and understanding and forgiveness. Those three words, and the order in which he wrote them, can help us understand an important O'Neill obsession, and his final reconciliation with life and art. Indeed, in retrospect, we can see that his quest for "pity" and then "understanding" and then "forgiveness " was his lifelong search, through his art, from first play until last. Especially perhaps in first and last. Beyond the Horizon was O'Neill's flIst full-length play. It opened at the Morosco Theater in New York in February of I920. It is clearly a quest play. In typical early O'Neill language, a throbbing groping toward articulation, Rob Mayo hopes for meaning off somewhere beyond the horizon. Rob and his brother Andy both violate their own nature; they find themselves in a world in which they do not belong. Both end in gUilt. "You're runnin' against your own nature," Pa clearly warns, "and you're goin' to be a'mighty sorry for it if you do" (p. 106). Virtually all O'Neill characters are "a'mighty sorry" for what they do, for what they choose, or for their lack of choice. In O'Neill a person runs against his nature just by being born. O'Neill characters are naked in a universe which is out to get them; they have no intermediary between themselves and the cosmos. They must live alone with their guilt.' They have faith (199J) 34 MODERN DRAMA 499 500 DONALD P. COSTELLO in the love of no mediator; there is no one to pity and thus to understand and thus to forgive them. To face that stark realization, that life presents us with only loneliness and guilt, O'Neill in his fIrst play invokes a tragic consolation. The terms of that consolation predict the larger discovery that will come with his fInal play. The first predicts the last. In act three, scene two of Beyond the Horizon, a dying Robert Mayo fmds words which will take on full meaning in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Rob finds consolation in his death, for only then can the quest continue: "Don't you see I'm happy at last - free - free! - freed from the farm - free to wander on and on - eternally" (p. 167). Eternal rest is not what the quintessential O'Neill hero can hope to find, but rather eternal quest. What is not discovered here might be discovered there. But for those left behind to quest in this life, Rob gives advice. Rob's final word is the command, "Remember!" Andy is to remember Ruth's sacrifice. When he does, "an expression ofdeep pity gradually comes over hisface." Andy hopes for understanding: " ... we'll come to know what's right." And he pleads, with finality, "Forgive me, Ruth" (p. 168). In the tragic play Beyond the Horizon, what consolation we can get comes only from remembering sacrifice, and from the consequent human emotions ofpity and understanding and forgiveness.3 In the three autobiographical plays that ended his career, climaxing in the sacramental clarity of A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill moves those natural emotions into the supernatural. In The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939, O'Neill found the word for his basic philosophy that humanity's root sin - its Original Sin - is birth itself. Larry introduces the denizens of Harry Hope's as "the whole misbegotten mad lot of...