Past, Present, and Future Converged: The Place of More Stately Mansions in the Eugene O'Neill Canon

Past, Present, and Future Converged: The Place of More Stately Mansions in the Eugene O'Neill Canon MICHAEL SELMON Walter Kerr, reviewing the 1967 Quintero production of More Stately Mansions, likened the O'Neill play to an apartment building he had seen in his childhood. The building had been halfway completed when the Great Depression permanently halted construction, and the barren frame stood for years before final demolition. Mansions, Kerr wrote, was like that building: at "the point at which the master plan was meant to meet and be filled by believable, tangible, domesticated creatures ... the play, being unfinished, fell apart." Still, unlike many critics, Kerr could justify the production: "In the same way that an important playwright's very earliest works are mounted out of curiosity about, and respect for, a career as a whole, an aborted major play may very well be studied - and indeed respected - for what it has to tell us about a man's mind, his habits of work (while the work was only in progress), his unrealized intentions.,,' And so, Kerr concluded, he would remember the play "as I remember my desolate building - not with contempt but with regret and a kind of longing." After nearly two decades, Kerr's analogy still proves apt. While subsequent productions and criticism have made work on More Stately Mansions a somewhat less "desolate" endeavor, the play is still among O'Neill's least studied dramas. Consequently, the central issue which Kerr's review raised, the relationship of Mansions to the O'Neill canon, has remained an open question. Indeed, some recent works have shown a tendency to emphasize the play's isolation: the University of Wisconsin's 1980 production held that "More Stately Mansions is a work whose form differs substantially from those of earlier dramas written by O'Neill. It is one of the most innovative of his works"2; and Joseph Petite similarly urged readers to "consider the play on its own terms.") While such concern for text is admirable, I suggest that critics should show an equal concern for context. In this essay, I wish to examine a few of the connections which help to locate More Stately Mansions in this context: 554 MICHAEL SELMON not only the play increases our overall understanding of the O'Neill canon, as Kerr suggested, but also the canon in tum reflects upon More Stately Mansions, providing useful insights into some of the problems inherent in the unfinished work. The most obvious problem with More Stately Mansions is that it is unfinished. The full history of the play and the transmission of the manuscript have been given elsewhere.' To summarize, the play was written between 1936-1938, the sixth play in what was eventually a proposed eleven-play Cycle, ATale ofPossessors Self-Dispossessed. The Cycle, which occupied the greater part ofO'Neill's creative life from 1936 to his death, was never finished and O'Neill believed he had destroyed all drafts of the Cycle plays except for the fifth play, A Touch of the Poet. A typescript of Mansions, however, had been sent to the Beinecke Library at Yale, and with Carlotta Monterey O'Neill's permission this text was posthumously shortened and published as the 1964 Yale edition. Although this edition , perhaps rightly, has been criticized as "neither a play nor the intact manuscript of a draft,'" no definitive version of the play seems possible; convenience and precedence of use have made the Yale edition the standard text. While the tangled composition history of Mansions inevitably leads to textual difficulties in the prOduction and criticism of the play, the same history proves compelling when viewed in the context of O'Neill's overall career. The 1936-1938 composition of the first draft places More Stately Mansions at a crucial juncture in the O'Neill canon. The poorly received 1934 production of Days Without End marked the conclusion of the so-called middle plays and the beginning of what was to be an eleven-year hiatus from original productions. By 1936, O'Neill had finished the first draft of A Touch ofthe Poet (as well as substantial drafts of the Cycle's first plays). Writing "like a...