Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy by Stephen A. Black (review)

466 letters in canada 1999 Mansfield's use of repetition, deferral, spatial or section breaks, omissions, dashes, asterisks, and ellipses reinforces how close her technique does come to poetry, with its sensitivities to the way pace and rhythm affect sense, and its characteristic openness to fluid interpretation. New's most surprising and convincing material grows from the combination of his arguments about Mansfield's acute formal control, and her œuvre's preoccupation with how personality and behaviour are also shaped by words as social forms (etiquette, prohibitions, concessions, habits, the language of all convention.) While anyone who has read the Collected Letters or The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks will know how fiercely dedicated she was to technique, New's discussion of `The Escape' in particular gives a persuasive account of how reflexive a writer Mansfield was. His startling rereading of this story offers it up as an exposition of the nature of escapism, as much as an account of marital discord: the epiphany experienced by the male character being ultimately one of self-delusion. This is a bleak reading in terms of the husband's potential salvation from what has become a deadening social structure: but a reading which forces home how acutely aware Mansfield was of the censoring and illusionmaking that take place in daily social interactions. Thus New turns `The Escape' B and indeed, many of Mansfield's stories B into literary self-critical explorations of the dangerous seductions of certain social fictions. (EMMA NEALE) Stephen A. Black. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy Yale University Press. xxiv, 544. US $29.95 Every family has its ups and downs. For Eugene O'Neill, however, the tribulations of family life were unusually severe and traumatic. Taking their cue from O'Neill's own work, especially his overtly autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night, previous biographers have painstakingly sketched the dynamics of O'Neill's dysfunctional families: the importance of his famous theatrical father, his morphine-addicted mother, his profligate doomed brother, his tortured marriages and love affairs, and his inadequacy as a father to his own children. Stephen A. Black's new psychoanalytic biography is deeply indebted to those that have come before, especially to the extensive research of Louis Sheaffer and Arthur and Barbara Gelb (the Gelbs are currently at work on an even more massive biography). What Black contributes is the interpretive lens of his psychoanalytic background. Black's reading of O'Neill's life and, crucially, of his families' impact upon his writing and vice versa, focuses largely upon the problem of loss. Just as O'Neill began to establish financial, artistic, and personal independence, around 1919B20, he witnessed his father's prolonged illness and death; eighteen months later his humanities 467 mother died of a brain tumour; and less than two years after that O'Neill's elder brother Jamie finally managed to drink himself to death. For the rest of his life, as Black compellingly shows, O'Neill was obsessed with his losses yet unable to let the dead remain dead, as they continually haunt his plays. Black argues that O'Neill, who himself had several encounters with psychiatry, thought of playwrighting as self-psychoanalysis. The plays reveal unconscious impulses as well as conscious attempts to contrive coherence . If mourning is the process of separating one's mental image of oneself from one's mental representations of the lost person, O'Neill's mourning was pathologically inhibited. O'Neill's first character even to attempt to confront her dead is Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra (1929B31). Only in the last great plays, decades after his parents are buried, does O'Neill effectively move beyond mourning and tragedy to what Black calls`that remote dramatic continent discovered by Sophocles at the end of his working life.' The reader may feel, understandably, adrift in this language, and the lack of precision of the language is a serious problem. The book is pervaded by words such as perhaps, probably, seems, and (at the other extreme ) the overdetermined must have B as in `Having his character abandon all ties must have seemed too desperate a risk for Eugene to imagine.' The proof of must have...