Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill ed. by Travis Bogard, Jackson R. Bryer (review)

178 Comparative Drama major narrative incidents. Notable accretions do occur in other variants of "Little Musgrave"-a threat or bnoe is held against the page to secure his silence; the lord and his enemy are blood relations; Musgrave is himself married; Lord Barnard either kills himself, is hanged, or does penance; or the lady's blood is caught in a basin of silver (Child, II, 243)-yet clearly none of these touches derives from Heywood's play. More decisively, such secondary treatments are commonly marked by a faithful transcription of significant character names from their sources. None of Child's or Bronson's versions refer remotely to appellations like "Frankford," "Acton," "Wendoll ," or "Anne," but contain instead recognizable offshoots of "Barnard" (Barnet, Burnett, Barnaby, Barnabas, Barhoas) and "Musgrave" (Mousgrove, Mossgrey, Messgrove , Sir Grove, Matty Groves, Mathew Grew). 13 Allan Holaday, "Thomas Heywood and the Puritans," lournal of English and Germanic Philology, 49 (1950), 197-98. 14 McNeir, "Heywood's Sources," pp. 199-200. 15 Keith Sturgess, ed., Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 30. 16 McNeir, "Heywood's Sources," p. 206; Clark, Thomas Heywood, p. 236. 17 Cromwell, Thomas Heywood, p. 105. REVIEWS Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. pp. xi + 602. $35.00. That the personal and professional letters of Eugene O'Neill are deeply fascinating and of immense use to O'Neill scholars goes without saying. That the work done by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer in selecting, editing, annotating, and providing introductory statements for the present volume is a careful and thoughtful scholarly effort needs saying. One can comment little on the selecting, of course, without detailed knowledge of the body of material selected from (which includes far more letters than the number published here), but those in the volume cover every period of the playwright's life and include correspondence with family, acquaintances, colleagues, critics, theatrical producers , legal advisors, and public inquirers. There seems little chance that anything important has been omitted, and the notes are clear and informative. Especially notable is the fact that in the introductions to the different sections of the book, Bogard and Bryer speculate sensitively and usefully on the possible significances of important correspondence, especially in treating the later periods of the playwright's creative life when many of his letters, like his plays, appear to deepen in understanding and self-awareness. The letters are divided into sections representing chronologically eight different periods of the playwright's life. They progress in the earlier sections from his voluminous love letters to Beatrice Ashe (in 1914-15) through the numerous letters to people associated with his developing career as a playwright-prospective producers like George C. Tyler and professional friends like Kenneth McGowan. He shows himself in these years to be as tough and stubborn in defense of what he perceived to be his integrity as an artist as he was maudlin, verbose, and self-pitying as a lover and young husband. With his burgeoning success of the mid-20's came the breakdown of his marriage and an outpouring of letters to both his new lover (Carlotta Monterey) and to the wife (Agnes Boulton) he at first sought to placate and later vilified viciously for her delay of their divorce-these accompanied by many letters to his ever-faithful attorney Harry Weinberger. So many of the letters written before 1932 have to do with the many diffuse elements of O'Neill's life-his love life, his "divorce" life, his business life (including his byzantine tax problems), not to mention his theatrical life-that the focus of reader interest is drawn away from his artistic development and ideas. This period was also marked by his surprisingly prolific correspondence with his son and nameSake by his first, hastily ended marriage (of 1909). His belief in the wisdom and stability of Eugene O'Neill, Jr., apparently persisted right up to the moment of that classicist's suicide 179 180 Comparative Drama in 1950. The letters show him repeatedly throwing Eugene Jro's apparent success up to the indecisive and ill-fated Shane (whose suicide followed Eugene...