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Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill by Jean Chothia, and: Poems: 1912–1944 by Eugene O’Neill (review)
- Comparative Drama
- Western Michigan University
- Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 1980-1981
- pp. 374-379
- 10.1353/cdr.1980.0047
- Review
- Additional Information
REVIEWS Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 243 pp., $24.50. Eugene O’Neill, Poems: 1912-1944, edited by Donald Gallup (New Haven: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 119 pp., $9.95. The publication for the first time of Eugene O’Neill’s collected poems and a new critical study on the effectiveness of language in his plays affords an opportunity to consider that aspect of the dramatist’s career upon which critics have been most divided. It was Eric Bentley who contended in the forties that O’Neill, despite his theatricality, was not a writer. Others nodded but excepted two or three of the late plays. More recently, some have made a virtue of defect by arguing in favor of impassioned verisimilitude. Forging a Language by Jean Chothia and Poems: 1912-1944 shed light on the debate, and those interested in the topic may want to own both volumes. It should be said first of Chothia’s book that its author has the difficulty of navigating in the wake of other vessels that by now comprise a fleet. Not to mention scores of articles and several essay collections, ten full length studies on O’Neill have been published in the past decade and a half, each in its way as significant as any issued before in the span of criticism starting in the twenties. In short, it has become rather difficult to launch new ventures on the subject of America’s foremost playwright. Readers now have at their disposal John Henry Raleigh’s The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1965), Timo Tiusanen’s O’Neill’s Scenic Images (1968), Egil Tornqvist’s A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Supernaturalistic Technique (1969), Rolf Scheibler’s The Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1970), Horst Frenz’s Eugene O’Neill (1971), Louis Sheaffer’s two mammoth biographies, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (1968) and O’Neill: Son and Artist (1973), Travis Bogard’s Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1972), Leonard Chabrowe’s Ritual and Pathos: The Theater of O’Neill (1976), and Frederic Carpenter’s newly revised edition of an earlier study, Eugene O’Neill (1979), In this context Chothia has decided to restrict her scope to the single issue of dialogue in the plays. In doing so she has produced a trim, watertight, meticulous study that sails into a crowded harbor without banners but carrying its cargo safe and dry. For critical judgment Chothia apparently relies on Robert Brustein’s strong opinions in The Theater of Revolt (1963). There Brustein argued that the first twenty years of O’Neill’s career now seemed to be of historic rather than artistic interest. Chothia does find some of the early plays linguistically arresting, but like Brustein she attributes the failure of O’Neill’s middle years to an adolescent’s thrall with Nietzsche and 374 Reviews 375 other declamatory writers who adversely influenced his style. Conse quently Chothia does not examine closely most of the early and middle plays, reserving her precise analysis and praise for The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, each the subject of a particularized chapter. In judging O’Neill’s best writing to be in his acknowledged masterpieces, Chothia has no need to prove a case, but she anchors a body of opinion that sometimes has been careless of detail. Professor Chothia begins by insisting that prose dialogue is every bit as difficult to write as verse and that it has its own conventions, pitfalls and potentialities. If, as she claims, O’Neill mastered these poten tialities only in his final years, to what extent was he an innovator in the plays that brought him first success? The colorful colloquialisms and dialects employed in the early plays she attributes to O’Neill’s read ing of the naturalists. However, Chothia notes that before O’Neill the vernacular was used on the American stage almost entirely for comic purposes and that he is to be credited for developing its range. She admires O’Neill’s ability to express emotion through inarticulate voices— e.g., All God...