Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson: Controversial Experimentalists

Eugene O'NeillandMaxwellAnderson: Controversial Experimentalists Laurence G. Avery,ed. Dramatist in America: frttersof Maxwell Ande1:rnn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 366+lxxxiiipp. JeanChothia.Forging a Language: A Study ofthePlaysof Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1979.243 pp. Vngmia Floyd,ed. Eugene O'Neill: A a'lnldView.NewYork: Frederick Ungar PuMishmg Co., 1979.309 + ix pp. Geraldine Anthony, S.C. EugeneO'Neill and Maxwell Anderson, whose lives and plays are rooted in America'smost creative era in theater-the 1920s to the 1950s-each had anextraordinary interest in forging new languages for their drama. Moved bysimilarhistorical, political and sociological backgrounds, their individual needsto experiment with dialogue arose from their unique visions of America andtheir desire to translate those visions into meaningful plays. Each knew andused the power of tragic drama in highly different ways-O'Neill with a new,awkward prose rhythm which gradually matured in his final great tragedies ,Anderson with a revitalization of verse drama in his largely historical tragedies.Both met with disfavor among the critics, who dismissed O'Neill's dialogueas unworthy of him and chose to concentrate on other elements in his plays, as they dismissed Anderson's dialogue as an anachronism, worthyof another age but unsuited for the twentieth century. In both cases the problem has remained unresolved. The three books under discussion shedlight on this question of language-Floyd's book indirectly in the fifteen essaysdevoted to O'Neill's drama from European and American scholars; Chothia'sbook directly as a first serious in-depth treatment of O'Neill's use oflanguage; Avery's book as a statement of purpose in this first edition of Anderson'sLetters which can be read for many other reasons as well. VirginiaFloyd has edited a stimulating series of essays on O'Neill's plays. O'Neillspecialists will discover that the fifteen articles by European and Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 232 Geraldine Anthony, s.c. American scholars which comprise this new book on the Father of American Drama, provide fresh perspectives from which to view this controversial playwright. Although uneven in quality, these essays are contributed by serious and knowledgeable O'Neill scholars from Sweden, Finland, Poland Hungary, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Germany, England and the United States: Virginia Floyd has achieved a successful unity through careful selectionand placement of the articles. Eugene O'Neill: A World View is divided into three sections: "AEuropean Perspective," "An American Perspective" and "Performers on O'Neill."Half the book is devoted to critical and documentary articles by Europeans, one fifth to American scholarly essays, and a few final pages to reminiscences of actresses and a director of O'Neill plays. There is justice to this division since the Europeans have outnumbered the Americans in their productions and appreciative responses to O'Neill's plays. The editor has written introductions to each of the three sections, incorporating quotations from O'Neill's unpublished notes and work diary. The first section, "A European Perspective," presents the reader withth~ usual provocative question of why O'Neill has always had such appealfor European audiences while his reception in the United States has been less than satisfactory. European writers in this section remind the reader once again of the bonds O'Neill early established with European dramatists, his affinity for their techniques, their spirit and their philosophy of theater. O'Neill's rapport with the leading European philosophers, novelists and dramatists of his day was intense and lasting. His brooding, pessimistic spirit, less American than Irish in some respects, is examined in some of these articles. "O'Neill and the Royal Dramatic" is an appropriate opening essay,coming from Tom Olsson, curator of the Archives at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm where some of O'Neill's plays have been premiered and produced consistently since the 1920s.It contains valuable documentary and historical material on the performances of the O'Neill plays in this key theater from 1923to 1976.Swedish loyalty to the O'Neill canon is significant, but Olsson does not give the reasons for this unprecedented devotion, other than to repeat O'Neill's statement in his Nobel Prize speech that he owed a...