Kit To Eugene: John Mason Brown's "Letter" To Eugene O'neill

Most imitations of Elizabethan writing are very poor. John Mason Brown's letter to Eugene O'Neill in the voice of Christopher Marlowe is the exception, in that it is terrible.

You are not soul-blind and hence it is that I am glad you have not chosen to glut us with the dainties of this world and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay. Your heart, as was my Edward's, is an anvil unto sorrow, and within the closure of that phrase lies cause for your having monarchized the tragic drama of your time.¹

This is how it opens. In what follows, there are roughly 375 auxiliary verbs—I know, for I did count them—which are meant to sound sixteenth century or something. To be fair, Elizabethans often used auxiliary verbs to pad pentameter lines. Consider Marlowe's Faustus, who, while trying to "extinguish clean" his intimations of repentance, speaks of "those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow" in which "do" doesn't do anything. (It's a mild intensifier at best, like when upon "de-planing" the cabin crew announces that they "do thank you," drawing attention to the performance rather than the sincerity of their gratitude.) The effect in poetry is bad enough, though often harmless. To press auxiliary verbs into prose is to force more wadding into an overstuffed chair, and the results are just as uncomfortable.

Style aside, we can admire the conceit of Brown's book of 1934, which could have been called Odd Bedfellows. It isn't. It's called Letters from Greenroom Ghosts, and it includes epistles from Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Noël Coward, Peg Woffington to Ina Claire, Sarah Siddons to Katherine Cornell, Inigo Jones to Robert Edmond Jones, and Christopher Marlowe to Eugene O'Neill. In a New York Times review at the time, the anonymous critic called the form a "tough and cumbrous one," which is a fair estimation. The reviewer also critiques Brown (1900–1969) for falling into "epistoloquacity," which is funnier and even fairer.² However cumbrous, the approach produces bracingly incongruous juxtapositions, and it's hard not to imagine a gifted mimic arranging other unlikely dance partners: Dryden and Sondheim, Brecht and Parks, Behn and Ruhl, until the floor is full of dancers quarreling over who should lead.

It's the incongruity of the form that arrests, then, and the bizarre idea of Marlowe reading O'Neil often produces both clarity and candor. "Marlowe" does not pull his punches when assessing O'Neill: "Your Pegasus has been a powerful but wingless dray that, after being mud-bound at the start, has stumbled between sprints"; "I abominate the pretentiousness of those empty lines of yours which you dress up as gaudily as if they were masqueraders on a holiday"; and the letter closes by scolding O'Neill for retiring to an island off Georgia to "pore over the writings of your Doctor Freud." Brown's throwing his voice here, largely it seems for the purpose of hitting O'Neill right between the eyes.

O'Neill replied to Brown in a letter of November 18, 1934, addressed "Dear Friend and Critic" since the terms were not mutually inclusive. O'Neill is more gracious than Brown deserved—what business of his was it where O'Neill chose to live?—and also demonstrates the restrained sense of humor that Brown's Marlowe praises: "you tickle my pride by choosing Marlowe to address me, but if I could do so without arrogance, I would say that the analogy seems a little forced."³ This is a marvelous bit of understatement, since the pairing may have puzzled O'Neill, whose plays nowhere betray any direct influence from Marlowe.

However bizarre the coupling, Brown had clearly read Marlowe both widely and well. In one of his happier phrases, "Marlowe" refer to "the golden cannonading of my verse" and thus captures what arrested Marlowe's contemporaries, the sound that Marlowe made upon the stage as much as or more than the sense. Brown also understands...