The Iceman Cometh ed. by William Davies King (review)

The Iceman Cometh percolated in Eugene O’Neill’s mind as the Blitzkrieg overran Poland and initiated the catastrophe of World War II. O’Neill himself, isolated from these events except for the radio broadcasts he regularly monitored from his sylvan retreat in the Las Trampas hills, seemed to will away the horrors of the present by casting his creative energy back in time. Iceman was the first of the searing, final, retrospective dramas he would complete at Tao House before the inability to write silenced him. William Davies King’s new critical edition provides context, insight, interpretation, and historical background to guide the reader in masterful fashion through the complexity of O’Neill’s difficult text.

The volume contains the play itself, with extensive textual notes, plus a glossary of O’Neill’s sometimes curious terminology, a historical examination of each character, a (usefully) concise “O’Neill Chronology,” a major essay, “Historical and Critical Perspectives,” an overview of the play’s production history, and an annotated bibliography of canonical and current O’Neill scholarship. It is a meticulous yet highly readable (at times even humorous) work of scholarship that should instantly take its place as the reference work for Iceman.

King provides detailed historical context for the play’s setting in the New York of 1912, describing the three bars of O’Neill’s youth that formed the basis for Harry Hope’s saloon, including photographs of all three of the actual buildings. He delves deeply into the real-life models for character and situation within the play; his evocation of “Movement” politics (including detailed material on historical figures such as Emma Goldman and Donald Vose Meserve, the model for Don Parritt) is critical for understanding motivations and actions within the drama. King mines historical references with vigor. His unearthing of O’Neill’s source for the quip that Larry Slade attributes to Horace Walpole (“he could love [his country] if it weren’t for the people in it,” actually probably seen by O’Neill in a 1913 short story by Alfred Henry Lewis) is exemplative, as are his detailed recipe for a “sherry flip” (sherry, cream, powdered sugar, raw egg, and nutmeg) and his revelation that the term “high ball” derives from a ball that “registered high pressure in the steam engine of a locomotive” (237).

Indeed, there is a lot about alcohol in this book, as must be so in any volume that deals with O’Neill’s biography. But King is careful about tying too much of Iceman’s complexities to O’Neill’s actual experience, recognizing the role of invention, rather than reportage, in the dramaturgy, and succinctly noting that “the play offers the frame of autobiography without the picture” (270). He does begin his “Historical and Critical Perspectives” with a revealing biographical double contrast, noting that the year in which O’Neill wrote the play (1939) “should have seemed a high point in his life, but it was also the moment when he foresaw the end of his writing career” (263). He sets this against the observation that “nineteen twelve—the year in which The Iceman Cometh is set—was a low point in the life of Eugene O’Neill but also the beginning of his rise to greatness” (264). Such thought-provoking reflections are rampant in King’s analysis.

The major interpretative contributions are contained in an extensive survey of the play’s critical reception. Writing that O’Neill “tested the limits of what was acceptable to show about the world and say about its complexity, and, hit or miss, he brought drama into the big conversations of the era—about psychology, politics, religion, and art” (265), King asserts broadly that “the core of [O’Neill’s] art from the first had been an acceptance or even celebration of doom” (263). It is perhaps a stretch to think that the Elizabethan pun conflating orgasmic “coming” with death inspired O’Neill...