O'Neill the "Novelist"

O'Neill the "Novelist" NORMAND BERLIN Martin Lamm's assertion - back in 1953, the year of O'Neill's death - that Eugene O'Neill's "gift is for narrative" pinpoints an important aspect of O'Neill's dramatic art; and Larnm's belief that "the one-act plays of his youth are evocative short stories, and his mammoth dramas are half-novels,'" has received well-documented support from Peter Egri thirty-five years later.' Both of these fine critics, and many others in between and since. recognize the novelistic tendencies of O'Neill and suggest how these tendencies affect O'Neill's dramatic art. I wish to pursue this idea further in order to make the claim that O'Neill's novelistic impulse carried him too far away from his instinctive theatrical strengths, and that only by tempering this novelistic impulse was he able to create his finest work. One should applaud his boldness in attempting to take drama in new directions, but one should acknowledge the failure of his attempts to be a novelist/dramatist. I believe O'Neill finally recognized this failure, and by subduing the novelist in himself the dramatist of the last great plays emerged. A natural rebel, one from whom experimentation was expected, O'Neill often challenged the usual expectations of an audience seeing a play by avoiding the conventions associated with dramatic writing. Many of his theatrical experiments point to the inescapable fact that America's most important playwright wished to accomplish in drama what a novelist is able to accomplish in the novel, as if O'Neill wanted to be a novelist or did not want his chosen, comparatively inflexible, medium to deny him the freedom enjoyed by the novelist. One may even wonder why O'Neill didn't become a novelist. Some of our best O'Neill scholars have given necessary attention to O'Neill's avid reading of the major novelists and his closeness to them,' and Travis Bogard correctly suggests that O'Neill's earliest inclination and reading seemed to have been leading him toward the writing of short stories and novels.4 No doubt, an inclination was there - and, in fact, it is realized 50 NORMAND BERLIN in one way or another throughout O'Neill's career - but drama was the inescapable medium for O'Neill's creative energies. He was a child of the theater, very much his father's son, and he saw life in terms of drama and drama as the truest representation of life. With the passing years his dramatic sensibility became more and more powerful, his theatrical sense more assured and natural. Still, for the writer obsessed with self, for the writer with an autobiographical impulse, for the writer who seems forced to confront his own personal problems by projecting them in some objective way, for the writer who is forever aiming for psychological realism, the novel is the most available and conventional art form, especially the modem novel as practiced by a Marcel Proust or a Virginia Woolf or a James Joyce. And for a writer who seems to demand of his art form that it provide a comprehensiveness based on expanded time and space, then again the novel seems the inevitable form, especially the more traditional novel as practiced by a Balzac or a Dickens or a Tolstoy. O'Neill wanted drama to do what the novel did; the novel had a flexibility that O'Neill wished to claim for the drama. Simply stated, O'Neill wanted drama to do more, the more that he found in the novel form, so he pushed his dramatic art closer to the art of the novelist in his boldest experiments, experiments which stress a character's inner reality through such devices as masks and thought monologues and split personalities . And his novelistic urge forces him to extend the length of the play beyond its usual two or three hours duration. This urge also prods him to offer extended and highly specific stage directions which sometimes become a form of narrative, often presenting psychological descriptions of characters, sometimes meant for a reader only. O'Neill's novelistic ambition is based primarily on the advantages and possibilities...