-
The Lonely Dream
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 9, Number 2, September 1966
- pp. 127-135
- 10.1353/mdr.1966.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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THE LONELY DREAM THE CREATIVE ENERGY OF Eugene O'Neill flailed away in all directions. That his unceasing grapple with himself was the dynamo of his talent can no longer be doubted. The prospect of releasing his tensions attracted him to playwriting, but mature expression in him too often was blighted by his over-reliance upon recollection in white heat. He rarely was able to separate out the distorting effects of tittering overstatement, sledge-hammer repetition, and dice-loaded self-pity. N0where is this emotional bloodletting more apparent than in his young artist characters, the men of feelings. Like O'Neill himself, these close copies waver endlessly between engagement and disengagement in their quest for identity. Their progress is from hurt to knowledge of hurt to hurt of knowledge. All of these fictional O'Neills, from the Poet in "Fog" to Edmund Tyrone, look and act alike. They are all tall, slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and long, thin-fingered. In his descriptions of them, O'Neill often distinguished between the influences of their mothers and those of their fathers. Delicate features, sensitivity, and refinement derive from the mothers, while coarseness and profligacy come from the fathers. The total make-up is thus quite heavily biased in favor of the mothers. Only Richard in Ah7 Wilderness! differs from this pattern of influences. He is unique among O'Neill's artist characters in that he is "a perfect blend of father and mother."l But Richard is a pre-artist, a portrait of the young artist before the fall of innocence, not a ghost-ridden O'Neill spokesman. The O'Neill artists often are contrasted with their exact opposites , the prosaic men of material things, the Great God Browns. The Browns are handsome, blond, blue-eyed, stocky, and athletic. "Yank" in The Hairy Ape is an in-between character. He is related to the O'Neill artists in his abnormal sense of alienation, but his brow is "low" and "receding." He is too Neanderthal to be a blood relative. All of O'Neill's self-portraits have a "high" or a "broad" or a "fine" forehead. O'Neill evidently found the new anthropological attempts to correlate brain size and brow ridges with intellectual capacity a useful way to distinguish his artists from the herd. Whereas other characters are either normal or shrewd in mental powers, the artists are intelligent. 1 Ah, Wilderness!, Act I, p. 193, Vol. II. All references to O'Neill's plays except More Stately Mansions (New Haven, 1964) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (New Haven, 1956) are from The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, 3 vols. (New York, 1947). 127 128 MODERN DRAMA September An O'Neill poet-artist nearly always can be recognized by his love of books. Romantic poetry is his red meat, but he will seize upon any book that stirs in his imagination an idealized world. Almost all other O'Neill characters are non-readers who berate the artist for the time he wastes on books. At the opening curtain of Beyond the Horizon~ for instance, Robert is discovered reading a book of poetry. His brother Andrew introduces the conflict of the play in the first line by chiding him for his impractical book-dreaming. Their father, James Mayo, also appeared in the first draft version of this scene, primarily to support Andrew's ridicule of Robert's reading habits: MAyO. What's that he's got there-'nother book? Good Lord, I thought you'd read every book there was in the world, Robert; and here you goes and finds 'nother one. [Old Mayo and Andrew talk farming for a short while.] (Robert has been trying to pretend an interest in their conversation but he cannot help showing it bores him. Andrew notices this.) ANDREW. Farming ain't poetry, is it, Rob? MAYO. There's more satisfaction in the earth than there ever was in any book and Robert'll find it out sooner or later (with a twinkle in his eye) when he's grown up and got some sense. ROBERT. (WhimsIcally) I'm never going to grow up-if I can help it. MAYO. Time'll see-you...