AN EXAMINATION OF THE PARABOLIC NATURE OF
•SUFFERING’
IN SELECTED PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL, 1913-1923
Gerald L. Ratliff
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
June 1975 ii
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to explore some of the dimensions of Eugene Gladstone O’Neill's religious thought in order to come to a better understanding of his tragic vision and what would appear to he his potentially Christian impulse, The five chapters treated the evolution of O'Neill's religious thought from 1913 to 1923, and included a detailed analysis of his use of Biblical saga and prophecy in Thirst, Fog, Beyond the Horizon, and The Hairy Ape. In addition, there was an exploration of the "fragment" religious thought of O'Neill as it was revealed in lie, Where the Cross is Made, Gold, The Rope, Bound East for Cardiff, The Straw, and All God's Chillun Got Wings.
The study concluded thats
1) O'Neill's use of Biblical allusion is less significant than his use of Biblical analogue, and that analogue may be operating when allusion is not evident.
2) O'Neill is centrally a Christian playwright-prophet and that it would seem to be implicit in the shape of his tragic vision and in his treatment of the Biblical concept of suffering a potentially apprehendable recognition that man's saving grace comes from his divine origin.
3) O'Neill's unique contribution to world literature is his ability to focus the Biblical doctrine of suffering upon the back ground of human despair and misery and to reveal in the nature of man,nakedly exposed to the primal terrors and threats to which his limited and imperfect creatureliness is subject, a gospel of hope and salvation. iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Listing all of the persons who have assisted me in the direction which this dissertation has taken would be impossible, but I am forever indebted to my advisor, Dr. Allen White, and to Dr. Alma Payne, of the
American Studies program, for their support and guidance. Without them, I would have had neither the interest nor the desire to complete my studies at Bowling Green State University. As both friends and mentors, they have been a constant source of inspiration.
I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the Department of Speech and to Dr. F, Lee Miesle for making it possible for me to continue my education on a fellowship; to Dr. Lois Cheney, whose understanding and compassion made me aware of what fine teaching embraces; to Dr. Norman Myers, whose love of scholarship and research re-kindled my own love of academic excellence; and to Dr. Charles
Boughton, whose perceptive criticism helped me to fashion my inter pretation. IV
CONTENTS Page
PREFACE...... vi
CHAPTER ......
I. EUGENE O’NEILL! PLAYWRIGHT-PROPHET ...... 1
II. THE THEOLOGICAL PRELUDE...... 22
III. THIRST AND FOGt EARLY SEEDS OF SUFFERING AS
INDIVIDUAL RETRIBUTION ...... 50
IV. BEYOND THE HORIZON! THE FLOWERING OF SUFFERING
AS ATONEMENT FORI NDIVIDUAL SIN...... 93
V. THE HAIRY APE: SUFFERING AS AN INDICTMENT
AGAINST SOCIAL INJUSTICE ...... 132
SUMMARY ANDC ONCLUSIONS ...... l?0
LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED...... 180 V
And what place is there in me into which my God can come
Even He who made heaven and earth?
Is there anything in me, 0 Lord my God, that can contain Thee?
Or should I not rather say, that I could not exist unless I were in Thee from whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things?
Augustine vi
PREFACE
In a remark made to the critic Joseph Wood Krutch early in the nineteen thirties, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill pointed out what he considered to be the fundamental difference between himself and the majority of contemporary dramatists:
Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not Interest me at all. I-am interested only in the relation between man and God.
O'Neill, in other words, thought of himself as primarily a religious playwright and was concerned with the conscious effort to make his dramas bridge the gulf between man and God.
But whereas most religious playwrights have been eager to communicate their visions and to proclaim the divinity of their inspirations, O'Neill was a dramatist who apparently concealed his spiritual impulse in biblical text. Not only is he capable of pro- I ducing pages filled with biblical allusion, but he also employs ♦ biblical text for the purpose of commenting on the religious malaise which arises when man continues to be "haunted by the God whom he has discarded."2
Although few readers may at first discern the fact, O'Neill's knowledge of the Bible is unusually extensive. In the plays selected for examination in this discussion, for example, there are allusions to or verbal echoes from at least fifteen books of the Old and New 3 Testaments and a specific mention of twenty-five biblical characters.
In spite of these findings criticism has been slow to assimilate
O'Neill's use of the Bible and biblical characters in an over-all perspective of his plays. Rather, O'Neill's use of biblical allusion vii
and corresponding religious implication has only added to the gen
eral difficulty of understanding his religious thought, which has
characteristically been misconstrued in the past by a too literal
interpretation of what is apparently parabolic thought.
The disparity in those views which suggest that if O’Neill "ever
heard of grace and forgiveness he did not remember them when he looked 4 into the souls of his characters," or that "in the contest between c the Devil and God he almost always found the Devil winning cut,"^ is
understandable when the difficulty is considered.
To begin with, there is the notable fact that where O’Neill’s
biblical reference is overt and on the surface it generally comes from
those characters who are quoting scripture for their own purposes, and
when the reference is concealed it usually signals a religious dimension
by which to interpret the suffering and despair of his characters.
What is suggested in the following discussion is that biblical
allusion in O’Neill’s drama is less significant than biblical analogue
and that analogy may be operating when allusion Is not evident. There
is also the suggestion that O’Neill utilizes biblical analogue as his
thematic concordance and that he extracts from scripture those examples
of liturgy, saga, and prophecy which provide religious instruction of
"spiritual understanding which releases man from the petty greeds of everyday existence."^
In this respect, O’Neill’s drama resembles the prophetic "para bles" of Christian scripture which sought to reveal in dramatic form the saving grace that comes from man's divine origin. O'Neill himself suggests as much when he notes that his drama aims at depicting the viii
"transfiguring nobility of man in as near the spiritual sense as one 7 can grasp it." That is why it is not incorrect to assume that O'Neill
is centrally a "playwright-prophet" and that he achieves the greatest
significance for modern thought when a perspective grounded in biblical
lore is brought to bear on his dramas.
Like most religious playwrights, however, O'Neill never evolved
an elaborate theory of his spiritual vision. Yet In the few inter
views and letters which are now available to scholars, especially those
of the early nineteen twenties, he occasionally expresses his tragic
vision. The similarity between this vision and the biblical concept
of suffering, which teaches that salvation is the reward for pain
greatly endured, is significant enough to make comparison both natural
and instructive.
In a letter to the New York Tribune, written in February of 1921,
O'Neill declares that to him the tragic "is alone that significant
beauty which is truth" and that suffering "is the real meaning of 8 life—and the hope." Another letter, written two years later, again expresses the "exhilarating" aspect of a "tragic nature" and suggests that suffering is an example of the "spiritual significance which life o attains."
By comparing these statements with an interview given in March of
1926, in which O'Neill admits "going in heavily for the study of religion as a sort of large background for work in the future,"10 it is possible to postulate that suffering is the key element in O'Neill!s admittedly religious conception of drama. It is also possible to postulate that an examination of his early plays may shed some light ix
on the religious "background." of his later plays. That is why a
study of the years 1913 to 1923 is so important in revealing the
spiritual impulse which later shaped O'Neill’s dramatic art and why
a study of the apparent consistency of his use of biblical analogue
may indicate a certain permanence in his religious views.
There are, to date, no scholarly investigations which have
attempted to evaluate O’Neill’s religious development during these
formulative years. This fact alone is enough to warrant the organ
izing principles which bring together the five essays that comprise
this discussion. But, in a larger sense, the precedent for an examin
ation of O’Neill’s early dramas is not a need in the area for an
academic review of his work. Rather, it is a need to sketch the por
trait of the man and the thinker; to present his beliefs on religious
questions not as facts but as alternatives; and to determine what, if any, witness his early dramas make to the Christian faith.
Part of the challenge of the present discussion also involves an
examination of what it means to speak of O’Neill's "tragic vision," and what that provides in terms of a perspective upon the human story that has any relationship to the Christian faith. Another challenge involves an explication of the parabolic form which O'Neill's early drama takes and what role suffering plays in developing O'Neill's apparent religious ethic.
Before proceeding to an examination of selected plays, there are a few observations that should be made. The main interest of the present study is neither biographic nor genetic,11 but is thematic.
The purpose is to examine O'Neill's position, both in his artistic X
work and in his religious thought, thus shedding new light upon the
parabolic nature of suffering as the primary Ingredient of his tragic
vision.
In this study a theological, not a chronological, development is
considered. For that reason plays, letters, poems, and interviews are
often placed in juxtaposition when it will enhance the development of
O'Neill’s religious thought.
The central hypothesis of this study is that the unique contri bution of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill to modern American thought and literature is his ability to focus the biblical doctrine of suffering upon the background of his drama and to reveal in parable significant religious instruction. A secondary hypothesis is that O'Neill's liter ary development closely parallels his religious development and that the motif of suffering which is apparent in the plays from 1913 to 1923 helps to fashion his concept of the spiritual ecstasy which may be wrung from misdeeds and tribulations. A third hypothesis is that the leitmotif of suffering is the only consistent principle in O’Neill’s tragic vision and that it may assume a mystic, a moral, or a social role.
Chapter One explores O’Neill’s personal relationship to Christian ity as it is expressed in his non-dramatic writing. Another concern is an examination of O’Neill's effort to make the theatre itself
"religious" by suggesting that playwrights return to the classical form of tragedy which treats a vision of greatness in a man caught up in a contention for his destiny. A principal working assumption in examining O'Neill's own statements on religion will be that the author xi
expresses himself in much the same vein within the plays being dis
cussed and that both his statements and his plays suggest that man
lives for a life hereafter and not'for his life here on earth. This
will lead to an examination of his apparent attempt to reconcile the
tragic vision of man's precarious existence on earth with biblical
text which teaches that man's treasures lies in "other kingdoms."
Chapter Two surveys the best examples of O'Neill's early treat
ment of suffering and despair as it is exhibited in lie, Where the
Cross is Made, Gold, The Rope, Bound East for Cardiff, The Straw, and
All God's Chillun Got Wings. Although the treatment here is only to suggest the "fragment thoughts" of O'Neill's apparent religious make up, a foundation is laid for interpreting in more detail the plays which follow. The primary emphasis of this chapter is to untangle
O'Neill's oftentimes conflicting statements on the value of suffering in an attempt to detail what these early plays themselves suggest about the man and the thinker. There is also an attempt to provide a better understanding of that peculiar religious temperament of O'Neill's which appears to identify literature with man's salvation.
In Chapters Three, Four, and Five those plays which appear to contain the most powerful and pervasive treatment of suffering are placed at the center of discussion. In this respect, Chapter Three is devoted to Thirst and Fog, both of which contain a decidedly "mystic" approach to the value of suffering. Having established the fact that
O'Neill himself regards the plays in the Thirst collection as the
"first" of the five stations of the Cross, this chapter is concerned with the playwright's suggestion that this first station on the road xii
to redemption involves the biblical notions of "self-sacrifice" and
"self-denial,"
Chapter Four, which also contains elements of the mystic nature of suffering, is concerned with an examination of Beyond the Horizon and continues the suggestion of "atonement" for sin through acts of self-abnegation which concludes both Thirst and Fog. Of particular interest in this chapter is O’Neill’s use of the Adam and Eve parable and its biblical suggestion of resignation to suffering as a test of religious fidelity.
Chapter Five concludes a discussion of selected plays which deal with suffering and the felicitous relationship of man and God with a detailed analysis of The Hairy Ape. The value of this chapter as it relates to those which precede it rests in O’Neill’s apparent use of suffering to now suggest an indictment against social injustice. The central principal in this chapter appears to be O’Neill’s attempt to point out the dawn of a new age of social reform. In his view, witnessed by an examination of The Hairy Ape, a reorganization of mankind in terms of social equality is necessary to promote the brotherhood of all men.
The summary of this discussion is concerned with an evaluation of
O'Neill’s development as an essentially religious thinker and an assessment of those aspects of the biblical doctrine of suffering which appear to be of primary importance in shaping the evolution of his tragic vision.
It is hoped that what emerges from this study will be a better understanding of the true religious impulse of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill xiii
as man and as artist than hagiographers or denigrators have, here-to- fore, transcribed. It is also hoped that this new understanding will lead to a re-evaluation of his contribution to American literature and to world thought with regard to the role that religion might play in alleviating the suffering of mankind.
With these thoughts in mind this study now turns to an examin ation of O’Neill as a conscious religious playwright who wishes to make his drama bridge the gulf between man and God. It must be pointed out, however, that while O'Neill's quest for faith is sincere, it often resembles a child's game of trying to spell out God and salvation with the wrong building blocks. Chapter One attempts to assist him in placing each block in its proper order and to display critically what is involved in the semantic of his parabolic spelling. xiv
FOOTNOTES FOR PREFACE
1. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Oscar Cargill, N. BryIlion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, (New York: New York University Press, 196l), p. 115.
2. Egil Tomqvist, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill’s Super- naturalistic Technique, "(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 1969), p. 12.
3. O'Neill's knowledge of the Bible suggests a theological order of fact in his early drama. In the present survey there are implicit references to the following books of scripture: Luke ("The Rope");» Job ("All God’s Chillun Got Wings"), Genesis ("Beyond the Horizon"), Matthew ("A Wife for a Life"). Isaiah ("Fog"), Mark ("The Fountain"), Exodus ("The Emperor Jones"), Psalms ("The Straw"), Jeremiah ("Where the Cross Is Made"), Romans ("Diff'rent"), and John ("The Fountain"). In addition, there is specific mention of the following biblical characters: Salome, Mary, James, Paul, Lucy, Joseph, Ruth, Peter, David, Esther, Benjamin, Katherine, Pearl, Abraham, Luke, Moses, Isaiah, Abel, Sarah, Caleb, Martha, John, Mark, Beatrice, and Matthew,
4. Fred Eastman, Christ in the Drama, (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1947), p. 97.
5. Fred Eastman, "Eugene O'Neill and Religion," The Christian Cen tury, L, July, 1933» P- 957.
6. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Cargill, et. al., O'Neill and His Plays, p. 13.
7. Ibid., pp. 13-14.
8. Eugene O'Neill, "Eugene O'Neill's Credo and the Reasons for His Faith," New York Tribune, February, 1921, p, 30.
9. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Cargill, et, al., O'Neill and His Plays, p. 14.
10. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973)» p. 197.
11. A general note on the biographical evidence is appropriate. I rely to some extent on the information given in the existing O'Neill biographies, particularly on the information provided in the first comprehensive one, Arthur and Barbara Gelb's O'Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), and the most recent one, Louis Sheaffer*s O'Neill: Son, and Artist (Boston: XV
Little, Brown and Co., 1973). Neither of them, however, ful fills scholarly demands for exact dating, critical evaluation of sources, or clear references. For this reason the possibility that external evidence may be fallacious and inaccurate is not to be denied. CHAPTER ONE
EUGENE O'NEILL* PLAYWRIGHT-PROPHET
Twenty-two years after his death, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's
dramas remain the most important repository that we have of the Christian concept of "salvation by suffering/'1 an explanation of
why catastrophe is built into human existence.
Wilting for those "helplessly driven by forces they have not the 2 character to withstand," O'Neill asserts that "the church in our world 3 has no relationship to Christianity" and seeks to depict in dramatic
form the interminable struggle of man's attempt to liberate himself
from the "inscrutable" forces which, Ixion-like, weld him to the wheel
of his misfortune.
It is for this reason that he apparently rejects the impulse to
evangelize from the pulpit and turns to the playhouse to profess his
religious thought, demanding for his plays what he likes to term an
"Imaginative Theatre":
I mean a theatre returned to its highest and sole significant function as a Temple where the religion of a poetical interpretation and symbolical celebration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in spirit by their soul-stifling daily struggle to exist as masks among the masks of the living.
O'Neill's imaginative theatre admittedly rejects the "passive" and
"negative" tenets of conventional Christian doctrine, which reveal a
"god who turned His back and slammed the door,"-’ and advocates that type of drama which reveals "some -vital, unquenchable flame in man which makes him triumph over his miseries—over life itself—so that, dying, he is still victorious." 2
Such a triumph, which echoes Emerson’s treatment of individual
heroism, attempts to dramatize man’s achievement of tragic nobility
as he confronts religious despair which appears initially so im
provident and obeys the dictates of his subjective impulses. And
this, for O'Neill, is "the only way we can get religion back" because
it demonstrates that "man is able to achieve an exultant acceptance for life."7
The greatness of Christianity, O'Neill contends, is precisely revealed in its adequacy to just this kind of ambivalent world; and herewith he distinguishes his faith in Jesus Christ from all other ways of resolving the ambiguities of man's temporal existence. Al though the contrarieties of the world remain perplexing there is a "way out," and the point is that the despair and the suffering to which they give rise may be removed. Faith is, of course, the way out, and that is why O'Neill insists that "behind the smaller themes of all my plays lies a larger theme, namely, that sickness of today which is caused by 8 man's loss of religion and his need to find some substitute for it."
In this respect O'Neill appears to apply a sort of "spiritual
X-ray" to his characters to reveal how "man has squandered his soul by trying to possess something outside of it," "But why go on," he relates, "the Bible said it much better: For what shall it profit a o man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
Employing the human soul as his "keyboard," O'Neill proceeds to depict life as a "gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent, splendidly-suffering bit of chaos, the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous significance."10 And back of the human lives he presents, 3
O’Neill sees a force "so infinitely greater than any character that
man cannot estimate it," but can "only feel, dimly or ecstatically, the power he can but vaguely interpret."11
At least one contemporary critic, however, sees O’Neill’s effort to resolve the chaos of the human predicament by relating it to a force outside of personal existence as a "mirage" and concludes that he is "thoroughly hostile" to Christianity. To read or to witness
O’Neill’s plays this critic maintains is to:
live temporarily in an intense but a simplified and Impoverished world, a world narrow in range and meager in substance. Scanty to begin with, this world has been further stripped and denuded by its creator’s preoccupation with primal forces only. And not only is it so to speak an emaciated skeleton world, but also one which by subordinating man and making him the hopeless victim of larger forces, and by depicting him as always undergoing a spiritual defeat, is thoroughly hostile to human life.12
But the careful reader of O'Neill will find ample evidence that he has no quarrel with human life and that he does not allow man to undergo a spiritual defeat. "In all my plays," he maintains, "sin is 13 punished and redemption takes place." Perhaps that is why O'Neill is not concerned to say that existence,is without purpose and that it has no order or no governing principle at all. He simply acknowledges that he is always acutely conscious of:
the Force behind life (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly)—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being an infinitesimal incident in its expression.^
In this respect, O'Neill may be said to represent the modem secular ized man who is unable to accept the latent religious assumption that it
God is an incomprehensible, transcedent power which may never be reached nor understood. His modernity lies in the fact that he antici pates the "Renaissance" of American religious thought in the fifties,1^ with its focus on the inner man and his need for assurance that God is not dead. O’Neill sums up his prophetic understanding of the type of tragedy which transforms man’s despair and suffering into spiritual exaltation in the following wordss
life is a struggle, often, if not usually, an un successful struggle; for most of us have something within us which prevents us from accomplishing what we dream or desire. But, a man wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable and his struggle is his success.
While some critics maintain that such an ethic necessarily results in 1? "negativeness" and a sense of "desolation," O’Neill's view of life provides a real philosophy of happiness and suggests a kinship with the classical tradition of religious drama in which tragedy is a vision of greatness in a man caught up in a contention for his destiny.
The most serious aspect of O'Neill's kinship with the drama of classical tragedy is the peculiar manner in which his tragic hero is touched with "glory" in his struggle with fate. In a comment more re vealing of his ultimate position than he was perhaps aware of at the time, O'Neill maintains that the classical strain of thought stands in the background of all his dramas
Where I feel myself most neglected is just where I set most store by myself—as a bit of the poet, who has labored with the spoken word to evolve original rhythms of beauty, where beauty apparently isn't and to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy, in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it, in seemingly the most ignoble, debased lives. And my profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible—or can be—to develop a tragic expression in 5
terms of transfigured modem values and symbols in the theatre which may to some degree bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theatre is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest everjl°
This understanding of the human situation is sufficiently similar to
that of both classical and Christian thought that one contemporary
critic has observed how ’'O'Neill is almost alone among modem drama
tists" in possessing what appears to be an "instinctive perception of
what a modem tragedy would have to be in its acceptance of a rational 19 istic view of man and the universe."
What appears to be an acceptance of a rationalistic view of man
and the universe, however, merely reflects the classical Stoic belief
that wisdom lies in accepting the inescapable and ridding oneself of
passion and desire. It also echoes the spirit of the wanderer in
Plato's parable who seeks to deliver the denizens of the cave from the 20 shadows of religious doubt to the light of everlasting truth.
But where the Greek man might find spiritual comfort in the religious dialogues of Plato's "deliverers," O'Neill's skeptical and disillusioned "modems" can find no such solace. Their failure to en noble the inexorable dilemma of living in an atmosphere of skeptical faith has apparently led them to an irreducible vanity. Exposed to anxiety, suffering, and death, they exclaim in that same stubborn, defiant spirit which sustained O'Neill through the long years of obscurity and the barren harvest of his early work:
Let your God first become man if he would save us. Shooting at stars is an amiable dreamer's pastime but we here on earth must needs prove our markman- ship by some target,21 6
Although O'Neill later tempered his defiant spirit and declared that
"an author is not always conscious of the deeper implications of his
writings while he is actually at work on them, and perhaps never fully 22 becomes aware of allthe has revealed," it is obvious from an analy
sis of his early drama that all of O'Neill's plays symbolically become
a personal testimony which suggest that suffering, privation, transience
and death are spiritual proof of His promise of eternal life; a promise
made possibly by virtue of Christ's having become man and having tri
umphed over sin and death on the cross.
One may compare O’Neill, then, with Prometheus, for whom the
mystery of the "incarnation," the joining of the finite and the infinite
worlds through a Man-God, alone could provide an escape from the con
tradictions of the two. Like Prometheus, O'Neill appears to endure the
immutable ordinances of heaven in the clash between the arbitrary vo
lition of the "gods" and the heroic defiance of man. He welcomes the
combat, as he admits in an account of the suffering and despair which
were part of his own"doom" on behalf of oppressed humanity, as a test
of how man might confront the inevitability of deaths
My vultures are still flapping around, thank God, hungry and undismayed; and I am very proud of them, for they are my test and my self-gratification. Each visit they wax stronger and more pitiless—which is naturally a matter of boast between them and mel---- And I look for ward to some last visit when their wings will blot out; and then I predict they'll turn out to be angels of some God or other who have given me in exchange the germ of a soul.23 24 For one who is, supposedly, "an unbeliever, who believes in evil,"
O'Neill here exhibits a rather marked religious suggestion that man's
suffering is the only necessaiy ingredient in achieving some sort of 7
spiritual harmony. If he is advocating that suffering provides man
with a kind of religious deliverance, he is also claiming that when
man faces the tragic he liberates himself from its despair. And while
O'Neill does not specifically employ the conventional tenets of
Christianity as a solution to man's predicament, he does note that
man himself iss
an example of the spiritual significance which life attains when it aims high enough, when the individual fights all the hostile forces within and without himself to achieve a future of nobler values.^5
All of O'Neill's early plays appear to mirror this general theme
that every man lives in basic, inescapable conflict with himself and
that it is only when man endures in the face of hostile forces that
his life acquires significant religious meaning and dignity. Each of
his plays is but a stepping stone toward his own acknowledgement that
" 'tis better far to live one day wholly, to realize one glorious sin
and then to die, than to drag out our lives through years of common-
sense to dull decay."
It is so small wonder, then, that an artist with O'Neill's ap
parent religious impulse should find it quite natural to guide man's
vision of a better world by relating the Biblical doctrine of suffer ing to his analysis of the human condition. The gist of this analysis, in O'Neill's words, is thats
people who have suffered do not need reminders. They already feel divine compassion. But there are those who have not been touched by misery. These may well suffer, by proxy. It will do them good. It will have a humanizing effect. Thus to taste vicariously a bit of life's bitterness,2?
It must be admitted, however, that O'Neill's attempt to express his essentially religious thought in terms of proxy suffering has often 8
resulted in what one critic has termed "the abstraction Man and the 28 archabstraction of God." But in examining man’s behavior in light
of the Biblical doctrine of suffering, O’Neill’s interest appears to
be metaphysical rather than theoretical. That is to say, he is not
attempting to invoke the mystery of man’s spiritual nature or his re
lationship to other men by portraying him as an "abstraction." Rather,
he appears more intent on exhibiting the mystery itself. His characters,
therefore, are not specific, individual, and isolated "types" but
representatives of mankind in general.
Although they may appear to be stumbling players prompted to
action by an unseen force which remains offstage, for O’Neill they are
"necessarily tragic, not depressing. They may be failures in our 29 materialistic sense but their treasures are in other kingdoms." And
even if they appear to be failures in the struggle against environment
or society they secure O'Neill's sympathy because they express what he 30 likes to term "man's humanity toward Humanity."
Such an expression, however, demands a language that will reveal the crucible of man's suffering. That such a language is not possible in modern drama is acknowledged by O'Neill in a letter to Arthur
Hobson Quinn when he laments that:
from the evidence of all that is being written today, I don't think that great language is possible for any one living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time. The best one can do is to be pathetically eloquent by one's moving, dramatic inarticulations.31
Not surprisingly, this is the same attitude in which O'Neill attempts to refute the critics who suggest that the inability of his characters to express themselves clearly often results in tragedy which "flies 32 with one clipped wing even when it is not earthbound. "They 9
cannot," O’Neill says, "write of their own problems. In many ways
they are inarticulate. So, they must often suffer in silence."
Here, then, is the key to an understanding of O’Neill’s plays»
the world of this lonely, silent soul becomes his world as he seeks
to express that desolation and despair which his characters are in
capable of voicing.
His approach appears to have been directed by Walter Prichard
Eaton’s advice for young playwrights to "return again to the old,
divine discontent with conformity, and old popular encouragement to every man and every artist to go ahead and be himself, to tell the 34 truth as he sees it, to follow his own destiny,Although Eaton never suspected, of course, that his blueprint for playwriting would be taken literally, it is apparent from O’Neill’s remarks in the
Philadelphia Public Ledger three years after Eaton’s comment, that he adopted this approach to drama as ,a kind of personal religion in its own right, O'Neill writes»
I shall never be influenced by any consideration but one» Is it the truth as I know it—or, better still, feel it? If so, shoot, and let the splinters fly wherever they may. If not, not.35
One might assume that in his effort to reveal the "truth" about the human predicament O'Neill might also attempt to create his own credo of good and evil, his own categories of morality. But, he insists, that "everything has been said before, there's nothing to write about.
One can only write about them in a new way, in his own way."-5
It is quite clear what O'Neill means by writing in his own way.
It involves the recognition that "the courage to face truth, just like 37 the fear of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom."'" It involves a 10
knowledge of pain and suffering and a vision of the meaningful
existence which is identified with obedience to God’s law. It involves
the joy of growth and the sorrow of decay. It involves the poverty
of man’s disillusioned wanderings in the world and the spiritual
wealth of his weary return home.
Thus, in a significant journal note of 1921, O'Neill asserts that
his primary goal as a dramatist is to make the human community see in the quandary of suffering and despair the primacy of a spiritual truth:
...the tragedy of Man is the only significant thing about him because it reveals that beauty which is truth. It is the meaning of life—and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their uncom promising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been! The man who pursues the mere attainable should be sentenced to get it—and keep it. Let him rest on his laurels and enthrone him in a Morris chair, in which laurels and hero may wither away together. Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for— and so attain himself. He with the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness is nearest to the stars and the rainbow!s foot.3°
In short, O'Neill is suggesting that man is on his own and that he must learn to live in an inhospitable world with an earnest faith in himself and in his own untrammelled dignity. It is also clear that
O'Neill himself tends to provide an example of messianism, for he supposes that man is able to attain a state of knowledge in which life will be more beautiful for all. This messianism, however, appears to be more like the capricious despair of D. H. Lawrence's heroes and their explorations for the "dark Gods" who are essential elements of a disordered world than like the conventional Christian concept of 11
an expected liberator, O'Neill suggests as much in his vow to "tear 39 down the curtain of Eternity that God has hung in the sky" and to 40 "vomit all my poison up on the bread and on the wine."
His purpose, however, is apparently not to deny a faith in God
but to confess his own helplessness in comprehending the spiritual
order to the universe:
I’m not what you could call perfectly at peace with God. I envy those simple souls to whom life is always either this or that. It's the this and that desire that slowly poisons my soul with complicated contradictions.^1
In an attempt to resolve that contradiction it is apparent that O’Neill
often assumes the role of a prophet, preaching that "the one reform
worth cheering for is the Second Flood and that the interesting thing
about people is the obvious fact that they don’t really want to be 42 saved—the tragic idiotic ambition for self-destruction in them."
It is for this reason that O'Neill evidently deprives man of the
importance which religion confers when it teaches that he is made in
God’s image and may pursue any course of action, even self-destruction,
without fear of redress; and demands that man raise himself by his own
bootstraps in order to assert the dignity which a spiritually bank rupt religion has denied by its emphasis upon passivity and resignation to God’s will.
No small part of O'Neill’s influence on modern literature has been his attempt to communicate the belief that man's rebellion against or disobedience in the face of divine command does not necessarily re sult in the chaotic disruption of religious precepts, which teach man to obey without question the dictates of God. In this respect O'Neill's thought reflects the essence of the Old Testament doctrine of rebellion: 12
it teaches man to exorcise the terrors of religious doubt, it re
conciles man to the cruelties of fate, and it makes amends for suffer
ing and privation.
O'Neill’s rebellious attitude, apparently directed toward an
infinite God who had hidden from him the impenetrable secret of sal
vation, is easily traced to a definitive experience of frustration and
despair which he shared with a friend in a short poem penned in 1914.
It is interesting to note, however, that O'Neill's rebellion is primarily
one of "wilful sinning." In a single, unbroken flow of inspiration
he writes:
My soul is whitened with the scars of many old leprosies. And how---- now, foresooth, I am Sir Galahad, The Virgin Knight, sans reproach, The devil fly away with mel To refuse sin to the unrepentant sinner—- That is too cruel. Lord, hear my prayer I I would sin'.
This conscious attempt by O'Neill to solve the problem of evil by making explicit what men have always wished, the courageous affirmation of life which arises when man may sin sans reproach, asserts rather than denies the ultimate worth, dignity, and hope of mankind in a robust, personal challenge to God Himself.
Just as O'Neill holds that man is not man save as he lives in tensely, albeit painfully, so also he holds that man is prone to defiance. But this defiance is, in itself, heroic and reminds one that man is capable of great heights and of great depths of spiritual exaltation; and that he could not be capable of one without being capable of the other also. Herman Melville put the difficulty in this philosophical context: "If we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; 13
and it is in this disobeying ourselveswherein the hardness of obeying /Ji. God consists."
Eugene O’Neill apparently could not obey God because he could not disobey himself. His personal writings, therefore, are for the most part a long, patient, and exhaustive analysis of what it means to be in defiance of the invisible cogs which manipulate the spiritual uni verse. His visions of despair and of suffering are conditioned by a
Jacob-like attempt to grapple with the mysterious machinery of God’s metaphysics and by a prophet-like attempt to warn mankind that it is
"only the fear of death which is the root of all evil, the cause of all man’s blundering unhappiness."
Although some critics view O’Neill’s attempt to wrestle with the 46 metaphysics of a spiritual reality as the repetition of some "trusim," they evidently fail to recognize that the spiritual harmony to which
O'Neill seems to be aspiring cannot be found in any controlling intel lectual idea and certainly not in any philosophical formula. On the contrary, O'Neill's blueprint for spiritual harmony appears to stem from his persistent attempt to make suffering bridge the gulf between the indiscriminate depreciation of man and his religious capacity for belief when oppressed by the idea of God.
Living in such a world of suffering as that which O'Neill suggests, however, does imply that the whole perspective of man's temporal es tate may be seen in an entirely different light. One notes, for example, the following characteristics in O'Neill's early plays which tend to reflect the religious malaise of the man who is seeking spiritual harmony in a world without apparent providential order: a sense of futility and a desire to flee the temporal world; decadence 14
of culture through pseudo-intellectuality as well as through indul
gence in sensuality and intemperance; the spiritless subjugation
and enslavement of individuals to fate; and an empty, cold, inflex
ible legalism which clings to externals and formulae as though these
were the pivot of existence.
In contrast to these empirical and secular strictures which appear
to deny a unified and meaningful existence stand the categorical im
peratives of immortality suggested by O’Neill’s belief that "vices are 47 often nobler than virtues and nearly always closer to a revelation:"
sin and disobedience are no longer matter for guilt and despair; af
flictions and suffering are no longer matter for regret and repining;
gross immorality may be causually efficacious; and the evil that good
men do is often counterbalanced by the good that evil men do.
It is evident that what O’Neill exhibits in this "apocalyptic"
vision of the duality of man’s nature is the ontology of modern secu
larism; his version, that is, of the reality that man is up against in this temporal world. The main tenet of that thought suggests that ours is a universe of ambivalent religious principles and that a unified and meaningful existence may only be achieved by an heroic act of rebellion or of defiance.
Constantly in the ambiguous position of having to struggle des perately to retain some sense of his identity, and not being able to discover anything against which he might really test himself, O'Neill’s characters appear to give themselves to first one and then another gratuitous action in the hope of gaining the immutable truth about existence. These actions almost always involve what the French term the reve exotique, or the dream of far away, and appear to be of far 15
greater value than the struggle of the individual to realize his own
integrity or his own identity because inherent in the anguished
experiment is the realization that suffering has a place In God’s
merciful design for mankind. In this respect suffering tests the
sincerity of man's virtue and, when borne in a spirit of humility,
strengthens his faith.
That faith, however, is not a resolution of the ambiguities of
human nature but appears to be the beginning of a renewed relationship
with God; a relationship which suggests the context in which redemption might take place. Theologically, such a discovery entails the possibility that, being forgiven for transgressions by a loving Saviour, man may overcome the world itself. This is precisely what the Bible teaches when it notes that man's suffering is a prelude to salvation:
For if in the sight of men they suffered chastisement, their hope was full of immortality. After a little chastening they shall be greatly favored. For God hath made trial of them, and found them worthy of him self. As gold in the furnace he tested them. And as a whole-burnt-offering he accepted them.
O'Neill's, then, is a thesis that Christians can rejoice in because it suggests that suffering bespeaks the way men relate themselves to the accumulative calamities of life and that it is not events, apart from men, which are tragic but, rather, the relations in which men place themselves to such calamities which become tragic.
The opposition that one discovers when attempting to reconcile these relations may, of course, itself become a source of religious despair. One way to resolve that despair is to refuse to entertain religion as an ideal requirement, in which case Philistinism is the consequence. But the other way is to let the requirement be an 16
occasion for repentance and faith, which is the Christian’s triumph
over an otherwise tragic world. O’Neill’s choice appears to he the
latter approach as he notes in a letter to Martin Lamm early in 1920s
"A writer whose main purpose is not to find a meaning in life, and a 4Q comfort in death, is only scratching the surface of things."
There is, of course, another side to O’Neill’s religious thought
which has not deeply touched the modern critic. Though dedicated to
the amelioration of the human condition, O’Neill also held it a worthy
cause to do what he could to turn man’s spiritual vision "inward" and
to point out that man’s salvation springs from his determination to
express himself regardless of consequence. His gospel is summed up in
the famous texts
Any victory we may win is never the one we dreamed of winning. The point is that life in itself is nothing. It is the dream of something higher that keeps us fighting, willing—living.5*
Indeed, a principal working assumption of O'Neill’s religious thought
is his assertion that man lives for a life hereafter and not for this
life here on earth. This leads O'Neill in his early plays to suggest'
that the universe rather than society is the ultimate cause of human
suffering. It is the business of his drama to somehow make sense out
of the apparent nonsense of the chaotic universe and to bolster man's
faith in a providentially structured spectacle of despair and frus
tration.
In this aspect of his religious thought, O'Neill may be counted
in the great tradition of the European humanists and the Enlighten
ment philosophers because he assumes that man can hope for knowledge or wisdom from no other source than the universe. He might even have 17
concurred—in spite of the religious acrimony between them at the
time of their simultaneous careers—in Karl Jaspers’ vision of a
great and noble life: "to endure ambiguity in the movement toward
truth and to stand fast in uncertainty; to prove capable of unlimited 51 hope for salvation.
O’Neill’s universe, then, is a cosmos of antithetical postulates
such as religion proposes. His literary effort suggests an attempt to
reconcile the tragic vision of man’s precarious existence on earth
with the Christian faith, which teaches that man’s treasures lie in
"other kingdoms." There is neither regret nor despair in O’Neill’s attitude that the God and the religion to which modem society has been
exposed is unable to provide a resolution for the suffering of man.
There is only a note of hope that if man continues to believe in God’s providence while enduring the self-crucifying agony of spiritual doubt he may yet be saved.
For O’Neill, then, tragedy is not enough. The "bare truth" about ourselves is not the whole truth about our veiled destiny. Faith must illuminate our suffering and despair before the grandeur and misery of man may be seen in their true proportions—where tragedy is crowned with glory and redeemed with God’s saving grace,
Hence it follows that O’Neill's thought may best be appraised by the canons of ethics and religion. This particular approach to an evaluation of O'Neill's thought appears to be most appropriate when one recalls that O'Neill himself, as he relates in a letter to a friend in 1918, had great difficulty in ascertaining precisely what
"form" his drama takes in expressing the "soul of an idea": 18
One part of me fiddles betimes while Rome bumeth and while the other part perishes in the flames—a martyr giving birth to the soul of an idea. One part of me is the author of my life-play tearing his hair in a piteous frenzy as he watches his 'worser' half play the lead and distorting the theme by many strange grimaces. Believe me, from line to line, the poor wretch can never tell whether the play is a farce or tragedy—so perverse a spirit is his star.52
In spite of O’Neill’s own appraisal of his early efforts as a
"martyr" playwright, it Is obvious from an evaluation of the ethical
and spiritual precepts which imbue the philosophy of O’Neills’ treat
ment of man estranged from God that he is the only American dramatist
who has persistently attempted to return to both a classical and a
Biblical concept of tragedy, which acknowledges that man’s suffering
does not destroy his faith in his own efforts to entertain the possi
bility of redemption and salvation.
Like Chesterton’s imaginary explorer, O’Neill now sets out to
discover if, indeed, "god's gas flickers alike for all in the same
dimness.in this sense his plays become mere way-stations in the
wanderings of a mortal who seeks to obey to the end God's inter
diction against idolatry. And it is in his testimony to God, the deus absconitus made present and manifest in man's suffering, that
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill distinguishes himself as the most significant playwright-prophet of our time. 19
FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE
1. Richard Scott, The Christian Faith, (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962), p. 82.
2. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co,, 1973), p. 552.
3. Ibid.
4. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p. 602.
5. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 236.
6. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Carol Bird, "Eugene O'Neill—The Inner Man: An Interview," Theatre Magazine, XXXIX, June 1924, p. 60.
7. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 520.
8. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Joseph Wood Krutch, 'Modernism' in Modem Drama: A Definition and An Estimate, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1953)» p. 118.
9. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in "The Ordeal of Eugene O'Neill," Time, LXVIII, October 1946, p. 76.
10. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, "As O'Neill Saw the Theatre," New York Times Magazine, November 1961, p. 34.
11. Arthur Hobson Quinn, "Eugene O'Neill, Poet and Mystic," Scribner's Magazine, LXXX, October 1926, pp. 369-370.
12. Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study, (New York.:. Random House, 193^)» p. 224,
13. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Mis begotten, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959)» p. 309.
14. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Quinn, "Poet and Mystic," p. 368.
15. Notable similarities in O'Neill's thought and the religious thought of the fifties are T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1950), which urges "a civilized acceptance of confusion" and "the kind of faith that issues from despair"; Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology (1951), which suggests that suffering is a requisite for the "awareness of possible redemption" and a symbol of "his power of salvation"; Archibald Macleish's Pulitzer prize-winning poems "Conquistador" and Collected Works (1952), which teach "How a man shall endure the silence" by faith alone; and John Hersey's The Wall (1954), a novel about the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghettos of 1945. 20
16. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Mary B. Mullett, "The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O'Neill," American Magazine, XCIV, November 1922, p. 120.
17. John Gassner, "The Nature of O’Neill’s Achievement: A Summary and Appraisal," as cited in O'Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by John Gassner, (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 166.
18. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criti cism, (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 125-126.
19. Joseph Wood Krutch, as cited in The American Theatre As Seen By It's Critics, ed. by Montrose J. Moses and John Mason Brown, "(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1934), pp. 271-272.
20. Compare O'Neill's suggestion of ridding oneself of passion and desire as the beginning of a spiritual truth and wisdom with Plato's wanderer in Book VII of The Republic, especially the section containing the "allegory" of the cave.
21. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Oliver Sayler, "The Artist of the Theatre: A Colloquy between Eugene O'Neill and Oliver M. Sayler," Theatre Arts, XXXXI, June 1957, PP. 23-24.
22. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Broussard, American Drama: Con temporary Allegory from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams, (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), p. 11.
23. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 257,
24. Bonamy Dobree, "The Plays of Eugene O'Neill," Southern Review, II, December 1937, P. 439.
25. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Mullett, "Extraordinary Story," p. 120.
26. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Play wright, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), pp. 281-282.
27. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Bird, "The Inner Man," p. 60.
28. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc,, 19&?), p. 45.
29. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Mullett, "Extraordinary Story," p. 120.
30. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Kantor, "O'Neill Defends His Play of Negro," New York Times, IX, May 1924, pp. 36-37.
31. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama From the Civil War to the Present Day, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 193^7, ?• 256.
1 21
32. John Mason Brown, "American Tragedy," Saturday Review of Literature, XXXII, August 1949, p. 12?.
33. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Bird, "The Inner Man," p. 60.
34. Walter Prichard Eaton, "Why America Lacks Big Playwrights," Theatre Magazine, XXXII, December 1920, p. 406.
35. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O'Neill, (New Yorks Robert M. McBride and Co., 1926), p. 99.
36. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 353.
37. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sayler, "Artist of the Theatre," p. 86.
38. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Cargill, et. al., O'Neill and His Plays, p. 104.
39. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Storys Eugene O'Neill as a Young Man in Love, (Londons Peter Davies Press, 1958), p. 86.
40. Ibid., p, 136.
41. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 624.
42. Ibid., p. 830.
43. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. 274.
44. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, (New Yorks Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957)» p. ^1.
45. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 201.
46. John Gassner, Masters of the Drama., (New Yorks Dover Publications, 1940), p. 653.
47. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 3.
48. Wisdom, 3« 4-6.
49. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Martin Lamm, Modern Drama, trans, by Karin Elliot, (New Yorks Philosophical Library, 19537» P. 333.
50. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Mullett, "Extraordinary Story," p. 118.
51. Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans, by H. A. Reiche and K. W. Keutsch, (Bostons Beacon Press, 1952), p. 105. 52. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. 421.
53. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 110. 22
CHAPTER TWO
THE THEOLOGICAL PRELUDE
In a somewhat quixotic sense, Eugene O'Neill might be -said, to
have fashioned a tragic view of human life. But surely only in a
quixotic sense is this the case. His great gifts are apparently en
listed in the effort to demonstrate that the average man's way of
construing the world in terms of frustration, suffering, and despair
is far closer to the religious truth of things than those esoteric
philosophical views which insist that reality is one and that the
plurality of things and principles is a mirage.
O'Neill's writings are, in a way, no more tragic than the world
of experience itself in which gross immorality can be causally
efficacious, in which logical fallacies are often historically im
portant, and in which the evil that good men do is often counterbalanced
by the good the evil men do.
To suppose, therefore, that everything will be discovered to
work for good and that all strands will be discovered to weave one
garment, if only man sufficiently distances himself from the human
scene, is surely the quixotic view. But O'Neill is primarily a play
wright-prophet whose aim is to provide religious instruction concerning the suffering of the world, not to philosophize man out of the world.
Few authors have phrased so exactingly as did O'Neill the pragmatic significance of Christian faith for such a world as ours.
"If the human race," he points out, "is so damned stupid that in 2000 years it hasn't had brains enough to discover the secret of happiness, then it's time we dumped it down the nearest drain and let the ants 23
have a chance."1
The first point to be noticed is that O’Neill apparently
subscribes to a "pessimistic" view of man’s fate in a world without
faith, such as was characteristic of the Old Testament prophets who 2 pronounced self-destruction upon those who forsake the Lord. It is
also most interesting in this religious respect that O'Neill should
have grasped the theological significance of the concept of "happiness"
and made it a primary element in his treatment of man's separation 3 from God. O'Neill gives a vivid summation of his mind when he relates
that;
Happiness is a word. What does it mean? Exaltation; an intensified feeling of the significant worth of man's being? Well, if it means that I know there is more of it in one real tragedy than in all the 'happy-ending' plays ever written. It's mere"present-day judgment to think of tragedy as unhappy. The Greeks and Elizabethans knew better. They felt the tremendous lift to it. It roused them spiritually to a deener understanding of life.1»'
Here is a personal creed of faith which suggests that happiness itself
is a means of resolution or of overcoming the tragic dissonance; and
it is this which justifies and redeems existence. The spiritual
"comfort" provided by happiness is the essence of O'Neill's effort to
make man aware that suffering itself is of value and that a "deeper understanding of life is possible" if man remains spiritually content while attempting to "dominate life, to assert and insist that life has 5 meaning outside of life." 6 Certainly this is not the mere "peddling of second-hand ideas" which is suggested by those critics who choose to interpret O'Neill's work as primarily a compromise between man's desire for happiness and his need of others. On the contrary, it is a beatific vision which 24
suggests that man can be ".happy" in spite of an unendurable state of
frustration and despair. Without such a hope man is unable to
tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on him.
O’Neill himself comments dryly that without the spiritual satisfaction
provided by happiness "God weeps and men curse, and all of life be- 7 comes a tragic folly and an idiotic pose."
All that O'Neill appears to be insisting upon is a reinterpre
tation of the Biblical doctrine of happiness, which teaches that it
is possible to achieve eternal bliss by reconciling oneself to the
suffering and despair inherent in an ambivalent world. His interpre
tation, however, transcends the Biblical conception of both happiness
and suffering in that it suggests that virtue is not necessarily co
extensive with prosperity and that calamity is no sure sign of mis
deeds.
Unable to accept the tragic universe with the strength of intel
lect and emotion, O'Neill appears to accept it with man's weakness,
his "blind faith." But this acceptance, rather than submission to
despair, suggests a temptation to hope because it transforms the sub
jectivity which necessarily limits man's vision of spiritual harmony 8 and reveals what O'Neill likes to term "god-like beings," who are able to make amends for their suffering and still achieve happiness.
Although such an interpretation may cast O'Neill as a modern
Job, it must be pointed out that the peculiar manner in which O’Neill's characters are made to know themselves and the reality of God's exist
ence is not through humble submission but, rather, through the medium of spiritual accusation and temporal rebellion. It is evident that the challenge which O'Neill suggests to a divinity that shapes man's 25
ultimate end is not presented merely as a theory to he understood
and considered, hut as a call-to-arms for deliverance from spiritual
doubt. As he says in his own rebellious attitude:
How many we are'. We scarce can drag one thought after another Up the long tiresome hill to Calvary To keep our Tryst With thou and the two thieves; Where now they crucify us all On question marks. And that man there, And this man here, Who beats his brains against a rock, And I myself We are all Lazarus And we accuse Theee.
If any one thing now beings to emerge clearly it is that, whatever the
relationship between O'Neill's work and creedal Christianity, a crucial
factor in helping to fashion O'Neill's essentially tragic vision is
his own experience in the pilgrimage from despair to religious affir
mation. That is why it is not incorrect to assume that his own "crushing" sense of spiritual "doubt" and "guilt"1^ become a sort of
travelling companion and a handmaiden to the religious truth about
man’s predicament as he sees it.
O'Neill is, of course, a highly complex artist whose vision and
faith are full of paradox and ambivalence, When he speaks as prophet and moralist he consistently urges us to have faith in man and in his destiny. When he speaks as playwright and poet he consistently affirms some kind of religious creed, although the precise nature of that creed very often remains unclear. But a study of the various religious pro nouncements that have come over the years from O'Neill the prophet, the moralist, the playwright, and the poet, and a comparison of these with 26
the themes of his early plays, indicates that his fiction is much
more susceptible to interpretation in terms of Christian precepts
than are his utterances as man. It is the task, then, to untangle the
threads of O’Neill’s personal religion in an attempt to ascertain
what his poems and his plays themselves suggest about the man and
the artist.
In his earliest adventure at self-understanding O’Neill once
drew up a diagram, designed solely for his own eyes, in which he out
lined his changing attitudes from infancy into adolescence. Summariz
ing his early childhood he notes: "Reality found and fled from in
fear---- life of fantasy and religion in school-----inability to belong to reality,"11
Here is the knot—the image of flight—which appears to bind
O’Neill's religious thought into a unified thematic expression for
the thirty plays written between the years 1913 and 1923. Fearful of
a reality which to him is apparently cold and Insensible, and doubt
ful of a religion which implants feelings of guilt in those who trans
gress against the moral codes of conventional ethics, O'Neill con
sciously rejects the way to God that lies through the Catholic world and seeks to discover his personal salvation in what may best be termed
Descartes' "great book of the world."
Perhaps that is why O'Neill's favorite theme in the years under consideration appears to be that of a man who, in order to preserve his own personal Integrity or in the name of emotional honesty, ex presses some Inordinate and primitive passion which can neither be indulged without religious transgression nor suppressed without intel- 12 lectual hypocrisy. It is apparent that O'Neill's hero is trapped 27
in an ideological conflict, not between warring aspects of finite
dimension, but between finite existence as such and the claims of
a "higher", divine realm.
Although such a divine realm demands a denial of reason and an
acceptance of faith, O’Neill nowhere disparages this conflict but
insists that it is a condition essential to man's eventual redemption.
His aim obviously is to see in the suffering which arises from the
conflict "a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modem values
and symbols which may to some degree bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage.
The source of tragedy, O'Neill contends, lies in the fact that man has within his grasp the possibility of eternal salvation but is unable to unlock its mystery. Believing that men carry within them
selves the key to the souls of their brothers and that men may never be said to be fully alive until they become plainly conscious of the meaning of existence, O'Neill admits that his drama seeks to reveal 14 that "every person has within him his own spiritual truth."
Seen in this religious perspective, the apparent deterioration and expiration of O’Neill’s heroes is not the result of what some critics term the "immoderate pursuit of some merely limited good" or a "farcical anticlimax to the agonies of birth,but the result of an heroic attempt to comprehend and to actualize the divine realm itself on the temporal plane.
Thus, at the outset of his literary career, O'Neill seems to have been obsessed with the belief that man has within himself the source of faith which transforms tragic existence and makes salvation possible. 28
And though he appears to accept this belief as the initial truth
about human nature, it is also true that his dramas are the best
expression of that truth. O’Neill intimates as much when he notes
that drama should incorporate "affirmative actions" which may prevent
man from falling into the "abyss of despair.
Pursuing to its end the attempt begun by the Romantics, O’Neill
evidently seeks those affirmative actions which may prevent despair
where they are "buried deep beneath the dull and crude, so that one's 17 deep-seeing vision is tested." He writes, as he admits, "to arouse 3.8 compassion for the unfortunate, the suffering, and the oppressed."
However, he does not merely "present" life as a majority of playwrights
do for the carapace of characterizations
The dramatist does not present life, but interprets it within the limitations of his vision. Else he's no better than a camera, plus a dictograph. The dramatist works just as Beethoven did, employing every sound in existence, molding tones, giving them color, new meaning, thus creating music. When a dramatist interprets the world, and thus creates his own world, he uses the human soul. He is the creator of this world and like all creators absolute boss. If he isn't a sound creative architect his structure crumbles.19
It is for this reason that the crucial importance of O'Neill for
twentieth century thought lies not only in his desire to seek an answer for the elusive and inscrutable mystery of God's providence and man's suffering, but also in his exploration of the tangled relations between writing and personal salvation; an exploration, it
should be pointed out, which was initially begun by the Old Testament prophets.20
At first, however, O'Neill's relation to writing as personal 29
salvation appears to be only a profound yearning. The transformation
of his inner life through literature is obviously something in which
he believes but has not yet experienced. Although his religious des
pair obviously rushes toward expiation in writing, he was, for many years, unable to achieve the definitive expression requisite for prophetic drama. What he apparently lacks, as he once noted in bold red and black letters painted above the rafters of his Provincetown flat, is a consciousness of his own inarticulate spirit:
Before the eye can see it must know blindness. Before the ear can hear it must be deaf to the noise of the world. Before the heart can learn to love it must have known the agony of emptiness.
Space forbids illustration of the ways in which O'Neill sought to realize his consciousness and to articulate what he considered to be its wide impact on his life and thought in general. But in the spirit of a conquistador he was to attend Princeton (1906-1907); devote his adolescent life to drinking, women, and anarchists; accompany a married couple on a gold-prospecting expedition to Honduras; secretly marry against his parents' wishes; delight in reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake
Zarathrustra; contract malaria in the wilds of South America; sign on as a crew member of a Norwegian sailing vessel bound for a trip around the world; divorce his wife and reject his son; associate with dere- lects, loafers, and exiles; spend some time in English waterfront dives; become a reporter on the New London (Connecticut) Telegraph; contract tuberculosis and spend nine months in a sanatorium; live in a saloon and rooming house on the New York docks known as Jimmy-the-
Priests; join his father's acting company as an apprentice; and sleep 30
on park benches or on the beach with other down-and-outs.
The casually acquired experiences of this kind of life apparently
led him to his most fundamental discoveries regarding the nature of man and the purely appetitive, sheerly irrational, starkly amoral nature of the world. Although he did not seriously entertain the idea of becoming a playwright, tuberculosis forced him to chisel into some shape the al most unbelievable experiences which had been a part of his early youth, and to analyze them in terms of his own suffering. Cut off from the escape of alcohol and drugs, O’Neill began to explore "new" dramatic modes and some of the more painful aspects of the human condition. His approach appears to be primarily motivated by a desire to calm the:
poignant pain of emptiness inside of me, as if I’d lost the vital spiritual organ without which the rest of the machine is a mere whirring of wheels. 2
Before turning to a more detailed analysis of those plays which reflect
O'Neill's earliest attempt to calm the poignant pain of spiritual emptiness and to discover the vital spiritual organ which has apparently been lost, it is well worth while to scan those plays which suggest the religious soil from which O'Neill's more complete treatment of suffering and despair appears to spring.
Except for Thirst and Fog, which will be considered at length in the next chapter, O'Neill was to write nothing of importance during the years 1914 and 191?. But in The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other
Plays,first published in 1919, he signals the tragic perspective which is never far from the surface of many of his later works.
Most of these plays are concerned with sailors of the British tramp-steamer S. S. Glencairn. The chief characters—Driscoll, the 31
Irishman; Yank, the tough; Smitty, the sensitive boy; and. Olson, the
Swede—appear in each of the first four plays. In The Moon of the
Carlbbees they are at anchor off an island in the West Indies; in Bound
East for Cardiff they are in the mid-Atlantic; in The Long Voyage Home they are in an alehouse near the London docks; and in In the Zone they are again in mid-ocean during World War I.
O’Neill is surely correct in giving his preference, from among the early sea plays, to these four dramas rather than to the remainder of the "Glencairn cycle." There is a fanciful treatment of a ship’s life here and there is a marked economy in the handling of plot and dialogue.
The incidents themselves, however, are rather commonplaces a drunken sailor weeping for a lost love, a stokeholer's dying moments as he recalls his life of debauchery and fears the unknown, a suspected spy who suffers the indignity of having his love letters read aloud, and a whaler who is shanghaied before he is able to return home to his dying mother.
The other three plays in the cycle are of a less delicate develop ment and only occasionally hint of O’Neill’s later powers as a dramatist. lie, for example, deals with a whaling captain's wife who accompanies her husband on a long voyage and goes mad when he refuses to return to port before acquiring a full complement of "ile." Her agony is mirrored in the pronouncement she places on the husband for his failure to realize that "pride will send your soul to hell":
I can't bear it any longer. All this horrible brutality, and these brutes of men, and this terrible ship, and this prison cell of a room, and the ice all around, and the silence. It's God's punishment on you. (p. 5^6)
Where the Cross is Made is a shorter treatment of a story which O'Neill 32
later expanded into the full-length play Gold, The story is concerned
with Captain Isaiah Bartlett, who resorts to murder in order to keep the treasure which he and some of his crew believe they have found on a
Pacific island. Although the treasure is later revealed to be "junk,"
Captain Bartlett clings to the illusion that he has "gold" and that he is not responsible for the murders which he committed in order to protect his riches.
The action of Where the Cross is Made is frankly melodramatic 24 and contrived. But in the Gold version, where the ghosts of the murdered crew appear on stage and try to make Captain Bartlett admit his self- deception and repent his crimes against God and nature, there is a touch of O’Neill's religious thought concerning the value of suffering and the grace of God's forgiveness:
You ran away from your own self, Isaiah---- the conscience God put in you, that you think you can fool with lies. Confess your sin, Isaiah*. Confess to God and men, and make your peace and take your punishment. I'll get down on my knees, Isaiah, and pray you to do it, as I've prayed to God to send you His graceI Confess and wash your soul of the stain o' blood that's on it, I ask you that, Isaiah—and God asks you—to make your peace with Him. (pp. 653-654) The Rope,2^ the final play included in the Glencaim cycle, is a rather ironic melodrama which, nevertheless, reveals a point of view towards the Christian faith that pervades O'Neill's later plays. The apparent incongruity between Christian text and human practice is employed as the principal characteristic in this story of a Bible-quoting old man,
Abraham Bentley, and his prodigal son, Luke.
Abraham, a sixty-five year old farmer, discourses at will on the "fury" of the Lord and cites significant passages of scripture to 33
clothe his hatred for those who disobey his wishes. When Abraham’s
wandering son returns home, he hangs a "bag of gold" from the rafter of
the barn and attaches a rope to it. "Go hang yourself," he challenges
his son, "for the love of God go hang yourself." (p. 597)
But the son suspects that his father is depraved and refuses to
believe that the rope is "just the tie that binds." Little Mary, Luke's
niece, does believe, however, and pulls on the rope after her uncle has
left the barn. When the bag of gold falls to the floor Mary empties it
and rushes immediately to a near-by cliff, where she "throws one gold
coin after another into the ocean as fast as she can." (pp. 600-601)
The religious moral of the play apparently lies in the fact that
the "word of God" has become so intrinsically corrupt in the mouth of a
vicious old man that it cannot be believed as it relates to the welfare
of others. This appears to be Luke's assessment of the tragedy as he
relates it to his sister, Annie:
After me bummin' and starvin' round the rotten earth and workin' myself to death on ships and things— and when I come home he tries to make me bump off— wants to see me a corpse—my own father, too. Ain't he a hell of an old man to have? God roast his soul', (pp. 591-592)
Although these last three plays of the Glencairn cycle had considerable impact when first performed by the Provincetown Players, it is Bound
East for Cardiff which most clearly details O'Neill's earliest attempt to wrestle with the universal question of suffering and death and man's relationship to God.
The scene of the play is in the seamen's forecastle on a foggy night when the Glencairn is midway between New York and Cardiff. A 34
sailor, Yank, is lying in his hunk mortally injured by a fall from the top deck of the ship. Yank knows instinctively that death is near, and he has a fear of what it will bring. It is the blustering Irishman,
Driscoll, who attempts to comfort him.
Almost without plot and action, Bound East for Cardiff is the most innovative of O’Neill’s early sea plays. It depends almost entirely upon atmosphere and sound for its effect, and it possesses a kind of naturalistic, yet poetic, lenguage which was almost unknown in American drama at this time.2?
Except for an occasional glimpse of the incompatible nature of fixed social practices and individual freedom, the essence of the play is
O'Neill’s exploration of what goes on in the soul of a man when he finds himself drowning in the sorrow of his own deathwatch.
In his own simple way, Yank makes a summary of life's last reckonings and evaluates in plain language the Christian ethic of suffer ing and death, saying:
I was just thinkin', it ain't as bad as people think— dyin'...I ain't never had religion; but I know what ever it is what comes after it can't be no worser'n this. (p. 486)
Yet this same Yank, a few minutes later, in recalling that he has killed a man in anger, cries out: "D'yuh think He'll hold it up against me?"
When Driscoll asks, "Who's that?" Yank replies:
God. They say He sees everything. He must know it was done in fair fight, in self-defense, don't yuh think? (p. 488)
With Driscoll's reassurance that "there's justice in hiven so let your conscience be aisy," Yank becomes easier at heart. As the last sharp pain 35
of suffering shoots through his body, Yank looks before him and sees
"a pretty lady dressed in black," who has come to comfort him, Driscoll
sinks to his knees beside Yank and puts a trembling hand on his chest, his lips moving "in some half remembered prayer," (p. 490)
"It's hard to ship on this voyage I'm goin' on—alone," Yank cries out as his body writhes in a final spasm and then straightens out rigidly. But as Driscoll makes "the sign of the Cross" over Yank's life less body, "the fog lifts" and O'Neill here suggests the religious theme that many of his later plays take in reconciling suffering and death: man's ultimate end is a discovery of God's benevolent grace and a triumph over despair and misery.
While it is to be admitted that there is much pathetic and groping uncertainty in Bound East for Cardiff, in spite of O'Neill's evident feeling of spiritual exaltation and discovery, there is a decidedly
Christian effort to resolve the conflict between hope, faith and individual will as it relates to the inevitability of death. This essentially
Christian effort provides the natural prelude to the theme of O'Neill's pp next play, The Straw, which deals with his personal experiences in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
The play, which was written in 1919» has as its leading characters
Eileen Carmody, the tubercular daughter of an Irish contractor, and
Stephen Murray, a newspaper reporter who is also a victim of tuberculosis.
Although O'Neill enthusiasts have consistently underplayed The Straw's importance in the development of O'Neill's tragic perspective and have dismissed it as primarily "an autobiographical account of his own con- oQ finement at Gaylord Sanatorium." 7 the play's ending suggests the stimulus 36
of a spiritual hope in "hopelessness" which characterizes O’Neill’s
later treatment of suffering and the value of what has already been
termed "blind faith."
As patients at the sanatorium, Eileen and Murray develop a strong
comradeship and discover the "moment’s peace" which only friendship is
capable of giving to those who suffer from tuberculosis. With Eileen’s
encouragement, Murray begins to take an interest in the writing that he
has always wanted to do and miraculously recovers from the dreaded disease.
Before he is able to leave the sanatorium, however, Eileen con
fesses that her friendship has grown into love. Murray finds himself unable to return that love and immediately departs for New York to resume his writing career. From this moment on Eileen's decline is rapid. Al though Murray writes to her occasionally, Eileen eventually gives up hope for her own recovery and becomes resigned to death.
When Murray finally returns, Eileen is dying. It is only then that Murray realizes that his lack of concern has taken away Eileen's will to live. He pretends to love her and to be seriously ill.himself so that his suffering will be identical with hers. In the act of pretending
Murray discovers that he does love Eileen and for the first time seriously contemplates the possibility that death can be overcome by "the spirit of hope." The dialogue in the final scene of the play, between Murray and
Miss Gilpin, a sympathetic nurse, is symptomatic of O'Neill's later attempts to suggest that love, whether man's or God's, is the only possibility for alleviating suffering and despair:
Mss Gilpin: I feel as if I may have done a great wrong to myself—to you—to her—by lying to Eileen and telling her that you have tuberculosis. And yet— something forced me. 37
Murray: It has saved her—us. No half and half measures can help us—help her. But we’ll win together. We can'. We must'. There are things doctors can’t value— can't know the strength of. You'll see. I'll make Eileen get well, I tell you. Happiness will cure! Love is stronger than---- . I tell you we'll win! We must! All the verdicts of all the doctors— what do they matter? This is—beyond you'. And we'll win in spite of you! How dare you use the word hopeless—as if it were the last! Come now, confess, damn it! There's always hope, isn't there? What do you know? Can you say you know anything?
Miss Gilpin: I? I know nothing---- absolutely nothing! God bless you both! (pp. 121-122)
Although the reviews of The Straw were generally favorable, the public did not endorse it as one of O'Neill's best plays, apparently because of its hopeless atmosphere and its rather naturalistic portrayal of sanatorium life. O'Neill's reaction to the public's lack of interest in his admittedly autobiographical sketch of confinement at Gaylord Sanitorium was swift and solemn. Writing in the New York Tribune several days after
The Straw opened, O'Neill reminded his detractors that his intent was primarily religious instruction:
...it is at bottom a message of the significance of human hope---- even the most hopeless hope. For we know deep down in our souls that, logically, each one of our lives is a hopeless hope—that failure to realize our dreams is the inexorable fate allotted to us. Yet at the same time we know that without hope there is no life, and so we go on pursuing our dream to the last gasp, convinced in spite of our reason that there must be some spiritual meaning behind our hope which in some 'greener land' will prove it was all justified,30
In relationship to the plays which will be treated later as representative of O'Neill's concept of the suffering and despair which arises when man has lost his faith in God to redeem and to give meaning to life, The Straw 38
is without doubt one of the best examples of O’Neill’s early efforts to
depict the reconciliation between the futility of temporal life and the
efficacy of spiritual life. But in All God's Chillun Got Wings, which
was first published in 1922, O'Neill explores in depth what such a
reconciliation entails. Its theme is a marriage between a Negro and a
white girl, and it details the difficulty of their achieving a meaningful
relationship.
The protagonists are first shown in two early phases of life:
a childhood in which prejudice means nothing and an adolescence in which
social mores prevent any hope of a marriage. After being discarded by a prizefighter, Ella, the young girl, overcomes her prejudice and marries
Jim, her black childhood sweetheart. They go to France to escape from
social pressure, but soon find it is no better there and so return to face the difficulties awaiting them.
Ella and Jim’s almost futile attempt to hold onto happiness and to still retain a sense of individual identity suggests the universal tone of the play. Although Ella is grateful to Jim for defending her as a child and for rescuing her from a life of prostitution, recurrent pre judice makes her want to reduce Jim to menial status; she is glad when he fails the law examination he has the intelligence to pass, she is resent ful of the racial pride he exhibits, and she is seemingly indifferent to his efforts to better himself. In her persistent effort to reduce her husband to the commonality of "a nigger," Ella loses her mind.
The abasement which O'Neill here suggests finds its most forceful religious statement in Jim, who ironically, perhaps, is given the same name as Christ's brother. In spite of Ella's attempts to degrade him, 39
Jim struggles to find some purpose in life and to justify his own
suffering. Initially, his hope is that meaningful recognition will come
from outside in the position as a lawyer. As that hope fades, however,
Jim begins to despair. His frustration, itself a symbol of the spirit
ual sickness in modem society, quite naturally finds its expression in
a moving rejection of God's apparent lack of sympathy for those who
suffer without reason:
Pass? Me? Jim Crow Harris? Nigger Jim Harris---- become a full-fledged Member of the Bar? Why the mere notion of it is enough to kill you with laughter. It'd be against all natural laws, all human right and justice. It'd be miraculous, there'd be earthquakes and catastrophes, the seven Plagues*d come again and locusts'd devour all the money in the banks, the second Flood'd come roaring and Noah'd fall overboard, and the sun'd drop out of the sky like a ripe fig, and the Devil'd perform miracles, and God'd be tipped head first right out of the Judgment seat! Maybe He can forgive what you've done to me; and maybe He can forgive what I've done to you; but I don't see how He's going to forgive---- Himself, (pp. 340-34l)
But as Ella, now fully crazed, finds joy in a return to the childish peace of mind which provided the background of the opening scene of the play, Jim at last receivesthe spiritual illumination inherent in his suffering and despair. Throwing himself on his knees and "raising his shining eyes, his transfigured face" toward Heaven, he cries:
Forgive me, God---- and make me worthy! Now I see Your Light again! Now I hear Your Voice! (He begins to weep in an ecstasy of religious humility) Forgive me, God, for blaspheming You! Let this fire of burning suffering purify me of selfishness and make me worthy of the child You send me for the woman You take away! (p. 342)
And as Ella tugs at Jim's hand and begs him to come and play with her, he cries out again: "Honey, Honey, I'll play right up to the gates of 40
Heaven with you*." (p. 342)
O’Neill’s implicit suggestion here is that the futility of
temporal life, replete with the suffering and. despair which arise from
society's prejudicial attitude, may have greater spiritual dimension and
in a very special sense greater personal dignity when related to a belief
in God's saving grace.
Although some critics choose to view Jim's apparent spiritual
illumination at the conclusion of the play as one more manifestation of
the "insanity" which relegates All God* s Chillun Got Wings to an "analysis 32 of the question of intermarriage between blacks and whites,it is
evident that O'Neill is merely echoing the Biblical invocation which bids
"suffering little children" to come "unto the Lord," for such is "the 33 kingdom of God." The Bible is quite explicit in this respect regarding the value of a child-like nature and God's promise of spiritual purific ation: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall 34 not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
Although the play was for the most part commercially successful,
O'Neill again felt it necessary to defend All God's Chillun Got Wings 35 and to point out that it is not, as some critics thought at the time, a sensational expose of miscegenation. As O'Neill related in the New
York Herald-Tribune one week after the production of All God's Chillun
Got Wings:
The play itself, as anyone who has read it with intelligence knows, is never a 'race problem' play. Its intention is confined to portraying the special lives of individual human beings. It is primarily a study of the two principal characters, and their tragic struggle for happiness. To deduce any general application from 'God's Chillun' except in a deep, 41
spiritual sense, is to read a meaning into my play which is not there, and I feel that even the most prejudiced could not fail to acknowledge this if they should see the play,36
From a survey of O’Neill’s defensive comments and fragmented thoughts as they are revealed in the Glencairn cycle, it is obvious that he is attempting to transform his own inner despair through writing. His acknowledgement that "my own personal experience with human life"3? is the key to understanding the suffering which his characters inevitably encounter in their pursuit of happiness, and sheds a light of hope upon man’s veiled destiny as it is revealed in his drama. To judge, therefore, what he suggests about man’s suffering and the benevolent grace of God in these early plays is to admit that each recital serves as a sort of magical and spiritual incantation which replaces man’s frustration and despair with the solidity and firmness of faith.
It is also evident from a survey of O’Neill’s early plays what
"form" his drama must take if it is to communicate successfully to an audience his personal statement about salvation. It must sweep smoothly from sight, to sound, to perception without digression. It must be an / expression, not of some limited action in the world, but, of the total ity of the human experience. It must include in the shape and arrangement of plot the shapeless storms of unseen and unheard forces which coalesce and fuse in the concrete particularity of words and images.
That is why it is incorrect to speak of O’Neill’s drama as pri marily "symbolic," as if his mysterious words, images, descriptions, and actions stood for something other than themselves. They are not symbolic but, rather, prosaic embodiments of O’Neill’s inner spiritual turmoil.
Indeed, the fact of the matter seems to be that drama for O’Neill is an 42
emblem which deepens and enriches Spiritual values, which gives meaning and form to Christian myth. It is a theology which O’Neill embraces without hesitation:
What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing some body on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.38
Here, then, is a fundamental difference between O’Neill and the majority of modem dramatists: a conscious attempt to bestow on drama the potentiality to help man bear the burden of life, and to sustain its battle, by objectifying man’s tragic plight. Such an admission has led a fellow playwright to remark that in the history of the theatre O'Neill's drama stands out as a "gospel" of faith in man's search for redemption, and that O'Neill's tragic vision "is cast in the eyes of a battle-scarred
Crusader staring from a rocky, sun-browned hill at the distant city of
Jerusalem." 39
Some popularizers and critics, however, prefer to view O'Neill's blueprint for salvation and redemption as primarily the "Manichaean vision"---- that ancient doctrine which saw man as irremediably tainted by the presence of the prince of darkness. They point out that O’Neill 40 is an "agnostic" and that "in the cosmos he is a badly rattled Villager straining titanically with platitudes whose spiritual and intellectual 41 context are negligible."
But in his own life and literary career there is no evidence to suggest that O'Neill's concern with the relations between man and God is predicated upon an acceptance of the reality of evil or upon a denial of the religious sanctions which condemn such a reality. On the contrary, 43
O’Neill’s conception of God, as it is revealed in his early parabolic
drama, suggests a motiveless ambivalence which welcomes suffering and
despair as the price one must pay to insure a blissful journey from a
temporal world of self-inflicted tortures that arise from the fear of
death to a spiritual world of eternal love which transcends death.
Sometimes teleological, more often ideal and apocalyptical,
O’Neill's God is never a static concept from play to play. And yet,
whatever His multiple faces or however various are the ways of compre
hending them, O'Neill suggests that there can be no serious doubt about
His design for human living or His loving, benevolent nature. In short,
O'Neill's prophetic fables are not denials of the fact that God exists
and that His ways are often unjust, but, rather, the fact that the world
which is held to be under His goverance is hopelessly hostile to the
spiritual polity, O'Neill's problem, therefore, appears to be one of
theodicy: how, that is, are the sufferings and fears of man to be reckoned
with—-or, rather, do they not demand to be reckoned with in terms of
some principle higher than that presumably ordained by the necessities of a conventionally structured natural law?
But the idea that human tragedy may be conquered by a type of life which is able to take suffering and fear upon itself, without at the same time being destroyed by them, is implicit in O'Neill's solution to the dilemma. Indeed, it appears to be a fundamental proposal of O'Neill's that salvation is the discovery that suffering leads to redemption; that suffering, the Christian atonement for sin, is the first stage of a passage to another and better life. One could very well argue, further, that O'Neill is the most orthodox of Christians in his allegorical re- 42 telling of the Biblical stories which deal with the "suffering servant." With this theological prelude before the reader it is now time to turn to an in-depth analysis of those plays which appear to serve as a kind of personal testament of O'Neill’s belief in suffering as atone ment for sin and individual retribution. Such a testament is built out of the blocks of Christian doctrine and thought, shaped by Christian images and themes, welded by Christian feeling and emotion, and deepened by Christian faith. It is hoped that what follows will provide a better understanding of that peculiar religious temperament of O’Neill’s which seeks to make the leap from tragic vision to Christian faith, and which seeks to identify literature with man's ultimate salvation. 45
FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO
1. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), P. 279.
2. The theme of the lot due respectively to the good and the bad became enshrined in the sayings of the Book of Proverbs: "Treasures of wickedness shall profit nothing. But righteousness shall deliver from death," (10: 2) The principle was well known to the Jewish people at large, and appeal was wrongly made to it by men who were suffering but by no means innocent, even after Jeremias and Ezechiel had exposed the falseness of the complaint in their parable of eating sour grapes. (See esp. Jeremiah, 31: 28-31). The theme of pessimism recurs in Ecclesiastes (?: l6 and 8: 10-14) and Idalah (44: 24-25). That God should have inspired these thoughts to be enshrined in Holy Scripture is certainly for a purpose. And that purpose, as is O'Neill’s, seems to have been to awaken men to the imperfection of their conception of His designs for mankind, and gradually to bring them to a realization of His saving grace as it is manifested in faith.
3. When the providence of God finally brought the Jewish people as a whole to the belief in a future life where happiness awaited the good and punishment the evil, their thoughts concerning suffering and affliction underwent a profound change. The belief appears to be slow in maturing and does not seem to have been widely held until some time in the third century. But in the second century it was the prevalent view, as shown in the history of the Maccabees (See esp. Maccabees: 7x9, 7» 18, 7* 23-29, and 7: 32), and it is taken for granted in the later Book of Wisdom (3: 1-5» 4: 7-9, and 4: 11-13). As it is revealed in these Old Testament accounts, happiness is a belief in immortality and God's eternal reward for the virtuous.
4. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in John Anderson, "Eugene O'Neill," Theatre Arts, XV, November 1931, p. 941.
5. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p. 336.
6. Horst Frenz, Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1971), P. 103.
7. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son ’and Play wright, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), p. 27^7”
8. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Kantor, "O'Neill Defends His Play of Negro," New York Times, IX, May 1924, p. 38.
9. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), p. 178. 46
10. Ibid., p, x.
11. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. 64.
12. The conflict between primitive passion and religious transgression is perhaps best illustrated in O’Neill's treatment of David and Alice Roylston's tortured relationship in Servitude, first published in 1914. A play with overtones of both Ibsen and Shaw, Servitude is concerned with what happens to a "liberated" Nora and a "skeptical? Bluntschli when they assert their independence in order to attain a "higher plane" of happiness. Although the play is rather melo dramatic, O'Neill makes the moral diagrammatically explicit when he has David Roylston admit that his suffering has been the result of an "agony of doubt, which made it necessary for me to get back of dry words to a flesh-and-blood reality."
13. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur Hobson Quinn, "Eugene O'Neill, Poet and Mystic," Scribner's Magazine, LXXX, October 1926, p, 368.
14. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in David Karsner, "Eugene O'Neill," Six teen Authors to One; Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers, (New York: Lewis Copeland Co., 1928), p. 119,
15. Bernard DeVoto, Minority Report, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,) 1940, p. 194.
16. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Mary M. Colum, "The Drama of the Dis integrated," The Forum, XCIV, December 1955» PP. 358-359.
17. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Isaac Goldberg, "Eugene O'Neill to George Jean Nathan: Selections from Correspondence," The Theatre of George Jean Nathan: Chapters and Documents Toward a History of the New American Drama, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926, P. 159.
18. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Carol Bird, "Eugene O'Neill---- The Inner Man: An Interview," Theatre Magazine, XXXIX, June 1924, p. 58.
19. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Kantor, "O'Neill Defends Play of Negro," pp. 39-40.
20. According to Biblical prophecy, the "word" of God is "written" to teach man to "abhor that which is evil" and to "cleave to that which is good." (Romans: 12: 9) The doctrine of the Psalms is an extension of this religious mentality for it suggests that God, in order to speak in human fashion, accommodated Himself to the modes of thought and speech of the writers He inspired; that His thoughts, as they are related in the "covenants" and in His direct address to the Jewish community, are examples of the blessings promised in the Pentateuch for the faithful observance of God's law. Isaiah also teaches that his writing is an example of the personal salvation which man may attain if he "believes" in the 47
word of God. (Isaiah: 30* 8) The most significant Biblical reference to writing and personal salvation, however, is Job’s wish to detail his suffering in such words that others may learn from hearing them: "Oh thatmy words were now written'. Oh that they were printed in a book'." (Job: 19-23)
21. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story; Eugene O'Neill As A Young Man In Love, (London: Peter Davies Press. 1958), p. 125.
22. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 55.
23. Eugene O'Neill, "The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1955), PP. W-573.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
24. Eugene O'Neill, "Gold," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. ¿22-692.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
25. Eugene O'Neill, "The Rope," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1951), PP. 576-¿02.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
26. Eugene O'Neill, "Bound East for Cardiff," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 195l), PP* 476-490.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
27. Timo Tiusanen, writing in O'Neill's Scenic Images (Princeton University Press, 1968), suggests that the language of Bound East for Cardiff is a "modified monologue," spoken "in spite of another character," out of "inner compulsion," and "not in reaction to a previous speech." (p. 46) The success of the play may have led O'Neill to repeat the technique in Strange Interlude, written in 1927, as part of the "thought-aside" pattern of speech.
28. Eugene O'Neill, "The Straw," Six Short Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Vintage Books, 195l), PP. 36-122.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
29. Clifford Leech, Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963), PP- 27-28.
30. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, pp. 465-466. 48
31. Eugene O’Neill, "All God's Chillun Got Wings," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1955)» pp. 300-342.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
32. Arthur Pollock, "All God’s Chillun Got Wings: A Review," as cited in Jordan Miller, Playwright's Progress: O'Neill and the Critics, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 19¿5), p. 3§7
33. Mark, 10: 14.
34. Matthew, 18: 3-
35. Reports of the initial production of All God’s Chillun Got Wings, starring Paul Robeson as Jim Harris and Mary Blair as Ella Downey, resulted in a storm of protest from segregationists. Conservative newspapers like the New York Tribune and the New York Daily Herald led the campaign and published warnings against the "moral" implications of O'Neill's play. Augustus Thomas, a highly successful commercial playwright with whom O'Neill had often quarreled in the past, also participated in the campaign, speaking of "a tendency to break down social barriers which are better left untouched." O'Neill, however, was quite sure that All God's Chillun Got Wings was only his "most misunderstood" play and that someday it would come into its own. He put his sentiments into Jim Harris* mouth in Act II, Scene 2: "She's all I've got'. You with your fool talk of the black race and the white race'. Where does the human race get a chance to come in?"
36. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Frenz, O'Neill, pp. 42-43.
37. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur Nethercot, "O'Neill on Freud- ianism," Saturday Review of Literature, VIII, May 1932, p. 759.
38. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 336.
39. Sean O'Casey, Rose and Crown, (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1952), p. 321.
40. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, "Eugene O'Neill: The Man with a Mask," New Republic, L, March 1927» p. 95«
41. DeVoto, Minority Report, p. 194,
42. The suffering that is brought on a servant of God in the course of and on account of his "intercession for transgressors" is detailed at length in the "epistle" to the Hebrews. (Hebrews, 7: 20-25) The best example of the "suffering servant" is the prophet Jeremias, who felt himself at times "heart-broken" by the sufferings that it was his duty to announce as punishment for the sins of his people. (Jeremias, 9: 10-22) O'Neill's relationship to the Biblical motif of the suffering servant appears to be most clearly expressed in his 49
own comments on the personal despair which arises when one has lost his "faith" (See esp. Louis Sheaffer*s O’Neill" Son and Playwright, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968, pp, 85-88 and 105-110) and in his apparent usage of the Old Testament doctrine of sin that is punished by misfortune. Of particular interest in this respect is O'Neill’s use of parable in Abortion (1914), The Sniper (1915), Where the Cross is Made (1918), Beyond the Horizon (1918), and Anna Christie (1920) to suggest that suffering is the only means to alleviate the misfortune that arises from having sinned. 50
CHAPTER THREE
THIRST AND FOG: EARLY SEEDS OF SUFFERING
AS INDIVIDUAL RETRIBUTION
Oddly enough, the mutual compatahility between the Christian and the apparently tragic doctrine which is suggested in Eugene O’Neill’s early plays of the sea has sometimes been overlooked. More curiously still, it has been overlooked more often than not by Christians them selves.
In their eagerness to behold the apocalyptic vision of God's de liverance and man's ultimate redemption, some Christians have rejected what they consider to be the essentially "pessimistic" nature of O'Neill's dramaturgy as an irreconcilable frustration of the human spirit. They exclaim that O'Neill's tragic thought contradicts the Christian heritage of serenity and resignation by allowing man "to proceed from violence to violence, and to make of human torture not so much the occasion of other things as the raison d'etre of drama."1
Likewise, contemporary philosophers, in their zeal to afford a sardonic vision of man unable to escape his tragic destiny, have rejected the essentially religious nature of O'Neill's dramaturgy as an inexorable illusion of the human predicament; and have suggested that O'Neill's heroes "are forced through mechanical malice on the part of destiny or 2 providence or the playwright to inevitable defeat."
What the Christian and the philosopher appear to confuse, however, is that for O'Neill irreconcilable opposites suggest a spiritual truth.
They make man aware, that is, of the most fundamental law of spiritual 51
evolution: the clash of antinomies which constitutes human life and details the progress from sin to salvation.
According to O’Neill, man’s salvation is to be found in exactly that kind of life which intertwines irresolvable contradictions and cultivates violence and torture. Unlike the tragic philosopher, he is "far from being a pessimist" and remains "tickled to death with life."^
Here, then, is the mainspring of O'Neill’s supposedly negative philosophy: an exaltation of life. It contradicts the prevalent notion that his tragedy treats the world as a negation of spiritual values and suggests that man's hope lies in his willingness to face and to accept life as it is; to pursue a life of active partisanship instead of seeking solace in the aesthetic insulation of detached and passive observation.
It also suggests that there is no necessary incompatibility between man's life on earth and life as it might be in heaven.
The Bible, however, does recognize a discrepancy between certain facts of life on earth and the will of God in heaven. But this discrep ancy is moral, not spiritual. It is a discrepancy which suggests that
O'Neill's recurrent use of conflict, calamity, and chaos is, indeed, completely different from a purely tragic view of human disaster.
Whereas the tragic view of human disaster sees disruption, both temporal and spiritual, as the inevitable consequence of the clash of equal and opposite forces, the Bible regards neither the conflict as inevitable nor the forces as neutral. Rather, scripture suggests that conflict is not an inherent part of life, but is adventitious to it. In the Biblical view, the many "pairs of opposites" which condition man's relationship to God are not necessarily at war with one another. While 52
it is true that they may at times appear to be incongruous, they do not
necessarily conflict; and when they do, it is because of the dislocation
of God’s divine plan for the world, and not because of any inherent
spiritual ambiguity. As one contemporary theologian has aptly phrased it: "Life is thus not at war with itself and its energy is not in con- 4 flict with its spiritual order."
And while the Bible takes a far more compassionate attitude toward the suffering which originates because man has been deceived by the apparent disruption of God’s blueprint for salvation, O’Neill suggests that suffering arises when man fails to discriminate between good and evil.
He also suggests that the suffering which man brings upon himself is not the result of the dispassionate impartiality of tragic destiny but a willing 5 "self-destruction," which not only crowns man with spiritual salvation but also adorns him with the courage necessary to affirm temporal life in the face of individual defeat.
In addition, O'Neill’s persistent application of the Biblical theme that each "dies" for his own "sin" provides abundant evidence that side by side with the concept of self-destruction there is always pre sent the .knowledge of individual responsibility and retribution, the knowledge that man is either rewarded or punished in another life for deeds perpetrated in this life,
O'Neill's interpretation of life in these terms bears a striking resemblance to the medieval morality play. Both are concerned with the freedom of man to align himself with the forces of either good or evil, with the ultimate triumph of good; both see in the human predicament a certain degree of poetic justice; both envision a day of reckoning and a 53
last judgment, when injustice will be redressed; and both demand ultimate
allegiance to the Creator.
But here the similarity between O’Neill and the morality play
appears to end. Unlike the medieval moralist, O’Neill is decidedly secular
in his approach to individual responsibility and retribution. He does
not define goodness in terms of moral "do’s" and "don’t’s," but declares
that since all men are involved in the sempiternal act of evil there is
none who may claim total innocence. His characters, therefore, are what
he likes to term "unmoral, not immoral,"
And while the moralist’s rulebook is an attempt to fashion theo
retical censorship on man's involvement in life here on earth, O'Neill's
spiritual lexicon is an attempt to construct substantial probation for
man's inculpation in a life hereafter. Like Matthew, O'Neill is not come
to call the "righteous," but to persuade sinners to "repentance."' His
apostolic dispatch appears to be for those "who succeed and do not push
on to a greater failure; the spiritual middleclass whose stopping at 8 success is the proof of their compromising insignificance."
It should not be surprising, therefore, that some of the more
haut monde critics note O'Neill's use of the "middleclass" as his "chief
flaw" and suggest that if he is intent on writing about the universal
nature of man's spiritual malaise "he should seek his protagonists else- q where than among the most ignoble, debased lives." Nor is it uncommon to encounter those critics who disparage O'Neill's creation of the middle-
class as a "portrait of dumb, tortured persons who come in the end to worse than naught."^
What these critics fail to note, however, is that O'Neill is not 54
relating his characters just to other common men and to other pedestrian
issues, but to those relative and spiritual forces which affirm man’s
triumph over adversary; which suggest that all men, regardless of their
social status, are in conflict not between warring aspects of class delineation, but between the claims of the earthly and the divine realm.
That is why O'Neill’s conception of "middleclass" drama entails a corresponding metaphysic and why his characters are proof of a "com promising insignificance": they accept "the unrealistic truth wearing the mask of lying reality"11 and refuse to entertain the "inscrutable" forces behind life. And that is why O'Neill demands that:
the playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he sees it---- the death of the old God and the failure of modem science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for man's surviving primitive religious instinct.12
Here is the context in terms of which it becomes possible to understand
O'Neill's concept of the relationship between sufferingand religion: man suffers when he denies a paradisaical vision of spiritual verity on earth and accepts the unrealistic truth of temporal existence, with its emphasis upon materialism. In this respect, suffering is not a causal consequence inherent in the death of the "old" God but an unbearable implication that there are no "new" gods.
It is precisely this relationship between suffering and religion which leads to an examination of Thirst and Fog as O'Neill's parabolic 13 expression of the "motionless, unbearable horror" J in man's being alive in a world without God.
Perhaps the furthest penetration of this expression, and the prelude to O'Neill’s detailed analysis of it in Thirst and Fog, is that 55
of the period which immediately follows O’Neill’s attempt at suicide in 14 1912, Although details of the incident remain sketchy, it appears that one of O’Neill’s roommates at Jimmy-the-Priest's, a waterfront boarding house on New York’s lower east side near the docks, killed himself in a jump from a window and that O'Neill was so disconsolate that he also tried to end his life by means of an overdose of veronal. Fortunately, however, he was discovered in time and revived at Bellevue Hospital.
Later, O’Neill described his suffering and the ultimate spiritual illumination which thwarted self-destruction imparts in Exorcism, a bio graphical account of his life at Jimmy-the-Priestst
when a fellow tries hard to kill himself and seems to fail, the effect is quite as though he had succeeded. The person is a new person, the life ahead is life in a new world. -*-5
The phases which O'Neill here observes with reference to the spiritual illumination of man and life in a "new world" have their natural counterpart in his mystic treatment of suffering as suggested by Thirst and Fog, both written in 1914. These, much more so than the later
Exorcism,.demonstrate the spiritual power necessary to destroy the isolation of individual life and exhibit the spiritual tranquillity and sublimity which necessarily follow as a consequence of having endured the agonies of a transfiguring self-destruction.
What O'Neill implies in both of these mystic expressions of man's transfiguration may, in other words, be a spiritual affirmation of life; an affirmation which acknowledges that the pessimistic view of existence may be transcended by providing man with an insight into the tragic nature of human fraility and by helping him to bear it without being "turned to 56
stone" by the vision.
The first point to notice in considering the relation of Thirst and Fog as O’Neill’s mystic solution to the problem posed by the religious and moral contradictions inherent in the Christian tradition of faith is his view that "the one-act play is a fine vehicle for some thing poetical, for something spiritual, in feeling that cannot be carried through a long play,"^
It is most revealing in this connection that O’Neill appears to have grasped the medieval significance of the one-act play as a religious or parabolic expression of biblical doctrine and to have employed its specifically Christian form for his own interpretation of the basic orientation of man to the will of God.
Like the medieval scribes, O’Neill is not "intent on writing 17 about people, but about life." He is, in other words, more earnest in his conviction that the function of dramatic art is essentially didactic and that it is for the purpose of relating both character and situation to something other than just "people." There can be no question, then, that his early plays are theological and that his tragic repertoire is a parabolic tale of man's relationship to all of those aspects of
"life," social, moral, ethical, and religious, which express the essence of man's existence.
Perhaps the best example of O’Neill’s attempt to depict those aspects of life which mirror man’s true essence, and his effort to re solve the suffering which arises when one aspect of life is in conflict with another, is Thirst, which is included in the "ten lost plays" collection published in 1964 as an "authorized" reprint of O’Neill’s debut 57
anthology Thirst and Other One-Act Plays (1914)
To begin to read this mystic tale, in which spiritual suffering
of cosmic proportion is raised, and in which an effort is made to resolve
it against a metaphysical background, is to enter a world of indeter
minate horizon, a world of sand and sky, a world of thick murk and fog,
a world of dazzling sunlight. It is a world of pure spectacle in which
the fateful pilgrimage of those who wander aimlessly within the labyrinth
of the human world is brought closer and closer to the. same ending: the
death of the hero, which is only the fulfillment of a spiritual death
that precedes the beginning of the story.
O’Neill described the plays in the Thirst volume as the "first 19 five stations of the Cross in my plod up Parnassus," 7 and an examination
of Thirst in particular reveals the playwright’s fundamental contention
that redemption from suffering is the discovery, not as a matter of mere
information or knowledge but in the form of ecstatic participation, that
the spiritual self may be united with the mystery of Nature in one
genuine reality.
It is significant, therefore, that O’Neill chooses the sea as a metaphor to depict the fluctuation of man’s spiritual fortune in the grim tides of suffering, despair, and death and suggests that Nature is the one continuity in a universe replete with mystery.
The impetus of O'Neill’s preference for the sea as a force greater than mankind itself finds its spiritual counterpart in that same Christ ian context which teaches that Nature, as well as all other forces of 20 creation, is within the divine providence and control of God. Both
O'Neill and the Christian doctrine suggest that the forces of Nature 58
require His power and His wisdom for their harmonious working. Both
suggest that the universe is but a reflection of His mysterious blue
print for the dominion of man. Both suggest that man comes and goes in
a world created by God at a time when man was nothing, a creature of
ignorance and impotency.
O’Neill, however, enlarges his conception of the sea to include
the suggestion that man’s essential harmony and eventual unity with the
external forces of the universe may also be measured by the intensity of
his desire to seek an answer for the elusive and inscrutable mystery of
God in the continuity of Nature.
Nearly a century ago, Emerson termed this merging of oneself and
Nature "universal brotherhood" and founded his conception of the "Oversoul,"
the life force that animates everything, on the saving grace that comes
from man’s divine origin.
Likewise, O’Neill, in his gospel of hope that arises when man
discovers the possibility of rebirth and inward transformation by merging
with the forces of Nature, suggests the cosmic context in which man's
spiritual redemption might take place. His discovery that man's life,
like Nature's, is part of the divine order of revivification suggests an attainment of holiness and the sovereignity of God's divine knowledge.
This is implicit in his comment that man's achievement of significant spiritual stature may only come through the establishment of a relationship with some cosmic force outside of himself, with some cosmic force which transcends life itself:
I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every 59
white sail in the moonlight, towering above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself---- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself.21
The sea, then, casts a radiant and ominous reflection upon
O'Neill’s oftentimes unfathomable treatment of transcending immediate
reality by seeking the privacy of the.cosmos and the anonymity of the
spirit. It also reveals the endless continuity O'Neill’s own rebellious
soul follows in a consistent path across the sea of his inner spiritual
quandary. And it is no wonder, therefore, that in Thirst O'Neill appears
more concerned with casting his Christian vision in a liturgy of mystic
faith than in prosaic common sense.
This is the central action of Thirst t the slow recognition of three seafarers who appear to have been drawn together without reason on a steamer's life raft that they are no longer part of the human world, and that they are now at the mercy of infinitely powerful and infinitely merciless forces which demand recognition.
The play begins and ends with allusions to God, but it is a God who is mystically visualized in the sun (¿.e,, the "son"), like a "great angry eye" (p. 3). It is also a God who has apparently forsaken the three shipwrecked characters, as He Himself was forsaken at Calvary.
Two men and a woman are seated on the raft, which rises and falls in a monotonous, "chant-like" rhythm on the glassy sea. One is a West
Indian mulatto who croons a song, more like a "dirge than a song," (p. 6) to himself as his eyes follow the movement of the shark fins in their 60
everlasting circles about the raft.
Another is a middle-aged white man who sits staring at the water
"with unseeing eyes." Between the two is a young woman who lies in a
penitent posture, "with arms outstretched, face downward," In the eyes
of all three the "light of dawning madness is shining." (p. 4)
Although the sky is "pitilessly clear," the heat from the sun is
"terrific" and "writhing, fantastic heat waves" rise from the "white
deck" of the raft, merging into a "black shadow" on the horizon's rim.
In contrast to this vivid, Homer-like, scenic image sits the West Indian
mulatto in a "blue uniform" and "rough sailor shoes," the middle-aged
Gentleman in "stained and rumpled" evening dress and "black tie," and
the woman Dancer in a "short-skirted" costume of "black velvet covered
with spangles," (pp. 3-4)
The Dancer, obviously once a woman of great beauty but now trans
formed by hunger and thirst into a "mocking specter," raises herself from
the penitent posture and turns "piteously" to the Gentleman, crying out:
"My God'. My God', This silence is driving me mad! Why don't you speak
to me?" (p, 4) The Gentleman's inconclusive response and the ambiguous address to "you" is O'Neill's indication that the real tragedy to be revealed here is God's silence.
What follows is O'Neill's attempt to dramatize the theme of God's
silence and to analyze as acutely as possible the implications of that silence for modern man tossed metaphorically about on the troubled sea of life without the ability to resolve the spiritual suffering which arises from God's separateness.
While it is certainly O'Neill's intention in Thirst to make his 6l
characters aware of the suffering which it is commonly the lot of man
to bear in a world forsaken by God, his treatment of the inner anxiety
and inordinate capacity of man’s striving for knowledge of God’s in
finite creativity indicates that the supreme goal of life must be to
overcome such individual separation and to merge into the cosmic unity
of Nature, that mystical identification with God’s providential design
for man.
Unlike some mystic treatments of the identification of the self 22 with the cosmic, however, O’Neill's drama of spiritual transcendence is woven with Biblical text and in order to discover his religious thesis it is imperative to uncover his Christian context. It should also be noted that for O'Neill Biblical text is merely a parabolic portrait of the drama, and that it is presented not as speculative myth but as an expression of the religious insight which makes possible the joy of super abundant creation.
Part of the spiritual significance of Thirst as a recital of faith arises from O'Neill's apparent selection of a title which combines both biblical text and dramatic situation. It suggests, for example, the unquenched desire of those who "hunger and thirst after righteousness,"
(Matthew, 4:3-9), the passion of those whose souls "thirsteth for Thee"
(Psalms, 62:1), and the craving of those spiritually "dry" who are given
"drink" by the Lord (Matthew, 25:35-36).
Against this Biblical motif of man's arid spirituality, O'Neill depicts the conflict which arises in a world without God, a world in which God is silent to man's plea for the tender care of a benevolent providence. It is a conflict which, while not to be taken as an account 62
of the origin of man’s disobedience of God’s strictures, must, neverthe
less, be understood in terms of a movement away from individual existence
and a movement toward dependence upon God as an expression of triumphant
self-affirmation.
In Thirst conflict appears as both a passionate form of personal
existence and as a prescient example of God’s divine will. It is evident,
for example, that the conflict which disrupts the harmony of the raft
stems from the inability of the castaways to discern some semblance of
meaning in their isolation. Although each seeks to bear his grief and
suffering as a condition of the circumstances which have brought them
together following a shipwreck, each fails to realize that his grief and
suffering is merely symptomatic of the "punishment" necessary to purge one
of Iniquity.
It may seem strange to set O’Neill’s view in this perspective, for, after all, will he not crucify Christian thought after 1923 and describe himself through the mask of The Great God Brown as the "anti- 23 Christ"? J Moreover, is it not clear that the metaphysical orientation of his proposed solution to the Christian dilemma exists in another sphere from that which is conventionally found in Biblical doctrine?
All of this is true, but it does not alter the fact that O’Neill appears to be endeavoring, at least in the early expression which is noted in Thirst and which will be noted later in Fog, to find some interpre tation for tragic existence by employing at least the motif of Biblical scripture and Biblical suffering. And his understanding of the human situation is sufficiently similar to that of Christianity to make com parison both possible and instructive. 63
The only curious fact about O'Neill's analysis of suffering as
a purgation of sin and as an example of God's divine will is that in his
eagerness to grasp and to express the cosmic forces which spawn man's
spiritual tragedy, he almost neglects to give a clear account of tragedy
itself. But in his model of individual retribution, or the requittal
of sin through self-sacrifice, it is possible to see how the concept of
suffering may provide a resolution to the tragic and approach the
spiritual.
The Dancer's and the Gentleman's suffering exists as both a
psychological and a metaphysical reality. The journey of each from
tragic despair to redemption in the mystical aspects of Nature is not unlike a similar journey which the Maccabean martyrs took in seeking a
"happy" immortality by cheerfully giving up their present life in the 24 certain hope of resurrection to "eternal life." Like their Old Testa ment brethren, O'Neill's two shipwrecked sinners appear to endure the pain which leads to eternal life and accept suffering for their "own 25 doings, having sinned against God."
This is the Biblical tenor of the Dancer's attempt to resolve the tragic dissonance which leads to pain and suffering, and ultimately to death, in a world in which God is "silent" to man’s plea for redemption.
Unable to explain away the "great crimson spots" which make the sky appear "to be raining drops of blood,” and unable to accept the
Gentleman's suggestion that "perhaps it is the blood of all those who were drowned that night of the shipwreck rising to the surface," the
Dancer attempts to articulate the torment which plunges her into tragic despair by imploring God for His divine intervention and saving grace: 64
What have we done that we should suffer so? It is as if one misfortune after another happened to make our agony more terrible. This is too horrible', (pp. 12-13)
Sensing no reply to her prayer for mercy, the Dancer then assails the
justice of God and implores Him to save her from certain death:
God! Oh, my God*. Must this be the end of all? I was coming home, home after years of struggling, home to success and fame and money. And I must die out here on a raft like a mad dog! (p. 18)
With a sudden resolution, perhaps prompted by the Gentleman's assurances that "the blind sky will not answer your appeals or mine" and that "the cruel sea will not grow merciful for any prayer of ours," the Dancer proposes one possible escape from the inevitable despair and suffering which such isolation has bred: "I still have one chance. It has never failed me yet. I will offer more than money." (p. 25)
Encouraged by the Gentleman, who believes that the Negro sailor has hidden water on the raft, the Dancer offers first her diamond neck lace and then herself to the mulatto. Amid mocking encores of "Dance!
Dance! Dance, Salome," (p. 26) she kneels before the sailor in a sup plicating posture and begs him to forgive her for treating him so sus piciously:
I am offering my body to you. I promise to love you—-a Negro sailor---- if you will give me one small drink of water. I am kneeling before you---- I who always had men kneel to me! Oh, will you never understand? Are you so'stupid that you do not know what I mean? (pp. 27-28)
But the sailor rejects both her offer of wealth and of flesh as he pushes her roughly away. Shaking with fury, the Dancer again appeals to heaven for redress: 65
Great God, have I abased myself for this? Have I humbled myself before this black animal only to be spurned like a wench of the streets? It is too much! (p. 28)
Raising herself from the same penitent posture which began the journey
from deapair to redemption, the Dancer, now mad and muttering incoherently
to herself, begins a dance of death on the swaying raft. Like some
"ghastly marionette jerked by invisible wires," she grasps the front
of her dress and rips it down over her shoulders, revealing herself
naked to the waist, with "breasts withered and shrunken by starvation,"
(pp. 29-30)
Kicking first one foot and then another frenziedly into the air, the Dancer grotesquely parodies the dance of temptation which is suggested by the Biblical Salome in her entertainment of John the Baptist. She dances faster and faster, "her arms and legs flying around as if beyond control." When a "little crimson foam appears on her lips" the dance abruptly concludes. She is dead. Again, a "great stillness hangs over everything." (pp. 29-30)
But, unlike the previous silence, this pause suggests some meta physical and spiritual resolution for, as the Gentleman and the Sailor look on in disbelief, "the heat waves rising from the raft near the woman’s body seem like her soul departing into the great unknown." Gone is the "wild stare" of her eyes and, as the Sailor relates, "she is better off. She does not suffer now." (p. 30)
Implicit in the Dancer’s despair and suffering which leads to eventual union with the cosmic forces of Nature is the Biblical notion that those who protest against the "misery" of mankind and who question 66
n/ why God has "forsaken" them may yet, in the "flesh," be redeemed.
And it is in her final effort to seek protection in the mystic aspects
of the sea that the Dancer secures metaphysical comfort from the unbearable
present.
The journey of the Gentleman from tragic despair to redemption
in many ways parallels that of the Dancer. Like her, the Gentleman is
evidently a first-class passenger before the shipwreck; but now a "sorry
and pitiful figure" in his stained and rumpled evening dress, (p. 3)
He also is unable to resolve the tragic dissonance inherent in a world
where God is "dead," "silent," and "still." (pp. 15-16) And, like the
Dancer, his tragic despair arises from "gazing at the sea too long and
listening to the great silence." (p. 9)
However, there is a note of benign affirmation in the Gentleman’s
assessment of the mysterious force which does not exist in either the
Dancer’s or the Sailor’s perception of the tragic situation. He suggests,
for example, that each is but a "companion in misfortune" and that "God knows we are all in the same pitiful plight." "It is only your
imagination," he tells the others, which prompts fear and suspicion of both the unknown and of one another, (p. 9)
Ironically, however, it is the Gentleman’s own imagination and fear of the unknown which leads inevitably to his death and spiritual redemption. The first note of the fear and suspicion which is aroused by his imagination is detected in his accusation that the Sailor "stole the last drop of water" salvaged from the shipwreck for himself, (p. 6)
Later, the Gentleman’s imagination and fear of the unknown makes his
"soul quiver with terror" (p. 15) at the sight of the shark fins which 67
circle the raft. Finally, imagination and fear prompt a renunciation
of the Gentleman's acceptance of the tragic despair inherent in a world
which is "silent":
Oh God, God! After twenty years of incessant grind, day after weary day, I started on my first vacation. I was going home. And here I sit dying by slow degrees, desolate and forsaken. Is this the meaning of all my years of labor? Is this the end, oh God? (p, 18)
In an attempt to reconcile himself to the narrow limits of confinement
on the "doomed" raft and to avoid the silence which greets his plea for
an answer to the tragic predicament, the Gentleman strikes an attitude
of irreverence and vows to sell his "soul for a drop of water." (p. 22)
With a vision of the water "clear before his glaring eyes," he then
tempts the Dancer to offer her necklace to the Sailor so that they both
may survive, (p. 23)
As the Dancer entices the Sailor, however, the Gentleman
mysteriously "ceases to notice them" and appears to "stare at the horizon
with blinking eyes." (p. 26) It is only after the Sailor has spurned
the advances of the Dancer that the Gentleman arouses himself from the
stupor of his "dream" and instinctively realizes what the tragic con
sequences of his suggestion have been:
What is it? I was dreaming I was sitting before great tumblers of ice water. They were just be yond my reach. I tried and tried to get one of them. It was horrible. But what has happened here? What is the matter? Oh, no. Boor, dead girl. (pp. 28-29)
In a courageous attempt to prevent the Sailor from taking his knife
from its sheath so that both may "now eat and drink," the Gentleman cries out in tones of anguished horrors "No! No! No! Good God, not 68
that," and grasps the Dancer’s body with both hands as he pushes it
into the water; where it "disappears in a swirling eddy." Then, all is
quiet again, (p. 3l)
The Sailor, his knife in hand, lunges at the Gentleman and
strikes as both fall backward into the sea. As the water is lashed by the fins of the waiting sharks, the Sailor’s black head appears for a moment, "his features distorted with terror, his lips tom with a howl of despair." Then, he is drawn under. Although the sun again glares down like a "great angry eye of God," the shark fins no longer circle the raft and the "eerie heat waves float upward in the still air like the souls of the drowned." Only the Dancer’s diamond necklace glitters in the blazing sunshine as "the raft floats in the midst of a vast silence," (pp, 31-32)
Although many critics cite the ending of the play as O'Neill’s 27 "keen eye for the irony of fate," it should be pointed out that in the metaphysical sense dying is not the mere release from weariness or the pain and suffering in human life. Rather, it is a return to full commun ion with eternal life and the transcendence of individual being into cosmic unity. While the individual will is preserved, it attains an added dimension of mystic "oneness" with and participation in the cosmic creativity behind the temporal world of individual phenomena.
This explains why the Gentleman’s protest, "No! No! No! Good God, not that," is an explicit attempt to resolve the individual separation which arises from suffering. It also explains why his actions which follow this protest may be seen mystically as an ecstatic and enthusiastic identification of the individual self with the source of life, the cosmic 69
and creative will of the Creator.
By willing his own death as a consequence of his intervention
in the Sailor's cannibalistic solution to the tragic situation, the
Gentleman achieves a transformation of character and, in the viewpoint of Christian parable, a religious significance not altogether unlike that which is suggested by the earnest theology of John, who notes that man achieves personal redemption and salvation when he "lays down his
aO life" for the love of his friends.
It is a far-reaching defect in O'Neill’s religious thought that his treatment of individual suffering could not hope to deal with the moral defects in the human will because his perception of spiritual values has apparently gone so far in the elimination of the ethical dimension altogether. His genetic reduction of religious concepts to the status of mystic unity with the cosmic forces of Nature appears to make it impossible for him to consider man’s religious malaise except as manifesting some form of superstition or primitive myth. In Thirst, however, O’Neill is very careful to point out the moral deficiencies which arise from a faith predicated upon superstition and myth in his treat ment of the cannibalistic Sailor.
The most obvious differentiation between the Sailor and his fellow companions on the raft is the fact that the former is a "black man," whose hesitating, "drawling sing-song" speech makes it difficult for him to express his anguish, (p. 3) In addition, he sings a "queer monotonous song" and only listens in attitudes of strained attention to the lamentations of the other castaways, (p. 6)
His only fear is detected in the movement of the sharks as they 70
circle the raft. That is why his vision is apparently centered on the
sea and the ominous specter of "those devil shark fins." "I am singing
to them," he says. "It is a charm, I have been told it is very strong.
If I sing long enough they will not eat us." (p, 7)
Both the Dancer and the Gentleman, however, are immediately sus
picious of the "unknown" Sailor and of the song he croons. "He is
strange, that Sailor," says the Gentleman. "I do not know what to think
of him," (p. 8) "I am afraid of him also," confesses the Dancer, "be
cause his song makes me dream of horrible things," (p. 9)
It is not difficult to understand why each fears the strange
Sailor and the song he sings. There is something in his eyes when he
looks at them, and something in his voice when he speaks to them, that
suggests he is "no better than a murderer." (p. 2l)
This is only one reason, however, that both the Dancer and the
Gentleman view the Sailor as a "cunning one" who looks as if he wishes
"to hide something from them." Another, far more pervasive, reason is that the Sailor never grows weak or disillusioned when exposed to the raging elements, (p. 20)
Although neither the Gentleman nor the Dancer have ever seen the
Sailor sleep, he appears much healthier than either of his companions.
"Why is it," the Gentleman asks, "that he is so much stronger than we are? He can stand up without effort and we can scarcely move. Why is that, I ask you?" (p, 2l)
Apparently, it is because the Sailor has not expiated his primitive character in the redemptive process of mutual suffering and because he has not made an effort to overcome the tragic situation by 71
seeking an enthusiastic identification with the cosmic forces. He
remains content to abide in solitude, crooning his monotonous song and avoiding the mystic invitation of the sea and the horizon as a release
from present pain.
Sitting with his knife in hand, the Sailor impatiently watches as the Gentleman and the Dancer approach madness. He rejects each of their attempts to involve him in corporate suffering, each of their attempts to involve him in speculative solutions regarding the tragic situation, and each of their attempts to involve him in identification with the mystic aspects of Nature,
With the death of the Dancer, this "heartless savage" (p. 22) reveals himself a true pagan. He turns slowly and looks at her, "his round, animal eyes dull and lusterless," (p. 23) anticipating the moment.
As his swollen lips "part in a grin" he points with his knife to the lifeless body and "sings a happy Negro melody that mocks the great silence." (p. 3l) It Is only the courageous effort of the Gentleman as he pushes the Dancer’s body into the sea that prevents a sacrilege.
The religious suggestion that the tragic situation may be con quered by a type of life willing and able to take suffering upon itself, even if it means self-sacrifice, is implicit in O’Neill’s concluding remarks to this mystic drama.
As the Gentleman wrestles with the Sailor, causing him to lose his balance and plunge headlong into the water, the "waiting shark fins" rush in and the water is "lashed into foam." The Sailor is drawn under and a "black stain" appears on the surface of the sea. The sharks are appeased and disappear. But there is no mystical union of the mulatto’s 72
self with the creative will or no apparent transformation of character,
as there is with both the Dancer and the Gentleman, because the frag
mented "black head" which rises to the surface suggests a rejection of
the primitive disposition which has characterized the Sailor’s previous
actions.
Now, in order fully to grasp what is involved in O’Neill's treat
ment of suffering as a form of individual retribution and as a necessary
element in the transformation and eventual union of the spiritual self
with the mystic will of the cosmic universe, it is imperative to pay
attention to what is suggested by the biblical leitmotifs in Thirst as
O'Neill's theological expression of the truth about human existence.
But since every solution should be internally related to the
problem from which it emerges, it is necessary to recall O'Neill’s stated understanding of the circumstances which give rise to the tragic sit uation. In his view, suffering stems from man's inability to discriminate a pattern or a purpose in the apparently patternless and purposeless design of the Creator on the one hand, and from the crime committed by man's rebellion against the divine command to stand "fast" in the faith on the other.
In both instances the human tragedy stems from the demands of conflicting claims—between man and God and between man and his spiritual self---- neither of which can finally and simply be subordinated to the other without identification of the self with the mystic aspects of
Nature; as a sort of individual redemption from temporal life through transcendence of the spiritual life.
At least part of the human tragedy may be resolved, however, if 73
one accepts O'Neill’s mystic interpretation of the cosmos as the
expression of God's divine will and sees in his concept of suffering a
spiritual transcendence which makes the previous conflicting claims of
man’s obedience more compatible with God's providential design for ulti
mate redemption. This is the theological perspective which is suggested by the role of Biblical leitmotifs in Thirst.
From a Christian standpoint, the least disguised Biblical emblems are the frequent references to God, the indicative title of the play, the prevalence of pain and suffering as a symptom of man's iniquity, the penitent attitudes of both the Dancer and the Gentleman, the quietistic treatment of God's "silence," and the apparent punishment of the force of evil.
To this parabolic portrait may be added more subtle tokens, the full import of which suggests O’Neill's own vicarious participation with and expression of the omnipotent will which lies behind and includes the individual,
O'Neill's use of the sea as a metaphor for life and the "life raft" as an expression of the spiritual truth inherent in Nature suggests the
Biblical notion that God is to be found upon the "waters" and that His saving grace is the "raft" of hope for those who are cast adrift on the 29 "sea" of religious doubt and despair. 7 The apparently isolated reference of "dying for a crust of bread, for a drink of water" (p, 12) likewise gains added spiritual significance when one recalls that God Himself is often seen as the "bread" of life and that to cast bread upon the "waters" 30 is to discover Christ the Saviour and to be forgiven for sin.
Neither should one ignore the parable of Christ taking bread and 74
blessing it as an invitation to eternal life: and see in the Dancer and
the Gentleman’s preoccupation with "blood" and "guilt" (p. 5) a
suggestion of the "remission" of sin which is promised in the New Testa ment to those who "repent" of their iniquities and "drink" Christ’s 31 "blood,' Nor should one ignore the essentially Christian theme that if man has not faith, his "root" in life, he "withers" away like one who 32 is dying of "thirst,
And yet to say that these Biblical leitmotifs represent O’Neill’s characteristic treatment of man’s spiritual aridity and that they reveal 33 the "pitiless rain of God" to wash away man’s iniquity is to deny the mystical suggestion of a return to eternal communion with the spiritual universe and to deny the transcendence of individual being into a cosmic unity which is inherent in the play’s conclusion.
Thus, when it is pointed out that the early sign of the Christian church was the "fish" and that the ancient tribes of Hebrew elders often disguised their religious meetings with variations of the fish emblem hung above private doorways---- retaining only the essential outline of the fish---- O'Neill's use of a "man-eating" shark acquires a positive force of spiritual affirmation.
The initial description of the sharks as projections of the fear and despondency which necessarily accompany a world in which God is silent, and their crucifying effect on the castaways---- particularly on the Dancer and the Gentleman---- implies that here is O'Neill’s secular attempt to reveal a mystic version of the possibility for redemption and salvation.
By allowing the restless power and insatiable hunger of the sharks 75
to become the means whereby the struggle, the pain, and the destruction
of appearances itself can be transcended, O'Neill makes it possible for
us to see in the death of both the Dancer and the Gentleman a life which
is transfigured and permeated with a new meaning; a life, that is, which
merges with and is a part of the cosmic forces of the spiritual universe.
Subsequent conduct of the sharks, particularly their ravage and
rejection of the superstitious Sailor, affords the modern Christian with
a singular and penetrating definition of God's saving grace and suggests
the value of human suffering in light of a promised eternal bliss: there
is a moral order behind the world of individual existence and there is
a divine justice beyond the world of cosmic creativity. But for those
who refuse to submit to the common tragic situation and for those who
refuse to endure suffering as a condition of purging iniquity, as in the
case of the Sailor, there is only a "howl of despair" and then the agony
of death.
It is clear, then, that O'Neill cannot accept any of the solutions
to salvation and redemption which are offered in the progressivism, the
scientism, or the social meliorism of his age and that he seeks his own
solution to the religious riddle of man's suffering in the mystic
identification of the self with the source of life, the cosmic universe.
There can be no question, either, that O'Neill knows the meta
physical, even if not the full religious, depth of man and of the cosmos
in which he lives and that in Thirst he explores the universal spiritual
law of suffering, pain, and self-sacrifice as the only possible restor ation of the metaphysical balance,
A similar attempt to dramatize the theme of suffering, pain, and 76
self-sacrifice as the only necessary restoration of the metaphysical 34 balance is found in Fog, another play which opens just after a ship
wreck and which explores the conquest of the tragic situation through
the special sense in which mysticism provides the truth about spiritual
existence.
Although the tone of the narrative is more sedate and the dialogue
more succinct than that found in Thirst, the subtle Biblical overtones
of resurrection and redemption suggest that here again is O’Neill’s
attempt to transcend tragic despair and to tranquilize spiritual doubt
by an identification of the individual self with the mystic aspects of
Nature.
Like Thirst, the action of Fog takes place on a "lifeboat" which
is "drifting helplessly off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland." A dense
fog lies heavily upon the sea and a "menacing silence" broods over every
thing. Set adrift on the still sea are a Man of Business, a Poet, and
a Polish Woman with her dead child. The characters only gradually appear
to the viewer, outlined for the greater part of the drama in silhouette
against the "gray background of vapor" which veils the raft. (p. 85)
As the "vague twilight" of dawn creeps over the sea and the day
light sifts through the "thick screen of fog," the shadowy figures
emerge. At first, the speaking characters are indicated as the "Man’s
Voice" and as "Another Man’s Voice." (p. 85) A little later, as the
faces of the two men in the boat become dimly distinguished, they are
introduced as the "Dark Man" and as the "Other Man." (p. 91) Finally,
an exchange of dialogue establishes them as a "Poet" and a "Buiness-
man." (p, 93)
1 77
Primarily a theological debate between these two men concerning the ambivalent expression of pain and suffering in human existence, the
Poet, obviously speaking for O’Neill, defends the "frightful injustice"
(p, 89) of life and the Businessman defends the "self-satisfied, success ful members of society." (p. 90)
Against this theological background sits the Polish Peasant
Woman, huddling stiffly at one end of the raft in silence as she clutches
"something like a bundle of white clothes" in her arms and appears to be "asleep." (p. 9l)
The Businessman is an apparent optimist who refuses to be "scared" by the "damned wreck" which has brought the seafarers together. Although the "fear of solitude" is "alive" within him, the Businessman chooses not "to think" about the isolation and the "menacing silence" which presents itself as a "veil of fog," and cheerfully suggests that each castaway look upon the "bright side" of this potentially tragic situation,
(pp. 86-87)
A selfish egotist who is more interested in financial than human affairs, the Businessman appears to be indifferent to the pain and suffering of the Polish Woman. Although he characteristically refers to his pecuniary pursuits as "sort of like a child of mine," (p. 91) there is no exhibition of compassion or genuine understanding in his comments on the death of the small child which the woman grasps in an attitude of reverence throughout the play.
In contrast to the Poet, who views the child's death as "full of tragedy" and the "most horrible thing I have ever seen or even heard of," the Businessman sees the small one’s death as "enough to give anyone the 78
blues, that’s sure," but admits that the real discomfort is his own
"wet clothes" and the "freezing cold." (p, 87)
It is this indifference to another's pain and suffering, this
disregard for the Christian precept of Samaritan compassion, which
leads one contemporary critic to remark that "social ideals are more important in this play than the characters themselves."^ what this
critic has failed to note, however, in his rather vague assessment
of the tragic situation are the moral and spiritual implications
inherent in O'Neill's treatment of the contrasting values of the
Businessman and the Poet,
The association of the Businessman with all that is "successful"
and "satisfying" in life suggests a corresponding spiritual deficiency
which cannot recognize, as the Poet points out, the responsibility that each member of the world community must bear for the "injustice visited upon the heads of our less fortunate 'brothers’ in Christ."
(pp. 89-90) Likewise, it is the Businessman's "shameful indifference" to the Polish Woman's misery and his refusal to "think" about it which signifies his spiritual meaninglessness and characterizes him as one of O'Neill's spiritually dispossessed, (p. 90)
O'Neill himself provides the clue to the spiritual malaise of the
Businessman in his treatment of the mystic nature of the fog on the cast-aways and in his treatment of suffering as an essential element of redemption for those who would assume the tragic burden.
To the Businessman, who is not inclined to look beyond the sur face reality of life and who accepts "superstition" as a "good thing" because it "helps one forget everything in time," (p. 95) the fog is primarily a threat to his life. He curses it as a "damn" fog because 79
it clouds his vision and prevents him from seeing the distant steamer
which apparently is in search of the lost passengers, (p. 99)
His apparent fear of the fog also manifests itself when an ice
berg strikes the raft as it drifts aimlessly through the mist. Taking
it for some "horrible phantom of the sea," the Businessman shrinks in
fright and almost causes the boat to tip over. Only the reassurance
of the Poet that this "phantom" is an "ice and water reality" calms
the Businessman, (p. 99)
But that reassurance is only temporary, however, for the fog and
the iceberg present moral and ethical questions to both the Poet and
the Businessman. If the steamer were to seek a rescue and be drawn
upon the white mass of ice which now towers above the raft like "the
facade of some huge Viking temple," (p. 102) she would sink and
possibly drown all of those innocent sailors who are approaching
unaware of the danger that awaits. So, the Poet warns the Businessmans
The steamer, man, the steamer'. Think of the danger she is in. If she were to hit this mass of ice she would sink before they could lower a boat. Not a sound if you have any regard for the lives of those on board. We can die but we cannot risk the lives of others to save our own. (pp. 100-101)
But the Businessman has no regard for human life and, more concerned
with saving his own life than in sacrificing it for the greater good
of the innocent, struggles to raise his hands to his mouth and shout a call for helps
If we don’t let them know we’re here they are liable to pass by us and never know it. I'm not going to be left here to die on account of your damn fool ideas, (p. 100)
The Businessman’s call for help is only thwarted by an heroic act of
the Poet, who forces his hand over the Businessman’s mouth in time to 80
stifle the outcry. "You damned coward," the Poet snarls, "I might
have known what to expect." (p. 101)
The reader, also, might have known what to expect from the
Businessman in this situation. His primary concern has always been
for the "good life," and he admits that he would "not change it" even if he could, (p. 89) Obviously, his personal suffering has in no way liberated him from the bonds of self-satisfying "pleasure," and he is unable to accept the tragic situation as the context in which life itself may be permeated with new spiritual meaning and new spiritual direction.
Like his Biblical counterpart, the Businessman has allowed material wealth to substitute for religion, and his willingness to risk the lives of innocent bystanders for his own selfish desires makes explicit what the parable of the businessman and the pauper teaches about ultimate redemption and salvation: it is, indeed, easier for a "camel" to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
The Poet in Fog is apparently a combination of the "pauper" character found in Biblical text and an earlier self-portrait of
O’Neill himself at a timewhen he was brooding over the vapid theo logical and prophetic observations made as part of the 1912 verse hymn "The Lay of the Singer’s FaH'.':
A singer was born in a land of gold, In the time of long ago And the good fairies gathered from heath and wold With gracious gifts to bestow. They gave him the grace of mirth and Song, They crowned him with Health and Joy And love for the Right and hate for the Wrong. 81
But when they were gone, through the open door The Devil of Doubt crept in. The singer became a man and he fought With might of his pen and hand To show for evil the cure long sought, And spread Truth over the land; Till the Devil mockingly said, "In sooth •T is a sorry ideal you ride, For the truth of truths is there is no truth*." ---- And the faith of the singer died----
And the singer was sad and he turned to Love And the arms of his ladye faire, Till the Devil whispered, "I fondly trust This is folly and nought beside, For the greatest of loves is merely lust!" ---- And the heart of the singer died—
So the singer turned from the world* s mad strife And he walked in the paths untrod, And thrilled to the dream of a future life As he prayed to the most high God; Till the Devil murmured with sneering breath, "What think you the blind skies hide? There is nothing sure after death but death!" ---- And the soul of the singer died----
And the lips of the singer were flecked with red And tom with a bitter cry, "When Truth and Love and God are dead It is time, full time, to die!" And the Devil in triumph chuckled low, "There is always suicide, It’s the only logical thing I know." __ —And the life of the singer died, '
As the hymn suggests, the ultimate meaning of life is to be found in man’s inevitable progression toward death. The Singer, voicing O'Neill’s theodicy that affliction arises from the fact that temporal reality is at variance with the religious conception of life as taught by the Christian doctrines of "love for the Right and Hate for the Wrong," (line 7) attempts to give credence to this testimony by confronting the "Devil of Doubt" in a contest to "show for evil the cure long sought, And spread Truth over the land." (lines 12-13) 82
Although the Singer fights with "might of his pen and hand"
(line'll) to spread the joy of religious truth throughout the land,
he is haunted by the Devil’s pessimistic judgment that "the truth of
truths is, there is no truth’." (line 16)
As his faith gradually dies, the Singer turns to "Love" (line 18)
and to the "dream of a future life" (line 26) in an effort to re-kindle
his lost faith. But the mocking Devil dispels these visions of bliss
with his negative declaration that "the greatest of loves is merely
lust" (line 22) and that "there is nothing sure after death but death."
(line 30)
Finally, disillusionment at having "walked in paths untrod" (line
25) and not having seen the "most high God" (line 27) leads the Singer
to despair that when "Truth and Love and God are dead, It is time, full
time, to die!" (lines 34-35) And with this, the "life of the singer dies." (line 39)
The Poet, like the "pauper" of biblical text and the Singer of the 1912 verse hymn, is primarily a "reformer" in his attempt to reconcile the Christian view that "we are all responsible for the misery we see around us" with the Businessman’s view that "no one is responsible for the way the world is run." (p. 90) Like the pauper he is described as "poor" and as a "loafer." (p. 10l) Like the
Singer he is described as a "humanist" and as a "writer," (p. 92)
In addition, the Poet's own disappointment in being unable to prevent misery has led him to contemplate suicide. "I was going to die," he relates, "so I hid in the steerage fearing that some of the ship's officers would insist on saving my life in spite of me." (p. 94) 83
But when the ship strikes a derelict the Poet discovers a solution to the "weariness of life in general" which makes "death appear the only way out." (p. 94) His discovery suggests the spiritual evolution which O’Neill’s religious thought has taken since the decidedly pessimistic treatment of man’s fall from grace as it was expressed in "The Lay of the Singer’s Fall."
That solution is the "providential" discovery of compassion for the Polish Woman and her dead child. Seeing that the woman is "so happy in her love for her child that it would be wrong to let her die," the Poet abandons his idea of suicide and persuades the woman to join him in the "life-raft" as the sinking ship takes its final plunge, (p. 95)
This Christian act of charity results in the Poet’s affirmative conviction that "all that happened to me is an omen sent by the gods to convince me my past unhappiness is past and my fortune will change for the better." (p. 95)
The change of fortune for the better, however, is momentarily tempered by the untimely death of the small child. Even the recognition that "death was kind" to the child because it "saved him from many a long year of sordid drudgery" cannot allay the Poet’s sense of vicarious grief and suffering. Neither can the Poet justify such
"needless cruelty" as a "blessing" or as a recompense for his own
Christian act of "charity." (pp. 92-93)
Unable to discover in his act of "love" the truth of the Biblical notion which suggests that an act of charity for the least of God’s creatures is an act of love for God Himself, the Poet despairs: 84
Why was I not taken instead, I who have no family or friends to weep, and am not afraid to die? If I had known the sufferings that poor woman was to undergo as a result of my reckless life-saving, I would have let her go down with the ship and gone myself, (pp. 95-96)
O'Neill then details in the remainder of the play the mutual concern and mutual suffering which the Poet shares with the Polish Woman as the dead child lies "rigid" in its mother's arm, and attempts to de pict what life will be like now that it has been emptied of meaning by "death." (p. 93)
Ironically, however, it is also an analysis which acknowledges that the Poet's genuine concern for and participation in mutual suffer ing is the means of providing personal redemption and salvation.
One of the best examples of the Poet's concern, and one religious implication which is visualized in the vicarious suffering for others, is his effort to "comfort" the Polish Woman and her dead child in the chilly fog. At just about the "time for the sun to rise," the Poet notices that it is getting "considerably lighter" and that "it was just about this time yesterday morning when the poor little fellow died." (p. 96) Removing his "Ulster," which bears a striking resem blance to the Irish religious garment worn for confession, the Poet covers both mother and son and then resumes his vigil over them.
This subtle act of compassion, coupled with the resemblance of the poor peasant and her dead child to the Pieta figure of Mary grieving over the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion, signals the transformation of the Poet from a man of folly and error to a man of resolution and self-willed determination. 85
His subsequent action in preventing the Businessman from luring
the rescue ship too near the iceberg and his concern for the lives of
others, even if it means his own death, indicates a willingness on the
part of the Poet to sacrifice his own welfare for the immediate
benefit of the less fortunate.
Implicit in this expression of the individual capable of self-
sacrifice is the Biblical suggestion of redemption and resurrection,
the Biblical intimation that a "trumpet" shall sound and the dead shall
be "raised incorruptible" when man affirms life as an act of Christian op love and charity. O’Neill himself points to this religious motif
by dramatically punctuating each of the Poet’s acts of compassion and
self-sacrifice with "whistle blows" that seem to be "drawing nearer"
with each exhibition of love and charity. The most significant of
these punctuations is the "deafening blast" which accompanies the
Poet’s admission that the lives of others may not be risked to save
one’s own. (p. 100)
A further note of redemption and resurrection is apparent when
the fog finally lifts, and the rescue ship is able to reach the strand
ed craft. It appears that the dead child's "weird" crying has guided
the rescue ship in its search for the lost passengers, "If it hadn’t
been for the kid crying," the First Officer relates, "we would have
missed you." (p. 104)
Although both the Poet and the Businessman claim that the child
has been dead for twenty-four hours, the crew of the "deliverance"
ship insist that they were "steering by the sound" and that "it was a kid sure enough." "We could hear the kid crying all the time," the 86
First Officer maintains, "and it stopped just as the fog rose,"
(p. 105)
The Poet, redeemed apparently by his genuine love and compassion
for the dead child and mother, is prepared to accept this "miracle"
as an "unexpected return to life." (p. 103) It is only the Business
man who appears to be unaware of the significance which this miracle
has with that other, more familiar, miracle—Christ’s resurrection.
Casting a "horrified glance" at the still figures in the end of
the boat, the Businessman retreats to the rescue ship and, in the
accent of one "who is rarely acknowledged to be wrong," he confesses
to the First Officer that "what you have just finished telling us is
unbelievable." (p. 107)
O’Neill's'unexpected disclosure that the Polish Woman has also
died further suggests the affinity between suffering and redemption.
The idea that the tragic situation may be conquered by a type of life
willing and able to take suffering upon itself is inherent in the
Poet’s suggestive remark as he glances at the two bodies frozen in
silhouette against the now "blue" sky: "poor,, happy woman." (p. 106)
A Biblical note is also struck when it is recalled that suffering
is often likened in the Old Testament parables to the care of a mother
for her child and that redemption is made possible by God, who assumes
the allegorical role of "Mother Comforter," when man discovers the 39 essentially religious nature of a "happy" death.
To this discussion should be added the emphasis which O'Neill apparently places on the conclusion of the play. In contrast to the
vague twilight and barely perceptible swells of the ocean which 87
characterize the opening of the play, "fresh morning breezes" now
"ripple" over the water as the two boats glide swiftly away from the iceberg, (p. 107) The Poet, choosing to remain "with the dead," sits opposite the dead mother and child and looks at their "still faces" with "eyes full of a great longing," (p. 107)
As the sunrise filters through the misty fog this "cheerful beggar," who appears to echo the sentiments of the Biblical "beggar" who died and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,now appears to understand what it means to be redeemed by an act of com passion and mutual suffering as great as that which redeemed Jesus
Christ. He removes his ulster from the Polish Woman’s shoulders and presses his head against her breast in a final act of compassion as the sailors from the rescue ship jump into their own boat. With a brisk "Aye, aye," the towing ropes are secured and both ships sail off into the "dawn." (pp. 105-106)
O’Neill suggests in both Thirst and in Fog that suffering exists as a declaration of the religious impulse and that suffering itself is a means of resolution or of overcoming the tragic dissonance. His apparent choice of the Bible as the model for the "rebirth" of man through acts of self-sacrifice and charity enables one to see how the concept of individual retribution is related to a universal spiritual truth and hot* suffering justifies and redeems human existence.
Further clarification of the meaning of suffering may be found in the contrast drawn by O’Neill between direct participation and affir mation of life in the mystic aspects of Nature, which express the omnipotent will behind creation, and in the vicarious experience of 88
religious faith, which transforms individual existence in spite of
apparent destruction.
And while both Thirst and Fog plant only the seeds of suffering
as the means of individual retribution and redemption from the tragic
situation, they represent O’Neill's earliest attempt to communicate
the belief that pain and suffering may be exorcised through an unexplana tory metaphysical power and that temporal life should be guided by an adherence to the Christian precepts of mutual love and charity.
O’Neill seems to have been obsessed with the belief that only if life is surveyed in the first instance with resolution and with faith is it possible to grasp its true religious character, and to make this truth a starting point from which to cope with the human predicament.
But as a result both of his experimentation with the necessity of suffering as a transfiguration of the tragic situation and his dramatic employment of the Biblical parable to point out the sem blance of spiritual life to temporal life, O’Neill has provided a clue to resolving the spectacle of misery and despair which appear preeminent in modem society: when the inevitability of suffering is grasped, and misery and despair are understood as part of a divine pattern of creativity, the darker side of life must appear to us per meated by a renewed belief in God and a reassurance of belief in immortality.
It is not until Beyond the Horizon, however, that the early seeds of suffering as individual retribution flower into a redemptive vision of what this renewed faith imparts about man and his spiritual destiny. 89
But it is a vision which suggests that suffering is crowned with
glory and redeemed by grace; that nan must die to the world, must
crucify the flesh, must live eternal life in time, and must rejoice
in all things.
The religious lesson that appears to be dramatized may be
formulated in this fragmentary poem of O’Neill’s, which voices the
spiritual theme that dominates his work following Thirst and Fog.
It is a secular parable of one who:
Through indolence, Irony, Helplessness, too, perhaps, he Let the legends go, The lying legends grow; Then watched the mirror darken, Indolently, Ironically, Helplessly, too, perhaps, Until one final day Only a ghost remained To haunt its shallow depths---- Himself, Bewildered apparition, Seeking a lost identity.
This passage is, in truth, equally applicable to O’Neill himself and there can be no doubt that Beyond the Horizon is his attempt to re gain a belief in the "lying legends" of conventional Christian doctrine and that he discovers his "lost identity" by placing trust in God alone to reveal how mortal life is woven of the selfsame texture as the celestial life. And in this regard, Beyond the Horizon may be seen as
Eugene O’Neill’s own atonement for a momentary lapse of faith, in man and in God. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE
1. Joseph Wood Krutch,"The God of Stumps," The Nation, CXIX, November 1924, pp. 578-579.
2. Pierre Loving, "Eugene O’Neill," The Bookman, LIII, August 1921, pp. 514-515.
3. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), pp. 260-261.
4. Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), p. 168.
5. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in "R. J.," "A Dramatist of Monomania," The Spectator (London), III, October 1925, pp. 645-646,
6. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neills Son and Play wright, (Bostons Little, Brown and Co., 1968), pp, 238-239.
7. Matthew, 9:13.
8. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Gelb, O’Neill, p. 5.
9. William Peery, "Does the Buskin Fit O'Neill?", The University of Kansas City Review, XV, June 1949, p. 287.
10. Carl Van Doren, "American and British Literature Since 1890," as cited in Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O’Neills A Critical Study, (New Yorks Random House, 1934), p. 10^ ”
11. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Gelb, O'Neill, p. 724.
12. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), P. 95 •
13. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story: Eugene O'Neill as a Young Man in Love, (London: Peter Davies Press, 1958), pp. I85-I80.
14. Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension, (New Bruns wick, N. J,: Rutgers University Press, 1958), p. 165.
15. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p, 210.
16. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1926), p. 40.
17. Eugene O'Neill, as cited by Walter Prichard Eaton, "O’Neill---- New Risen Attic Stream?", American Scholar, VI, November 1937, p. 307. 91
18. Eugene O’Neill, "Thirst," Ten ’Lost' Plays, (New York: Random House, 1942), pp. 3-32.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
19. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. 273»
20. Job, 38s 4-7, and Psalms, 95-
21. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. I65.
22. Eugene O’Neill’s decidedly Biblical use of the mystic elements may be seen by comparing similar treatments of scripture and metaphysics in those dramatic narratives which precede both Thirst and Fog on the American stage. I direct your attention in particular to William Vaughn Moody’s The Faith Healer (1909), Norman Bel Geddes adaptation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1912), and Max Reinhardt’s Sumurun (1912).
23. Eugene O’Neill, "The Great God Brown," Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill, (New York: The Modern Library, 195^7» PP. 333-334.
24. 2 Maccabees, 7*9 and 7: 15-18.
25. Ibid.
26. Job, 19: 26.
27. Timo Tiusanen, O'Neill's Scenic Images, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 19^8), p. 42.
28. John, 15: 13.
29. Psalms, 29* 3.
30. John, 3: 35» and Ecclesiastes, 11: 1.
31* Flat the w, 26: 28.
32. Ibid., 13: 6. 33. Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918, (New York: Random House, 1939)» p. H5.
34. Eugene O'Neill, "Fog," Ten ’Lost’ Plays, (New York: Random House, 1942), pp. 85-107.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
35. Sophus Keith Winther, O'Neill: A Critical Study, p. 119. 92
36. Matthew, 19* 24.
37. Eugene O'Neill, "The Lay of the Singer's Fall," as cited in Ralph Sanborn and Barrett H. Clark, A Bibliography of the Works of Eugene O'Neill together with The Collected Poems of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Benjamin Blom Press, 1968)7" PP. 15^07
38. I Corinthians, 15: 51-52.
39. Isaiah, 17: 13.
40. Luke, l6: 22.
41. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), p. 534. 93
CHAPTER POUR
BEYOND THE HORIZON: THE FLOWERING OF SUFFERING
AS ATONEMENT FOR INDIVIDUAL SIN
Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon,1
closes with what is almost an announcement of the subject that is to
be central in the works of the next thirty years of his career: "only
through sacrifice may we know the secret beyond there (the horizon)
(p, 168) The cover of a recent edition of his plays, which includes
Beyond the Horizon, is lavishly decorated with crosses, apparently
designed by the publishers to call attention at once to the fact that
these works are a retelling and reinterpretation of Gospel doctrine and to draw into an already large public the great numbers of people who read chiefly religious or "inspirational" drama.
Faced with these suggestive facts, the reader is likely to con clude that the pattern of O’Neill’s dramatic and spiritual development is clear: from the violence and sensationalism and despair of such early experiments as Thirst and Fog to the religious affirmation and transcendent hope of the later Beyond the Horizon.
Fortunately, for the possibility of quick and easy generalization, there is just enough truth in this view to undercut any sweeping re jection of it. There is a difference in tone and mood between O’Neill’s early and later works, and one way of pointing to that difference is to say that in the plays which follow Thirst and Fog one often feels the effort to affirm some kind of faith, though the precise nature of that faith often remains unclear.
It is also true to say that in the plays which follow Thirst and 94
Fog O’Neill consistently urges faith in man and his destiny and that
not only does he invite the reader to bear with patience and even joy
the suffering that comesfrom religious despair, but that he also sug
gests that one’s spiritual fibre may be strengthened by voluntary self-
sacrifice and denial; though, again, precisely what this means and precisely what obligations and commitments it involves is far from
clear.
At this point it would be pleasant to assume that it is possible now to proceed to align O’Neill’s work with the neo-Christianity of our time and that there are no more tortuous qualifications or solemn warnings against seeing in his dramaturgy anything except "a struggle 2 in which the gods are always stronger than man."
But there are yet caveats and pronouncements to be advanced before attempting to delineate the inestimable benefits of suffering and re demption as they are suggested by an analysis of Beyond the Horizon.
Simplicity is always desirable but not always attainable; and, in any effort to understand O'Neill's relation of the tragic vision to the
Christian faith, it will be attainable, if at all, only late, not early.
It is possible, however, to overcome the glibness of popular generalizations which suggest that O’Neill’s drama results "only in 3 a kind of magnificent confusion""^ by turning our attention to his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon.
This drama, which is dedicated to his first wife "in memory of a land more beautiful than any I had ever known, a land of which I 4 had dreamed only hopelessly, a land beyond my horizon," not only 95
closes with what hindsight now sees as a kind of program-note for
future work---- the simple injunction of suffering and sacrifice as the
appropriate attitude for redemption; hut it also closes with a com
plex theological commentary on the value of such suffering and sacri
fice in light of a "future” life.
The theology implied in this complex fiction appears orthodox or
heterodox according to the religious position from which it is viewed.
If one thinks primarily of the main currents of thought expressed in
American literature in the last one hundred and fifty years or so,
O’Neill may likely to seen as one of the party of Hawthorne, Melville, and the elder James: an ironist with a vision of the possibility of
tragedy to express the truth about human existence and an unwillingness
or inability to ignore the presence of evil in the world.
This is the "conservative" party, the party that, with whatever necessary qualification, may be labeled Christian; not in some absolute sense, but In contrast to the followers of Emerson, who was hopeful that the literary artist would simply forget historic Christianity; and Whitman, who was to conceive his mission as helping to usher out the era of priests and religious creeds and to assist at the birth of the brave new world of science and humanity.
If, however, O’Neill is to be viewed as starting out from innocence to do battle with the world and being overwhelmed by its evil, then it is likely that he will be seen as one contemporary critic suggests:
As a true poet of tragedy who hungered for redemption, for a sense of meaning in life. As a man, that is, with deep guilt feelings and a consequent strain of self-hatred who was inexorably bent on punishing him self, primarily, it seems, for the sin of being born.5 96
In short, from any perspective which is established chiefly from a
view of American literature, O’Neill belongs not with those who feel
that the past is without value or instruction, like Whitman and Emer
son, and not with those who combine Satanic monomania with an appeal
ing heroism, like Hawthorne, Melville, and the elder James,
Rather, O’Neill appears to belong with those who, whatever the ambiguities of their religious position, have felt and expressed a kinship with the historic Christian, view of the human situation and with those who have come to .the realization that only by the way of faith and compassion is it possible for man either to understand the past or to free himself from it sufficiently to act redemptively in the present.
But if the meaning of O’Neill’s work may be seen as for the most part basically consistent with the broad outlines of the Christian view of man and the universe as expressed in American literature, it remains true that, when viewed as a part of the Christian literature of two thousand years, the meaning of O’Neill’s drama may come to seem
Christian only in a very much more partial and restricted sense.
The difficulty, as one critic notes in his evaluation of O’Neill as a "modem'’ Christian playwright, stems from the fact that:
the sins which O’Neill condemns, which he dramatizes so well, are the virtues of the past grown old, haggard, lean and skull-faced5 virtues that may have served a need in older cilivizations but which in the modern world have become parasitic tumors, swelling the body to ugly proportions, or appearing in the form of infected scabs that turn man into a disease and life into a dismal swamp.°
The effect of this kind of perception is to send one from the man to his work, from an attempt to untangle the threads of O’Neill's personal 97
religion to an attempt to discover how Beyond the Horizon, which
O’Neill admits is a personal "testimony" of the man who "looks over the horizon, who longs with his whole soul to depart on the quest, but >7 whom destiny confines to a place and a task that are not his," may indeed be Interpreted in Christian terms.
In a time when the reaction against secular optimism has made it almost fashionable to rediscover original sin, it is refreshing to discover in Beyond the Horizon old-fashioned deism, tinctured with romantic nature mysticism. One is back again to the Old Testament world in which sin and suffering, redemption and damnation, the way of faith and the way of faithlessness, are the really decisive categories of religious thought.
It is a world in which man is "fallen"---- that is, he is neither perfect nor impure, but as much a victim as a perpetrator of evil. It is a world in which man may only be redeemed by an "innerchange," a drastic re-orientation and movement of reversal from malevolence to atonement. It is a world in which O'Neill suggests that the fear of eternal damnation "drives a man to tell others of his sins before the 8 Furies within him seek to destroy him.”
If this is what the theme of Beyond the Horizon finally comes to, then it fits in very well with the views of nature, of God, and of the mystic universe which O'Neill expresses at the very beginning of his career in "Nocturne," a 1912 hymn of theistic affirmation to a transcendent God who is visualized in the "eye" of the horizon:
through the stillness rings The fretful echo of a sea-gull's screams, As if one cried who sees within a dream Deep rooted sorrow in the heart of things. 98
The cry that Sorrow knows and would complain And impotently struggle to express---- Some secret shame, some hidden bitterness---- Yet evermore must sing the same refrain.
Silence once more. The air seems in a swoon Beneath the heavens thousand opening eyes While from the far horizon's edge arise The first faint silvery tresses of the moon.9
Although the result of this poem in the O'Neill poetic canon is both less great as art and less convincing as theology than later attempts in Thirst and Fog to convey a movement toward faith in an undefined, mystical universe, it may be taken as evidence of his per sistent effort to detail the spiritual journey toward the necessity of belief and his acknowledgment of sorrow and suffering as a redemptive power.
Or, if that should seem too positive a way of putting it, it may be said that the theme of "Nocturne," with its emphasis upon O'Neill’s own struggle to express the deep rooted sorrow which is occasioned by the silence of the mystical universe, implicitly raises questions which appear to be relevant to the relation of O'Neill’s later treatment of God’s silence as answered quite profoundly in Beyond the Horizon.
O'Neill suggests in a letter to the New York Times, written in
1920, that the thematic strain which unites the various strands of thought in the play is that of a man who "throws away his instinctive dream and accepts the thralldom of the farm for the romance of sex."10
This has led many scholars to interpret Beyond the Horizon as a
"romantic conflict between what the heart desires and the outer bar riers to truth which reveal the great and tragic drama of human life,"11 and to conclude that the "play is concerned with the great truth that 99
I? there is nothing so precious in our lives as our illusions."
One could very well argue, however, that Beyond the Horizon, far
from being a poetic expression of the general themes of romance and
illusion, is an elaborate allegorical retelling of the events of the
expulsion from the Garden of Eden and a powerful statement of the
divine displeasure which is noted in the Old Testament as God’s penalty
for disobedience to His law and unfaithful observance of the covenant
entered into by Him with man.
Indeed, an analysis of the play with regard to the specific
incidents as they are revealed in the Genesis parable of Adam and
Eve, seems to suggest that Beyond the Horizon has for its achieved
meaning an examination of the need for redemption from suffering, of
the necessity for the confession of sin and the asking of forgiveness, and of the saving grace which is resident in Christ.
If it is open to interpretations with somewhat different em phases, it is certainly open to this one; and the others, if they are true to all the biblical evidence, will not invalidate this one.
The story itself is a very simple one. James Mayo, a successful middle-class farmer, has two young sons, Andrew and Robert. The invalid owner of an adjoining farm, Mrs. Atkins, has an attractive daughter,
Ruth. Both families have taken for granted the fact that the elder
Andrew will marry Ruth, eventually bringing the two farms together and providing a stable income for all concerned.
Buth Ruth is more attracted to the shy and dreamy Robert than to the shrewd and stalwart Andrew. It is within this classic romantic triangle that O’Neill weaves his allegorical tale of a modern Adam and 100
Eve and re-discovers in their suffering the biblical explanation of
atonement: an expiation of sin and a reconciliation of God to man as
amends for Christ's suffering and death in redeeming mankind.
As the play begins, one immediately notes the similarity between
O'Neill's stage setting and the biblical description of the Garden of
Eden. Running diagonally from left to right are "low, rolling hills" and multicolored fields of "bright-green" grass. To the rear is a
"sloping, grassy bank" which surrounds a "straggling line of piled rocks." (p. 8l)
In the center, just as in the Genesis version, is an "old, gnarled apple tree budding into leaf." Passing beneath the apple true is a
"snake-fence," which slides along the top of the grassy bank. Although it is a "hushed twilight of a day in May," there is a note of "uneasy calm" in the air as the horizon hills are "rimmed by a faint line of flame" and the sky "glows with the crimson flush of the sunset." Even the apple tree reflects the anticipation of the moment as it "strains its twisted branches heavenwards, black against the pallor of the distance." (p. 8l)
If the overall execution of the scenery is crude rather than re fined in Beyond the Horizon, there is one feature which, as Timo
Tiusanen points out, signals its importance to the biblical theme of the play.1^ a setting which demands that the spectator view the action from left to right is following the natural movement of the eye and, even when sitting in a theatre, suggests a rising action.
To follow O'Neill's stage direction is to focus attention in the very first scene on the distant hills and to mirror the theme of the 101
play in its "gradually fading" features, (p. 8l) It is also to direct attention to the parabolic nature of the "horizon," which the Bible 14 teaches is "whence cometh man’s help."
The importance of the setting to the essentially biblical theme of the play may also be seen in the division of the acts into alter nate indoor and outdoor scenes. Act One is set on the "road" and in the "farmhouse';" Act Two in the "farm house" and on the "top of a hill overlooking the sea;" and Act Three is the "farm house" and in a "ditch alongside the road." There is also an alternation of the seasons for each act. For example, Act One is set "in Spring," Act Two on "a summer day," and Act Three on "the dawn of a day in late Fall," (p. 80)
One need only recall the history of archetypal patterns to see that this deliberate division of the play into alternating scenes and seasons serves a conscious artistic purposes to trace the birth of man (Spring), the aging of man (Summer), and the death and resurrection of man (Fall).
An examination of Beyond the Horizon in this context makes a much more effective statement of O’Neill's inherently parabolic and religious nature than those critiques which suggest that all there is to be found here is a personal credo of despair and an "effort to transform into some peace-giving beauty and crude and obvious fact that life is vivid and restless and exciting and terrible."
In addition, the as-yet-unexplored parallels between the already noted archetypal patterns and the biblical motif of the Adam and Eve story seems to suggest that in contrast to O'Neill's earlier works, which hover at times between present despair and the memory of a lost 102
faith, Beyond the Horizon is O'Neill’s own confession of sin and a re-affirmation of faith in the sovereignity of God's divine will to provide ecclesiastical peace for suffering mankind.
The complex structure of the play and its relationship to this theme is revealed early in the script. As the curtain rises on what may only be described as a demi-paradise for this section of farmland,
Robert is discovered sitting on the fence. His features are delicate and refined; and like O’Neill himself, "there is a touch of the poet about him." (p. 8l) He is reading a book by the light of the fading sunset as his brother Andrew approaches from his work in the fields.
In contrast to the frail Robert, Andrew is "husky, sun-bronzed" and
"handsome in a large-featured, manly fashion." (p. 82) The resemblance of each to the biblical characters Cain and Abel is unmistakable.
As the brothers speak, their clashing natures emerge and it is revealed that Robert is a "dreamer" who has been a semi-invalid since childhood. His only desire now that he has regained some of his former strength is to "keep on moving" so that he does not "take root in any one place." (p, 83)
"There’s something calling me," he says as he points to the dis tant horizon, "but I can't just explain it to you, Andy." With prompting, however, Robert discloses that he is overwhelmed by the lure oft
Beauty, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, and the quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon, (p. 85)
It is this lure of "Beauty" which has prompted Robert to agree to 103
sail around the world with his mother’s brother, Captain Lick Scott,
who has promised exotic voyages to India, Australia, South America,
and South Africa.
Andrew, however, is skeptical of Robert’s "day-dreaming" and
mocks his poetic yearning for the romance of the sea. "I suppose it’s
that year in college gave you a liking for that kind of stuff," he
taunts, "I’m darn glad I stopped at High School, or maybe I’d be
crazy too." (p. 82)
Although Andrew is admittedly "wedded to the soil" and "as much
a product of it as an ear of corn is," he does recognize that a voyage
to sea is essential for Robert's welfare. "I know how you need this
sea trip," he confesses, "to make a new man of you," (p. 84) Reluct
antly, he agrees that it is best for Robert to set sail as soon as
possible. As Andrew leaves, he facetiously warns his younger brother
not to say anything to his Uncle Lick about "fainting spells" while
on the ship or "he’ll likely chuck you overboard for a Jonah." (p. 86)
Once again, it appears, O'Neill is to retell his favorite tale
that the true peace of nature and of the mystical universe begins a
thousand miles away from the nearest land and that only the most
sensitive, poetic, souls are summoned for the voyage.
But Ruth enters hurriedly from the fields in search of Robert and
the action of the play takes an abrupt turn from what may have been anticipated as another mystic tale of the religious insight which God
imparts to those who choose to follow the sea and to be smitten by the storm of spiritual doubt which lies ahead in the ambivalent cosmic universe. 104
She is a "healthy, blonde, out-of-door" girl of twenty, with a
rather graceful, slender figure "in a simple white dress." Her face,
though round, is "undeniably pretty;" and her small features are marked
by a "certain strength—an underlying, stubborn fixity of purpose
hidden in the frankly-appealing charm of her fresh youthfulness."
(p. 87)
Perching on the snake-fence beside Robert, Ruth, "tenderly play
ful," begins to tease and torment. "It’s really a shame that you're
going," she sobs mockingly, "just at this time, in spring, when every
thing is getting so nice." (p. 88)
When Robert reminds her that she still has Andy to comfort her,
Ruth "indignantly" turns away and moodily responds;
I oughtn't to talk that way when I know going's the best thing for you. You're bound to find all sorts of opportunities to get on, your father says. But it seems such a shame. And it's mean of you to think that any of us would forget you so easily. (pp. 88-89)
Although Robert doubts that Ruth will understand his reasons for leaving the farm and going to sea, he attempts to explain to her the strange fascination which the life of a sailor holds for him. It all began, he says, when he was a "sickly" child. His mother would fix his meals and place him in a window to gaze out on the rolling hills and the calm sea. "Those were the only happy moments of my life," he muses, "dreaming there at the window." (pp. 89-90)
Gradually, Robert came to believe that "all the wonders of the world happened on the other side of those hills" and that the horizon was "the home of the good fairies who performed beautiful miracles."
That is why he admits that he's going to sea now; "I can still hear 105
them calling. The horizon is as far away and as luring as ever."
(p. 90)
As Ruth listens to Robert’s mystic confession of faith in the
illusory nature of the "fairies" and the "horizon" she appears to be
"charmed by his low, musical voice" telling the dreams of his child
hood, Both she and the reader, however, are unaware that Robert is
also suggesting the true spiritual nature of his voyage when he
unconsciously confesses thats
I believed in fairies then. (With a smile) Perhaps I still do believe in them. Anyway, in those days they were real enough, and sometimes I could actually hear them calling to me to come out and play with them, dance with them down the road in the dusk in a game of hide-an-seek to find out where the sun (i.e., read son) was hiding himself. They sang their little songs to me, songs that told of all the wonderful things they had in their home on the other side of the hills; and they promised to show me all of them, if I’d only come, come*, (p, 90)
At this point Robert realizes that his arms are around Ruth and that her head is resting on his shoulder. As he looks into her eyes
"searchingly" he confesses his true feelings and softly whispers,
"I love you." It is the "revelation" of his love for the "fairies" and the "horizon," he admits, which has opened his own.eyes "to the love of others." (p. 9l)
A "spellbound" Ruth also confesses her true feelings and admits that it is really Robert whom she has always loved:
You stupid thing'. I’ve loved you right along, but you never seemed to want to go any place with me. You were always reading an old book and not paying any attention to me. I was too proud to let you see I cared because I thought the year you had away to college had made you stuck-up, and you thought yourself too educated to waste any time on me, (She suddenly throws her arms about his 106
neck) Oh, Roh*. Don’t go away'. Please! You musn't, now! You can’t! I won’t let you! It’d break my---- my heart! You’ll tell them you can't go on account of me, won’t you? You can't go now! You can't! (pp. 91-92)
This confession of love is enough to reverse Robert's decision to
take a long three-year voyage with his uncle, and he agrees to remain
on the farm with Ruth. "I won't go, Ruth," he says, "I promise you.
There! Don't cry!" (p, 92)
Robert's decision, however, is not of his own making. It comes,
in fact, from Ruth's reminder that she is unable to accompany him be
cause of her invalid mother. She no sooner tells Robert that she
loves him than she begins to exert her possessive instinct. Cling ing to him "imploringly," Ruth begs Robert to remain with her on the farm "where it's natural and we know things." (p. 92)
This appeal, and Ruth's reminder that Robert has confessed his love for her, appear to be the paramount reasons why the would-be seafarer hastens his decision and sways in his resolve to venture to sea. Although Robert seeks to justify his change of mind by seeing in
Ruth the answer to his "dream" of the beckoning horizon, and speaks of their love with "happy hopefulness," the tone of his voice betrays
"the conflict going on within him":
Perhaps after all Andy was right---- righter than he knew---- when he said I could find all the things I was seeking for here at home on the farm. I think love must have been the secret—-the secret that called to me from over the world's rim—the secret beyond every horizon; and when I did not come, it came to me. Oh, Ruth, our love is sweeter than any distant dream! Come, we'll go and tell them at once. (p. 92)
But Ruth is "dismayed" by Robert's suggestion that they should inform his family what has happened. "Oh, no," she protests, "don't Rob, not 107
’•til after I’ve gone. There'd be bound to be such a scene with them all together." It is only with "reluctance" that Robert agrees to depart alone to relay his decision to Andrew and to his parents, (p. 92)
Before he departs, however, Robert impulsively takes a last look at the horizon and discovers to his "surprise" that the "first star" of the evening has appeared. "Our star'." he exclaims as he bends down and kisses Ruth tenderly. But Ruth has already begun to move away and appears to be more interested in returning home than in lingering in the fields to look at what is apparently their "lucky" star rising.
"Gome, Rob," she urges, "we'll be late for supper!" (p. 93)
Robert shakes his head impatiently, as though "he were throwing off some disturbing thought," and runs after Ruth. As they exit, hold ing hands and laughing like innocent school children in the throes of a first love, the pale blue horizon "ominously" begins to fade and in its place rises a "dying sunset" which casts a dark "shadow" upon the gnarled apple tree outlined in silhouette against the distant hills.
(p. 93)
As night closes in on what has once appeared to be an earthly paradise one can almost hear the horizon beckon to Ruth and Robert, as it also beckoned to Adam and Eve. "What is this that thou hast done?"16
The action of the play is swift and solemn from this point on.
It is Andrew who now seeks to escape, once he "has discovered that Ruth does not love him. He attempts to justify his abrupt decision to leave the farm by suggesting to his parents that he "hates the farm and every inch of ground in it." "I'm sick of digging in the dirt," 108
he says, "and sweating in the sun like a slave without getting a word of thanks for it." (p. 108)
To Robert, however, Andrew confesses his true reason for wanting to "flee" the farms
I’d go crazy here, bein' reminded every second of the day what a fool I’d made of myself. I’ve got to get away and try to forget, if I can. I’d hate the farm if I stayed, hate it for bringin’ things back, I couldn't take interest in the work any more, work with no purpose to it. Can’t you see what a hell it’d be? (p. Ill)
In spite of his father's curse to "go to hell if you want to leave,"
Andrew agrees to ship with his uncle in Robert’s place. Old James
Mayo, the father, dies soon after from disappointment, and the farm, left in the irresolute .hands of Robert, slowly falls into decay and poverty, (p. 108)
While the underlying note of Act One is the tragedy of three people who suffer because they deny their own nature,.it is apparent that O'Neill devotes the closing scene to the inherent feelings of guilt and despair which the young dreamer and idealist Robert experi ences as a result of his compromise with Ruth.
Captain Scott signals the inner turmoil and frustration which is now beginning to distort Robert’s sympathetic character as a result of his "lost aspiration" when he notes how "half dead *n' alive" he appears to be. (p. 109) But Captain Scott attributes Robert's apparent suffering to "Love!" "I'm ashamed of you, Robert," he says scornfully, "to go lettin* a little huggin’ and kissin' in the dark spile your chances to make a man out o'yourself. It ain't common sense---- no siree, it ain’t-----not by a hell of a sight’." (p. 102) 109
Robert expresses his suffering and despair much more succinctly, however, as he accepts the burden of "guilt" for what he terms this
"senseless and tragic" affair with Ruth:
God! It’s horrible! I feel so guilty---- to think that I should be the cause of (Andrew's) suffering, after we've been such pals all our lives. If I could have foreseen what'd happen, I swear to you I'd have never said a word to Ruth. I swear I wouldn't, (He looks about him wildly, in a frenzy of rebellion, as if his vengeance were seeking the responsible fate)- Why did this have to happen to us? It's damnable! (pp. 109-110)
In this passage O'Neill appears to cast himself as an "Old Testament
Man," a prophet, that is, who preaches that feelings of guilt give rise inevitably to suffering. Like his biblical predecessors, par ticularly Jeremiah and Isaiah, O'Neill is at odds with himself to ex plain the exact nature of suffering and apparently sees in his juxtaposition of Robert's guilt and suffering the biblical notion that despair and pain are the instruments of chastisement and expiation which result in a reconciliation of man and God.
This subtle biblical motif, and the leitmotif of the "sin" of
Adam and Eve, provide the impetus for what O'Neill invites the reader to witness in the final two acts of the play as the resurrection or atonement of the fallen sinner, Robert.
The almost circular movement from sin to resurrection is detected in Act Two as O'Neill reinforces his declaration of the necessity of suffering as atonement by revealing Robert and Ruth in a barren life.
Three years have elapsed since Act One, and in those few years
Robert's management of the farm has left the family destitute. After only one month of marriage Ruth has admitted that she really is in love with Andrew. Although Ruth and Robert have been blessed with the 110
birth of a beautiful little girl, Mary, neither sees any meaning in
life now, and neither wishes to continue living together.
In contrast to the "clean, well-kept" sitting room of the Mayo
farmhouse which is described in Act One, a room which suggests the
"orderly comfort of a simple, hard-earned prosperity enjoyed and main
tained by the family as a unit," (p. 94) the atmosphere of the present
household suggests that "all industry has gone to seed," (p. 112)
It is mid-day on a hot, sun-baked fall afternoon and the "sultry,
scorching heat" appears to have penetrated indoors, causing even "in
animate objects to wear an aspect of despondent exhaustion." (p. 112)
Soiled white curtains cover the windows, a patched screen door hangs
at the rear of the house, the chairs appear shabby from lack of paint,
and the tables are spotted and askew.
The despondency of the situation is also mirrored in the drastic
alteration of appearance in both Robert and Ruth. She has "aged ap
preciably," and her face has "lost its youth and freshness." There is
a trace in her expression of "something hard and spiteful." (p. 116)
He, too, has aged, and the three years have "accentuated the weakness
of his mouth and chin." His shoulders are now "stooped as if under too great a burden," and his lips are "drawn down at the comers" to give him a "hopeless, resigned expression." (p, 119)
Now that their romantic illusions of beauty, peace, and harmony have faded into a coarse, stale, and sterile reality of an austere marriage based on mistrust, Ruth and Robert begin to despise each other and to abandon the paradisiacal portrait of life which they thought would be theirs as part of the covenant of love agreed to under the I 111
apple tree in Act One.
Robert "curses" the hills which he thought had once promised
freedom and admits that he has "grown to hate the sight of them."
"They're like the walls of a narrow prison," he confesses, "shutting
me in from all the wonder of life." His only desire is to "put the
whole rim of the world" between himself and "those hills, and be able
to breathe freely once more." (p. 126)
In her agony and despair, Ruth blames Robert's "cheap, silly
poetry talk" for the abject failure of their marriage, "If I could
have seen how you were in your true self," she admits, "like you are
now—-I’d have killed myself before I’d have married you." (p. 127)
Her only remaining hope of re-capturing the lost dream of beauty and
innocence which was promised initially by Robert is the return of
Andrew, who now appears to Ruth "ten times the man" her husband is
"or ever could be." (p, 126)
The anticipated visit by Andrew, however, only sharpens the con
flict which exists between Ruth and Robert. It appears that some of
Robert's "wanderlust" has been transferred to Andrew, but with it he has also acquired a hardened, materialistic outlook on life. His love of the soil has given way to a love of what the soil might bring---- untold wealth. The old "easy-going" good nature which was evident in
Act One has been partly lost in a "breezy, business-like briskness," which is particularly noticeable in his "authoritative" note of speech; as though he were accustomed to "giving orders and having them obeyed" as a matter of course, (p. 130)
Like the younger, more romantic Robert of Act One who saw the sea as "adventure" and "restless energy." Andrew wants to "get on" and 112
to "get in on something big" before he dies. He even echoes Robert’s
earlier sentiments that a man who is called to sea would be a "damn
fool" if he didn’t obey the urge to go:
I tell you, I feel ripe for bigger things than settling down here. The trip did that for me, anyway. It showed me the world is a larger proposition than ever I thought it was in the old days. I couldn't be content any more stuck here like a fly in molasses. It all seems trifling, somehow. You ought to be able to understand what I feel. It was an act of Providence I did go. It opened my eyes to how I'd been fooling myself, (pp. 137-138)
While it is obvious to Robert that Andrew's love for Ruth has now
vanished in favor of the stronger impulse of personal wealth, he
believes that they should be given an opportunity to re-kindle any
feelings that may still exist between them. It is significant that he chooses to leave them alone for their meeting because it was under
similar conditions that Ruth first seduced Robert and prompted him to deny his vision of the "fairies" and the "horizon."
O'Neill is very careful to point out the similarities between
Ruth's initial meeting with Robert and her reunion with Andrew. Both encounters occur on days which are "hot" and "cloudless." In the dis tance the "sea" can be seen. The top of the hill, like the previous country road, "slopes downward slightly to the left." Instead of an apple tree, however, a large "oak tree" surrounded by a "boulder" rests in the center of the knoll, (p. 129)
Ruth, as she appears in Act One, is dressed in "white." It is apparent that she has been "fixing up." She looks pretty, "flushed and full of life." The similarity of her Eve-like seduction of Robert in the previous act is also noted as she jumps "lightly on top of the 113
rock" next to Andrew and begins to tempt him with overtures of their
past affair.
"It’ll be like old times," she tells Andrew as she beckons him
to move closer to her. "I feel so free I’d like to have wings and fly
over the sea," Ruth continues, "but you're a man and can't know how
awful and stupid it is---- cooking and washing dishes all the time."
(p. 136)
But Andrew senses that Ruth is "tempting" him and insists that
she move away, which prompts her to respond«
Oh, I wish I could tell if you're lying or not'. Are you sure---- will you swear—-that you aren't leaving because---- it isn't the reason-----(She lowers her eyes and half turns away from him) You'd think I was trying to poison you. (pp. 136-137)
Hoping to calm the "flush of anger" which comes over Ruth's face when he admits that he doesn't know "what" she is talking about and that there is nothing to "lie for," Andrew promises, just as Robert promised under similar circumstances, to "return" in a few years and "settle down." (p. 138)
Ruth is defeated. As she listens to Andrew's dream of sailing across the sea to explore new horizons and to "go down to Buenos Aires to get in the grain business," Ruth realizes that Andrew has not come to rescue her from a life of bitterness and despair, (p. 138)
Even though her "hope is crushed," Ruth resorts to the same logic which has prompted Robert to alter his plans of sailing away and seeks to persuade Andrew to change his mind and stay with hers
Oh, Andy, you can't go'. You can't. Why we've all thought---- we've all been hoping and praying you was coming home to stay, to settle down on the farm 114
and see to things, You musn't go'. Think of how your Ma’11 take on if you go---- and how the farm’ll he ruined if you leave it to Roh to look after. You can see that, (pp. 137-138)
It is obvious, however, that Andrew will not be as easily dis
suaded as Robert had been. He reminds Ruth that she of "all people"
should be able to understand why he must leave:
I don’t blame you, Ruth, feeling embarrassed having me around again, after the way I played the dumb fool about going away last time. I know I oughtn't to talk about such foolishness to you. Still I figure it’s better to get it out of my system so's we three can be together same’s years ago, and not be worried thinking one of us might have the wrong notion, (p, 139)
But the ultimate blow comes when Andrew confesses that he doesn’t want Ruth "to think once a fool always a fool" and to be "upset all the time on my fool account." "It seems," he says, "that you'd al ways been my sister." (p. 139)
Ruth withdraws completely and, laughing hysterically, hides her face in her hands. "For God's sake," she mutters, "won't you please stop talkingl" (p. 139) Andrew leaves immediately to join Captain
Scott, who has booked passage for both of them on the El Faso tramp steamer which is sailing for Argentina. Ruth is left to the bitter ness of having loved twice without reciprocation.
As the curtain falls on Act Two, Ruth is once again on her way home to fix dinner, but this time her sorrow is not mirrored in a
"falling star" but in the "sun," which appears to "hurt her eyes" and
"fixes" them on the ground (p. 143); just as Eve was driven from the Garden of Eden by a "flaming sword" and "bowed her head" in shame 17 as punishment for the sin of having tempted Adam. 115
Any discussion of Act Two as a declaration of the suffering and
slow deterioration of the "fallen" as a result of the sin which is
committed by Ruth and Robert's felicity would be incomplete without
some mention of the role which Kate Mayo, Mrs. Atkins, and little
Mary play in the development of the religious theme.
Shortly after the marriage of Robert and Ruth, a marriage which
she has opposed, Mrs. Mayo appears to have "disintegrated," becoming
only a "weak mask wearing a helpless, doleful" expression of being
"constantly on the verge of comfortless tears." (p. 112)
In contrast to her former "refinement of movement and expression,"
(p. 94) Mrs, Mayo is now "without assertiveness" and easily prone to
irritation. O'Neill notes that whatever resemblance Robert has to his parents may be "traced" to her, and as he suffers one notes a corresponding despair embodied in his mother, (p. 95)
Her role in Act Two appears primarily that of "comforter" and
"confessor." (p. 113) Although she senses that Ruth and Robert are both "wicked," Mrs. Mayo excuses her son's apparent failure as both father and farmer as his "bad luck." (p. 114)
Mrs, Atkins, however, appears to be much more aware of the
"unnatural" relationship between Robert and Ruth, She attributes the change of "bad to worse" to Robert's "potterin' round and wastin' time doin' everything the wrong way." (p, 113) Her most significant ob servation is the suggestion that Robert's failure and the death of his father, James, is related to "God's punishment for blasphemin' and denyin' Him." (p. 114)
When-one considers O'Neill's relationship with his own father, who was also named James, and recalls the feelings of guilt and despair 116
X8 which he admits having had as a result of "mistrust" and "rejection,"
it is not difficult to imagine the author’s implied suggestion that
Robert's suffering is also a part of the responsibility that he must
bear for his father's death.
Although some critics are at a loss to explain the role which
little Mary plays in Beyond, the Horizon and see her .as merely a "pup
pet, a whimpering cry, whose scenes reveal the story's main weakness, 19 its chief instance of contrivance." a reminder that God's punishment 20 of Eve was to include her "bringing forth children in sorrow" who
would be a constant reminder of the sin of Eden is all that is needed to complete O'Neill's treatment of suffering in Act Two.
The child, whose name apparently is chosen by O'Neill to suggest the innocence of his beloved mother and the comforting nature of the biblical Mary Mother, is obviously Robert's only consolation in a life of despair and agony.
"If it wasn't for little Mary," he tells Ruth, "I'd chuck every thing up and walk down the road." (p. 126). It seems significant that
Robert only hopes and dreams of regaining his lost "horizon" while
Mary is alive to comfort him. Her untimely death at the conclusion of Act Two, like James Mayo's sudden death at the conclusion of Act
One, is sufficient to signal that here is another way-station along the road to redemption that Robert must pass in his journey to atone ment beyond the horizon.
Before proceeding to Robert's discovery of redemption beyond that dim horizon in Act Three, however, it might be well to re-consider how
O'Neill's pattern of suffering and despair demands ultimately to be construed in religious terms. 117
It cannot be repeated too often that O'Neill’s treatment of suf
fering in Act Two is related explicitly to the Adam and Eve motif and
that the deep spiritual struggle which he is attempting to depict stems
from an allegiance to that biblical parable. One is reminded, for
example, that Robert’s tilling the "unrewarding" ground of that "cursed
farm" (p. 122) with "streaks of sweat smudging the layer of dust on
his cheeks" (p. 119) is reminscient of God’s punishment of Adam, who
was to "sweat in the face" until he "returned to the ground" from which 21 he was taken as "dust."
Nor should one fail to see in Ruth, who apparently wears the stain
of the fallen Eve on her "soiled apron." (p. 116) a reminder of the
Hebraic conception of sin; which O’Neill is here content to character ize simply as weakness In the face of temptation.
Concentrating all of his attention upon the motif of suffering in the play, O'Neill allows Ruth to be punished by living a "hell" on earth. Indeed, her own suggestion that the Mayo household, particu larly at dinner time, is "like a furnace" (p, 116) recalls the biblical
"furnace of Fire" promised by God to those who sin by eating of the 22 "tree of knowledge of good and evil."
There can be little doubt that Act Two, even without these subtle biblical overtones, is O'Neill’s preparatory exploration of suffering as atonement for individual sin and that what he is suggest ing is that miraculous redemption cannot be magically and automatically achieved without first passing through a state of acute despair, dis appointment, and dejection.
The irony of such a journey, however, is that Robert achieves pre cisely what the serpent promised Adam and Eve they would receive if 118
they disobeyed God’s commandment and ate of the forbidden fruit: his
eyes are "opened" to the wonders of God’s saving grace, he achieves
a state of "godliness," and in his suffering he is finally able to 23 distinguish between "good and evil."
After all, it is only when Robert's idealism and romantic quest
for escape from temporal reality have given way to the moral, ethical, and theological struggles posed by feelings of guilt that he is able to exercise his religious nature and seek solace in the metaphysical
comfort of God's mystical universe. And it is only when he realizes that his transgression and guilt have been bought with the crime of sinful love and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering that
Robert comes to understand the necessity of inexorable punishment as it is expressed in biblical text: "He striketh but his hands do 24 heal."¿
It should also be pointed out that the fall of Robert, like the fall of Adam, is essential if O'Neill is to affirm that man's spiritual victories are won with God's help, and in Hell's despite. This is precisely what St. Paul deals with in his illustration of the necessity of sin to point the way to forgiveness and redemption. "Shall we continue to sin," he asks, "that grace may abound?" And he answers,
"God forbid." (Romans, 6:1)
But St. Paul had previously observed that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." (Romans, 5>20) Allied to this view is the doctrine of the felix culpa, the happy fault, which regards the fall of man as "fortunate" because, if he had not fallen, he would never have known the inestimable benefits of redemption. 119
It is, of course, an old Catholic doctrine, and its elaboration
may be seen in Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy. And
if sin may appear to abound more than grace in O'Neill, and the fall
appear more often unhappy than happy, it must be borne in mind that
O'Neill, like Milton and Dante, is not concerned with worldly criteria.
So, if there is spiritual growth in Beyond the Horizon, however
painfully attained (and spiritual growth is impossible of attainment
without pain), grace may be said to "much more abound," and the fall
may be said to have been "fortunate" though a worldly appraisal might
point to a different view.
Perhaps the furthest penetration of the religious implication of
the fortunate fall is contained in a devotional poem of the fifteenth
century; a poem which, incidentially, the Catholic church includes
in its liturgy and which O'Neill no doubt learned as a child at several
Catholic schools.
The poem refers to the fall of Adam as ultimately a fortunate occurrence on the ground that otherwise there would have been no need for the incarnation of Christ, and mankind would consequently never have enjoyed all the benefits of His coming. If Adam had not eaten the forbidden apple and been made to suffer for his disobedience, it says, then Our Lady would never have become Queen of Heaven. There fore, mankind should bless the day that Eve tempted Adam with the apple and give thanks to God. The poem is sufficiently brief as it is noted in the "Sloane MS." to warrant its full recital here and to point out that in the fifteenth century it was regarded as a "hymn" of faith to those whose anguish of the flesh yearned for compassion from Christ: 120
Adam lay I-bowndyn, bowndyn in a bond fowre powsand synter powt he not to long; And al was for an appil, an appil pat he tok, As clerkis fyndyn wretyn in here book.
Ne hadde pe appil take ben, pe appil taken ben, ne hadde neuer our Lady a ben heuene qwen; Blyssid be pe tyme pat appil take was, Per-fore we mown syngyn, *deo gracias’,25
When this felix culpa interpretation is applied to Robert's fall in
Beyond the Horizon it demands a much more sympathetic treatment of
Ruth, who is usually cast as the "possessive female seeking to domin- 26 ate, even to suffocate" the poetic nature of her adventurous hus
band. If she is to be condemned at all, it should be for the sin of
pride; though in many ways this sin, as the Bible instructs, is re
lated to attempts to purify oneself, even as pride was the sin of the fallen angels.
Briefly, then, Act Two is concerned with the spiritual affir mation of man's nobility in the face of inevitable suffering and death. In contrast to the imperturbable serenity of the "ideal" world in Act One, it concentrates on the intrinsic strife and tension of earthly existence and serves as a spiritual perspective from which to judge the triumph over the ills of the body which is to be treated in
Act Three.
At the beginning of Act Three five more years have elapsed. It is early morning on a day toward the end of October, The atmosphere of the Mayo farmhouse, in contrast with that of former years, is one of an "habitual poverty too hopelessly resigned to be any longer ashamed or even conscious of itself." An air of "decay and dissolution" hangs over what has once been a "clean and well-kept sitting room." (p. 144) 121
Both Ruth and Robert have aged horribly. She, still dressed in
mourning for Mary and Mrs. Mayo, who has recently died, now speaks in
a "low" and "monotonous" voice; her pale "deeply-lined" face betrays
the "stony lack of expression" of one to whom "nothing more can ever
happen," whose capacity for emotion "has been exhausted." The negli
gent disorder of her dress, the slovenly arrangement of her hair, now
"streaked with gray," and her muddied shoes give full evidence of "the
apathy in which she lives." (p. 144)
He, dressed in the same corduroy pants, flannel shirt, and
slippers of Act Two, now appears with long hair, unkempt face, and
emaciated body. There are "bright patches of crimson" over his cheek
bones and his "eyes are burning with fever." (p. 145) It is obvious
that during Andrew's absence in the Argentine, Robert has fallen victim
to tuberculosis.
And yet in comparison to Ruth, who seems to have weakened
considerably through the ordeal of personal suffering and despair,
Robert is admittedly "much better” than he has felt "in ages." (p. 145)
He even appears to have regained some, of the romantic nature of his earlier youth. Aglow with the eternal optimism of the consumptive, he still clings to his idealism:
Do you know what I've been dreaming back there in the dark, Ruth? I was planning our future when I get well. (Her expression does not change. His voice takes on a note of eagerness) After all, why shouldn't we have a future? We're young yet. If we can only shake off the curse of this farm'. It's the farm that's ruined our lives, damn it'. We'll go where people live instead of stagnating, and start all over again. I'll borrow money from Andrew to give us a good start in the city, I won't be the failure there that I've been here, Ruth. You won't need to be ashamed of me there. (p. 149) 122
Although Ruth is at first skeptical and then indifferent, there is
something "frightening" in the tone of Robert’s voice which convinces
her to go with him. Soothing Robert in "dull tones," but very aware
of the "wild-like" look in his eyes, she agrees to go to the city
"as soon as you’re well again, Robert. Honest I will, Rob, I promise."
(p. 149)
Robert, stimulated by the excitement of the moment, is at once
"flushed and happy," There is definite spiritual illumination in the
revelation of the glorious struggle which now accounts for his heroism:
We’ll make a new start, Ruth---- just you and I. Life owes us some happiness after what we’ve been through. It must! Otherwise our suffering would be meaning less---- and that is unthinkable. Oh, if you knew how glorious it feels to have something to look forward to! Can’t you feel the thrill of it, too---- the vision of a new life opening up after all the horrible years? (p, 150)
"All our suffering," he continues in a paraphrase of the biblical
"revelation" which Job cites as a spiritual truth about despair and anguish, "has been a test through which we had to pass to prove our
selves worthy of a finer realization. (Exultingly) And we did pass through it! It hasn't broken us'." (p. I50)
This confession is decisive in the religious motif of the play and its function is to resolve the action. It turns the scales in the great debate concerning Robert as a romantic "heretic" to the last,27 unconvinced, impenitent, unredeemed, and suggests that modem critics have, at best, an imperfect understanding of the play's inherently religious dilemma.
What Robert is confessing chiefly is God’s magnitude and severity; there could be no salvation without that. The confession is the first 123
step in Robert's eventual reconciliation with God; and perhaps with
Ruth, from whom there has been a complete estrangement. That this
initial admission of suffering entails a corresponding element of
redemption and atonement is implicit in O'Neill's description of Robert
following the confession.
Moving quickly to the window, from which he has often imagined
the "miracles" of the "fairies" as they sang to him, Robert peers out
and speaks in a mournful voice:
I'm going to see the sun rise. It's an augury of good fortune. No sun yet. It isn't time. All I can see is the black rim of the damned hills out lined against a creeping grayness. (He makes a pitiful attempt to smile) That's not a very happy augury, is it? But the sun'll come---- soon. (pp. 150-151)
In this particular passage O'Neill appears to be suggesting that, in
a spiritual sense, the black rim of the hills will disappear for
Robert only when the grayness of death has finally crept over them.
His subtle use of the double meaning of "sun," both as an incandescent
gaseous body which sits in the center of the solar system and as Jesus
Christ who is the central figure in the theological scheme of
resurrection and redemption, indicates that Robert is almost spiritually
suited for the ascension,
Although some critics regard Robert's confession as O'Neill's own personal testament of an acceptance of faith based on "false idealism,"
it is quite evident in his conversation with Andrew, who has returned
from Argentina with a tuberculosis specialist only to learn that
Robert is dying, that the romantic notions of Robert's youth have
faded before a truer revelation and that suffering has provided a
spiritual enlightenment for his present life. 12b
He inquires of Andrew, who has lost most of his money gambling
and speculating in wheat and who now appears "hardened" and "ruth
lessly cunning," what he has been doing in the intervening years. On
discovering that his brother has been led "astray" by his ruthless
tactics, Robert says:
I’ve been wondering what the great change was in you. You---- a farmer---- to gamble in a wheat pit with scraps of paper. There’s a spiritual significance in that picture, Andy. I'm a failure, and Ruth's another---- but we can both justly lay some blame for our stumbling on God, But you're the deepest-dyed failure of the three. Your gambling with the thing you loved to create proves how far astray you've gone. So you'll be punished. You'll have to suffer to win back---- , (pp. 161-162)
Like Christ before Pilate, however, Robert cannot pursue his accusation
against Andrew. Like Christ blessed his enemies, Robert blesses
Andrew and asks that he take care of Ruth:
I want you to promise me to do one thing, Andy, after---- . Remember, Andy, Ruth has suffered double her share. Only through suffering, Andy, will you---- awaken. Listen. You must marry Ruth---- afterwards. Now that I'm sure what's happening I can say Kismet to it with all my heart. It was only the silly uncertainty that hurt. (pp. 160- 161)
There is a hint that Robert's benedictory remarks have influenced his spiritually poverty-striken brother. As Robert retires to his room to await the "sunrise," Andrew confesses to Ruth that what Robert had to say "had truth" in it---- "even if he did talk them way up in the air, like he always sees things." (p. 163)
But Ruth remains "dully confused" and "unaware" that what Robert has promised in his spiritual dialectic of suffering and atoning death is the power of God to provide salvation and redemption to all who believe in His power of saving grace. "He was talking wild," she 125
says, "like he used to---- only this time it sounded-----unnatural."
(p. I63) At the same time, she can see no reason why Andrew should
not "lie" to Robert and promise that he will marry her after Robert’s
death:
I wouldn’t know how to feel love, even if I tried, any more, but you can promise---- so it’ll ease his mind---- and not mean anything. He wouldn’t believe me. (p. I65)
But it is apparent that Andrew has finally discovered the meaning of
Robert’s suffering and that he is willing to sacrifice his own des
pair so that his brother may enjoy one final moment of happiness.
With conviction he says to Ruth:
What? There isn’t a thing on God's green earth I wouldn't have done to keep trouble away from him. And I have to be the very one---- it's damnable'. How am I going to face him again? What can I say to him now? He asked me to promise---- what am I going to do? Lie to him now---- when he's dying? No'. It's you who'll have to do the lying, since it must be done. You've got a chance now to undo some of all the suffering you've brought on Rob. Go in to him! Tell him you never loved me---- it was all a mistake. Tell him you only said so because you were mad and didn't know what you were saying! Tell him something, anything, that'll bring him peace! You've got to make him believe you, do you hear? You've got to---- now---- hurry----- you never know when it may be too late. For God's sake, Ruth! Don't you see you owe it to him? You'll never forgive yourself if you don't, (p. 165)
Before Ruth can perform her Samaritan act of mercy, however, Robert creeps away from the house to die on the crest of the hill, looking at his beloved horizon. "Let's hope to God---- " (p. 166) Andrew exclaims as both he and Ruth rush after him.
The final scenic image of the play includes both the heavenly light of Act One and the earthly darkness of Act Two. In the "line 126
of flame" on the horizon at the beginning of the play (p. 8l) and the "thin, quivering line of flame" spreading slowly over the horizon rim of "the dark hills" at the conclusion of the play (p. 166) one notes a second suggestion of the "flaming sword" placed by God at 29 the east of Eden to "keep the way of the tree of life." y
Robert staggers weakly in and stumbles into a ditch alongside a section of the country roadside. The roadside is steeped in the
"grayness" of the dawn, shadowy and vague. The field in the fore ground has a "wild uncultivated appearance," as if it has remained
"fallow" since the preceding summer. Parts of the "snake-fence," which first appeared in Act One, surround the ditch and the apple tree, "now leafless and dead," (p. 166) rises from its center,
Andrew and Ruth arrive just in time to observe Robert’s "vision" shortly before his death and to hear his dying words. It is now that he reveals the truth that might have freed all of them if they had discovered it sooner. Holding Andrew’s hand, and pointing to the horizon, "his face radiant," Robert speaks in a voice which is "sud denly ringing with the happiness of hope":
I'm dying. I thought I'd try to end as I might have---- if I'd had the courage—-alone in a ditch by the open road---- watching the sun rise. The sun comes so slowly though. The doctor told me to go to far-off places---- and I'd be cured. He was right. That was always the cure for me. It's too late for this life---- but. You musn't feel sorry for me. Don’t you see I’m happy at last---- free-----free!-----freed from the farm---- free to wander on and on---- eternally! Look'. Isn't it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling to me to come. (Exultantly) And this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's a free beginning---- the start of my voyage! I've won to my trip---- the right of release---- beyond the horizon! Oh, you ought to be glad---- glad for my sake*, (pp. 167-168) 127
Robert wins his "release" at the climactic moment when "the sun’s
disc rises from the rim of the hills." Suddenly raising himself
with his remaining strength and pointing to the horizon, Robert finds
in his dying moment the Christian secret of suffering, the cruci
fixion that must precede the resurrection which is promised by the
sunrise:
Remember, Andy---- only through sacrifice-----the secret beyond there---- . The sun', (He remains with his eyes fixed on it for a moment. A rattling noise throbs from his throat. He mumbles) Remember! (And falls back and is still) (p. 168)
But the discovery is Robert’s alone and O’Neill’s final stage di
rections point with tragic clarity to the failure of his exultant
insight to enlighten either Andrew or Ruth,
She remains "silent" beside Robert’s body, gazing at Andrew
with the "sad humility of exhaustion," her mind already "sinking
back into that spent calm beyond the further troubling of any hope."
(p. I69) He, who has sinned equally perhaps by deserting the farm
and denying his roots, stares at Ruth for a moment, his "rage ebbing
away" until an expression of "deep pity gradually comes over his
face," and then speaks of Providence and futurity and the things
which lie beyond the human ken:
Forgive me, Ruth---- for his sake-----and I'll remember---- . I-—you--- we've both made a mess of things'. We must try to help each other---- and---- in time-----we'll come to know what's right---- And perhaps we---- . (pp. 168- 169)
It is apparent that Andrew's frantic plea for some sort of a new life
for Ruth and for himself is the tragic touch which concludes the play.
His failure to witness Robert's death as a glad self-immolation and 128
exultation of faith is just compensation for his religiously barren
life, which has been wasted in a futile search for wealth.
Unable to accept death as an affirmation of life, Andrew is
unable to discover the spiritual significance of his brother’s dying
words and the spiritual significance of the setting in which they
are uttered: "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness prepares the way of the Lord and makes straight in the desert a highway for 30 our God."^ There can, indeed, be no Christian faith worthy of the name (unless it be among the cherubim and seraphim) without this knowledge; and there can be no true redemption without it.
Beyond the Horizon is an exciting and important event in American drama. Not only did it win for O’Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes; more importantly, it signals the appearance of the serious play with a significant religious message at a time when the stage was cluttered with trivialities and indictments of moral and ethical decay.31 No greater injustice to Eugene O’Neill has been done than the attempt, so frequently made, to read this play as "the story of the ill-equipped trying to play the game of civilization without the password."3^ If anything, the work is a testament of faith which holds death as a release for those who have achieved a certain nobility, a certain dignity, and a certain transfiguring peace be cause of the agonies which they have endured.
It could well be said of O’Neill, as Andre Gide says of him self, that the idea of death and resurrection follows his thought as surely as the shadow of God follows man. Beyond the Horizon appears to be his declaration that the last enemy man must overcome if he is 129
ever to catch a glimpse of God. is death itself.
At the same time, this play of man as a wayward creature who
is never beyond the reach of God’s redeeming grace is prophetic of
a turn which O'Neill’s drama is about to take. Although the prophecy
is only hinted at in the moving statement of Robert's dream of "going
to the city where people live instead of stagnating," (p, 14-9) it is
apparent that O'Neill's religious perspective is to be directed to
ward an avenue of approach to God through the traditional institutions
of the human community and that in The Hairy Ape, written just two
years after Beyond the Horizon, he explores the social implications
of suffering.
Doubtless it is O'Neill's acute social consciousness, and his incomparably subtle analysis of it, in part, as a manifestation of
Robert's dream of a "better" life in the city, which makes it im perative for him to extend the biblical motif of suffering from the sea to the farm to the city; particularly at a time in American history when the link between God and man is apparently being broken by mechanization. The time, that is, when God is no more present and is not yet again present, the time when He may only be experienced negatively as a terrifying absence while man, as O'Neill suggests,
"bleeds and groans for Guggenheim" and "gives his life for Standard Oil."33 130
FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR
1. Eugene O'Neill, "Beyond the Horizon," The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1928), pp. 80-169,
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
2. Bonamy Dobree, "The Plays of Eugene O'Neill," The Southern Review, XI, December 1937» p. 439.
3. Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study, (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 289.
4. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959)» p. 101.
5. Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), p. 4l0.
6. Winther, O'Neill: A Critical Study, pp. 52-53.
7. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p, 336.
8. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Bowen, Curse of the Misbegotten, P. 309.
9. Eugene O'Neill, "Nocture," as cited in Ralph Sanborn and Barrett H. Clark, A Bibliography of the Works of Eugene O'Neill together with The Collected Poems of Eugene O'Neill, "(New York: Benjamin Blom Press, 1968), p. 132.
10. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Barrett H, Clark, Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1926), pp, 51-52.
11. Sophus Keith Winther, "Strindberg and O'Neill: A Study of Influence," Scandinavian Studies, XXXI, August 1959» p. 109.
12. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Representative American Plays,, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1928), p. 966.
13. Timo Tiusanen, O'Neill's Scenic Images, (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press",.. 1968),' p. 76.
14. Psalms, 121: 1-2,
15. Montrose J. Moses and John Mason Brown, The American Theatre as Seen jb£ It's Critics, (New York: W. W, Norton and Co., 193<"p. ¿¿77
16. Genesis, 3s 13. 131
1?. Ibid.. 3s 24.
18. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill; Son and Playwright, (Boston: Little, Brown and Go., 1968), pp. 132-134.
19. Ibid., p, 420.
20. Genesis, 3s 16.
21. Ibid., 3s 19.
22. Matthew, 13s 42.
23« Genesis, 3:5.
24. Job, 5: 17,
25. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century, (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 120.
26. Richard Dana Skinner, Eugene O'Neills A Poet's Quest (New York: Longmans and Green, 19357» P. 52.
27. "R. J.," "A Dramatist of Monomania," The Spectator (London) III, October 1925, p. 646.
28. Winther, O'Neills A Critical Study, p. 19.
29. Genesis, 3’ 24,
30. Matthew, 3s 3.
31. Beyond the Horizon did more than just establish America's kin ship with the stage of the modern world. Its remarkable suc cess doubtlessly encouraged other serious playwrights to follow O’Neill’s suggestion and follow the direction of his gaze to ward dealing with "spiritual realities" on the contemporary stage. The result is a succession of native drama which stands comparison with the finest Europe could offer at the same time: Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), George S. Kaufman and Flare Connelly’s Beggar on Horseback (1924), John Howard Lawson's Processional (1925)7 Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’ What Price Glory? (1924), Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (1928), and Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord (1927).
32. Thomas H, Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theatre, (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925), p. 105.
33. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sanborn and Clark, Bibliography and Collected Poems, p. 116. 132
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HAIRY APE: SUFFERING AS AN INDICTMENT
AGAINST SOCIAL INJUSTICE
Eugene O’Neill's early plays which deal with suffering as an
affirmation of faith, particularly Thirst, Fog, and Beyond the Horizon,
may he interpreted as continuing that tradition which goes hack through
Dickens to the eighteenth-century novel. They are stories which deal
with men who begin in estrangement from the human community and who
are brought ..through a series of mis-adventures to a meaningful
spiritual identity.
The central assumption of these stories is that man, as much as
ever the victim of misplaced allegiance, remains true to God and refuses
to bow to a succession of unbearable trials couched in anguish and
misery. Implicit in this interpretation is the idea that those who
remain true to God derive their peace and security in life from a
beauty, a widsom, and a truth that are given the "illusion" of reality,
just because they are not exhibited in the world as it actually exists.
But in O'Neill's later plays, those which follow the death of
his father and his mother in 1920 and 1922, there is a strange trans
formation of the value of suffering to the human world. Now, instead
of being identified with obedience to God's law, suffering is seen as an indictment against social injustice. The choice now appears to be
between evading those religious imperatives which teach that it is
Heaven alone which should be the field of man's aspiration, and ful
filling God's mission on Earth, where man is born and has to live.
Thus, in a significant journal note of 1922, O'Neill signals 133
his disappointment in the essentially Christian theology which has
been so pervasive in Thirst, Fog, and Beyond the Horizon, and embraces
the precise sociological commentary which the naturalistic movement
had generally followed in nineteenth-century literature:
The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it—the death of the Old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new One for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with.l
This apparent repudiation of a belief in God has been sufficient to
fashion the contemporary view that O'Neill’s drama after Beyond the
Horizon is "unable to return to religious assumptions out of which
a belief in the future had originally sprung" and that it is "but
natural, therefore, that he turn to the kind of skeptical reassurance- 2 in-chaos which had sustained the Classical Age,"
And yet to make this claim for O’Neill seems only to obfuscate
matters. For, if he describes the problem of modern man after Beyond
the Horizon as one arising out of his skepticism, his most conscious
concern is an exploration of the religious implications inherent in
contemporary society. His judgment of the urban, technological,
industrial, and bureaucratic world without spiritual values is unequivocal: "Man cannot hope to achieve salvation until he renounces all worldly materialism, accepts the defeat which his dream implies, 3 and returns to the spiritual faith of his fathers."
What O'Neill suggests in place of the private spiritual universe promised to those who suffer in obedience to God's divine law is a re-organization of mankind in terms of social equality. Once life has been emptied of meaning by the death or the banishment of God, 134
as illustrated in Thirst, Fog, and Beyond the Horizon, the only
recourse for man is rigorously to organize society into some semblance
of meaning, And, all things being permissible, there will be an
absolute settlement of human destiny in a purely social context.
But the perplexing flaw in O'Neill’s strategem is that there
will, of course, be nothing to check the abuses of those self-appointed
few who do the organizing---- so that in the utopia of social harmony
the equality of the multitude will be, in reality, the equality of
slaves. And here it is that O’Neill suggests the role which suffering
is to play in a social context in which man finds himself, having
sundered any linkage between himself and God.
The central principle of suffering in this movement of O'Neill's
career acknowledges man’s relevance, not just to himself and to
others, but to the universe. Suffering is a prescient symbol of what
O’Neill likes to term "the missing thread." That is to say, suffering re-affirms man’s dependence upon God as "a part of the fabric of
Life" and is literally "the tie that binds all men’s understanding 4 of one another."
It is only natural that O’Neill's earlier treatment of suffering as individual retribution and atonement should extend itself from the dialogue between man and God to the relations between man and his society; and that having achieved redemption in the sphere of religion he should seek redemption in the human polity. This is, indeed, what he suggests when he relates that "society must humanize the conscious ness of its humblest members to be saved at all."5
In O’Neill's view, it is essential that the kingdom of God be brought down to earth and that man assume the burden of a kind of 135
inverted Messianism, pointing out social injustice and announcing
the dawn of a new age of social reform. It is not surprising, there
fore, that O'Neill should adopt the tactics of the social critic and
resort to an evaluation of society which appears to be "obsessed"
with purely materialistic values and which remains unaware of "the z particular discount we moderns have to pay for the loan of life."
It is toward this conclusion that O’Neill's plays press inexorably
after Beyond the Horizon; and it is this conclusion which he presents
with merciless clarity for the first time in The Hairy Ape, written
at a time when O'Neill is perplexed not only by the death of his parents but also by the death of his "dream" for a providentially 7 structured natural law.
The genesis of the short story from which The Hairy Ape is
developed is noted by O'Neill in the "Wilderness" edition of the play:
It ms at Jimmy-the-Priests that I knew Driscoll, a Liverpool Irishman who was a stoker on a trans atlantic liner. Shortly afterwards I learned that he had committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean. Why? The search for an explanation of why Driscoll, proud of his animal superiority and in complete harmony with his limited conception of the universe, should kill himself provided the germ of the idea for The Hairy Ape.8
What emerges, however, from the dramatization of this incident is less an explanation of the tragic despair which leads Driscoll to suicide than it is an occasion to focus attention on the spiritual disorientation of man and to attribute that disorientation to man's denial of an order of "presence" which transcends the social and empirical dimensions of life. 136
Thus, in discussing the play four years after its initial pro
duction, O’Neill concedes that Yank, the prototype of Driscoll, is
"more a symbol of man who has lost his old harmony with nature, the
harmony which he used to have as an animal and has not yet acquired in a spiritual way,"^ than it is a treatment of the human dilemma.
"The subject here," O’Neill suggests, "is the same ancient one
that always was and always will be the subject of drama, and that is
man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with
the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt ’to
belong,
And yet in another sense, The Hairy Ape also suggests a continuation
of O’Neill’s own feelings of frustration and despair as he related them
in "Shut In," a poem published in the New London Telegraph on September
1, 1911, thats
I know how the beast of the desert feels As the steel bars shut him in, I know how he fights a superior force With never a chance to win, How he paces across his narrow cage As he drags his life in fruitless rage---- For I, too, am shut in... Bound by a chain of circumstances To a life that knows no peace; Fettered more closely than bird or beast, By duties that never cease; Closely the bars of my cage are set, Strong to withstand my wild regret---- And no hope of release.T1
It is apparent that no one understands better than O’Neill that the prison of frustration, despair, and inadequacy which holds man in bondage to the whims of society is nothing imaginary; its bars have that indestructibility which destroys beyond the hope of restoration.
In no American playwright of the past fifty years does this 137
response to the social predicament gain so trenchant an expression
as it does in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. For he, above all others, is
occupied with modern "social tragedy" and The Hairy Ape is his socio
logical treatise which suggests that social injustice as it is commonly
exhibited in human relations must be the necessary consequence of the
contemporary belief that God is dead.
The initial scene of the play, a fireman's forecastle on a
transatlantic liner, figuratively depicts the limiting condition of
man's existence in a world without spiritual values or social equality.
Tiers of narrow, steel bunks surround the "stokehole" on three
sides. The room is crowded with men, "shouting, cursing, laughing,
singing—a confused, inchoate uproar" which suggests "the bewildered,
furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage." The men themselves
"resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is
guessed at." (p. 39)
All are "hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power," and
"low receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes." Every civilized white race is represented and, except for the slight differentiation in color of hair, skin, eyes," all of these men are alike. They are dressed in dungaree pants and heavy shoes; the majority are stripped to the waist, (p. 39)
O'Neill suggests that "the effect sought after is a cramped space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel." The lines of bunks and the uprights which support them "cross each other like the steel framework of a cage." The ceiling crushes down upon the men's heads and prevents them from standing upright; thus accentuating the 138
"natural, stooping posture" which shoveling coal has given them.
(p. 39)
The first dialogue consists of twenty-nine short lines, mostly
exclamations of a word or two; they are assigned, without specific
reference, to "voices." In this short space O’Neill paints a verbal
picture of the typical stokers
Gif me trink dere, you! Drunk as a lord, God stiffen you’. Pass back that bottle, damn you! To hell with ’em all! See who’s the best man! No fightin*, maties. We're all chums, ain't we? Drink up and forget it! (pp. 40-41)
Into this world enters Yank, who "seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest." To the other stokers he is a "self-expression," the very "last word in what they are," their most "highly developed individual," (p. 40)
It is interesting to note here that O'Neill has chosen to characterize the spokesman of the stokers with the representative name "Yank," perhaps suggesting the commonality of "Yankee," instead of the more individual "Robert Smith" which is noted in the dramatis personae. This description also suggests that Yank may well be a modem "Everyman" figure and that to focus attention on his immediate predicament is to discover a common principle of association and insight,
O'Neill suggests as much in his admission that Yank is "really yourself and myself. He is every human being." It is not even difficult to imagine that Yank also represents an earlier view of the playwright and his delineation of the captive spirit which necessarily 139
inhibits man. As early as 1914 O’Neill conveys such thoughts in a
letter to his friend, Jessica Rippins
The low-browed ape which isthe flesh of me clamors for requittal, as once ten thousand years ago it ran gibbering through the pre-historic gloom and sprang from tree to tree in pursuit of its female. The mud inside of me churns and bubbles. I seethe with longings; desire has me by the throat, T3
It is apparent from Yank’s attitude in the first scene of the
play that he, too, is "seething" with some un-requited yearning.
Although he regards himself as infinitely superior to his acquaint
ances, he is constantly given to contemplative periods of "thought"
in which he dismisses "all dat old sailing ship stuff" which is the
only topic of conversation in the stokehold. He wants to be liked and
admired by everyone, and yet he confesses that he "cares for nobody"
and that everyone can "go to hell." His dominant emotions are contempt
and disgust---- especially for "dem slobs in de foist cabin:"
"We’re better men dan dey are," he insists. "Dey’re just baggage. Who makes dis old tub run? Ain’t it us guys? Well, den, we belong, don't we? We belong and dey don’t. Cat’s all." (pp. 43-44)
But in spite of the excessive pride which he exhibits in his
speeches Yank never ceases to be pained by the pathetic contrast be
tween his own sense of power and the public estimate of his worth. One
of the most concentrated treatments of the contrast in Yank’s personal assessment of his power and the public’s appreciation of it is when
O’Neill, speaking first through Yank and then through the ancient
Irishman, Paddy, reveals the changing social attitude toward the sea and the men who eke out their miserable existence by sailing its often- time uncharted waters. 140
Yank has been harassing Long, a radical Socialist, for his views
on the "bleedin* Bible," "all men being born free and ekal," and the
"damned Capitalist clarss dat’s ter blame" for dragging the modern
stokeholer "down ’til we're on'y wage slaves in the bowels of a
bloody ship, sweatin', burin' up, and eatin' coat dust!" (p, 44)
"Sit down before I knock yuh down," he shouts, "De Bible, huh?
De Cap'tlist class, huh? Aw nix on dat Salvation Armyr-Socialist bull.
Git a soapbox! Hire a hall! Come and be saved, huh? Jerk us to
Jesus, huh? Aw g'wan! Yuh're all wrong. Dis is a man’s job, get me?
It belongs. It runs dis tub. No stiffs need apply. Yuh're yellow, dat’s you," (p. 44)
But the old Irishman, who has been sitting in a blinking, mel ancholy daze, "suddenly cries out in a voice full of old sorrow":
We belong to this, you’re saying? We make the ship to go, you're saying? Yerra then, that Almighty God have pity on us! (His voice runs into the wail of a keen, he rocks back and forth on his bench.) Oh, to be back in the fine days of my youth, ochone'. Oh, there was fine beautiful ships them days---- clippers wid tall masts touching the sky---- fine strong men in them-----men that was sons of the sea as if 'twas the mother that bore them. We was free men---- and I'm thinking ’tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come---- until they're old like me. (pp, 46-4?)
Then, in one of the most mystical passages O'Neill has ever written,
Paddy, "with a sort of religious exaltation," goes on to describe the freedom which the human spirit finds when it is exposed to the wonder of God’s universe:
Nights when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire, when the sky’d be blazing and winking wid stars. Then you'd see her driving through the gray night, her sails stretching aloft all silver and white. Sun warming the blood of you, and wind over the miles of shiny green ocean like strong drink to your lungs. 141
Yerra, what’s the use of talking? ’Tis a dead man’s whisper. ’Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ’Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one. (p. 4?)
Then, with resentment as he looks around him at the filthy stokehole
and realizes what has happened to the world which separates him from
a realization of that lost dream, Paddy scornfully addresses Yank:
Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank—-black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks---- the bloody engines pounding and throbbing and shaking---- wid divil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air choking our lungs wid coal dust---- breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole---- feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along wid the coal, I’m thinking---- caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like 1 bloody apes in the Zoo? Ho-ho,..divil mend you! Is it to belong to that you’re wishing? Is it a flesh and blood wheel of the engines you’d be? (pp. 46-47)
But Yank will have nothing of Paddy’s dream of the past and condemns
his fellow worker for choosing to live in a mystical universe in which
social values cannot be affirmed. In an attitude which may only be
described as "self-deification," Yank summons the courage demanded by
his principles and, "fighting some queer struggle within himself," asserts in his half-educated intellect his superiority above all moral and spiritual laws:
Yuh don't belong no more, see? Yuh're too old. See what's happened since yuh croaked? Sure I'm part of de engines! Why de hell not! Dey move, don't dey? Dey're speed, ain't dey? Dey smash .trou, don't dey? All dat crazy tripe about nights and days: all dat crazy tripe about stars and moons; all dat crazy tripe about suns and winds, fresh air and de rest of it---- Aw hell, dat's all a dope dream'. It takes a man to work in hell. Hell, sure, dat's my fav'rite climate, I eat it up! I git fat on it! It's me makes it hot! It’s me makes it roar'. It's me makes it move! (pp. 47-48) 142
If Paddy is O’Neill reminding man of his fallen state, then Yank in
his concluding remarks is O’Neill the social critic, pointing out
the moral complications inherent in modern society’s emphasis upon
wealth and pointing out the spiritual complications inherent in modern
society’s attempt to fashion God in man’s image:
I’me at de bottom, get me! Dere ain’t nothin' foither. I’m de end’, I’m de start'. I start somep’n and de woild moves’. It---- dat’s me!-----de new dat’s moiderin’ de old! I’m de ting in coal dat makes it boin; I’m steam and oil for de engines; I’m de ting in noise dat makes yuh hear it; I’m smoke and express trains and steamers and factory whistles; I’m de ting in gold dat makes it money! And I'm what makes iron steel'. Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I’m steel---- steel-----steel! I’m de muscles in steel, de punch behind it! (p. 48)
As Yank says this "he pounds with his fist against the steel bunks" and all the stokeholers, with the exception of Paddy, "roused to a pitch of frenzied self-glorification," do likewise. Against this metallic roar Yank pronounces his benediction on modern society:
"Slaves, hell! We run de whole woiks. All de rich guys dat tink dey’re somep’n, dey ain’t nothin”. Dey don’t belong. But us guys, we’re in de move, we're at de bottom, de whole ting is us'." (p. 48)
As the scene closes an "enormous brazen gong" sounds through the steel walls of the forecastle. It quells the uproar which has greeted
Yank’s declaration of freedom and social importance and, ironically,
"all the men jump up mechanically" and "file through the door silently, close upon each other's heels in what is very like a prisoner's lock- step." Only Paddy, with a mocking burst of laughter, remains behind.
With "jovial defiance" he shouts after them: "To the divil wid it!
I’ll not report this watch. Let thim log me and be damned, I’m no slave the like of you. I’ll be sittin' here at me ease, and drinking, 143
and thinking, and dreaming dreams." (p. 49)
The social significance of the first scene of The Hairy Ape is
pointed out by O’Neill in an attempt to clarify any misinterpretation
which may arise on the part of those who like to see the play as "an
attempt to get rid of the bourgeois world,..by standing it on its 14 head." "It is only symbolic," he says, "of the regimentation of men
who are the slaves of machinery. In a larger sense, it applies to all
of us, because we all are more or less the slaves of convention, or of 15 discipline, or of a rigid formula of some sort." J
Although the first scene is only a prelude of O’Neill’s treat
ment of the "regimentation" of men, it does provide the social and
religious context in which the following seven scenes of the play may
be interpreted. He suggests that the machine age is not wholly a
problem of relating production and consumption but that it involves
the whole social matrix, man’s relation to his world, and man’s relation
to his God. O’Neill makes this clear in his treatment of Paddy, who
is able to relate to some ethical and religious concept which allows him to transcend his own petty existence, and of Yank, who, in his crude, violent fashion worships power, strength and energy, and imagines that he "belongs" because he is the force that drives the modern ship.
It is perhaps something more than a coincidence that in this play, which depicts modern man as an "ape," that O’Neill reveals himself for the first time under the influence of late nineteenth-century Darwinian thought, and the spiritual chaos which it produced in America. In two significant letters, one published before the production of The Hairy
Ape and one published fifteen years afterward, O’Neill suggests that 144
he never overcame the mental or emotional cloud which this social
doctrine entails. The first, which regards human nature as something
in need of spiritual illumination, sees life as "a farce played by
a baboon who feels in his invertebrate bones a vision that, being an
ape, he cannot understand. He scratches his fleas absently, with
melancholy eyes, and then hangs upside down on the nearest branch and 3.6 plays with his testicles."
The second, which sees the fall of man as the destruction of
society, also employs the ape-figure as a symbol of the decline and
the degeneration of social institutions:
It appears we apes always climb trees---- and fall out of them---- with a boringly identical behavior pattern! I am sure that Man has definitely decided to destroy himself, and this seems to me the only truly wise decision that he has ever made.I?
The main tenets of Darwinian thought which O’Neill appears to employ in The Hairy Ape, and the tragic prophecy which he adumbrates at length in his treatment of the ape-like Yank, include an explanation of human development in terms of cumulative causation. Nineteenth- century Darwinism assumes that primitive man emerges from the beast in a series of ascending "evolutions" until, finally, the cumulative effect is definitive perfection. A subsidiary corollary of man’s physical, organic, evolution is the gradual ascension of the soul until it achieves a state of divine perfection. Supposedly, this new species of mankind is emancipated from social restraint and redeemed from religious inquiry.
Although the result of Darwinian thought for nineteenth century man was the development of an often strange and perplexing new theology, 145
in which all the anthropomorphic and transcendental qualities of God
were sacrificed to science, it is apparent that in The Hairy Ape
O’Neill is merely suggesting, as a dramatic metaphor, an affinity for
evolutionary ethics. His real concern is centered in reconstructing
human life on the basis of spiritual values, a concern which the
Darwinian ethic denies; and his indictment of modem technology, which
has resulted not in the perfection of man but in his enslavement, does
not suggest that the hope for the future is to be found in the
continuing evolution of industrial complexes.
If anything, O’Neill has grafted Emerson’s "machine man" to the
Darwinian tenets which appear in The Hairy Ape. According to Emerson,
man, the "mechanic," has become "metamorphosed into a thing" because
of modern technology. Having sacrificed moral and spiritual values
to the "machine," he has now become "a victim of society in that de
generate state in which members have suffered amputation from the trunk,"
This, not the cumulative causation principle of Darwin, is the dreadful logic to which O’Neill is committed in his treatment of Yank.
He sees no salvation for modern man, a brute who continues to be brutal ized by society and industry, in Darwin’s consoling glance forward to discover the ultimately perfect man and social climate. He sees only the reality of twentieth century chaos in which man, not an angel and no longer a primitive, stands between heaven and hell without spiritual comfort; where society has become more and more technological and man has become less and less metaphysical. His is a dispairing glance backward, a glance which suggests the horror and anguish which accompany 146
man’s attempt to regain the state of innocence and purity from whence
he came and being unable to do so because the laws of society are
everywhere his enemy,
Man’s inability to return to his former innocence finds its most
conclusive expression in Scene II of the play in Yank’s confrontation
with Mildred, the "anemia-like” heiress who is travelling aboard the
liner with her Aunt after "exhausting the morbid thrills of social
service work on New York’s East Side," (p, 5^) O’Neill suggests that
the impression to be conveyed by this scene is the contrast between
"the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about" and the "two incon gruous, artificial figures (Mildred and her Aunt)." (p, 50)
Mildred, the granddaughter of a steel magnate, is one of the
first-class passengers. She is a decadent, aimless, artificial product of society, "a natural bom ghoul." (p. 51) "I'in a waste product in the Bessemer process," she confesses to her Aunt, "like the millions.
Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.
I am sired by gold and damned by it—damned in more ways than one."
(p. 52)
Having found no satisfaction in humanitarian work, Mildred is now seeking the "vitality and integrity" which has been denied her by being bom in "her Grandfather's blast furnaces." (p. 51) "I would like to be of some use in the world," she insists, and to "discover how the other half lives." (p. 52) Her Aunt reminds her, however, that she has already had an opportunity to perform a social service by working with the poor and that she was a failure. "How they must have 147
hated you, by the way," she adds, "the poor that you made so much
poorer in their own eyes." (p. 5l)
But Mildred protests that she is "sincere" in her concern to
help the poor. As proof of that concern she insists on visiting the
stokehold "to investigate how the other half lives and works on a
ship," (p, 53) In spite of the Second Engineer’s warning that "it’s
hot and dirty where you’re going," (p, 53) Mildred will not be dis
suaded. After all, she laughs, it couldn’t be any worse than "hell"
and "I may fall into the fiery furnace." (p. 54)
For all their outward dissimilarity, Mildred and Yank share
several basic traits. Both are young and of simple origins. Both are
seeking to relate their lives to something larger than just natural
law. Both are suffering from the frustration and agony of having to
live in a world which is not of their own making. Both are prepared to live out of the self-sufficiency of their own actions. Both are a curious admixture of tendencies toward sadism and masochism, toward the most excessive forms of pride and of humility in their own strength.
And both are unaware of the metaphysical implications inherent in
Nature.
Another basic trait, however, provides a closer affinity and sug gests that O’Neill is not limiting his criticism of social injustice to just those who labor in the stokehold. Referring to herself,
Mildred says:
When a leopard complains of its spots, it must sound rather grotesque, (in a mocking tone) Purr, little leopard. Purr, scratch, tear, kill, gorge yourself and be happy---- only stay in the jungle where your spots are camouflaged. In a cage they make you conspicuous, (p. 52) 148
Mildred is the leopard, which has been removed from society, a jungle,
to the cage of modern technology and automation. Although she still
retains the spots of the wild animal, she has lost the power and the
strength that should go with them. It is significant that this image
is transferred visually to Yank in their confrontation of Scene III.
Scene III is without doubt the core of social commentary in The
Hairy Ape. Unobtrusively, by means of stage directions and sound
effects, O’Neill focuses upon the predicament of modern man in an age
of technology. Although the scene parallels Scene I in its arrangement
of "dimly-outlined bulks" and furnaces and boilers, it is obvious that
the atmosphere has overtaken the human spirit and that the stokeholers
are in the midst of stark desolation.
There is just enough light through the "murky air" laden with coal dust to "pile up masses of shadows everywhere." High overhead one hanging electric bulb reveals a line of men "looking neither to right nor left, handling their shovels as if they were part of their bodies, with a strange, awkward, swinging rhythm." As they throw open the furnace doors a flood of "terrific light and heat" pours out full upon the men, who are "outlined in silhouette in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas." There is a tumult of noise---- "the brazed clang of the furnace doors" as they are flung open or slammed shut. The grating, teeth-gritting grind of steel can be heard against the crunching coal. (p. 55)
This is the modern "hell" where Yank is so proudly working as a self-appointed "god." Shaking his fist at those who have taken a rest by leaning on their shovels, Yank "growls" in a cursing rage: "Take 149
it easy dere, you*. Who d’yuh tink’s runnin* dis game, me or you?
When I git ready we move. Not before’. When I git ready, get me*."
(p. 57)
On seeing Yank, brandishing his shovel "murderously over his
head in one hand, pounding on his chest, gorilla-like," Mildred starts,
turns pale, and "shivers with fright in spite of the blazing heat."
Listening to his speech, uttered in animal-like brutality, she is
"paralyzed with horror, terror, her whole personality crushed, beaten
in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality,
naked and shameless." (p. 57-58)
As she looks at his gorilla face, she utters a low, choking cry
and shrinks away from him. Putting both of her hands to her eyes "to
shut out the sight of his face," and "to protect her own," Mildred
screams: "Take me away'. Oh, the filthy beast*." (p, 58)
Yank is "turned to stone." Rage and bewildered fury seize him.
"He feels himself insulted in some unknown fashion in the very heart of his pride." He roars "God damn yuh!" and hurls his shovel at the door which has just closed. It hits the steel bulkhead with a clang and falls clattering to the floor. From overhead, "the whistle sounds again in a long, angry, insistent command." (pp. 58-59)
For some reason which his primitive intelligence cannot fathom,
Yank no longer feels after this incident that he "belongs." He has become aware of his own social insignificance; this is his "fall."
Although he tries dimly "de tink" through the cause of his unrest, repeatedly assuming the pose of Rodin’s Thinker in the following scenes of the play, it is evident that Mildred’s intrusion has cut him adrift 150
from his primordial moorings.
From this point onward, Yank devotes himself to an attempt to
"revenge" himself upon society for making him aware that he is only a
missing link in the social chain of being. He discovers, however,
that he is constantly in the ironical position of having to struggle
and to suffer desperately to retain some sense of his identity, because,
since he holds nothing in the world except his own image of strength,
the world seems to afford nothing against which he might really test
himself and whereby he might, therefore, be given a deeper sense of
himself. So, amidst this essentially empty world, he gives himself to
first one and then another gratuitous action, hoping to gain the
assurance of his own social identity. Although these actions almost
always involve violence, either against himself or against others, and
end in futility and defeat, they acknowledge the spiritual imperatives
of suffering as an indictment against social injustice.
Fittingly, Yank embraces Christ’s all-encompassing invitation to
self-abnegation, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," (Matthew, 16:24) in his attempt to revenge himself against a society which has stripped life of all value and meaning. He denies his own nature by trying to think, by becoming "self-conscious," and advocates the destruction of the status quo, and the rebirth of man through a social revolution which will remedy the inequality which he feels permeates society.
The action of the play is now transferred from the solipsistic prison of Yank’s own ego to the remedies available for social change.
It is interesting to note that these "remedies" are quite similar in 151
ideology and imagery to the poem "Submarine," which O’Neill wrote for the Masses, a radical socialist newspaper, in 191?; the same year, that is, as he framed the scenario for the short story upon which
The Hairy Ape is based:
I will hide unseen Beneath the surface of life Watching for ships, Bull, heavy-laden merchant ships, Rust-eaten, grimy galeons of commerce Wallowing with obese assurance, Too sluggish to fear or wonder, Mocked by the laughter of waves And the spit of disdainful spray. I will destroy them,19
Yank sees his first opportunity for "destroying" commercial society, and restoring his own self-respect, in Scene Four as he
"tinks" of some revenge upon Mildred. His brutish and germinal soul before this scene has been sustained by the knowledge that his strength is the ultimate force which lies at the center of the social order; but now he finds himself engaged in the anguishing experiment of self-discovery. The contrast between his former sense of "belonging" to society and his present sense of "not belonging" to society is evident in his isolation from the other stokeholers.
Seated forward on a bench, "in the exact attitude of Rodin's ’The
Thinker*," Yank appears like "a blackened, brooding figure." Although the other firemen have "washed" and "shined" their bodies, he has cleaned neither face nor body. The other stokers admonish him to wash off the dirt or it will make spots on him "like a leopard." But Yank does not wash; he prefers to be left alone. "Aw say, youse guys," he demands, "Lemme alone. Can’t youse see I’m tryin' to tink?" (pp. 59-60)
But the others accuse him of having fallen in love. "Love, hell," 152
he cries. "Hate, dat’s what. I’ve fall in hate, get me?" (p. 60)
His hate, it appears, stems from the fact that for the first time he
sees himself as "the hairy ape," the lowest form of human life. It is
significant in this regard, however, to recall that Mildred never
referred to Yank as a "hairy ape." She was quite specific in her
reference: "a filthy beast." But in Yank's own mind he cannot now
regard himself as anything other than an ape.
"Say," he asks Paddy the old Irishman, "is dat what she called
me---- a hairy ape?" When reminded that she did not, even though "she
looked it if she didn’t say the word itself," Yank is still furious:
Hairy ape, huh? Sure! Dat’s de way she looked at me, aw right! Hairy ape! So dat’s me, huh? Yuh skinny tart! Yuh white-faced bum, yuh! I'll show yuh who’s a ape! (pp. 62-63)
It appears that Yank has had an education of sorts and that his pride
is being glorified by association with "the works" of steel has been
destroyed, and by a "skinny sow widout one drop of rale blood in her"
at that, (p, 64)
Long, the radical Socialist, tries once again to make Yank aware
that Mildred’s act of non-recognition and non-appreciation is merely representative of society's attitude in general. He strikes a responsive
chord when he refers to his fellow stokers as "bleedin' monkeys in a
menagerie." "Did we sign for hinsults to our dignity," he says, "as
'onest workers? Is that in the ship's articles? You kin bloody well bet it ain't!" (p. 6l)
As he listens to Long’s tirade against social injustice, especially the suggestion that Mildred "gives !er orders as ’ow she wants to see the bloody animals below decks," (p. 6l) Yank becomes increasingly 153
distressed with the vortex-like movement of radical, revolutionary,
socialistic thought. With a roar of rage, he repeats "with abysmal
contempt": "Hell*. Law!" "Hell! Governments!" "Hell! God!"
(pp. 61-62)
The realization that such forces as law, government, and God do
not concern themselves with the immediate problem of a life emptied of
meaning or address themselves to the recurrent grievances of suffering
indignation and contrition at the will of others compels Yank to refuse
to recognize any other ordinance but his own:
No one ain’t never put nothin’ over on me and got away wit it, see------not dat kind of stuff---- no guy and no skoit neither! I’ll fix her! (p. 64)
So, he resolves to leave his "cage" immediately and "to bust de face
offen her!" But if the immediate frustration of Yank’s dilemma can be
understood in the context of his confrontation with Mildred, it can
also be understood in the context of social injustice. After all,
Mildred is merely a representation of the "bloody Capitalist class" and her lack of compassion and sympathy is but an inescapable aspect
of society’s attitude toward Yank and his fellow stokers. Indeed, it is this principle of injustice to which Yank holds Mildred accountable and against the measure of which he finds her wanting:
Who de hell is she? Ain't she de same as me? Hairy ape, huh? I’ll show her I’m better’n her, if she on’y knew it, I belong and she don’t, see! I move and she’s dead. Twenty-five knots a hour, dat’s me! Dat carries her but I make dat. She’s only baggage. Sure! Say, who is dat skoit, huh? What is she? What's she come from? Who made her? Who give her de noive to look at me like dat? I'll show her if she tinks she---- She grinds de organ and I'm on de string, huh? She'll git down on her knees and take it back. She done me doit! I'll get her some way! I'll fix yuh, God damn yuh! I’ll show her who’s a ape. (pp. 64-65) 154
Here, then, is the strange irony that O’Neill presents: the man who has the strength and power to carry away the gates of Gaza and who, from the moment that he rejects the legitimacy of social injustice and tries to discover his own rule of life, recognizes that all acts of retaliation are permitted; that they are, indeed, lawful.
In this extremity, has virtue any reward—or evil any retri bution? In the name of what does one exist when one has lost his own soul and denied that social injustice is ultimately meaningful? If the immediate chaos of suffering is not to be understood in the context of an ultimate order, can one then act in the name of, or with the sanction of, anything other than chaos? These are the questions which
O’Neill poses in Scene Five, as Yank and the Socialist Long search for an answer to the human predicament by visiting Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning.
In this scene the "intermittent electric lights" blinking out their commercial messages in broad Sunday light suggest that here is
O’Neill’s attempt to depict the social aspects of the kingdom of heaven as they are revealed in the substitution of man-made, artificial light for the natural light of God. The atmosphere itself is one of "tempered sunshine" and "gentle, genteel breezes." There are two show windows of two shops, "a jewelry establishment on the corner" and a "furrier’s next to it." The jeweler’s window is "gaudy with glittering diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, fashioned in ornate tiaras, crowns, necklaces, and collars." (p. 65)
From each piece hangs an enormous tag from which a dollar sign of bright lights winks out the incredible price. The furrier's window is "rich in furs of all varieties and is bathed in a downpour of 155
artificial light," The general effect is of a background "of
magnificence cheapened and made grotesque by commercialism, a back
ground in tawdry disharmony with the clear light and sunshine on the
street itself," (p, 66)
O’Neill’s description of this scene presents a situation typical
of German expressionistic drama of the first two decades of the
twentieth century: "From the opening of the fourth scene, where Yank
begins to think, he enters into a masked world; even the faces of his
mates in the forecastle have become strange and alien. They should
be masked, and the faces of everyone he encounters thereafter should 20 also be masked."
Yank’s alienation in this dehumanized, hostile world is made prophetically clear in his inability to make social contact with Fifth
Avenue society. The people he sees do not see him. When he calls them insulting names, they do not hear. When he asserts his strength and assults them in his rage, it is he who recoils, not they. When he attempts to enlist their sympathy they merely respond "with mechanical affected politeness" and say "I beg your pardon." (p. 70)
These people are as incomprehensible to him in their smugness as
Mildred was in her superiority. As they exit from the church,
"sauntering slowly and affectedly," with their heads held stifly up they resemble "a procession of gaudy marionettes." The women are
"rouged, calcimined, dyed, overdressed to the nth degree." The men are
"in Prince Alberts, high hats, spats, and carry canes." They talk in toneless, simpering voices "with something of the relentless horror of Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness." (p. 69) 156
The function of this group, made more homogeneous by similar
clothing and speech, suggests, on a social level, a gross normality
of identity and a legacy of automation for those who live in a world
without any sense of individuality. Society, it appears, is but a
reflection of that erring and tragic adventure in opulence which
O’Neill predicted would result in "the loss of the human soul":
We’ve followed the same selfish, greedy path as every other country in the world. We talk about the American Dream and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things?21
So, to dismiss O’Neill, as some historical critics have done, as being
merely a splenetic expression of the malice toward twentieth-century
radical socialistic ideology is hardly to draw a full enough circle of
definition about his significance as a social critic. Inherent in
his social commentary is a portentous warning, on the spiritual level,
of how the worship of material wealth actually brings no real identity
at all and, furthermore, only results in the erosion of the human soul.
Yank recognizes this essentially theological principle with a kind of bewildered lucidity when he passes judgment on how narrowly
in its progress modern society has skirted the brink of extinction:
Tink yuh own de oith? G’wan, youse’. Yun look like stiffs laid out for de boneyard! Yuh don’t belong, get me? Youse simps don’t move. Yuh’re on’y dolls I winds up to see 'm spin. Yuh’re de garbage, get me---- de leavins---- de ashes we dump over de side'. Bums! Pigs! Tarts! Bitches! Git off de oith! (pp. 70-71)
If O'Neill had not already used the automaton effect in Thirst, its effect could easily be traced to The Hairy Ape as a demonstration of what he likes to term "the subconscious motive for the individual's 157
22 behavior with the rest of society." That is to say, the anonymity
of faces that pass by like masks and bodies that pass by like puppets
constitutes a mirror of the individual’s true feelings and beliefs
and suggests that the inhabitants of Fifth Avenue are unwilling, or
unable, to respond to Yank’s dilemma.
And it is for the sake of commanding from society an act of
recognition which will, as O’Neill relates, dispel the stark desolation
of "one’s outer life passing in a solitude haunted by the masks of 23 others" that Yank deliberately attacks one of the passers-by. By
preventing a gentleman from catching the bus---- his "crime"---- Yank is
arrested and about to be thrown into jail.
An incongruous element Is included as a "whole platoon" of police
men rush in on Yank from all sides of Fifth Avenue. The crowd,
"ecstatically, with a gasp of delight," have moved to the furrier's
window and are unaware of the disturbance. As the clanging gong of the patrol wagon approaches, they exclaim "in a tone of affected delight": "Monkey fur'." (pp. 71-72) Society’s inability to reconcile
Yank’s suffering in the social world, it appears, has found its expression in an admiration for him in the animal world.
In jail in the following scene Yank hears for the first time of the I. W, W. —the radical Socialistic society that believes in blow ing up the world with dynamite. His mind fastens upon a single portion of a speech made by a United States Senator in a barangue against that
"devil’s brew of rascals, jailbirds, murderers, and cutthroats who libel all honest working men by calling themselves the Industrial
Workers of the World": 158
They represent an ever-present dagger pointed at the heart of the greatest nation the world has ever known, where all men are born free and equal, with equal opportunities to all, where the Founding Fathers have guaranteed to each one happiness, where Truth, Honor, Liberty, Justice, and the Brotherhood of Man are a religion absorbed with one’s mother’s milk. They plot with fire in one hand and dynamite in the other. They stop not before murder to gain their ends, nor at the out raging of defenseless womanhood. They would tear down society, put the lowest scum in the seats of the mighty, turn Almighty God’s revealed plan for the world topsy-turvy, and make of our sweet and lovely civilization a shambles, a desolation where man, God’s masterpiece, would soon degenerate back to the ape. (pp. 76-77)
As he sits crouched on the edge of his cot with a blood-stained band age wrapped around his head and listens to this report of the I. W. W. read by a prisoner, Yank resembles both Rodin’s "The Thinker" and
Jesus Christ. His "meditative" attitude is reflected in the long row of cells which extend diagonally from right to left. They do not stop, however, but "disappear in the dark background as if they ran on, numberless, into infinity." One electric bulb from the low ceiling of the "narrow corridor sheds its light through the heavy steel bars of the cell." (p. 72)
At first, Yank appears as if "awakening from a dream" and imagines that he is in "a cage at de Zoo." (p. 73) Then, he recalls his offense and dully confesses that he is "a hairy ape." (p. 74) As he regains his "wits," he attributes his present plight to the injury done him by Mildred's father, who ironically is the chairman of "Nazareth"
Steel, and all those "millionaries" who have been "holdin* me down."
(p. 77) But when he hears the speech of the Senator who attributes to the workers all the sins of which he and his class are guilty, Yank 159
is enraged. Suddenly, "as if some appalling thought had crashed on
him," he jumps to his feet with a "furious groan" and cries:
Christ! (He shakes the bars of his cell till the whole tier trembles.) Steel! It don’t belong, dat’s what! Cages, cells, locks, bolts, bars—■ dat’s what it means! But I’ll drive trou! Fire, dat melts it! I’ll be fire---- under de heap---- fire dat never goes out---- hot as hell---- breakin* out in de night, (p. 7?)
Then, with the strength of an ape. Yank seizes one bar of the cell
with both hands and, "putting his two feet up against the others so
that his position is parallel to the floor like a monkey," he gives
a great "wrench" backwards. The bar bends "like a licorice stick"
under his tremendous strength. As the prison guards rush in with
"hoses" and a "straitjacket," Yank grabs another bar and yells his
warning to society: "Look out! Here I come!" (pp. 77-78)
In this scene, there is a significant shift of emphasis in
O’Neill’s treatment of Yank’s indignation and suffering. Initially, he appears to be distraught primarily because of Mildred’s failure to recognize his social importance. But now it appears that he is intent on "revenging" himself upon society, "de gang she runs wit," (p. 74) because they represent the injustice and inequality which deny him the freedom and spirit to discover a meaningful credo of faith and a substantial identity. O'Neill suggests as much in a letter to the
New York Herald Tribune in 1924 when he says that Yank'.s search is
"propaganda" in the sense that society has not provided the "corrective" necessary to restore man’s lost faith:
Thus, not being able to find it on earth nor in heaven, he’s (Yank's) in the middle, trying to make peace, taking ’the woist punches from bot’ of 'em,'24 160
Here O’Neill reveals himself in sympathy with the literature of all
forms during the last one hundred years which has dealt with social
problems and social protest. It must be pointed out, however, that
while his sympathy lies in this tradition there is deeper implication
which suggests that he is also condemning the whole structure of modern
civilization; that he is condemning the "system" which has not only
exploited man’s physical body but his spiritual soul as well. Indeed,
The Hairy Ape is a play which might be called by any of the titles
which attempt to describe the demise of the "Christian Society" and
the ultimate "Descent of Man" into a state of bestiality. It could
also be argued that the play’s most conscious concern is not with the
death of God but with the death of the City, of what the Greeks called
the "holy" polis: that is, the social community.
But the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that the builder and the maker of that city is God, (Hebrews, 11:8-10) How, then, do we reconcile this apparent paradox? Here it is that we are at the real point of juncture between God and the social order, and it is at this point that we may see that, when O’Neill attributes the suf fering of modem man to the injustice of society, he is really speaking far more directly to the modern condition than contemporary critics have suspected.
The solution, as O’Neill relates, is simple and precise. "The birth of the higher man," he says, "will not come by tinkering with externals or by legislative fiat. It will come at the command of the imagination and the will."2^ The limiting condition of man’s existence, in other words, is his dependence upon others to furnish guidance with 161
respect to the ultimate issues of political, social, or spiritual reform. What he yearns for is the "corrective" by which he might create a stable universal order that would make a technical civilization sufferable; what he seeks, that is, in order to give his life meaning is the Biblical "city which hath foundations." (Hebrews, 11:10)
However, in a society without guiding principle, a "city" which has spiritually "died" because it is a captive of the "god" of materialism, it is not possible to recognize any other law but one’s own; it is not possible to retain any sense of personal dignity without attempting to re-create one identity and one's freedom in a heroic act of titanism. This is the logic to which Yank appears to be committed in the last two scenes of the play as he challenges the social order in Scene Seven by embracing the doctrine of the I. W. W. and heroically asserts his own "personhood" in Scene Eight by coming face to face with a gorilla in the Zoo.
Yank’s reasons for seeking self-expression in the I. W. W. are relatively the same as those reasons he considers necessary to justify his sense of social importance: to experience the sense of "belonging," to experience the sense of "necessity," and to experience the sense of
"power." All of these needs are suggested in his meeting with the secretary of the I. W. W. in Scene Seven as he attempts to articulate why he is volunteering his services in bombing the steel mills---- an activity which he has been convinced by propaganda is typical of that organization:
Youse needn’t put me trou de toid degree. Can’t youse see I belong? Sure! I'm regular. I’ll stick, get me? I'll shoot de woiks for youse. Dat’s why I wanted to join in. Dis is a man's gang, ain’t it? Yuh wanter 162
blow tings up, don’t yuh? Well, dat’s me! Dat’s what I'm after---- to blow up de steel, knock all de steel in de woild up to de moon. I’ll do it by me lonesome! I don't give a damn if dey nab me—long as it's done! I'll soive life for it---- and give’em de laugh', (pp. 81-82)
But the I. W. W., whose method of social reform is not violence but the "peaceful change of the unequal conditions of society by legitimate direct action," (p, 8l) mistake Yank for an agent provocateur and throw him bodily out. "By god," the Secretary mockingly laughs, "this is the biggest joke they’ve put up on us yet. You’re such a bonehead!
You can go back and tell whatever shunk is paying you blood-money for betraying your brothers that he's wasting his coin. Oh, hell, what's the use of talking? You're a brainless ape," (pp. 82-83)
Yank's speech after he has been thrown out of the I. W. W.'s headquarters is an explicit summary of the human condition in which man finds himself when his transvaluation of ideas has gone so far as to destroy the ethical, social, and religious dimensions of living altogether, leaving him without a positive replacement for what he has destroyed:
So dem boids don't tink I belong, neider. Aw, to hell wit ’em! Dey’re in de wrong pew---- de same old bull---- soapboxes and Salvation Army---- no guts! Cut an hour offen de job a day and make me happy! Gimme a dollar more a day and make me happy! Tree square a day, and cauliflowers in de front yard ekal rights a woman and kids a lousy vote and I’m all fixed for Jesus, huh? Aw, hell! What does dat get yuh? Dis ting's in your inside, but it ain’t your belly. Feedin* your face—-sinkers and coffee---- dat don't touch it. It's way down---- at de bottom. Yuh can’t grab it, and yuh can’t stop it. It moves, and everything moves. It stops and de whole woild stops. Dat's me now---- I don't tick, see? I'm a busted Ingersoll, dat's what. Steel was me, and I owned de woild. Now I ain't steel, and de woild owns me. Aw, hell! I can't see---- it's dark, get me? It's all wrong! (He turns a bitter mocking 163
face up like an ape gibbering at the moon) Say, youse up dere, Man in de Moon, yuh look so wise, gimme de answer, huh? [Slip me de inside dope, de information right from de stable---- where do I get off at, huh? (p. 83) ! When a policeman finds him sitting "broodingly" on the sidewalk,
"tryin* to tink," and asks him what he has been doing, Yank replies:
"Enuf to gimme life for! I was born, see? Sure, dat's de charge. Write it down in de blotter? I was bom, get me!" (p. 84)
With Yank’s analysis ofj the human condition before us, further
comment is unnecessary. In his external aspect he has appeared so ineffectual and ordinary, so1 blundering and confused, that he has
very nearly succeeded in being the man whom no one notices is there.
Although he is pained by the pathetic contrast between his own sense
of his powers and the public'estimate of his worth, he can still insist that his essential value is to be found not in the public self but in the private, "way down---- at de bottom," self; and this it is, there fore, that he sets out to discover in the last scene of the play in the monkey house at the zoo before the gorilla’s cage.
Since he can belong neither to steel---- his own image of himself---- nor to "de woild"---- society’s image of him-----his last resort is "to go to hell." (p. 84) Here, at the Zoo, on the "twilight" of the following day, Yank attempts to catch a glimpse of a "Brother" ape.
(P. 85) I
As he enters the monkey house a "chorus of angry chattering and screeching breaks out." A spot of "clear gray light" falls on the front of one cage to reveal ".the gigantic animal himself squatting on his haunches on a bench in much the same attitude as Rodin's "Thinker."
I 164
Yank addresses the gorilla, ,who seems to "understand" him, gropingly:
Hail, hail, de gan’s all here! Say, yuh’re some hard-lookin’ guy, ain’t yuh? I seen lots of tough nuts dat de gang called gorillas, but yuh’re de foist real one I ever seen. Ain’t we both members of de same club---- de Hairy Apes? On’y yuh're lucky, see? Yuh don’t belong wit ’em and yuh know it. But me, I belong wit ’em-—but I don’t, see? Dey don’t belong wit me, dat’s what. Get me? Tinkin’ is hard—, It’s dis way, what I’m drivin* at. Youse can sit and dope dream in de past, green woods, de jungle and de1 rest of it. Den yuh belong and dey don’t. Den yuh kin laugh at ’em, see? Yuh’re de champ of de wpild. But me---- I ain’t got no past to tink in, nor nothin* dat’s coming, on’y what’s now---- and dat don’t belong. Sure, you're de best off! (pp. 85-86) 1
Here, then, in the crude language of Yank, is O’Neill’s most profound expression of the spiritual malaise which accompanies the loss of individuality in a world of social injustice. Man, a spiritual being with a soul, "ain’t got no past" and "nothin’ dat’s coming," He has 1 only "what’s now," a life of intermittent suffering and despair; a life only faintly illuminated, at best, by an aspiration that is so groping and so exasperating that the mind is stretched to the very end of its tether. It is a life ¡which, as Yank readily admits, denies man the hope of a blissful eternity:
I ain’t on oith and I ain’t in heaven, get me? I’m in de middle tryin’ ,to separate ’em, takin’ all de woist punches from bot’ of 'em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell, huh? (p. 86)
Caught between these two worlds, aware of both but belonging to neither,
Yank breaks open the cage door and invites the gorilla to shake hands---- i a gesture which means, according to O’Neill, that Yank, unable to go 26 forward in life, is now trying to "go back." But the gorilla, intuitively sensing "the tone of mockery" in Yank’s voice, suddenly 165
springs upon him and "wraps his huge arms around Yank in a murderous
hug," There is a "crackling snap" of crushed ribs and a "gasping
cry," which is "still mocking," from Yank. The gorilla then picks up
the crushed body and "throws it in the cage, shuts the door, and
shuffles off menacingly into, the darkness." (p, 8?)---- a symbolic
warning, perhaps, for an indifferent society.
The play is closed as it was opened, by a chorus of indistinguish
able voices. But this time it is the "chattering and whimpering" of
sympathetic monkeys which sing Yank to his final rest. As he lies
dying on the floor of the gorilla cage, Yank "opens his eyes" and
there is "silence" from the other cages. He grabs hold of the bars of
his cage and hauls himself painfully to his feet. Then, with "passionate
despair," he cries out "in the strident tones of a circus barker":
Christ, where do I get off at? Where do I fit in? (p. 8?i
As Yank slips "in a heap" on the floor and dies the monkeys "set up a
chattering, whimpering wail." O’Neill, however, cannot dismiss him without betraying a fundamental premise which has characterized all of his treatments of those who suffer in order that their spiritual disorders might be resolved. "And perhaps," he says in a poignant footnote to this tragedy of social injustice, "the Hairy Ape at last belongs." (p. 88)
Taken by itself, "The Hairy Ape" might be considered as a play which presents a powerful and paradoxical statement of the insoluble human predicament. But like all other O’Neill plays, it cannot be taken alone. It is one of a series which began with Thirst, Fog, and
Beyond the Horizon and it is ¡a continuation of his treatment of the
I 166
suffering which arises when ¡men find themselves thwarted by ignorance,
greed, or power from realizing the dream of eternal bliss.
The tragedy of Yank is 'the tragedy of the Gentleman in Thirst,
the Poet in Fog, and Robert 'Mayo in Beyond the Horizon: the failure I to realize that man is glorified in his dependence upon God, and that
only through suffering is it possible to share in the joy of eternal
life continuing beyond all appearance and in spite of individual des
truction. The Bible perhaps best describes what is involved in O’Neill’s
effort to conquer the despair of the human predicament in the following
words:
"Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteous, and sanctification and redemption. 'That abcording as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord," (_I Corinthians, 1: 29-31)
But man is too small to be a god and too great to be a beast.
Thus, he is tossed about on the troubled sea of life and never finds complete rest. He is forever tortured by an inner "anxiety," to use the word of O’Neill. He lacks that state of balance which is natural to the beast, because he wants to transcend his natural limits and achieve infinite knowledge. .This, again, according to O’Neill, is the deepest root of his sinfulness, and it is the root of suffering.
And yet there is great tragedy in the life of this man, precisely because his aspirations do so far exceed his grasp. He is a magnificent example of human titanism, of man's inordinate capacity for striving I and of his infinite creativity. In him all the distinctive human gifts i are greatly intensified, just as they are in O’Neill himself. He reaches out for the excessive! and for the extreme; for an all-embracing 167
vision of the universe. Although he often incurs misfortune,
injustice, and disappointment, he also succeeds in many ways. He
enjoys his energy and creativity to the full, and his death is the
natural culmination of a long, though oftentimes painful, life. The
transfiguration which crowns his life clearly indicates, in other
words, that his suffering is'not tragic frustration but rather a
beatific vision not altogether unlike that which led O’Neill to remark: 27 "Life’s a tragedy, hurrah!" '
Presumably, O’Neill felt after The Hairy Ape that he had written
the definitive play on the role of suffering in modern society. As
he suggested to Walter Prichard Eaton in an interview for the New York
Herald Tribune in 1928, most of the people who were moved by its
strangeness at all were moved to "admiration for the soul that aspires from the lowest stokehole" and finds "great beauty in that reaching oQ r upward toward the light." Now he was ready to abandon his treatment of the Christian’s triumph over an otherwise tragic world and seek an explanation for the complex moral complications inherent in a "god-less" society. But it is in his early testimony to God in Thirst, Fog,
Beyond the Horizon, and The Hairy Ape at a time when He appears to be absent that O’Neill remains as the most truly exemplary figure of our time. 168
FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER FIVE
1. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, Q.'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, (New York: New York University Press, 1961), p. 115.
2. Tom F. Driver, "On the Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill," Tulane Drama Review, III, December 1958, pp, 19-20.
3. Eugene O’Neill, as cited.in Frederic I, Carpenter, "The Roman tic Tragedy of Eugene O'Neill," American Literature and the Dream, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955)» p. 137«
4. Eugene O'Neill, as cited:in Mary B. Mullett, "The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O'Neill," The American Magazine, LCIV, November 1922, p. 118.
5. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Ludwig Lewisohn, "The Development of Eugene O'Neill," The Nation, CXIV, March 1922, p. 350.
6. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Barrett H. Clark, A Study of the Modern Drama, (New York: , D. Appleton and Co., 1925), p. 407.
7. Eugene O'Neill, "The Hairy Ape," Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill, (New York: The Modem Library, 1954-)» pp. 38-88.
NOTE: All quotations refer to this edition of the script.
8. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension, (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958), pp. 28-29.
9. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Cargill, O'Neill and His Plays, p, 110.
10. Ibid., p. 111.
11. Eugene O'Neill, as cited by Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Playwright, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), p. 193.
12. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Mullett, "The Extraordinary Story," p. 118.
13. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, p. 274.
14. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1946), p. 4?.
15. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Mullett, "The Extraordinary Story," p. 118. 169
16. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story: Eugene O'Neill As A Young Man in Love, (London: Peter Davies Press, 1958), P. 137.
17. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 278.
18. P. 55. '
19. Eugene O’Neill, "Submarine," as cited in Barrett H, Clark and Ralph Sanborn, A Bibliography of the Works of Eugene O'Neill together with The Collected Poems of Eugene O’Neill, (New York: Benjamin Blom Press, 1968), p. 120.
20. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co,, 1973), p. 81,
21. Eugene O'Neill, as cited ¡in Hamilton Basso, "The Tragic Sense: III," The New Yorker, XXIV, March 1948, p. 40.
22. Eugene O'Neill, as cited 'in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, p. 470,
23. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Cargill, O’Neill and His Plays, P. 117.
24. Eugene O’Neill, as cited in Falk, O’Neill and the Tragic Tension, P. 34.
25. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Oliver M. Sayler, "Eugene O'Neill," Our American Theatre, (New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1923), pp. 42-43.
26. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Engel, Haunted Heroes, p. 60. i 27. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Egil Tornqvist, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-naturalistic Technique, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 17.
28. Eugene O'Neill, as cited in Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Hermit of Cape Cod," New York Herald-Tribune, January 1928, p. 12. 170
CONCLUSION
Although there have been countless readings of Eugene Gladstone
O’Neill’s plays, each depending not solely on the text but equally
on the perspective of the reader, each new critic inevitably brings
with him to the world of the dramas some firmament of values of his
own. He brings premises, explicitly or implicitly, as regards the
nature of drama, and more ultimately as regards the nature of man and
of society.
These furnish at one level or another the reader’s stance for
viewing the playwright’s literary evolution. Whether as inklings or
as articulated beliefs, these premises are a working creed of sorts;
by which the reader’s ear is attuned or his eye enlightened to listen and to observe.
If resulting judgments clash with those of other readers, as frequently happens, there is no need to infer that all interpretation is a hopeless muddle and that opinion is relative to irreducible taste.
Indeed, taste is itself relative to perspective and to its conditioning of the sensibilities. Hence, the search for a representative reading goes on, testing various perspectives through a comparison of their success in discriminating thought and content in the logic of the plays.
And yet in spite of the conflicting interpretations which O'Neill’s dramas afford the reader, there are certain aspects of his perspective which appear to have an oddly familiar ring; as if one might have heard views rather like them from more conventional quarters.
It is imperative, therefore, to explore some of the dimensions of O’Neill's thought in order to come to a better understanding of 171
his tragic vision and what would appear to be his potentially Christian
impulse. The suggestive possibilities which arise from such an
exploration are best noted by a selective review of those early plays
from 1913 to 1923 which deal with the spiritual "rebirth" of man
through suffering. '
A key to the religious meaning which is implicit in O'Neill’s
parabolic use of suffering in these early dramas seems to be his use
of the Bible in the picturing of man's tragedy. Scripture teaches that
when God created man suffering had no part in his life. After victory
over temptation, by which his fidelity to his Creator would have been
tested and proved, man was to pass from the temporal world to a better and more felicitous existence with God. But when man yielded to the first suggestion of evil, as portrayed in the parable of Adam and Eve, he lost the privilege of terrestrial blessedness not only for himself but for his posterity also. Thus, through the malice of the devil t and the weakness and ingratitude of man, suffering and death came’to hold sway in the world.
Throughout Christian history and into our own times suffering has continued to be a punishment inflicted by God as a mark of His divine displeasure for "fallen" humanity. It was not until the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that suffering came to be a "trial" of obedience which duly faced resulted in new spiritual strength and undying glory.
O’Neill's conception of suffering, with its underlying note of the torment which arises from a loss of paradisical innocence, echoes the Biblical rhetoric of what life is like when the Creator is for gotten and man is left at the mercy of the temporal forces which 172
control his destiny.
In Thirst and Fog, for;example, O’Neill suggests that the despair
of his characters is related to their failure to find order in the
mystical universe and that the elusive and inscrutable forces of
Nature are the spiritual realities which illustrate the providential
power of God to redeem rebellious man. In Beyond the Horizon he
suggests that when man becomes corrupted by inordinate love of a
temporal good, or allows himself to betray his own nature in the pursuit
of a temporal good, he may only console himself for the brevity and
despair of life on earth by fhe hope of a blissful eternity. In The
Hairy Ape he suggests that even in the most degraded man there is a
saving grace that comes from his divine origin and that suffering is the counseling appetite which teaches him there is a gospel of hope for those who stand fast in défiance of a world that is impersonal and unconcerned about the welfare of others.
There is space in the present summary only for trying out very briefly the kind of reading which O'Neill's use of suffering might yield if elaborated. Although the efforts at illustration will necessarily be partial and tentative, they do suggest that in general
O'Neill's early dramas of the sea, the farm, and the city rehearse various segments of the Old and New Testament parables which offer a glimpse of spiritual redemption for those who are willing to face life as it is; accepting its limitations and, on the foundation of these limitations, erecting a new world free from religious despair.
The segments may vary but ,in each the hero of the drama in clines toward some form of inordinate self-interest or idolatry of some aspect of himself and accordingly spends his life in a passionate 173
despair which ultimately leads to the dream of another life in
another world. At the same'time, however, the hero’s despair also
leads him to seek an explanation for the "mystery" of the spiritual
universe and to characterize, on God’s behalf, all time and all
existence.
In Thirst, for example,' both the Dancer and the Gentleman cheer
fully give up their present life in the certain hope of resurrection
to eternal life. They endure for a brief time the suffering which results from having sinned against God and accept the mystery of God’s
"silence" as a resolution of the tragic dissonance.
The religious suggestion that the tragic situation can be conquered by a type of life willing and able to take suffering upon itself, even if it means self-destruction, is implicit in O’Neill’s concluding remarks to Thirst.. Both the Dancer and the Gentleman deny their own self interests and accept the mystic interpretation of the cosmos as an expression of God’s divine will. There is also the suggestion that suffering, seen as a form of individual retribution, is a necessary element in the transformation and eventual union of the spiritual self with the mystic will of the divine,
O’Neill also attempts to dramatize the theme of suffering as the only necessary restoration; of the metaphysical balance in Fog, another mystic drama which explores the conquest of the tragic situ ation through sacrifical death and reveals the special sense in which mysticism provides the truth about spiritual existence.
Like Thirst, the action of Fog is concerned with the mystery of
God’s "silence" and again suggests O’Neill’s attempt to transcend tragic despair and to tranquilize spiritual doubt by an identification 174
of the individual self with the mystic aspects of Nature. Although
the play is primarily a philosophical debate between the Poet and
Businessman concerning the ambivalent expression of pain and
suffering in human existence, it is also an exploration and discovery
which acknowledges that the Poet’s genuine concern for and participa
tion in mutual suffering is the means of personal redemption and
salvation.
Implicit in the Poet’s suffering is the suggestion that a man
of folly and error may be transformed to a man of resolution and
determination if he is willing to sacrifice his own welfare for the
immediate benefit of the less fortunate. O’Neill’s choice of the
Bible as the model for the rebirth of both the Poet and the Gentleman through acts of self-sacrifice and charity also enables one to see how the concept of individual retribution is related to a universal spiritual truth and how suffering justifies and redeems human existence.
Further clarification of the meaning of suffering is to be found in the contrast drawn by O’Neill in Beyond the Horizon between the need for redemption from suffering and for the necessity of confession of sin and the asking of forgiveness. The leifmotif of the sin of
Adam and Eve provide the impetus for O’Neill’s treatment of Robert and Ruth and the chastisement and eventual expiation which result from their apparent weakness in the face of temptation.
It is only when Robert realizes that his transgression and guilt have been bought with the crime of sinful love and paid for by suffering that he understands the necessity of inexorable punishment and affirms that spiritual victories may only be won with God's help. 175
In this respect, Beyond the Horizon continues the testament of faith
which O’Neill began in Thirst and Fog and suggests that death is a
release for those who have achieved a certain nobility, a certain
dignity, and a certain transfiguring peace because of the agonies
which they have endured.
It was inevitable that O'Neill's earlier treatment of suffering
as individual retribution and atonement should extend itself from
the dialogue between man and God to the relations between man and
his society; and that having achieved redemption in the sphere of religion he should seek redemption in the human polity. This is, indeed, what he suggests in The Hairy Ape, the final play under con sideration in this discussion.
In this particular play, which follows immediately the death of
O'Neill's father and mother, there is a strange transformation of the value of suffering to the human world. Now, instead of being identified with obedience to God's law, suffering appears to be an indictment against social injustice. The,choice seems to be between evading those religious imperatives which teach that it is Heaven alone which should be the field of man's aspiration, and fulfilling God’s mission on Earth.
What O'Neill appears to offer in place of the private spiritual universe promised to those who suffer in obedience to God's divine law, as illustrated in Thirst, Fog, and Beyond the Horizon, is a reorganization of mankind in terms of social equality. The central principle of suffering in this movement of O'Neill’s career acknow ledges that social injustice is the necessary consequence of the 176
belief that God is dead and that science and materialism have failed
to provide an adequate substitute for man’s spiritual dilemma,
Yank, O’Neill’s social critic and spokesman, points out the moral and ethical complications inherent in modem society’s emphasis upon wealth and the spiritual complications inherent in modern society's attempt to fashion God in man’s image. It is perhaps something more than a coincidence that in this play, which depicts man as an "ape,"
O’Neill reveals himself for the first time under the influence of late nineteenth-century Darwinian thought, and suggests that unless human life is reconstructed ori the basis of spiritual values there is no hope for the future.
The Hairy Ape is representative of the essentially tragic cycle of O’Neill’s drama from 1913 to 1923: from a mystical universe which appears alien to those who refuse to struggle with the mystery of
God’s divine blueprint for redemption, to a wasteland where man yearns for a state of no knowledge of sin, to a social environment in which the worship of material wealth brings no real identity at all and only results in the erosion of the human soul.
O’Neill's universe, then, is one in which sin and suffering, redemption and damnation, the way of faith and the way of faithless ness, are the only consistent elements. The frustration, the agony, and the suffering of his characters is presented not merely for itself, however, but to affirm the value' of man’s rapport with himself and with God.
Even if the struggle of his characters against fate or cir cumstances appears to be a failure, that effort is spiritually exalt— 177
ing, for it acknowledges man’s relevance, not merely to himself or
to society, but to the universe, which is a reflection of God's
mystical nature.
And if the meanings of O'Neill’s work may be seen as for the
most part basically consistent with the broad outlines of the classic
Christian view of man and the world as expressed in the Bible, it also
remains true that his treatment of suffering as an act of purification
and redemption is consistent with the teachings of the Old Testament
prophets.
Grant all objections that may reasonably be made at this point,
grant the difficulty of defining not only "purification" but also
"redemption," grant all this and more, and it still remains true that
the common core of belief that has united Christians of all persuasions
in all ages has been faith in, acceptance of, hope for, the injuction
of suffering as an instrument of God's saving grace. Without it the early church would have had no "good news;" without it, there would be no radical distinction between Christianity and other theistic religions; without it, there would be no gospel of hope in the early dramas of O'Neill.
That is why this study is merely a prelude to an understanding of O'Neill's contribution to world literature in general and American drama in particular. His early dramas only refashion and reconstitute the parabolic patterns of suffering, imposing on the reader the burden of further study for new perception. From their sometimes violent dislocations of familiar Biblical text, O'Neill's initial dramas of suffering and redemption raise the same old questions of man’s 178
spiritual nature and spiritual destiny but appear to emerge with new
and unsuspected answers.
This unsuspected revelation appears to be relevant to the whole
matter involving the relation of O'Neill’s work to Christianity and
the tragic vision: for our secularist culture has tended to forget
not just the Christian answers proposed by O’Neill in his treatment
of suffering, but the questions that must be put before the answers
can seem meaningful to contemporary society.
And while O’Neill's often experimental treatment of spiritual
anguish, helplessness, and destruction in these early plays may
prove to be dated, they are genuine and powerful expressions of the
suffering and sacrifice which are yet to appear in his more mature
drama. To suppose, therefore, that everything has been discovered
and that O'Neill's tragic vision has been clearly delineated is to
deny that he speaks more immediately to the spiritual condition of
our age than more contemporary playwrights. So to dismiss him, as
some critics have done, is hardly to draw a full enough circle of definition about his significance as America's only significant play wright-prophet .
It was not the purpose of this study, therefore, to evaluate the technical artistry of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill but, rather, to sketch the man and the thinker, to present his beliefs on religious questions not as facts but as alternatives to the tragic sense of life in which man must suffer without apparent reason.
It is hoped that what has emerged from this investigation is a portrait of these very thoughts as painted by their creator—a story written admittedly in the tears of humanity by a man who attempted to 179
lead suffering mankind out of the darkness of the fear of death to the mystic heights of eternal life. 180
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Books
Bentley, Eric. The Playwright as Thinker. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1946.
Boulton, Agnes. Part of a Long Story: Eugene O'Neill as a Young Man in Love. Londdn: Peter Davies Press, 1958.
Bowen, Croswell. The Curse of the Misbegotten. New York: McGraw- Hill Book Co., 1959..
Broussard, Louis. American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams. Norman, Oklahoma: Univer sity of Oklahoma Press, 1962.
Brown, Carleton. Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Cargill, Oscar and N. Bryllion Fagin and William J. Fisher. O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, Í9S1,
Carpenter, Frederic I, American Literature and the Drama. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.
Clark, Barrett H, A Study of the Modern Drama. New York: D. Apple- ton and Co., 1925.
Clark, Barrett H, Eugene O'Neill. New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 19267"^
DeVoto, Bernard. Minority Report. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1940.
Dickinson, Thomas H. Playwrights of the New American Theatre. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1925.
Driver, Tom F. O'Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Eastman, Fred. Christ in the Drama. New York: Macmillan and Co., W.
Engel, Edwin A. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953-
Falk, Doris V. Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension. New Bruns wick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1958. 181
Frenz, Horst. Eugene O'Neill. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Go., 1971.
Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama. New York: Dover Publications. 1940. '
Gelb, Arthur and Barbara, O'Neill. New York: Harper and Brothers Go., 1962.
Goldberg, Isaac. The Theatre of George Jean Nathan: Chapters and Documents Toward A History of the New American Drama. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926.
Jaspers, Karl. Tragedy Is Not Enough. H. A. T. Reiche, trans. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.
Karsner, David. Sixteen Authors to One: Intimate Sketches of Lead ing American Story Tellers, New York: Lewis Copeland Co., 1928. I Krutch, Joseph Wood. 'Modernism' in Modern Drama: A Definition and an Estimate. New York: Cornell University Press, 1953.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American Drama Since 1918. New York: Ran dom House, I939.
Lamm, Martin. Modern Drama. Karin Elliott, trans. New York: Philo sophical Library,,1953.
Leech, Clifford. Eugene O'Neill. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963. I Melville, Herman. Moby Dick or The White Whale. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957.
Miller, Jordan Y. Playwright's Progress: O'Neill and the Critics. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co~ 19^5•
Moses, Montrose and John Mason Brown. The American Theatre as Seen By Its Critics. New York: Norton and Co., 1934.
Niebuhr. Reinhold. Beyond Tragedy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.
O'Casey, Sean. Rose and Crown. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1952.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama From the Civil War to the Present Day. New York: Appleton- Century- Crofts, 1936.
Quinn, Arthor Hobson. Representative American Plays. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1928. 182
Sanborn, Ralph and Barrett H, Clark. A Bibliography of the Works of Eugene O’Neill together with The Collected Poems of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Benjamin Blom Press, 1968,
Sayler, Oliver M. Our American Theatre. New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1923.
Scott, Richard. The Christian Faith. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962. I Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.
Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 19¿8,
Skinner, Richard Dana. Eugene O'Neill: A Poet’s Quest. New York: Longmans and Green, 1935»
Tiusanen, Timo. O'Neill’s Scenic Images. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Tornqvist, Egil. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill’s Super- naturalistic Technique. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press,,19 69.
Winther, Sophus Keith. Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study. New York: Random House, 1934.
Winther, Sophus Keith, Eugene O'Neill. New York: Random House, 1934.
II. Periodicals
Anonymous. "The Ordeal of Eugene O'Neill," Time, XXXXVIII, (October 21, 1946), pp. 71^-78.
Anderson, John. "Eugene O'Neill." Theatre Arts Monthly. XV, (November 1931), PP. 938-942.
Basso, Hamilton. "The Tragic Sense: III," The New Yorker, XXIV, (March 13, 1948), pp. 37-47.
Bird, Carol. "Eugene O'Neill---- The Inner Man: An Interview," Theatre Magazine, XXXIX, (June 1924), pp. 9-60.
Brown, John Mason. "American Tragedy," Saturday Review of Litera ture, XXXII, (August 6, 1949), pp. 124-127.
Dobree, Bonamy, "The Plays of ,Eugene O'Neill," The Southern Review, II, (December 1937), pp. 435-446. 183
Eastman, Fred. "Eugene O’Neill and Religion," The Christian Cen tury, L, (July 26, 1933), pp. 955-957.
Eaton, Walter Prichard. "O'Neill---- 'New Risen Attic Stream*?," American Scholar, ¡VI, (November 1937), pp. 304-312.
Eaton, Walter Prichard. "The Hermit of Cape Cod," New York Herald- Tribune, (January 8, 1928), pp. 10-12.
Eaton, Walter Prichard. "Why America Lacks Big Playwrights," Theatre Magazine, XXXII, (December 1920), pp. 346-406.
Fergusson, Francis. "Eugene O'Neill," The Hound and Horn, III, (January 1930), pp. 145-160.
Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. "As" O’Neill Saw the Theatre," New York Times Magazine, (November 12, 1961), pp. 32-39.
Kantor, Louis. "O'Neill Defends His Play of Negro," New York Times, IX, (May 11, 1924), pp. 5-6.
Krutch, Joseph Wood, "The God of Stumps," The Nation, CXIX, (November 12, 1924), pp. 578-580.
Lewisohn, Ludwig. "The Development of Eugene O'Neill," The Nation, CXIV, (March 22, 1922), pp. 349-350.
Loving, Pierre. "Eugene O'Neill," The Bookman, LIII, (August 1921), pp. 511-520.
McGuire, Harry. "Beyond Strange Interlude," The Drama, XIX, (March 1929), PP. 172-189.
Mullett, Mary B. "The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O'Neill," The American Magazine,; XCIV, (November 1922), pp. 34-120.
Nethercot, Arthur. "O'Neill on Freudianism," Saturday Review of Literature, VIII, (May 28, 1932), p. 759»
O'Neill, Eugene. "Eugene O'Neill's Credo and His Reasons for His Faith," New York Tribune, (February 13, 1921), p. 30.
Peery, William. "Does the Buskin Fit O'Neill?," The University of Kansas City Review, XV, (June 1949), pp. 281-287.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. "Eugene O'Neill, Poet and Mystic," Scribner's Magazine, LXXX, (October 1926), pp. 368-372,
R. J. "A Dramatist of Monomanias The Plays of Eugene O'Neill," The London Spectator, III, (October 1925)» pp. 645-646.
I 184
Sayler, Oliver. "The Artist: of the Theatres A Colloquy Between Eugene O’Neill and Oliver M. Sayler," Theatre Arts, XXXXI, (June 1957). PP» 23-24. I Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, "Eugene O’Neills The Man With a Mask," The New Republic, L, (March 16, 192?), pp. 91-95»
Winther, Sophus Keith. "Strindberg and O’Neills A Study of Influ ence," Scandinavian Studies, XXXI, (August 1959)» pp. 103- 120.
Young, Stark. "Eugene O’Neills Notes From a Critic’s Diary," Harper’s Magazine,. CCXIV, (June 1957), PP» 66-74.
Ill. Plays
O’Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "All God's Chillun Got Wings," in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New Yorks Random House), 1955»
O’Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "Beyond the Horizon," in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New Yorks Random House), 1928.
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "Fog," in Ten 'Lost' Plays, (New Yorks Random House), 1942.
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "Gold," in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New Yorks Random House), 1951»
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "The Great God Brown," in Nine Plays By Eugene O'Neill, Joseph Wood Krutch, ed., (New Yorks The Modern Library), 1954.
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "The Hairy Ape," in Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill, Joseph Wood Krutch, ed., (New Yorks Random House), 1954.
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays," in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New Yorks Random House), 1955»
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "The Straw," in Six Short Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New Yorks Vintage Books), 1951»
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone. "Thirst," in Ten 'Lost' Plays, (New Yorks Random House), 1942.