The renegade haunted by God
Lauder, Robert E.
EUGENE O'NEILL'S DREAM OF FORGIVENESS The renegade haunted by God ROBERT E. LAUDER O NE OF THE most " C a t h o l i c " plays to appear on Broadway in years arrived last spring:...
...She throws her arms around him, forgives him, and tells him how proud she is that he came to her because he knew she was the only one in the world who loved him enough to understand and forgive...
...The key to O'Neill's vision lies in his view of fate and tragedy...
...Unlike some of the humanized Christs of contemporary theology, therefore, the Renaissance took the divinity of Jesus for granted, an unquestionable credo that was in fact the sine qua non for the awe and delight which its artists took in unveiling Christ's sex...
...In O'Neill: Son and Playwright (Little Brown and Company, 1968), Louis Sheaffer depicts O'Neill praying fervently for his mother and even thinking of becoming a priest if this might save her...
...The tension between fate and freedom is tied to O'Neill's vision of Greek tragedy, a view that urged us toward life...
...As she loves and understands and forgives...
...He replied, "Unfortunately not...
...Unable to FOR THE FIRST TIME, MERTON BY THOSE WHO KNEW HIM BEST EDITED BY PAUL WILKES i iii i i i i i i i Revealing personal remembrances of Merton by friends and acquaintances whose lives touched his most closely, including James Laughlin, Robert Giroux, John Eudes Bamberger, Jean Leclerq, Ernesto Cardenal, the Dalai Lama, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Joan Baez...
...After confessing to Josie, Tyrone says of his mother: , S h e ' d understand and forgive me, don't you think...
...Nuts...
...Although O'Neill never returned to the church, there is ample evidence that, in addition to suffering guilt feelings, he never stopped searching for a benevolent God...
...They are also my prayer for the insightful, sensitive, wounded thirteen-year-old who could not believe in a benevolent God...
...Yet one can also dread the self-confrontation which such a drama, induces...
...And of the lot of them, and the list includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, and John O'Hara among others, O'Neill is the blackest of all...
...Her purity is important to Tyrone because he wants a chaste love from her that is pure, non-judgmental and forgiving...
...And just here is where I am a most confirmed mystic, too, for I'm always, always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just in terms of character...
...She was beautiful...
...Neither too little nor too much should be made of the "Catholic" dimension in O'Neill's plays...
...You're like her deep down in your heart...
...He hopes that if he can spend one night with Josie Hogan, daughter of a tenant farmer on Tyrone's property, that somehow his burden of guilt will be lifted...
...Sheaffer points out that thirty years dater O'Neill revised his own history in Days Without End, the story of an embattled Catholic apostate named John Loving...
...To minimize the influence of his Catholic background would be to miss a key element in his creative vision...
...While it would be a mistake to miss the "Catholic influence" in O'Neill's plays, it would be a worse mistake to identify O'Neill as a Catholic apologist or his plays as dramatizations of orthodox Catholic dogma...
...They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever...
...No such vagueness was permitted the makers of images...
...The emergence of this sexual motif in distinctively sacred Western art isunthinkable except as the fruition of a thousand years of meditation on the "true God, true man" of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A,D...
...An essay by Croswell Bowen entitled "The Black Irishman," published in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin and William J. Fisher (New York University Press, 1961), supports this view of O'Neill: A Black Irishman . . . is an Irishman who has lost his Faith and spends his life searching for the meaning of life, for a philosophy in which he can believe again as fervently as he once believed in the simple answers of the Catholic Catechism...
...O'Neill wrote the play in 1943 as a conciliatory offering to his deceased brother James who had died twenty years earlier half-crazed by alcohol...
...Accordingly, artists like Fra Filippo Lippi, Bellini, Michelangelo, Roger van der Weyden, Schongauer, Andrea del Sarto, and VerCommonweal: 692...
...Fate did not erase freedom...
...Forget it...
...as if imitating Byzantine icons, they tended to accent only the upper torso, in their physieo-mystical hierarchy the godly part, and tellingly left the lower, human part vague...
...The power of the play convinces me that agnostic O'Neill wanted for his brother James "the promise of God's peace in the soul's dark sadness...
...Well guess again...
...In fact fate gave persons an opportunity to achieve a spiritual victory...
...In A Moon for the Misbegotten the dream is expressed in Catholic symbols...
...EUGENE O'NEILL'S DREAM OF FORGIVENESS The renegade haunted by God ROBERT E. LAUDER O NE OF THE most " C a t h o l i c " plays to appear on Broadway in years arrived last spring: Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten...
...To an extent, O'Neill seems to epitomize the adage that it is often easier for the person to get out of the church than to get the church out of the person...
...You can't get away from it...
...Though their lives are and will remain tragic, Tyrone and Josie under the moon attain what O'Neill viewed as a spiritual success: Tyrone's dream of forgiveness is achieved through Josie's love...
...To dramatize the battle within the character O'Neill literally split him in two: "John" is a Faustian character and "Loving" is a kind of Mephistopheles...
...John" is the suffering half who is starving for salvation while "Loving" represents enmity to life and God...
...Furthermore, during a discussion about religion in 1946 O'Neill was asked whether he had returned to Catholicism...
...Kirkus Reviews $12.95" Hlqtql:~tq ~ A(]~ *Suggested at bookstores ] 0 ] ~ Ftq[::~([].r consumer price 14 December 1984:691 find peace and aware that he has "seen too God-damned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows," Tyrone is looking for some kind of forgiveness and salvation...
...Behind such reactions lurks a latent Gnosticism, Steinberg shows, or a sensibility which separates the earthy and natural from the mystical, two spheres which it was the whole point of this art to join together...
...What better way, moreover, to purge the West's imagination of its congenital Gnostic contempt for the earth, anneal its chronic Manichaean dualism, and stretch the soul into the channels of promise opened out by the God-Man - - than to portray Christ, the exemplar of freedom, in his most vulnerable member without shame, indeed "sliame.less...
...On the other hand, the church did come out of the man while O'Neill was still a boy...
...It appeared amid productions of three other O'Neill plays and a PBS screening of Hughie...
...The ostensio genitalium was as basic as the ostensio vulnerum, the showing of the wounds...
...and the author of The Priest as Person...
...Part of O'Neill's appeal is that each time one enters his world one is invited to experience more deeply what is personal without being private and what is universal without being abstract...
...O'Neill's wish for his brother is voiced in Josie's last lines: "May you rest forever in forgive= ness and peace...
...A Black Irishman is a FATHER ROBERT E. LAUDER is a professor of philosophy at Cathedral College of the lmmuaculate Conception in Douglaston, N.Y...
...Of course late medieval theologians typically asserted Christ's complete humanity, but it strikes us as fishy, not wholly honest...
...The model thirteen-year-old student at Catholic boarding school was undergoing a spiritual crisis brought about by a mother suffering drug addiction...
...It seems Commonweal: 690 to me that anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer...
...Admitting that one wills defeat by pursuing the unattainable, O'Neill insisted that the very struggle was the success...
...In Moon for instance, a play based on O'Neill's own family experience, one can admire the courage that enabled him to expose his own pain and to share it with the audience...
...His sins of drunkenness during his mother's final illness and of fornication near his dead mother's body are torturing Tyrone's conscience...
...There is no ribaldry here...
...I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind -- Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it - - Mystery certainly - - and of the eternal tragedy of Man in,his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression...
...She was simple and kind and pure of heart...
...When Tyrone awakens, though he cannot immediately remember the details of the night, he says he feels, "Sort of at peace with myself and this lousy life -- as if all my sins had been forgiven...
...The normal viewer overlooks it...
...Victims of post-Reformation black-out, of what art historian Leo Steinberg calls a "modem oblivion," we have not seen what's directly in front of our noses...
...Time I got a move o n . . . Josie does forgive him...
...Unlike O'Neill, the apostate returns to the church at the end of the play...
...For example in Moon, James suggests his belief in fate: "There is no present or future - - only the past happening over and over again ' - now...
...That's why I told you...
...In the recent Broadway production, director David Leveaux underlines the symbolism of this scene by lighting the two figures on the stage so that they resemble a Pieta...
...In a letter to George Jean Nathan, O'Neill wrote: "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...
...Books: CONFRONTING THE INCARNATION D ID we congratulate ourselves that a signal difference between Christianity and Greek Dionysianism, or between Christianity and Hindu Shaivite devotion, was the refusal in Western iconography of the latter's phallicism...
...Or do we imagine that the recovery of Christ's humanity, redressing a centuries-old Nicene overstress on the divinity,- constitutes an entirely modern phenomenon...
...Or in Long Day's Journey into Night Mary says: "None of us can help the things life has done to us...
...As tragedy roused the Greeks to deeper spiritual understanding, freed them from the petty greeds of everyday existence, and enabled them to see their own hopeless hopes ennobled in art, O'Neill argued that it is our dreams that keep us fighting and living...
...Accompanying his mother's coffin back east James had arrived in New York so drunk that he couldn't even attend the funeral...
...up until now I THE SEXUALITY OF CHRIST IN RENAISSANCE ART AND IN MODERN OBLIVION Leo Steinberg Pantheon Books, $11.95, 222 pp...
...However, O'Neill's view of fate was not so narrow as pure determinism...
...She always did...
...No longer a believer, O'Neill continued to attend Mass for about a year until the summer of 1903 when he refused to attend church and declared that he was never going again...
...For him drama that did not deal with these questions was of no interest...
...I can guarantee it: after reading this monograph and more to the point, taking in its ample illustrations, you will never again stroll through galleries of late medieval and Renaissance artworks with the same innocent, unseeing eyes...
...Tyrone sees through Josie's facade of foul mouth and loose morals...
...T HE PRESENCE of Catholic symbols in his plays is mixed with a philosophical vision that O'Neill eventually embrace d, a vision that is a fascinating mixture of fate and freedom, tragedy and spiritual salvation, mystery and mysticism...
...If outward success were impossible, spiritual success was always attainable...
...for Renaissance artists, Christ's sexual member became the demonstrative sign of the verity of Incarnation, "the pledge of God's humanation...
...O'Neill has been described as an agnostic in search of redemption, a renegade haunted by the God he had discarded...
...American letters are richer for Black Irishmen...
...My mistake...
...When no cure came O'Neill could no longer believe in the God of Catholicism...
...And Josie adds: "As she forgives, do you hear me...
...convincing mosaic-portrait of Merton as a warm-blooded mensch and g i f t e d s p i r i t u a l adventurer...
...He claimed that human life attained a spiritual significance when an individual fought all the hostile forces within and without in order to achieve a nobler future...
...I N A LETTER probably written in 1925 O'Neill provided a marvelous summary of his ambition: "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...
...O'Neill never lost his interest in ultimate questions despite his rejection of Catholicism...
...O'Neill told Philip Moeller, the director of Days Without End, that the hero's return to his Catholic faith was a wish fulfillment on O'Neill's part...
...the pious find it in bad taste...
...How could we have missed the obvious - - that in all those devout representations of Madonna and Child, Adorations of the Magi, Ecce Homos, Deposition scenes, and Pier,is, the principal axis of attention, the "action" of these paintings and sculptures, is the sex of Christ, his genitals...
...brooding, solitary man -- and often a drinking man too -- with wild words on the tip of his tongue...
...I thought -(Abruptly his expression becomes sneering and cynical -- harshly...
...No wonder Dorothy Day who knew O'Neill in 1918 described him as ab-sorbed by death and darkness...
...David Toolan most Renaissance art historians misconstrued it as erotive naturalism or the intrusion of folk elements into the sacred...
...In the play, James Tyrone, modeled on James O'Neill, is steadily drinking himself to death because of his guilt feelings about his deceased mother...
...their theological anatomy lesson, by virtue of their m6tier, had to be bolder, specific...
...O'Neill felt the need to explain his older brother's love for their mother and, posthumously, to forgive James's behavior after her death...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
