O'Neill and His Critics:
ABEL, LIONEL
O'Neill and His Critics By Lionel Abel Some weeks ago, Joseph Wood Krutch tried to reply, from the pages of the New York Times Book Review, to two of Eugene O'Neill's intellectual critics, Eric...
...They are serious, vehement, clearly intended to do permanent damage to the great reputations involved...
...As drama critic for the Nation, he had not scrupled to place O'Neill on the same plane with Shakespeare, finding Mourning Becomes Electra inferior to Macbeth only as language, not as drama...
...It was she who announced in her comment on The Iceman Cometh, right after its Broadway production, that O'Neill was one of the Americans who could not write, who, like Dreiser and Farrell, did not have the "slightest ear for the word, the Lionel Abel is a translator and literary critic who has written for Partisan Review and other journals...
...But—and this point was completely overlooked by Krutch in his Times piece—Bentley judged O'Neill as a writer of plays...
...But what is great in writing for the stage may easily seem not so in isolation from it...
...O'Neill and His Critics By Lionel Abel Some weeks ago, Joseph Wood Krutch tried to reply, from the pages of the New York Times Book Review, to two of Eugene O'Neill's intellectual critics, Eric Bentley and Mary McCarthy...
...Not so Mary McCarthy...
...How could they be...
...Generations of Frenchmen have admired Roxane's "Sortez!'* in Racine's Bajazet...
...Mary McCarthy's criticisms of O'Neill, as of Ibsen, do not belong to this sophisticated genre...
...Yet, all thai'"Sortez...
...Moreover, I think he quite honestly tried, as he told us, "to like O'Neill...
...O'Neill was certainly able to make characters speak authentically at the critical points of their life experience...
...Mary McCarthy and Eric Bentley tended to judge O'Neill as a writer...
...Now of course she could hardly hope to destroy reputations like Ibsen's and O'Neill's—for people who love the theater—without giving some argument...
...He held that O'Neill would have equaled Shakespeare had he possessed a comparable rhetoric...
...She scarcely seems to notice in her abusive assault on Ibsen that what he wrote was plays, not novels or essays...
...She is without any real theatrical culture, and her opinions of plays are, I think, designedly immoderate, violent and feminine...
...But I think her dramatic criticism is addressed to another type of playgoer: the timid soul who is capable of feeling "caught" if he happens to admire Ibsen's use of symbols, and can be made to feel ashamed, after admiring a play by O'Neill, for not noting that he could not write...
...The crudeness of that judgment went unremarked during the period of O'Neill's successes...
...The pleasure we take in hearing such views expressed is inseparable, even as we entertain them, from the knowledge that we are going to revert to the very contrary ones...
...to do this, one must have a very superior command of language, even if not of the sort which could have imposed itself outside the theater...
...I think O'Neill was a master of rhetoric, but not the kind of master that Mary McCarthy—or Krutch, while under her tutelage—can recognize as such...
...Unfortunately, he fell into two errors...
...Now Krutch is not one of O'Neill's new admirers...
...He has earned the right to hold the opinions he expresses, for which he always gives reasons that are pointed and relevant...
...First, he wrongly identified Bentley's views on O'Neill with Mary McCarthy's, and they are not at all the same...
...Even in his new, posthumously published play, A Touch of the Poet (Yale, $3.75), which is hardly up to the level of his very best work, he is able to hold my interest in a way which would be unaccountable to me if the writing were clumsy or cold...
...And there has never been a fine playwright, let alone a great one, who was not a master of rhetoric...
...The fact is that the writing is quite good...
...Not that it would be easy to quote from A Touch of the Poet in such a way as to indicate the play's dimensions or the playwright's cunning...
...Bentley is a serious judge of plays...
...Now I submit that dramatizing a character's different states of consciousness—before and after a critical conversion—by two distinctly different kinds of speech is the idea of a man who thinks as ? writer...
...indeed, the whole work is far beyond most of what is written today for the stage...
...later, a new generation appeared which did not find real satisfaction in O'Neill's art and set about downgrading his reputation...
...O'Neill was a master of speech insofar as the words spoken by his characters convince us as coming from them...
...There are any number of things in O'Neill almost as good as that...
...Reading again his essay, "Trying to Like O'Neill," which still stands up as an analysis of the playwright and especially of The Iceman Cometh, I could not find that Bentley at any point distinguished O'Neill the writer from O'Neill the playwright...
...In my view, he should have defended O'Neill's language...
...But if they are seriously intended, they are frivolous in form...
...In his Times piece, Krutch was trying to answer this attack (as well as to defend his earlier estimate of the American dramatist...
...But to say this is to take nothing from him as a dramatist...
...sentence, the speech, the paragraph...
...Examples: Gide calling War and Peace a "bore," Val?ry attacking Flaubert for his lack of artistry...
...means is "Get out...
...Where Bent-ley is critical of O'Neill's writing, he is critical of his plotting and of his treatment of character...
...But Mary McCarthy has simply tried out her dislike of O'Neill—as her dislike of Shaw and of Ibsen—on us...
...When Melody is exposed, he reverts with pained relief to a coarse Irish brogue, after having spoken throughout the play the language of a cultivated gentleman...
...Which brings me back to Krutch's second error...
...Let no one tell me she is sophisticated...
...In the character of Major Con Melody—I think even the choice of such a name shows verbal imagination—O'Neill has sketched a profoundly pathetic figure of human pretension...
...This was in agreeing with Mary McCarthy's judgment of O'Neill's writing while yet trying to maintain his estimate of O'Neill as a playwright...
...What matters on the stage is not that a speech should be elegant—unless the character is—but that the words spoken should be discovered by the character himself in the act of saying them...
...There is a type of malicious criticism which is both useful and enjoyable...
...for, after all, if it were as poor as has been claimed, then how could the plays have the very great merits Krutch still holds they have...
...It is simply too much of a paradox to say that a man is a great dramatist and that he lacks the gift for putting his characters' feelings into words, since it is only through the words spoken on the stage that the characters and their feelings can become real for us...
...The idea that O'Neill could not write, while he could excite and captivate audiences, is just an absurdity...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 6
