A Baedeker of O'Neill's Genius
WOLFE, ANN F.
A Baedeker of O'Neills Genius The Curse of the Misbegotten. By Croswell Bowen, with Shane O'Neill. McGraw-Hill. 384 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, "Saturday Review" New York...
...The elder son, Eugene Jr., calls to mind Patrick Bronte, gifted brother of the sister geniuses and their co-dweller in the eerier realms of the Celtic imagination, who drowned his frustrated creative urge in alcohol...
...Much of his art was born of the anguish he suffered in having to live, like Con Melody, "alone in the hell of his pride...
...The inability to communicate love, in any case, is of a piece with the terrible loneliness and the defensive pride that O'Neill externalizes in so many of his characters...
...the bibulous, sardonic young brother, a brooding malcontent with "a touch of the poet...
...It is not without significance that this chronicle, so deeply indebted to the surviving son, Shane, should be subtitled, "A Tale of the House of O'Neill...
...There are indications that Carlotta Monterey, his enigmatic, over-protective third wife, may have been at least partly responsible...
...It is in the preface that he thus quotes O'Neill's elder son and namesake: "My father's seemingly tragic view of life covers a deep-seated idealism, a dream of what the world could be 'if only...
...Teen-age Oona, defying her father's opposition, went ahead with her May-December marriage to Charlie Chaplin...
...Bowen, to be sure, does not labor this theme...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, "Saturday Review" New York "Times Book Review" THE DARK, DESTRUCTIVE mysticism that fed the roots of Eugene O'Neill's being and art can best be approached by way of his Irish spiritual heritage...
...Thanks to Long Day's Journey into Night, the public is familiar with four of the dramatis personae in the living tragedy that was, in some ways, more harrowing than any of O'Neill's plays: the penny-pinching actor who prostituted his great talent...
...Bowen traces the history of the dramatists three marriages and the third generation of the "curse-ridden" O'Neills...
...How this spiritual son of a proud, ill-fated Irish king was able, like Poe, to discipline the inner furies that seemed certain to destroy the artist in him shows up here as another of the infinite mysteries of genius...
...Resisting the temptation to Freudianize his story, he has concentrated on O'Neill's daemonic odyssey, the brawling youth, the love affairs, the compulsive changes of residence, the olympian binges, the writing of the plays...
...The son touched a sensitive spot in the Irish psyche...
...the silver-corded wastrel son who drank himself to death...
...His interpretation is almost clairvoyant in its illumination of the father's obsessive pursuit of the dream beyond the horizon, the reckless flight from a guilt-harassed self, the isolating pride, the tragic characters foredoomed to ironic destruction...
...As for the "curse" that has blighted all the O'Neills but Oona—if she can be said to have escaped it—Bowen believes that it stems from the family inability to communicate love...
...Be that as it may, such inability is not uncommon in the repressed, conscience-troubled Irish character...
...Shane, from youth a narcotics addict, is apparently a psychiatric casualty...
...Eugene Jr., a brilliant classical scholar, killed himself at 40...
...But as Baedeker for this stark dynastic terrain, Bowen's comprehensive volume should long remain a standby...
...Eugene, like his father before him, seems to have failed his children...
...The tale of these three tormented generations and the disparate, yet pathetically interdependent, individuals in them can never be told, certainly not with psychological completeness...
...That touch—was it despite or because of an inauspicious psychological climate?—was to flower darkly into the art of the poete maudit and the malcontent into the eternal stranger "who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death...
...What raises Croswell Bowen's book above the level of first-rate journalism is his insight into the basic Irishness—Catholic Irishness, if you will—of the man who was America's greatest dramatist...
...Except in the preface, in fact, he hardly adverts to it...
...That heritage was as integral to his genius as Poe's County Cavan lineage to his affinity for spectral horror and Joyce's Dublin Catholicism to the creation of Ulysses...
...the gently reared nun manquee who sought release in drugs...
...And, indeed, it may go a long way toward explaining his own suicide...
...The author has reached out among the family's living friends and acquaintances for primary sources and fresh, specific details, for eye-witness accounts, memories—in the .nature of things, sometimes contradictory—and documents old and new...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 32
