A Touch of the Adolescent

...In making the shift, O'Neill acknowledges what both his real interest and real competence were...

...Therein lies the essence of even pseudo-American works, like Look Back in Anger, which contains no adult anger whatsoever, but is one long adolescent tantrum...

...In actuality, artists as serious as Eugene O'Neill do what they have to do and pay the price...

...Brecht himself would have admired the little scene in which a capitalist's wife, to demonstrate her new-won belief in the system, blackmails and browbeats into acceptance of the cash-nexus a representative of the pre-capitalist ideal of honor...

...We get—melodrama...

...Actually, it is not dramatized...

...O'Neill's characters, on the other hand, being American adolescents, want to be loved, and they don't really want anything else...

...and it is O'Neill's doing that it is thus, and not vice versa...

...What After the Fall really shows is the adolescent male discovering sex: At first it is absolutely yummy but a little later on, girls turn out to be awful bitches, and one needs to let the world know it—loudly...

...But what might be called the archetypal situation in Strindberg is one in which the romance of falling in love has given way, perhaps long ago, to cold hate...

...Such chatter gets boring after a while...

...In the act of acknowledging his utter identification with the adolescent, and the adolescent's viewpoint, Eugene O'Neill transcends that adolescent and his viewpoint to give a dramatic account of three men and women...

...In More Stately Mansions the protagonist, giving up political progressivism, regresses instead to childlike dependence upon the mother-woman, but the sense of loss is not dramatized because the political progressivism had belonged to the same phase of being as the dependence: progress was itself regress...

...It is just as much a war play as a love story, and to Romeo and Juliet the feud of the families is an essential element, as are the humors of Mercutio and Tybalt, as is the botany of Friar Laurence...

...If the dialogue is occasionally awkward and more than occasionally ponderous, it earns these defects by an unhurried thoroughness, an evident preoccupation with something more than the moment...

...O'Neill had it in mind to give some impression in drama of the whole sweep of American history from the Revolution to the present...

...They meant sex maybe...

...And indeed immaturity is less important as existing in artists than as demanded by their audience...

...The life of men and women, as we have encountered it in literature or even in life, does not exist for the greatest American dramatist...

...In the cycle of plays which O'Neill was busy with in the '30s, it comes immediately after A Touch of the Poet, and resembles that play in style and substance...

...This confusion is itself far from arbitrary...

...There have been actors, praised in all sorts of other terms, whose actual appeal is their durable infantility...

...It is true enough that she was not a traditionally glamorous woman...

...In short, we live in a culture that does not believe in men and women but in Boys and Girls', the fashion pages of any paper or magazine are enough to prove it...

...The question is whether it makes for more than that...

...In our society, at least, it would seem that no one surmounts these two crises with complete success, and the failure to surmount them can even be made a virtue...

...Melodrama is thoroughly satisfactory when it is intended as melodrama: There is an awkwardness about it, and much waste motion in the writing, if it is intended as more...

...After long years of cogitation he finds the answer: by making sure my wife is a Mom...

...The art of the drama illustrates this, time and time again...

...Consequently, economics often symbolizes sex, and not vice versa...

...There was a piquancy about the asexual innocence behind the sexual provocation...

...He drops the grandiose kitsch of Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra and lets his own voice be heard...

...And what a relief it must have been to throw away most of the camouflage and "come right out with it...

...It is such an achievement for an American to overcome the official optimism of the country that he tends to think his hard-won pessimism must sound original and daring...

...It seems to me that Mr...

...All too often they only want to be loved by Mom...

...And they are convinced that she suffered terribly when satisfying their needs...

...The decaying gentry of the South are, for example, an appropriate symbol for the inner life of Blanche Dubois-Tennessee Williams...

...But our dramatists, with Eugene O'Neill at the head, have taken their Candys at face value: They have really believed those men needed her...

...Now, if no one fully solves the problems of infancy and adolescence, at least these problems are later complicated by a growing awareness of the reality outside oneself, and the knowledge that the world was not built for ME—was not even built exclusively for LOVE —is no longer totally overwhelming...

...Or take Marilyn Monroe...

...Similarly, as I see it, More Stately Mansions is no more about Jacksonian America than Mourning Becomes Electra is about the Reconstruction...

...They are wrong, and Strange Interlude has as one of its many faults that it is untrue from beginning to end...

...The typical O'Neill protagonist cannot bear to part with Mom, and if he has to, there is nothing for it but Death...

...Atheneum, 194 pp., $7.50...

...Immaturity is a cult of modern civilization as a whole—Western and, more particularly, American...

...Long Day's Journey into Night is a much less disguised picture of the family neurosis, and O'Neill did not try to destroy it...

...His bad women are not even Lady Macbeths who collapse under the burden of guilt, they are Gonerils and Regans who rage coldly on to the end...

...For the sweetheart of American men, taken collectively, must offer a combination of a sexless relationship with a kid sister and an incestuous relationship with Momma...

...Period...

...If they are male, the spiritual age is a little older than that since physical toughness is a part of the act...

...In Europe pessimism is taken for granted, and optimism— as when a European writer joins the Communist party—is a "daring" gesture...

...So one wonders if one of the factors bringing him to abandon the cycle and burn parts of what he had already written was the realization that he could not break out of the closed circle of his own adolescence, and that therefore his dramatic history of his country would turn out to be only an unbroken series of disguised portraits of his parents, his brother and himself...

...And she was a child with large breasts, those much photographed breasts which almost came to replace the stars and stripes as emblems of the national allegiance...

...Perhaps only in the Broadway theater, whither so many Candys are escorted on their free evenings, could such stuff ever have been taken for truth, and one can hear the repeated exclamation as the characters of Mourning Becomes Electra bounce from fornication to homicide and back again: "Good grief...

...But the less than great artist may see fit to wallow in immaturity...

...the protagonist of More Stately Mansions has to ask himself...

...Ultimately his mother withdraws into a crazy illusion of living in a prebusiness civilization, while his wife accepts the cash-nexus in full knowledge of what it is, and also becomes a mother to Simon in place of his actual mother...

...Clurman's idea might arise from a discussion around Desire Under the Elms, but would never, never come spontaneously from a reading or seeing of the play...

...But for O'Neill's characters it is...

...That he does not wish to thrash the matter out and expose his own confusion reveals itself, at times, in the dramatic structure of More Stately Mansions...

...If they are female, their spiritual age is generally about 12, sexlessness being a part of the act...

...And it does this early on, so that the hopeful attitude is hardly created at all, whereas the voice of disenchantment is heard so often it gets monotonous...

...And, American playwrights being as responsive to time and place as they are, Arthur Miller could hardly have been the only one who saw in Marilyn Monroe exactly what he had been looking for...

...What is offered as a Utopia ahead was really only the image of an Eden in the rear...

...Whether or not Long Day's Journey into Night provides a catharsis for its audience, which has been argued about, it must surely have provided one for its author...

...Some such criticism of O'Neill used to be offered in the '30s, when the critic meant that O'Neill ought to have moved forward to Communism...

...I have mentioned that in More Stately Mansions O'Neill verges at times on social-historical drama...

...Rather, in a ranking established by the work itself, the question of land ownership is subordinated to the sexual question...

...What we come to, finally, in O'Neill is a blockage, not of thought per se, but of feeling...

...It even unites the professions, and enemies within the same profession: It is the one thing lohn F. Kennedy had in common with Barry Goldwater...

...Eric Bentley, Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia, is author of The Life of the Drama...

...It also becomes apparent why the positive and hopeful side of More Stately Mansions is too weak to sustain a fully dramatic dialectic...

...Hence, for men and women, happiness is in the past, a few luminous moments remembered...

...Wondering where tragedy has gone, people gravely ask if Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman is an adequate hero, if the little man of democracy has the requisite dignity etc...

...The cult of immaturity is an admirable subject for art when seen from the viewpoint of maturity, as in Southern's novel, Candy...

...In O'Neill's plays both of these flags are waved ad nauseam...

...More Stately Mansions would support such a conjecture, and since it survived destruction, we are told, only by accident, we have in it a clear-cut instance of the kind of work O'Neill wished to destroy...

...Conflict in his plays is invariably conflict à outrance, so we are not surprised that the rivalries of the wife and mother, like the resentment of Simon against now one, now the other, produce the desire, even the resolve, to kill...

...But the adolescent obsession with sex enters in not only to hold such material down to a minimum but also to subordinate it very strictly to the "love interest," and it ends up as either background or symbolism or both...

...Harold Clurman has made a gallant attempt to prove something like the opposite of the point I am making...

...The drama is pre-eminently the art of human extremes, and O'Neill enjoys depicting extremities and piling on the agony...

...And, in that nightmare, experience is thinned down to a mere syndrome of unhappy adolescence: nostalgia, deprivation, and, in one's rage, the wish to kill oneself and others...

...In the case of More Stately Mansions and the cycle it belonged to, this was obviously not intended to be the case...

...This bit of current dogma is appealed to by O'Neill's distinguished son-in-law, Charles Chaplin, in the ex cathedra declaration that closes The Great Dictator...

...There is a corresponding battle within Simon, who is also divided in his professional aims...

...That also could be an excellent theme to treat—if it were a theme, and were treated, instead of being just a fact which the author cannot treat because he cannot stand back and look at it...

...O'Neill is no poet, but one can read almost any passage from More Stately Mansions and take pleasure in the honesty, the dignity...

...Sex has to be mixed with other things to be really interesting...

...And there is a paradox in the success of Long Day's Journey as a whole...

...Even Miss Julie is not seeking love: She is seeking degradation...

...and these moments are experienced in adolescence...

...Rewritten by Terry Southern and renamed Before the Fall, Miller's latest could become a real play for an audience of men and women...

...Her emotional age seemed well under 20 and, most important of all perhaps, she was a misfit...

...All of which makes for "good theater...

...As O'Neill tells it, it is a haunting, blood-curdling tale...

...And when the young American doesn't love, or isn't loved, or both, he has two flags with which to signal his message to the world: the bottle and the whore (of which recent variations are the needle and the boy...

...Hatred itself seems only the product of this failure...

...If he is not exactly Aeschylean, does O'Neill manage to be Strindbergian...

...Our literature is as sex-obsessed as the chatter of "college boys," and presumably for the same reason...

...What else can be said of Arthur Miller's actual stage presentation of himself and Miss Monroe...

...shortened from the author's partly revised script by Karl Ragnar Gierow, edited by Donald Gallup...

...For example, since the protagonist is to pass in the course of the play from the optimistic view of human possibility to the pessimistic one, you would expect the reversal to be a climax...

...No pretense, here, that the real subject is American history...

...He says that the story of Desire Under the Elms, sexual as it seems, is really about the disposition of the soil of this North American continent...

...What is offered as a Might Have Been is actually a mere Has Been...

...The life of men and women exists on the other side of two crises, the crisis of infancy and the crisis of adolescence...

...I speak in principle...

...He wanted it to be the subject of the famous Cycle...

...Her originality consisted in her not being a woman at all but a child...

...Human happiness is known only in moments of floating passivity that presumably recall life in the womb...

...The crisis of infancy cannot be dealt with in a play, so in drama we get a double dose of the crisis of adolescence, the infantile character of which is not to be underestimated...

...The same could be said of A Streetcar Named Desire and Sweet Bird of Youth—the theme of the decaying gentry of the South has considerable life in both...

...It is this last feature that makes O'Neill's Electra ludicrous: to this merely puerile murderousness he would reduce the majestic plot of the Oresteia...

...It happens because O'Neill can find no goal other than the starting point...

...Which might also be said about modern life in general: Not that there is too much sex, but that there is too much talk about it—perhaps indeed because there is too little sex...

...America, it seems, is blamed for having missed the opportunity of giving humanity a fresh start and creating an earthly paradise...

...For example, Eugene O'Neill was not an adolescent in 1912, which is the time of the action of the play, but Edmund Tyrone, the character corresponding to him, is...

...Certainly they meant Mom...

...The logically minded will ask which of the two mutually exclusive propositions—that man is good, that man is bad—O'Neill really believed...

...More Stately Mansions is about a young man, Simon Harford, and the battle for possession of his heart that is fought by his mother and his wife...

...But the psychologically minded will be quick to observe that he believed both without knowing it, and appealed to one view or the other according to context...

...Both times it is a matter of going out into a cold world, of discovering that there is a world to go out into, a nest to be left behind...

...In modern conversation, A is so frequently said to symbolize B when all that is meant is that A could symbolize B. In art, whether it does symbolize B depends upon whether the artist made it symbolize B, and to make it symbolize B surely means to call the symbol to the attention of any audience not hostile, stupid, or ignorant...

...So ingratiating is this dignity that for a good deal of the way O'Neill can convince us that he has more than a melodrama on his hands...

...ON STAGE A Touch of the Adolescent By Eric Bentley More Stately Mansions* is a four-hour play put together by the Swedish theater man Karl Ragnar Gierow from an O'Neill manuscript which was about twice as long as that...

...I would say that, like much of the work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, More Stately Mansions succeeds quite well as psychophilosophic melodrama, and it is better than Miller and Williams precisely in what the Broadway crowd would find worse: It is not slick, it is not adjusted to the clientele of Sardi's and the Algonquin...

...Is it not precisely because the picture is less disguised...

...Even such disguises as remain serve to reinforce the main point I am making...

...His men do not need love: They need respect, so they can keep their old patriarchal status...

...They take very personally indeed the discovery that the world was not built for them, and are likely to seize the occasion to disburden themselves of all their ideals...

...In both cases, history is the merest backdrop for the O'Neill family neurosis of around 19001915 as seen in terms of the popularized psychoanalysis of 19151930...

...But the question whether it is the subject of Desire Under the Elms or the Cycle can hardly be settled with reference to O'Neill's intentions...

...But if More Stately Mansions is a thoughtful play, there are contradictions at the base of the thinking...

...How can I possibly give up Mom for a wife...

...From the boyish charm of actors, the mind runs on to the fact that Boyish Charm is all a man needs these days to pursue a profession—any profession...

...The theme is an excellent one in itself, as Conrad's Shadow Line and a thousand other works testify...

...This is to rank More Stately Mansions with the finer works of its author, for in the '30s he became a better writer, less pretentious, more sincere...

...There is, for example, a highly interesting element of social realism in the play...

...There is too much talk about sex in More Stately Mansions...

...His adults are only projections of adolescent nightmare...

...But when he is challenged to show his family that he can succeed in business where they are failing, he rises to this challenge and gives up his poetry and its social ideals...

...A development of the plot would do, provided that the dramatist refuses to develop that plot arbitrarily, "melodramatically," and only presents such developments as he can "feel" to be truly implicit...

...If it does not work out excellently in O'Neill it is because of this confusion between a goal that is ahead and a starting point that is behind...

...Yet the fact of this failure is also presented as proof that human nature is perverse and evil, in which case the opportunity to make a fresh start never existed...

...Having "a touch of the poet" about him, he would like to pursue the life of the spirit, and the spirit for him is directed toward the creation of the good society...

...At that, the portrayal of Edmund is the least satisfying feature of Long Day's Journey...

...They only misbehave when they don't get love...

...So far as one can tell without seeing the manuscript, Mr...

...In this play, as in so many others, O'Neill constantly recurs to the theme of the loss of specifically adolescent romance and optimism...

...I cannot believe that a qualified audience would take Desire Under the Elms to be primarily about the ownership of the soil...

...The Teen-Ager (an American invention) is the current culture hero, and the archetypal dramatic situation of the culture is the adolescent misfit who is cutting loose a bit and is sorry for himself a whole lot...

...How much sex does Shakespeare exhibit or talk about in the greatest tale of passion that he told, Antony and Cleopatra...

...The setting is the America of Andrew Jackson's time, and O'Neill's interpretation is on the lines of some of that time's great social critics—Carlyle, Engels and Marx...

...A wonderfully adolescent touch in the stage production (hence perhaps Kazan's adolescence rather than Miller's) was a tableau showing the protagonist surrounded by young women all of whom want him— while he sits and suffers...

...Such a transcendence is not achieved in More Stately Mansions...

...But actually heroes have not been replaced by quiet, little businessmen, they have been replaced by big, noisy adolescents...

...In other words, O'Neill's failure to "thrash the matter out" is not just a philosophic limitation but also a dramatic one...

...Well, melodrama is a good genre too, and its appeal to the adolescent in each of us is fair and above board—if it is above board...

...It takes this to save him from seizing his actual Mom and making her his wife, so close do we come to the crime of Oedipus in a play written, as it were, by Oedipus himself, and not by Sophocles...

...Particularly in art...

...It is a question of the impression given—granted that the person "impressed" be reasonably responsive...

...Even perhaps: "Good grief, it's daddy...

...The play jumps from one point to the other without presenting the change...

...And it is not simply that they only want to be loved...

...This does not prevent the great artist from also being the most "mature" (highly developed) of men at the same time...

...More Stately Mansions, by Eugene O'Neill...

...Thesis clashes with antithesis, but then there is no development forward to synthesis, only a continuation of the same clash, whence the notorious O'Neillian monotony...

...To portray one's family is one thing, to portray oneself is another, and O'Neill resorts to the desperate device of characterization by quotation: We are asked to believe Edmund is a bit of a poet because he quotes quite a bit of poetry...

...Gierow has done an excellent job, for one cannot tell that he has done a job at all: More Stately Mansions seems a finished O'Neill play...

...It is true that O'Neill was very consciously concerned with this latter subject...

...For childhood remains more vividly alive in the artist than in anyone else...

...For in art, as in morals, noble intentions have no particular merit: More Stately Mansions could have been a better play had the author's intention been less noble...

...But dramatically speaking the forward development would not have to be any particular philosophy...

...From which it can be seen how near O'Neill's lifeworship comes to death-worship: sex leads back to the womb...

...At one time he was swept off his feet by reading Strindberg, which has caused some to think he wrote Strindbergian plays...

...By calling this sort of thing an "act" I imply that it is done to please—that there is a demand for it, an audience for it...

...It is a flat voice at times, but it has character, and in one play, Long Day's Journey into Night, it becomes the voice of suffering humanity, the voice of tragic drama...

...There is no breakthrough to what might fairly be called either tragedy or critical realism...