Genius Revealed and Reconfirmed

...So bigness—as copiousness rather than monumentality, though that doesn't hurt either—matters...

...He is also undone by women, and thus resembles Con Melody in that as well...

...Victor Hugo, hélas...

...By the early I mean especially the sea plays, as well as Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, and the undervalued, almost unknown, The Straw...

...This door becomes her constant temptation, as it becomes Simon' s. When he was a boy, Deborah once made up a story for him about an enchantress who promises a young king the kingdom she has deprived him of: Someday he will find an ordinary-looking door and recognize it as the one leading to his kingdom...

...35 each...

...And they plot Deborah's downfall, for Simon cannot stand either being ruled by two women in concert or being torn asunder by their conflicting demands on him...

...The late, and much the best, period comprises the two absolute masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night, and the popular comedy Ah, Wilderness...

...Certainly Con Melody, whose favorite stanza from Chitde Haro Id includes the lines " I have not loved the World, nor the World me...

...his diction is frequently dated...

...And the way his growing ruthlessness in business mirrors the intensifying violence of his private inferno is conceived in masterly fashion and executed almost as well...

...The two women, in fierce contest for Simon, assert their enmity...

...how much psychological truth is dramatically conveyed by that misconception, especially since it is followed by the above lines that show Simon himself confirming Deborah's diagnosis, only much more grandly and verbosely...

...They plan ever greater wealth, including a castle for Sara far outstripping her father's Irish one, where she was born...

...not exactly stilted, perhaps, but much too formal and heuristic to be spoken by anyone save theorists, rhetoricians, or automata...

...It concerns Cornelius (Con) Melody, a former Irish nouveau riche who distinguished himself at the battle of Talavera, earning Wellington's praise, only to have a scandal involving a married Spanish lady bring him low...

...the next, it is Simon, the despondent and unhealthily worshiping son, and Deborah, the possessive and overprotective mother, against Sara...

...It is really her son, whom she once pushed away from her, that she now wants back...

...He has become a robber baron, using unscrupulous methods for ruining others and buying them out...

...As for his Utopian, egalitarian dream, "I've laughed it out of him...

...Pretty fair for a man who dropped out of college after a couple of semesters...

...An evening scene that has Simon, Sara and Deborah sitting in their parlor thinking desperate and fiendish thoughts (audibly rendered), and indulging in both mental and physical power plays —it becomes hard to sort out what is thought from what is spoken—is surreal, magisterial, and again too long...

...Simon insists that, after he and Sara have enough, he'll go back to writing that book of his...

...The only thing he did not have until now was a truly satisfactory edition of his works, but with the three-volume Complete Plays, edited for the Library of America series by Travis Bogard, that gap has finally been filled...

...Bigness, let's face it, is very nearly a prerequisite for greatness in drama, as in most other arts...

...It would serve equally well as answer to the question, Who is the greatest American playwright...

...602 pp...

...but "after I [got] his mind made up," she says, "there [was] no stopping him...

...I can think of only four dramatists who have achieved undisputed greatness without a certain magnitude of output: Georg Büchner, Heinrich von Kleist, Anton Chekhov, and Samuel Beckett...

...It would have stood as a symbol of O'Neill's perception of America destroyed by its greed...

...Her poet turned predator equivocates: "As if at the end of every dream of liberty one did not find the slave, to whom oneself, the Master, is enslaved...

...In real life, neither his three wives nor his three children—let alone the whores —could satisfy O'Neill...

...many of his plays seem overlong, while their reach is shorter than their aim...

...He writes Eugene Jr., who has announced his intention to become a teacher, "I always grin with fury at what professors have done with the drama in their appreciations and critical tomes...

...He is ultimately undone in turn by his repressed poetic part, and unable to go on being a ruthless capitalist...

...For those interested in the intimate, day-to-day side of this sometimes forbidding dramatist, there is now also a useful companion volume, Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, coedited by the ubiquitous Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer...

...It is a riveting contest, but repetitious and overlong...

...Deborah's is her ability to mother the little boy inside the tycoon who wants to get out and rest in the maternal bosom...

...For, as Deborah reflects, "the means always becomes the end—and the end is always oneself...

...least of all the mother with whom one has an inflamed Oedipal relationship: Deborah, in whose final rejection of Simon and espousal of madness Ella's addiction is again encoded...

...But the textile empire of the late Henry Harford is declining...

...In it is a summerhouse where she used to withdraw to spin her fantasies—and where in time she found madness lying in wait for her, so that she no longer dares to enter it...

...the Wife, disappointing either through excessive self-sacrifice that her husband, infuriatingly, cannot reciprocate (like Hickey's wife in Thelceman Cometh, and Nora in.4 Touch of the Poet), or through excessive demands, like Sara...

...But what a marvelous television miniseries, in this centennial year of O'Neill's, could have been fashioned from Poet and Mansions, the fifth and sixth plays of the projected cycle, with only minimal trimming and polishing...

...Nonetheless, Sara is worried about excessive greed...

...or the superficial Whore (Belle in Ah, Wilderness...

...Together they work the hostile takeovers of other businesses and humiliation of their competitors...

...Exasperated by Nora's dumb, sweet love and Sara's scorn and scolding, and brought to the breaking point by Henry Harford's contemptuous disregard, Con and a faithful henchman set off to challenge old Harford to a duel...

...Much of the rest—the enormous rest —of the play is taken up by this threeway struggle and its continually shifting realignments...

...The playwright has to create a world with his dramatis personae, and a world will not be encompassed with a handful of plays...

...she simply gazes, fascinated, at its door...

...But some friends did, and for an appreciation of O'Neill the friend and generous supporter of other writers, including rival playwrights, it is heartening to read the lively, unforcedly conversational correspondence in Selected Letters...

...Simon Harford, a rich young Harvard graduate rebelling against his family, has rented a lakeside cottage from Melody...

...and the tarts in Iceman...

...Reviewed by John Simon Few witticisms have achieved the immortality of André Gide's answer to the question, Who is the greatest French poet...

...Still, Mansions remains a major, albeit exhausting, expression of O'Neill's view of women...

...The way the rivalries keep reshuffling themselves and increasing in ferocity, until Simon proposes that either of his women kill the other, or at least drive her into insanity or disgrace, because he himself cannot choose between them, is absorbing...

...It is on these two sole survivors of a projected cycle of 11 plays about America's rise and fall as O'Neill saw it that I wish to concentrate...

...He renounces preening in uniform before a mirror, reciting Byronic poems, and affecting fancy language...

...The last occurs at least once or twice on virtually every page...

...At first she is the happy grandmother, in easy harmony with Sara and the boys...

...Deborah's domain is her unnatural garden, where topiary artifice has made a toy out of every shrub...

...Then it is Sara and Deborah in an unholy alliance meant to subjugate Simon and turn him into their joint slave...

...Even more, it would have been a mighty dramatization of what Leonard Chabrowe (in his book Ritual and Pathos) calls "the process of inevitability itself...

...It is a pity, indeed, that O'Neill did not live to turn the play into something actable...

...As far as poetry is concerned, it betrays too much of O'Neill's early grounding in Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite verse, rather than current awareness of what Anglo-American poetry was doing when Mansions was written (1935-39...

...Besides his cotton mills and shipping lines, he aims to own banks, railroads and, eventually, slave ships and slaves, along with retail stores, to achieve a gargantuan self-sufficiency...

...It is the language of ornate, essayistic prose, not of theater—even poetic theater...

...Boxed set, $100...

...He and Sara have moved into his father's mansion, where Deborah continues to live...

...At first, Sara had to prod Simon...

...Simon and Sara had originally set up housekeeping at the cottage and had four boys there...

...Although Simon is never seen, his mother, the genteel and haughty Deborah, drops by...

...It is an ample, well-annotated selection...

...More Stately Mansions covers the decade between 1832 and 1842, from Melody's wake at the tavern ("He never lived in life, but only in a bad dream, " Sara remarks about her father) to Simon's final return to the cabin on the lake as a broken, brainsick, but potentially redeemed ex-exploiter of men...

...the one extant attempt to do so by another hand has proved unsuccessful...

...That 11 -play cycle, A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, intended to cover the story of the Harfords from 1775 to 1932, might have "changed the courseof American drama," as Bogard claims...

...sometimes there are two or even three such reversals within a single speech, and the device becomes tiresome...

...Add the excellent twovolume biography by Louis Sheaffer and Bogard's aforementioned study, and you have all you need to know and understand our—like it or not—greatest playwright...

...When he leaves, Sara, who has been eavesdropping, steps out of hiding...

...Now he is a publican near Boston, where he has been tricked into buying a tavern that ceased being profitable when the stagecoach changed routes...

...He accepts on his own selfish terms, and he and Sara, more in love than ever, are exultant...

...Asked during a Harvard examination what were the three phases of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, a friend of mine answered, "Early, middle and late.' This applies, in all seriousness, to O'Neill, whose early and late phases I prefer to the middle...

...Melody, abetted by his parasites, drinks and dreams of his former glory (he still maintains a white Arabian Thoroughbred and wears his old uniform on anniversaries of Talavera), while his humble, dowdy, loving wife, Nora, and his proud and independent-minded daughter, Sara, struggle to make ends meet as they buy food on credit...

...All of A Touch of the Poet takes place Aristoteleanly during one day: July 27, 1828...

...Woman exists in three basic forms: the Mother, frequently disconcerting (like Ella O'Neill, Eugene's mother, who became a morphine addict, and her alter ego, Mary, in Long Day's Journey...

...In the most attractive and authoritative form, then, O'Neill lives here...

...It contains, too, the not uninteresting A Touch of the Poet, and—made available in the Complete Plays for the first time in full —its sequel, More Stately Mansions...

...None of these prototypes will do, however...

...Unable either to enter or to leave, the king remains at the door forever, a beggar living off alms from passers-by...

...Everything that has been objected to in his work is true: His language is often pedestrian...

...Going back to the brogue and to being a mere shebeen keeper, he sneers at his past, and seems to realize he has not much longer to live...

...doesn't seem right tome.' And as disastrous a father as O'Neill may have been in life, he was a damn good one on paper...

...In the next play (272 pages in its entirety, and requiring at least nine hours to perform), we see how Simon strangles the poet within him to become an ever more powerful merchant...

...After, at long last, he does find the door, the enchantress' voice is heard from behind it, telling him that if he opens it, there will be nothing except desert, night, and a hideous witch to dispossess him forever...

...One moment it is Simon, the passionate husband, and Sara, the adoring mistress-wife, against Deborah...

...Here she becomes both his secretary and his mistress-whore...

...In the letters as in the plays, O'Neill the artist sometimes lets us down, but as a human being, in both the correspondence and the dramas, he never fails to provide stimulus for thought, enjoyment and respect...

...his other son, Joel, is an unimaginative drudge...

...Deborah becomes identified with the enchantress, Simon with the king, and the door to the summerhouse with that fairy-tale door...

...On the other hand...

...Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill Edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer Yale...

...There is Deborah reading aloud seven long stanzas from Byron...

...And Eugene O'Neill had it in all its forms...

...You can make new laws but you can't make new men and women to fit them...

...Like an aimless improvisation on a far-off, out-of-tune piano that tinkles into silence...

...Despite its flaws, More Stately Mansions develops into a terrific psychological thriller, keeping us in suspense about how this frenzied three-way conflict will resolve itself...

...I stood/ Among them, but not of them...

...Take Deborah's valid but strained, unidiomatic expression of her (or O'Neill's) philosophy: " [Life] has no meaning and the sentence, worn out by futile groping within its own stupid obscurities, stammers haltingly to an unintelligible end—and that is all...

...The excesses, though, are cheek by jowl with real successes...

...in Mansions, the characters are apologizing and self-reversing machines...

...In the finished text of Long Day's Journey Into Night, this technique, though a trifle excessive, is under control and believable...

...Sara's appeal for Simon is her sexuality...

...there is a protracted, exhausting scene with, say, Simon and Sara clashing one-on-one, followed schematically by a similar jockeying-for-power scene between Simon and Deborah, and yet another between the two women...

...In Act III it is 1840...

...Instead, they are beaten up and humiliated by bodyguards and policemen, and when Con returns to find out that his daughter has gone to bed with Simon, he mockingly applauds what he calls her entrapment of the young man, and then goes to the stables to shoot his horse (which he does) and himself (which he doesn't, considering himself spiritually dead already...

...In A Touch of the Poet, we see how this poetic touch makes Con mad, and how he finally turns away from it with equally destructive results...

...she merely offers him a compassionate heart and cushioning bosom—a wish-fulfillment figure if ever there was one...

...Who here has that eponymous touch of the poet...

...1,007pp...

...Realizing that Simon and Sara are in love, she gives her consent to their marriage, but urges a year's wait, especially since her husband, Henry, would not agree to such a misalliance...

...Could cuts and revisions have saved something so basically skewed...

...There is the sheer length of the monologues and soliloquies that rattle on for pages...

...There is the strategy of making a character say something hurtful and promptly apologize, withdraw the statement, and proceed along the opposite tack, all in the same speech...

...Gradually, however, rivalry asserts itself again, as each woman wants Simon for herself...

...Yet Simon Harford has it too: He rejects the family wealth and proposes to live in a cottage, happily married to Safa, writing a book inspired by Rousseau about how the world could save itself by repudiating greed...

...Deborah, Joel and the family lawyer go to plead with the rising young business star, Simon, to take over...

...Simon, ensconced in his office, bullyingly lectures his brother about the difficulties of being successful, rich and ruthless—"facing the secret that success is its own failure...

...Yet how filigree is his closest competitor, Tennessee Williams, compared to the massiveness of O'Neill...

...Having fallen sick, he is being tended by Sara in a room above the tavern...

...The archetypal dramatic hero is Everyman, who, except in the monolithic medieval morality (and perhaps even there), resists capture by shortcuts...

...Deborah comes to see Simon at the cottage, and she echoes Sara: "If only men—and women—were not men and women...

...Volume Three: 1932-1943...

...Eugene O'Neill, alas...

...Worse yet is the stiff, theoretical language...

...Included is an ample and excellent chronology of O'Neill's life and work by Bogard (whose Contour in Timeis probably the best critical study of the playwright), as well as the seminal story "Tomorrow,' wherein O'Neill relates the suicide of James Blyth, his roommate in the digs above Jimmy the Priest's saloon and the very fellow who previously rescued him from a similar fate...

...Though he is estranged from his mother, a gift of money from her is what gave the young couple their start...

...to which Simon replies, "Oh no, don't imagine I have lost, I always win...

...become lost in yourself and very lonely...

...How wonderful to have O'Neill write Kenneth Macgowan about the Provincetown Theatre's projected repertory in Greenwich Village, "Two plays by Stark [Young] and two by [Edmund] Wilson and two by me and none by Strindberg, none by Wedekind, none by Hauptmann, none by Ibsen, none by Andreyev, etc...

...The price is far from exorbitant for this comely boxed set whose volumes, like all the items in the series, are easy on the eye and the hand...

...Sara's domain, at Simon's instigation, is his office, into which a vulgar, mirrored bed has been mo ved...

...The backbone of the play is the battle of wits between the dissipated but still handsome, arrogant and clever Melody, full of the castle he once owned and his own importance, and the realistic Sara, who detests his boozing, shiftlessness and mighty airs, yet underneath, unconsciously, admires and loves him...

...But other things are gravely amiss...

...no calling can be more spiritually exalting or give greater inner rewards for a life of devotion and concentration on an ideal...

...They can manage to suck the blood even out of Shakespeare— because they are congenitally frightened of blood...

...with hard work and Sara's support, Simon went on to become a prosperous, respected merchant...

...The way Simon begins to fuse and confuse the two women, turning "they" into a " she, " wife into mother, and mother into wife, is chillingly spellbinding...

...At the same time, he is having problems with the two women in his life...

...The sole exception is Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten, ahuge, big-breasted virgin, wifely and motherly, who makes neither conjugal nor maternal demands on the man...

...Or take Simon's confession: "Lately, Mother, alone in my office, I have felt so weary of the game— of watching suspiciously each card I led to myself from across the table—even though I had marked them all—watching my winnings pile up and becoming confused with losses—feeling my swindler's victorious gloating die into boredom and discontent—the flame of ambition smoulder into a chill dismay— as though that opponent within had spat an extinguishing poison of disdain...

...Still, a great deal about More Stately Mansions is tremendously right...

...How brilliantly Simon is made to understand "lost" in the sense of "disoriented" for "lost" in the sense of "defeated...

...In a soliloquy, she recalls her lifelong fantasies of being mistress to Louis XIV or Napoleon, then complains to Simon, "The time G ve wasted hiding in my mind...

...Thus in the speech preceding Simon's that I have just quoted, Deborah laments, "You have...