Art and Life in Apposition

...He steers us through the story of a protagonist who, for suffering and defiance, rivals his own outsized heroes and heroines...

...O'Neill seldom smiles in them, and then usually when he has one of his children nearby, as though responding to their evident delight in sharing a shot with their famous father...

...he may have brought them to birth as versions of himself...

...In that complex work (in nine acts...

...One similarity between them, though, was their helpless drinking...

...Eugene, who kept trying to dry out with medical guidance and the spiritual consolations of writing, survived for 20 more excruciating years...

...Diverse critical treatments have followed, plus essay collections by the dozen and studies such as Virginia Floyd's invaluable ?'Neill at Work...

...The latest in a line of ambitious O'Neill biographers, Black is a sound scholar, a good drama critic and a sensitive narrator...

...O'Neill was a person...

...These parts may have started out as "parts' of O'Neill...

...To the text Black adds 35 pages of photographs...

...When I first looked at the book I had a couple of misgivings about its subtitle, Beyond Mourning and Tragedy...

...he may have formed them through draft after draft by consulting his own feelings...

...O'Neill in this book is Yank in The Hairy Ape and is John Loving in Days Without End and Nina in Strange Interlude, and so on...

...He lived wracked by mental and physical illnesses...

...In addition, Louis Sheaffer has written a monumental life in two volumes...

...He dips respectfully into the work of his predecessors, starting with Arthur and Barbara Gelb's ?'Neill, a tome of almost a thousand pages published in 1960...

...Liquor as a refuge, as an entrance to oblivion and a delusive freedom from constraints, almost surely killed both brothers...

...Black also adroitly uses the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey into Night as reference points for O'Neill's father, mother, brother, and his younger, consumptive self...

...But Black's psychoanalytical tackling of the plays implies that he regards their central figures as stand-ins for the playwright...

...Celebrities and family guests had to stand by until he freed himself from the bonds of his muses...

...More likely he grew so absorbed in his art, and simultaneously so oppressed by the ills that cascaded down on him, that the writing fortuitously dissolved some of his inner turmoil...

...His difficult birth was facilitated by injecting his mother with morphine, some of which must have entered his system...

...His worst affliction, though, must have come from the mutual torture that marked his third marriage, to Carlotta Monterey —a melodrama Strindberg might have concocted...

...Black rightly emphasizes O'Neill's resolve to plumb his past and present selves ruthlessly, whatever the cost...

...The last two were side effects of bromides, painkillers and other drugs—and the by-product of most of a lifetime of liquor...

...Yet the result of all the amplification has been another instance where the more you know, the less you feel you know...

...O'Neill himself partly foresaw it and dramatized it with dread in Welded several years before it began...

...A quarter-century later, he and Carlotta, both invalids and both ragingly jealous, could neither bear to be separated nor to live together...

...Agony at a failure to grieve...

...Black further argues that O'Neill's plays record his attempts to wrestle with what finally proves to be an Oedipus complex...

...Strange Interlude...

...published, respectively, in 1968 and 1973, they total close to 1,300 pages...

...The closest Oedipal analogies Black uncovers in O'Neill's theater come to the surface, or nearly, in Desire Under the Elms—the love between Eben and his voluptuous young stepmother, Abby— and in More Stately Mansions—where Simon Harford's wife and mother exert conflicting pulls on him...

...His observations will prove enlightening to O'Neill spectators and serviceable to actors and directors—especially the recreators of Long Day's Journey, More Stately Mansions, A Touch of the Poet, and The Iceman Cometh...

...these roles are imaginings...

...The clouds hanging over his 65 years were thunderheads that broke into storms...

...The partial case history Black teases patiently out of O'Neill's confessions and the testimony of others points, rather, to a sibling rivalry involving the witty, fascinating, brash, masochistic Jamie, whose personality appears in most respects the opposite of Eugene's shy, slow-talking intellectual...

...And what could beyond mourning mean...

...The retraction pattern, most evident in Long Day's Journey, can be found too in a slightly different form in O'Neill's most popular play during his lifetime...

...When Black tracks down correspondences between O'Neill's life and art he adds zip to the life but depersonalizes the art...

...Still, as he brings the life and the art into apposition, new coloring is cast on a number of the plays...

...It took Jamie at 45...

...they speak a soothing or complimentary thought and immediately contradict it with a private, supposedly unuttered jibe...

...Death...

...The bouts of boozing, in which Eugene became offensive, if not brutal, in utter contrast to his courteous, guarded, sober self, left him feeling ill— and empty, apart from self-contemptuous...

...Long after dying, he continues to exalt an audience, in the United States and elsewhere, with his tales of sheer bleakness...

...It is Sheaffer's research that Black leans on most heavily—not simply the biography but the notes, memos and other sedulously pursued material too extensive for Sheaffer himself to have taken into published account (now in an archive at Connecticut College...

...But no decision, for or against life, came to him easily, as we can see from what Sheaffer calls the "blame-retraction pattern" in the plays...

...He scathes himself and us...

...Here I disagree with Black...

...But, amazingly, he turned the hatred of what he was and had been, as well as the regrets that went unspoken, into a tool to jump-start and fuel his artistry...

...Yet O'Neill, a highly literate man who underwent psychiatric treatment more than once, would hardly have mistaken either attraction for a stepmother, or a contest between a wife and a mother, for an oedipal setup...

...While they are not nearly as comprehensive as those in the Gelb and Sheaffer books, better than 20 are unfamiliar...

...The playwright become autoanalyst thereby connects up with the most deeply engulfed feelings of his readers and spectators, those that resist exploration, even acknowledgment...

...Toward the end of his writing career he resolves the mourning dilemma by exhuming from childhood the conviction that his mother loved him insufficiently and had failed to extend to him the confidential affection she shared with his brother, Jamie...

...What lies beyond tragedy...

...The words "drinking" and "got drunk" and "drank" are as insistent in this biography as the accelerating drumbeat in The Emperor Jones...

...They had fled from one residence to another in Georgia, Massachusetts, California, New York, all the while bringing home friends and other referees whom Carlotta called "buffers...

...Black contends that after the dramatist's father, mother and brother died in a short span of years, he could not mourn sufficiently to satisfy his conscience...

...Rereading him and reading about him one feels sure that in his maturity he longed to destroy himself, not out of the pique or despair that led to a halfhearted suicide attempt when he was in his early 20s, but to discover whether he might not be able to spring up again and laugh at death like Lazarus, leaving buried the woes that had killedhim...

...Miraculously, out of the aging, the ailments, the shifting from one place to another, the worsening domestic warfare, the days or even weeks of being stewed to the gills, came one mighty play after another...

...Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, translator and professor emeritus of theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York: author of the forthcoming "Shakespeare at the Moment" Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (18881953) earned his anguish...

...But starting in his 20s he doggedly wrote and wrote, not letting up until seven years before his death, when he could no longer master the tremor in his hands inherited from his mother and her father...

...Did he intend it to, as Black suggests...

...Black is a professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and according to the book jacket, "a trained psychoanalytic therapist...

...Playmaking served him as therapy...

...As a good critic, Black doesn't need anyone to tell him this, but he does spend more time on chasing psychological similarities than on ?'Neill's artistry in transforming himself into a gallery of independent creations...

...but as roles they provide frameworks for different actors and each offers a range of possible character interpretations—as the author must have known they would, despite his overabundant stage directions...

...In that final phase he also succumbed to the torments Stephen A. Black mentions in his new biography: prostatitis and neuritis, fatigue from low blood pressure, wooziness and melancholia...

...Haunting guilt at neglecting something or someone...

...the roles mentally step outside themselves...

...There have also been astute gatherings of letters (Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer), descriptive analyses of how the plays are and were staged (Ronald Harold Wainscott), and illuminating issues of The Eugene ?'Neill Review under the exemplary editorship of Frederick C. Wilkins...

...O'Neill's concentration, his devotion to what he felt he had to say, kept him working every day...

...Any O'Neill speaker is liable to let loose an insult, then as if fearing the damage, the agony it might cause, the speaker almost instantly wants to gulp it back with a "Gee, I'm sorry," or "I didn't mean that...