Robert M. Dowling. Eugene O’Neill. A Life in Four Acts.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014
As reviewed by Ted Odenwald
Eugene O’Neill has been the subject of several noteworthy biographies, particularly those written by Arthur and Barbara Gelb in the early 60’s and by Louis Scheaffer in the early 70’s. Decades later, another O’Neill expert has written a new interpretive biography of the “Father of American Drama.” As a professor of English at Central Connecticut College, editor of The Eugene O’Neill Review, and board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society, Dowling has accessed a large number of letters and articles—even the manuscript of a play, generally believed to have been destroyed. Dowling argues that O’Neill was a brilliant innovator, bringing to the stage social and political issues previously thought inappropriate or too risky, and using new or seldom used dramatic techniques through which he opened new worlds of theatrical experience. The backstory to O’Neill’s writing career is his tempest-tossed life: his frequent plunges into the depths of drunkenness, depression and violent outbursts; his periods of enormous creativity. “In the telling of O’Neill’s life…[the] blend of suffering and awakening, forged in the heat of struggle and the light of the stage, will be shown as the starting place from which to arrive at a sincere understanding of this perennially fascinating man.”
Dowling cites O’Neill’s reaction to being labelled a pessimist: “I see life as a gorgeously ironical, beautifully indifferent, splendidly-suffering lot of chaos the tragedy of which gives Man tremendous significance, while without his ‘losing fight’ with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal. I say ‘losing fight’ only symbolically for the brave individual always wins. Fate can never conquer his—or her—spirit.” In this statement, one may find distant echoes of Sophocles, who believed that the true greatness of a tragic hero was not displayed in wins or losses, but in the manner in which he confronted adversity.
Dowling believes that O’Neill confronted tragedy “head-on” throughout his life and upon the stage. In fact, the biographer has organized his work into four acts (a dramatic structure O’Neill frequently used). In the first act, Dowling examines O’Neill’s formative years, heavily influenced by his mother’s drug addiction and his father’s selling out in an artistically empty acting career. The biographer gives insights into O’Neill’s Irish upbringing, his sailing adventures, and his addictions to alcohol and women. The second act features O’Neill’s experiences with the Provincetown Players, an independent, anti-establishment, anti-traditional group that performed first on Cape Cod and then in Greenwich Village. The Players encouraged the writer to pursue his original ideas about the theater and helped to begin his innovative and experimental journey into the American theater. In the third act, O’Neill became recognized for his breaking of the barriers of the theatrical conventions of subject matter and technique. His success guaranteed his movement from the Village to Broadway, where his notoriety was unequaled. Act four analyzes his final years of poor health, brought on to a great extent by years of dissipation. His writing career was cut short in 1943—about a decade before his death—by a degenerative neurological disease. During those years of illness he produced what most critics believe to be his greatest plays: Long Day’s Journey Into Night; The Iceman Cometh; and A Moon for the Misbegotten.
O’Neill’s plays berate “all social and political institutions as ‘phantasms,’ ‘ghosts,’ or ‘spooks’ to exorcise from one’s mind.” Underlying his anger against these institutions is the anti-Irish bigotry that he experienced: “…his Irish characters would lay bare their creator’s emotional and political affiliation with ‘shanty’ or ‘bogtrotter’ Irish against ‘lace-curtain Irish.’” One early work, The Straw, focuses upon the subservient role of women, while also displaying his preoccupation with the “devastating results of uneducated working-class women pairing up with educated men from wealthy families… hoping to gain stability….” Unfortunately, what they get is “volatility, alcoholism, and an unwanted exposure to existentialist angst.” The Emperor Jones strips away “society’s false trappings and exposes humanity at its most primal. The Hairy Ape, according to one critic, “…proclaims an abiding and everlasting hatred and contempt for the law as it is made and enforced, for the church as it apologizes for the greed of its rich patrons, for the press as it lies and misrepresents, for the state as it censors and suppresses natural impulses of human beings, and for the manifold evidence of hypocrisy and cant with which our people are …endowed.” All God’s Chillun Got Wings confronts racism and miscegenation (which he calls “a reigning moral stance”), as he traces the relationship of an educated African-American man and a working-class woman. Desire Under the Elms exposes the oppression of puritanical values that “inhibit life-lust” and reveal the obsession with possessions. In Great God Brown the main character is “the visionless demi-God of our new materialistic myth—a success—building his life of exterior things…empty and resourceless….”
O’Neill experimented with numerous dramatic techniques. Using special effects in sound, lighting, and sets, he borrowed from French expressionism in The Emperor Jones. He used masks in The Great God Brown to display the surface character, while the removed mask revealed the inner character. Believing that his true calling was as a novelist, O’Neill wrote Strange Interlude, as a “novel in dramatic form,” with long soliloquies delivered while the other characters froze. The symbolic set of Desire Under the Elms—the four-“chambered” house, the looming elms, the stone wall—served as constant reminders of the restrictive, smothering atmosphere of a society ruled by hypocritically puritanical standards.
Through writing, O’Neill dealt with many of his personal demons. Dowling points to a great number of passages from Long Day’s Journey Into Night which allude to specific events that shaped his life. The characters in this play are definitely his family, easily identifiable from their general behavior and addictive personalities. Dowling alludes to a recent discovery— a play thought to have been destroyed before reaching the stage. The sole surviving manuscript of Exorcism likely alludes to O’Neill’s attempted suicide when he had few prospects besides living as a drunken bum in dives in Latin America and New York. A Moon for the Misbegotten appears to be a tragic picture of his brother Jamie, whose alcoholism, self-hatred, and depression led to his early death.
Dowling’s biography belongs on a shelf next the other well-known biographies of this great innovator. He clearly demonstrates that O’Neill’s theatrical accomplishments were important to the growth of the American stage. The dramatist’s life, however, was a tragic mixture of human frailty, self-alienating iconoclasm, and bursts of creativity followed by extended periods of stagnation.
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 45 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.