35-] American Literature - Eugene O'Neill

35- ] American Literature

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity.

He is a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).

His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Born in a hotel on Broadway in 1888, Eugene O’Neill was the son of Ella Quinlan and the actor James O’Neill. Eugene spent the first seven years of his life touring with his father’s theater company. These years introduced O’Neill to the world of theater and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity. His father, once a well-known Shakespearean, had taken a role in a lesser play for its sizable salary.

O’Neill spent the next seven years receiving a strict Catholic education before attending a private secular school in Connecticut. Though a bright student, he was already caught up in a world of alcohol and prostitutes by the time he entered college. He eventually dropped out before finishing his first year at Princeton University. Though he would later enroll in a short class in playwriting at Harvard, this was the end of his formal education. After leaving Princeton, O’Neill moved to New York, where he spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his older brother.

In 1910 he fell in love with and married the first of three wives, Kathleen Jenkins. Soon after, however, O’Neill left his wife for the adventures of traveling. In Honduras he contracted Malaria, and returned to find Kathleen pregnant with his child. Without seeing the boy (Eugene O’Neill, Jr.), O’Neill shipped out again, this time for Buenos Aires, and later for England. In 1912, Kathleen filed for divorce and soon after, plagued by illness, O’Neill returned to his parents’ home. It was there among the turmoil of a despondent father and a morphine-addicted mother that he decided to become a playwright.

O’Neill spent the next five years working primarily on one-act plays. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and with her had two children, Shane and Oona. He continued to publish and produce his one-acts, but it was not until his play “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), that American audiences responded to his genius. The play won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for O’Neill. Many saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American theater. O’Neill’s poetic dialogue and insightful views into the lives of the characters held his work apart from the less sober playwriting of the day.

Following the success of “Beyond the Horizon”, O’Neill went into an incredibly productive period, writing many of his greatest plays. “The Emperor Jones” (1920) and “The Hairy Ape” (1922) follow the lives of two men through personal struggles and their search for identity. Received well, these two established O’Neill as a master of the craft. The times, however, were fraught with turmoil—seeing the death of O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother, as well as the break-up of his marriage.

Despite (or because) of these tragedies, he went on to create a number of penetrating and insightful views into family life and struggle. With plays such as “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) and “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931), O’Neill uses the moral and physical entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life. Throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s, O’Neill continued in this vein working on a cycle of plays (nine) which would deal with lives of a New England family. Concerned that they might be altered after his death, O’Neill eventually destroyed the manuscripts, accidentally leaving behind only one, “A Touch of the Poet.”

O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, most of his later works were not produced until after his death. His failing health did not prevent him, however, from writing two of the greatest works the American stage has ever seen. Both “The Iceman Cometh”, a story of personal desperation in the lives a handful of barflys, and “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” a view into the difficult family life of his early years, were profound insights into many of the darker questions of human existence. Produced posthumously, these were to be his two greatest achievements. By the time of his death in 1953, O’Neill was considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Period of the major works of Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill’s capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays—several of them double and triple length—and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisfied, and he filled shelves of notebooks with research notes, outlines, play ideas, and other memoranda. His most-distinguished short plays include the four early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913 and 1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title S.S. Glencairn; The Emperor Jones (about the disintegration of a Pullman porter turned tropical-island dictator); and The Hairy Ape (about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal stoker).

O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family’s tragic relationships—his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O’Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three.

Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the classic American example of the ancient “harlot with a heart of gold” theme; it became an instant popular success. O’Neill’s serious, almost solemn treatment of the struggle of a poor Swedish American girl to live down her early, enforced life of prostitution and to find happiness with a likable but unimaginative young sailor is his least-complicated tragedy. He himself disliked it from the moment he finished it, for, in his words, it had been “too easy.”

The first full-length play in which O’Neill successfully evoked the starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own life was Desire Under the Elms (1924). Drawing on Greek themes of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context of his own family’s conflicts. This story of a lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous wife who murders her infant son was told with a fine disregard for the conventions of the contemporary Broadway theatre. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th century.

In The Great God Brown, O’Neill dealt with a major theme that he expressed more effectively in later plays—the conflict between idealism and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically intricate to be staged successfully when it was first produced, in 1926, it was significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with expressionistic dialogue and action—devices that since have become commonly accepted both on the stage and in motion pictures. In spite of its confusing structure, the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as well as in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde movements in American theatre.

O’Neill’s innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude. This play was revolutionary in style and length: when first produced, it opened in late afternoon, broke for a dinner intermission, and ended at the conventional hour. Techniques new to the modern theatre included spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters’ hidden thoughts. The play is the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her roles as daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and platonic friend. Although it was innovative and startling in 1928, its obvious Freudian overtones have rapidly dated the work.

One of O’Neill’s enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), represents the playwright’s most complete use of Greek forms, themes, and characters. Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was itself three plays in one. To give the story contemporary credibility, O’Neill set the play in the New England of the Civil War period, yet he retained the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders him; his jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son, who is goaded by his sister first to matricide and then to suicide.

Following a long succession of tragic visions, O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway in 1933. Written in a lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the playwright’s mischievous desire to demonstrate that he could portray the comic as well as the tragic side of life. Significantly, the play is set in the same place and period, a small New England town in the early 1900s, as his later tragic masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness! was characterized by O’Neill as “the other side of the coin,” meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as dramatized later in Long Day’s Journey into Night).

The Iceman Cometh, the most complex and perhaps the finest of the O’Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did not appear on Broadway until 1946. Laced with subtle religious symbolism, the play is a study of man’s need to cling to his hope for a better life, even if he must delude himself to do so.

Even in his last writings, O’Neill’s youth continued to absorb his attention. The posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey into Night brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of O’Neill’s greatest. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two sons. Spanning one day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four central figures, revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival.

O’Neill’s tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with the three women he married—two of whom he divorced—and with his three children. His elder son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr. (by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), committed suicide at 40, while his younger son, Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of emotional instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut out of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was O’Neill’s age.

Until some years after his death in 1953, O’Neill, although respected in the United States, was more highly regarded abroad. Sweden, in particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because of his publicly acknowledged debt to the influence of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in O’Neill’s plays. In 1936 the Swedish Academy gave O’Neill the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first time the award had been conferred on an American playwright.

O’Neill’s most ambitious project for the theatre was one that he never completed. In the late 1930s he conceived of a cycle of 11 plays, to be performed on 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an American family from the early 1800s to modern times. He wrote scenarios and outlines for several of the plays and drafts of others but completed only one in the cycle—A Touch of the Poet—before a crippling illness ended his ability to hold a pencil. An unfinished rough draft of another of the cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in 1964 and produced three years later on Broadway, in spite of written instructions left by O’Neill that the incomplete manuscript be destroyed after his death.

O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O’Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage.

Legacy of Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920, Broadway theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce. O’Neill saw the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragedies—a drama that could rise to the emotional heights of Shakespeare. For more than 20 years, both with such masterpieces as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other serious dramatists, O’Neill set the pace for the blossoming of the Broadway theatre.

Career

After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night). O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by George Piece Baker, but left after one year.

During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, about the life of John Reed; Louise Bryant was portrayed by Diane Keaton. His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. Terry Carlin reported that O'Neill arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays", but this was an exaggeration.[9] Susan Glaspell describes a reading of Bound East for Cardiff that took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf (pictured) that was used by the Players for their theater: "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays, such as The Emperor Jones, began downtown and then moved to Broadway.

In an early one-act play, The Web, written in 1913, O'Neill first explored the darker themes that he later thrived on. Here he focused on the brothel world and the lives of prostitutes, which also play a role in some fourteen of his later plays. In particular, he memorably included the birth of an infant into the world of prostitution. At the time, such themes constituted a huge innovation, as these sides of life had never before been presented with such success.

O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been.

In 1936, O'Neill received the Nobel Prize in Literature after he had been nominated that year by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy. O'Neill was profoundly influenced by the work of Swedish writer August Strindberg, and upon receiving the Nobel Prize, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work. In conversation with Russel Crouse, O'Neill said that "the Strindberg part of the speech is no 'telling tale' to please the Swedes with a polite gesture. It is absolutely sincere. [...] And it's absolutely true that I am proud of the opportunity to acknowledge my debt to Strindberg thus publicly to his people". Before the speech was sent to Stockholm, O'Neill read it to his friend Sophus Keith Winther. As he was reading, he suddenly interrupted himself with the comment: "I wish immortality were a fact, for then some day I would meet Strindberg". When Winther objected that "that would scarcely be enough to justify immortality", O'Neill answered quickly and firmly: "It would be enough for me".

After a ten-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and it was decades before coming to be considered as among his best works.[citation needed]

He was also part of the modern movement to partially revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, such as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed.

Work

See also: Category: Plays by Eugene O'Neill

Full-length plays

Bread and Butter, 1914 , Servitude, 1914 , The Personal Equation, 1915 , Now I Ask You, 1916 , Beyond the Horizon, 1918 - Pulitzer Prize, 1920 , The Straw, 1919 , Chris Christophersen, 1919 , Gold, 1920 , Anna Christie, 1920 - Pulitzer Prize, 1922 , The Emperor Jones, 1920 , Diff'rent, 1921 , The First Man, 1922,

The Hairy Ape, 1922 , The Fountain, 1923 , Marco Millions, 1923–25 , All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924 , Welded, 1924 , Desire Under the Elms, 1924 ,

Lazarus Laughed, 1925–26 , The Great God Brown, 1926 , Strange Interlude, 1928 - Pulitzer Prize , Dynamo, 1929 , Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931 , Ah, Wilderness!, 1933 , Days Without End, 1933 , The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940, first performed 1946 , Long Day's Journey into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956; Pulitzer Prize 1957 , A Moon for the Misbegotten, written 1941–1943, first performed 1947 , A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958 , More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967 , The Calms of Capricorn, published in 1983

One-act plays

The Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:

Bound East for Cardiff, 1914 , In the Zone, 1917 , The Long Voyage Home, 1917 , Moon of the Caribbees, 1918 , Other one-act plays include:A Wife for a Life, 1913 , The Web, 1913 , Thirst, 1913 , Recklessness, 1913 ,Warnings, 1913

Fog, 1914 , Abortion, 1914 ,The Movie Man: A Comedy, 1914 ,The Sniper, 1915 , Before Breakfast, 1916 , Ile, 1917 , The Rope, 1918 , Shell Shock, 1918,

The Dreamy Kid, 1918 , Where the Cross Is Made, 1918 , Eugene O'Neill's "Exorcism" 1919 , Hughie, written 1941, first performed 1959

Other works

Tomorrow, 1917. A Small Story published in The Seven Arts, Vol. II, No. 8 in June 1917.

The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog, 1940. Written to comfort Carlotta as their "child" Blemie was approaching his death in December 1940.