BRIETZKE, ZANDER. THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE: DYNAMIC STRUCTURE IN THE PLAYS OF EUGENE O’NEILL. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. xi+258pp. ISBN 0-7864-0946-0.

 

The Aesthetics of Failure is a book that should interest both theatre people and literary scholars. Brietzke is a trained director, and in calling his introduction “The Director’s Perspective,” he is suggesting that a play should be looked at from many angles as one prepares to put it on. At the same time Brietzke’s study stems directly from the work of several of O’Neill’s literary interpreters of the last thirty years: myself, Kurt Eisen, Jean Chothia, Normand Berlin, and John Henry Raleigh, to name a few. It is also highly indebted to R. B. Heilman’s Tragedy and Melodrama.

At first, the title seems puzzling. But upon reflection, one realizes it is a good one. In one sense, O’Neill was a failure. One thinks of Browning’s famous insistence that one’s reach must exceed one’s grasp, and as O’Neill’s denigrators are quick to point out, his reach certainly did exceed his grasp. But what impresses Brietzke is that O’Neill knew it and didn’t care. Samuel Johnson’s view of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a failure redeemed by the large-scale purpose of the work fits many of O’Neill’s plays, especially Mourning Becomes Electra. And like the playwright, Brietzke suggests, are many of his major characters, of whom it can be said that some large failure is their most distinguishing characteristic: for example, Yank (the “hairy ape”), Brutus Jones, Ephraim Cabot, Nina Leeds, Lavinia Mannon, Cornelius Melody, Larry Slade, Hickey, James Tyrone (Sr. and Jr.) and Erie Smith. (The cover picture of Al Pacino as Erie Smith is especially appropriate.) Brietzke explores the ways in which the monumental failures of these figures contribute to their plays being monumental.

 

Brietzke’s chapters move us through the variety of ways a director might look at the plays. He considers the way O’Neill, always distrustful of the theatre, sought in his successful middle period to employ the characteristics of the novel in his work, telling rather than just showing. Hence his “copious stage directions, elaborate character descriptions, … thought asides [and] lofty monologues” (16). Yet Brietzke makes clear O’Neill’s unflagging dedication to the theatre—at first to the theatrical through his use of melodrama, later through his growing understanding of the complex nature of tragedy.

Next Brietzke takes us into O’Neill’s much-discussed fascination with masks, which at first O’Neill employed to have characters hide their true natures but which he ultimately used to reveal his characters’ complexity:

What I hope to show … is not the reality beneath the mask so much as the possibility that yet another illusion … lies under the exterior presentation. For O’Neill, character is not a question of appearance and essence, but a matter of compatibility between multiple versions of the self. (61)

Brietzke illustrates this idea with insightful discussion of plays ranging from The Great God Brown and Mourning Becomes Electra to A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

 

The next chapter, “Beyond the Proscenium,” is a little difficult to follow until Brietzke gets to his discussion of The Iceman Cometh. He suggests that in many plays one gets the sense of an “outside,” unseen world always lurking in the background; sometimes a world of promise, sometimes of terror. He thinks of the sea as always an unseen presence in Beyond the Horizon, and of the looming city in Hughie. And he locates that outside presence in Iceman in the way the inhabitants of the saloon live within their separate pipe dreams about the outer world until they are driven to face truths about that world by Hickey.

 

In “Plays Without End,” Brietzke traces the ways in which O’Neill earlier closed his plays with explosively forceful actions and later wrote endings that are open, ambiguous, suggestive of repetition and continuation. From suicide, infanticide, murder and sudden conversion, Brietzke sees O’Neill moving to endings that follow from Lavinia’s quiet withdrawal into the family mansion in Mourning Becomes Electra—endings that, in the words of the quoted Frederic Carpenter, “would accept uncertainty, or multiplicity of choice” (129). Of Long Day’s Journey Brietzke concludes that the play “dramatizes the inability of individuals to see themselves or others in complete totality and the failure to accept the partial vision that is the only one available as sufficient” (163).

 

Brietzke’s final chapter, “Tragic Vision,” follows directly from this assertion. Building from R. B. Heilman’s idea that it is the dividedness within its central figures that chiefly distinguishes tragedy from melodrama, Brietzke discusses Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra in detail as enactments of this idea. “Something unseen,” he says—the sense of Eben’s ghostly “maw”—counters the clarity and certainty of the Eben-Abbie sexual melodrama, and Ephraim’s melodramatic stubbornness is softened by his affection for the murdered infant and his love of his farm and livestock. Similarly, the various melodramas of Mourning Becomes Electra are finally offset by Lavinia’s quietly determined withdrawal from the world.

 

O’Neill’s greatest success, Brietzke suggests in his conclusion (“Resonant Emotion”), is his achievement of what I would call an Aristotelian catharsis, at least in his best plays. Those plays, especially the late ones—Iceman, Journey and Moon—arouse emotion as do few other plays of the 20th century, and it is this quality above all that keeps audiences flocking to them.

 

Michael Manheim
University of Toledo

 

 

WILLIAM DAVIES KING. “A WIND IS RISING”: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF AGNES BOULTON AND EUGENE O’NEILL. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001. 328 pp. ISBN 0-8386-3808-2

 

First the statement of interest. I know and like Dave King. We’ve met at libraries and conferences. Broken bread together. Talked about his book—before it was written. So before I say things like this: A really exciting read. Enlightening. Revealing. Widening our knowledge of O’Neill, and things— and people—O’Neillian. Yet saddening. Even disheartening. Even at times disgusting. All of which is true. So before . . . as I said, before explaining what the book is, let’s see it in CONTEXT, let’s crunch numbers and facts.

 

The genre: Letters. But more than that. Letters by O’Neill have been published in various arrangements. Jackson Bryer made an early contribution with “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan (1982). Four years later Dorothy Commins published her memorial to her husband, Saxe, “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill­Commins Correspondence (1986). The next year Nancy and Arthur Roberts brought out “As Ever, Gene ”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan. There have been, in addition, articles by Bogard and Bryer in collaboration, and singly, and others by William Scheick, Stanford Apseloff, Dan Isaac, and two articles by me (with a little help from one R. Eaton), all of which have been contributions to the epistolary canon.

 

But then there came, again in collaboration, Travis Bogard and Jackson Bryer’s Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill (1988). Having examined the 3,000 or so known letters O’Neill wrote, they chose 560 of them for the delight and/ or edification of their readers.¹ Surely the last word (unless someone decides to inflict the whole 3,000 on us). Now if letters can be revealing of the inner man, and O’Neill’s letters are, then the 560 written between 1901 and 1952 should be a sufficient record of the growth of an artistic and spiritual intelligence.

 

But even so an awful lot of that artistic and spiritual intelligence appears to have a side that the reader has not been introduced to—or at least not introduced to till now with the publication of King’s “A Wind is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill.

 

The reason is this. As Jackson Bryer admits in “The Theatre We Worked For,” his collection was “essentially a one-sided correspondence” (about 130 letters from O’Neill or Carlotta, out of a total of 164 items). Despite the subtitle of Dorothy Commins’ “Love, and Admiration and Respect,” nearly 200 of the 242 letters, postcards and telegrams included are by one of the O’Neills. The Robertses found 130 letters to George Jean Nathan for their “As Ever, Gene,” but none from Nathan. We have had O’Neill responding, not corresponding— interacting, but with whom? about what? Then comes “A Wind is Rising.” Here are 295 letters, postcards, telegrams, almost evenly divided between O’Neill and Agnes, composed between December 1918 and October 1928. Forty-six of them—those by O’Neill himself, of course—are included in Bogard and Bryer’s Selected Letters. But that means there are close to 100 by O’Neill that are new to us. And, in addition, another 140 or so by O’Neill’s first wife, Agnes. So now finally—thanks to Agnes’s saving ways—we have a case of both sides talking. And what a story those sides tell: a story about the rise and fall of a love affair by the two who made it rise and fall.

 

They met one evening in (probably) December 1917. What a first date it must have been. Remember O’Neill’s words to her at the end of the evening (Agnes recalled them in her Part of a Long Story: Eugene O’Neill as a Young Man in Love): “I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. I mean this. Every night of my life.” Ten years later, in 1927 (also in December), he wrote Agnes: “Well, I will not beat about the bush but come to the point at once. I love someone else.”

 

The first entry in the book is dated December 17? 1918; the last October 3, 1928. These ten years define an important period in O’Neill’s life, during which he wrote Beyond the Horizon, “Anna Christie,” The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude—to name just the most important of some twenty-three. Though, to some, his most important plays lay in the future, these 23 included the ones for which he won three of his four Pulitzers, and which, with Mourning Becomes Electra—in its gestation during this same time—led to his winning the Nobel Prize. In these same years his father, mother, and brother Jamie died. Two children, Shane and Oona, were born. His alcoholism was finally gotten under control. From pretty much a drunken bum—but with dark seering eyes, a melancholy mouth, and a gift for reciting desperate poetry— he became a family man of substance and sobriety, of reputation and respect, with a grand, if dull, life in a Bermuda mansion on the water. Also an adulterer. And—a minor note—a self-plagiarist (some of the more passionate passages in his letters to Agnes had been worked up—given, in effect, a dry run—in letters to Beatrice Ashe, written during an earlier romantic episode).

 

To readers steeped in O’Neill, knowing their Gelbs or Sheaffer (or, best, both), the plot of this work won’t come as a surprise. But knowing what is really happening behind the letters—and what is to come can be harrowing even so—our knowledge makes it all seem so inevitable. Of course in knowing what is behind O’Neill’s letters, we may forget that there can also be something behind Agnes’s; so she can come off as an innocent. But it’s not an ignorant innocence: the passage (page 25) in which Max Wylie recalls Agnes’s opinion in later years of O’Neill is a devastating indictment of the playwright: “grossly deficient in every area (except sex) in which a normal woman can find trust, fulfillment, response, or secure companionship.... Petty, churlish, ungallant, unnoticing, self-immolated, and self-consuming.” Also “a hell of a bore.” But maybe Wylie was misquoting.

 

Still, O’Neill does have the last word—at least in this book—as the final entry is from a postcard he sent Agnes. I won’t tell you what he said. Perhaps he wasn’t “petty, churlish, . . . unnoticing, self-immolated, and self-consuming” in this instance. But he was surely “ungallant.” (The item is not in Bogard and Bryer; you’ll have to read King).

 

“A Wind is Rising” follows what has become the pattern for such collections: it is divided into chronological periods with short prefaces for each; there are entry numbers for the letters (followed by the when, whence, whither, and where they are located now), and the notes² are placed at the end of each letter. All are preceded by a twenty-page introduction that gives us a biography of Agnes and the provenance of the letters. King, who has been working on and researching Agnes for several years, is obviously the right person for the job of editor, but his introduction and notes and the elegance of his writing style surely make him more a coauthor, with Agnes and O’Neill, then simply an editor.

 

Madeline Smith
California University of Pennsylvania

 

NOTES

 

¹ A census of the 3,000 letters—where located, where and when written, to whom, with a brief note about the subject—was compiled by Bogard and Bryer. One computer printout is in the Department of Special Collections at Connecticut College’s Shain Library; but much more available for those of us with computers, but no easy access to New London, is Harley Hammerman’s version of the census on his www.eoneill.com website (thank you, Harley).

 

² No, George Eliot did not write The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Lord Dunsany was not English (O’Neill’s sneer was not at his nationality, but, presumably, at his lordliness).

 

 

BARBARA OZIEBLO, SUSAN GLASPELL: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 345 pp. $22.50 paperback. ISBN: 0- 8078-4868-9.

 

During her long and prolific career, Susan Glaspell wrote ten novels, more than fifty short stories and essays, a biography of her husband, George Cram (“Jig”) Cook, and fourteen plays, including the widely anthologized Trifles and the Pulitzer-winning Alison’s House. Like many women writers of her generation, Glaspell was celebrated during her lifetime, forgotten after her death, and relegated to the margins of theatre and literary history until a new generation of scholars began to reassess her significance in the late 1960s. Although scholarly interest in Glaspell has grown steadily in the past several decades, Barbara Ozieblo’s study is the first book-length critical biography since Marcia Noe’s excellent, but slim (85 pp.) Voice From the Heartland in 1983. Ozieblo, who teaches American literature and women’s studies at the University of Málaga, provides a comprehensive overview of Glaspell’s life and work, documenting both in considerable detail and exploring relationships between the two. Thoughtfully designed, extensively researched, and gracefully written, Susan Glaspell is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning body of Glaspell scholarship.

 

Ozieblo begins her chronological survey by tracing Glaspell’s biological and cultural roots, from her pioneering Puritan ancestors, who journeyed West from New England to Davenport, Iowa in the early nineteenth century, to her mid-Victorian parents, whose intellectual, spiritual and economic horizons were somewhat diminished by the time of Glaspell’s birth. Apparently drawing from her adventurous ancestral heritage as well as modern stirrings of New Womanhood, young Glaspell managed to escape her conventional upbringing, winning prestige as a writer and orator at Drake University before embarking on a writing career. Ozieblo traces Glaspell’s journey toward intellectual and economic independence from her literary debut, just after high school graduation, as a reporter for the Davenport Morning Republican, to the publication of her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, in 1909. This novel features a protagonist common to almost all of Glaspell’s major works, the strong and gifted woman struggling to live and love independently, and a frequently recurring theme, sacrifice inspired by love. Ozieblo highlights the autobiographical nature of these works, asserting that Glaspell, “in most of her fiction, elaborated on her own experience”(51) and offering details of Glaspell’s personal life as proof. Glaspell’s personal rebellion culminated in her relationship with Jig Cook, Davenport’s leading nonconformist. Cook was not only an intellectual and social radical; he was married, and Glaspell’s affair with him, as well as their eventual marriage, was a scandal.

 

Ozieblo devotes five chapters to Glaspell’s life with Cook and their association with the Provincetown Players (1915-1922). She provides plot summaries and brief critical analyses of Glaspell’s Provincetown plays, identifying recurring themes such as the “dilemmas of womanhood”(142) and the “right of the individual to self-development” (138) and formal innovations such as the unseen protagonist, introduced in Trifles, and the linguistic experiments in The Verge. Ozieblo is especially interested in clarifying Glaspell’s role in recruiting and mentoring Eugene O’Neill, sifting through various accounts of O’Neill’s introduction to the company to do so.

 

In the drama of Glaspell’s personal life, Ozieblo identifies four key figures who “leavened her ambition to transcend the patriarchal limitations imposed on women:” an “affectionate” but “ineffectual” father; a “possessive mother who soothed her own frustrated ambitions through her daughter’s triumphs”; a “callous lover” (writer Norman Matson), and an “exalted husband”(3-4). Of these four, Ozieblo views Cook, the “exalted husband,” as the most detrimental to Glaspell’s personal autonomy. Other writers have characterized Cook as a womanizer and a heavy drinker, haunted by failure and prone to self-pity, who was, despite these flaws, an inspired and charismatic personality. For Ozieblo, Cook was an “obstreperous megalomaniac”(225) who badgered Glaspell into acquiescence to his dreams and schemes. Although Glaspell’s theatrical characters were “forceful women who dare to risk all for love while maintaining more than a measure of independence”(279), her personal struggle seems to have been squelched, rather than “leavened,” by her marriage.

 

Ozieblo detects no self-motivation in Glaspell’s participation as a founder, actor, manager and leading playwright for the Provincetown Players. She views the enterprise as entirely Cook’s dream, and she views Glaspell’s participation as wifely submission: “The ‘Fire from Heaven’ that energized Cook, giving him the ardor to challenge Broadway, did not touch his wife, who felt utterly depleted by the brouhaha of the summer’s theatricals”(91). Ozieblo similarly presents (in a later chapter) Glaspell’s two-year stint as Director of the Midwest Play Bureau of the Federal Theatre Project as wifely duty: “her dream of continuing Cook’s work in the theatre”(262). Although the image of Glaspell as a reluctant participant in the Provincetown experiment is one that Glaspell herself helped create, both in her self-effacing Road to the Temple and in several published interviews, it is not entirely convincing. That Glaspell’s enormous contributions to the development of American theatre and drama, including several of the most radically feminist subversions of the twentieth century, were primarily motivated by feminine submission to masculine desire is a provocative and ironic assertion that will no doubt provoke further analysis.

 

Ozieblo’s depiction of Glaspell’s marriage as unrelieved misery—she even speculates that Cook’s drinking “must have affected his virility”(214)—does seem supported by Glaspell’s haste to begin an affair with Norman Matson after Cook’s death in 1924. Glaspell spent considerable effort promoting her younger and less-talented lover, even co-writing a play with him, The Comic Artist, which she later disclaimed. Despite the time and effort that Glaspell expended on Matson’s career, she produced a number of notable novels and several plays during her years with him, including Alison’s House.

 

Ozieblo’s final chapter documents Glaspell’s last years of solitary living and writing in Provincetown (1940-1948). Her last novel, Judd Rankin’s Daughter, features a midwestern setting and her most atypical female character: “Glaspell acknowledges that, in a patriarchy, it is up to the men to act—she limits women to the role of passive inspirer or muse”(273). After noting the singular characterizations in this final novel, Ozieblo concludes that Glaspell’s voice was silenced in the 1950s because her characters generally “did not conform to postwar consumer society role models”(279). Ozieblo’s insistence that Glaspell deserves attention because “her work still ‘helps us in understanding ourselves’”(278) is a valid one; the themes manifested in Glaspell’s fiction and drama still resonate, and her aesthetic innovations still excite the imagination. This latest interpretation of Glaspell’s life and art should stimulate greater interest in both, leading to further explorations of both her neglected oeuvre and her elusive personality.

 

Cheryl Black

University of Missouri-Columbia

R. VISWANATHAN, O’NEILL AND THE SEA. Calicut: Poorna Publications, 2000. ix+208pp. $20.00 paper. ISBN: 81-7180-826-3

 

This study, first presented as a doctoral dissertation at Calicut University

in 1977, surveys with some thoroughness O’Neill’s use of the sea as a setting, as a motif or theme, and as a passionate but unreliable companion. R. Viswanathan has worked conscientiously through all the O’Neill plays, studying each for its individual qualities and then grouping them, when possible, according to comparable dramaturgy and congruent themes. The effort is worthwhile because throughout O’Neill’s career as a writer the sea remained a pervasive presence.

 

A difficulty arises, however, because the works are so varied, so experimental, and sometimes so exceptional that they often defy classification. The enduring tension between studying works grouped into categories or as individual constructs is illustrated in any inclusive thematic review of O’Neill’s plays. This volume, which focuses on the sea and scenes on ships or in seaside locations, often achieves helpful reading of individual scenes—for example, the two port scenes in Marco Millions (II, ii and iii). Less persuasively, it also treats fully the eighth act of Strange Interlude, which takes place on a yacht at Poughkeepsie. Because he focuses on the sea, Viswanathan omits scenes which treat the generative power of fresh water, notably those at the spring which conclude The Fountain and the flowing water in Dynamo.

 

The author begins with a brief review of maritime traditions in the United States and proceeds to some discussion of the literature of the sea, notably works by Melville, Cooper, Whitman and Hart Crane. He identifies the “voyage of progression,” related to the establishment and growth of the country, and the “voyage of regression,” akin to the sense of disinheritance felt by settlers who longed for what they had left behind in Europe. He comments on traditional imagery, beginning with Roger Williams and his vision of the “ship of colony,” and notes that the “ship of state allegory” has been a recurring theme since Greek literature. Although a setting on a ship, isolating and testing a representative group of men, is a familiar device, O’Neill explores and expands its varied possibilities.

 

Viswanathan considers O’Neill the “first and foremost playwright of the sea in America,” adding that in the “history of world drama … there has hardly ever been another playwright whose treatment of the sea can match O’Neill’s in variety, depth, and precision of details.” In his chapter entitled “O’Neill and the Sea Play,” he asks whether the sea play is an identifiable genre, and decides that it is. A “pure sea play,” he says, “presents the lives of seamen against a background of the sea.” This definition leads him to consider Fog and Thirst as “pseudo” sea plays because the characters are not seamen, and to classify a group of plays, all written by 1920, as “pure” sea plays.

 

This group begins with Warnings and the S.S. Glencairn cycle and also includes Ile, Where the Cross Is Made, Gold, Anna Christie and The Personal Equation. Not all of these are set on ships, but they all depict the lives of sailors. Because O’Neill based many of these early works on his personal experience as a seaman, the characters and situations are specific and convincing. The difficulty of arranging the S. S. Glencairn plays as a coherent group is described and the moonlit impressions of The Moon of the Caribbees are admired.

 

As O’Neill’s dramaturgy gradually evolved and his characters became more resonant, the recurring themes of his career emerged. For example, fog encloses and isolates characters in these plays as it does Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey, and the sounds of the sea—the waves themselves, whistles, bells, foghorns and chanties—reverberate in play after play. The theme of sail versus steam is established in the early plays and recurs throughout O’Neill’s career: “by dramatizing this twilight moment of change … he articulates the modernist’s apprehensions about the erosion of values and the loss of natural harmony in the age of technology.” Viswanathan’s passage on The Hairy Ape begins with a quotation from Nietzsche and proceeds to describe the play as the “history of man from primitivism to civilization,” with man seen as “tormented and chained by machines.”

 

The tension between religious repression, often in the form of New England Puritanism, and genial hedonism erupts in various conflicts between austere propriety and Dionysian revelry. For example, the conflict between Christian and pagan informs Diff’rent, but the fate of Emma Crossby hardly seems a “tragedy,” as Viswanathan labels it. Anna Christie, “structured on a number of beliefs, taboos, and customs cherished by sailors,” is classified as a “sea tragedy,” related to “determinism or inherited destiny.”

 

It is useful to be reminded of connections between the work of O’Neill and that of other writers. In Mourning Becomes Electra, Orin Mannon dreams of the south seas as described in Melville’s Typee; the Chantyman may echo both the porter in Macbeth and the gravedigger in Hamlet. But to read Captain Bartlett in Where the Cross Is Made as a compelling early exemplar of the “reality-illusion antithesis” and as foreshadowing Pirandello’s Henry IV and Williams’s Glass Menagerie seems extravagant, though the theme may presage The Iceman Cometh.

 

Most of the plays of O’Neill’s middle and late years are treated in “The Sea-Haunted O’Neill,” in which Viswanathan focuses on references to the sea. Close reading of the slave ship scene in The Emperor Jones leads him to see it primarily as an experience in Jones’s voyage of regression; his “mind is sailing its way back from the land of civilization to its original land of primitive culture.” He associates this idea with Jung’s theories about water and the subconscious. One difficulty, however, is that the slave ship would in fact have been sailing in the other direction—from Africa towards North America. He does not mention the ocean voyage in All God’s Chillun Got Wings, in which the trip to Europe is a flight from the restrictions of American racism.