When Susan Glaspell's biography of her husband George Cram Cook was first published in London 80 years ago, precious few people there had ever heard his name, or knew why they should read about him. A few more knew of the author, since several of her novels had been published and met with success in England, one short and one full-length play of hers, as well as a short one she wrote with Cook had also been successfully staged there. Nor was the situation much different in America when the book was published here a year later. It wasn't until Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for Alison's House that she became better known, although in America she had achieved success with a string of novels. Nevertheless, this biography proved remarkably popular. A new edition appeared in 1941 when the world looked to Greece in admiration, but it wasn't until the feminist movement rediscovered Glaspell in the 1970s that she slowly entered public consciousness. And "Jig" Cook, as he was generally called, is still mostly unknown, except to specialists of American theatre history, and to O'Neillians.

The current edition, under the care of, with a new, concise and poignant introduction and very welcome footnotes to the original text, along with a careful select bibliography by the noted Glaspell scholar, Linda Ben-Zvi, is also primarily due to the increased interest in the author rather than the subject—although one may say that curiosity about the latter is now also on the rise. Ben-Zvi's introduction—based on decades-long research and analysis of both author and subject as well as of the Provincetown Players—provides the poetic and at times imaginatively embellished text with a sharpened—and occasionally corrective—focus.

The biography has at times been labeled a "hagiography" and, to be sure, Susan's luminous prose shines the light primarily on positive aspects of her subject: Jig's almost limitless lust and enthusiasm for life, spontaneous creativity, and individual freedom; his skilled and ingenious use of his hands and tools; his knowledge and worship of ancient Greece; his infectious optimism and frequent bursts of inspirational support for younger companions. Nevertheless, she allows the reader to catch occasional glimpses of Cook's darker side: his drinking, periodic depression, and quick anger; an often unrealistic view of reality; and a stubborn belief in the rightness of his convictions, no matter how sudden or short-lived they might prove to be. Embedded in what has repeatedly been characterized as an intimate portrait of the Midwest—both she and her subject grew up in Davenport, Iowa—Glaspell provides a detailed and accurate family background for Cook, then traces his boyhood and adolescence, his academic beginnings at Harvard and Heidelberg, from which he returned to Iowa to become a truck farmer; his early journalistic and belletristic activity in Davenport and Chicago. She gives a solid assessment of the influence of Cook's early interest in Greece, the impact of his mother (Ma-mie, later an active Provincetown Player), and his first marriage, but becomes more restrained in regard to his second marriage (to the anarchist Mollie Price, mother of his two children) during which she entered his life in significant and lasting ways.

Friendships and working relationships with Arthur Davison Ficke and especially Floyd Dell—who was an active socialist, and with whom Cook founded the Monist Society—aren't given short shrift either. After the break-up of this second marriage, the lives of Susan and Jig having become bound together, they migrate to the East Coast—specifically Greenwich Village and Provincetown. The section dealing with this period, while short, is the crux of the story. The further eastward migration to Greece, although yearned for since boyhood, is viewed as the consequence of Jig's conclusion—disputed by many of his collaborators— that he failed to realize his magnificent dreams. There, on the slopes on Mt. Parnassus, Cook comes to his untimely but correctly foretold death at 50.

In addition to the polished and poetic language, strengths of the volume include Glaspell's intimate, at times candid observations of her husband, as well as ample incorporation of selections from Cook's scattered writings, such as unpublished poems, incomplete novels, his Farm Journal, and, perhaps most important, letters sent and unsent to friends and relations, collaborators and critics, as well as random and fragmentary jottings of thoughts and visions that were more often directly converted into practice than into articulate written statements. These, in effect, render the book a double-memoir. As Ben-Zvi points out with appropriate tact, Susan's skilled creation of appropriate contexts for Jig's writings, occasional dramatizations of his actions, as well as silences (e.g., of his philandering) raise the very current issue of where truth ends and fiction begins in memoirs. The sensitive introduction as well as the copious and thorough footnotes added to the original text help bridge the time gap for readers who come uninitiated to this tender account of Jig Cook's flamboyant life.

Robert K. Sarlós
Emeritus, University of California, Davis

 

During her professional heyday (circa 1900-1920), Neith Boyce was a popular and prolific author of novels, short stories, plays, poems, and essays. Along with her husband, writer Hutchins Hapgood, Boyce was a founding member of the Provincetown Players and a central figure in a charmed circle of literary and artistic innovators that included Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Djuna Barnes, and Bernard Berensen. Personal tragedies, including marital conflict, a nervous breakdown, and the death of her oldest son in the influenza epidemic of 1918 curtailed her literary career. Boyce published nothing between 1923 and her death in 1951, and only one of her novels has been reprinted. Consequently, this modernist pioneer, whose early work critics had compared favorably to that of Edith Wharton, is virtually unknown today. A handful of critical essays and one full-length study (Ellen Kay Trimberger's Intimate Warriors, an exploration of the Boyce-Hapgood marriage) comprise the body of Boyce scholarship to date. Carol DeBoer-Langworthy's edited volume of Boyce's autobiographical writing is therefore a welcome and significant contribution.

DeBoer-Langworthy, who completed a master's thesis on Boyce in 1980, has spent more than two decades exhaustively researching Boyce's life and career. For the selections included in this volume, she mined the vast Hapgood archive of unpublished materials at Beinecke library, publishing for the first time Boyce's autobiography and two travel diaries. In addition to scrupulous editing of multiple holograph and typed drafts, DeBoer-Langworthy has liberally annotated these three works, identifying unnamed and pseudonymous individuals, verifying dates, places, and incidents, sorting out intricate relationships among the Boyce-Hapgood circle, and providing a wealth of interesting information to illuminate or augment Boyce's accounts. DeBoer-Langworthy also provides a useful introduction in which she summarizes Boyce's life and surveys recurring plots and themes in her works, identifying her most prevalent concern as "the general difficulty of most women's lives" (6). In publishing these autobiographical works, DeBoer-Langworthy hopes to strengthen Boyce's burgeoning reputation as a literary modernist and to highlight Boyce's significance as a pioneer of what we now call "creative nonfiction" (3).

Boyce called her life story a "sort of autobiography" (25), perhaps because she disguised the identity of almost everyone mentioned, including herself. She not only created a fictional persona named "Iras," she has Iras create an alter ego called "You." Although the Boyce family fortunes fluctuated, leading to a nomadic existence (from Indiana to Los Angeles to Boston to New York), they lived in relative comfort. The family always seemed to have servants (whose ethnicity varied geographically) and access to literature and culture. If materially sufficient, however, Boyce's childhood was emotionally lacking. A diphtheria epidemic claimed four of her siblings, and Boyce grew up isolated and emotionally withdrawn from her parents. With typical understatement, Boyce recalled, "caresses were not familiar" (46). By the time Boyce began her "bachelor-girl" existence, living alone in downtown Manhattan and working as a reporter for Lincoln Steffens's Commercial Advertiser, she was "firmly set in her own way of life [. . .] she didn't feel obliged to make herself agreeable and didn't really know how to do it. [. . .] she met few people that she ever wanted to see again" (163). Boyce's plans for an emotionally detached existence, however, were disturbed by the determined pursuit of her Commercial Advertiser colleague, Hutchins Hapgood. Boyce's temperamental opposite, Hapgood was "enthusiastic about life, he was lyric about it, he found something interesting and likeable in almost every person, his sympathies were unbounded, he was open to experience and shut himself off from nothing" (175). Ultimately Boyce's reserve gave way to Hapgood's élan vital, and she agreed to marry him with the stipulation that "retreat must be easy" (186). The narrative ends with their wedding night in 1899.

Boyce's Diary of 1903 records a relatively joyous five-month sojourn in Italy. Four years into her marriage, having borne her first child and completed her first novel, Boyce seems to have picked up a little of Hapgood's optimism. The exclamation point, a punctuation mark rarely seen in the autobiography, makes frequent appearances throughout this diary, as Boyce enthusiastically describes the natural and manmade beauties of the Italian countryside. This diary also offers a revealing look at the expatriate American and British community in Italy during the time, a fascinating assembly including art critic Bernard Berensen and his wife Mary; Gertrude and Leo Stein, May Morris, Janet Ross, and Violet Paget. In this autobiographical writing, with one brief exception, Boyce writes in the first person: "I have been very happy here, partly because of the perpetual beauty that surrounds me" (221). When Boyce learns of her father's death in America, however, she reverts to third person: "Iras began to pack. She was too stunned to weep or to feel much then" (288).

Boyce's War Diary recounts her brief but dramatic trip to Italy in August 1914. Now fifteen years married and the mother of four, Boyce made this trip without her husband, traveling instead with her friends Mabel Dodge Luhan and Carl Van Vechten, and two of the Hapgood children. Preoccupied with Luhan's divorce proceedings against Edwin Dodge and new affair with journalist John Reed, the group paid scant attention to "something in the papers about Austria and Serbia" (298). Within days, however, Boyce and her companions found themselves trapped in Italy as the war erupted: "trains stopped; mails stopped; money stopped" (302). The remainder of the diary recounts their struggle to get back home, providing striking portraits of the main characters along the way: Van Vechten hysterical, but too loyal to leave Boyce; Luhan loathe to leave Reed even at the cost of her life; and Boyce cool enough to shop (and haggle over prices) for souvenirs while they wait. They eventually managed passage on a crowded boat, arriving safely in New York on September 3. Boyce summed up this adventure with trademark irony: "not a great success this trip" (306).

Although DeBoer-Langworthy admits that she finds these documents "ultimately sad," partial evidence of Boyce's "disillusionment with marital happiness and, perhaps, her disappointment in her own literary career" (8), she insists that Boyce must not be seen as a "tragic, forgotten, or second-rate writer [. . .] one needs to celebrate what she was able to accomplish" (35). These documents offer strong evidence of the nature and significance of those accomplishments. They provide a tantalizing glimpse into Neith Boyce's world and whet the appetite for further reading of her works.

Cheryl Black
University of Missouri-Columbia

 

In his long and distinguished career, Egil Tornqvist has written eloquently both about the plays of Eugene O'Neill and the works of those who have most influenced him. A prominent Strindberg and Ibsen scholar as well as an expert on Ingmar Bergman, he has written comparative studies that cross cultures and media, including theater, film, television, and radio. Thus he brings to this book, which covers, among other things, influences on and productions of O'Neill's plays, a rich context from which to examine O'Neill's canon.

The book's subtitle, "A Playwright's Theatre," derives from O'Neill's suggestion in 1916 that those words (more modestly punctuated Playwrights') be added to the name "Provincetown Players," indicating even at the start of his career a desire to control every aspect of his plays and their production. Given his lack of faith in most directors and actors to translate his vision adequately, O'Neill, Tornqvist argues, composed his plays as much—perhaps even more—for the page than for the stage. "Although most of O'Neill's plays were produced before they were published," O'Neill, he writes, had "publication in mind. For many of the plays there would be one version for the reader and another for the spectator" (23). Many of the original productions in which O'Neill was intimately involved were based on scripts different from the published versions, he notes, illustrating with the comment O'Neill appends to the title page of Strange Interlude's first typewritten script:

The published book of this play is not identical with the staged version. I kept material in the book which I felt was necessary when the play was read but which was not needed when one heard and saw the play acted. This was done in the case of many of my other plays, too. (22)

With this in mind, Tornqvist examines the plays and their construction with an eye to the differences between staged and published versions.

The book is divided into four parts. The first, "Preliminaries," discusses O'Neill's composition practices and expands upon the differences between page and stage versions of the plays. In Part Two, "Affinities," Tornqvist considers the impact of the three thinkers who most influenced the playwright, devoting a chapter each to Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg. Part Three, "Formalities," analyzes various formal aspects of the plays, including titles, setting, language, and allusions. The final part, "Individualities," is designed to synthesize the previous sections by applying all these aspects to an analysis of three plays: Bound East for Cardiff, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Touch of the Poet.

Tornqvist also includes two appendices. The first is a detailed comparison of Ingmar Berman's 1988 production of Long Day's Journey to Karl Ragnar Gierow's 1956 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, along with a discussion of Swedish playwright Lars Noren's play, And Give Us the Shadows, a fictionalized account of the end of O'Neill's life, set 37 years after the events of Journey and four years before his death. The second is a very useful "Configuration Chart" which graphs, scene by scene, the speaking, silent, and offstage characters of the three plays he discusses in the final section of his book. Also helpful is his list of all the plays' completion and publication dates. I found Tornqvist's discussion of page-stage differences the book's most interesting contribution. He points to the fact that many of the stage directions, unavailable to a theater audience, contain what he calls "interpretive comments" with information "addressed in the first place to the reader and wholly graspable only by him" (29). The song "Shenandoah" in Mourning Becomes Electra, for instance, is said to hold the "brooding rhythm of the sea." The Hairy Ape's final stage directions state likewise that "perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs," and the famous elms of Desire Under the Elms "brood oppressively over the house" like exhausted women with sagging breasts. He also points to "nonentities and nonactions" (34), like the fact in Elms that there is "no wind," or in Long Day's Journey that Mary wears "no makeup," and to what he calls "small objects," like the famous books on the Tyrones' shelves with titles that no audience member can possibly read. In these instances, Tornqvist argues, O'Neill is writing to what he calls the "recipient," i.e., the reader, not the spectator, an insight which invites one to read O'Neill's stage directions in a new light, particularly since he argues that O'Neill himself "apparently preferred the page to the stage" (21). In his chapter "The Playwright at Work," he also provides valuable information about O'Neill's revising process, detailing changes made both during rehearsals to the acting versions and afterwards to the published ones. During the rehearsals of Strange Interlude, for instance, O'Neill cut almost ten thousand words, four thousand of which were restored to the published version (22).

I was also fascinated with his discussion of the plays of Lars Noren, who is famous in Europe and Scandanavian countries but virtually unknown in England and the United States. In his play about O'Neill's last days, the fictionalized O'Neill parallels Journey's James Tyrone, as Carlotta does Mary and Eugene, Jr. and Shane do Jamie and Edmund, dramatizing the Strindbergian concept that "everything comes back" in the end. It is a play one would ardently wish to see produced in America.

While the section on Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg's influence on O'Neill is interesting, I found nothing new there. The "Formalities" section, likewise, offers a thorough survey of the play's elements useful perhaps to a reader unfamiliar with O'Neill's style, but covers no significant new ground. In fact, only six of the book's fourteen chapters are new; the others are drawn from articles Tornqvist published elsewhere. That said, this book brings together much useful material about O'Neill's canon and makes a valuable point about the multiple audiences for which O'Neill wrote.

Laurin Porter
University of Texas, Arlington

 

Eugene O'Neill was determined to create high dramatic art, a noble aim that led him directly back to the great works of the Greek tragedians. He was attracted not only to the idea of how fate mysteriously determines human destiny, but also to the methods and structures of ancient Greek drama. Thus, Mary Koutsoudaki's study, The Greek Plays of Eugene O'Neill, is greatly welcome.

Koutsoudaki links the origin of O'Neill's fascination with ancient Greek drama to the young radicals who gathered in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the years 1915-1922. O'Neill absorbed the heady atmosphere of this innovative avant-garde group, especially George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and the man who brought him to Provincetown, John Reed. These idealists revered Greek drama, socialism, and mysticism. They stimulated O'Neill's already omnivorous reading, and left a mark on his work until the end of his life. O'Neill also read Nietzsche and the writings of the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology, sources that were also admired by Cook. From these people and his reading, including Freud and Jung, Koutsoudaki observes, O'Neill gained a grasp of the nature of the Dionysiac rituals and the birth of Greek tragedy.

In a lengthy discussion of Desire Under the Elms, Koutsoudaki shows how O'Neill follows Euripides's Hippolytus in developing fully all three characters in the love triangle, and argues that Abbie is the greatest and most tragic figure of the three, showing more vision and daring than either Cabot or Eben. She notes that O'Neill's ending would be unthinkable in classical times, since Abbie's display of emotion would be considered improper. She concludes that O'Neill combined in the play the American "dream of possession" with Greek myth to construct his play. Freudian determinism was a successful substitution for Greek fate, and the tragic effect "was not [. . .] inhibited by the drama's archetypical patterns, because he succeeded in transcending all mythical stereotypes" (62). Most audiences have agreed with Koutsoudaki's judgment.

Many admirers of O'Neill find The Great God Brown a significant and provocative piece of work but few critics agree on what it means. O'Neill himself thought it was flawed but still among his best works, with its bold use of masks, myth, split characters, and mystery. Koutsoudaki packs an enormous amount of information into her discussion of the play, drawing from many diverse points of view. She sees the play as based on the Dionysiac ritual of the "resurrection of the dying god, ensuring life's continuation on earth along with the cyclical pattern of the rotation of the seasons" (79-80). The reason O'Neill chose this myth and ritual for The Great God Brown, the author says, was to challenge "the modern stage with a form of catharsis similar to a Dionysiac spectacle" (80). In doing so, O'Neill employed the ancient dramatic device of masks to create split characters and doubles to suggest the contradictions and inconsistencies of modern life and character, described by Jungians, Freudians, social theorists, and others. Thus, we have Dion Anthony standing for Dionysius, the wild creative artist, and "Anthony" signifying Christianity in the person of St. Anthony, the ascetic hermit who renounced society, suggesting a conflict in human nature. Koutsoudaki closes her discussion of the play with praise for O'Neill's accomplishment in bringing to "the modern stage the Dionysiac paradox in the true spirit of the Greeks" (93).

Koudsoudaki greatly admires O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, calling the trilogy "a magnificent play consciously patterned on Greek tragedy" that "marks the playwright's mature phase"(101). O'Neill follows Aeschylus's Agamemnon of the Oresteia for the Homecoming, but tends to follow his own lights in the following two plays of the trilogy, The Hunted and The Haunted. Koutsoudaki spends a good deal of space discussing the diverse interpretations of the trilogy, e.g., autobiographical and psychoanalytical. The Freudian view rings true despite O'Neill's denials. She points out that O'Neill retained the idea of using masks, but shunned physical devices in favor of emotional or psychological facial expressions, the forbidding "Mannon look" (105). A small New England seaport shortly after the Civil War was an ideal location to tell the story of a Puritanical family with an inherited curse passed on through the generations, just like that of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Koutsoudaki relates that "conscience plagued" New England was the land of repression, where Indians were exterminated, witches hanged, slavery practiced, and Yanks waged war against the Catholic immigrants. The name "Mannon" itself resonates with theatrical history and moral judgment: "Mannon," she suggests, is possibly derived from "Agamemnon," and also may be an echo of "mammon," the Judaic-Christian description of material riches (114).

O'Neill's most significant modification of the Greek tradition is his treatment of Lavinia in The Haunted, the final play of the trilogy. Koutsoudaki writes that O'Neill admired the great female characters of Greek drama, particularly Electra. Moreover, he felt that the Greek tragedians did not give her a fate equal to her tragic stature. She does not even appear in Aeschylus's Eumenides. Lavinia, O'Neill's Electra, chooses entombment in the Mannon house as punishment for her misdeeds, and Koutsoudaki says that her decision is "an heroic act of dignity that restores her Aeschylean stature." Thus, O'Neill had succeeded in creating a great "twentieth-century heroine, torn between paganism and Puritanism" (128). Koutsoudaki concludes her chapter by judging Mourning Becomes Electra the best, or one of the best, plays of the 1930s, and "a great challenge to the theatres abroad" (142).

The final chapter and epilogue describe Greek influences on O'Neill such as his loose observance of the unities in many plays, as in Long Day's Journey into Night, which observes the unities of time and place but not of action.

Koutsoudaki is no stranger to studies of the influence of ancient Greek culture on American literature, having written The Dionysiac in Camus and Williams (1987) and Thornton Wilder: A Nostalgia for the Antique (1992). This book is a mine of information about her subject, both within the text and in the abundant endnotes. Some of her scholarly techniques, however, are open to question. For example, she occasionally presents quotations from primary sources but cites secondary sources for their origin. She also has the habit of not sufficiently identifying the quotations in her text. This reduces coherence and forces the reader to stop reading and consult the endnotes. However, in highlighting O'Neill's enormous debt to the Greek tragedians, Koutsoudaki has made a considerable contribution to O'Neill scholarship.

Robert Simpson McLean
Emeritus, City University of New York

 

This is the sort of book that you don't read . . . until you need it. At that point, you're glad to have it, or at least to know where to find it at your nearby college or research library. With 3,338 entries from "Caroline Aaron" to "Eric Zwemer," this volume lists primarily actors and actresses (about two thirds of the total number), but also directors, producers, and designers of O'Neill plays and film and television versions. Such thick work combined with Smith and Eaton's previous effort, Eugene O'Neill: An Annotated Bibliography, 1973 through 1999 (McFarland 2001), reviewed in Volume 25 of the EOR (2001), which built upon Jordan Miller's book, forms an impressive O'Neill reference library.

A standard entry begins with a name and lists what the person did on a particular O'Neill production and when and where it was performed. In the case of multiple productions, they are listed in chronological order. I found this a little confusing and would have preferred a resume format with the most recent productions first. In some cases, such as Jason Robards, whose first role was Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, perhaps his most famous role, the immediate link between an actor and a role is actually helped by the chronology of performances. Still, with two columns of dense text running down each page, reading a passage of any length is a bit difficult, so frontloading the crucial information makes that task much easier. After mentioning a person's O'Neill work, the individual passages might include birth names and dates, other significant credits on stage and screen, nominations for awards and those won, some further biographical facts, such as degrees earned, places of study and training, marriages, and children, and dates of death. Again, separating dates of birth from death provides a narrative flow, but I found myself wanting to know at the beginning whether or not the person was still alive.

The information above is by no means available for every entry and some are much longer and more thorough than others. This is perfectly acceptable for a volume that attempts to catalogue personnel not just from the major New York or London commercial stage, but also from world theaters, off-Broadway and regional theaters, college and university productions, and community theaters. There is simply much more available information for an actress such as Greta Garbo on page 111 than for Howard Garner, listed on that same page, who played in a bare bones production of The Personal Equation at the Provincetown Playhouse in summer 2000.

Indeed, given the scope of Production Personnel, the alphabetization of names juxtaposes odd combinations of theater folk. On page 169, for example, Jessica Lange appears alongside Lawrence Langner, but also with Sam Langham, who played Tommy in Ah, Wilderness! in 1975 at Gainesville Little Theatre; opera singer Kevin Langan and Robert Lane, who designed settings for "Anna Christie" at the Focus Theatre in Dublin; Leonora Landau, who played the "young girl" in Desire Under the Elms at Circle in the Square in 1963; and Elizabeth Landis, who designed costumes at the Sharon Playhouse (CT) for a 1978 production of Marco Millions. A similar gathering of the famous and non-famous occurs on each page.

The listings of relatively unknown people in the more obscure productions are what make this volume most useful. While it's fun to read that Gabriel Byrne was once married to Ellen Barkin, that kind of information is readily available online or in celebrity magazines. By looking outside and beyond New York, Smith and Eaton discover and publish a lot of information that is not accessible anywhere else or in any other format. I have consulted the production appendix of Travis Bogard's Contour in Time repeatedly in search of a name, date or location for a particular production, but Bogard includes only the major New York premieres of O'Neill plays and their significant revivals. Smith and Eaton fill in a lot of blanks, giving the scholar a place to start for further research.

A short bibliography, mainly of O'Neill reference books and biographies, and three indices follow the individual listings. Given the predominance of actors and actresses in the volume, the "Index of Directors, Producers and Technical Personnel" is a welcome user-friendly shortcut. The "Index of Production Companies, Theatres and Festivals" includes an impressive range of world-wide venues, and the "Index of Plays and Characters" provides graphic and comparative evidence regarding how often individual plays are performed.

McFarland has published many books on O'Neill recently, but it specializes in reference works in a variety of fields. This book is a sturdy volume that is able to withstand being knocked around and toted from place to place. The pages are sewn well into the binding, the paper quality is excellent and the font is easy to read. The book is built to last, as is Smith and Eaton's thorough research. In the preface, the authors indicate that the project became much bigger than they had ever first imagined. Their book reminds the reader of just how large O'Neill looms in the theater.

Zander Brietzke
Suffolk University

 

The first thing one notices about Linda Ben-Zvi's superb new Susan Glaspell biography is that it's just one volume. Perhaps someone will eventually produce a two or three-volume work to put alongside Sheaffer's and the Gelbs' great O'Neill sagas. Perhaps no one should. Somehow it seems fitting that this crucial figure in American drama receives a definitive biographical treatment more compatible with the scale of her own incisive art and sensibility.

This is not to say that Ben-Zvi has in any way cut corners in archival research or interpretative analysis. She draws extensively on the collection of Glaspell's and Jig Cook's papers in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and numerous other repositories, especially personal letters, to reveal the private contexts of Glaspell's fiction and drama. Ben-Zvi astutely traces the sources of Glaspell's identity from its prehistory, as it were, among her ancestors in colonial Massachusetts to the lives of her more immediate forebears, who traveled west to Iowa and settled in Davenport in the late 1830s.

Detailing this family history before her subject's birth is crucial to establishing a key idea in Ben-Zvi's presentation of an artist whose creative bohemianism was always tempered by a sense of self rooted in the heartland. If O'Neill's art is marked by his restless distrust of "home" as a valid emotional center, Glaspell's, from her early fiction and drama to her final works, is animated by an instinct that is both liberatory and domestic. Ben-Zvi presents Glaspell as far less flamboyant than some of her Greenwich Village contemporaries such as Louise Bryant and Mabel Dodge, and less radical than Emma Goldman, but more probing in her constant reexamination of women's societal roles and domestic values within the ferment of American modernism.

Readers already familiar with Ben-Zvi's landmark 1992 article on the origins of Trifles in the Hossack murder case, which Glaspell covered as a young reporter in Des Moines, will recognize not only the substance of that article in chapter five of this biography, "The Genesis of Trifles," but the same skillful interweaving of research, textual analysis, and judicious psychological insight throughout the book.

Among the biggest challenges any Glaspell biographer must confront is how to present her relationships with the two men most important to her life and career: her husband Jig Cook, primarily, for his decisive impact on her personal life and her writing career; but also O'Neill for his conspicuous presence as they emerged together as major American dramatists during the Provincetown years and beyond. Ben-Zvi does not set out to argue that Glaspell is the superior playwright, but she does remind us that in the 1920s when O'Neill was enjoying his greatest critical and commercial success it was Glaspell whom many critics, especially in England, regarded as the better artist. She also notes several elements in O'Neill's plays that seem to have been inspired by, or perhaps even directly lifted from, Glaspell's. The point of such observations seems to be less to expose O'Neill as an imitator than to emphasize the independent and original course that Glaspell always set for herself, even during the years when she seemed to devote herself more to Jig's needs than to her own art.

Glaspell's life with Cook forms the center of Ben-Zvi's narrative, but it does not eclipse that image of self-determination. Glaspell spent less than 17 of her 72 years with Jig, but Ben-Zvi is surely right in presenting their marriage as the crux of her life and work, with the years leading up to their marriage a kind of prelude to her major period as a writer. By dividing the book's 29 chapters into four parts, with two "interludes" on either side of part three—which deals with the eight years from the founding of the Provincetown Players to Jig and Susan's departure in 1922 for Greece—Ben-Zvi effectively frames this special period in Glaspell's life. After Jig's death in 1924, Glaspell's writing of his life story in The Road to the Temple seems as much an act of separation as a labor of love.

Like Barbara Ozieblo's Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (2000) and J. Ellen Gainor's Susan Glaspell in Context (2001), Ben-Zvi's biography emphasizes its subject as someone very connected to her time, with a strong sense of community in contrast to her more reclusive contemporary, O'Neill, or even her husband, for all his energetic inspiration of others. Why did Glaspell leave her dramatic career behind in New York to accompany Jig to Greece? Ben-Zvi suggests several possibilities but decides that the main reason was simply that "Susan loved Jig." This blunt observation is forceful only because the biographer has already taken pains to uncover the full complexity of that emotion between these two very different creative spirits. Throughout the book Ben-Zvi permits herself measured speculation on Glaspell's feelings and motives. She also offers a compelling feminist reading of Glaspell's stature in 1931 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House, to the chagrin of several important New York critics who seem to have forgotten that Glaspell was also the creator of several important plays in the previous decade—a result, Ben-Zvi argues, of a "disremembering" of the feminism that marked the years when the Provincetown Players were reinventing American drama and the roles of women in and for the theater.

In some ways the later chapters of the book, if perhaps anticlimactic, are the most fascinating, charting Glaspell's return to American life after Jig's death. Her resumption of fiction writing, her struggle for proper recognition of Jig's legacy to the American theater, her rocky relationship with the much younger Norman Matson, and her battle with alcoholism all offer glimpses of Glaspell as almost a tragic figure. But always the image of Glaspell as the daughter of pioneer Iowans, capable of meeting each new challenge and sturdier than any personal demons, persists in Ben-Zvi's portrait, including her stint in the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during the later 1930s. Ever disappointed by her childlessness, Glaspell was a reliable friend to those less capable of overcoming their self-destructive drives.

Ben-Zvi's Susan Glaspell sets a high standard for any future biographer. More romance than epic, it is the kind of thorough, insightful, and definitive account that this major American author deserves.

Kurt Eisen
Tennessee Technological University

 

In his foreword to the letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Oskar Kokoschka: Letters [New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992] 7-11), the Austrian painter, playwright, and poet born two years before O'Neill, E. H. Gombrich writes:

Those of our contemporaries who like to identify artistic creation with self-expression have rarely been able to avoid the trap of circularity. They fashion the image of the artist out of what they know of his work and interpret the work in terms of their image of the artist's personality. No wonder they are often disappointed when the documents contradict this imaginary equation. It so happens that Oskar Kokoschka belonged to the generation that launched this idea.

O'Neill was part of that generation as well, and how strange that a playwright frequently deemed an expressionist for much of his career and an avowed foe of realism should find almost all of his work judged in terms of the alleged facts of his own life. The facts, however, have been inspired by the playwright's own work.

Ever since the publication and first performance of Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill's reputation as one of the most autobiographical playwrights ever has been set in stone. Soon thereafter, the quest began to create the dramaturgical backstory for all of his plays. Critics and commentators have identified every stray character that appears or is even mentioned in his plays. An interesting pursuit, but recently questions have begun to surface about its validity as the best way to understand the plays. It is clear that O'Neill's life is compelling in its own right. Let us allow the biographies to stand alone and move them to a separate shelf from the plays. While we are at it, let us bar O'Neill biography from the rehearsal room and the stage itself.

When you read Doris Alexander's latest book on O'Neill you will understand why such steps are necessary. The book is a bombshell. The lifetime of research that Professor Alexander has put into it explodes not only myths, but much of what is now taken to be the foundation of O'Neill studies as well. The book's subtitle lets us know immediately what she has set out to do. Alexander concludes her preface:

Because this book compares the facts of the plays with the documentary evidence of the historical record, it offers what is really a first study in biography based on knowledge of what in a work are the facts of the author's life and what are not. From the publication day of Long Day's Journey into Night, books on Eugene O'Neill (up to Stephen Black's Mourning and Tragedy, which perhaps leans on it most heavily) have taken the play as reliable guide for interpreting the meaning of his life. So perhaps this study will alert O'Neill biographers and all biographers of the dangers in confusing the artistry of a work with its raw materials and of taking a revelation of an aspect of human life as literally the life story of its author. (ix)

This is the third of Alexander's books on O'Neill (The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill [1962] and Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle [1992] are the others). It is far more than a third installment; it is a radical revision of O'Neill studies that shines a searchlight on fundamental problems that have interfered with our understanding of O'Neill. Alexander fearlessly argues that we have been held bound by our fascination with his life and failed to grasp fully his artistry. Alexander's tone is so reserved, her demolition work so quiet and swift, that it leaves the reader breathless, a rare occurrence for a scholarly work.

To take but one example, at the opening of chapter eight she reveals that a central article of faith in our understanding of Ella O'Neill/Mary Tyrone probably never existed. There was no wedding gown. There was in fact no father around at all to plan a wedding, let alone to indulge a darling daughter's every whim. Thomas Joseph Quinlan died three years before Ella Quinlan married. (In O'Neill Son and Playwright, when Louis Sheaffer describes Ella Quinlan's wedding dress he uses almost verbatim O'Neill's language describing Mary Tyrone's wedding dress. The Gelbs' Life With Monte Cristo makes no such error). Alexander demonstrates that it was a debutante ball gown of O'Neill's wife Carlotta that inspired the dress in the play (80-81). Indeed, she argues that there is much more of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene O'Neill than Mr. and Mrs. James O'Neill in this family portrait. Alexander reminds us that O'Neill could not possibly have known the things about his parents that he seems to be revealing in Long Day's Journey.

Theater historians familiar with the diary of the Monte Cristo company actress Elizabeth Robins are aware that Mr. and Mrs. O'Neill were quite different than Mr. and Mrs. Tyrone. What is more, Alexander reminds us that James O'Neill always had defenders among his surviving contemporaries. Old troupers spoke out against Long Day's Journey in 1956, but their voices have been overwhelmed. The crushing burden of biography has not only limited academic discussion of the play, it has virtually proscribed the play's performance unless its set conforms to the dimensions of a certain parlor in New London, Connecticut.

Beside Long Day's Journey, Alexander also discusses The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten. She devotes six chapters to Iceman; seven to Long Day's Journey; and one to Moon. While there is much to be learned from her findings about Iceman, it is Alexander's commentary on Long Day's Journey that will raise the most controversy and consternation. Her argument offers a sober assessment of the contrast between what is so and what we think is so, making one aware of an almost Pirandellian cast to the way Long Day's Journey has been perceived by scholars even when the evidence of performance contradicts O'Neill's own text.

The original Broadway production is one of the most revered in American theater history, yet Alexander picks up a telling detail to illustrate a revealing anomaly. She draws our attention to the ascot worn by actor Fredric March, so different from the knotted handkerchief that O'Neill describes Tyrone as wearing. March transformed the unassuming gardener in a threadbare suit who doesn't give a damn how he looks to a bespoke-kitted-out gentleman of leisure. Alexander allows us to see that the original Broadway production is allowed such an idiosyncrasy. (Alexander does not comment on March's most famous stage business, the brogue he assumed during James's descent into alcohol-sodden despair.) Conversely, productions since then have been judged according to a standard of being true to the life of the O'Neills rather than the Tyrones, and the principle that the Tyrones of the original New York company were the embodiment of the O'Neills so it is best to follow their example, a perfect demonstration of Gombrich's trap of circularity.

In her final comments on the play Alexander points out another false lead, the famous inscription to Carlotta. Alexander argues that self-serving machinations by O'Neill's widow set the play on the autobiographical course followed so relentlessly by so many. The critic who was the bellwether for this was none other than Brooks Atkinson, who declared that the play was "as personal and as literal as drama can be" (153). To counter this, as mentioned above, Alexander reports the little-remembered phenomenon of friends and fans of James O'Neill who were upset by his portrayal in the play (153). She offers the reasonable assertion that it was just this sort of reaction that O'Neill sought to avoid with his 25-year interdiction. She also refers to comments by George Jean Nathan, who knew the play before it was published and was a friend of O'Neill's, that O'Neill wished to withhold it (152).

Alexander takes O'Neill's wishes quite as seriously as did Bennett Cerf, who lost Random House a bestseller when he insisted on abiding by the contract he had signed with the playwright. While I for one am glad the play was made available, Alexander's argument is a strong one. To be sure, this controversy is not new; nevertheless, the context she provides for it is. Whether O'Neill knew what he was doing by giving complete control to his wife has been argued before, but Carlotta's manipulative wiles have never seemed so stark as in Alexander's account.

In sum, this concise, yet devastating study is neither a sweeping indictment nor any sort of bill of incrimination, but rather a straightforward suggestion that we fully recognize that O'Neill was an artist and forget that he was ever a son. The record speaks for itself; he cut off almost everyone in his life so that he could write his plays. Who among us would deny that it is the plays that matter now, not the man?

Thomas F. Connolly
Suffolk University