Eugene O’Neill: A Critical Study

Eugene O'Neill was shy and private. He had few close friends, especially as he grew older and more reclusive. Sophus Winther and his wife, Eline, were among this small group. Winther was born in Denmark in 1893, making him five years younger than O'Neill. His family emigrated to Nebraska when he was two, and the three novels he wrote in the late 1930s are set there. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Oregon in 1918 and 1919, respectively. In 1927, he completed his doctorate at the University of Washington, on whose faculty he would serve for the entirety of his career.As an assistant professor in the early 1930s, Winther wrote a manuscript on O'Neill's plays. He sent his work to the playwright, hoping for a review as he sought a publisher. Responding to Winther on July 7, 1933, O'Neill called the book "a splendid job": "What particularly strikes me is that you have so illuminatingly revealed the relationship of the plays to the mental and spiritual background of their time, and shown that background as inseparable from the work—something no one else has so far troubled to do except sketchily, yet which is so essential to any true comprehension of what I have attempted to accomplish" (Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer 1988, 416). The playwright closed his handsome letter by thanking the aspiring critic.O'Neill took Winther's manuscript to New York three weeks later and encouraged his publisher, Random House, to accept it. Their acquiescence presumably influenced Winther's prompt promotion to associate professor. The playwright provided Winther with material on Days Without End, which had opened to dismal reviews on January 8, 1934, so the book could be as current as possible.Through the correspondence that followed, Winther and Eline became friends with O'Neill and Carlotta. The Winthers visited the O'Neills in Sea Island, Georgia, in the summer of 1936 and were instrumental in convincing them to leave that hot, isolated Georgia locale. Sick and in need of rest, the O'Neills traveled to Seattle in October, renting a house overlooking Puget Sound, which the Winthers helped them find. On the morning of November 12, the Associated Press confirmed that O'Neill had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to reach O'Neill directly, the AP reporters contacted Winther, who brought the news to the O'Neills and joined them in their living room for the press meeting that afternoon.The friendship endured. O'Neill wrote a letter supporting Winther's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942—a kindness mentioned in an exchange of Christmas greetings between the two families. When Winther and Eline visited the O'Neills in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1949, O'Neill lent Winther unpublished manuscripts of A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten, a sign of deep trust and high regard. Russell and Russell reissued Winther's study in 1961, after O'Neil's death and the revival of interest in his work. This second edition, which includes a new chapter on the Tao House plays, is the one I discuss here.O'Neill and Winther's friendship may have rested on a shared worldview similar to the one that Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, attributes to the Greeks before Socrates and Euripides. The author of an unsigned note about Winther suggests, "The sympathy between the two writers seemed to reflect similar efforts to portray human struggle against unfriendly and amoral social and natural worlds" ("Sophus Keith Winther," nebraskaauthors.org). Winther clearly endorses this worldview and its attribution to O'Neill. Responding to a critic who dismisses O'Neill's characters as "people of rather primitive instincts" gripped by "soul-destroying powers which they cannot understand," Winther evokes the nobility in O'Neill's pessimism: "It is the very fact that they are tortured by 'soul-destroying powers which they cannot understand' that makes them the embodiment of man's tragic struggle against an unfriendly universe, that gives them universality, that arouses tragic pity, and makes us understand more clearly than we ever understood before just what it means to be human" (11).O'Neill had expressed the same idea in an August 1923 letter to one of the nurses who had attended him when he was recovering from tuberculosis at Gaylord Farm Sanitarium a decade earlier: "I'm far from being a pessimist. I see life as a gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent, splendidly-suffering bit of chaos the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous significance, while without his losing fight with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal" (Selected Letters, 181).Winther examines O'Neill's vision of tragedy from various perspectives: religion and social conventions, ethics, free will and its limits, sociology, conceptions of tragedy and comedy, and stagecraft. His O'Neill is a nineteenth-century European Romantic working in the American tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, a twentieth-century Transcendentalist exploring the tension between romantic ideals of flourishing individuality and the demands of capitalism and modernity: "the intellectual frame of reference out of which O'Neill created his dramas," Winther argues, "was the poetry and philosophy of the Nineteenth Century" (vii). For Winther, the romantic strain runs through all of O'Neill's plays and culminates in his work at Tao House, which Winther addresses in the added chapter that concludes the second edition, "O'Neill and Modern Tragedy." This chapter provides the best entrée to Winther's argument, due to its joint consideration of romanticism and Aristotelian theory. I note, however, that Winther's emphasis on romanticism initially yields a skewed and inadequate vision of O'Neillian tragedy.Winther begins this chapter by arguing that O'Neill's tragedies have the same "subject matter and theme" as Aristotle's model but differ in "form." For Winther, Aristotle's vision of tragedy has three elements: character, hamartia, and katharsis. He sees character as concerning a person's attitudes, powers of judgment, and will, and hamartia as a flaw in character that leads people to be tragically overwhelmed by the forces that challenge them. The tragic outcome leads the individual—and the audience—to katharsis, a renewed appreciation of the immutable, inviolable, and sacred moral order of the universe. Winther holds that modern tragedy, beginning with Ibsen and Strindberg, rejects the divine ordering of the universe that gives Aristotelian tragedy its "form." Nonetheless, it retains the "subject matter," the plots of people overwhelmed by immutable forces. He says of the typical O'Neillian tragic character: "He is brought to disaster by forces that are stronger than he is. . . . The men and women of O'Neill's world are victims of a cosmic trap, cold and impersonal as steel" (298). Winther cites Mary's line to Edmund in Long Day's Journey Into Night in attributing this view to O'Neill: "It's wrong to blame your brother. He can't help being what the past has made him. Any more than your father can. Or you. Or I." For Winther, the appeal of Long Day's Journey "lies not in 'order re-established,'" which is the perspective of ancient Greek drama, "but in the realization of man's powerlessness to deal with life in any way that would indicate a universal good. He stumbles in the fog, that in this play is the dominant atmosphere, seeking for a pathway that is not there" (298–99).Winther then compares The Iceman Cometh to Gorky's The Lower Depths, which he sees as "a tragedy of the failure of the social order." A protest piece, Gorky's play calls for changes in society that could have saved his characters. Winther argues that is not the case with Iceman, in which each character "has failed in his own peculiar way to make a normal adjustment to the world" (301). Each is a personal variation on the "Tomorrow Movement," the hopeless hope that the future somehow will redeem a destructive past. These characters are forced into suffering and despair not through a reparable flaw in social institutions in which they found themselves enmeshed but through an ennobling personal romanticism: "because they wanted from life more than it in reality could give them" (305). Each copes with memories of a painfully destructive past, using "pipe dreams" of a happier future that lingers unattainably but always temptingly and tenderly just a few moments ahead—as O'Neill would put it, just "beyond the horizon." What links these characters to tragic figures of the ancient Greeks is not their form, their place in the order of the universe, but their inner longing as a "tortured spirit that finds itself betrayed by arbitrary and capricious forces over which it has no control" (304). Even Larry Slade, who sees the fantasy inherent in these hoped-for tomorrows, ultimately is "shattered by his intellectual realization of the complete futility of life," a theme that provides "consistency to all of O'Neill's work from Bound East for Cardiff to A Touch of the Poet" (303, 306). The fact that Iceman distills this theme so starkly "may in time rank it as O'Neill's greatest tragedy" (306).O'Neill's drama for Winther is not sociopolitical like Gorky's but existential: "Kafka's Castle is visible on the hill, but there is no road through the thicket that surrounds its base. This is the meaning of tragedy" (308). In the end, the human condition drives us to become like Con Melody, who murders his beloved thoroughbred in A Touch of the Poet. Exhausted by our struggle to achieve an unattainable ideal, we let go of what had given our life meaning and direction, and we collapse into despair and cynicism, overwhelmed by the realization that the futility of our pursuit has made us absurd. Yet a character's insight into this absurdity is for Winther's O'Neill a sign both of a character's and of humanity's highest nobility, which is a thematic thread running through O'Neill's full oeuvre. His final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, observes Winther, is an "elegy," O'Neill's "final word to the brother he had loved just this side of idolatry": "The dramatist forces himself to see all the faults of the one he immortalizes, and then beneath a thousand failures, recognizes the great worth of the man betrayed and driven to disaster by the Fates, relentless in their determination that he be destroyed" (311).For Winther, understanding O'Neill's romanticism is the key to understanding his drama. He romanticizes O'Neill as ennobled by his courageous acceptance of life's capricious absurdity, much as he sees O'Neill as a dramatist who depicts romantics ennobled by their slide into despair and cynicism as they engage with a dream-thwarting reality. "Nothing is more characteristic of O'Neill," Winther writes in a chapter entitled "The Destructive Power of the Romantic Ideal," "than the conflict between his criticism of the romantic ideal and the manner in which he succumbs, at times, to its seductive appeal" (4). Winther sees "conflict" as common among many of O'Neill's characters: they are dreamers confronting a reality in which their dreams cannot be realized.For Winther, O'Neill himself is such a dreamer. His romanticism "is the very essence of his nature. He is the romantic dreamer who knows the deadly power of the dream's appeal" (42), "the rebel against the romantic ideal who is himself an idealist at heart" (12). O'Neill's works often depict confrontations between a romantic poet-like figure and a more pragmatic businessman. Consider, among others, the Poet and the Businessman on the raft in Fog, Robert and Andrew Mayo in Beyond the Horizon, and Dion Anthony and William Brown in The Great God Brown. Clearly, O'Neill favors the poet figure in all of these instances, but he also realizes that this figure's idealism and rejection of the material pressures of the surrounding world will lead to his destruction.Winther explains O'Neill's position in chapters 2, 3, and 4 on religion and social convention: O'Neill is a Nietzschean who sees these values and mores as subordinating the individual to a social order. The rebellion that Winther attributes to O'Neill is the playwright's rejection of this practice. Winther suggests that Lazarus in Lazarus Laughed descends from these poet-rebel figures and is O'Neill's version of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, a teacher guiding us to a new way of being who rejects suppression and encourages the enrichment and expression of our humanity, a new "pagan way of life," to reference the title of Winther's fourth chapter.It is easy to understand why we succumb to the "seductive appeal" of this romanticism, as Winther says O'Neill did. O'Neill's characters manifest the noble heroism of perseverance, like Don Quixote or Camus's Sisyphus. They are acting on Beckett's dictum in Worstward Ho: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." But there is a problem: if the romanticizing is all there is to O'Neill's vision of the human condition, his vision is puerile and ultimately harmful.I first encountered O'Neill in late adolescence and found him both fascinating and toxic. There was indeed something ennobling and heroic about his characters, but their nobility arose from their failure. Their tragedy is what gave them dignity. Taking this into my own life, I felt that if I were working hard and succeeding, it could be only because my goals were shabby and unworthy. Nobility required futility. That's the toxicity of this romanticized O'Neill. It leaves no place for effective aspiration because it reduces aspiration to tragic delusion. Either people embrace society's values and institutions, as Andrew Mayo and William Brown do, and are led to lives that are banal, hypocritical, and ultimately unfulfilling, or they reject social conventions and follow personal ideals, as Robert Mayo and Dion Anthony do, and confront the social forces that destroy them. Life is a trap from which there is no escape. A flourishing life is impossible. Ultimately, we must confront the fact that our activities are destined for failure and our lives have been absurd.As literature teachers, we need to take care not to bring this toxicity to our students through our enthusiasm for O'Neill. It is easy to leave students enthralled by visions and ideals that ultimately do more harm than good. There must be more to O'Neill's vision of the human condition than this. This "more" is found in Winther's sixth chapter, "Determinism, Fatalism, and Free Will." For the Greeks, Winther reminds us here, the universe was inherently organized in beautiful order. This is the world depicted on Achilles's shield in book 18 of The Iliad: everything in the universe, physical and social, is displayed in an orderly relationship to everything else. The justice inherent in the universe expresses and maintains this order. People suffer tragedy when they violate it. The Furies then hunt down the transgressors, inflicting pain both as a means of indicating the violation and as retribution that will bring the universe back into a just, beautiful, and natural equilibrium. Suffering has meaning in this world; it is not merely a byproduct of the chaos of the universe and the inherent absurdity of human life.Winther argues that the Greeks viewed individual lives in this universe as governed by what he calls "fatalism": the forces guiding a person's life were outside his or her control; they were cosmic and teleological. Life was aimed toward an unalterable, predetermined end. For example, there was nothing Oedipus or his parents could do to avoid his killing his father and marrying his mother. This simply was part of the order of the universe.The audience for whom O'Neill was writing no longer believed either in this beautifully ordered universe or in strict predestination. O'Neill adapted this Greek vision to make it resonate with modernity. People were still overwhelmed by forces they could not control, but these now were temporal physical, social, economic, and psychological forces of people's daily lives. Lives were not teleologically predetermined. People had free will, but their will was exercised only within a chaotic matrix of conflicting worldly forces that influenced and often forced their decisions. This is not Greek fatalism but what Winther calls "determinism," the idea being that our decisions are determined by the situations in which we are required to act. Lives are governed by something like the determinism of Darwinian natural selection. The individual has a particular set of traits and must act within an environment that offers a particular set of opportunities. Individual thriving declares a match between one's traits and their environmental opportunities. Unlucky individuals have no such match and so suffer. This Darwinian understanding of determinism prompts Winther to call O'Neill's view of the human situation modern, naturalistic, and scientific. He sees O'Neill sharing this perspective with Maugham, Galsworthy, Dreiser, France, and Twain.This worldly determinism is "the modern substitute for the Greek sense of fate," and the change in worldview has consequences for our understanding of ethics (177). If there is no universal order, there can be no moral rules that apply universally: always do this; never do that. Each situation must be examined in its unique complexity of competing forces and values. We cannot judge people by some set of supposed universal standards—the abusiveness of the Puritanism that both Nietzsche and O'Neill criticize. We must appreciate people's struggles to understand and navigate the particular situations they face and the way complexity often will overwhelm them. They will not be able to honor all the values they hold or to meet the challenges of all the forces confronting them.O'Neill in this paradigm is not celebrating failure as a protest against the social order, a kind of romantic self-immolation; rather, he is celebrating the nobility of people's willingness to confront the complexity of life, however overwhelming it may be. He is encouraging realism, a willingness not to hide in comforting, oversimplified narratives that are actually irrelevant and abusive. This is where O'Neill's critique of the false consciousness of social convention is like Nietzsche's. The ethical focus is on forgiveness and the nobility of the individual's struggle. It celebrates this more realistic conception of the complex human condition and rejects the abusive condescension of conventional morality.This view of determinism also gives us a new vision of tragedy, adapted from the Greeks. There are indeed immutable forces that overwhelm human lives, as there were for the Greeks, but these forces are not teleological or indicative of a preordained order; they are a consequence of particular factors in human psychology and the social and economic environment. O'Neill celebrates the nobility of people's willingness to recognize this complexity and their attempt to navigate it. He is not endorsing the nobility of failure but the nobility of openness to the complexity of life's fullness and the willingness to engage with it. There is romanticism here, but it is not the limited, puerile romanticism that Winther seems at first to be attributing to O'Neill. Puerile romanticism kills aspiration by encouraging people to reject their society and its institutions as a possible source of opportunity for fulfilling lives. Certainly, there are social conventions and attitudes that merit criticism, and O'Neill and Nietzsche are astute critics, but that criticism does not mean that there are only two options in life: degrading, ignorant banality, or ennobling, enlightened misery.How did this puerile romanticism arise in interpreting O'Neill? The answer is found in another "Used Book" I have been thinking about recently: Joel Pfister's Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (see Eugene O'Neill Review 43, no. 2, 2022: 183–92). Pfister argues that O'Neill was writing in and helped define the social milieu of the large-scale corporate capitalism that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This economic system generated a new class of white-collar bureaucrats whose work failed to accommodate their aspirations and actualize their values. Winther captures the way O'Neill's romanticism responds to the alienation introduced by modern capitalism, which is why O'Neill could praise Winther's manuscript as having "so illuminatingly revealed the relationship of the plays to the mental and spiritual background of their time."But romanticism is merely the veneer of O'Neill's plays. Their heart, as Winther shows in chapter 6, is O'Neill's replacement of the fatalistic teleology of Greek tragedy with a tangle of conflicting social forces, attitudes, and ideals that overdetermine people's decisions, often tragically. Modern tragedy does not endorse moral orderliness, as Greek tragedy did, but rather dramatizes the overwhelming of humankind by the passions and social forces that drive our lives. O'Neill asks us to acknowledge chaos, not hide from it in moral platitudes. Winther is right, as cited above, when he says this of O'Neill's characterization of his brother in A Moon for the Misbegotten: "The dramatist forces himself to see all the faults of the one he immortalizes, and then beneath a thousand failures, recognizes the great worth of the man betrayed and driven to disaster by the Fates, relentless in their determination that he be destroyed" (311). Jim Tyrone's destruction, as Winther shows, is Darwinian, not Greek. Jim had certain personal traits and found himself in certain situations that compromised him. He was destroyed by circumstance, and O'Neill wants us to empathize with and understand him. But that does not mean O'Neill wants us to believe that all human endeavor is inexorably futile and absurd; that is puerile romanticism. Some of us are lucky; circumstances offer us ways to thrive if we are observant and diligent. O'Neill's point is not that a life lived with integrity must inevitably be tragic, but that tragedy at times can be noble, and good fortune in itself does not bestow a right to smug self-congratulations or condescension. Although we have abandoned the Greek sense of fatalism, as Winther suggests, we nonetheless must admit the truth of Mary Tyrone's lament: "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever." For O'Neill, as for the Greeks, although the vision of the source of our suffering is changed, the purpose of dramatic tragedy remains the same: to lead us to compassion.