The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh

Eugene O’Neill

With a Foreword by

Harold Bloom

YALE NOTA BENE

Yale University Press  New Haven and London

I

It is an inevitable oddity that the principal American dramatist to date should have no American precursors. Eugene O’Neill’s art as a playwright owes most to Strindberg’s, and something crucial, though rather less, to Ibsen’s. Intellectually, O’Neill’s ancestry also has little to do with American tradition, with Emerson or William James or any other of our cultural speculators. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud formed O’Neill’s sense of what little was possible for any of us. Even where American literary tradition was strongest, in the novel and poetry, it did not much affect O’Neill. His novelists were Zola and Conrad; his poets were Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne. Overwhelmingly an Irish American, with his Jansenist Catholicism transformed into anger at God, he had little active interest in the greatest American writer, Whitman, though his spiritual darkness has a curious, antithetical relation to Whitman’s overt analysis of our national character.

Yet O’Neill, despite his many limitations, is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most: Williams, Miller, Wilder, Albee, Kushner, perhaps Mamet and Shepard. A national quality that is literary, yet has no clear relation to our domestic literary traditions, is nearly always present in O’Neill’s strongest works. We can recognize Hawthorne in Henry James, and Whitman (however repressed) in T. S. Eliot, while the relation of Hemingway and Faulkner to Mark Twain is just as evident as their debt to Conrad. Besides the question of his genre (since there was no vital American drama before O’Neill), there would seem to be some hidden factor that governed O’Neill’s ambiguous relation to our literary past. It was certainly not the lack of critical discernment on O’Neill’s part. His admiration for Hart Crane’s poetry, at its most difficult, was solely responsible for the publication of Crane’s first volume,
White Buildings
, for which O’Neill initially offered to write the introduction, withdrawing in favor of Allen Tate when the impossibility of his writing a critical essay on Crane’s complexities became clear to O’Neill. But to have recognized Hart Crane’s genius, so early and so helpfully, testifies to O’Neill’s profound insights into the American literary imagination at its strongest.

The dramatist whose masterpieces are
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, and, in a class just short of those,
A Moon for the Misbegotten
and
A Touch of the Poet
, is not exactly to be regarded as a celebrator of the possibilities of American life. The central strain in our literature remains Emersonian, from Whitman to our contemporaries like Saul Bellow and John Ashbery; even the tradition that reacted against Emerson—from Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville through Gnostics of the abyss like Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon—remains always alert to transcendental and extraordinary American possibilities. Robert Penn Warren must be the most overtly anti-Emersonian partisan in our history, yet even Warren seeks an American Sublime in his still-ongoing poetry. O’Neill would appear to be the most non-Emersonian author of any eminence in our literature. Irish-American through and through, with an heroic resentment of the New England Yankee tradition, O’Neill from the start seemed to know that his spiritual quest was to undermine Emerson’s American religion of self-reliance.

O’Neill’s own Irish Jansenism is curiously akin to the New England Puritanism he opposed, but that only increased the rancor of his powerful polemic in
Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra
, and
More Stately Mansions
. The Will to Live is set against New England Puritanism in what O’Neill himself once called “the battle of moral forces in the New England scene” to which he said he felt closest as an artist. But since this is Schopenhauer’s rapacious Will to Live, and not Bernard Shaw’s genial revision of that Will into the Life Force of a benign Creative Evolution, O’Neill is in the terrible position of opposing one death-drive with another. Only the inescapable Strindberg comes to mind as a visionary quite as negative as O’Neill, so that
The Iceman Cometh
might as well have been called
The Dance of Death
, and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
could be retitled
The Ghost Sonata
. O’Neill’s most powerful self-representations—as Edmund in
Long Day’s Journey
and Larry Slade in
Iceman
—are astonishingly negative identifications, particularly in an American context.

Edmund and Slade do not long for death in the mode of Whitman and his descendants—Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Theodore Roethke—all of whom tend to incorporate the image of a desired death into the great, triple trope of night, the mother, and the sea. Edmund Tyrone and Larry Slade long to die because life without transcendence is impossible, and yet transcendence is totally unavailable. O’Neill’s true polemic against his country and its spiritual tradition is not, as he insisted, that “its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.” Though uttered in 1946, in remarks before the first performance of
The Iceman Cometh
, such a reflection is banal and represents a weak misreading of
The Iceman Cometh
. The play’s true argument is that your own soul cannot be possessed, whether by possessing something or someone outside it, or by joining yourself to a transcendental possibility, to whatever version of an Emersonian Oversoul that you might prefer. The United States, in O’Neill’s dark view, was uniquely the country that had refused to learn the truths of the spirit, which is that good and the means of good, love and the means of love, are irreconcilable.

Such a formulation is Shelleyan, and reminds one of O’Neill’s High Romantic inheritance, which reached him through pre-Raphaelite poetry and literary speculation. O’Neill seems a strange instance of the Aestheticism of Rossetti and Pater, but his metaphysical nihilism, desperate faith in art, and phantasmagoric naturalism stem directly from them. When Jamie Tyrone quotes from Rossetti’s “Willowwood” sonnets, he gives the epigraph not only to
Long Day’s Journey
but to all of O’Neill: “Look into my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.” In O’Neill’s deepest polemic, the lines are quoted by, and for, all Americans of imagination whatsoever.

II

Like its great precursor play, Strindberg’s
The Dance of Death
, O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
must be one of the most remorseless of what purport to be tragic dramas since the Greeks and the Jacobeans. Whatever tragedy meant to the incredibly harsh Strindberg, to O’Neill it had to possess a “transfiguring nobility,” presumably that of the artist like O’Neill himself in his relation to his time and his country, of which he observed that: “we are tragedy, the most appalling yet written or unwritten.” O’Neill’s strength was never conceptual, and so we are not likely to render his stances into a single coherent view of tragedy.

Whiteman could say that “these States are themselves the greatest poem,” and we know what he meant, but I do not know how to read O’Neill’s “we are tragedy.” When I suffer through the
New York Times
every morning, am I reading tragedy? Does
The Iceman Cometh
manifest a “transfiguring nobility?” How could it? Are Larry Slade in
Iceman
or Edmund Tyrone in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, both clearly O’Neill’s surrogates, either of them tragic in relation to their time and country? Or to ask all this in a single question: are the crippling sorrows of what Freud called “family romances” tragic or are they not primarily instances of strong pathos, reductive process that cannot, by definition, manifest an authentic “transfiguring nobility?”

I think that we need to ignore O’Neill on tragedy if we are to learn to watch and read
The Iceman Cometh
for the dramatic values it certainly possesses. Its principal limitation, I suspect, stems from its tendentious assumption that “we are tragedy,” that “these States” have become the “most appalling” of tragedies. Had O’Neill survived into our present age and observed our Yuppies on the march, doubtless he would have been even more appalled. But societies are not dramas, and O’Neill was not Jeremiah the prophet. His strength was neither in stance nor style, but in the dramatic representation of illusions and despairs, in the persuasive imitation of human personality, particularly in its self-destructive weaknesses.

Critics have rightly emphasized how important O’Neill’s lapsed Irish Catholicism was to him and to his plays. But “importance” is a perplexing notion in this context. Certainly the absence of the Roman Catholic faith is the given condition of
The Iceman Cometh
. Yet we would do O’Neill’s play wrong if we retitled it
Waiting for the Iceman
, and tried to assimilate it to the Gnostic cosmos of Samuel Beckett, just as we would destroy
Long Day’s Journey into Night
if we retitled it
Endgame in New London
. All that O’Neill and Beckett have in common is Schopenhauer, with whom they share a Gnostic sense that our world is a great emptiness, the
kenoma
, as the Gnostics of the second century of the Common Era called it. But Beckett’s post-Protestant cosmos could not be redeemed by the descent of the alien god. O’Neill’s post-Catholic world longs for the suffering Christ, and is angry at him for not returning. Such a longing is by no means in itself dramatic, unlike Beckett’s ironically emptied-out cosmos.