University of Virginia Library

§ 3

O'Neill entered the theater by the side door of the one-act play. Some of the earlier ones were incredibly bad. If he had written nothing better than "Thirst" and "Fog" and the others in that early groping volume, his name would not be known beyond the amateur stages of the Little Theaters. But in association with The Provincetown Players and The Washington Square Players he struck his pace, and the seven resultant sketches of life at sea, published recently under title of "The Moon of the Caribbees," are sufficient to themselves, and at the same time foreshadow the longer, more sustained work that has followed. With Richard Bennett's production of "Beyond the Horizon" in February, 1920, the playwright came professionally of age, and that arrival at majority was doubly confirmed last season with "The Emperor Jones" and "Diff'rent," both of which were first disclosed by The Provincetown Players in Macdougall Street, and later were taken to Broadway for wider audience. "Gold," in the final month of the season, neither added to nor subtracted from his reputation, for the production was too inept to bring out the play's merits or reveal its defects. Like its successors this season, "The Straw" and "Anna Christie," it is fair to consider it here only in its unacted form.

Just as O'Neill the man is largely the result of the life he has lived, so O'Neill the artist is product and expression of the man. The impact of life upon him, which opens his eyes to things as they are, finds creative outlet in the somber and ironic etchings of "The Moon of the Caribbees" series, in the grim and candid severities of "Beyond the Horizon" and "Diff'rent," in the meticulous chronicle of stalking disease of "The Straw," and in the frank moral adjustments of "Anna Christie." It is just like him to see and admit and reveal the pitiable intimacies of common sailors in his one-act sketches, the tragic consequences of misplaced careers in "Beyond the Horizon," the appalling dénouement of sex repression in "Diff'rent," the heartrending realization of love after it is too late in "The Straw," and the futile efforts of a vengeful mariner to outwit the sea, the "Old Davil," in "Anna Christie."

All these plays are the logical outcome of a mind that has known life bitterly face to face, but not long enough to become cowed by it or sentimental over it. Call this cynicism if you like, but there is nothing of the cheap striving for effect which we usually associate with cynicism. Neither is it mere sophomoric impatience with a disillusioning world. O'Neill is too terribly in earnest and too firmly grounded in experience to make either of those mistakes. It is just possible that greater maturity will temper his harshness without relaxing his honesty and conviction. It did that with Ibsen. It did not with Strindberg.

The plays in one act published as "The Moon of the Caribbees" are like the pencil-sketches an artist makes before he sets to work with oil and canvas. And just as the preliminary drawings of Leonardo and Turner and Whistler are preserved not only for their sentimental associations, but even more for their intrinsic worth, these short dramatic studies by O'Neill are bound to retain the respect they commanded on their first appearance. They may even be valued more highly as time goes on. The best of the playwright's early work has been gathered together in this group, and it will serve as base-line for consideration of whatever else he has done or will do.

The heart of this early work is a series of episodes in the life on sea and land of the motley crew of the British tramp steamer Glencairn. Scotch and Irish, Swede and Russian, Yank and Briton, all rub shoulders and match their wit and profanity on deck and in forecastle and in sea-port dive. These are the men the playwright knew in his own years before the mast, and he has drawn them with swift, sure strokes. To meet them on the printed page, though, is to catch only fleeting glimpses of them. O'Neill's instinct for the theater is already unmistakable here, for these men and their women become their vivid selves only when embodied on the stage. And when they are so embodied, the comparative lack of plot or story is forgotten in the realization that these outcasts have known close contact with some profound moment of life.

In "The Moon of the Caribbees" that chastening moment comes to Smitty, the "Duke," when memories of a girl back home, assisted by the stimulus of rum, steel him against the luring temptations of the bumboat negresses and the crooning chant from shore in West Indian harborage. "S'pose there's a gal mixed up in it some place, ain't there?" puts in the donkeyman to the restive Smitty, and the reply comes stiffly: "What makes you think so?" "Always is when a man lets music bother 'im," is the retort. "An' she said she threw you over 'cause you was drunk; an' you said you was drunk 'cause she threw you over. Queer thing, love, ain't it?" Beyond the range of Smitty's testing, the play is just a picture, a vivid, startling canvas like those in the current exhibitions, with bold splashes of color applied carelessly, it would seem at first glance, but really with unerring precision.

Similar impact of the essence of life upon the humdrum course of every day, against the same vivid pictorial backgrounds, characterizes the other three plays of the Glencairn series: the incomprehensibility of death when it strikes one of the crew in "Bound East for Cardiff," the fatal recurrence

Eugene O'Neill

[Description: Drawing of Eugene O'Neill ]

of accident which keeps a homesick sailor tied to the sea in "The Long Voyage Home," and the mutual humiliation which abashes both victim and tormentors when, as conclusion to the panicky solemnities of "In the Zone," a parcel of Smitty's is found to be a bunch of old love-letters instead of the suspected bomb. Of the remaining plays preserved in this volume from their experimental production, one of them, "Where the Cross is Made," is interesting chiefly as the germ from which the longer play "Gold" was made. "The Rope" is a study in the sour and sardonic consequences of greed, while "Ile" penetrates to the frozen North to relate the coming of madness to the wife of a whaling captain, crazed by the loneliness of the polar sea.

"Beyond the Horizon" was O'Neill's first full-length play, and the first of any length to reach the professional stage. It bears the marks of immaturity and early composition. It is too long by a fourth or a fifth, and has to be compressed that much in performance. It is broken up into too many scenes—two for each of its three acts—for the most effective interpretation by our clumsy contemporary stage machinery. It is needlessly disregardful of the practical limitations of the theater, too, in demanding realistic outdoor settings that the designer cannot make illusive, and its psychology is marred by the presence of a youngster of two who speaks the language of four at the least. But, despite these flaws, it is sound and convincing drama, a play that cuts clean home to the primal facts of life and stirs the tragic emotions like no American contribution to the theater since "The Easiest Way." The award to its author of the Pulitzer prize for 1920 was frank and prompt recognition of its superior merits.

I know of few plays in the modern theater which plunge so inexorably downward in tragic disintegration of human hopes as "Beyond the Horizon." There is no compromise here with life or with the traditions of the stage. There is something almost Greek in the austerity of the tragedy, for, despite the homely and starkly honest realism of scenes and characters and speech, the catastrophe is classic in that it proceeds not so much from conscious or avoidable mistakes as from the grim fatality of a choice whose innate consequences its victims were unprepared to foresee.

O'Neill's accomplishment, it seems to me, consists not only in following this catastrophe with stern veracity to its inevitable conclusion, but also in conveying by subtle and unobtrusive touches the impression of unremitting dissolution, of the appalling gloom of the years that intervene between the mile-posts of these crucial episodes he has selected to bear the burden of his narrative.