The 40s: The Story of a Decade (90 page)

WOLCOTT GIBBS

OCTOBER 19, 1946 (ON
THE ICEMAN COMETH
BY EUGENE O’NEILL)

T
he circumstances attending the appearance last week of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
were certainly enough to intimidate the most frivolous critic. There was the illustrious author—except for Shaw, perhaps the only living Olympian—returning from years of mysterious silence with a play that was vaguely reported to be just a part of a far vaster project; there was the knowledge that this work, though possibly only a fragment, was still of such dimensions that
the acting of it could not be accomplished in anything less than four and a half hours; there was the impression, somehow confirmed by the cryptic title and by the fact that the reviewers were furnished with the text in advance, that the visible play offered but a very small percentage of its author’s total meaning and would therefore require a concentration on everybody’s part at least adequate for deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone. Under these conditions, it was a little disconcerting to find that
The Iceman Cometh
, while an interesting play, was by no means comparable to its author’s best efforts in the past, either in style or substance, and furthermore that, except for some possible ambiguity at the end, it was no harder to understand than any work that attempts to convey large general ideas in terms of specific and circumscribed action. Mr. O’Neill’s idea in this case is no more original or abstruse than the discovery, not unknown to melancholy sophomores, that life is insupportable without illusions; his treatment of it, however, is so monumental, so clearly designed to merit words like “Greek” and “symphonic,” that it is no wonder that elaborate interpretations are already being provided by the metaphysicians in the parish. For the moment, we will stick to the facts.

The curtain at the Martin Beck goes up on the bar of a Raines Law hotel in the summer of 1912. It is six o’clock in the morning and a dozen or so of the inmates are sprawled asleep over the tables. They are thus disposed, rather than being upstairs in their beds, because they are waiting for the arrival of Hickey, a sporty travelling salesman who turns up once a year on the proprietor’s birthday to buy them drinks and to relieve the tedium of their lives with the horsy humors of the road. It is a scene of appalling squalor, though Robert Edmond Jones has made it tremendously effective theatrically, and it is not improved as, one by one, the lost men wake up and we are allowed to inspect them in more detail. Inevitably, since Mr. O’Neill is dealing with the fate of all mankind, the personnel is extensive, ranging from cheap whores and mad Nihilists to scarecrow remittance men and Harvard graduates sunk without a trace. All they have in common, except for chronic alcoholism and filth, are their sorry lies about the past and their boozy dreams of an impossible tomorrow, but these still are enough to distinguish them as living men, capable of at least some dim parody of the emotions of human beings, even including a kind of desperate gaiety.

Hickey turns up at last, but it is soon obvious that he is not the companion they have known in the past. It is bad enough for them to discover
that he is on the wagon but far worse to learn that he is preaching a curious salvation. Peace can come to them, he says, as it has come to him, only when they have abandoned all their empty dreams. Before these illusions can be given up, however, it is necessary to put them to the test, and, one by one—sober, terrified, and dressed with pathetic care—the bums leave the shelter of the bar to make their doomed attempts to take up life again. When they come back, they are finally without hope, but peace has escaped them, too. Faced with the tragic truth about themselves, some wearily accept the idea of death, some are roused to a savage hatred of their companions, all begin to lose their last resemblance to men. In their extremity, however, they learn that Hickey has murdered his wife, whose illusions about his behavior had given him an intolerable sense of guilt, and that the peace he offered them was only a spiritual counterpart of the physical death he had already accepted for himself. At the last moment, stricken with remorse at the terrible effect of his compassionately meant interference with their lives, he allows them to think that he has been insane, and with enormous relief they go back to their bottles and their hollow, happy dreams.

This, of course, is only a bare summary of Mr. O’Neill’s theme. There is also an almost intolerable mass of supporting detail, for each derelict in the bar is relentlessly determined to give his own personal history, often as many as three or four times. Obviously, there isn’t room for all of these here, but a few may help to indicate the play’s impressive range and, incidentally, since this review is necessarily a work of drastic compression, give a partial listing of the cast that supports James Barton in the tremendous central role. Harry Hope (Dudley Digges), the owner of the bar, has never stepped out of it for twenty years. It is his pipe dream, his special evasion of the fact of lost will, to imagine that he has sequestered himself because of his grief over his wife’s death and that any day now he will go out and resume his old career as a wardheeling politician. Piet Wetjoen (Frank Tweddell) and Cecil Lewis (Nicholas Joy) fought on opposite sides in the Boer War, and it is their delusion that presently they will go back across the sea to an honorable old age. Willie Oban (E. G. Marshall), a law-school graduate, is the son of a convicted bucket-shop operator. The most hopeless alcoholic of them all, he dreams of straightening up and getting a brilliant job in the district attorney’s office. Rocky Pioggi (Tom Pedi) is Harry’s night bartender, and his illusion is of a peculiar and negative character. He is under the impression
that although two agreeable girls turn over their earnings to him, he is not a pimp, for the excellent reason that he holds a regular job and prostitution is only a casual sideline in his life. Unlike the rest, Larry Slade (Carl Benton Reid), a disenchanted radical, appears to be without any hope whatever. He is, he says, through with the Cause and only waiting around to die. In spite of the fact that he is able to identify the real nature of Hickey’s peace and to fight it for the others, he is finally obliged to accept it for himself, since, if I am not mistaken, he is the symbol of tragic omniscience (or the author) on the stage. Of them all, only Dan Parritt (Paul Crabtree), who has betrayed his Anarchist mother to the police out of motives very similar to those that led Hickey to shoot his wife, dies in the end. All through the play, he and the metaphysical drummer have had a curious sense of identity with each other, and when the truth about Hickey is revealed and he is taken off to the electric chair, the other man finds his parallel solution in suicide.

There are many more in the cast, but these characters—all superlatively acted, by the way—should be enough to establish Mr. O’Neill firmly in the company of William Saroyan as a wonderfully prolific inventor of damned and fascinating people. His other qualifications for the position of America’s leading playwright, however, I’m afraid remain just about what they were before. The construction, the ponderous building up, over three acts, of a situation that is to be resolved by a much too abrupt theatrical trick at the end of the fourth, is at least questionable, especially when the trick is so executed that it can be interpreted in two ways by the audience. If, that is, my own impression is right and Hickey’s insanity is feigned for the purpose of giving his companions back their drunken hopes, he is simply a misguided philanthropist who has sincerely believed right up to the last that peace can be found only in the final, absolute acceptance of defeat. If, on the other hand, he is really insane, he is only a figure of crazy malevolence and the point of the play is hard to imagine. This alternate explanation, while it can hardly be justified on reflection, is nevertheless one that seems to have been subscribed to by a great many reasonably attentive people, including at least one critic, after the opening night, so it is hard to credit Mr. O’Neill with wholly satisfactory craftsmanship from a sheerly theatrical point of view. He has erred even further, I think, in a certain obscurity of intention that seems to mark several members of the cast. The demented Nihilist, for instance, undoubtedly keys in with Hickey’s own spiritual Nihilism,
but the analogy is never clearly developed and all that appears on the stage is a sort of irrelevant, comic-supplement bomb-thrower. The same thing applies to a lot of the others—they are obviously meant to be essential pieces of the total design, but their exact relation to it is not sufficiently defined and they become merely atmospheric “characters,” present for a scenic effect rather than for comprehensible artistic purposes. I’m sure, of course, that Mr. O’Neill could readily explain how each actor is vital to the pattern and the forward movement of his play, but it is certainly by no means apparent in the theatre, where, unfortunately, the playwright’s secret mind is not on view.

In regard, finally, to the style in which
The Iceman
has been written, I can only say that there is little evidence of the lofty eloquence that distinguished
Mourning Becomes Electra
or even, indeed, some of Mr. O’Neill’s lesser works. As several critics have pointed out, the locale of the play and the prototypes of the bums who appear in it have been taken from the author’s own remote past. The assumption, however, that he has exactly recaptured the sound of their speech may be open to question, and it is my opinion that, while Mr. O’Neill is a superb reporter of behavior and even of processes of thought, the language he uses to convey them is actually non-realistic, being of the conventional dese-dem-dose school of dialect, which a certain kind of abstracted literary intelligence, from Richard Harding Davis to Thomas Wolfe, has somewhat arbitrarily decided is the language of the lower depths. It is odd but nevertheless a fact that a writer can often understand perfectly what is being said around him without really hearing the accent of the voice or the structure of the sentence, and I’m afraid that this is particularly true of Mr. O’Neill.

Inaccurate as his bums may be, however, I’m not sure that they are as painful as some of his more articulate types. Slade, the radical, who serves more or less as his author’s spokesman, is naturally given some rather towering sentiments to express and perhaps he may be forgiven a certain grandiloquence, but there can be no such excuse in the case of the burlesque old-school-tie locutions employed by the British captain, the elaborate, pedantic witticisms of the fallen Harvard man; or the laborious Babbittries and really stupefying repetitions of Hickey himself. On the whole, in fact, I suspect that Hickey is the worst of all, and there were times during the now famous sixteen-minute speech when I felt a deep sympathy with the old saloonkeeper and his guests, who could only
murmur hopelessly, “For God’s sake, Hickey, give us a rest! All we want to do is pass out in peace.”