A Will to be Great

O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT by Louis Sheaffer. 543 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

Eugene O'Neill will probably be remembered as one of the most flawed major playwrights in history. Aiming for greatness, he often achieved only length. When he tries to make his characters Greek-tragic, they appear just plain accident-prone. The notoriously awkward prose of The Iceman Cometh inspired Mary McCarthy to remark: "You cannot write a Platonic dialogue in the style of Casey at the Bat."

Yet something in O'Neill refuses to be belittled. It is as if his greatness lies in his will to be great. His passionate intentions, in fact, become his talent--a rude, almost barbaric thrust that can seize a blase Broadway crowd and wring it dry, half from fatigue, half from an emotional buffeting that no other American playwright ever inflicted on an audience. O'Neill could do what only a major artist can do: make his public share in the life of his private demons.

And who were O'Neill's tormentors? His family, says Louis Sheaffer in the first book of his two-volume biography. Sheaffer suggests that O'Neill might have been "perhaps no writer at all, had he had a more stable and reassuring childhood." Even less a stylist than his subject. Sheaffer, a former newspaper reporter, does little more than lean over the playwright's shoulder, tirelessly paraphrasing what O'Neill wrote in his most autobiographical play and his one masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night: "I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death." But even in a biography more notable for detail than for new perceptions, the accumulated O'Neill agonies still produce a power beyond themselves, just as they do in his plays.

Gothic Tastes. O'Neill the sometime melodramatist could not have improved upon his own beginnings. He was born on a grey, showery day in October 1888 in the Barrett House, a family hotel fittingly located on Broadway. (During his last illness in Boston 65 years later, he was to raise himself from a stupor and cry: "Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!") His father, James O'Neill, a famous romantic actor of the day. was giving something like his 1,400th performance in Monte Cristo, the play which for over a quarter of a century was to stunt his growth as a performer while it made him a rich man. In recovering from the aftereffects of Eugene's birth, his mother, who had hoped for a daughter, became addicted to morphine--a tragic accident for which his older brother Jamie held Eugene half responsible.

Before he was out of diapers, then, there existed in full force the family cross-tensions that were to help make O'Neill the blackest of black Irishmen. A nanny with Gothic tastes in murder stories and a puritanical Catholic schooling--the nuns frowned on the theater-- were hardly needed to complete the job. Before he was 15, young Eugene had cut himself off from his church, but not from his sense of damnation. "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell" was his new credo. He had become the most savage of insurrectionists: the rebel with a bad conscience. In one of his last interviews he confessed: "Revenge is the subconscious motive for the individual's behavior with the rest of society."

Vile Weed. For "the rest of society," most O'Neill biographers have read "Father." But James O'Neill comes off rather well with Sheaffer. He thinks that the old man was justified when he declaimed to his sons in his best matinee voice: "Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows." For one thing, he did not, as his sons charged, hire a quack to attend Mrs. O'Neill after Eugene's birth, and so "in all probability was guiltless" of his wife's addiction. Sheaffer concludes that Eugene's standing quarrel was really with his mother, because it was toward her that he felt his truly unatonable guilt: "Had he never been born, the wife and mother would have escaped her 'curse,' they all would have escaped what that 'curse' had done to their lives." Sheaffer fails to develop this suggestion beyond referring the reader as usual to Long Day's Journey and pointing out that those two woman-hating geniuses, Nietzsche and Strindberg, became O'Neill's literary idols and remained so to the end. At least one girl sensed young Eugene's mother hangup. Beatrice Ashe, whom O'Neill wanted to marry in his mid-20s, complained: "I felt that he wanted someone to baby him . . . He was always talking about having his head on my breast . . . But I also felt he would have wanted to possess me."

Resentful, Resentful. Girls were inclined to melt when they looked into his "Madonna eyes" but refreeze slightly when they noted his "mean-looking mouth." O'Neill maintained a free course for himself, to the point of sleeping with the wife of lohn Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) at a time when Reed was one of his closest friends. But whenever his own second wife, Agnes Boulton, so much as sat with another man, O'Neill was capable of hitting her across the face "as hard as possible with the back of his hand."

When he was drinking, O'Neill dreamed of living on a dark estate enclosed by a great fence with barred and guarded gates. Within, he would enjoy all the prerequisites of comfort and happiness, including, as Agnes Boulton reported it, unlimited power "over ideas; over things; over people." He came nearest to this role of father-mother deity in his writing, which he once referred to rather chillingly as "my vacation from living."

Writing--like the sea--may have given O'Neill a vacation from the kind of dry-land actuality he hated. But by 1920, where Sheaffer ends the first volume, both O'Neill and the American theater were about to come of age, and it had become obvious that the make-believe of drama was where O'Neill most truly engaged life. "Resentful against God, resentful against family, resentful, resentful," as a Harvard classmate described him, he crossed in the right direction the thin line that separates self-pity from pity and hate from love, making a tentative peace with his family if not with his God.

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