The Trouble with Brown

The greatest playwright in U.S. history died last week. The scene of his death, as depressing as any in his 47 plays, was a Boston hotel, where he had been living for the past two years, too sick to write. By his bedside, when a final attack of pneumonia felled him, were his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, with whom he had quarreled bitterly (two years ago he unsuccessfully tried to have her committed to a mental hospital). .His children were dead or far away. His name, once a clarion call, threatened to be drowned out by the tinny trumpets of lesser men. Yet Americans had reason to remember him with respect and gratitude. For the stage, even in the restless age of movies and TV, is still a window on a nation's culture, and Eugene O'Neill opened that window wide. Before O'Neill, the U.S. had theater; after O'Neill, it had drama.

The Sickness of Today. "My soul is a submarine," Eugene O'Neill once wrote. His plays were his torpedoes. Half the torpedoes that he launched from the brooding depths of his imagination were duds, the other half jolted theatergoers from Tokyo to Copenhagen. When O'Neill first upped periscope on the U.S. scene, he joined that literary wolfpack which, as one critic put it, was staging "an ill-will tour of the American mind." H. L. Mencken was lustily swatting the "boo-boisie." Sinclair Lewis was baiting Babbitt. O'Neill tried to go deeper than both, and he both succeeded and failed. Few of his characters are as simple as Babbitt; but none, in all likelihood, will be remembered as long.

O'Neill's own version of George F. Babbitt is William A. Brown. He appeared for the first time in The Great God Brown (on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theater in 1926), an outwardly happy businessman ("the visionless demigod of our new materialistic myth--a Success"). His antagonist is an artistic soul both envied and victimized by Brown. The artistic soul cries out: "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am L. afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love? . . . Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched? Or, rather, Old Graybeard, why the devil was I ever born at all?" Brown himself shares the mood of despair: "This is Daddy's bedtime secret for today: Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue."

George Babbitt could never have talked that way. In fact, he would scarcely have understood what was the matter with Brown, anyway. In almost all his plays, O'Neill tried to dramatize the cause of Brown's despair. Brown's trouble, as O'Neill saw it, was "the sickness of today." The symptoms: love had given way to possessiveness; a sense of "belonging" had been crushed by the Machine Age; faith had become atrophied; the "old God was dead" and a new one was not in sight. With such a view of the U.S., O'Neill set out to do what no American playwright had done before: write tragedy.

He was a superb craftsman. He was not afraid of greasepaint. He had a deep, warm understanding of suffering. He was immensely diligent. And he produced some granitic, unforgettable plays. Yet Brown --his many Browns--never quite added up to the great American tragedy.

"Gawd! What a Night!" Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was a legitimate child of the theater. His father, James, was a matinee idol of the '80s who discovered a milk & honey of a role in The Count of

Monte Cristo, nursed it for 16 years, and became rich. Trundled about the country on one-night stands, young Gene developed a lifelong loathing of hotels and railroads, but sopped up his father's sturdy showmanship. According to legend, young O'Neill was bounced out of Princeton for heaving a beer bottle through President Woodrow Wilson's window, but the truth is that he flunked three midyear exams and all his freshman finals.

In the next few years, O'Neill married and was divorced, prospected vainly for gold in Honduras jungles, went to sea and knocked around the Atlantic from Southampton to South Africa. For O'Neill, the sea was a mystic experience. Some of his best plays, e.g., The Moon of the Caribbees and some of his worst, e.g., Anna Christie, are salty with the tang of the sea, saltier still with the tongue of lonely, hard-bitten sailormen.

His sea voyages were punctuated by Homeric booze-feats ashore, a slum-bum stretch when he lived at Jimmy the Priest's saloon in Manhattan and slept on the hickory-topped tables, too broke to pay $3 a month for a room. At 24, hospitalized with a mild case of tuberculosis, he began to think about writing plays. Primed on Ibsen and Strindberg, he enrolled in Professor George Pierce Baker's famed 47-Workshop at Harvard. His first published play, The Web, was set in a squalid boardinghouse. Its three main characters (not counting an illegitimate baby in the cradle) were a prostitute, a pimp and a murderer. The play's opening line was: "Gawd! What a night!"

In various ways, often poetically, O'Neill kept repeating the same line. Shaw called him "The Banshee Shakespeare." Theatrical statisticians have calculated that in O'Neill's plays there are seven cases of insanity, eight suicides, twelve murders and 23 more or less natural deaths. His dramas charted the canceled dream, the twisted love, the frustrated hope--cardiograms of the outraged heart.

Tragedy of Hormones. When in 1920 his father saw his first Broadway hit, Beyond the Horizon, a bitter domestic drama, he grumbled: "Are you trying to send the audience home to commit suicide?" But the audiences seemed to enjoy the beating they took. In the ripe years 1920-35, O'Neill made almost $1,000,000. Three plays (Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude) won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1936, he became the second American (after Sinclair Lewis) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Once, he wrote a comedy--Ah, Wilderness! (1933), a story of adolescence as shiny as a fresh apple, but even in that there was a touch of the worm. In Desire Under the Elms (1924), one of his best plays, he wrote an earthy drama of love and greed in which passion for the soil became as real as, in his earlier work, the passion for the sea. He intrigued jaded theatergoers with stage tricks: a steady, offstage tomtom in his superb Emperor Jones, masks in The Great God Brown, choral chants in Lazarus Laughed. In Strange Interlude (1928), with the insolence of genius, he spun a thin soap-opera plot into nine acts and four hours, letting his characters speak their thoughts out loud in constant asides, the result being about as dramatic as five psychoanalyses going on simultaneously.

Aristotle pointed out that the tragic hero must be of great dignity and high station. Perhaps Americans--whose real-life heroes are habitually debunked, called by their first names and photographed at breakfast--would not accept theatrical heroes who stand high enough to fall very far. O'Neill's heroes, at any rate, rarely had farther to fall than from the sidewalk to the gutter. As one critic remarked bluntly of The Iceman Cometh: "The characters all start out as a bunch of drunken bums and finish the same."

Greek tragedy is tragedy of Destiny: man's fate is in his stars. Shakespearean tragedy is tragedy of character: man's fate is in his will. Through suffering and death, Greek and Shakespearean tragic heroes appeased the gods and found redemption. Eugene O'Neill's audiences were almost as suspicious of God, Will and Destiny as of a flat earth. Bowing to his time, he wrote the tragedy of Personal Psychology: man's fate is in his genes and hormones. He blended the determinism of Calvin and Freud to produce the kind of tragic hero whom the 20th century, and especially its intellectuals, could easily understand--the victim of circumstances.

In Mourning Becomes Electra, in which O'Neill transplanted the ancient Greek tragedy into an American setting, he significantly left out the scenes from the original legend showing the hero's final judgment by the Furies. O'Neill's leading character says at the end: "There's no one left to punish me . . . I've got to punish myself!" With each man his own fate--and each woman her own Fury--there was no redemption, no catharsis, only O'Neill's superb but chilly resignation.

Lost Soul? In 1918, O'Neill had married a second time, adding to the marriage service the skeptical clause: "Until love do us part." The parting came eleven years later. In 1929 he married his third wife. Actress Carlotta Monterey, who played Mildred Douglas in The Hairy Ape. They built a big, rambling house near Berkeley, Calif., where he started work on a projected eleven-play cycle following one family all through American history. Then, all the world that was not a stage began to crumble about him.

His elder son, Eugene Jr., a brilliant classical scholar, committed suicide, reportedly over an unhappy love affair. Younger son Shane did a stretch in a federal narcotics clinic for dope addiction. Daughter Oona became Charlie Chaplin's fourth wife, and O'Neill never forgave her. World War II had sapped his will to write; then a muscular disorder made it physically impossible. He destroyed most of what he had written of the play cycle. His dark brown eyes rested in a pathetically drawn face, his big frame grew skeletal, his voice, out of control, now boomed, now croaked in a whisper. He was in and out of hospitals. The few people who met him called him gentle and immensely patient. When he died last week at 65, he left at least three plays in manuscript, including the reportedly autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night, which, by the terms of his will, may not be produced until 1978.

A few years ago, Eugene O'Neill complained that America was losing its soul. More likely; it was he who had never quite found his. Yet there was a deep-down probity in the man and his work. He never cheated with his evidence, and his evidence came from the secret places of the heart. Though he manhandled the English language, recalling Dreiser's powerful clumsiness, he never consciously wrote a shoddy line. On the 20th century stage, so far, only Shaw and Sean O'Casey outrank him. He failed in his ultimate goal, to go beyond the tree line of tragedy and reach the highest, noblest peaks. But few others in his day have tried to climb so high or got so far.

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