A poet writes about things, he said, and his words “are of things that do not exist without words.” At the same time he was aware, as Valéry had been, that “the mind’s desire will always exceed the beauty that poetry can bring to reality.” He was drawn to poetry (rather than science, say) because in human nature “one is better satisfied by particulars.” “Poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of the imagination.”19
In saying that God is a work of the imagination—as is poetry, or any successful artwork—Stevens also thought that many metaphysical and philosophical ideas are inherently poetic: that is to say, products of the imagination. The notion of “infinity” was essentially poetic (“cosmic poetry,” he called it), as were the idea of the Hegelian state and, perhaps most pertinently for this book, the ideas of “final cause” and “wholeness,” which people seem to find so important. (Does it make sense to speak of the “final cause” of poetry? he asked.) The way in which a poem can suddenly “enlarge” our lives, effect a change in us that is like going from winter straight into spring, is the creation of meaning; of approaching—however briefly—a feeling of wholeness. “There is no wing like meaning,” he said. And we must hold within us the realization that “[i]t is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.”
“The poet is a stronger life. . . . The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything. The tongue is an eye but the eye sees less than the tongue says and the tongue says less than the mind thinks.” (Compare Valéry.) “Poetry sometimes crowns the search for happiness. It is itself a search for happiness.” “The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.” “Reality is a cliché / From which we escape by metaphor.”20
There is nothing here that one would wish to fight with Stevens over. In making clear claims for the supremacy of poetry he manages to escape into metaphors that enlarge, reinforce and exemplify his arguments. And he chooses his moments to extend his claims to life in general and the role of the imagination in it. Here he brings a poet’s command of language, and imagination, into observations, or aperçus, that are both general and specific and have almost a biblical quality: “The imperfect is our only paradise.”21 “We receive but what we give / And in our life alone does nature live.”22 “Things simply are, and are not molded to a human purpose.”
Elsewhere he speaks of “the ‘neverthelessness’ of nature.” “The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.” “Life is a composite of the propositions about it.” “Life lived on the basis of opinion is more nearly life than life lived without opinion.”
And perhaps this is Stevens’s most significant observation, which coincides with and extends Valéry’s main point: “We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas).”23 Once we understand this distinction, he is saying, once we accept that we will never feel whole intellectually or philosophically, we can get on and enjoy the emotional (artistic, imaginative) wholenesses, the “sudden rightnesses,” that are available to us.
SO HAPPY FOR A TIME
In the depths of the Depression, following the Wall Street crash of October 1929, only twenty-eight out of the eighty-six legitimate theatres on Broadway were still open, but Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra had sold out even its top-of-the-range six-dollar seats. O’Neill had been confirmed as “the great US playwright, the man with whom true American theatre really begins,” long before Mourning, which premiered on October 26, 1931.24 Curiously, however, it was not until the other end of the decade, by which time O’Neill had turned fifty, that his two great masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, were written. The intervening years have become known as “the Silence.” We shall see how wrong this epithet is.
More than for most artists, certain biographical details are crucial to understanding his work. He had lost his faith in the summer of 1903 when he suddenly refused to go to mass with his father, and insisted on transferring from a Catholic school to a secular one.25 Thereafter he always felt there was a “spiritual vacancy” in his life and, as an adult, spoke of himself as a “Black Irishman,” one of the fallen, with a black soul.
When he was not yet fourteen, he found out that his own birth had precipitated a morphine addiction in his mother. He also discovered that his parents blamed their first son, Jamie, for infecting their second son, Edmund, with measles, from which he had died at the age of eighteen months. When, in 1902, Ella O’Neill ran out of morphine, she attempted suicide; this set off in Eugene, then in adolescence, a period of binge drinking and self-destructive behavior; he also began to hang around theatres (his father was an actor). After an unsuccessful marriage he attempted suicide himself, overdosing in a flophouse in 1911, after which he saw several psychiatrists; a year later his TB was diagnosed. In 1921, his father died tragically from cancer, his mother’s death following in 1922; his brother Jamie died twelve months after that from a stroke, which followed an alcoholic psychosis—he was forty-five.
O’Neill had intended to study science at Princeton, but in college he was greatly influenced by his discovery of Nietzsche (his “literary idol,” as he put it), and adopted an approach to life that his biographer calls “scientific mysticism.” He was eventually removed from the course because he attended so few classes. He began writing in 1912, as a journalist, but before long turned to plays. Autobiography apart, his dramatic philosophy may be inferred from his verdict on the United States: America, “instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country . . . its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.”
Politically, O’Neill was drawn to anarchism, and he always maintained a healthy disdain for capitalism, which promoted a “vicious materialism,” an acquisitiveness which invited people to “clutch at everything but holding nothing fast,” and “put the mind to sleep.”26 Nor was he totally sold on democracy, which, he felt, when combined with capitalism, made America the land of desire, where people felt free to “take what they want,” where desire “knows no bounds” (and therefore “the soul knows no rest”); where, in fact, “democracy is the expression of desire,” in which man “is one-tenth spirit and nine-tenths hog.” “Success is still our only real living religion,” he wrote.27
But we are still only halfway there. As J. P. Diggins explains, “For O’Neill, as for the modern philosopher, existence may have no meaning, yet the rage to live is stronger than the reason for life.” Desire can mean the need to avenge a wrong, the demand for social recognition, the greed for a piece of property, lust for another’s body, but O’Neill saw power as the ultimate form of desire. Even so, and despite his political interests, he conceived power as the expression of the desire to control and dominate that has more to do with personal relations than with political activity.28
And that is why, probably, although he wrote three plays explicitly about religion—Dynamo (science versus religion), Lazarus Laughed (the dread of death) and Days without End (atheism, socialism, anarchism)—it is his two late masterpieces that most claim our attention (The Iceman has often been called a religious play). These works reflect his stated view that “there are no values to live by today.” All the characters have seen better days, and all they have left is to fantasize about the future “as the return of a past more imagined than true.” They need no guidance to recognize that “one can be sentenced to life for simply living it.”
O’Neill shared with James Joyce a passion for finding larger meanings in small things, “to make the rut of everyday life resound with meaning and significance.” And he shared with George Moore the conviction that “all a man’s interests are limited to those near himself.”29 He liked to say that theatre was a temple “whe
re the religion of poetic interpretation and symbolic celebration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in spirit by their soul-stifling struggle to exist as masks among the masks of the living.”
But above all—and this is where the drama in his plays chiefly lies—he knew that desire and its discontents can be a form of blindness. His plays show characters whose identities are fixed (unlike Shaw’s, say), making difficult their attempts to clarify their own feelings and know their own reasons, as people who “refuse to accept excuses as explanation.”
Both The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey last several hours, and both are talking plays with little action. The characters, and the audience, are trapped in the same room, where conversation is unavoidable.
In The Iceman the characters are all assembled in the back room of Harry Hope’s saloon, where they drink and tell each other the same stories day in, day out, stories that are in fact hopes and illusions that will never see fruition. One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician, a third simply wants to go home. As time goes by, from one thing and another that is said, the audience grasps that even these characters’ far from exceptional aims are illusions—pipe dreams, in O’Neill’s words. Later it becomes clear that they are waiting for Hickey, a traveling salesman who, they believe, will make things happen, be their savior (Hickey is the son of a preacher). But when Hickey finally appears, he punctures their dreams one by one.
O’Neill is not making the glib point that reality is invariably cold. What he is saying is that there is no reality; there are no firm values, no ultimate meanings, and so all of us need our pipe dreams and illusions (our fictions, if you like). Hickey leads an “honest” life; he works and tells himself the truth, or what he thinks of as the truth. But it turns out that he has killed his wife because he could not bear the way she “simply” accepted the fact of his numerous casual infidelities. We never know how she explained her life to herself (this is crucial, as we have seen: how we explain our lives to ourselves), what illusions she had and how she kept herself going. But, we realize, and this, too, is vital: they did keep her going.
The Iceman, of course, is death and it has often been remarked that the play could be called Waiting for Hickey, emphasizing the similarities to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (which we shall come to, as we shall also return to the concept of waiting and what it means).
Long Day’s Journey is O’Neill’s most autobiographical work, a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.” The action takes place in one room, in four acts, at four times of the day, at breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime, when the members of the Tyrone family gather together. As already mentioned, there are no great action scenes, but there are two events: Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (who is Eugene’s brother who died) discovers he has TB. As the day wears on, the weather outside turns darker and foggier, and the house seems more and more isolated. Various episodes are revisited time and again in the conversation, as characters reveal more about themselves and give their version of events recounted earlier by others.
At the play’s core is O’Neill’s pessimistic view of life’s “strange determinism.” “None of us can help the things life has done to us,” says Mary. “They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” Elsewhere, one brother says to the other, “I love you much more than I hate you.” And then, right at the end, the three Tyrone men, Mary’s husband and two sons, watch her enter the room in a deep dream, her own fog. They watch as she laments, “That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”
As Normand Berlin has written, it is those three final words of the play, “for a time,” that are so heartbreaking. O’Neill’s relatives hated the play. For him, it was a mystery how one can be in love, and then not in love, and then be trapped forever. In such devastating ways, he is saying, the past lives on in the present, and this is something science has nothing to say about.30
THE SPIRITUAL MIDDLE CLASS AND THE LIFE-LIE
We must allow for the fact that, as Berlin has also said, O’Neill was a “gazer into abysses.” Like Nietzsche, he considered Greek tragedy the unsurpassed example of art and religion. Tragedy, he said, “is the meaning of life—and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle classes.” As Egil Törnqvist of the University of Amsterdam has put it, “The struggle of Nietzsche’s ideal man to turn himself into a superman (Übermensch) is the struggle also of the O’Neill protagonist. As the playwright himself said in an early interview: ‘A man wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable. But his struggle is his success!’” He goes on: “For Nietzsche the tragic spirit equaled a religious faith. . . . Out of the need to justify existence after the death of the old God was born the concept of the superman, the man who welcomes pain as a necessity for inner growth and who, like the protagonists in Greek tragedy, achieves spiritual attainment through suffering.”31
O’Neill accepted Nietzsche’s argument, and in an often quoted statement commented: “The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it—the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with.”32 Elsewhere, he said that the only cure for the sickness of today “is through an exultant acceptance of life.”
For him that meant an acceptance of suffering, even within the family, especially within the family, and that brings with it the necessity of the “life-lie,” the idea that a man cannot live without illusions—about himself. For O’Neill the riddle of life is insoluble, whether we see our problems as psychological or metaphysical; essentially, the search for the meaning of life is equivalent to finding a justification for suffering.33 Simon Harford, in More Stately Mansions (written in the late 1930s but not produced until 1952), echoes Paul Valéry in asserting that men’s lives “are without any meaning whatever . . . human life is a silly disappointment, a liar’s promise . . . a daily appointment with peace and happiness in which we wait day after day, hoping against hope.”34
Professor Berlin makes much of the fact that The Iceman Cometh was only tepidly received in New York on its first production in 1946, but was much more successful ten years later when it opened two weeks after Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. As Berlin rightly says, the two plays occupy the same metaphysical ground. O’Neill himself felt that he had achieved a lot with Iceman. In a letter to Lawrence Langner he said: “There are moments in it that suddenly strip the soul of a man stark naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority, but with an understanding compassion which sees him as a victim of the ironies of life and of himself. Those moments are for me the depth of tragedy, with nothing more that can possibly be said.”35 Irony and tragedy: this was Paul Fussell’s point in his book about the First World War (see chapter 9).
FORGIVENESS—AND FAITH—IN THE FAMILY
O’Neill believed that illusions must be shared—and be sharable—if life is to be livable; we all have them, and they are no disgrace (though he does refer to philosophers at one point as “foolosophers”).
At a time when, as we have noted, psychology came to replace—or attempted to replace—religion in people’s lives, it is worth pointing out that, as much as anyone and far more than most, O’Neill hones in on the family as the locus—for most people—of the most “significantly lived experience, complex and deep and passionate.” As J. P. Diggins put it, “The love-hate within a family, the closeness-distance, the loneliness within a togetherness, the guilt and need for forgiveness, the knowing and not knowi
ng a loved one, the bewilderment in the face of a mysterious determinism—this is the human condition.” As Long Day draws to a close and Mary enters the room—the center of the lives of her three men—they are sharing the death of hope; but they endure, and the human bond “seems to transcend the stage.”36
O’Neill’s late plays all show characters seeking a higher ground for human experience, hoping to endow that contemporary experience with transcendent meaning, highlighting the conflict—especially sharp in the United States, O’Neill felt—between materialistic greed and the desire for spiritual transcendence.37 In Dynamo (1929), the search for “God-replacements” (O’Neill’s words) looked at Puritanism versus Science (electricity), which he regarded as no less futile. In America, he thought, even the arts had been taken over by a business ethic, and even the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake had been corrupted by the lure of grants for research. Money and wealth were false gods, and rather than “waste time on the accumulation of material wealth or the illusion of power through the accumulation of knowledge,” America should look to its spiritual health.
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 30