2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Dama2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Damascus (my review), then remembering that I had always meant to sit down and read his most famous plays, after doing so a decade ago with his peer Tennessee Williams after my brother moved to New Orleans and I started making regular visits there myself. Written in 1939 but not publicly premiered until 1956, right after his death (thankfully betraying his original wishes to not have it produced until 25 years after his death, in 1978), I'm simply not going to have as much to say about Long Day's Journey Into Night than I did about his other magnum opus, The Iceman Cometh (my review), because there's simply not as much to say; smaller in scope than the other play, it's the story of a single middle-class family over the course of a single 16-hour working day, as they start the morning with the kind of bland, pleasant interactions you would expect from such a family, but by midnight have turned into a bunch of screaming, irrational monsters clawing at each other's throats, greatly fueled by an entire day and evening of substance abuse (alcohol in the case of the father and two grown sons, morphine in the case of the mother).
This makes it much clearer than Iceman why O'Neill is considered one of the three founders of American Modernist drama, along with Williams and their mutual peer Arthur Miller; because much like Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miller's Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey primarily concerns itself with a deeply dysfunctional middle-class family, one which will never be able to solve its problems because the family members are incapable of acknowledging that they have a problem in the first place, and are too much of weak moral cowards to ever be able to directly confront their own dysfunctional behavior and bring a stop to it. And all three of these plays came out right in the middle of the post-war Mid-Century-Modernist period of the 1940s and '50s, when an ascendent American military-industrial complex was attempting to sell the idea to a war-weary, shell-shocked American public that the concept of the bland "nuclear family" was actually the pinnacle of enlightened, civilized society, as most notoriously seen in the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, which represented one of these post-war nuclear families in its perfect ur-form.
Now, don't get me wrong, decades of data have now conclusively proved that a society full of bland, happy middle-class families really does prevent the rise of radical politics and its inevitable degradation into violent authoritarianism (either fascism from the far-right or communism from the far-left), as we're unfortunately seeing in our own age, when the rapid disappearance of the middle class has left us with a country with no other choices left but the MAGAs or the Wokes, essentially the Hitler and Stalin of our own times; in fact, business guru Peter Drucker was expressly preaching this message in all his early books from these same 1950s years (but for more, see my review of his classic The End of Economic Man), and he turned out to be exactly right, which is what made him such a hugely influential figure in post-war politics and economics. But there are three big problems with this theory, which not by coincidence are the exact three problems addressed in these plays, which is why they were so passionately loved by 1950s audiences: being a bland middle-classer is a soul-killing experience; such a society tends to turn conformity and a rigid adherence to rules into an all-holy religion; and most importantly, sometimes it simply doesn't work, and you can do all the things society tells you to do in order to be happy and prosperous and still end up a miserable failure, the exact subject of Death of a Salesman, which is why Miller's play is far and away the most powerful and successful of all three of these.
As much as a post-Holocaust American society wanted to believe in the power of the bland middle-class, they were smart enough to be able to sniff out the bullshit that often lies underneath this pretty fairytale; and that makes it easy to see why they went so crazy for plays like these when they first came out, because all of them take the unspoken anxiety about post-war promises and makes them explicit, a rightly nagging worry that fixing the world after a planet-destroying war was going to be a lot more complicated than simply giving the Beaver a stern talking-to. Like with the other plays, that makes Long Day's Journey much more interesting now as a historical document than as a contemporary piece of drama to be enjoyed for simple pleasure; but as a historical document, it's a fascinating one, a brilliant record of the exact things the entirety of American society was worrying about in these years, which makes it all the more astounding that it's actually an autobiographical play based on the relationships his real family members had with each other during O'Neill's youth in the 1910s (thus explaining why he didn't want the play produced until long after the death of everyone who knew his family). It should be read with this mindset, that it's no longer exactly a powerful story unto itself (like Williams and Miller, there's an awful lot of stagey melodrama and other "THEATAAHHHH!!!!" moments going on here, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five), but rather a powerful reminder of just how shaky American society was in the years after the war, when everyone agreed that they never wanted another Hitler and Stalin again, but didn't quite yet know what would replace them. ...more
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this.
It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room."
It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize.
But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time.
That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then!
But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation.
It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash."
But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence!
See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character.
And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether they deserve the label
Book #19: Candida, by George Bernard Shaw (1898)
The story in a nutshell: As one of many "comedies of manners" from the Victorian- and Edwardian-era playwright George Bernard Shaw, the actual storyline of today's book under review is much slighter than normal; it is not much more than a breezy 50-page play about a middle-class couple living in the suburban edge of London at the turn of the 20th century, a liberal activist minister and his smart-as-a-tack wife (the "Candida" of the play's title), as well as the young moon-eyed artist they know who has fallen in love with Candida himself. The actual plotline, then, is not much more than that of this minister husband and artist wooer arguing humorously for an hour over which of them loves Candida more, and of what type of man she obviously most needs in her life; Candida herself finally puts an end to the argument by patiently explaining that she doesn't exactly need a man at all, and that the two of them are pretty much morons. Seriously, that's about the entirety of Candida just from a plot standpoint; the main reason to still read and enjoy this script, then, is mostly for the sparkling wordplay and attention to language Shaw brings to the story, as well as its razor-sharp look at the issues and details making up day-to-day life for the British middle-class during these years.
The argument for it being a classic: You can't even mention "classic literature" without bringing up Shaw, his fans claim; this was an artist, after all, who both wrote and published new material literally from the 1880s to 1940s, painting an indelible portrait of what was at the time the most literary society on the planet, right during the years that novels and plays were at their most popular with mainstream society in general. By the end of his life, Shaw was considered a literary superhero by most, to this day still the only person in history to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar; that makes a whole ton of his old work worth going back and revisiting, argue his fans, and not only that but also spread out evenly over the course of his remarkable 60-year career. Take 1898's Candida, for example; although not as polished, say, as a late-career classic like Saint Joan, nor as popular as something like Pygmalion (itself adapted into the insanely popular Broadway musical My Fair Lady), it nonetheless was one of the first really big hits of Shaw's career, as well as a great record of what the times were actually like for an average middle-class citizen during the end of the Victorian Age. As such, then, its fans say, Candida rightly deserves to still be read and enjoyed on a regular basis to this day.
The argument against: Of course, as we've all learned over the course of this "CCLaP 100" essay series so far, although Victorian and Edwardian literature still continues to be legible and readable to modern eyes, that's a long way from being entertaining or simply not tedious; and critics will argue that Shaw's work is especially guilty of clunky aging, precisely because he wrote about the issues and pumped out the kinds of light, frothy stories that were so popular with contemporary audiences at the time. In fact, you could almost view Shaw as a brilliant television writer more than anything else, in a time when the television industry didn't actually exist; he did crank out over 60 plays over the course of his career, after all, most of which last no more than an hour or so, most of which deal with the same slight plots and family trivialities of a typical B-level network drama on the air right now. If you take a cold, hard look at Shaw's work, critics say, you'll see that they're mostly valuable anymore as historical documents, as records of the times and of what the average citizen of those times found important, a big part of why he was so popular to begin with; the plays themselves, though, are badly dated relics of the Victorian and Edwardian times from which they came, the exact thing a modern show is satirizing anymore whenever you see one of the characters affect a fake stagey British accent and yell, "I say, Lord Wiggelbottom, what a surprise to see you here, old chap!" Shaw's plays are important, the argument goes, just not worth most people these days taking the time to sit down and actually read.
My verdict: I have to admit, today I very quickly fall on the side of Shaw's critics, and in fact we can take the printed book version of Candida itself as strong evidence; I find it very telling that of the 140-page manuscript, only 52 of those pages are needed to print the actual play, a whopping 88 pages instead devoted to notes about the play, Shaw's preface to the play, interviews about the play, letters Shaw wrote about the play, etc etc. Because it's definitely true -- there's barely anything to Shaw's actual plays themselves, certainly not the strong three-act structure loaded with suspense and drama like we expect anymore from our live theatre, with their 60-volume cumulative effect being much more important these days than any of the individual volumes themselves. (Want even more evidence? Check out Shaw's Wikipedia bio, and notice that no one's yet bothered creating separate entries for over half his plays, and this from a website that includes detailed plot recaps for every episode of every television show in human history.) I agree that the cumulative effect is important, I want there to be no mistake -- I agree that Shaw is one of the most important figures in the history of the English-language arts and letters, and I agree that there is just a ton of information to be mined from his work concerning real life in the British Empire during both its Industrial-Age height and its eventual downfall. But man, let me admit this as well -- sheesh, was Candida a freaking chore to actually get through. ("I say, Lord Wiggelbottom, what a surprise to see you here, old chap!") Perhaps some of his later, weightier, more mature work (which I definitely plan on tackling in the future) will turn out to be more worth the effort; for now, though, I reluctantly conclude that what is more entertaining for most audience audience members would be an interesting book about Shaw and his work, not the work itself.
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