Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stephen A. Black’s remarkable work of psychoanalytic biography, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. Among the works that are recognized as standard biographies of Eugene O’Neill—including Louis Sheaffer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning O’Neill: Son and Playwright and O’Neill: Son and Artist, the several voluminous works by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, and Robert M. Dowling’s Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts—Beyond Mourning and Tragedy stands alone for its singleness of purpose and its psychoanalytic methodology.In his 2001 review of Black’s book, William Davies King discussed the differences among the existing biographies. The Gelbs’ three-volume biography is “novelistic, a variation on Les Miserables” and the Monte Cristo plot as well as “the work of two extremely diligent and crafty journalists who managed to interview an enormous range of people who had some connection with their topic.”1 Sheaffer, “less capable as a novelist, but even more dogged in pursuing interview subjects and the telling anecdote . . . depicts a metamorphic O’Neill, an epitomic artist, who synthesized the dialectics of personal and public history” (King, “Beyond Mourning and Tragedy,” 122). In King’s view, “Both Sheaffer and the Gelbs offer portraits that are at once too mythic, too world historical, and too microscopic. They fail to keep in focus a continuous life story” (King, “Beyond Mourning and Tragedy”). For King, Stephen Black’s achievement was to have written “the first coherent analysis of the life and works of O’Neill” (“Beyond Mourning and Tragedy,” 123). And he did so by not choosing to write a conventional biography, by not “interviewing countless people who might provide insight” or making use of the “critical, biographical, and historical discourse on O’Neill” (King, “Beyond Mourning and Tragedy,” 123). Instead, he has “listened as an analyst would to O’Neill on O’Neill, reading his plays, letters, and quoted words as statements of a psychoanalysis—not as autobiography” (King, “Beyond Mourning and Tragedy,” 123).In his “Word to the Reader,” Black explains that what is new in his biography “is the interpretations made both of numerous small matters and of the large patterns of O’Neill’s life, interpretations that grow partly out of their author’s professional training and experience as a literary scholar, a psychoanalytic researcher, and, for a time, a clinician.”2 His thesis was that “O’Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning” (xvi). This condition was based on O’Neill’s multiple losses of his mother: in his infancy when she became addicted to morphine, at the age of seven when he was sent away to boarding school, at the age of fourteen when he learned of her morphine addiction, and at the age of thirty-three when he learned of her death. These losses contributed to his oedipal issues, based on the triads with his mother and father, and, Black argues, with his mother and his brother Jamie.According to Black, O’Neill’s mourning intensified between 1913 and 1919, when five of his close friends died, at least three by suicide, and even more between 1920 and 1923, with the loss of his father, mother, and brother. He maintains that O’Neill “found a way to use the writing of plays as a form of self-psychoanalysis” (xviii). The analysis was successful “to the extent that it allowed him to mourn his dead and to create in his last plays work that must have come very close to fulfilling even so large a talent as his” (xviii).Black delineates his methodology in the “Word to the Reader,” explaining that he decided not to interview any of O’Neill’s associates on the grounds that “personal accounts by witnesses might seem more vivid than the published testimony of the dead and so might bring additional sources of bias to the project” (xv). He did, however, make extensive use of the notes from Sheaffer’s hundreds of interviews, including both those quoted in his biography and those in the extensive Louis Sheaffer Collection at Connecticut College. Thus, Sheaffer became a “character” in Black’s narrative because the use of his work “necessitated examination of his conclusions, impressions, and interactions with witnesses” (xvi). Black also studied thousands of letters, both published and unpublished, as well as diaries and other documents in various archives. In the book as published by Yale University Press, he chose a method of internal citation to acknowledge these sources, along with an annotated bibliography. The volume has just six footnotes. The result is a biography that, while supported by a firm foundation in research, reads as a coherent narrative.Because of Black’s thesis and methodology, the emphasis in his biography is unique. Plays that have previously been given scant attention assume outsized importance in this narrative driven by O’Neill’s progress in mourning and general self-psychoanalysis. A prime example is the early love-triangle melodrama Recklessness, which dramatizes the affair of Mildred Baldwin with her chauffer Fred. Black writes that O’Neill’s “weaker plays usually reveal their author more directly than the good plays,” and “few are as bad—or reveal as much—as Recklessness” (148). In his thorough analysis, Black notes that Fred resembles O’Neill in appearance, and he analyzes the play in oedipal terms, with Mildred as Ella O’Neill and her husband Arthur as James, but more meaningfully as “distorted, generalized parental figures who represent sexual and economic power” (146). What’s more, giving the name Gene to Fred’s jealous girlfriend suggests that “unconsciously, at least, [O’Neill] seems to mean her to represent the homosexual aspect of the normal oedipal lover, who loves his father possessively, is jealous of the father’s lover (his mother), and wants to do away with her. (Fred represents the heterosexual aspect)” (147). The play makes clear, Black writes, that “however much [O’Neill] might sympathize with his mother’s illness, anger and even dread outweighed his love for Ella O’Neill . . . probably with some consciousness, Eugene hated and feared his need for his mother” (148).In the artistic failure Dynamo, Black sees a similarly important step in O’Neill’s progress in the psychological work of mourning. He writes that in Dynamo, “O’Neill meant to show the undoing of loss, the restoration of a union with one now dead, which in the play he effected at the cost of the young man’s life” (368). He sees O’Neill making “personal progress by dramatizing for himself the unconscious assumption of many bereaved persons that to accept as permanent the loss of the dead is to die oneself” (369). The dramatization, Black observes, “marked visible progress toward reaching the end of the first stage of mourning: accepting the reality of the losses” (369).Dynamo’s companion piece, Days Without End, receives more extensive analysis. Here Black suggests that O’Neill “deliberately tried to isolate the narcissistic, fragmented aspects of himself from which the play arose from the more integrated person he was becoming” (380). At the heart of the play is the conflict between the sense of the tragic that O’Neill had derived from Nietzsche and the Greek classics and the Christianity he associated with his parents, a conflict that is represented in the split character, John Loving. The difficulty O’Neill had with this play was related to his denial of “the intellectual incompatibility of the tragic sense and Christianity” in his attempt to bring about a synthesis of the two (381). O’Neill had a difficult time writing this play, in which, Black suggests, he was trying to do the psychological work of mourning his mother. Loving’s wife, Elsa, a mother substitute, can readily be seen as a stand-in for Ella O’Neill. Black suggests that, by writing the play, O’Neill “laid bare certain psychologically primitive fears and retaliatory impulses,” and that “guilt over his sadistic wishes toward his mother” made him anxious, sick, and depressed as he wrote (384–85). Nonetheless, the ordeal “furthered the self-analysis and the mourning that would allow him to write his finest work” a few years later (385). The ending, in which the two parts of Loving are symbolically united, “expresses O’Neill’s wish to annihilate the narcissistic isolation that has kept him from loving, or from being loved as he wished to be . . . the ending projects the achievement of a psychological integration that O’Neill now begins to feel he can claim” (386).Some of the plays that are recognized as among O’Neill’s best are seen in a revealing new light when Black discusses them in terms of O’Neill’s progress in self-analysis. In Desire Under the Elms, for example, the protagonist Eben Cabot is often seen as one of many characters who physically resemble Eugene and are taken as representations of the playwright. But Black suggests that it is his brother Jamie who is “discernible in the characterization of Eben” and that O’Neill was thinking of his intimacy with their mother after the death of their father and his behavior when she was dying in developing the character and his situation (310). Thus, Eben became “an expression of Eugene’s identification with his brother, particularly his identification with Jamie’s oedipal war with their father” (310).Black sees Jamie as more present in O’Neill’s work than is generally thought—as the model for Lazarus in Lazarus Laughed and Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown as well as, of course, Jamie/Jim Tyrone, in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Perhaps most importantly, Black notes in the interactions of Simon and Deborah Harford in More Stately Mansions, “some mixture of [O’Neill’s] own fantasies of a relationship with his mother and what he believed had been his brother’s actual relationship with her” (408). He suggests that writing this play gave Eugene “the freedom to explore his envy of Jamie, whom he thought his mother had preferred, his identification with Jamie, and his own fantasies of maternal seduction” (408).In The Iceman Cometh, Black agrees with Michael Manheim and others in identifying Jamie with Hickey, but more interesting to him is the association of Larry with Eugene and of Parritt with both Eugene and his son Shane. In Black’s view, O’Neill “made use of the youth to represent the parts of himself that denied or distorted his crimes against his mother” (423). Parritt’s real crime, he writes, “greater even than that of betraying his mother, is the refusal to know that he hates her” (423). On the other hand, O’Neill “seems to have had in mind a specific model for Parritt’s syntax, tone of voice, and style of relating to others, and it was probably his troubled second son” (429). The implication would be that “O’Neill felt even worse about Shane than about [his son] Eugene” (433).When it comes to self-portraits, Black had some interesting new insights. Lavinia Mannon, for example, is “his Electra, his female self” (370). And Lavinia, in accepting the reality of death, “links tragedy to psychoanalysis.” The ending of Mourning Becomes Electra signifies that she has reached the “‘working through’ stage of grieving,” the first of O’Neill’s characters to do so (371). Black writes that in creating her, “O’Neill shows he is ready to begin the minute work that will eventually allow him to pass beyond the obsession with his dead that has possessed him for a decade” (371). In Iceman, he sees the character of Larry as built around the “difficulty [O’Neill] experienced in being with his own children,” which caused his “pessimism to emerge in its most extreme form, to the point that almost all he could see was the likelihood of disaster” (423).As Black sees it, the progress toward the work of mourning was completed with Long Day’s Journey and A Moon for the Misbegotten. His main insight about the first play as a psychoanalytic biographer is the placement of the “facts of family life” within “the process in which they occur,” which expresses “meanings more general than and different from anything explicit in things said. The purpose of the process of Long Day’s Journey is to repeat itself endlessly” (446). This process “binds the four Tyrones together with almost unbreakable bonds, which ensure that no matter how unbearable matters become, the family will remain intact . . . the Tyrones endure endless dissension because it almost eliminates the risk of loss” (446). As a playwright engaged in self-analysis, it was making sense of the process that “made it possible for [O’Neill] to understand with deep pity and forgive,” thus possibly completing the process of mourning (446). Black waffles a bit on the question of whether O’Neill “ceased to mourn” after writing the play, noting the difficulty of proving a negative, but said that he had clearly made great progress. In the plays that follow it, there are no characters resembling his parents (447). More importantly, “O’Neill now shows himself able, for the first time, to imagine characters who suffer a loss, mourn, emerge from mourning, and pass beyond it” (447).Black writes about Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten in these terms. Hughie, he suggests, is “O’Neill’s paradigm of mourning” (451). Erie Smith “accepted the loss of his friend, grieved intensely, laid Hughie to rest, and eventually earned the peace of mind that lets him make a new friend” (451). After Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill’s remaining unfinished business with his brother was completed in Moon, Black suggests, with the creation of the character of Josie Hogan, “a woman who is first an objective witness to his own last act of mourning” (469). But gradually “the playwright’s point of view merges with Josie’s. Through her, he wishes his brother peace and lets him go quietly to his death with the recognition of having been loved selflessly. The playwright had passed beyond mourning and tragedy” (469).The initial reception of Black’s biography was positive, with most reviewers impressed by his expertise and applauding his systematic psychoanalytic approach. Judith E. Barlow described the book as “a monumental work—part biography, part posthumous psychoanalysis, part study of the creative process.”3 Noting that some previous studies had taken a psychoanalytic approach to O’Neill, she wrote that “this is the first full-length study of O’Neill’s life and work to stick rigorously to such a paradigm. As both an accomplished literary critic and trained psychoanalytic therapist, Black is uniquely qualified to take readers on a tour of the tortured O’Neill psyche.”4 Gary Jay Williams praised Black’s “professional psychological acumen and rigor.”5 Zander Brietzke noted that the book “delivers many riches to a prospective director and actor.”6 Taking another angle on the book’s biographical mission, Martha Bower wrote that “the new material Black gleans from interviews and papers stored in various libraries, especially the Sheaffer papers housed at Connecticut College,” makes this biography “readable and interesting” as Black “regales the reader with little-known tidbits about O’Neill’s youth, his romantic interests, school experiences, and second marriage.”7There were also some complaints. A few reviewers found the psychoanalytic analysis vague or unconvincing. Bower thought that Black failed to clearly define O’Neill’s specific mental disorder or to delineate the process of self-analysis in the plays. She also thought he offered an inadequate explanation for the Freudian concepts and terms that were used. Albert Bermel questioned whether O’Neill’s using playwriting as therapy was as intentional as Black suggests: “More likely he grew so absorbed in his art, and simultaneously so oppressed by the ills that cascaded down on him, that the writing fortuitously dissolved some of his inner turmoil.”8 In a similar vein, Williams suggested that the facts Black puts forth do not completely support “the argument that [O’Neill] was in conscious control of the self-psychoanalytic process to the extent that Black seems to want.”9 Barlow noted that, while Black acknowledged “recent discoveries about the organic etiology of much mental illness . . . in good Freudian fashion, Black places most of the for O’Neill’s not on . . . but on his mother” while O’Neill in Black’s of the family the psychoanalytic issues, that Black’s analysis not the in the because the of tragedy not the attention that the of mourning noted Black’s to O’Neill’s and in while he his psychoanalytic were of a narrative by about O’Neill’s life that was several reviewers at the of and of what they thought was inadequate and of the narrative and the years its Beyond Mourning and Tragedy has as a O’Neill is second to for example, in the of in the And its beyond O’Neill the two to the book in and biographical works on O’Neill, there are a in psychological works on such subjects as and Black’s biography is in the of a standard book in the of family and Perhaps most Black’s of O’Neill’s family is the citation in of Great to biographical of O’Neill, Beyond Mourning and Tragedy stands out for the and of its approach to his approach to facts has made question about O’Neill’s that had been for a close at the For example, Black is about the of O’Neill’s sexual about by Jamie, the of which was O’Neill. Black writes that seems for a biographer to from the at a to any at alone to assume that Eugene was for life, as has been As for the O’Neill Black suggests that it was not because of a that was at a than the about but it was because had so few and so of the work that he chose not to take the few he would have been allowed to and was for He notes that he for O’Neill have once are he or not have seen the The the of O’Neill’s life, to some of the parts of the and present a in analysis also him to some of the plays that have a from other and As noted his psychoanalytic approach to plays Recklessness, Dynamo, and Days Without and that been He also a new and revealing way of at plays is generally recognized among O’Neill “the of mourning as the endless of loss, and the denial of loss the with and Hughie is “a paradigm of mourning” (451). He has also to see the of O’Neill’s brother Jamie in his work and the importance of his oedipal conflict with him, as well as with his father for his mother and with his mother for his are some that seem a too Black is that O’Neill wrote more and more than he is given which to the of as “an of the who make a of and the as are few and as a the experience of Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy the In the of this it has to an even for Stephen Black’s outsized in creating this volume and his to of Eugene O’Neill and his