Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Abstract

This installment of Used Books commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Oxford University Press's initial publication of Travis Bogard's Contour in Time. The 1988 issuance of a revised edition constitutes one indicator of the book's durability; below, our contributors provide additional evidence.In 1972, when Contour in Time was first published, a number of things about it were hailed as new and perhaps groundbreaking for the study of Eugene O'Neill. Noting that the book was only secondarily a work of criticism, Frederic Carpenter emphasized the primary purpose that Bogard articulated: to write “‘a form of biography’ which will discuss O'Neill's ‘life in art.’” Suggesting that “obviously this fusion of biography with criticism is difficult,” he nevertheless thought that “when successful it produces something more than the sum of its parts.” Mardi Valgemäe agreed that as “‘a form of biography’ … the study succeeds admirably,” and John Henry Raleigh wrote that “‘Contour in Time’ is the fullest and finest charting of [O'Neill's] agonized process: a portrait of the artist as an autobiographer, young and old.”1Critics who represented the general reader's interests tended to be less impressed than academics, suggesting that the biographical ambition locked Bogard into what the young Joyce Carol Oates, in the New York Times Book Review, called the “structural determinism” of a “deadening chronological approach.” Likewise, the Boston Globe's reviewer, Kevin Kelly, recoiled from the “scrupulously detailed, chronologically choked play-by-play study of O'Neill” (55). But not all nonacademic reviewers shared this point of view. A second reviewer for the Times suggested that the book ultimately succeeded in executing Bogard's biographical aims: “By dealing with some 70 of O'Neill's plays in chronological order, and by relating them to the most forceful vectors in his life, Bogard … manages to clarify the pattern of his personal growth.”2Regardless of how he got there, Bogard's last chapter, “The Door and the Mirror,” was widely acclaimed as an original and even brilliant contribution to our understanding of O'Neill. Oates wrote that “this academically respectable book springs to life in its last chapter … in which Bogard finally gets to his true subject—his sympathetic analysis, by way of ‘A Long Day's Journey Into Night,’ of the personality of Eugene O'Neill.” Kelly called it brilliant, “the one chapter that gives ‘Contour in Time’ its distinction,” noting that “it is as though the rest of the book has been a preparation, a slow advance to a climactic revelation.” Even self-described O'Neill detractor Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the chapter “comes as a moving and even tragic climax to the story.” Noting Bogard's conclusion that Long Day's Journey “was the play [O'Neill] had been trying to write from the outset of his career; its achievement … his raison d'être as an artist,” Lehmann-Haupt complained that “one is only left to wonder why Bogard devoted quite so much space and weight and owlish contemplation of the gloom to the preliminaries.”3In addition to the accolades accorded the last chapter, reviewers, primarily academic ones, appreciated the book's exhaustive study of O'Neill's work, particularly what was then almost virgin territory for O'Neill scholars: the early unpublished works and the Cycle plays. Many noted the extensive analysis of what Bogard calls O'Neill's “borrowings.” Some, like Oates, found what she could only call O'Neill's plagiarism “upsetting.” Kelly insisted that, “baldly put, [Bogard] accuses O'Neill of being a cheat, a text thief.” Academic critics were more tolerant of this side of O'Neill's artistic process, expressing a great deal of interest in Bogard's uncovering of a long list of writers and thinkers “to whom he was indebted,” as Raleigh put it.4Finally, there was the question of the effect this hefty tome of biographical criticism had on the reader's attitude toward O'Neill. Kelly posited the book's “predominant value” as its “question[ing]” of O'Neill's “lasting significance among ‘the three or four greatest dramatists of our century,’” noting that “our greatest dramatist” left behind “only one acknowledged masterwork.” Oates wrote that it is “in many ways a disturbing book. It will certainly undermine the reader's admiration of O'Neill” as it “make[s] obvious his limitations as a thinker and as an artist…. He was uninterested, ultimately, in the larger themes he tried to write about, fashioning them only in terms of his own private doubt.”5In the fifty years since these initial reactions, Bogard's book has had an outsized influence on the study of Eugene O'Neill. Perhaps most important is its centrality to the biographical direction much of that study has taken. It is hard to escape the trajectory of O'Neill's self-made autobiographical myth, particularly when his development as a dramatist seems to fit so neatly with its tragic culmination in Long Day's Journey Into Night. As the most comprehensive exemplar of that trajectory in criticism, Contour in Time is one of the basic tools of the O'Neill scholar, along with the suitably hefty biographies by Louis Sheaffer, Arthur and Barbara Gelb, Stephen Black, and Robert Dowling, the letters edited by Bogard himself and Jackson Bryer, and the work diaries edited by Virginia Floyd.The major points in Bogard's master narrative are familiar territory to anyone who has studied O'Neill criticism. After a youth lost to tortured attempts to escape his inner pain and a subsequent stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium, Bogard tells us, O'Neill's creativity exploded in 1913 and 1914 in a raft of amateurish and undisciplined plays. In these years, O'Neill seemed to be trying every style the contemporary stage had to offer, from vaudeville sketch to Shavian discussion play, with mostly awful results. But there were some glimmers of the brilliance he was to show later, primarily in The Moon of the Caribbees, which exemplifies a form of realism not seen in the American theater before this, a theatrical idiom that was seemingly native to O'Neill. Had the playwright continued along this path, Bogard maintains, his development toward the great works of his later life might have been much quicker, but he took a circuitous route because of his susceptibility to the inferior influences that came his way.The influence that comes in for Bogard's greatest censure is that of George Pierce Baker, whose Harvard class, dominated by the professor's formulae for success in the commercial theater, Bogard says, derailed O'Neill for several years, as he tried to follow Baker's prescriptions rather than his own instinctive understanding of playwriting. Bogard writes that O'Neill “recovered from Baker's doctrine by writing Before Breakfast in unrelenting imitation of Strindberg,” the jumping-off place for “his first serious work.”6 In Strindberg, he found both the model for the battle between the sexes that seemed to emerge instinctively when women entered his plays and a context for his many self-portraits of the sensitive and suffering artist preyed upon by a materialistic and domineering woman. In Bogard's account, Strindberg is one major figure who looms over O'Neill's work from 1916 on. Another is Nietzsche, whose presence is most deeply felt in the experimental plays O'Neill wrote for the Art Theatre after coming under the influence of Kenneth Macgowan—an influence that, in Bogard's view, was to have “the same consequences of nearly ruining him as a playwright” (59) as Baker's had.Bogard writes that The Emperor Jones set O'Neill “on a path that at its farthest end was to prove artistically perilous,” for in writing it, he “accepted the dicta of the American Art Theatre movement and began to write plays that moved far from his realistic style” (135). The wrongheaded modernist works include especially the plays he wrote as part, along with Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, of the “triumvirate” running the Experimental Theatre Inc.: Welded, The Ancient Mariner, All God's Chillun Got Wings, The Fountain, The Great God Brown. Exempted from this censure is Desire Under the Elms. It was produced by the triumvirate but in Bogard's view exemplifies a technical experimentation that “is no longer self-assertively symbolic”; in it, rather, “experiment serves realism and also, unobtrusively, opens the play to full perspectives” (200). Bogard asserts that the play, imbued with the Nietzschean conception of tragedy and a Strindbergian conception of women, “fulfills the promise of O'Neill's early career and is the first important tragedy to be written in America” (200).In a tour de force of analysis, Bogard devotes twenty-six pages to Desire Under the Elms, more space than he gives to Long Day's Journey Into Night, even finding a way to praise the dialogue, which, he writes, “extends its meanings by overtone and implication to present both the multi-levels of the characters' consciousness and, at the same time, their symbolic significance, welding both particular and general into a tonal pattern that has appropriateness, broad meaning and beauty” (210). He concludes that Desire is “a major work of art prepared by a playwright who in mastering his craft and completely understanding the implications of his theme had finally come of age” (225). Bogard does not offer an opinion as to how the same Art Theatre influences that drew O'Neill off the rails as a playwright succeeded in combining with him on this manifestly successful fusion of realist and modernist theater.To the more mature works of the modernist theater that O'Neill produced with the Theatre Guild, Marco Millions, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, and Days Without End, Bogard devotes considerably less time. In his schema, these plays are of interest primarily as they exemplify the influence of Strindberg and Nietzsche on O'Neill's search for God or God-replacements, which Bogard considers the unifying thread in O'Neill's work from this period. In his discussion of Strange Interlude, for example, Bogard focuses on Nina as a Strindbergian heroine and “God-force,” in which a man “can achieve a sense of belonging he can obtain nowhere else in life” because “her possessive greed for his love provides his means of belonging” (300). For Bogard, “Nina's attempt to discover and to belong to the force from which she takes her life, and the attempt of the men to belong to the God in her, is at heart O'Neill's primary theme” (314). He downplays the play's psychological considerations, complaining that “although the essence of the theology is there, it is ‘masked’ by the psychological intimations of the new dialogue” (315), and he virtually ignores O'Neill's treatment of World War I and American history generally, which give the play a good deal of its dimension.With Mourning Becomes Electra, Bogard finds O'Neill at another significant turning point, as he takes the Oresteia for his model, situates his play clearly within the historical context of the Civil War, vows to write a “modern psychological play—fate springing out of the family” (338), and, after some experiments with masks and the Interlude technique in early drafts, decides to abandon what Bogard calls the “Art Theatre Show Shop” and “write plays primarily as literature to be read” (340). In his trilogy, Bogard suggests, O'Neill also leaves the old theological and philosophical problems of the earlier plays behind and concentrates on ethical ones. Hope is gone for all the characters, and “what is left is damnation, an acknowledgment of guilt and acceptance of the consequence: human obligation” (353). He groups this play with Ah, Wilderness! as historical plays, a stage in O'Neill's journey toward the last great plays whose subject is “what lies within himself” (355).Bogard places the Cycle plays not in the history chapter, but in the final autobiographical one. To him the “Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed” is not so much about America as about “a Strindbergian pattern of female domination over the male…. Woman's dream is of corruptive and spectacular power; man's dream is of perfect, idealistic freedom” (406). He reads the entire Cycle as a working out of this pattern, a kind of final apotheosis of Strindberg's power over O'Neill. But he finds in the autobiographical plays the full development of O'Neill's final quest. In Bogard's view, Long Day's Journey “ended his search for identity.” O'Neill “had to write the play; literally, he lived to write it” (445). Bogard recognizes that, considering the brutal honesty with which O'Neill treats James, Mary, and especially Jamie Tyrone, his treatment of the autobiographical Edmund is less than truthful. Unlike the others, it is unclear what the past has made him and too easy to sympathize with him. He is “no more than an embittered adolescent, certainly a pale copy of what Eugene O'Neill was at that time” (432). Bogard does not at last succeed in solving this issue. Insisting on the play as a mirror, the last time O'Neill “would look to see if he was ‘there,’” he suggests that finally the playwright “understood himself as his figure was illuminated by the pain and concern of those about him. In the agony of the others, it is possible, the playwright's identity was at last to be found” (445).With the coda of A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill's final gesture of forgiveness for his brother, his quest was finished. Bogard points out that the last line he wrote for the theater was Josie's blessing on Jim Tyrone: “May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace” (452). “When he could no longer write,” Bogard says, “he died” (6). A fitting end to the myth. But he did not die. O'Neill actually lived another six years after his last work on the play for a 1947 Guild production that never got off the ground. They were six tortured years marked by his relentless physical decline, a fraught relationship with his wife Carlotta that sometimes crossed the line into psychosis, and as far as public or literary utterances went, silence. Did O'Neill find forgiveness and peace for himself? Not likely.John Stroupe, who found Bogard's book “disappointing,” stressed in his 1974 review that neither its thesis nor its approach to O'Neill was new: Surely, it is a commonplace of O'Neill criticism that the areas of action within his plays are neatly coincident with his own moral universe—that as an obsessed dramatist, his entire canon is a search for meanings in a world he finds sterile and corrupt. Certainly the complexity of O'Neill's obsessions and their relationship to his well-known psychological difficulties are the sources of his unique virtues and defects as an artist; the author's psychological state is the catalyst bringing together artistry and idea, linking each play to his own core concerns.7 What Stroupe found most disappointing about a book that contained many “telling critical insight[s]” was that Bogard chooses as his central thesis to argue the point once again: “O'Neill used the stage as his mirror, and the sum of his work comprises an autobiography. In many of his plays, with a bold directness of approach he drew a figure whose face resembled his own, and whose exterior life barely concealed a passionate, questing inner existence.”8 Stroup found Bogard's Freudian analysis “excessive” and the basic handling of his material “pedestrian.”9How does Contour in Time look to the critical eye of 2021? Some of the very characteristics that early critics saw as its weaknesses—Bogard's insistence on discussing all the plays and his relentless chronological structure—have helped to secure its place as one of the basic texts on O'Neill. Its master narrative may not have been as new as Bogard claimed it was, but his version of it has been so pervasive that it looks like received truth. O'Neill's lifetime search for meaning and his forgiveness of “the four haunted O'Neills” in his great autobiographical plays, as described in Bogard's final chapter, is a central part of our understanding of the plays. But some aspects of Bogard's master narrative seem more forced from this vantage point. To describe A Moon for the Misbegotten as “suffused with an elegiac tone” is to dismiss the first half of the play because it doesn't fit in with the placement of the autobiographical plays in Bogard's narrative. To insist on the pervasive centrality of Strindberg and Nietzsche in O'Neill's work diminishes his achievement. For example, to ignore the significant treatment of American history and culture in Strange Interlude and the Cycle plays, to portray them as fully centered on the Strindbergian woman's desire to dominate and ultimately destroy the male, is to ignore a great deal of O'Neill's accomplishment. To view O'Neill's contributions to the modernist theater as a long and wrongheaded diversion from realism is to ignore an important segment of his work as a playwright and to undervalue the important artistic achievement of The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and Strange Interlude, which Bogard labels a failure. To consistently undervalue O'Neill's use of new theatrical means of expression as the tools of a “Show Shop” of which he wisely divested himself when he came into his own is to ignore his considerable significance as an impetus for the modernist theater and all that followed from it in the twentieth century.There is a great deal in the book that still commands attention after fifty years. The analysis of Desire Under the Elms is remarkable and bears out Bogard's claim that the play manages to be a significant Nietzschean tragedy while remaining rooted in the American folk play tradition. His analysis of the fundamentally musical movement that underlies the lyricism of The Iceman Cometh should inform every reading of the play. Such insights crop up regularly in the book, amply rewarding a contemporary reading of it. What O'Neill students, scholars, and critics have discovered since the 1970s, however, is that there are many “ways in” to the work of Eugene O'Neill and that the value of the work goes far beyond O'Neill's biography. Contour in Time is a venerable work of criticism. It did its work well. It is a significant milestone on what has become a very wide and rich landscape of O'Neill criticism.The first edition of Travis Bogard's Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill is a seminal study that includes many brilliant observations about O'Neill's work and his crucial role in the development of twentieth-century drama. In hindsight, I can see that my understanding of O'Neill was forever changed by several of Bogard's perceptive and well-reasoned arguments. One particularly important observation is Bogard's assertion that The Iceman Cometh was ahead of its time because it anticipated key aspects of what would later come to be called (by Martin Esslin) the Theatre of the Absurd. Bogard explains that New York audiences may have been baffled by The Iceman Cometh's existential concerns and seeming plotlessness when it premiered in 1946, but—thanks to their subsequent exposure to the work of Beckett, Sartre, Camus, and Genet—they were finally ready to understand and appreciate O'Neill's play when it was revived in 1956 (xvi, see also 415). As Bogard puts it, O'Neill “had only to wait for his audiences to catch up with him” (xvi).Another invaluable aspect of Bogard's study is his demonstration of how traces of nineteenth-century theater persisted in O'Neill's work throughout his career. Particularly fascinating is his argument that O'Neill always wrote for “flamboyant” pre-Stanislavsky actors like his father whose “semi-presentational style of acting … placed a heavy emphasis on rhetoric and stances of formal delivery” (xvii)—actors described by O'Neill himself as “big-chested, chiseled-mug, romantic old boys who could walk onto a stage with all the aplomb and regal splendor with which they walked into the Hoffman House bar, drunk or sober” (qtd. in xvii). As Bogard argues: That the last plays do not appear to be written [for such actors] … is something of an illusion…. A large part of the characterization of both Cornelius Melody and James Tyrone rests in their being actors performing in the old, romantic tradition of O'Neill's father's theatre. Thus “performance” becomes in the late plays an element of characterization and theme, totally incorporated into the context of the play. (xviii) Important too are the numerous occasions when Bogard demonstrates the influence on O'Neill of Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sinclair Lewis, and August Strindberg. However, in focusing on these writers (and others from the Anglo-American canon and continental Europe), Bogard reveals the main weakness in his study: his failure to fully appreciate the impact of Ireland and Irishness on O'Neill and his work. In 1946 O'Neill told journalist Croswell Bowen: “The one thing that explains me more than anything about me is the fact that I'm Irish. And, strangely enough, it is something that all writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.”10 Bogard, unfortunately, is among the many critics who have “overlooked”—or, more accurately, significantly underestimated—the fundamental importance of O'Neill's status as “thoroughly Irish,” to reference a judgment attributed to James Joyce.11How does this “blind spot” manifest itself in Contour in Time? Variously. For example, Bogard fails to see the WASP/Irish Catholic tensions in many of the early works, including Abortion, The Movie Man, The Rope, The Straw, and The Hairy Ape. Neither does he seem to be aware of the importance of “race memory” within Irish discourse throughout the early to mid-twentieth century—see, for example, writers such as AE, Frank O'Connor, and Seán Ó Faoláin, and the persistence of Famine-related folk beliefs such as “the hungry grass.” Therefore, when writing about The Emperor Jones, Bogard doesn't recognize the degree to which O'Neill would have been able to relate to the title character's sense of being haunted by the traumas that befell one's ancestors: O'Neill's father, after all, was a Famine immigrant.Interestingly, writers from the African Diaspora have recognized the psychic link that O'Neill shared with Brutus Jones, as well as his sense of alienation from hegemonic WASP society. Consider, for example, Jamaican playwright Dennis Scott's intertextual use of both The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape in his classic 1974 play about “race memory,” An Echo in the Bone. O'Neill's ability to relate to African Americans is also evident in his decision to model key aspects of the interracial couple at the heart of All God's Chillun Got Wings—African American Jim and Irish American Ella—after his own parents, including giving them his parents' first names. Bogard does not realize that in this play O'Neill is attempting to examine not just white American views regarding African Americans, but also, more specifically, white Irish American perspectives. In All God's Chillun, O'Neill demonstrates his awareness that some Irish people in America have made important interpersonal, cultural, and political links with African Americans by understanding that past Irish suffering demands siding with the oppressed, while other Irish Americans have leveraged their whiteness and engaged in appalling acts of racism in order get ahead in the United States. And still others, like Ella Downey, have ended up stuck between these two irreconcilable positions.It should be noted that Bogard, in his analysis of All God's Chillun, does notice that O'Neill sympathizes with Hattie's expressions of racial pride and recognizes her warnings against trying to deny one's cultural background to attain higher socioeconomic standing in America. However, he does not link this sympathy to O'Neill's own frequently expressed Irish pride, which sometimes manifested itself in Hattie-esque tirades against the rich WASPs of New London, Connecticut (and the United States more generally). Bogard admirably explains that O'Neill's depictions of African Americans in this and other plays are problematic (and even, in places, arguably racist). Yet, because he does not fully appreciate how O'Neill's left-wing Irishness helped to give him a sense of solidarity with Black people, he cannot interrogate the aspects of O'Neill's work that have earned him important African American admirers/defenders, from W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson during O'Neill's own lifetime to Cornel West and Glenda E. Gill today.Bogard's “blind spot” regarding Irishness also results in his vastly underestimating the importance of Irish writers to O'Neill's development as a playwright. It is not until the section on 1918's Beyond the Horizon that Bogard finally (and briefly) mentions the importance of O'Neill's exposure to the work of the Abbey Theatre during their company's visit to the United States in 1911–12 (119). Thus Bogard is unable to acknowledge the influence on O'Neill's early sea plays of the literary Hiberno-English developed by J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory in their precedent drama. The language used by characters such as Driscoll and Mat Burke bears a much stronger resemblance to the early Abbey's colorful “peasant dialogue” than it does to the “turns of phrase” favored by the Irish-born people in O'Neill's own life, such as his father, his maternal grandparents, Terry Carlin, a stoker called Driscoll (who was the real-life model for Driscoll from the S. S. Glencairn plays), Lyons from “Tomorrow,” and “Yank” from The Hairy Ape. By contrast, O'Neill shows in the late masterpieces that he is perfectly capable of writing “true-to-life” (i.e., less consciously theatrical and poetic) Hiberno-English dialogue. When, at one point, Bogard does admit the possibility that the Abbey playwrights might have influenced the poetic, colloquial dialogue in early O'Neill plays, he does so grudgingly and in one sentence (O'Neill “may have learned” to write such dialogue “from the work of Synge and other dramatists of the Abbey Theatre”). And he immediately follows this up with the dismissive “Whatever the source [of inspiration]” (211, emphasis added).Because he seems unprepared to fully engage with O'Neill's admiration for Synge, Bogard does not realize that the idea of depicting the sea as an “ole davil” and a thief can be traced not only to O'Neill's personal experiences as a sailor and to writers such as Conrad, but also to Synge's one-act masterpiece Riders to the Sea. Bogard's disinclination to credit Irish writers also means that the influence of Yeats's Noh plays on O'Neill's use of masks is passed over in half a sentence (263). Likewise, while Bogard analyzes the influence of Abbey playwright T. C. Murray's Birthright on several O'Neill plays (119–23, 389–91), he misses the obvious and strong influence of Murray's Autumn Fire on Desire Under the Elms. Finally, he never links O'Neill's invocation of Pan in The Great God Brown to the preoccupation with the Greek god demonstrated by leading Irish writers throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evident, for example, in important works by Yeats, James Stephens, and—a writer whose poetry was greatly admired by O'Neill—Oscar Wilde.All that said, Bogard does occasionally show a sensitive understanding of Dublin-born Bernard Shaw's importance to O'Neill, and at one point he perceptively discusses the influence that the 1921 novel Messer Marco Polo, by the New York–born but Co. Armagh–raised Donn Byrne, had on Marco Millions (254). But these instances—together with his reflections on Murray's Birthright—are the exceptions that prove the rule.On a related note, one imagines that Bogard's distance from, and perhaps his reticence to learn more about, a specifically Irish Catholic identity accounts for several other curious moments in the book. One example is the passage in which Bogard implies that O'Neill's biographers have made too much of the fact that O'Neill was a “renegade Catholic,” given that the playwright “left the Church early, as a boy” (323). As someone raised Catholic, I can confirm that I have been involved in many discussions with other “born Catholics” in which we marvel at the strong and enduring imprint that the Church made upon our souls and psyches during our formative years. There is also the moment when Bogard describes the title of Days Without End as coming “from the [Anglican] Book of Common Prayer” (326). Of course, O'Neill would have known the phrase as being the ending of the prayer that Catholics refer to (a touch irreverently, I always thought) as the “Glory Be”—and also as a translation of the last line of various Latin prayers commonly used during the pre–Vatican II Mass. Essentially, Bogard fails to recognize that being a Catholic in a Protestant-dominated society has a significant impact on a writer's art. As a result, he ends up undermining one of his book's notable strengths: for all of his penetrating analysis of Conrad's influence on O'Neill, Bogard fails to consider that O'Neill's ability to relate to Conrad's fiction might in some way be linked to Conrad's status as a Polish “lapsed Catholic” in Protestant England.It is arguably churlish to focus so much on Bogard's “blind spot” regarding Ireland and Irishness or on certain errors and omissions related to Roman Catholicism, given that his classic study has numerous, undeniable strengths. Indeed, I am fully aware of the debt that I owe to Bogard when it comes to the memorable arguments from his book that I recalled easily and have highlighted above, and I am certain that my sense of several O'Neill plays—as well as O'Neill's development as a writer—has been forever marked by Bogard's frequently profound analysis. This is another way of saying that Bogard's Contour in Time still has much to teach O'Neill critics, regardless of its Irish and Catholic lacunae and despite the new approaches to O'Neill's work (and the n