Living With It: The Comic Valedictories of Faulkner and O'Neill, "Ah, Wilderness!" and The Reivers

Abstract

All but of the Reivers' complicated, almost slapstick jokes have been played out; Colonel Linscomb and the assembled white men, awed and befuddled, try sort out how a borrowed car was traded for a stolen horse that had some fishy source of speed. Ned, the stowaway manipulator of plot, explains, Everybody got kinfolks that aint got no more sense than Bobo. Ned's is wisdom that links disparate works by Faulkner and O'Neill. Such wisdom allows my apparently incorrect title. These strangely warm, nostalgic ascents from the darkness by Nobel laureates noted for their tragic visions, these valedictions forbidding mourning, may be considered parallel Comic Valedictories--parallel in origin, in reception, and in pattern, as in ways largely unexplored, their creators led somewhat parallel lives. Strictly speaking, of course, neither The Reivers nor Ah, Wilderness! is a Valedictory. As Judith Wittenberg points out,(1) Faulkner didn't know that the book he himself called one of the funniest books ever would be his last,(2) nor did O'Neill intend that this play, which surprised him by coming easily that I'm scared of it, a play for which he told his son, I have an immense affection,(3) would be a final word--and indeed, it was not. After Wilderness came five major plays, including Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is the Janus side of Ah, Wilderness!(4) Although both Edmond Volpe's label of Faulkner's novel as a didactic fairy tale and Michael Manheim's conclusion that O'Neill is determined to trowel honey over bitterness in his play seem pejorative if not reductive,(5) readers may acknowledge that both honored valedictorians, if you will, use their comic vehicles ladle out more overt advice, especially advice the young, than they were wont do elsewhere. Curiously pious advice as it might be, it nevertheless resonates the patterns of romance delineated by Northrup Frye. From James J. Kibler and Cleanth Brooks in the sixties Judith Wittenberg and Susan Tuck more recently, readers have traced possible influences of O'Neill in Faulkner's work;(6) certainly Faulkner's 1922 article in The Mississippian is proof that Faulkner read and probably saw early O'Neill. Through mutual editors at Random House (Saxe Commins and Bennett Cerf) and through Hollywood connections (collaborator Dudley Murphy had directed Emperor Jones) he also knew more than the work of the playwright, who was only nine years his senior. What O'Neill did with fatally feuding New England farmers acting out their desires under elms, Faulkner did with Snopeses and Sartorises. What O'Neill did with the intra-family greed, jealousy, and sexual desire of the Mammons, Faulkner did with Sutpens; what O'Neill created of the masculine solidarity borne of lonely stretches in sailors' watches, Faulkner brought the wilderness of Ike McCaslin and Sam Fathers. Both interrogate the savage effects of race and gender; compare Emperor Jones and Red Leaves. Both reflect the continuing pressure of history, particularly the Civil War (Mourning Becomes Electra and Absalom! among so many others). Both get inside the skin of titanic and mad characters and into the simple minds of those who, as Anna Christie says, are poor nuts, and things happen, and we get mixed in wrong, that's all or the people who, as The Mansion's Gavin Stevens says just do the best they can ... the poor sons of bitches.(7) Those who have commented on the Faulkner-O'Neill connection point particularly their uses of the plots and devices of classic tragedy. Unremarked are the parallel uses of the plots and devices of comedy, and the nearly parallel ironic disjunction between text, whether novel or play, and subtext--the not-so-idyllic family life of these laureates. While Faulkner's novel of course allows far more characters, more playfully meandering side-trips, more subtlety, and more time engage the reader, it shares much with O'Neill's play of thirty years before. …