Perhaps it is time to hand O’Neill over to the sociologists, along with Dreiser and Farrell. A concern with our generic weakness is proper to their discipline, and the critic ought to deal with our particular strength as it emerges in works which exhibit the mastery known as style. O’Neill is clearly overmastered by something, and the sociologist (fresh, we may imagine, from a “content analysis” of mystery stories in which he has tabulated the number of times a father substitute is murdered or secretaries are “upgraded”) will receive him gladly.
But before we let him go let us make the strongest imaginable case on his behalf. Is he not, after all, the best poet of adolescence we have had? (Not of adolescence as a part of growing up, as in Huck Finn’s bouts with his conscience, but as a perennial state.) This may sound like the argument of the historian of ideas that a third-rate book should be remembered because it is the best instance of the principle of plenitude or the cult of filial piety. The apparent difference is that O’Neill deals with an emotional climate by which we have all been affected. The Iceman Cometh is suffused with the view that life’s alternatives are catastrophic; that a murderous self-assertion, or a retreat into the labyrinth where the minotaur waits to unman us, is the only choice of roads open to men. Hickey tries to transcend this choice—he murders his mother-wife and assumes her role. But the minotaur gets him nonetheless, and those who can do so are justified in retaining their illusion that they will act on the awful choice tomorrow. If you are in possession of the open secret that a choice of absolutes is always unreal—if you are grown up—you will find this suffocating. But can we dismiss O’Neill on this account?
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