LITERATURE: Playwright Eugene O’Neil

Another shameless steal from Jerz’s Literacy Log, I lead you to the TSL Education site for the Times Literary Supplement and Tony Kushner’s interesting piece on Eugene O’Neil. One of the main points I took from this was what the man put into his work from his personal life, and in particular his political viewpoints and how he dealt with them. This quote from the article (less the background re O’Neil’s talent and strong liberal leaning) are very near and dear to my own worried stand on political revolution:

“Like many great writers, O’Neill mistrusted the political; he viewed it as a shallow bog in which one risks getting stuck on the way to full, tragic understanding. But his mistrust, his pessimistic genius, and his aesthetic ambitions did not lead him to become a reactionary. O’Neill was a left- leaning liberal manqué with a deep respect for the successes of American democracy, and paradoxically an equally deep affinity for anarchism; as for activism, he chose to remain a guilt-wracked observer. His creed and conundrum are articulated by Larry, the fallen Wobbly in The Iceman Cometh:

“I was forced to admit, at the end of thirty years’ devotion to the Cause, that I was never made for it. I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you’re damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all questions and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.”

And later, because O’Neill never missed an opportunity to reiterate:

“By God, there’s no hope! I’ll never be a success in the grandstand – or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I’ll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die! May that day come soon!”

This is typical of my own indecision to act after spending too much time playing Devil’s Advocate with every well-meant intention to expound on matters of principle. Even afraid to put into words what the seeming lack of passion was grounded in, I admit I often keep my thoughts to myself until things resolve themselves with time or continue to fester just because it is their nature. While I’m obviously grateful for O’Neil’s works, I’m even more appreciative of his straightforward self-assessment of his own character in giving me some insight into my own.

While there are world-wide battles to fight over large scale injustice, I am too obsessive to step up to the plate without the research and consideration of all viewpoints that time just does not allow. I prefer to fight the small battles closer to home; the necessity of my family and friends to cut costly pills in half or slip them into every-other-day slots in the weekly pillbox, the rage over an insurance company’s belief that it needs to pay only $1500 of a $6000 bill for one chemotherapy session, the medical center’s belief that it needs to charge $6000 for it, the one person on the street who asks for a couple dollars for food. These I can clearly see as right or wrong, deal with and do something about.