Eugene O’Neill was one of those figures in American arts and letters whose principal stock in trade was domestic agony. His best work came from being the youngest son of a respectable but dysfunctional American Irish Catholic family. As a boy, Eugene learned about the theater through his father, one of the most famous actors of his time. The future playwright spent his adolescence as an enthusiastic rakehell, partial to drink, whores, and lowlife companions. These tastes, combined with a deliberate failure to complete his Princeton education, a bout of tuberculosis, and a spell in the merchant navy, seemed to point toward a short, dirty, and deliberately proletarian life.

But O’Neill also had a taste for literature, especially poetry and plays; his early life on tour with his father had added to this an easy familiarity with theatrical techniques. In 1912, after spending six months in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, O’Neill decided to become a playwright. He threw himself into the task, completing thirteen plays in two years. In 1916, he began his long association with the Provincetown Players, which produced many of these one-act plays.

O’Neill’s was a rather limited literary talent (his prose is often awkward and his poems range from amateurish to crude), but the shows, drawn mostly from his sea voyages and his painful family life, had a vitality and fire that caught the imagination of audiences. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and then, in 1936, the Nobel Prize.

Such a figure was bound to attract a cloud of biographers and analysts. What made him stand out among his contemporaries was a ferocious determination to grasp and exploit the painful events in his own family life. O’Neill’s work was spurred by a peculiarity of character that made him, in Louis Sheaffer’s description, “an emotional haemophiliac.” His only real predecesor in emotional ruthlessness was the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose plays had had a profound influence on O’Neill’s approach to theater (and writing).

The best of the biographical works about O’Neill are the intelligent and sympathetic treatment by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (1962, though currently being revised and expanded to three volumes) and the excellent biography by Louis Sheaffer (1968). These tell the reader almost everything worth knowing about O’Neill and his work.

Stephen A. Black’s Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy is another matter altogether. Black is both a professor of English at a Canadian university and a trained psychoanalyst. He began work on this biography at the same time that he began nine years of academic and clinical training at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute. The vast majority of his factual material appears to have been gleaned from the Gelb and Sheaffer biographies. Black says in his introduction that he avoided interviewing anyone who had known O’Neill “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.” Additional to what, he does not say, but it rapidly becomes obvious. What Black has done is to take a broad selection of information about O’Neill’s life and pour it, so to speak, in an arbitrarily liquified form into a mold formed from various psychoanalytic elements. The result is an awful warning to those who still suppose that the genre of psychobiography has anything sound to offer.

Black’s thesis is that O’Neill “spent most of his writing life in mourning.” He explains the process of that mourning in psychoanalytic object-relations theory jargon: subject and object, distinguishing “me” from “not-me,” and so on. Black speculates wildly about the motives, feelings, and other dynamics animating O’Neill and his family and friends. It would be tedious to give a long list of such instances; at a rough estimate, they make up about three-quarters of everything he has not taken from Gelb and Sheaffer or other printed sources. But one incident in particular stands out as characteristic of Black’s approach:  

Eugene believed or had heard that in the months between Edmund’s death and his own conception his mother underwent a “series of brought-on abortions.”

The knowledge [sic] of the series of pregnancies said to have been aborted between 1885 and 1887 leads one to wonder whether there had been abortions during the five years between Jamie’s birth and Edmund’s birth.

Black is asking the reader to believe that a highly conventional and devoutly Catholic nineteenth-century American lace-curtain Irish wife and mother, on tour and living cheek by jowl with her deeply Catholic and very famous Irish-American husband, managed to procure not just one, but several illegal abortions without his knowledge or consent and with no obvious physical aftereffects. Black says this proposition—the “hunch” of a son whose business is dramatic fantasy and who, it is well known, resented his mother bitterly—has “the ring of something always known and accepted as true.” He seems to sense the absurdity of the claim, but nevertheless tries to justify it:

The sheer logistical problem of arranging abortions, probably without her husband’s knowledge, while traveling about the country, would have defeated many people. But with the resourcefulness of the truly desperate, she apparently found ways. Eugene’s hunch is plausible.

Subsequently these putative abortions are treated as solid fact and used as an element in Black’s psychoanalysis.

This approach is the model for Black’s treatment of O’Neill’s inner (and much of his outer) life and its effect on the plays. Nothing escapes Black’s speculation. His text is riddled with terms such as “seems,” “it is likely,” “probably,” “possibly,” “must have been,” “one might say,” “unconsciously,” and the like, always preceding some allusion to motives, feelings, or other details that the author could not possibly have known to be true or for which he has no hard evidence, but which are subsequently treated as fact, bearing fundamentally upon his analysis of O’Neill’s life and work. Black remarks in his introduction that “Distinguishing subject from object (me from not-me) is one of the necessary achievements of human development in the first 20 or 30 years of life.” There is a corollary to that in literary (and especially theatrical) criticism: one of the necessary achievements of the métier is to distinguish the work of the artist from the vicissitudes of his personal life. These may of course affect the work, but they do not prevent the best of it from transcending the peculiar problems of the artist as an individual. Black has, in effect, reduced O’Neill’s work to a mere function of his personal pathology, and so trivialized it.

Black’s years as a professor of literature have not saved him from some strange ideas. For example, he seems to believe that Oedipus at Colonus is a comedy. The difference between tragedy and comedy, he thinks, is that “in comedy individuals are not taken so seriously.” If he knew anything about how the theater functions and how a playwright’s craft of selection and shaping actually works (on the evidence of this book he understands almost nothing of either), he might have been able to offer some useful comment on the twists in O’Neill’s writing: on his curious use of English in dialogue, which can sound like a bad translation from some other language; on his occasional tone-deafness to the musical ebb and flow of conversation, remarkable in a man whose work was still impressive enough to grip audiences and eventually to win the Nobel Prize.

Most of all Black might have noted that O’Neill, despite his reputation as a writer of “tragedy” (much stressed in this book), was not really that at all. An authentic writer of tragedy is like the classical actor in Shaw’s definition:

He can present a dramatic hero as a man whose passions … have produced the philosophy, the poetry, the art, and the state-craft of the world, and not merely those which have produced its weddings, coroners’ inquests, and executions.

Anyone who is familiar with O’Neill’s work will know that it belongs almost entirely to the latter half of that quotation. His excursions into the territory of high theatrical symbolism, like those of Strindberg, proved to be clumsy. O’Neill’s attempt to translate the majesty and poetic power of Greek myths into a totally different American culture and idiom was a brave failure. Much of his dialogue now has the dated metallic thunk of experimental period pieces. For instance, the Sandburg-style rhetoric in The Hairy Ape can be (just about) played as stylized theater, but it still sounds wooden and windily over-written today. It evokes the memory of O’Neill’s preference for plays in his head as opposed to performance on the stage.

Nevertheless, Eugene O’Neill is secure on his plinth as one of the towering figures in American theater. He remains the first of our playwrights to be respected as a serious literary figure (though not the first to be internationally successful). The great plays based on O’Neill’s dysfunctional family lay bare and dissect as few others have done the rocky, dangerous terrain of harsh domestic tensions. In tone and detail O’Neill has a broader sweep and greater emotional depth than his Scandinavian master, and—as recent productions have shown—his late plays remain formidable achievements. They--and the man who crafted them—deserve better than the self-serving academic fakery and psychobabble which smothers the reader of this awful book.

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