The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh

 

The Iceman
Cometh

 

Eugene O’Neill

With a Foreword by

Harold Bloom







 

YALE NOTA BENE

Yale University Press  New Haven and London

First published as a Yale Nota Bene book in 2006.

Copyright © as an unpublished work by Eugene O’Neill 1940; copyright ©

renewed by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill 1967.

Copyright © 1946 by Eugene O’Neill.

Copyright © renewed 1974 by Oona O’Neill Chaplin.

Foreword copyright © 1987 by Harold Bloom. Foreword originally published in a slightly different version by Chelsea House in its Modern Critical

Interpretation Series. Foreword reprinted with permission of Chelsea House

Publishers, an imprint of Infobase Publishing.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by

Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

   U.S. office   [email protected]

   Europe office   [email protected]

Set in Garamond type by Tseng Information Systems.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006903367
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11743-1 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-300-11743-4 (pbk.)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Iceman Cometh, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including Canada, and all other countries of the copyright union, is subject to royalties. All rights, including professional and amateur performance, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. All inquiries regarding production rights to this play should be addressed to William Morris Agency, Inc., 1325 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, Attn. Samuel Liff. All other inquiries should be addressed to Yale University, Office of the General Counsel, P.O. Box 208255, New Haven, CT 06520-8255, or to Herbert P. Jacoby, Lacher & Lovell Taylor, 750 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10022.

Foreword

HAROLD BLOOM

 

I

It is an inevitable oddity that the principal American dramatist to date should have no American precursors. Eugene O’Neill’s art as a playwright owes most to Strindberg’s, and something crucial, though rather less, to Ibsen’s. Intellectually, O’Neill’s ancestry also has little to do with American tradition, with Emerson or William James or any other of our cultural speculators. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud formed O’Neill’s sense of what little was possible for any of us. Even where American literary tradition was strongest, in the novel and poetry, it did not much affect O’Neill. His novelists were Zola and Conrad; his poets were Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne. Overwhelmingly an Irish American, with his Jansenist Catholicism transformed into anger at God, he had little active interest in the greatest American writer, Whitman, though his spiritual darkness has a curious, antithetical relation to Whitman’s overt analysis of our national character.

Yet O’Neill, despite his many limitations, is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most: Williams, Miller, Wilder, Albee, Kushner, perhaps Mamet and Shepard. A national quality that is literary, yet has no clear relation to our domestic literary traditions, is nearly always present in O’Neill’s strongest works. We can recognize Hawthorne in Henry James, and Whitman (however repressed) in T. S. Eliot, while the relation of Hemingway and Faulkner to Mark Twain is just as evident as their debt to Conrad. Besides the question of his genre (since there was no vital American drama before O’Neill), there would seem to be some hidden factor that governed O’Neill’s ambiguous relation to our literary past. It was certainly not the lack of critical discernment on O’Neill’s part. His admiration for Hart Crane’s poetry, at its most difficult, was solely responsible for the publication of Crane’s first volume, White Buildings, for which O’Neill initially offered to write the introduction, withdrawing in favor of Allen Tate when the impossibility of his writing a critical essay on Crane’s complexities became clear to O’Neill. But to have recognized Hart Crane’s genius, so early and so helpfully, testifies to O’Neill’s profound insights into the American literary imagination at its strongest.

The dramatist whose masterpieces are The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and, in a class just short of those, A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet, is not exactly to be regarded as a celebrator of the possibilities of American life. The central strain in our literature remains Emersonian, from Whitman to our contemporaries like Saul Bellow and John Ashbery; even the tradition that reacted against Emerson—from Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville through Gnostics of the abyss like Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon—remains always alert to transcendental and extraordinary American possibilities. Robert Penn Warren must be the most overtly anti-Emersonian partisan in our history, yet even Warren seeks an American Sublime in his still-ongoing poetry. O’Neill would appear to be the most non-Emersonian author of any eminence in our literature.