Irish-American through and through, with an heroic resentment of the New England Yankee tradition, O’Neill from the start seemed to know that his spiritual quest was to undermine Emerson’s American religion of self-reliance.

O’Neill’s own Irish Jansenism is curiously akin to the New England Puritanism he opposed, but that only increased the rancor of his powerful polemic in Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and More Stately Mansions. The Will to Live is set against New England Puritanism in what O’Neill himself once called “the battle of moral forces in the New England scene” to which he said he felt closest as an artist. But since this is Schopenhauer’s rapacious Will to Live, and not Bernard Shaw’s genial revision of that Will into the Life Force of a benign Creative Evolution, O’Neill is in the terrible position of opposing one death-drive with another. Only the inescapable Strindberg comes to mind as a visionary quite as negative as O’Neill, so that The Iceman Cometh might as well have been called The Dance of Death, and Long Day’s Journey into Night could be retitled The Ghost Sonata. O’Neill’s most powerful self-representations—as Edmund in Long Day’s Journey and Larry Slade in Iceman—are astonishingly negative identifications, particularly in an American context.

Edmund and Slade do not long for death in the mode of Whitman and his descendants—Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Theodore Roethke—all of whom tend to incorporate the image of a desired death into the great, triple trope of night, the mother, and the sea. Edmund Tyrone and Larry Slade long to die because life without transcendence is impossible, and yet transcendence is totally unavailable. O’Neill’s true polemic against his country and its spiritual tradition is not, as he insisted, that “its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.” Though uttered in 1946, in remarks before the first performance of The Iceman Cometh, such a reflection is banal and represents a weak misreading of The Iceman Cometh. The play’s true argument is that your own soul cannot be possessed, whether by possessing something or someone outside it, or by joining yourself to a transcendental possibility, to whatever version of an Emersonian Oversoul that you might prefer. The United States, in O’Neill’s dark view, was uniquely the country that had refused to learn the truths of the spirit, which is that good and the means of good, love and the means of love, are irreconcilable.

Such a formulation is Shelleyan, and reminds one of O’Neill’s High Romantic inheritance, which reached him through pre-Raphaelite poetry and literary speculation. O’Neill seems a strange instance of the Aestheticism of Rossetti and Pater, but his metaphysical nihilism, desperate faith in art, and phantasmagoric naturalism stem directly from them. When Jamie Tyrone quotes from Rossetti’s “Willowwood” sonnets, he gives the epigraph not only to Long Day’s Journey but to all of O’Neill: “Look into my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.” In O’Neill’s deepest polemic, the lines are quoted by, and for, all Americans of imagination whatsoever.

II

Like its great precursor play, Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh must be one of the most remorseless of what purport to be tragic dramas since the Greeks and the Jacobeans. Whatever tragedy meant to the incredibly harsh Strindberg, to O’Neill it had to possess a “transfiguring nobility,” presumably that of the artist like O’Neill himself in his relation to his time and his country, of which he observed that: “we are tragedy, the most appalling yet written or unwritten.” O’Neill’s strength was never conceptual, and so we are not likely to render his stances into a single coherent view of tragedy.

Whiteman could say that “these States are themselves the greatest poem,” and we know what he meant, but I do not know how to read O’Neill’s “we are tragedy.” When I suffer through the New York Times every morning, am I reading tragedy? Does The Iceman Cometh manifest a “transfiguring nobility?” How could it? Are Larry Slade in Iceman or Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, both clearly O’Neill’s surrogates, either of them tragic in relation to their time and country? Or to ask all this in a single question: are the crippling sorrows of what Freud called “family romances” tragic or are they not primarily instances of strong pathos, reductive process that cannot, by definition, manifest an authentic “transfiguring nobility?”

I think that we need to ignore O’Neill on tragedy if we are to learn to watch and read The Iceman Cometh for the dramatic values it certainly possesses. Its principal limitation, I suspect, stems from its tendentious assumption that “we are tragedy,” that “these States” have become the “most appalling” of tragedies. Had O’Neill survived into our present age and observed our Yuppies on the march, doubtless he would have been even more appalled. But societies are not dramas, and O’Neill was not Jeremiah the prophet. His strength was neither in stance nor style, but in the dramatic representation of illusions and despairs, in the persuasive imitation of human personality, particularly in its self-destructive weaknesses.

Critics have rightly emphasized how important O’Neill’s lapsed Irish Catholicism was to him and to his plays. But “importance” is a perplexing notion in this context. Certainly the absence of the Roman Catholic faith is the given condition of The Iceman Cometh. Yet we would do O’Neill’s play wrong if we retitled it Waiting for the Iceman, and tried to assimilate it to the Gnostic cosmos of Samuel Beckett, just as we would destroy Long Day’s Journey into Night if we retitled it Endgame in New London. All that O’Neill and Beckett have in common is Schopenhauer, with whom they share a Gnostic sense that our world is a great emptiness, the kenoma, as the Gnostics of the second century of the Common Era called it. But Beckett’s post-Protestant cosmos could not be redeemed by the descent of the alien god. O’Neill’s post-Catholic world longs for the suffering Christ, and is angry at him for not returning. Such a longing is by no means in itself dramatic, unlike Beckett’s ironically emptied-out cosmos.

A comparison of O’Neill to Beckett is hardly fair, since Beckett is infinitely the better artist, subtler mind, and finer stylist. Beckett writes apocalyptic farce, or tragicomedy raised to its greatest eminence. O’Neill doggedly tells his one story and one story only, and his story turns out to be himself. The Iceman Cometh, being O’Neill at his most characteristic, raises the vexed question of whether and just how dramatic value can survive a paucity of eloquence, too much commonplace religiosity, and a thorough lack of understanding of the perverse complexities of human nature. Plainly Iceman does survive, and so does Long Day’s Journey.