They stage remarkably, and hold me in the audience, though they give neither aesthetic pleasure nor spiritually memorable pain when I reread them in the study.

For sheer bad writing, O’Neill’s only rival among significant American authors is Theodore Dreiser, whose Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy demonstrate a similar ability to evade the consequences of rhetorical failure. Dreiser has some dramatic effectiveness, but his peculiar strength appears to be mythic. O’Neill, unquestionably a dramatist of genius, fails also on the mythic level; his anger against God, or the absence of God, remains petulant and personal, and his attempt to universalize that anger by turning it against his country’s failure to achieve spiritual reality is simply misguided. No country, by definition, achieves anything spiritual anyway. We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality.

Whether the confessional impulse in O’Neill’s later plays ensued from Catholic praxis is beyond my surmise, though John Henry Raleigh and other critics have urged this view. I suspect that here too the influence of the non-Catholic Strindberg was decisive. A harsh expressionism dominates Iceman and Long Day’s Journey, where the terrible confessions are not made to priestly surrogates but to fellow sinners, and with no hopes of absolution. Confession becomes another station on the way to death, whether by suicide, or by alcohol, or by other modes of slow decay.

Iceman’s strength is in three of its figures: Hickman (Hickey), Slade, and Parritt, of whom only Slade is due to survive, though in a minimal sense. Hickey, who preaches nihilism, is a desperate self-deceiver and so a deceiver of others, in his self-appointed role as evangelist of the abyss. Slade, evasive and solipsistic, works his way to a more authentic nihilism than Hickey’s. Poor Parritt, young and self-haunted, cannot achieve the sense of nothingness that would save him from Puritanical self-condemnation.

Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion. Hickey, once a great sustainer of illusions, arrives in the company of “the Iceman of Death,” hardly the “sane and sacred death” of Whitman, but insane and impious death, our death. One feels the refracted influence of Ibsen in Hickey’s twisted deidealizings, but Hickey is an Ibsen protagonist in the last ditch. He does not destroy others in his quest to destroy illusions, but only himself. His judgments of Harry HOPE’s patrons are intended not to liberate them but to teach his old friends to accept and live with failure. Yet Hickey, though pragmatically wrong, means only to have done good. In an understanding strangely akin to Wordsworth’s in the sublime Tale of Margaret (The Ruined Cottage), Hickey sees that we are destroyed by vain hope more inexorably than by the anguish of total despair. And that is where I would locate the authentic mode of tragedy in Iceman. It is Hickey’s tragedy, rather than Slade’s (O’Neill’s), because Hickey is slain between right and right, as in the Hegelian theory of tragedy. To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory “pipe dreams” is right also.

Caught between right and right, Hickey passes into phantasmagoria, and in that compulsive condition he makes the ghastly confession that he murdered his unhappy, dreadfully saintly wife. His motive, he asserts perversely, was love, but here too he is caught between antitheses, and we are not able to interpret with certainty whether he was more moved by love or hatred:

HICKEY

Simply.

So I killed her.

There is a moment of dead silence. Even the detectives are caught in it and stand motionless.

PARRITT

Suddenly gives up and relaxes limply in his chair—in a low voice in which there is a strange exhausted relief.

I may as well confess, Larry. There’s no use lying any more. You know, anyway. I didn’t give a damn about the money. It was because I hated her.

HICKEY

Obliviously.

And then I saw I’d always known that was the only possible way to give her peace and free her from the misery of loving me. I saw it meant peace for me, too, knowing she was at peace. I felt as though a ton of guilt was lifted off my mind. I remember I stood by the bed and suddenly I had to laugh. I couldn’t help it, and I knew Evelyn would forgive me.