You’re all being too harsh on O’Neill, but why? It’s not enough in response to simply say that he is good, because he isn’t simply so.

George Orwell wrote about what he called “good-bad” books by which he meant tripe that nevertheless had real staying power. I don’t like the term, because if something is essentially bad, then it’s just bad, and trying to say anything more will make you a fan of kitsch and camp.

Better to start from the other end. There is art that is simply good. Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes. They know more than we do, or than all of us put together do, and they say it better.

Then there is small/good. Everyone loves P.G. Woodhouse (except Dylan Thomas, who wrote a snippy comment somewhere–I thought he was nuts). Some go so far as to say that he was peerless at what he did. But what he did was P.G. Woodhouse stories. They are farces. They are never anything else, they can’t be, we wouldn’t want them to be. A one trick pony–good trick, wonderful pony. (What would Terry Teachout say about small/good in music? He is writing a book on Louis Armstrong, whom he loves, and who was very good indeed. All his songs are three minutes long. Is this is a limitation, even though he covers many moods in those songs? Duke Ellington tried to write longer than three minutes, Terry believes unsuccessfully.)

Then there is flawed/good–writers who at their frequent best are good, but who have flaws or limitations that persistently pop up, or disable whole works. Wordsworth, Whitman, Henry James.

Finally there is bad/good, the inversion of Orwell. Comprehensively flawed writers who nevertheless have hold of some story, or myth that triumphs over their clumsy telling of it. Cooper Lovecraft, Dreiser.

Where is O’Neill? I would say flawed/good. The flaws are obvious. But sometimes they aren’t there. I saw a production of The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards in the role of Hickey. Robards was much too old by then. But even so the play was dynamite. I even saw a production of Strange Interlude–Groucho’s target–which mostly worked. They played the interludes as asides, not trances, and went for mordant laughs that they persuaded you were intentional. There were still plenty of unintentional laughs. (My favorite: “I don’t believe in God the Father neither.” Say it really fast.)

One way of telling what kind of a writer you have is studying the successful parodies of him. One of my favorite books is The Faber Book of Parodies–mostly by Brits, though there are some great American hit jobs (Bret Harte on Jane Eyre). A parody of a good writer can only be done by stuffing new content into his forms. So, while there are funny Shakespeare parodies, they only work by modernizing him (e.g., The Skinhead Hamlet, a five page version of monosyllabic slang and obscenities.) Flawed/good, small/good and bad/good can all be parodied by getting inside the skins of their authors. (We cannot get inside Shakespeare’s skin, or Homer’s–they are inside ours.)

Two of the very best such parodies are J.K. Stephens’s “A Sonnet,” on Wordsworth, and G.K. Chesterton’s version of “Old King Cole,” in the voice of (early) Yeats.

In conclusion, there is no parallel universe in which “From Here to Eternity” is in any way good. See the movie.