Books in Brief

More Stately Mansions, by Eugene O’Neill (Yale, $7.50). A stone-dark parable in three acts about the Kingdom of Hell as three members of thé Harford family find it in a mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts landscape. The borders of Simon Harford’s world are set by the log cabin, where he has made blueprints for a national Brook Farm, and the city factory, where he gives up Rousseau and Andy Jackson for Adam Smith. The battle within these borders has its symbolic soldiers without, in the persons of Simon’s mother, whose touch of the poet is blackened by the stain of madness, and his wife, whose self-proclaimed lucidity about life as it is really lived naturally resolves itself into sensuality and acquisitiveness. The Harfords are dreamers all without honesty, but the Father of O’Neill’s infernal land is less the Father of Lies than the Father of Greed. Possession of goods is merely the shadow of possession of one’s fellow man, and the play is long in its examination of the infinite, minute implications of human rapacity. In the twilight before the defeat of possessor and possessed, O’Neill allows his characters only the vision that at the end of every dream of liberty is the slave who is the self, to whom the master, the self, is enslaved. The Hartfords strive for the antique stature and self-explained significance the author seemed to want for them, but fall short of both and the dialogue comes in ungainly slabs of lumber to be tripped over and wondered at. The play, published as shortened by Karl R. Gierow and edited by Donald Gallup, was to have been the fourth in the nine-play cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

R. Bemis

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More Stately Mansions, by Eugene O’Neill (Yale, $7.50). A stone-dark parable in three acts about the Kingdom of Hell as three members of thé Harford family find it in a mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts landscape. The borders of Simon Harford’s world are set by the log cabin, where he has made blueprints for a national Brook Farm, and the city factory, where he gives up Rousseau and Andy Jackson for Adam Smith. The battle within these borders has its symbolic soldiers without, in the persons of Simon’s mother, whose touch of the poet is blackened by the stain of madness, and his wife, whose self-proclaimed lucidity about life as it is really lived naturally resolves itself into sensuality and acquisitiveness. The Harfords are dreamers all without honesty, but the Father of O’Neill’s infernal land is less the Father of Lies than the Father of Greed. Possession of goods is merely the shadow of possession of one’s fellow man, and the play is long in its examination of the infinite, minute implications of human rapacity. In the twilight before the defeat of possessor and possessed, O’Neill allows his characters only the vision that at the end of every dream of liberty is the slave who is the self, to whom the master, the self, is enslaved. The Hartfords strive for the antique stature and self-explained significance the author seemed to want for them, but fall short of both and the dialogue comes in ungainly slabs of lumber to be tripped over and wondered at. The play, published as shortened by Karl R. Gierow and edited by Donald Gallup, was to have been the fourth in the nine-play cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

R. Bemis