O’Neill: Playwright as Irishman

Eugene O’Neill never grew up. To some degree, this was his inheritance. Still to an extent a clan society, and a matriarchal one at that, the Ireland of the last century had learned to cling fiercely to its own. Resenting their alien government, Irishmen relied more heavily on the family, yet they had no clan-arranged wedding plan to keep marriage from becoming that severance from family which all clan-groups fear. Whence the Irish loyalty, family closeness and, sometimes, immaturity.

O’Neill, acutely sensitive to racial background, was enough an heir of this spirit to fight it. All his life and work were an attempt—at which he failed—to sever himself from his family. As a youth he ran away to the sea, trying to escape his home. And in his dramaturgy, the sea, fog, even death beckoned him because they promised release. To have roots meant having an anchor, and he would tear up the anchor to drift in isolation through the fog or the foam which seals away the world. In his alias as Edmund Tyrone he said, “The fog was where I wanted to be . . . alone with myself in another world where life can hide from itself.” But he had said this many times before in aliases less obvious, like Anna Christie’s: “I love this fog. I feel as if I was out of things altogether. … It makes me feel clean, ’sif I’d taken a bath.”

GW

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Garry Wills

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Eugene O’Neill never grew up. To some degree, this was his inheritance. Still to an extent a clan society, and a matriarchal one at that, the Ireland of the last century had learned to cling fiercely to its own. Resenting their alien government, Irishmen relied more heavily on the family, yet they had no clan-arranged wedding plan to keep marriage from becoming that severance from family which all clan-groups fear. Whence the Irish loyalty, family closeness and, sometimes, immaturity.

O’Neill, acutely sensitive to racial background, was enough an heir of this spirit to fight it. All his life and work were an attempt—at which he failed—to sever himself from his family. As a youth he ran away to the sea, trying to escape his home. And in his dramaturgy, the sea, fog, even death beckoned him because they promised release. To have roots meant having an anchor, and he would tear up the anchor to drift in isolation through the fog or the foam which seals away the world. In his alias as Edmund Tyrone he said, “The fog was where I wanted to be . . . alone with myself in another world where life can hide from itself.” But he had said this many times before in aliases less obvious, like Anna Christie’s: “I love this fog. I feel as if I was out of things altogether. … It makes me feel clean, ’sif I’d taken a bath.”