Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy

Black, a professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and a psychoanalytic therapist, clearly states his central thesis in a prefatory chapter. ""O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning,"" Black argues; his plays were the vehicles through which the playwright explored his tortured relationships with his father, mother and brother, and came to terms with their deaths, which all occurred in a devastating three-year period at the beginning of O'Neill's career. While this premise may sound simplistic, Black's examination of its manifestations in O'Neill's art is rich and complex. With his guidance, plays like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude reveal the dramatist's intense interest in (and use of) Freudian theories, making Black's psychoanalytically oriented approach appropriate. Yet the author does not insist on that approach as the only one; indeed, he makes a cogent case for the tragic worldview O'Neill (1888-1953) imbibed from Greek drama as a means by which the playwright developed a more objective view of his family and shed some of his guilt over the pain he inflicted on them. In his stimulating consideration of the late plays (Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten), which he believes contain strong comic elements usually ignored, Black paints a moving portrait of an artist who ""had passed beyond mourning and tragedy."" His thoughtful and provocative analysis does not supersede Louis Sheaffer's magnificent two-volume biography (O'Neill: Son and Playwright, 1968; O'Neill: Son and Artist, 1973), nor does it tell the whole story. Nonetheless, Black offers many fresh insights into the great American dramatist's life and work. 40 illus. (Dec.)