| Chapter 1: | Radicalizing the Discourse of American Drama |
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day and will retire in a body to [our] estates.” Therefore, three years later, the editors declared that we are tired of the job, although it has been a lot of fun…So we are merrily concluding our performance.32 Granted that this journalistic sojourn was no O’Neillian milestone, nonetheless, it did represent a rare instance of O’Neill officially taking part in an organization. Even so, as inadequate as this venture was, Nathan’s antic “Whatever-it-is-I’m-against-it” editorial policy was in harmony with O’Neill’s ultimate rejection of popular wisdom, group efforts, or party politics of any kind. After Nathan had helped put O’Neill in the national spotlight, other critics followed Nathan’s lead. When Barrett Clark first offered a more scholarly approach in 1926, he placed O’Neill with European playwrights; he was content to comment on O’Neill’s admiration for Nietzsche and let O’Neill be a modernist artist, and, like Nathan, Clark had no interest in O’Neill’s politics. It was as though the explicit anarchistic, anti-bourgeois sentiments of his characters were just lines in a play. This was not unusual, but consider the illogic. When O’Neill’s plays made references to the sea, drinking, or the “hard life,” these were regarded as dramatic illustrations of his personal experience. Not so when his characters denounced capitalism, espoused anarchism, or even assailed America herself, these speeches were seemingly disconnected from any genuine ideology. This concentration of identification with the personal at the expense of the political continued through the remainder of his career. Of course, the greatest and seemingly irrefutable, explanation for this analytical course is O’Neill’s supposed last will and testament Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Doris Alexander’s recent study of O’Neill’s final plays has revived the controversy about the playwright’s “testament.” If we accept the notion that the personal depoliticizes, we observe that there has been an almost Pirandellian cast to the way Long