Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of ...

Day’s Journey has been perceived by scholars even when the evidence of performance contradicts O’Neill’s own text. Additionally, Alexander reminds us of something we do not want to know: Long Day’s Journey’s famous inscription to Carlotta was no more than that; it was not intended as some sort of explanatory prologue to the play. Alexander demonstrates that self-serving machinations by O’Neill’s widow set the play on the autobiographical course followed so relentlessly by so many. The forerunner of this was Brooks Atkinson (1894–1984), who declared that the play was “as personal and as literal as drama can be.”³³(In those days, the New York Times’ Atkinson was the most beloved and widely read drama critic in the country––he even had a Broadway theatre named after him when he retired.) Nonetheless, even in Long Day’s Journey there are several bitter exchanges among the Tyrones assailing American hypocrisy and genteel complacency.

It is not only that mainstream reviewers or genteel academics overlooked O’Neill’s radicalism; leftist intellectuals abjured him because he rejected Marxism. Shortly after O’Neill’s death, and on the eve of his reputation’s revival, Masses and Mainstream published articles by two leading Marxist screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Lester Cole (both were among the “Hollywood Ten” imprisoned for contempt of Congress in 1947) who savaged the late playwright.³⁴ Lawson blames the “tragedy of Eugene O’Neill” on his enslavement to “current fashions in bourgeois philosophy.”³⁵Lawson and Cole rehearse all the usual suspect ideologies in their assault on O’Neill. There is, though, a voice from the left that counters this attack. Paul Robeson, of unimpeachable radical credentials, maintained a life-long admiration for O’Neill, and Robeson’s performances in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings were signal events in the raising of Robeson’s political consciousness.