The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In the novel there are four Makioka sisters, and they have a delicate problem. The third sister, Yukiko, is unmarried, and remains so almost throughout the book despite the determined efforts of the second sister, Sachiko, to find her a suitable hus- band. Meanwhile the fourth sister, the liberated and rather "loose" Taeko, would be only too glad to get married, to whomever is her unsuitable beau of the moment, but is pre- vented from doing so by the polite social convention that the sisters must marry in order of age. This sets the stage for a pro- longed and subtle comedy of manners that shows TanizakTs lit­erary talents at their fertile best.

Relatively subdued in The Makioka Sisters, in comparison to some of his other works such as Naomi (1924) or A Cat, a Man, and Two Women (1936), is the undercurrent of obsessive

and somewhat fetishistic sexuality that many readers identify as the hallmark of TanizakTs writing. A critic once quipped that ali of Tanizakfs novйis are about a man's search for a perfect woman to be abused by. This element of suppressed weirdness lurking beneath the surface of things leads some people to regard Tanizaki as an acquired taste, and others (I, among this group) to find him oddly wonderful. I invite you to see for yourself.

J.S.M.

I 15

EUGENE 0'NEILL

1888-1953

Mouming Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night

Despite his unquestioned position as the greatest of American dramatists, the original edition of this book omitted Eugene 0'Neill. At that time (1960) I did not feel that he ranked with such figures as Shaw [99] and Ibsen [89]. I still hold to this opinion. During the years since his death, however, it has become clear that his appeal did not die with him. His plays continue to be revived both here and abroad. He has become a classic figure, exerting an influence far transcending his histori­cal importance as the first truly serious dramatist ever to write for the American stage.

It is interesting that 0'Neill maintains and even strengthens his position despite the fact that his plays, when read, lack cer­tain literary qualities. He is almost entirely humorless. When he essays the lyric flight, trying for elegance or beauty of lan- guage, he sounds mawkish, even naive. Worst of ali, for a play- wright specializing in characters who use the vernacular, he has a tin ear for dialogue. There is something not grossly but subtly wrong, for example, with the presumably low-life phrasing of the speakers in one of his finest plays, The Iceman Cometh.

Yet on the stage these defects, and other literary weak- nesses, are hardly noticed, so powerful is his emotional thrust, so insistent the reiteration of his bleak theses. And even on the page his power forces its way through, at least in his best work.

Much of 0'Neill is, or was in its day, experimental in tech- nique: the use of masks; the fresh employment of that old standby, the soliloquy; enormously long and multidivisional dramas; the abandonment of realism in favor of an expression- ism influenced by the Swedish dramatist Strindberg; the rehandling in modern terms of plots from the classical Greek drama that we have discussed under Aeschylus [5], Sophocles [6], and Euripides [7].

The most successful example of the latter is the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra. The Clytemnestra-Agamemnon- Electra-Orestes story is ingeniously transferred to a New England post-Civil War setting. 0'Neill, decisively influenced by the Greeks, is trying here to write pure tragedy, a dramatic mode rather foreign to the American stage tradition. Its force, however, derives less from the fatalities implicit in the plot than from a sense the reader gets that 0'NeilPs own conflicts are here transmuted.

This is even truer of the other two recommended plays. To my mind they are his masterpieces, both derived from intense personal experience, both dealing not with the periphery of life, but with the most agonizing questions man can ask of the cosmos.

The Iceman Cometh is about failure, not only the failure of the whisky-sodden derelicts in Harry's Bar, but the failure of perhaps ali of us. It is relentless both in its stripping away of the illusions by which we live and its bitter demonstration that without them we could not live at ali.

Long Day⁹s Journey into Night is probably the most striking example in dramatic literature of a nakedly autobiographical play. Its characters are 0'NeilPs family, its tragedy theirs, its hopelessness his own.