Nietzsche and O`Nesll: A Study in Affinity

Nietzsche and O'Nesll:
A Study in A ffin ity
Egil T drnqvist, U ppsala
“For me, he remains, as Nietzsche, in his sphere, the master, still to this day
more modern than any of us, still our leader.” 1
T hat O ’Neill should pay homage to Strindberg in his Nobel acceptance
speech is not surprising; time and again he had acknowledged Strindberg’s
influence; and now when he was addressing the Swedish Academy and the
Swedish people, it seemed an appropriate way of expressing his gratitude for
being honored with the prize. Perhaps he also took an ironical delight in
reminding the Academy of its failure to bestow its highest honor on Sweden’s
leading writer.
There was certainly much less reason to praise Nietzsche before a Swedish
audience. But to O ’Neill it seemed natural to mention him along with the
Swede, for Nietzsche was the only other writer who had exercised an influ­
ence on him comparable to that of Strindberg.
As a m atter of faet, O ’Neill became acquainted with Strindberg’s work
some half dozen years after he had familarized himself with that of Nietzsche
and, if we may believe the playwright himself and his second wife, Agnes
Boulton, Strindberg’s writings never meant quite as much to him as at
least one of Nietzsche’s works: Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a letter to the
friend and fellow writer Benjamin De Casseres, dated June 22, 1927, O ’Neill
pointed out:
W hat you say of “Lazarus L aughed” deeply pleases me - particularly th at you
found something of “Z arath u stra” in it. “Z aratb u stra”, although my w ork may
appear like a pitiable contradiction to this statem ent and my life add an exclamation point to this contradiction, has influenced me m ore than any other book I ’ve
ever read. I ran into it, through the bookshop of Benjamin Tucker, the old
philosophical anarchist, w hen I was eighteen and I ’ve always possessed a copy
since then and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is
1. Quoted from Arthur & Barbara Gelb, O ’Neill (New York, 1962), p. 814.
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m ore than I can say of alm ost any other book. (T hat is, never disappointed in
it as a w ork of art. Spots of its teaching I no longer concede.)2
Agnes Boulton has expressed herself to the same effect:
Thus Spake Z arathu stra . . . had m ore influence on G ene than any other single
book he ever read. It was a sort of Bible to him, and he kept it by his bedside
in later years as others might th at sacred book. In those early days in th e Village [i. e. ca. 1917] he spoke often of Z arathu stra and other books of Friedrich
Nietzsche, who at that time moved his em otion rath er than his mind. H e had
read the m agnificent prose of this great and exciting m an over and over again,
so that at times it seemed an expression of himself. I have some copies of N ietz­
sche th at belonged to him, which he bought and read before I knew him, and
which are copiously m arked . .. .3
It was, the Gelbs claim, in the late spring of 1907 that O ’Neill discovered
ZarathustraA Two years later he dragged Edward Keefe, a young New Lon­
don painter, to Tucker’s bookstore “for doses of Nietzsche.” 5 In 1912 he was
trying to find another proselyte for the German philosopher in Maibelle
Dodge, the New London girl he then courted, later to appear as Muriel in
A h, Wilderness! His first gift to her was a copy of Zarathustra, inscribed
with a quotation from the text which he presumably found of spécial significance.6 It is thus perfectly correct, autobiographically, that Edmund,
O ’Neill’s alter ego in Long D a y’s Journey Into Night, the action of which
takes place in August, 1912, keeps Nietzsche in his bookshelf and quotes from
ZarathustraJ
Two years later, while attending George Pierce Baker’s playwriting
course at Harvard, O ’Neill met William Laurence, another Nietzsche worshiper and - perhaps for this reason - the only classmate he felt any respect
for. Laurence had read Zarathustra in German.8 Inspired by his example,
2. The letter is in the O’Neill Collection of Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College.
I wish to thank Mrs. Carlotta Monteray O’Neill and the authorities of the library for per­
mission to quote from it. The main part of the passage quoted here has earlier been
reproduced (somewhat inaccurately) in the Gelb biography, pp. 121f.
3. A. Boulton, Part of a Long Story (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), p. 61.
4. Gelb, p. 119. The reader should be warned that due to the lack of a scholarly O’Neill
biography, my external evidence is not foolproof. I do not think, however, that there is
any reason to seriously question the reliability of the data presented by the biographers
concerning Nietzsche’s importance for O’Neill.
5. Gelb, p. 124.
6. Ibid., p. 209.
7. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (New Haven and London, 1956), pp. 11, 78.
8. Gelb, p. 275.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
99
it seems, O ’Neill now read “the whole of A lso Sprach Zarathustra in the
original,” aided by “a German grammar and a dictionary.” 9 Laurence told
O ’Neill that Brand and Peer Gynt “were expressions of the Nietzschean idea
of the individualist.” 10 Agreeing or not, O ’Neill was clearly fascinated by
Peer G ynt especially; he would recite from this play,11 and much later
he selected it as the only Tbsen play in an imaginary repertoire of twelve
favorite pieces.12
More im portant than the friendship with Laurence was the one O ’Neill
shortly afterwards struck up with Terry Carlin. Carlin, who was later to be
immortalized as Larry Slade in The Iceman Com eth, was steeped in Nietzsche
and considered himself, spiritually and intellectually, a Nietzschean super­
m an.13 His mysticism and philosophical anarchism paved the way for further
immersion on O ’Neill’s part in Nietzschean ideas.
There were others, too, who stimulated or were stimulated by O ’Neill’s
interest in Nietzsche. George Cram Cook, leader of the Provincetown Players
and in that capacity O ’NeilPs collaborator for a time, gave the German philosopher a respectful reading in 1912. George Jean Nathan, the well-known
theater critic and O ’Neill’s close friend, was in favor of certain aspects
of Nietzsche’s philosophy. H. L. Mencken, N athan’s co-editor and in that
capacity acquainted with O ’Neill, brought out an enthusiastic book on Nietz­
sche as early as 1906 and later (1920) translated D er A ntichristM Benjamin
De Casseres, finally, in 1928 published his Anathema: Litanies of Negation
with a foreword by O ’Neill, in which De Casseres was actually lauded as
something like an American Nietzsche. As if in response to O ’Neill’s comparison, De Casseres the following year brought out a book entitled The
Superman in America.
Although O ’Neill was thus by no means isolated in his worship of Nietzsche
- the radical circles in which he moved during and after World W ar I hailed
the Germ an’s revolt against what Mencken called “the booboisie” - it is
doubtful whether any other major American writer has embraced Nietzsche
9.
10.
11.
12.
Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O ’Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York, 1947), p. 25.
Gelb, p. 277.
Ibid., p. 361.
“What Shall We Play? Repertoires for a National Theatre,” Theatre Arts (Feb. 1941),
p. 147. For the impact of both Ibsen plays on O’Neill’s work, see my “Ibsen and O’Neill:
A Study in Influence,” Scandinavian Studies (Aug. 1965), pp. 217ff.
13. Gelb, p. 286. See also Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (New York,
1962), pp. 211-18.
14. Edwin Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O ’Neill (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 77.
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with quite the same ardor as did O ’Neill. A testimony to his concern with
Zarathustra are the copious excerpts he made from this work; out of the
eighty chapters which make up the book he took down passages from some
fif ty on nine large pages.15
Agnes Boulton’s information that besides Zarathustra O ’Neill read several
other works by Nietzsche is valuable; unfortunately she never mentions their
titles. A perusal of the other O ’Neill biographies adds only one. Barret
Clark reports that when he met the playwright in 1926, he noticed that
O ’Neill carried “a worn copy of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy” in his coat
pocket.16 That the work impressed O ’Neill appeared from the playbill of The
Great G od Brown, produced the same year, where there were two considerable quotations from Nietzsche’s long essay.17
The biographical evidence thus makes it quite clear that Nietzsche’s
impact on O ’Neill was both profound and lasting, of such magnitude, in
faet, that it suggests a basic spiritual affinity between the two; to chart the
nature of this affinity and to demonstrate how an understanding of O ’Neill’s
plays may profit from a Nietzschean reading are the purposes of this study.18
Since O ’Neill, unlike Nietzsche, never, aside from the plays, formulated his
view of life or tragedy at any length, we have to be satisfied with whatever
statements he made on these topics in letters - official or private - and inter­
views. There is, of course, always a danger that the views expressed in such
circumstances are topical, polemical, or in other ways un representative. Yet
these general suspicions are given little support by the views themselves,
15. The excerpts, which are now in the O’Neill Collection at Yale University Library, are
undated. It is therefore difficult to understand how Doris Alexander, no doubt referring
to the Yale excerpts, can State in her biography (p. 103) that O’Neill was “carefully copying
out excerpts” from Zarathustra “thirty years” after he had first become acquainted with
the book - that the excerpts, in other words, were made in 1937. It is significant that
O’Neill’s excerpts are from Alexander Tille’s translation of Zarathustra, brought out in
1896 and again in 1906; this must have been the rendering O’Neill came across in Ben­
jamin Tucker’s bookstore.
16. Clark, p. 5.
17. O. Cargill, “Fusion-point of Jung and Nietzsche” in O. Cargill, N. B. Fagin, and W. J.
Fisher (eds.), O ’Neill and His Plays (New York, 1961), pp. 412f.
18. Of the full-length books on O’Neill only those by S. K. Winther and Engel pay more
than casual attention to Nietzsche’s role. Doris Alexander deals with this aspect in some
of her essays, notably in “Eugene O’Neill as a Social Critic,” American Quarterly, Winter
1954, and “Lazarus Laughed and Buddha,” Modern Language Quarterly, Dec. 1956. By
far the best contribution to date is Cyrus Day's study “Am or Fati: O’Neill’s Lazarus as
Superman and Savior,” Modern Drama, Dec. 1960. The only lengthy treatment of the
topic is Esther J. Olson’s unpublished dissertation An Analysis of the Nietzschean Elements
in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Univ. of Minnesota, 1956).
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
101
which appear to be exceedingly consistent whoever the addressee might have
been. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not so, since we are here
concerned especially with O ’Neill’s tragic vision of life, a phenomenon, that
is, which is too basic to be easily changed.
Since the most obvious and fundamental affinity between Nietzsche and
O ’Neill is found in their view of tragedy, we shall begin by examining this
aspect, which will naturally cause us to consider such matters as the doctrine
of eternal recurrence, the anti-naturalistic tendency, inner division as a counterpart of Dionysiac dismemberment, and the role of music as an element
in tragedy.
Next, we shall examine the two men’s attitude to politics, religion notably Christinity - and ethics; their view of illusions as life-savers, and
their opinion of marriage.
Finally, we shall consider some correspondences between Nietzsche’s and
O ’Neill’s imagery: the symbolic use of costumes, the significance of animals,
the contrast between city and countryside.
Greek tragedy - or rather, Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy - to Nietzsche
represented the summit of human artistic endeavor. With Euripides and the
Socratic age of reason the decline began and there has been no approximation
to the Olympic heights of pre-Euripidean tragedy since; the tragic spirit was
killed by the “Socratic optimism,” that despicable heritage which enslaves
modern man.
. . . in the opera just as in the abstract character o f our mythless existence, in an
art sunk to pastim e just as in a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as
life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had revealed itself to us (BT 24) ,19
The spiritual sickness Nietzsche found in the Germany of his day, O ’Neill
found in the America of his. Nowhere, the author of M arco M illions felt,
had the Socratic optimism been carried to such extremes as in Babbit’s coun19. References to Nietzsche’s works are to sections, not pages. The following abbreviations
are used: BT = The Birth of Tragedy; Z = Thus Spake Zarathustra; A = The Antichrist. The quotations from The Birth of Tragedy refer to Wm. A. Haussmann’s trans­
lation, brought out in 1909. Thus Spake Zarathustra is quoted either in the rendering
found in O’Neill’s excerpts, i. e. in Prof. Tille’s translation qualified by some minor
copying errors, or else from Miss Bozman’s revision of Tille’s translation, brought out in
1933, Tille’s original translation being inaccessible to me. The few quotations from The
Antichrist, The Dawn, and Human, All-Too-Human are, again due to the inaccessibility
of earlier translations, based on Walter Kauffmann’s translations in The Portable Nietzsche,
New York, 1954.
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try with its shallow “pursuit of happiness,” nowhere had the amusement
industry beeome more inartistic and parasitical than along “the Great Trite
W ay” as O ’Neill liked to call Broadway.
Like Nietzsche - and in this respect most certainly influenced by him O ’Neill considered Greek tragedy (including Euripides) the unsurpassed
example of art and religion. Enacted in theaters that were also temples, it
had a religious spirit that O ’Neill found “completely lacking in modern life.”
Yet both Nietzsche and O ’Neill saw a hope of regaining the paradise
that had been lost so long ago. Thinking primarily of Wagner, Nietzsche
felt that the Germans were moving into a “period of tragedy” (BT 19).
O ’Neill’s æuvre is in itself a gigantic endeavor to recapture the spirit of
Greek tragedy within a modern framework. And he, too, in the beginning of
his career, would hopefully announce that America was “in the throes of a
spiritual awakening” and that tragedy would soon be native to its soil.20
The “pessimism of strength,” which Nietzsche considers a premise of
Greek, i. e. true, tragedy has little to do with pessimism in the common sense
of the word. It is a “predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical
in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence”
(BT 1). Nor is the effect of tragedy pessimistic; with its glad tidings that “in
spite of the perpetual change of phenomena life at bottom is indestructibly
powerful and pleasurable,” it is, on the contrary, a “metaphysical comfort”
(BT, “An A ttem pt at Self-criticism,” 1). When the spiritual climate changed
and optimistic rationalism became dominant, Greek tragedy dwindled together
with the tragic spirit from which it had sprung.
O ’Neill agreed wholeheartedly with this view. Tragedy, he frequently
declared, is not pessimistic. On the contrary,
it is the m eaning of life - and the hope. T he noblest is eternally th e most tragic.
The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual
middle cla sse rs. . . .
The optimists, he claimed, adopting a Nietzschean revaluation of tradi­
tional values, are the ones who make “life so darned hopeless.” 21
The idea that man could, by logical reasoning, plumb “the deepest abysses
of being” (BT 15) seemed to Nietzsche utterly absurd; this is precisely the
20. Gelb, p. 487.
21. N ew York Tribune, Feb. 13, 1921. Quoted from Cargill et al., p. 104.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
103
task of the arts; and art is therefore “the necessary correlative of and supple­
ment to science” (BT 14).
O ’Neill often expressed a similar skepticism towards rational thinking,
whether in life or in the theater; he made no distinction between the two.22
“Thinking,” Michael Cape says in W elded, “eliminates the unexplainable by
which we live” (481).23 And when defending the play O ’Neill made his antirational position clear. “The play,” he said, “is about love as a life-force, not
as an intellectual conception. Reason has no business in the theatre ..., any
more than it has in a church. They are both either below - or above it.” 24
The statement applies not only to W elded but to O ’Neill’s art in general,
which is characterized by constant attempts to emotionally plumb “the deepest
abysses of being.”
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche, drawing on Schiller, also stated m an’s
tragic dilemma: “Nature and ideal ... are either objects of grief, when the
former is represented as lost, the latter unattained” (BT 19). The thought
was later to be repeated with metaphorical pregnance in Z arathustra’s wellknown words: “Man is a rope, stretched betwixt beast and Superman - a rope
over an abyss” (Z P 4).
In O ’Neill’s phrasing the idea was expressed thus: “ ... man ... has lost
his old harmony with nature ... which he used to have as an animal and has
not yet acquired in a spiritual way.” 25 O ’Neill’s comment concerned especially the theme in The Hairy A pe; but, as he himself pointed out, the problem
is an ancient one and, he implied, a fundamental one as far as his own work
is concerned.
The struggle of the Nietzschean creator to raise himself above the level
of the much-too-many and attain spiritual perfection, to overcome himself
and become a superman - this is the struggle also of the O ’Neill protagonist. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had actually indicated that what
was later more explicitly considered the only worthwhile struggle of man is
in faet identical with the struggle of the tragic hero, who “prepares himself”
for “a higher joy,” “by his destruction, not by his victories” (BT 21).
22. Cf. D. Alexander, “Eugene O’Neill, 'The Hound of Heaven,’ and the 'Hell Hole’,” M o­
dem Language Quarterly (Dec., 1959), pp. 308 ff.
23. Page references to O’Neill’s plays are, if not otherwise indicated, to The Plays of Eugene
O ’Neill, Vols. I-III (New York, 1954-55).
24. Letter to George Jean Nathan, May 7, 1923, published in A. Caputi (ed.), Modern Drama
(New York, 1966), pp. 449 f.
25. Quoted from Clark, p. 84.
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In the same vein O ’Neill, like Nietzsche equating the tragic hero with
man-such-as-he-ought-to-be, declared that
A m an wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable. But his struggle
is his success! . . . . Such a figure is necessarily tragic. But to me he is not depressing; he is exhilarating!26
Robert Mayo in Beyond the H orizon and Juan Ponce de Leon in The
Fountain are examples of O ’Neill protagonists who pursue the unattainable
and thus through their noble struggle gain victory despite their seeming defeat.
Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as a metaphysical solaee and of the theatrical
experience as effeeting a sense of Dionysiac oneness with one’s fellows and
with the universe led him to believe that the pre-Socratic Greeks “could not
endure individuals on the tragic stage” (BT 10), and that the protagonists in
the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles are, in faet, only masks of the original
hero: Dionysus. A t this Dionysiac stage tragedy was still mythopoeic, was
still an “artistic reflection of a universal law” (BT 17), which could convey
an ecstatic, metaphysical experience. When, beginning with Euripides, tragedians began to draw finely individualized portraits, it was a sign that the
mythopoeic power had become corrupted by scientific reasoning. Without
nourishment from the fertile, visionary Dionysiac realm, tragedy was dwarfed
and crippled; no longer the highest human task, the true metaphysical activity, the writing of tragedy shrank to mere “quasi-anatomical preparation”
(BT 17). In W agner’s work, as we have noted, Nietzsche saw a hopeful return
to the high aim of the pre-Socratic Greeks.
Whether Nietzsche’s assumption of the anti-individualistic tendency in the
oldest Greek tragedy is historically accurate or not does not concern us here.
Right or wrong it had a definite impact on O ’Neill in his attempts to recapture what he considered the Greek tragic spirit. W hat was essential to
Nietzsche in life as in true tragedy - the two should be interchangeable! was the rapturous feeling of being, not an individual but part of the life force.
O ’Neill shared this mystical, Dionysiac feeling:
I ’m always, always trying to interpret Life in term s of lives, never just lives in
term s of character. I ’m always acutely conscious of the Force behind ...2“
26. M. B. Mullet, “The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O’Neill,” American Magazine (Nov.
1922), p. 120.
27. Letter to A. H. Quinn, ca. 1925, in Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the
Civil War to the Present Day, Vol. II (New York, 1937), p. 199.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
105
The metaphysical concern is evident everywhere in O ’Neill’s work; it is
one of the surest distinctions between him and most other modern playwrights.
By declaring himself mostly interested in the “Life in terms of lives”
aspect, O ’Neill, along with Nietzsche, favors the general, the universal, and
rejects idolatry of verisimilitude as the road to inartistic naturalism, “the
region of cabinets of wax-figures” (BT 7).28 In the last instance it is always
the image of man - not this or that man - in his internal struggle he is
trying to make vivid to us.
Thus Emma Crosby in D iff’rent, whom the critics concerned with more
topical values considered a Freudian case, O ’Neill found to be a spokesman
for us all. About Yank, in The Hairy A pe, he complained that “the public
saw just the stoker, not the symbol, and the symbol makes the play either
im portant or just another play.” 29 Michael Cape in W elded, he said,
is M an dimly aw are of recurring experience, groping fo r the truth behind the
realistic appearances of himself, and of love and life.30
The meaning of The Great G od Brown, he expounded,
is M ystery - the mystery any one m an or w om an can feel but not understand
as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth. And it is this
mystery I want to realize in the thealer.31
Through symbolic or typified characters and through parallel situations
O ’Neill tried to plumb the Dionysiac depths and convey this sense of the
mystery of existence.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his adoption of the truly mystic
Nietzschean doctrine of eternal recurrence. This doctrine, although it is usually
considered less significant than such concepts as the will to power and the
superman, apparently meant more to Nietzsche. This is not surprising, for
the doctrine of eternal recurrence is in faet the philosopher’s great attempt to
find a golden mean between what to him seemed two altogether unsatisfactory views of life: on one hand, what we might call traditional atheism, which
28. For O’Neill’s criticism of naturalism see his “Strindberg and Our Theatre,” Provincetown
Playbill, No. 1, Season 1923-24, Jan. 1924; reprinted in Cargill et al., pp. 108 f.
29. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 16, 1924, Quoted from Clark, p. 84.
30. Letter to G. J. Nathan in Caputi, p. 449.
31. New York Evening Post, Feb. 13, 1926. Quoted from Clark, p. 106.
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can give no real meaning to life, and, on the other, Christianity, which similarly deprives life per se of all meaning by regarding it as merely a preparation
for eternity. The gist of the doctrine is found in the following words by Z ara­
thustra, excerpted by O ’Neill:
Now I die and vanish and in a m om ent I shall be nothing. Souls are as m ortal
as bodies.
But the knot of causes recurreth in which I am twined. It will create me again. I
myself belong unto the cause of eternal recurrence.
I come back not for a new life, or a better life, or an eternal life, but back
eternally unto this one and the same life, in the greatest and the smallest things
(Z III 13).
The moral consequence of this is obvious: it makes every moment of life
important.
It is difficult to assess how far back the doctrine of eternal recurrence can
be traced in O ’Neill’s work. Already Anna Christie, cleansed by the sea,
voices a mystical experience, which reveals a kinship with Nietzsche’s idea:
It all seems like I ’d been here before lots of times - on boats - in this same
fog (28).
Brutus Jones has a similar experience in the Congo scene:
Seems like I know dat tree - an’ dem stones - an ’ de river. I rem em ber - seems
like I been heah befo’ (200).
It is, however, not at all certain that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is at
the root of these experiences. A nna’s mystical note may perhaps better be seen
as a verbalization of the faet that the sea is in her blood, that she has “come
home” to the positive faith in the sea - in fate - that has been her family’s
for generations. And a similar explanation may be given for Jones’s recognition of his origin. Whether or not O ’Neill was familiar with Jung’s writings
at this period (around 1920), their déja vue experiences may be taken as mani­
festations of the power of the collective unconscious.32
It is easier to see the impact of Nietzsche’s religion on statements that
refer, not to the past, but to the future or to the continuum of time. In The
First M an M artha Jayson shows a genuine, Nietzschean affirmation of life
as it is:
32. Cf. Doris Falk, Eugene O ’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the
Plays (New Brunswick, N. J., 1958), pp. 51, 66.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
107
Yes, it’s been a wonderful, glorious life. I ’d live it over again if I could, every
single second of it - even the terrible suffering .. . (580).
M artha ise a noble spirit, a creator in the Nietzschean sense, and as such
she voices the superman’s willingness not only to endure the inevitable but
to love it; her life affirmation is identical with the superman’s am or fad.
M artha’s attitude to the eternal recurrence is significantly hypothetical: if
she, individually, could live her life over again, she would do so. When the
doctrine is presented as a faet, when the recurrence of life is actually experienced, it is, as Professor Day has noted,33 no longer a question of individual
life but of “the abstraction M an” ; it concerns, in O ’Neill’s terminology, not
“lives” but “Life.”
Thus Juan Ponce de Leon’s dying revelation in The Fountain discloses to
him that his individual soul will be absorbed like a drop by the “Fountain of
Eternity” - Life - and that, as part of the Fountain, it will eternally recur.
Juan’s experience parallels even verbally Zarathustra’s; his final words are:
Oh, Luis, I begin to know eternal youth! I have found my Fountain! O F ountain
of Eternity, take back this drop, my soul! (448).
Z arathustra uses the same imagery for his identical longing; in the TilleO ’Neill version:
O sky above me! T hou gazest at me? T hou hearkenest unto my strange soul?
W hen drinkest thou the drop of dew th a t h ath fallen down on all things earthly?
W hen drinkest thou this strange soul?
W hen, well of eternity? T hou gay, shuddering abyss of noon! W hen drinkest
thou my soul back into thyne (Z IV 10).
The equivalent in modem tragedy for the truly Dionysiac suffering, physical dismemberment (BT 19), is inner division, man tearing himself apart.
“The worst enemy thou canst meet is ever thyself,” says Zarathustra (Z I 17),
and O ’Neill echoes him when stating that “one’s inner life passes in a solitude
hounded by the masks of oneself.”34 All O ’NeilPs heroes fight primarily
against tendencies within themselves; inner division is their hall-mark. In the
experimental plays of the middle period the split is expressed by startling
devices: the removable masks in The Great G od Brown, the half-masks in
Lazarus Laughed, the thought asides in Strange Interlude, and the even physi33. Op. cit., p. 301.
34. “Memoranda on Masks,” American Spectator, Nov. 1932; quoted from Cargill et al., p. 117.
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cally split protagonist in D ays W ithout End. Unlike the Greek masks, which
were highly typified, O ’Neill’s masks closely resemble the faces of the charac­
ters. Dion’s mask “is a fixed forcing of his own face” (260), the half-masks in
Lazarus Laughed accentuate the facial traits of the characters, the Mannons
have mask-like faces, Loving’s mask is almost identical with John’s face.
O ’Neill’s interest in masks should certainly be seen in relation to the enthusiasm for masks demonstrated by his friends and collaborators Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edm ond Jones and further back by Yeats, Pound, and
especially Craig.35 Yet O ’Neill’s depth-psychological concept of the mask
appears more in line with Nietzschean thinking than with classical, oriental,
or primitive practice; with Zarathustra O ’Neill seems to be saying: “Verily,
ye could wear no better masks, ye men of the present, than your own faces!
Who could know you
(Z II 14).
In all truly productive men Nietzsche finds a rivalry between instinct, “the
creatively affirmative force,” and reason, the dissuader and critic (BT 13).
This rivalry or split O ’Neill has dramatized in D ays W ithout End, where John
represents the affirmative, instinctual drive within man and Loving the nega­
tive, rational one. The first act begins with a conversation between the two,
representing the battle of thoughts that takes place within the man John
Loving. Then a business partner enters and the conversation at once takes
on another, more superficial tone. The whole arrangement seems like a dramatization of the following words by Zarathustra:
“ I and mysclf are ever too hot in converse: how could I bear it if there w ere not
a friend?”
T o the herm it the friend is ever a third: this third is the float which hindereth
lest the converse of the two sink in the deeps (Z I 14).
It is not difficult to see the connection between Nietzsche’s “hermit” and
O ’Neill’s John the Baptist character.36
The full title of Nietzsche’s first book is The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music. Nietzsche considered music an expression of Dionysiac rap­
ture, and the meaning of tragedy was to him essentially the “manifestation and
illustration of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the
35. Cf. Engel, pp. 90 ff.
36. Cf. my “Personal Nomenclature in the Plays of O’Neill,” Modern Drama (Feb. 1966),
p. 370.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
109
dream-world of Dionysian ecstacy” (BT 14). The musical element in Greek
tragedy was embodied in the choral songs; when these were reduced in favor
of the dialogistic elements, the very foundation of tragedy was threatened. The
Wagnerian opera meant a rebirth of the spirit of music as a basis for and an
integral part of tragedy; hence Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for it.
O ’Neill’s plays, from the M ulatto’s strange crooning in Thirst (1913) to
Phil Hogan’s melancholy dirge in A M oon for the M isbegotten (1943), are
full of music, mostly popular hits or folk songs. The songs may have been
chosen for their local and historical flavor, for their melodies, their rhythm,
or their words. But the exceedingly high frequency of musical elements in the
plays - few are without any - should, I think, be seen in relation to Nietzsche
and his view of music as an integral part of tragedy.
In The Great G od Brown, the play that is particularly influenced by The
Birth of Tragedy, Cybel has a player-piano, which “is groggily banging out a
sentimental m edley of lM other-M am m y’ tunes” (278). Cybel being a nature
goddess (Cybele, the E arth Mother), her music is Dionysiac in the Nietz­
schean sense. “I love those rotten old sob tunes,” she tells Dion. “They make
me wise to people. T hat’s what’s inside them - what makes them love and
murder their neighbor - crying jags set to music!” And Dion(ysus) adds compassionately: “Every song is a hymn. They keep trying to find the word in the
beginning” (284). Folk song, Nietzsche claims, should be regarded as “the
original melody,” a musical mirroring of the cosmos, and “every period which
is highly productive in popular songs has been most violently stirred by
Dionysian currents” (BT 6). In O ’Neill’s play we witness how even Brown,
despite his contempt for the player-piano, is held by the music; no one can
wholly resist the longing for primordial oneness expressed in the Dionysiac
music.
There is a player-piano also in the Fife family (Dynamo). Mrs. Fife is
linked with the major ’musical instrument’ in the play, the dynamo; she looks
like it and worship its “metallic purr.” As much of an Earth M other as
Cybel she is clearly a Dionysiac figure; it is not accidental that her musical
surname suggests Pan’s syrinx.
In the operatic Lazarus Laughed the Dionysiac spirit of music is brought
out not only in the dance music played by Lazarus’ followers on flutes (281)
but also in the pervasive laughter, which O ’Neill, of course, borrowed straight
from Zarathustra.
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Egil Tdrnqvist
Nietzsche was basically anti-political and disliked the idea of party belonging. Kaufmann goes so far as to call the central issue of his philosophy
“the theme of the anti-political individual who seeks self-perfection far from
the modern world.”37
O ’Neill had a political fling in his youth, but as early as 1922 he had, as
far as politics are concerned, placed himself “in the grandstand” - much as
Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh.
Tim e was [O’Neill told an interviewer] when I was an active socialist, and,
that, a philosophical anarchist. But today I can’t feel that anything like
really m atters. It is rather amusing to m e to see how seriously som e people
politics and social questions and how m uch they expect from them . Life
whole is changed very little, if at all, as a result of their course.
after
th at
take
as a
This does not mean that O ’Neill would pessimistically accept the status
quo. Like Nietzsche - and even adopting the philosopher’s terminology as
though to indicate the source of his individualism - he believed that “the
birth-cry of the higher men” would come, not “by tinkering with externals”
but “at the command of the imagination and the will.”38
He agrees with Nietzsche and Marx that the capitalist state is a cold
monster. But socialism or any other party-organized revolt provides no solu­
tion, for the party, like the state, breeds deadly conformity. Nietzsche’s warning in The Dawn (section 206) that the workers are in danger of becoming
slaves either of the state or of the revolutionary party has a parallel in The
H airy A pe, where the stokers are victims of capitalism, represented by the
Steel Trust, and are in danger of becoming victims of power-hungry revolu­
tionaries like Long. Says Nietzsche:
Poor, gay, and independent - that is possible together. Poor, gay, and a slave that is possible too. A nd I would not know w hat better to say to the w orkers in
factory slavery - provided they do not consider it altogether sham eful to be
used up as they are, like the gears of a machine, and in a sense as stopgaps of
hum an inventiveness.
Phew! to believe th at higher pay could abolish the essence of their misery - I
m ean their im personal serfdom! Phew! to be talked into thinking th a t an increase in this im personality, within the m achinelike workings of a new society,
could transform the sham e of slavery into a virtue! Phew! to have a price for
which one rem ains a person no longer but becomes a gear! ( The D aw n, 206).
37. W. A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1950), p.
366.
38. The Century Magazine, Jan. 1922; quoted from Cargill et al., p. 107.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
111
The first part of the quotation deseribes the situation in the beginning of
O ’Neill’s play; and Nietzsche’s views, translated into New York waterfront
lingo, appear in Y ank’s soliloquy in Scene 7, where he satirizes the aims of
the I. W. W.:
C ut out an hour offen de job a day and m ake m e happy! G imm e a dollar more
a day and m ake me happy! T ree square a day, and cauliflowers in de front yard
- ekal rights - a w om an and kids - a lousy vote - and I’m all fixed fo r Jesus,
huh? Aw, hell! W hat does dat get yuh? Dis ting’s in your inside, but it ain’t your
belly (250).
The premise of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is the postulate that “God is
dead,” that we have destroyed our faith in Him. Nietzsche saw it as his task
to attempt to fill the terrifying void after the death of God and give modern
man a faith in which he can believe.
O ’Neill accepted Nietzsche’s postulate. Already at the age of thirteen39
he lost his Catholic faith, and although he always seems to have been longing
to return to his childhood religion, there is no indication that he ever did.40
Six years after he had given up Catholicism he became acquainted with
Nietzsche’s writings, and Doris Alexander is doubtless quite right in assuming
that it was above all as a (comparatively) meaningful substitute for his shattered faith that Nietzsche’s philosophy appealed to him.41 W hat teaching could
be more attractive to a man who shunned the creed of the Church, yet who
declared that he was primarily concerned with the relationship between man
and God!
It was apparently after he had prayed to God without avail that his mother
be cured of her drug addiction that O ’Neill lost his faith in Him .42 O ’Neill
seems to refer to this in the following lines in Long D a y’s Journey, which also
suggest his conversion from Catholicism to Nietzscheanism:
E D M U N D . ( bitin gly ) D id you pray fo r M am a?
TY R O N E . I did. I ’ve prayed to G od these many years fo r her.
E D M U N D . T hen N ietzsche m ust be right. (H e qu otes from Thus S pake Z ara­
thu stra.) “G od is dead: of His pity fo r m an hath G od died” (78-79).
39. Cf. C. Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O ’Neill (New
York, 1959), p. 9.
40. Ibid., pp. 233, 316.
41. The Tempering of Eugene O ’Neill, p. 103.
42. Gelb, p. 72.
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Egil Tdrnqvist
In an often quoted statement O ’Neill declared that there is a “big subject”
behind all his plays and he described it thus:
T he playw right today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it
- the death of the old G od and the failure of science and m aterialism to give
any satisfying new one fo r the surviving prim itive religious instinct to find a
meaning fo r life in, and to com fort its fears of death with.43
This is identieal with Nietzsche’s search for a religion that can replace
Christianity. Some ten years earlier O ’Neill had indicated that he saw the
only cure for the “sickness of today” in Z arathustra’s gospel. “The only way
we can get religion back,” he then said, “is through an exultant acceptance
of life.”44
In Lazarus Lau g hed the old God is, in a sense, represented by Jesus,
whose crucifixion is reported early in the play. Nietzsche took a respectful but
somewhat belittling attitude to Jesus; in O ’Neill’s quotation:
W hen Jesus the H ebrew knew only the tears and m elancholy of the Hebrew,
together with the hatred fo r the “good and just,” - then a longing fo r death
surprised him . . . . Perhaps he w ould have learnt how to live and love the earth
- and laugh besides.
Believe me, my brethren, he died too early. H e him self would have revoked his
doctrine. N oble enough to revoke he was (Z I 21).
This wish-thinking is actually dramatized in Lazarus Laughed. Except for
his age the old Lazarus - he who died - seems patterned on Z arathustra’s
description of Jesus. “A poor breeder of sheep,” never feeling at home in the
world, the old Lazarus was a pale, sorrowful man who rarely smiled and
“wished for death” (276). The Lazarus who is resurrected is altogether different. His first word, in answer to Jesus’ questioning eyes, is “Yes.” When
Jesus hears this, he smiles sadly “as one who from a distance of years of sorrow rernembers happiness” and calls Lazarus “My brother.” Lazarus kisses
Jesus’ feet and begins to laugh softly “like a man in love with God” (277).
Jesus, in other words, approves of Lazarus’ Zarathustrian, life-affirmative
teaching; with a variation of Nietzsche’s recantation theory it is implied that
Lazarus’ evangel is an adequate expression of Jesus’ faith before he knew
sorrow, before he began teaching his other-worldly gospel; and that Jesus is
ready to return to his earlier faith. In this way the antithesis between Jesus
43. Letter to G. J. Nathan in Nathan’s “The Theatre,” American Mercury (Jan. 1929), p. 119.
44. Gelb, p. 520.
N ietzsche and O ’Neill
113
and Zarathustra is resolved; to O ’Neili’s Catholic-Nietzschean mind this fu­
sion of the two no doubt expressed a deeply felt need.
There was only one true Christian, Nietzsche held, “and he died on the
cross” (A 39). Nietzsche’s violent attacks on dogmatized and institutionalized
Christianity have an easily recognizable counterpart in O ’NeilPs work, even if
the playwright is more tempered and vacillating in his criticism: witness the
sympathetic portraits of Luis, the poet-monk in The Fountain, and of Father
Baird in Days W ithout End.
Already the disciples showed the most unevangelical feeling, Nietzsche
found, when they demanded retribution for the crucified M aster (A 40).
O ’Neill expressed this with pungent dramatic irony in Lazarus Laughed,
when he let the messenger’s announcement of Christ’s death be followed by
M ary’s savage, Old Testament cry: “An eye for an eye! Avenge the M aster!”
(290).
There is, I beheve, a more disguised allusion to the Nietzschean antithesis
between Christ and his disciples in Anna Christie, a play which, as Professor
McAleer has shown,45 is permeated with Christ symbolism. Anna Christie,
we learn, was an innocent young girl until Paul, one of her cousins and “the
youngest son” in the family where she stayed, raped her. After this event she
moved from the country to St. Paul, where her prostitution began.
It is hardly accidental that the name Paul occurs twice and is both times
connected with Anna Christie and depravity. Anna is described as “tall,
blond . . . handsome after a large Viking-daughter fashion” (13). She is a
noble pagan, not unlike Nietzsche’s “blond beast”.46 Paul, it will be recalled,
was the ‘youngest’ of the ‘true’ apostles and is known especially as the apostle
to the pagans. Nietzsche despised him and considered him the first one to
pervert the evangel by substituting mere faith in Christ for Christ-like liv­
ing.47 In O ’NeilFs play the cousin Paul’s hypocrisy is only hinted at; but
Paul has a counterpart in Mat(thew) Burke, another ‘apostle’ to judge by
his name. Says Anna about Paul: “I hated him worse’n hell and he knew it.
But he was big and strong - (Pointing to Burke) - like you!” (57). Mat makes
45. “Christ Symbolism in Anna Christie," Modern Drama, Feb. 1962.
46. Nietzsche’s blond beast is referred to in the unpublished N ow 1 Ask You (1917) by a
character significantly named Leonora, nicknamed Leo. There are typescripts of this play
in the Library of Congress and in the university libraries at Harvard and Yale.
47. See Kaufmann, p. 302.
2
Egil Tdrnqvist
114
much of his Catholic faith and considers Anna a “haythen” but cares little
about leading a Christ-like life himself.
Seen in this Nietzschean light, Paul’s rape of Anna, her subsequent suffer­
ing from the supposedly “nice inland fellers” in St. Paul, and M at’s eager
attempts to convert her to Catholicism take on a deeper significance: she is
the truly Christ-like noble pagan, victimized by a dogmatic society which
poses as Christian; she is Christ against the disciples.
Referring to the Christian crusades Nietzsche writes:
C hristianity would become m aster over beasts o f prey: Its m ethod is to m ake
them sick; enfeeblem ent is the Christian recipe fo r tam ing, fo r “civilizing”
(A 22).
We are not surprised to learn that Anna, who has for years been the object
of this “civilizing” process, is “run down in health” (13). Nietzsche’s idea is
visualized also in Scene Two of The Fountain, where the four converted
Indians on Columbus’ flagship are thus described:
T hey are dressed in incongruous costum es, half savage and half civilized. T hey
are h u ddled in the right corner, not asleep, but frozen in helpless apathy (389-
90).
The battle in M ourning Becomes Electra between, on one hand, Christine’s
and - later - Lavinia’s paganism and, on the other, the Mannon Puritanism
seems basically inspired by Nietzsche’s description in The Birth of Tragedy
of the first Dionysiac attacks on the Apollonian realm:
F o r I can only explain to myself the D oric state and D oric art as a perm anent
war-cam p of the A pollonian: only by incessant opposition to th e titanic-barbaric
nature of the D ionysian was it possible fo r an art so defiantly-prim , so encompassed w ith bulw arks, a training so w arlike and rigorous, a constitution so cruel
and relentless, to last fo r any length of tim e (BT 4).
The Mannons, it will be remembered, are rigid, austere, military, and they
live in a house of the “Greek temple type,” i. e. in a building not unlike that
of the Delphic Apollo. Such as it was depicted by Robert Edmond Jones in
the original production of the play, supervised by O ’Neill, the house with
its Doric columns has an Apollonian beauty. But the beauty is illusory; says
Christine:
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
115
Each tim e I come back after being away it appears m ore like a sepulchre! The
“w hited” one of the Bible - pagan tem ple front stuck like a m ask on P uritan
gray ugliness! It was just like old Abe M annon to build such a m onstrosity - as
a tem ple for his hatred (17).
Christine here, as Esther Olson notes,48 echoes Z arathustra’s remark that
he that w hitewasheth his house betrayeth to me a whitewashed soul.
Some fall in love with mummies, others with ghosts; and both are enemies of
flesh and blood. Oh, how contrary are both to my taste! (Z III 11).
Ezra, Adam, and Grin all want to escape with Christine from their
Puritan “tom b” to the green, pagan “Blessed Isles,” where sin is unheard of.
Their longing is a suppressed Dionysiac desire for oneness with Life. “Must I
yet seek the last of happiness on Happy Isles, and afar midst forgotten seas?,”
the Soothsayer asks Zarathustra (Z IV 2), who has earlier been assured by
Life: “Beyond good and evil have we found our islet and our green pastures
- we two alone!” (Z III 15). The Mannons, thwarted by their ghosts, never
reach theirs; that is their tragedy.
T hat Nietzsche’s ethical relativism found favor with O ’Neill is indicated
by the quotation he chose for the inscription on the copy of Zarathustra he
gave to Maibelle in 1912:
Almost in the cradle we are given heavy words and values. “ G ood” and “Evil”
such cradle-gift is called.
But he hath discovered himself, who saith: “This is m y good and evil.” Thereby
he m aketh mute the dw arf who saith: “G ood fo r all, evil fo r all.”49
Ten years later O ’Neill was to tell an interviewer:
To me there are no good people o r bad people, just people. T he same with
deeds. “G ood” and “evil” are stupidities, as misleading and outw orn fetishes as
Brutus Jones’ silver b u lle t. .. ,50
And among his excerpts we find the following:
Verily, I tell you: good and evil, which would be imperishable, - do not exist!
Of themselves they must ever again surpass themselves (Z II 12).
48. Op. cit., p. 462.
49. Gelb, p. 209.
50. Ibid., p. 487.
2*
116
Egil Tdrnqvist
As Winther has observed,51 although he does not connect this faet with
Nietzsche, a relativistic view of good and evil characterizes O ’Neill’s work.
O ’Neill too would reveal the hollowness of traditional morality by showing
how what is commonly held to be good often appears to be evil and vice
versa. He too sees a danger in the thwarting of the instincts which charac­
terizes our civilization. Referring to his own sexual urge, Jack Townsend in
A bortion (1914) philosophizes in a Nietzschean manner:
Some impulses are stronger than we are, have proved themselves so throughout
the w orld's history. Is it not rather our ideals of conduct, of R ight and W rong,
our ethics, which are unnatural and m onstrously distorted? Is society not suffer­
ing from a case of the evil eye which sees evil where there is none? Isn ’t it our
m oral laws which force me into evasions like the one you have just found fault
w ith?52
Like many other O ’Neill characters Jack is the victim of a society with
warped morals. He is partly to blame because he has adjusted to these morals,
but the major guilt rests with all the generations that have contributed to the
false values of modern civilization.
One of the pervading themes in O ’Neill’s work as well as in modern drama
generally is what is often referred to as the life-lie motif: m an’s need to surround himself with protective illusions, his inability to face life in the raw.
Ibsen had exhaustively dealt with this theme in Peer G ynt and The W ild
Duck. Strindberg had made a significant contribution to it in The Dance of
D eath , one of O ’Neill’s favorite plays. Nietzsche admirably pinpoints what
Peer Gynt, Hjalm ar Ekdahl, Edgar, and Alice have in common when writing:
By lie I mean: wishing not to see something that one does see; wishing not to
see som ething as one sees i t . . . . The most com m on lie is th at with which one lies
to oneself; lying to others is, relatively, an exception (A 55).
This fits also practically all the later O ’Neill characters. The pipedreamers
in The Iceman Com eth, Erie and the Night Clerk in Hnghie, Cornelius Melody in A Touch of the Poet, Josie and Phil Hogan in A M oon for the M isbegotten are all people who do not wish to see what they do see. They have an
early kinsman in Captain Bartlett in Gold. Bartlett does not dare to show
others what he holds to be gold, for in his heart of hearts he knows that it is
worthless brass. The truth, when he finally faces it, kills him and seriously
51. Eugene O ’Neill: A Critical Study ('New York, 1934), pp. 114—48.
52. Ten “Lost” Plays (New York, 1964), p. 155.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
117
harms his son Nat, who has become to believe in the father’s life lie. As
Esther Olson notes,53 the play thus dramatizes Nietzsche’s dicta that “in the
son that becomes conviction which in the father still was a lie” (A 55) and
that “illusions are expensive amusements; but the destruction of illusions is
still more expensive” (Human, All-Too-H um an 312).
From a metaphysical point of view life itself may, of course, be seen as an
illusion hiding the true reality of which we can partake, if at all, only in brief
moments. To Nietzsche these moments are characterized by a Dionysiac rap­
ture; it is then that the veil of Maya, Schopenhauer’s image for the illusory,
phenomenal world, is torn apart and only shreds remain floating “before
mysterious Primordial Unity.” Man feels himself godlike, “the artistic power
of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest
gratification of the Primordial Unity” (BT 1).
W e are really for brief mom ents Prim ordial Being itself, and feel its indom itable
desire for being and joy in e x is te n c e -----In spite of fear and pity, we are the
happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose
procreative joy we are blended (BT 17).
Many O ’Neill characters experience brief moments of such Dionysiac
rapture. The most eloquent of them, although even he feels that he cannot at
all verbalize his experiences, is Edmund Tyrone, who says that he has, at such
moments, felt “drunk with the beauty” of nature and, within “a wild joy,”
belonging to “something greater than [his] own life, or the life of Man, to Life
itself! To God, if you want to put it that way” (153). Then “the veil of things”
has momentarily seemed drawn apart.
F o r a second you see —and seeing the secret, are the secret. F o r a second there
is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog
again, and you stum ble on tow ard nowhere, for no good reason! (153).
“Alas! that soul’s poverty of two! Alas! that soul’s dirt of two! Alas! that
miserable ease of two!” (Z I 20). Z arathustra’s description of the marriages
of the much-too-many, excerpted by O ’Neill, is quoted with obvious delight
by Lucy in N ow 1 A sk You. Although Lucy, like Richard Miller in Ah,
Wilderness!, is a bit of a poser and loves to shock her environment with bold
passages from H edda Gabler and from Nietzsche, her posing concerns most of
53. Op. cit., pp. 183 ff.
Egil Tdrnqvist
118
all herself: she likes to consider herself a superwoman, who creates her own
laws, whereas in faet she is quite commonplace.
Nietzsche’s views on marriage vibrate through many O ’Neill plays, most
obviously, perhaps, in W elded, where Michael Cape’s demand that the m ar­
riage between him and Eleanor be “hard, difficult, guarded from the com­
monplace, kept sacred as the outward form of [their] inner harmony” (448)
rings very Nietzschean. “Our life,” this creator of higher values concludes in
the final act, “is to bear together our burden which is our goal - on and up!
Above the world, beyond its vision - our meaning!” (488). This, to quote
another playwright-creator, Roylston in Servitude, is “a superlove worthy of
the superman.”54 Roylston and Cape, who are both very autobiographical,
have evidently looked closely into the chapter “Of Child and M arriage,”
where Zarathustra preaches:
T hou shalt build beyond thyself. But first I would have thee be built thyself perfect in body and soul.
T hou shalt propagate thyself not only onw ards but upwards! T hereto may the
garden of m arriage assist thee! (Z I 20).
The much-too-many form a large and varied group; after all, people may
be superfluous in different ways. Already in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche
indicated that he considered the theorist, also referred to as “Alexandrine
man,” if not altogether superfluous at least despicable in his petty matter-offactness. This Alexandrine man “is in the main a librarian and corrector of
proofs,” who “goes blind from the dust of books and printers’ errors” (BT
18). Alexandrine optimism
combats D ionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it substitutes fo r
m etaphysical com fort an earthly consonance, in faet, a deus ex machina of its
own, namely the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the genii
of nature recognised and employed in the service of higher egoism; it believes
in am ending the w orld by knowledge, in guiding life by science. . . . (BT 17).
The great god Brown has much in common with Nietzsche’s Alexandrine
man. Brown, O ’Neill explained,
is the visionless demi-god of our new m aterialistic myth - a Success - building
his life of exterior things, inwardly empty and resourceless, an uncreative creature of superficial preordained social grooves, a by-product forced aside into
slack w aters by the deep m ain current of life-desire.55
54. Ten “L ost” Plays, p. 295.
55. New York Evening Post, Feb. 13, 1926. Quoted from Clark, p. 105.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
119
It is significant that the two scenes of the play set in Brown’s home dis­
play his library, that Brown himself resembles a “Roman consul” (294), and
that his designs are “conventional Greco-Rom an” (295). He and his designs,
that is, are merely a superficial “by-product” of the original Greek sense of
beauty and “life-desire,” which Dion(ysus) represents.
“The Alexandrine culture,” Nietzsche observed, “requires a slave class, to
be able to exist permanently: but in its optimistic view of life, it denies the
necessity of such a class” (BT 18). In The Great G od Brown this class is re­
presented by Cybel, who, O ’Neill explained, is
doom ed to segregation as a pariah in a world of u nnatural laws, but patronized
by her segregators, who are thus themselves the first victims of their laws.56
Modern society corresponds to the Alexandrine one (such as Nietzsche
conceived of it) in its worship of science and in its acceptance of an unnatural
double standard.
“The Professor of Dead Languages” in Strange Interlude is another
Alexandrine man; and so is, in a measure, his friend Charles Marsden, the
writer of genteel novels. Scholars, Zarathustra says, “sit cool in cool shades:
they love in all things to be spectators, and take heed lest they sit where the
sun burneth on the steps.” Zarathustra, who loves freedom and fresh air, is
their antithesis: “I am too hot, I am scorched by mine own thoughts; often
they rob me of breath. Then I must go into the open air, away from dusty
rooms” (Z II 16).
We find this imagery transposed to O ’NeilFs play, where “sunshine, cooled
and dim m ed in the shade of trees” fills Professor Leeds’ library “ with a
soothing light” (3). The antithesis between Zarathustra and the scholars becomes in the play an antithesis between Gordon and Nina, on one hand, and
Leeds and Marsden, on the other. Gordon, N ina’s aviator-lover, has been
brought down “in flames” at the end of World W ar I; Marsden, by contrast,
has fled from a torn Europe to seek refuge in a sleepy New England town;
thinks Nina,
what has C harlie done? ... nothing ... and never will ... C harlie sits beside the
fierce river, im maculately timid, cool and clothed, watching the burning, frozen
naked swimmers drow n a t l a s t . . . (13).
56. Ibid., pp. 104 f.
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Egil Tdrnqvist
When Nina decides to leave the library for the army hospital, she feels the
same contempt as Zarathustra for the passive scholars, who only play with
their thoughts and are not burned by them.
The naked Gordon in the fierce river of life is contrasted with the comfortably clothed Marsden beside it, removed from it. The life-denying Marsden, moreover, appears in dark, usually black, costumes throughout the play,
the color worn by Nietzsche’s “preachers of death.”57
O ’Neill’s metaphorical use of costumes often has a striking resemblance to
Nietzsche’s. Benny, the rascal in D iff’rent, appears as a soldier in uniform.
“Uniform,” Zarathustra says, one calls what soldiers wear; “would that were
not uniform which they conceal beneath” (Z I 10). But this is precisely what
it is in Benny’s case; and the irony of the play is that Emma thinks that it is
not, that he is “diff’rent.”
When the Polos in M arco M illions return home to Venice, they put on a
veritable strip-tease show. First they appear in rich crimson robes; when they
take these off “even m ore gorgeous blue ones underneath” come to view; but
these too are taken off and the Polos are finally revealed in their “old dirty,
loose Tartar traveling dress” (428-29). Marco pronounces the moral: do not
put too much faith in appearances. Ironically, this is precisely what he does
himself, for Marco is another Alexandrine man. The meaning of the scene is
found in the following passage in The Birth of Tragedy:
... if the artist in every unveiling of tru th always cleaves with raptured eyes
only to that which still rem ains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical man,
on the other hand, enjoys and contents himself with the cast-off veil, and finds
the consum m ation of his pleasure in the process of a continuously successful
unveiling through his own unaided efforts (BT 15).
M arco represents the scientific, inquiring mind of the West, always aware
of his own self and always eager to impress it upon others. His contrast is
Kublai, who, in the final scene, appears in “a simple white robe,” his eyes
“fixed on a catafalque,” on “that which still remains veiled”: death (432).
Marco and Benny belong to the majority of men who, Nietzsche found,
are no more than animals; by and large man is “the beast that hath red
cheeks” (Z II 3). In O ’Neill’s plays references to animals abound and the
Nietzschean implication is relevant in most instances. Marco is called a pig by
57. Cf. Olson, pp. 436 f.
N ietzsche and O ’Neill
121
his soulful antithesis Kukachin, and the same epithet is given to the train
prostitute in A M oon for the M isbegotten; the mobs in Lazarus Laughed
behave like herds of hyenas, curs, or rats; Abbie and Eben in Desire Under
the Elms, when full of sensual passion, pant like two wild animals; etc.
“Ye have trod the way from worm to man,” Zarathustra says, “and much
in you is yet worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more ape than
any ape” (Z P 3). Here, in nuce, is a portrait of Yank, who fails to see (until
the very end) that he is still a “hairy ape” ; of Marco, whose final speech
about the “millions upon millions” of silkworms that have created his millions
implies that Marco is still a worm; and of Caligula in Lazarus Laughed, who
keeps squatting monkeywise.
It is aboveall as a domesticated “animal,” as a social being weakened by
civilization and Christianity, that Nietzsche holds man in contempt. When
he retains the characteristics of “the blond beast” - strength, pride, passion he is realizing what is best in him. It is suggestive, in this context, to note
that while the older brothers in Desire Under the Elms are compared to beasts
of the field, Eben is likened to a wild animal in captivity (203); he is deter­
mined to fight it out with the tyrannical father; they merely escape his slavedriving.
In an interesting essay58 Doris Alexander has claimed that Lazarus and his
philosophy can be fully understood only if one sees them in the light of
Buddhist thinking. Practically all the elements in O ’Neill’s play which she
traces to Buddhism may, however, be found in Nietzsche’s work. Thus, as
Miss Alexander herself admits, the mystical radiation that surrounds Lazarus
is found also in Nietzsche’s “light-surrounded” superman, and the negative
view of individuation is a basic tenet in The Birth of Tragedy. Lazarus’ passivity before the slaughter of his family is understandable not only in terms of
Buddhist quietism but also in the light of the Zarathustra who said:
If I must be compassionate, yet will I not be called so: and when I am so, let
it be from afar off (Z II 3).
And, as excerpted by O ’Neill:
Myself I sacrifice unto my love, and my neighbor as myself! thus runneth the
speech of all creators.
But all creators are hard (Z II 3).
58. “Lazarus Laughed and Buddha,” Modern Language Quarterly, Dec. 1956.
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Egil Tdrnqvist
There is in faet a striking parallel between Lazarus’ reaction in the slaughter scene and Z arathustra’s, when, in the Prologue, the tight-rope dancer falls
down on the market place and is crushed to death. Like Lazarus, Zarathustra
remains calm, even immobile, until he kneels beside the mortally wounded
and reveals his love for him.
Since Nietzsche’s thinking, via Schopenhauer, offers certain parallels to
Buddhism it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish O ’Neill’s source. Unless
the evidence points unequivocally in one direction it seems, in such cases,
reasonable to give preference to the philosophy that meant most to the playwright: Nietzsche’s. A case in point is the scene with the crucified lion in Act.
III. 1 of Lazarus Laughed.
We are outside Tiberius’ villa-palace at Capri. In the center of the stage
is a triumphal arch. And underneath this “a cross is set up on which a full
grown male lion has been crucified” (326). The symbolism of the cross inside
the triumphal arch is easy to translate. Tiberius wants to demonstrate that the
Romans intend to crush Christianity. The inscription above the lion’s head
reads: “From the East, land of false gods and superstition, this lion was
brought to Rome to amuse Caesar” (328). The lion, as Caligula points out, is
a warning to Lazarus “not to roar - or laugh - at Caesar.”
C A L IG U L A . . . You may be in his place soon! (H e poin ts to the lio n ) Will
you laugh then? ...
LAZA RU S, (c a lm ly ) Yes. (T hen hu m bly, bow ing his head) I will laugh with
the pride of a beggar set upon the throne of Man! (328).
Then, as he “gently pushes the lion’s hair out of its eyes,” the lion smiles
at him and licks his hands.
This scene recalls not so much Buddha’s taming of a maddened elephant59
as the end of Zarathustra. Zarathustra repudiates the “higher men” in favor
of “laughing lions,” and in the final chapter a literally laughing lion appears
as a sign that Z arathustra’s hour has come. The prophet reaches into the
thick, warm mane of the lion, which lies at his feet, pressing its head against
his knees, unwilling to part with his “master.” And when Zarathustra’s heart
overflows, the lion licks up the tears that fall on his hands (Z IV 20).
The lion in Lazarus Laughed is Nietzsche’s “blond beast” and “laughing
lion,” higher and stronger than man and therefore murdered by him - as
Lazarus is murdered.
59. Ibid., p. 364.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
123
If man can learn strength, freedom, and passion from the lion, he can
learn to lie in the sun and to “chew the cud” from the cow, i. e. learn patiently
to accept this life as it is and to find happiness in it: “If we turn not and become as cows we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Z IV 8).
The O ’Neill characters who are in harmony with life are significantly often
bovine in appearance. Peter and Simeon Cabot have already been mentioned.
The Dominican Father Superior in The Fountain is “a portly monk with a
sim ple round face. . . . His large eyes have the opaque calm of a ru minat ing
co w ’s ” (444). The prostitute in W elded, who preaches a “loin to like” life
gospel, is of a “bovine, stolid ty p e ” (471). Cybel “chews gum like a sacred
cow forgetting time with an eternal end” (278). And Mrs. Fife, the stout
M other Earth figure in Dynamo, has blank, dreamy eyes (428) and loves to
bask in the sun (454).
Ephraim Cabot in Desire Under the Elms lacks these characteristics and
(therefore?) seeks the company of the beasts of the field. Feeling cold and
lonely in the farmhouse, where he is unloved even by his own wife, he sleeps
away from her in the barn, where it is restful, “nice smellin’ an’ warm - with
the cows” (231). Ephraim, in this respect, was doubtless patterned on Z ara­
thustra, who, after his confrontation with the ugliest man,
was cold and he felt his solitude: fo r m any cold and lonely thoughts passed
through his mind so th at even his limbs were chilled. But as he wandered on
and on ... he becam e of a sudden w arm er and m ore joyous.
W hat hath befallen me? he asked himself. Something w arm and living refresheth
me and must be nigh me.
A lready I am less alone; unconscious com panions and brethren hover about
me and their w arm breath toucheth my soul.
But as he looked about him and sought the com forters of his loneliness, lo,
there were cows standing together upon an hillock; whose nearness and smell
had w arm ed his heart (Z IV 8).
O ’Neill’s frequent juxtaposition of nature and civilization, countryside
and city, can be traced back to Z arathustra’s remain-faithful-to-the-earth
gospel and disgust with the “great city.” Zarathustra admonishes the higher
men to flee from the market place and from the city of shopkeepers out into
the wilderness, up into the mountains; in O ’Neill’s quotation:
Thy neighbors will always be poisonous flies. T h at which is great in thee - that
itself must m ake them still m ore poisonous and ever m ore like flies.
Fly, my friend, into thy lonliness [sz'c] and where the rough, strong wind bloweth.
It is not thy lot to be a fly-brush (Z I 12).
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Egil Tdrnqvist
“Out into the woods! Upon the hills!” exclaims Lazarus, echoing Z ara­
thustra. “Cities are prisons wherein man locks himself from life” (310).
“Y ou’re like a swarm of poisonous flies,” Curtis Jayson shouts to the “small
minds ’ that surround him in Bridgetown, Connecticut, before he leaves to
dinib the Himalayas in search for “the first m an” (613-14) —clearly not so
much an archeological expedition as a moral and religious one, a search for
the antithesis of Nietzsche’s last man, for the superman who has not yet come
into being. “There is no harder lot in all human fate,” says Zarathustra in a
passage excerpted by O ’Neill, “than when the powerful of the earth are not
at the same time the first men” (Z IV 3). And in another excerpt we read:
“I am a w anderer and a m ountain-clim ber” said he unto his heart “ I like not the
plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still” (Z III 1).
Curtis, with his “ rugged health" and “great nervous strength” (553), demonstrates the same impatience with the flat landscape around him, the same
restless longing for the “big, free life” on the mountains.
In O ’Neill’s work the megalopolis, as John Raleigh has noted,60 is usually
a place of evil, corruption, artifice - “the lie of civilization,” to use Nietzsche’s
terminology.
The countryside, on the other hand, usually represents virginity, nature,
truth. in A M oon for the M isbegotten life on the farm is contrasted with life
in the city and Josie, the innocent, powerful country lass, is pitted against the
petite Broadway tarts. When Tyrone leaves her for his old debauched life in
New York, it is not because he longs for the city but because he belongs there
as the “dead” man he is. Yank in Bound East for Cardiff, after his dissolute
life in sailor towns, longs for a farm with a house of his own. Chuck and Cora,
the pimp and the prostitute in The Iceman Conieth who have never been
outside New York, have the same pipe dream. Andrew Mayo in Beyond the
Horizon, who leaves the farm he loves and where he makes things grow and
prostitutes himself in Buenos Aires by gambling with what he used to love,
clearly does not remain faithful to the earth. “ It is time for man to sow the
seed of his highest hope,” says Zarathustra. “His soil is yet rich enough therefor. But the day cometh when that soil shall be impoverished and effete, and
no tall tree shall any longer be able to grow therefrom ” (Z P 5). O ’Neill visualized this in his play, when he stated that the field of Act I (while Andrew is
60. The Plays of Eugene O ’Neill (Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. 25 ff.
Nietzsche and O ’Neill
125
still faithful to the earth and still plants “his highest hope”) should be sprouting with bright-green blades and the apple tree budding into leaf, whereas in
the final act the field lies fallow and the tree looks dead.
In the letter to De Casseres quoted initially, O ’Neill indicates that by 1927 he
no longer accepted certain Nietzschean tenets he had earlier embraced. Although the remark is parenthetical and obviously inserted afterwards, and although O ’Neill may have put it in mainly as a warning to De Casseres not to
view the play, which O ’Neill at this time considered his best to date, as a mere
dramatization of Nietzschean thinking but as an independent work of art, we
should not pass over it too lightly. If we compare it to Agnes Boulton’s ob­
servation, that Nietzsche around 1917 “moved [O ’NeilPs] emotion rather than
his mind,” we would conclude that there were spots of Nietzsche’s teaching
the playwright did not agree with already at this time. The external evidence
does not contradict this view. It gives us the impression that O ’Neill’s adoration of Nietzsche was at its highest in the years following his discovery of the
German philosopher. It was then he tried to convert others to Z arathustra’s
religion; it was then he quoted Nietzsche’s most catching slogans - “God is
dead,” “the superman,” “the blond beast” - with iconoclastic delight. For in
those days of youth O ’Neill could still believe in the saving power of a particular philosophy. By 1922, as we have seen, he found this impossible. Nietz­
sche still ranked high with him and was in faet, as The Great G od Brown and
Lazarus Laughed bear out, a greater source of inspiration than ever before.
But his ideas were not accepted Wholesale. Unfortunately O ’Neill does not teil
us which doctrines he now reacted against. We may guess, however, that he
was thinking especially of some of Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity, notably
on the Christian “slave morality.” For in O ’Neill’s plays there is a clear emphasis on “servitude” as the key to true living. The idea that you become a
true superman when you accept the Christian doctrine of servitude is, as the
title indicates, the basic idea in the early Servitude (1914) and it appears again
in many later plays, especially in W elded (1923), Days W ithout End (1932),
and A Touch of the Poet (1942).
By and large, however, there is no fundamental change in O ’Neill’s atti­
tude to Nietzsche over the years. Nine years after the critical remark to De
Casseres he could still, as we noted initially, call Nietzsche his “master.” And
enlarging upon Agnes Boulton’s observation that O ’Neill more or less identified himself with Nietzsche, the Gelbs point out that
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M any aspects of O ’N eill’s later life strikingly parallelled those of N ietzsche’s.
T he drooping black m ustache O ’N eill grew in his late twenties, the solitude
in which he spent his last years, the trem endous strain he put on his Creative
spirit, the som ber satisfaction he took in being m isunderstood, and the final
collapse - all are a m irroring of Nietzsche.61
The Gelbs are non-committal as to wether the resemblances should be
attributed to a conscious or unconscious identification on O ’Neill’s part or
to a basic spiritual affinity between the two men leading to similar mani­
festations. There is, of course, no simple answer to this question. Both the
external and the internal evidence suggest a mingling of all three aspects.
But, as was pointed out earlier, only a basic spiritual affinity can explain the
scope and depth of Nietzsche’s impact on O ’Neill’s writings - unless we choose
to regard the playwright as uno thinker” 62 and a mere epigonus of the
philosopher, a view which is clearly quite untenable.
Early in his writing career O ’Neill revealed his integrity as a playwright,
declaring that he would never be influenced by any consideration but one:
“Is it the truth as I know it - or, better still, feel it? If so, shoot, and let the
splinters fly wherever the may.”63 Some forty years later he wrote a dedication to his wife on the script of one of his last plays, Long D ay’s Journey
Into Night, that begins: “/ give you the original script of this play of old
sorrow, written in tears and blood .”64 The two statements form a fitting
epitaph for a lifework which, like Nietzsche’s, was characterized by unusual
integrity, sincerity, and earnestness. O ’Neill rarely - and then only in his
earliest period - forgot Z arathustra’s admonishment to the creator: “Write
in blood, and thou shalt leam that blood is spirit” (Z I 7).
61.
62.
63.
64.
Gelb, p. 121.
Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York, 1955), p. 272.
Quoted from Clark, p. 163.
The dedication has been published together with the play.