426 Making It New: 1900–1945“I want the whole city to hear it – fresh blood, arms. We got ‘em. We’re glad we’re
living.” It is a typical ending, for Odets and for the Group Theatre: Ralph has
experienced a personal awakening that is coincident with awaking to the realities of
his and others’ social condition. Sometimes the affirmation on which these
plays close came out of conviction or convention, emotional need or dramatic
requirement, rather than out of the material of the play. But it was just about always
there: there was invariably the sense that out of the ashes of the old – the decaying
social system on which, of necessity, the drama was focused – a new dispensation,
and a new state of being, should and could emerge.
“Most modern plays,” Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) once declared, “are concerned
with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am
interested only in the relationship between man and God.” That is not strictly true,
for two reasons. The first is that, in many of his plays, like Lazarus Laughed (1927)
and Marco Millions (1928), even The Hairy Ape (1922), he does move toward
the condition of social drama to the extent that he explores the contemporary
emphasis on acquisition and material standards or the plight of those at the bottom
of the social and economic ladder. And, in all of them, he is drawn into intensely
poetic, often erotic accounts of the tentacular relationships to be found, say, in
families (Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956)),
among confined groups at sea, or in a bar (Bound East for Cardiff (1916), The Iceman
Cometh (1946)), or in local communities and neighborhoods (All God’s Chillun
Got Wings (1924)). The second is that it was not so much God as the absence of
God that preoccupied O’Neill. “The playwright today must dig at the roots of the
sickness of today as he feels it,” O’Neill wrote in a letter, “– the death of the old God
and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the
surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in and to comfort its
fears of death with.” O’Neill was born into a generation that included Joyce, Eliot,
and Stevens, profoundly concerned with the death of the old grounds for belief. He
was deeply affected by European expressionism (Strindberg especially), with modern
psychology as an instrument to analyze human nature, and by a Nietszchean
philosophy which reinforced a characteristically American tendency to explore
heroic individuals and their search for self-realization. The fundamental problem
O’Neill dramatizes and develops in all his work is the problem of the relation of the
human being to something, anything outside himself; something to which he can
belong, something which he can ground his life in so that it can have more shape, a
sense of purpose, something that saves him from feeling lonely, lost, an existential
exile – or, as one of his characters puts it (in Long Day’s Journey into Night), “a stranger
in a strange land.” The Hairy Ape is exemplary. The character who gives the play its
title is the leader of the stokers on a transatlantic liner. He is content with his lot,
stupid and brutal though it is, as long as he believes that he is essential to the ship
and the voyage of the ship has a meaning. “I belong,” is his recurrent, triumphant
cry. When, however, he loses that belief, when he comes to realize that the system
he serves is unaware of his existence and that, consequently, he has no function
in or proper understanding of it, then he falls into the curse of consciousness,GGray_c04.indd 426ray_c 04 .indd 426 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM