A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions are regarded as two of Eugene O'Neill's finest plays. Companion pieces, linked by characters and themes, they form part of a projected series of eleven interconnected plays in which the playwright intended to give a psychological and economic account of American life. Now these works, the only surviving plays in O'Neill's "Cycle," are brought together for the first time in a paperback volume. The version of More Stately Mansions presented here is O'Neill's unexpurgated text, scrupulously edited by Martha Gilman Bower, which restores the playwright's original opening scene, a crucial epilogue, and other material essential to our understanding of the play.
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"A Touch of the Poet is in a class just short of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night." - Harold Bloom
About the Author
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), the father of American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. Martha Gilman Bower is professor of English and graduate literature and criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
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The only two surviving parts of O'Neill's 11-play cycle, "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed",
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This review is from: A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions (Paperback)
The two texts in this volume, "A Touch of the Poet" and "More Stately Mansions," are the fifth and sixth (and only extant) parts of what was to have become an 11-play cycle tentatively called "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed." Neither play was published or produced during O'Neill's lifetime, although "Poet" was staged (with Helen Hayes, Eric Portman, and Kim Stanley) in 1957 and is currently enjoying a revival in Manhattan, and an extensively abbreviated and heavily revised "Mansions" made its American debut (with Colleen Dewhurst, Ingrid Bergman, and Arthur Hill) in 1967.
Even though he left fairly complete manuscripts behind, it's probably unfair to critique O'Neill's unpublished, unstaged work. Like most other playwrights, O'Neill revised and honed his plays during readings and rehearsals, gauging the success or failure of lines and scenes as they were delivered and performed by the actors. Even so, "A Touch of the Poet" turns out to be an unpolished gem. Its tragic hero, Cornelius Melody, is an Irish cavalry hero from the Napoleonic wars who moves to America and brings along his pretensions of being a "gentleman" in a young country with little use for the gentry. At the play's open, he is a shell of his former glory, running a tavern for the local riffraff and regaling an audience willing to endure his tales of heroism and high-living for a free round of drinks. His long-suffering wife bears the burden of his shattered dreams, and his proud daughter finds him little more than an embarrassment, rebelling against his goal of making her a finely bred lady. The dichotomy between Cornelius's delusions and his circumstances trap him in the same sort of schizophrenia that plagued John Loving, O'Neill's equally tragic hero in "Days Without End." While "Touch of a Poet" is rough around the edges, it's a strong hint of what could have been one of O'Neill's finest plays. "More Stately Mansions" is another beast altogether. During the previous decade, O'Neill had read his fill of Freud and had undergone a series of extensive psychoanalytic treatments--and it shows here. Setting aside the impossible length of the play (which O'Neill surely would have cut had he finished it), the characters are unintentionally comical caricatures in a Freudian nightmare. Married to Sara (Cornelius's daughter from the previous play), Simon Harford is torn between his ambition to become a writer and his longing for success as an industrialist. He tries to please both his mother (poetry) and his wife (wealth); they at first compete for his attentions and then join forces to rule the roost and raise the children. Eventually, in his imagination, Simon conflates both of them and then manipulates each woman to compete with the other in a struggle for his soul and his household. "What made their petty sentimental women's world of lies and trivial greeds assume such a false importance?" he despairs, "--why did I have to meddle in their contemptible ambitions and let them involve me in a domestic squabble about the ownership of children?" Simon's "meddling," along with the scheming complicity and mean-spirited rivalry of the two women, reduces his wife to a whore-like mistress and his mother to the Madonna-like figure he remembers from his childhood. The resulting three-way war lacks in subtlety what it boasts in absurdity, and the series of relentlessly tedious scenes pitting one bipolar/schizophrenic member of the trio against another would be impossible to stage in anything like its present form. (The first scene of Act 3, in particular, is among the worst ever conceived by O'Neill and is almost painful to read.) It's not difficult to see why O'Neill never finished this play--and it's equally clear he would be appalled to find it in print. (He even added a cover sheet to the draft exclaiming that the work was unfinished and should be destroyed on his death.) Unlike "A Touch of the Poet," this play will always be of interest only to scholars and to O'Neill fans who feel compelled to read everything he's written.
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