The Iceman Crumbleth

A TOUCH OF THE POET (182 pp.)--Eugene O'Neill--Yale University ($3.75).

During the last twelve years of his active writing life (1934-46), Eugene O'Neill was at work on a massive and abortive project: an eleven-play cycle, to be titled A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which would virtually span U.S. history as reflected in the life stories of two Irish-American families. After completing seven of the plays and part of an eighth, O'Neill tore up all but two, planned to revise the cycle, but never got around to it (he died in 1953). The U.S. public now gets its first glimpse of one of the surviving plays (the other, More Stately Mansions, has yet to be published). The work appears at the peak of an O'Neill renaissance--two plays and a musical adaptation running on and off Broadway, a film of Desire Under the Elms ready for release soon, two family histories of the O'Neill clan in the offing.

As a hint of what the cycle might have been, A Touch of the Poet is distressingly flaccid. Even so, it pulses with a dramatic inner life that makes most contemporary Broadway plays seem stillborn.

Byron Under Brogue. The play's mock hero (time: 1828) is an O'Neill staple--the man of illusions-cum-sorrows, bottle-fed. With the help of liquor, fiftyish Cornelius Melody cultivates a highly colored remembrance of things past--the Gaelic gallant seducing the lovelies of Europe, the fearless cavalry major decorated on a Spanish field of honor by the great Wellington himself. In sorry reality he is an impoverished Massachusetts tavernkeeper too proud to tend bar as his father did in Ireland. Indeed, pride hag-rides Con Melody like the Greek Furies, except that he is driven to travesty rather than tragedy.

In his scarlet dragoon's uniform he daily preens himself before a mirror and mouths stanzas from Byron, charges over the countryside on a thoroughbred mare that he cherishes above wife, daughter and life itself. As daughter Sara starts tripping up the social ladder peasant-fashion by stumbling into bed with the son of the local Yankee squire, Con Melody is shorn of his illusions and his pride. Ravening for vengeance, he manages only a fool's kind of suicide--he shoots his beloved mare, symbol of his Byronic self.

A Touch of Chekhov. The theme of A Touch of the Poet is one that O'Neill developed with more corrosive force amid the derelict barflies of The Iceman Cometh; i.e., that a life of illusions is unpardonable, but a life without illusions is unbearable. This theme links O'Neill with Chekhov in that the reality of his characters is rooted in their inability to cope with reality. Chekhov took the despair of ineffectuality and from it composed hauntingly melancholy mood music steeped in life's big and little ironies. But despair only drives O'Neill's characters into cacophonous rantings and ravings at each other.

The pathos of A Touch of the Poet is that America's greatest playwright, with his powers and spirits waning, had apparently come to feel that dreams and drink are the best medicines to take for this worst (as he saw it) of all possible worlds.

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