âJohn Patrick Diggins, Eugene OâNeillâs America: Desire Under Democracy (2007)
To be honest, I donât find this bewildering at all. One of OâNeillâs fellow American Nobel laureates wrote a famous anthem about leaving the left; there he accused the left of teaching that âliberty is just equality in schoolââin other words, the leftâs exoteric language of freedom and democracy conceals a set of Rousseauist concepts about âforcing people to be freeâ and a âgeneral willâ that doesnât actually correspond to what any phenomenal populace wishes but only what their supposed intellectual tribunes deem best for them. American artists are anarchists; the famed CIA exploited this but did not invent it; and leftoidsâas well as tradcaths and other theocrats on the rightâshould get used to it and get over it.
I confess I only skimmed Eugene OâNeillâs America to get a grip on the playwrightâs politics, but its author, a historian rather than a literary critic by training, wrote another book around the same time counterintuitively vindicating Ronald Reagan from the libertarian left, as the heir to Paine and Emerson, and as a more pacific liberator than the war-making and rather authoritarian emancipators Lincoln and Roosevelt (at least as far as I could tell from what I was able to read on Google books). OâNeill and Reagan were also both ancestral Irish Catholics who spent their lives in productive confrontation with Anglo and Germanic Protestantism and its various legacies from the Puritans to Nietzsche. As an ancestral Italian Catholic (married into an Irish Catholic family to boot) wrestling the same angel, I can sympathize. Reagan and I also share a birthdayâIâm sure the astrologers can tell us what that means. (My uncle was once head of the Pittsburgh Astrological Association, but I never studied the science myself.)
Anyway, I offer this as a footnote to my new essay on several of OâNeillâs plays. I barely discuss his politics at all in that pieceâexcept to chart his burgeoning misogyny, though heâs the kind of literary misogynist who writes more commanding female characters than some simpering male feminist could. I was too busy with the paradox of an indisputably major canonical author, often hailed as Americaâs greatest dramatist, who is also considered, even by his admirers, not a very good writer. And the people who say this are right: I am awed by the grandeur of OâNeillâs conceptions, even as I find his situations and dialogue often ridiculous. What, in a case like this, do words like âgreatnessâ or âbadnessâ even mean? There is an apocryphal phrase we can apply. I once saw Walter Benn Michaels attribute it to T. S. Eliot in reference to Theodore Dreiser, though I could never find the reference: âHe had no talent, only genius.â Itâs similar to my theory of âgreat but not goodâ books. OâNeill isnât good at all, but he certainly is great.Â
