578
PARTISAN REVIEW
O'Neill has neither the phenomenal memory which serves Farrell
as a substitute for observation, nor the documentary habits which, for
Dreiser, performed the same service. In
The Iceman Cometh,
the scene
is a cheap bar somewhere in downtown New York in the year 1912; the
characters are the derelict habitues of the back room-a realist's para–
dise, one would think. But it needs only a short walk along Third Avenue
today (or the armchair method of inquiry) to solidify the suspicion
that, unless drinking
moeurs
have changed in the last thirty-five years,
O'Neill is an incompetent reporter. In the day and a half that elapses on
the stage of the Martin Beck, none of the characters is visibly drunk,
nobody has a hangover, and, with a single brief exception, nobody has
the shakes; there are none of those rancorous, semischizoid silences, no
obscurity of thought, no dark innuendoes, no flashes of hatred, there
is, in short, none of the terror of drink, which, after all, in the stage
that Harry Hope's customers have presumably reached, is a form of
insanity. What is missing is precisely the thing that is most immediately
striking and most horrifying in any human drunkard, the sense of the
destruction of personality. Each of O'Neill's people is in perfect pos–
session of the little bit of character the author has given him. The Boer
is boerish, the Englishman english, the philosopher philosophizes, and
the sentimental grouch who runs the establishment grouc):les and senti–
mentalizes in orderly alternation. So obedient indeed are these supposed
incorrigibles to the play's thematic dictation, so well behaved in speech
and in silence, that one might imagine, if one shut one's eyes, that one
was attending the Christmas exercises in some respectable school ("I
am Wind, I blow and blow," says little Aeolus with his bag).
And the didactic tone is, in fact, the play's natural mode. The
"realistic" scene that stretches, rather Moscow Art style and friezelike,
across the stage is no more than mood or
decor.
The play quickly calls
itself to order, the drunkards awake and embark on an elementary
study of the nature of reality and illusion. Each drunkard, it seems, has
his "pipe-dream": he imagines that tomorrow he will get a job, take
a walk, marry, see the anarchist millennium, go home to England or
South Africa. A hardware salesman, beloved of all, who is expected to
arrive for one of his periodical benders, finally does appear on the dot
of the dramatist's excellent schedule; he is changed, sober, exhilarated, he
has a mission to perform; he will cure Harry Hope and his customers
of the illusions that are making them unhappy. In the course of the
play, he obliges each of the characters to test himself. All fail to carry
out the actions projected in the pipe-dream, but self-knowledge, the
recognition of failure, does not bring them the freedom the salesman
promised. On the contrary, it kills whatever life was left in them; dis–
gruntled, despairing, demoralized, they cannot even get drunk, though
they are full of red-eye whiskey. Fortunately, it turns out that the sales–
man had attained his own state of freedom and euphoria by killing
his wife; the police come for him, and Harry Hope and his clients,
