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of joy. Its world therefore exists on a higher level, humanely speak–
ing, than does that of Farrell. In Farrell's novel there are
all
kinds of
things to blame for the vulgarity and pettiness of the characters' lives.
In O'Neill there is no pettiness, no real vulgarity, and nothing is to
blame except everybody. Social forces, as such, do not exist and, as
in
Greek tragedy, we are face to face with guilty-innocent humanity
on the purely personal level. All the terrible things that members
of a family-in this case an Irish family-will do to one another,
often in innocence, and always without reference to outside people
or events, are presented in a relentless and yet compassionate honesty.
(It should be added, although it will not concern me here, that the
finest primarily comic expression of the same culture is O'Neill's
Ah, Wilderness!).
I
When Yeats and Shaw founded the Irish Academy of Letters,
they invited O'Neill to become an associate member, which he did,
although he was an American by birth. For it would be no exaggera–
tion to say that an American of Irish-Catholic parentage born in
New England in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century was
really not American but Irish.
l
This distinctive, closely knit culture,
which is in our day relaxing, produced a whole gallery of "un–
American" types. Here is how O'Neill describes one of them in
A
Moon for the Misbegotten:
he is Mike Hogan.
He has a common Irish face, its expression sullen, or slyly cunning, or
primly self-righteous. He never forgets that he is a good Catholic, faith–
ful to all the observances, and so is one of the elite of Almighty God
in a world of damned sinners composed of Protestants and bad Catho–
lics. In brief,
MIKE
is a New England Irish Catholic Puritan, Grade B,
and an extremely irritating youth to have around.
But it also produced Eugene O'Neill and the four haunted Tyrones
of
Long Day's Journey,
end-products, you might say, of the Irish
famine of the late 1840's, which set off the vast migrations to Ameri–
ca. James O'Neill himself was born in County Kilkenny in Ireland,
in the year 1849 and came to this country at the age of five, bring-
1.
Obviously things have changed, as the smiling face of Senator Kennedy on
the cover of
Life
or
Time
attests.
