EUGENE O'NEILL

Mourning may become Electra, but it served equally well for O’Neill, who, as Black (English/Simon Fraser Univ.) contends in this massive biography, worked through his personal tragedies by recasting them for the stage. Beginning before O’Neill’s birth, Black adumbrates the troubles of the young marrieds who brought the playwright into this harsh world and then delineates the misfortunes which struck O’Neill at an early age. After he survived the problems of a morphine-addicted mother and schoolyard politics, the adversities of childhood gave way to traumas of adulthood. Death overshadowed O’Neill’s life: Within a period of six years, he witnessed the death of five friends (three of whom committed suicide). Within three years of his first Broadway success, O’Neill’s entire family—mother Ella, father James, and brother Jamie—died. A scandalous divorce and subsequent remarriage offered little respite from his turbulent life and times, and physical affliction in the form of muscle tremors tormented him in later life. Through subtle readings of O’Neill’s plays and extensive research into his life and letters, Black explores how these monstrous losses ravaged O’Neill’s psyche and how the playwright’s mourning perversely inspired his creative processes. Black’s structure sometimes groans even more loudly than his hero, as diagnoses are swept in to stand alone rather than woven into the thread of the narrative, and pedantic explanations of such common terms as “separation anxiety,— better buried in footnotes, disrupt the biographical flow. Despite such minor flaws, however, the writing at its best is as straightforward as it is informative, presenting O—Neill’s sadly heroic tale with welcome grace. Though completing this massive tome may require several long days’ journeys into night at the library, the destination is more than adequate recompense. O’Neill proves a fascinating, if morbid, traveling companion, and Black a capable and erudite cicerone. (40 illus.)