Eugene
O’Neill’s Philosophy of life,
in
‘The Iceman Cometh’
JAGDISH V. DAVE
Dharmendrasinhji Arts Collge,
In
the month of July, 1948, O’Neill wrote to Carlotta, his wife, in her copy of The
Iceman Cometh that a “new vision of deeper love and security and above all,
serenity, to bind us ever closer in our old age” had dawned upon him after long
experiencing pain and sorrow of their life. So report Arthur and Barbara Gelb
in their O’Neill, a definitive biography of the author. (Dell Publishing
Co., Inc.,
The
Iceman Cometh is
a tragedy. But it is a tragedy as an established fact of human life in general
rather than a result of some miscalculated action. It does not spring from
action or from character. We wake into it as an actual state of things and
fumble our way out of it but fail. All humanity is groaning under the burden of
life, and its representatives here are a few drunkards and debauchees. They try
to drown their present grief in the bottles of drink and live when its kick
dwindles into “pipedreams” of yesterday and tomorrow, pining ever after what is
not. The bar of Harry Hope which is the scene of action throughout the play
symbolically represents the world. The clownish antics of the characters here
are pitiable and wretched and no less senseless than the sane activities of
politicians and intellectuals in the world. But neither the bums here nor the
majority of mankind they represent realize that their life is wretched and
worthless, and therefore their plight is at once comic and tragic.
Forgetfulness on their part of life’s absurdity and wretchedness and consequent
action are comic; the awareness of it is deeply tragic.
Larry Slade with
“mystic’s meditative pale-blue eyes” is a retired anarchist revolutionary. He is
thoroughly disillusioned, has grasped the human predicament in the nihilistic
world, and therefore there is darkest despair clouding his soul. Life has tired
him, and his one great longing is liberation that death brings. All his
“pipe-dreams” are “dead and buried.” He says:
“What is before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep, and I’m damned tired, and it can’t come too soon for me.” (Eugene O’Neill, ‘The Iceman Cometh’, P.16) He has realized that no political movement can make man happy so long as greed is rooted in his heart:
“Forget the anarchist
part of it. I’m thorough with the movement long since. I saw men didn’t want to
be saved from themselves, for that would mean they’d have to give up greed and
they will never pay that price for liberty. So I said to the world, God bless
all here, and may the best man win and die of gluttony! And I took a seat in
the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the
cannibals do their death dance.” (Ibid. P. 16)
Larry is consciously
pessimistic and has lost all zest in life. But his comrades who have not
grasped the sorriness of the human condition make fun
of him and call him “do old foolosopher.” Larry’s
despair plus Hickey’s solution of it make up the thought of this play.
Harry Hope, the owner of
the bar, is a good, old, silly soul. He is slightly deaf and short of sight. He
is always kind and serves wine to the inmates on credit which he often loses.
He is a widower for the last twenty years, and has never set foot out of his
house since the death of his wife. He loves the memory of his wife and manages
to live: “Poor old Bessie!….A sweeter
woman never drew breath.” (Ibid. P. 49) So exclaims Megloin,
one of the roomers, pamperingly to his fond affection
to keep him pleased. He lives thus in the “pipe-dream” of yesterday
escapes the dreary present. He is lovable and loved by everyone.
Then there is Theodore
Hickman, or Hickey as known among the company. With his characteristic
“kidding”, good humour and jokes he brings life to
the roomers at Hope’s. He is a salesman, and therefore remains out of town most
of the days. But when he comes home, he invariably visits Hope’s and entertains
his friends who are all more or less unhappy recluse in this bar. He dominates
the company when he is present, and is remembered with admiration tinged with
affection when he is absent. He is sincere, witty and “master of all ceremony.”
As a salesman he is a complete success. Still he is not happy. But he finds out
a way out of his sorrow, and thinks that he has a message to deliver to his
friends to make them happy. His views added to Larry’s despair constitute the
thought of this play, ambiguious though it is. We
will consider it later on.
Then there are Hugo Kalmar, “one-time editor of anarchist periodicals”,
declaiming when less drunk, “Capitalist swine! Bourgeois steel pigeons!” before
any speech; Don Parrit, the son of a woman anarchist
who was Larry’s companion in his old anarchist days; Jimmy Tomorrow, Rocky Pioggi, Joe Mott, the street walker whores Pearl, Margie,
Cora and others.
There is no action in
the play in any traditional sense except what little is revealed in the
desultory dialogues. The roomers have gathered together to celebrate Harry
Hope’s birthday. All except Hickey have come, and Hickey is expected to arrive
soon. The characters in a drowsy and drunken state talk deliriously and talk
more to themselves than to one another. They abuse, quarrel, swallow, drink and
swoon. Their condition to the objective onlooker is wretched, but they do not
feel like that. “Don’t waste your pity”, said Larry to Parrit
who felt their life must be very tough and miserable. They shouldn’t thank you
for it. They manage to get drunk, by hook or crook, and keep their pipe-dreams,
and that’s all they ask of life. I have never known more contented men. It
isn’t often that men attain the true goal of their heart’s desire.” (Ibid. P.
37) They have no regular economic occupations and no established and stable
family life. “Once in a while”, continues Larry, “one of them makes a
successful touch somewhere, and some of them get a few dollars a month from
connections at home, who pay it on condition they never come back. For the
rest, they live on free lunch and their old friend, Harry Hope, who doesn’t
give a damn what anyone does or doesn’t do, as long as he likes you.” (Ibid.
Pp. 36-37)
So all these inmates
await Hickey. Hope eagerly awaits him, for it was his birthday, and all
celebration would be spiritless without Hickey’s presence. “I’d like a good
laugh with old Hickey….He’d make a cat laugh! (Ibid. P. 59) says Hope. At last
Hickey arrives, but he arrives a changed man. He has given up drinking, has
found deep within himself a kind of peace. Not only this; he wishes to
distribute what he has discovered–peace to all his comrades. This time he comes
not to drink and joke and pass time, but to deliver the inmates from the need
of all this. He comes as a kind of salvationist, a
deliverer. But he retains still his good jolly temper and cheers up the party.
In the beginning nobody takes him seriously. They think, it all must be a part
of some new joke. But later they realize that he was really serious about it.
He says that man is miserable because instead of facing the existence as it is,
he tries to escape from it in “pipe-dreams” or drown it in drink. “Pipe-dreams”
never give peace. They only enhance the pain of the present. But if one has
courage to face the existence–the present existence–it loses all its horror or
tedium, and one is at peace with oneself and with life. Our attempts to evade
or escape grief only entrap us to it and tie us more tightly to it. He explains
the reason of his giving up the drink:
“The only reason I’ve
quit is–Well, I finally had the guts to face myself and throw overboard the
damned lying pipe-dream that’d been making me miserable, and do what I had to
do for the happiness of all concerned–and then all at once I found I was at
peace with myself and I didn’t need boose any more.”
(Ibid. Pp. 74-75)
He says further in a saviour’s tone of voice:
“I meant save you from pipe-dreams. I know now, from my experience, they’re the things that really poison and ruin a guy’s life and keep him from finding any peace. If you know how free and contented I feel now. I’m like a new man. And the cure of them is so damned simple, once you have the nerve. Just the old dope of honesty is the best policy–honesty with yourself, I mean. Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrows.” (Ibid. P. 76)
Larry, at once agrees
with Hickey, but agrees only in as much as the latter spoke of the pipe-dreams.
“Be God, you’ve hit the nail on the head, Hickey! This dump is the
“Well, well! The Old
Grandstand Foolosopher speaks! You think you’re the
big exception, eh?……You’ll be grateful to me when all at once you find you’re
able to admit, without feeling ashamed, that all the grandstand foolosopher bunk and the waiting for the Big Sleep stuff is
a pipe-dream ... Hell, if you really wanted to die, you’d just take a hop off
your fire escape, wouldn’t you? And if you really were in the grandstand, you
wouldn’t be pitying everyone.” (Ibid. Pp. 78-103)
Even this desire for
death is a pipe-dream, a wish for an imaginary escape from the concrete facts
of life. Pitying others only means that their life is not in keeping with
certain idealistic norms. Discontent with what is, and wishing for what is not
only generates inner tension, alienates human spirit in this world and creates
the absurd confrontation between mind that seeks to realize its chosen dreams,
and the universe which denies these dreams any materialization. All
pipe-dreams, therefore, are equally undesirable and responsible for human
misery. They should all be abandoned, and reality should be faced with full
with force, without trying to alter it, without trying to make it accord with
certain ideal. Hickey has achieved the extinction of all the pipe-dreams, and
therefore he has achieved peace.
But, then, what was
Hickey’s pat pipe-dream? What was it that had troubled him so much before he
abandoned it? It was a desire to be virtuous and faithful in love to his wife.
He loved Evelyn more than anything else. But he was a salesman, and he had a
weakness for woman. When he was out on travelling from time to time as a
salesman, he had to stay at hotels. But he could not stay alone without a
woman. Therefore, he would have some wench or the other to sleep with. But he
would repent this when he would come home and see his wife. He would confess
everything and make a promise of never repeating the folly. But he would again
fall, again confess, repent and ask for his wife’s forgiveness. Each time his wife
would readily forgive and sympathise. She had only
love to offer, no fault to find with her husband. She was constant and
steadfast, and hundred thousand follies on her husband’s part would not make
her revolt or entertain the idea of paying him in the same coin taking in deed,
or even thought, to another man. She always believed that her husband would
improve. He always sincerely wished to improve but never could improve. This
was his great pipe-dream–to be loyal as much as he was loving to his wife, to
make her happy. But this was impossible. All pipe-dreams are impossible. The
clash between the ideal and the actual of his life continued to burn his spirit
from within. He could not be happy unless he abandoned the desire for
improvement and put an end to the conflict. He decided to do so without making
his wife in the least unhappy. He would willingly kill himself. But that would
make her miserable. So the only alternative left to him was to kill her when
she was in sound sleep. This he did, made her short sleep–a permanent sleep,
and made her happy to this extent. Now
no improvement in him was necessary, no attempting the impossible. He
committed murder no doubt, but committed it with good intention, and he was ready
to take upon himself all the consequences it entailed. The consequences can
well be foreseen–in all probability death-sentence or at least life-term of
imprisonment. Still he was quiet, happy and his usual hilarious self. His
pipe-dreams were dead, and he was at peace.
At the end of the play
we see that he is arrested and taken to the police custody. His comrades do not
take his message seriously. No sooner was he out of the bar, than they all
forgot his existence. Only Larry is an exception. But even he fails to
understand the positive salvationist aspect of
Hickey’s philosophy. Hickey had only convinced him that his desire for death
was nothing more than a pipe-dream, and that it had not the backing of active,
resolute will. Therefore, he should either commit suicide and make it a reality
or he should abandon the idea of death as it good long sleep. He says:
“Be God, I’m the only
real convert to death Hickey made here. From the bottom of my coward’s heart I
mean it now!” (Ibid, P. 222)
He is seen, when the
curtain falls, sitting in the chair and looking blankly in front of him
oblivious of all the noise and commotion of the bar.
Allardyce Nicell
observes in his World Drama:
“........The Iceman Cometh (1946) is a vastly
disappointing play. The characters talk too much; we become wearied with the
constant repetition of the phrase “pipe-dreams”; the philosophy of the scenes
is confused.....It appears that Hickey, realizing that he has given pain and
sorrow to his wife, has murdered her in order to put her out of her misery,
although at the close of the play we discover that the murder has been
committed because, in reality, he hated her. What this farrago of despairing
scenes implies no one can tell: O’Neill’s latest play is perhaps his poorest.” (Word
Drama George G. Harpar & Co. Ltd. Pp.
892-893)
But Nicoll’s
criticism is not just. The play is in a way a precursor of the absurd theatre
and it is expressionist in thought and technique. It is poetry come to stage,
poetry expressed through the medium of dramatic action. The “wretched saloon
where the flotsam and jetsam of society gather” which is the setting of the
entire action, itself is a fit symbol, an external equivalent of an inner
feeling that the state of man in a nihilist world is wretched and pitiable.
Here are not a few characters; they are whole mankind. The symbolism is clear
enough to the sensible spectators. It fitly expresses the turmoil and
volubility and meaninglessness of the modern humanity. Still, if there is a
certain degree of inclarity or ambiguity, it is
because the modern literature, the writers often make it clear, has not
intellectually to mean, but emotionally to be. Thought is derivative from it,
and never of principal importance. There may be clear and coherent system in
philosophy, but never in life. Literature has to represent life, its anguish,
its inclarity, its fumblings
for light. So it is in The Iceman Cometh, Willis Wager, an American
critic, writes about O’Neill’s plays in his book American Literature A World
View;
“The means by which the action is presented is what is
sometimes referred to as “expressionism”–according to which events are acted
out on the stage as they are conceived of within the somewhat disordered mental
world of one of the characters. As a result, expressionistic stage settings and
action tend to be mechanical, automatic, stylized; and at its best, values are
stressed that are more visionary and poetical than utilitarian and prosaic.” (American
Literature A World View, A. H. Wheeler & Co. (P) Ltd.,
An expressionist play is by its very nature vague, but
not therefore bad. If intellectual clarity and meaningfulness is our standard to
judge the works of literature, most of the modern works will fail to pass the
test. What clarity! For example, do we find in Backet’s Waiting for Godot or Ionesco’s The
Chairs? They are absolutely symbolical and vague and may yield more than
one definite meaning.
Besides, the philosophy
of The Iceman Cometh is not quite so confused. Here we have considerably
sound philosophy of life. Since metaphysical inquiry has ended in absolute scepticism in these days even in the field of philosophy
proper, philosophy of life alone is the kind which may be fruitfully pursued.
And the two important questions about it are (1) why to live? and (2) how to
live? Albert Camus asks the first question in his The
Myth of Sisyphus, and comes to the conclusion that man has no reason to
live, human life has no ulterior motives, and therefore we must make the
gratification of passions the aim of life and live in the world like Don Juan,
stoical and yet pleasure-seeking and revoltive in
character.
Larry’s view of life in The
Iceman Cometh is partially similar to that of Camus’,
since Larry also has discovered no reasons to live, no goals worthy of pursuit,
and so he is waiting for the final Long Sleep. Hickey, the central character of
this play, shows greater maturity than either Camus
or Larry. He does not ask the futile question, why to live or whether to live.
He has taken metaphysical and ethical nihilism for granted. Hence, more
important question for him is, how to live? We have seen that he asks his
comrades to face life boldly and forget all pipe-dreams. One has to face
oneself, one’s existence with courage and, to employ existential term, “lucidity.”
It is the fear of existence and futile attempts to escape it that causes
disturbance and despair in man. Once this fear is got rid of, once the
extinction of all the pipe-dreams is achieved, once the positive and health
attitude of accepting without complaint all that life brings cultivated, serene
peace reigns in the soul. This is what Hickey has decided to do, and to a large
extent done. After this even his long-fed vices automatically, effortlessly
drop dead-booze drops, and even his insatiable lust for woman drops, for we
discover no desire in his behaviour at the bar amid
such whores as
“His whole life-work,
intended for ‘theatre of tomorrow’, was devoted to an end which might well be characterised as the dispelling of the illusions of Maya
and the achieving of Nirvana…..Many of the traditional aims of poetry are
realized through his dramas, and the prevailing tone has often been
characterized as one of mysticism.” (Ibid. pp. 215, 217). This is what we
discover in The Iceman Cometh also.
The Iceman Cometh is written in colloquial
American. Through the vulgar tongue and desultory dialogues of a few bums
O’Neill has presented here the spectacle of human life in general. There
is perfect unity of time and place in the play. From start to finish it
covers a period of less than twenty-four hours. The place of action is Harry’s
saloon all throughout. There is unity of action also, but there is hardly any
action in the traditional sense of the word, for the play does not unfold any
close-knit story. In modern drama the substance is often some startling idea,
some new vision of life, not simple plot and events. We have already examined
the substance and thought of The Iceman Cometh. Willis Wager
considers it as one of the “plays much more spare in action, background
and characters, closer to O’Neill’s personal experience, and written with the
superlative mastery one sometimes finds in the very late work of many great
artists.” (Ibid. P. 216)