beyond desire and thought. According to theUpanishads, which constitute some of the core texts of Hinduism, this state of pure, silent consciousness, known as Brahman, is also the essence of the individual self. To know Brahman is to know the eternal nature of the self. This is a state of knowingness, in which, as Nina intuits, questions die, because questions are only the products of the restless intellect and cannot be answered at the level at which they are asked. The answer to the question is to transcend the question altogether, exactly as Nina does in this brief moment of contemplation.

Unfortunately for Nina, she cannot maintain this state of being for more than a few moments. It dissolves as soon as her husband enters and she is brought back into the world of human interaction. Then the whole restless process, so well created by O’Neill in the characters’ stream-of-consciousness asides, begins again as she thinks of her lover Darrell, wants a divorce from Sam, bemoans how she has sacrificed her life to him, and then immediately regrets all these thoughts as being unjust. This unremitting procession of unquiet thoughts is what Schopenhauer called the ‘‘endless stream of willing’’ to which all humans are subject and which ensures that no one ever knows contentment for more than a fleeting moment.

Schopenhauer saw the innermost nature of life as nothing more than the blind striving of an impersonal will-to-live, a ‘‘universal craving for life’’ which manifests most strongly in sexual desire, since this is how each species perpetuates its own existence. In Strange Interlude, Schopenhauer’s notion lies behind the desire of Nina and Darrell to conceive a healthy child that will not be subject to hereditary insanity. As a man of intense passion who thinks he has made himself immune to love by cultivating the detached manner of the scientist, Darrell thinks that he can conceive the child as an experiment and not get drawn into an obsessive desire for Nina. He is, of course, quite wrong. Desire takes hold of him too, just as it has Nina, and buffets them both as it carries them along helplessly, like a boat swept downstream by a fast current.

All the characters, especially Nina and Darrell, but also Evans and Marsden, are helpless in this grip of desire. Their plight crystallizes in another of those fleeting cosmic moments when Nina seems to become larger than life and sees herself as an embodiment of the universal mother god who absorbs the many into the one. This moment comes at the end of act 6, when Darrell, Marsden, and Evans are all contemplating her with different degrees and kinds of desire. She is acutely aware of all their desires, and her desire dominates and absorbs theirs in a kind of maternal cosmic womb:

My three men! . . . I feel their desires converge in me! . . . to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb . . . and am whole . . . they dissolve in me, their life is my life . . . I am pregnant with the three! . . . husband! . . . lover! . . . father! . . . and the fourth man! . . . little man! . . . little Gordon! . . . he is mine too! . . . that makes it perfect!

But once again, it is perfect only for a moment. Salvation for Nina comes not in one of these inspired, mystical balancing acts, since life is continually in flux and cannot be frozen in one particular moment that happens to be pleasing to the desirebound personality. Only when Nina lets go of the whole business of desire can she be free. But in her case this comes not through some deliberate act of detached contemplation—the Eastern ideal—but when desire simply exhausts itself, leaving behind it only a longing for rest and peace. And this is where Charlie Marsden becomes important.

Marsden is different from the other male characters, Darrell and Evans. Although he has an emotional attachment to Nina, it is not a sexual one. Sexually, he is undeveloped, and in that sense he is always beyond desire. The reasons for his sexual abstinence are a combination of latent homosexuality, an unfortunate encounter with a prostitute as a teenager, a naturally refined sensibility, and a neurotic attachment to his mother. He is also, as he admits to Nina, afraid of life, afraid of grappling with the really deep issues. When he is in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, he is unable to write because the issues are too large for him to deal with: ‘‘how answer the fierce question of all those dead and maimed? . . . too big a job for me!’’

One of the key images of Marsden occurs in act 1. It is thought by Nina, who in this scene regards him with a kind of affectionate contempt:

What has Charlie done? . . . nothing . . . and never will . . . Charlie sits beside the fierce river, immaculately timid, cool and clothed, watching the burning, frozen naked swimmers drown at last.

These words are prophetic on Nina’s part, since the fierce river is the river of desire that eventually will pull everyone under. In contrast, Marsden sits apart from the river, observing it. This remarkable image surely owes much to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs about the enlightened man, established in the eternal nature of the self, detached from the stream of desire which he observes without being affected by it. In this view, ‘‘being’’ is more important than ‘‘doing,’’ and this is exactly the attitude that enables Nina and Marsden to find some peace and contentment at last. ‘‘God bless dear old Charlie . . .’’ Marsden says to himself, alluding to how Nina has always regarded him, ‘‘who, passed beyond desire, has all the luck at last!’’

The Eastern metaphysical framework does not explain everything about Strange Interlude, which also draws on Freudian and perhaps Jungian thought, as well. But it does give insight into an aspect of O’Neill’s thought, nourished by his wide reading in comparative religion and philosophy, that was an important part of his life and work in the 1920s.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Strange Interlude, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

In Strange Interlude, the emphasis shifts away from Jamie, though when one recalls the very distorted Jamie of Lazarus Laughed, it is quite possible he may appear in guises here still more difficult to recognize than in that play. The emphasis in Strange Interlude seems again primarily on O’Neill himself trying to cope with all the deaths around him and, as always, with that one awful shock of his adolescence, his mother’s addiction. Like so many others, the play explores his attempts to escape the pain associated with those events.

If in two previous plays O’Neill had been ‘‘much possessed by death,’’ he was absolutely obsessed with it in Strange Interlude. While death, except in the early scenes, is not so explicit a subject of the play as it is in Lazarus Laughed, it is heavily in the background from beginning to end, tormenting all the characters in a variety of ways and directly affecting their responses and behavior. There are seven deaths referred to in this play, deaths of individuals closely related to central characters. There is the death of Professor Leeds’s wife before the play opens, which the Professor finds himself unable to face. There is the earlier death of the airman Gordon Shaw, Nina’s first lover, which Nina finds herself unable to face. There is the death of Professor Leeds himself, which Nina cannot ‘‘feel’’ anything in response to. There is the death of mad old Mr. Evans, Sam Evans’s father, which his strange wife is still trying to cope with. Not long after, there is the death of Charlie Marsden’s mother, whose apron strings Charlie could never cut and whose memory possesses him throughout the rest of the play. There is the death of Charlie’s sister referred to in Act Eight, which Charlie responds to precisely as he had to the death of his mother. And finally there is the death of Sam Evans, which no one seems to know how to respond to. In addition, these deaths are all linked by the fact that the character closest to the deceased either has trouble feeling the death, or facing it—which amounts to the same thing in the context of the play. The incapacity to feel is presented as simply an early manifestation of the incapacity to face. And so with O’Neill himself toward the deaths around him. First he could not feel them, then he could not face them.

But while death is extremely important as a force which generates people’s responses and behavior, it is not the immediate or surface subject of the action. Rather, the subject is a life story, the life story of Nina Leeds, told more as a novel might present it than as a play. It is also a disguised version of the life story of Eugene O’Neill, from the great disillusionment of his adolescence up to his involvement with his later wife Carlotta Monterey. Not for the first time and not for the last, O’Neill disguises an identity by changing the sex of the person intended, a simpler disguise than some because he might thereby treat certain topics more directly. The central agonies of Nina’s young adulthood parallel the agonies that haunted O’Neill’s existence. Although in the course of the play other characters reenact important aspects of O’Neill’s attitudes and behavior, it is Nina who most comprehensively lives out the long-range fears, guilts, and frustrations which O’Neill felt were leading him to total despair.

The nine acts of this enormous play may be broken into four episodes, three relatively short, and one quite long. The first centers on Nina’s relationship with her father and her response to his death; the second tells the strange tale of madness and death in the family of Sam Evans; the third traces the long, chaotic love affair of Nina Leeds and Ned Darrell; and the fourth predicts a desperate future. Although O’Neill divides the play into two major parts denoting a break of ten years, the natural story lines actually fall into the four I shall be discussing. And these four episodes follow the major preoccupations of O’Neill’s adult existence: the deaths in his family, the addiction of his mother, his affair with Carlotta, and his fear of the future.

Professor Leeds, the subject of the first episode, is described in terms, and acts in ways, which suggest Mary Tyrone. The change in sex from mother to father is consistent with the change that makes Nina represent O’Neill. We meet the Professor as the play opens living on the same seacoast as Mary (New Haven substituted for New London), longing for a recently deceased (and, we infer, dominant) spouse, compulsively dedicated to the past, and unable to confront the problems of the present. He is described, like Mary, as ‘‘a fugitive from reality,’’ ‘‘over-refined,’’ and ‘‘temperamentally timid.’’ He concentrates most of what he has to say in his brief appearance on his personal insecurity and on the guilt he feels toward his daughter, the recent death of whose lover both he and his daughter feel, quite irrationally, he has helped to bring about. The lover was an airman shot down during World War I, but Nina feels that had her father not prevented their marriage before the lover’s departure, the lover might not, somehow, have died. Both see Gordon Shaw’s death as the cause of Nina’s recent nervous breakdown, and the Professor fears he may have been to blame.

Nina is described from the start in terms which suggest the young O’Neill both in appearance and in his struggle with disillusionment and guilt:

Her face is striking, handsome rather than pretty, the bone structure prominent, the forehead high, the lips of her rather large mouth clearly modelled above the firm jaw . . . . Since Gordon’s death [her eyes] have a quality of continually shuddering before some terrible enigma, of being wounded to their depths and made defiant and resentful by their pain. Her whole manner, the charged atmosphere she gives off, is totally at variance with her healthy outdoor physique. It is strained, nerve-racked, hectic, a terrible tension of will alone maintaining self-possession. (I. 12–13)

Like Nina, the active, athletic O’Neill was ‘‘nerve-racked,’’ not by the idealized image of a dead airman but by the equally idealized image of a dead mother. The Gordon Shaw theme parallels that motif of a lost ideal past O’Neill represented earlier in the image of childhood to which Jim and Ella Harris long to return. With the memory of Gordon Shaw representing O’Neill’s distorted recollection of his mother ‘‘before the fall,’’ the guilt of Professor Leeds then stands for his mother’s guilt after she had revealed her great crime. The nervous breakdown Nina is recovering from is symptomatically no different from the whole set of reactions O’Neill experienced following the great trauma of his adolescence. Both feel inexpressible loss and inexpressible guilt, and both try to escape into a life of unabated debauchery. To parallel his own tuberculosis sanatorium, O’Neill includes a battle-fatigue sanatorium for Nina, where she ‘‘gives herself’’ to patients as O’Neill ‘‘gave himself’’ to whores and drink. O’Neill has combined in Nina’s story the debauchery of his late teens with his experience in the sanatorium. Ned Darrell makes the point about Nina that she will shortly ‘‘dive for the gutter just to get the security that comes from knowing she’s touched bottom,’’ an idea which describes O’Neill’s early adult life as accurately as any.

The second act of the play, which concludes this first episode, deals with Nina’s first reactions to the death of her father and grows out of O’Neill’s first reactions to the death of his mother. Nina keeps repeating in a voice ‘‘flat and toneless’’ that she is utterly unable to ‘‘feel anything at all’’ about her father—as O’Neill confessed that he could feel nothing at all about his mother’s death. It is in response to this inability to feel that Nina decides to accept marriage. Since there is nothing, she reasons, that can replace her mutilated ideal, she decides that she must assume the outward characteristics at least of adult behavior, a compromise O’Neill felt he had made in his marriage to Agnes Boulton and in his early career. O’Neill’s understanding of his own condition is suggested by the physician Ned Darrell’s diagnosis of Nina. Ned clinically announces that Nina’s inability to feel (like O’Neill’s) is only a result of shock, that her feelings (like his) are actually very great. O’Neill writing Strange Interlude had come to understand, as he had not earlier, the nature of his supposed lack of feeling; and the play’s opening episode reveals the nature of the understanding. But he was far from able to find hope in that understanding.

The second of the play’s four episodes is much shorter and quite different in tone from the others. It is a melodrama in one act (Act Three) presenting the same disillusionment and fear of the opening episode from a different, less reasoned perspective. Now married to Sam Evans and pregnant, Nina is briefly happy at the prospect of becoming a mother. But she soon discovers the illusory nature of her new happiness, just as she had discovered the illusory nature of her old ideal. We meet Sam Evans’s mother, who is described in the old familiar terms. She is

. . . very pale. Her big dark eyes are grim with the prisoner-pain of a walled-in soul. Yet a sweet loving-kindness, the ghost of an old faith and trust in life’s goodness, hovers girlishly, fleetingly, about the corners of her mouth. . . . (I. 53)

But despite the familiar description, it is not Mrs. Evans who reminds us of Mary Tyrone in this scene so much as it is the late, withdrawn, and unstable Mr. Evans described by Mrs. Evans, and the insane sister she also describes locked away in an upstairs room (the spare room motif), who sits laughing to herself without a care in the world. The mood of the play suddenly becomes gothic. Nina’s emotion as she learns that her late father-in-law’s ‘‘madness’’ is an inherited one is one of horror. Her flicker of hope at the prospective child is quickly doused. The effect of the family past is haunting to her. Thus the atmosphere of the brief second episode repeats the underlying elements of the first episode but strongly counters its reasoned, clinical tone. Both the clinical and the gothic were parts of O’Neill’s complex perspective of the 1920s.

The solution proposed by Mrs. Evans—that Nina have an abortion and find a substitute father for her children—leads into the play’s long and best-remembered third episode, which begins with Act Four and runs through Act Seven. This is on the surface a modish 1920s love story which in its time was undoubtedly rather titillating. The relationship between Nina and Ned precisely parallels the boiling affair between O’Neill and Carlotta. ‘‘Oh, those afternoons!’’ the lovers murmur through much of their anguished dialogue, afternoons certainly paralleling those O’Neill spent on his increasingly long and frequent trips to New York in the mid-twenties, ostensibly to work on rehearsals, but actually to yield to the very real attractions of a quite provocative actress. Here, of course, Ned Darrell is O’Neill, as his ‘‘dark, wiry’’ appearance suggests he sooner or later must be. But he is only O’Neill the attractive lover succumbing to a forbidden passion, not the O’Neill viewers of the plays know better, the terrified victim of an incomprehensible guilt. That O’Neill in this episode is the province of the enigmatic Charlie Marsden, a figure I shall consider in a moment.

The reason the Nina-Ned episode is so predominantly a soap opera is that, like O’Neill’s earlier play on the subject of his marital and amatory problems, Welded, it is so engagingly superficial. It deals with that fascinating subject of people struggling with forbidden sexual attraction. It in no way deals with the conditions or causes which lead them to such activity. O’Neill did something here he would never do again. He dramatized effects— which so many second-rate writers do—rather than causes, and the results were immensely successful commercially. The popularity of Strange Interlude was in fact very much the popularity of soap opera.

These episodes are saved from utter banality, however, by Charlie Marsden, who keeps us in touch with the emotions O’Neill could not escape from, try as he might. In this episode at least, Marsden stands for O’Neill himself, more or less in the way William Brown did. Like O’Neill, Brown and Marsden are successful artists unsure of their own talents and plagued by the commercial appeal of their works. And both are, like O’Neill, overly sensitive, devastatingly self-critical, and unsure of their abilities as lovers. That last may seem strange in the light of O’Neill’s active sex life, but extreme ambivalence in this area was a hallmark of all the O’Neill’s. O’Neill’s puritanical Roman Catholic upbringing was so full of taboos and his adolescent sexual experiences so fretted with fear and guilt that both his marriages were seriously affected by frequent periods of sexual disgust and inadequacy. The pervasive presence of that disgust in the plays is suggested by Charlie as he encounters Nina and Ned in the midst of their yearning for one another:

lust in this room! . . . lust with a loathsome jeer taunting my sensitive timidities! . . . my purity! . . . purity? . . . purity? . . . ha! yes, if you say prurient purity! . . . lust ogling me for a dollar with oily shoe button Italian eyes! (I. 100)

These lines anticipate that potent atmosphere of sexual disgust particularly evident in the later plays: in the professional remarks of Cora and the Italian Pearl in Iceman, Edmund’s recollections of his sexual initiations in Long Day’s Journey, and Jamie’s drunken sexual attitudes and behavior in A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Charlie Marsden we encounter in these scenes is the O’Neill who could be terribly, viscerally disturbed at the subject of sex even as he had, like his Ned Darrell, exceptional sexual appetites and, intermittently, prowess.

But more revealing still are other attitudes of Charlie Marsden’s, especially in Act Six: his selfpitying lament for his dead mother and his contempt for himself as a writer, which are significantly related. He criticizes himself from the beginning of the play for being unwilling to dig deeply in his novels, afraid that he will ‘‘meet himself somewhere.’’ In Act Six he links that fear, significantly, to the death of his mother:

I couldn’t forget Mother . . . she haunted me through every city of Europe. . . (Then irritatedly) I must get back to work! . . . not a line written in over a year! . . . my public will be forgetting me! . . . a plot came to me yesterday . . . my mind . . . is coming around again . . . I am beginning to forget, thank God! . . . (Then remorsefully) No, I don’t want to forget you, Mother! . . . but let me remember . . . without pain! . . . (I. 112–13)

O’Neill’s recurrent periods of inability to write are well-known, and his desire to remember his mother ‘‘without pain’’ is the futile effort of all these plays. Charlie tells us more a bit later:

. . . but I might have done something big . . . I might still . . . if I had the courage to write the truth . . . but I was born afraid . . . afraid of myself. . . (I. 120)

If the audiences of 1928 were puzzled about the precise nature of that truth, those of Long Day’s Journey some thirty years later would not be.

While Marsden and Nina represent O’Neill’s anxieties about his art and about his past, Ned Darrell reflects the domestic O’Neill, revealing his guilt at having to confront his betrayed children. In Act Seven, Nina and Ned are still, in this manyyears- later scene, the on-again off-again lovers, unable to part, unable to join, unable to be anything but deceptive and manipulative. Nothing new is provided about their relationship because O’Neill had nothing new to provide about his with Carlotta at that point. But what he adds, quite poignantly, is his fear concerning his children. The treatment O’Neill lets young Gordon Evans give Ned Darrell, his secret father, is treatment Shane O’Neill was not too young to have awarded his father on his infrequent trips home during the courtship of Carlotta; and it feels in the play like treatment O’Neill felt he deserved. As in other instances in which guilt and hurt can be felt most intensely in O’Neill’s plays, the intensity here seems the direct result of immediate experience.

But it is still essentially unexplored experience— or experience at one remove from its source. O’Neill is here dealing with behavior and responses which are the result of earlier unrelieved agonies, and it is only when O’Neill deals more directly with those earlier agonies that the plays probe deeply into human experience. Notwithstanding O’Neill’s characterizations of Charlie Marsden and little Gordon Evans, the long third episode is maudlin. If O’Neill went further in representing the ‘‘inner’’ lives of his characters than he had ever gone before, he did not go much further, largely because in this play he did not have much further to go. He was mired in immediate domestic problems and in a love affair, both of which grew out of deeper problems of his past; and while he sensed the connections between past and present, he understood neither. The tedious third episode of Strange Interlude sheds little real light on the nature of human relationships.

The last episode of the play (Acts Eight and Nine) represents O’Neill’s attempt to achieve an idyll of withdrawal, a death in life, that condition later paralleled by Deborah Harford’s in More Stately Mansions. It is written out of O’Neill’s despair, of both past and present, and his desire to find the kind of escape the residents of Harry Hope’s saloon find through their pipe dreams and their nickel whiskey, but which O’Neill never could find by such methods.

There are many elements of the play present in the last episode, not all of them successfully drawn together. I shall concentrate only on those clearly enough related to O’Neill’s deeper feelings to make them relevant to this study. The end of the play can best be understood through its three central characters—Sam Evans, Nina Leeds, and Charlie Marsden—in that order. For out of these characters can be seen O’Neill’s two alternative routes to the eternal oblivion his despair had led him to seek in all these plays.

To begin with, Sam is O’Neill’s image of what is best in life. His life and death call to mind Larry Slade’s dark quotation from Nietzsche:

Lo, sleep is good; better is death; in sooth. The best of all were never to be born.

Sam lives with his illusions intact and he dies a sudden death. Because he never knew the real conditions of his life—the madness in his family, his wife’s true affections, the real paternity of his son—it could be said that he had lived a long sleep. Sam’s life was a healthy pretense to O’Neill. Free from the burden of knowing reality, completely protected in his illusions, Sam has been able to achieve material success and bring security to those around him. These are qualities O’Neill envies him, and still more does he envy him his sudden death. And Sam’s ‘‘son’’ Gordon is following directly in his supposed father’s footsteps when he refuses to believe that his mother could ever be unfaithful, unable even to comprehend the news that Ned Darrell is his real father. The Evans men are of the genus that sensitive and disturbed people envy for the impenetrability of their illusions, though by the time he wrote Iceman O’Neill believed no one could be entirely protected from his ghosts.

More important in the episode is Nina, who represents O’Neill himself in the overall design of the play as a life story, but who from time to time suggests other important women in O’Neill’s life. Her agonized exchanges with Darrell, for example, suggest Carlotta. In the last episode, through signals we are well acquainted with, she anticipates Mary Tyrone. At the point in Act Eight when her selfish clinging to her son is frustrated and she is prevented by Darrell from trying to break up her son’s planned marriage, she becomes increasingly remote and her thoughts become vague and confused. She imagines Charlie to be her long-dead father and confesses the great sin of her life to him in tones which suggest Mary’s narcotic withdrawal.

It is quite reasonable, of course, that at this point in the play, when Nina has become the mother of a young adult, she should follow the pattern of so many troubled matrons before and after her in O’Neill’s plays. What is surprising is that the character who began the play as the author’s representative should end as his mother’s. In fact, she represents both at the end of the play. What we see O’Neill doing in this final episode is dramatizing that aspect of his fear in which he identified with his mother’s desire to withdraw. As Nina, like Mary, seeks a death in life, an insulation from all feeling, so O’Neill, nervous and guilt-ridden like both, longed for such a release so much that he was willing to betray those closest to him to find it. The Nina of the final episode is a fusion of O’Neill’s anxieties concerning his mother and his anxieties concerning himself and his future—a fusion which would be central in plays to follow, especially More Stately Mansions.

Nina’s ‘‘strange dark interlude called life,’’ then, is O’Neill’s. The play is a not-so-brief abstract of O’Neill’s emotional history—‘‘a long drawn out lie with a sniffling sigh at the end,’’ says Nina. Now unwilling to write in the courageous if essentially suicidal terms of The Great God Brown, O’Neill seeks an escape in this life, and he does so through a totally new version of his Earth Mother, his Cybel, the comforting bosom on which he ‘‘might cease upon the midnight with no pain.’’ He assigns this role to the altogether surprising figure of Charlie Marsden. The ubiquitous Charlie has represented several facets of O’Neill’s experience in this play, and there are many ways to approach him, almost all of them accurate but none of them complete. We have most recently heard him uttering O’Neill’s most self-pitying thoughts and thus representing O’Neill’s self-condemnation in these plays. But in this final episode, he becomes something quite different from the embodiment of O’Neill’s uncertainty about his talent. The first overt indication of this larger function in the last episode is when he begins thinking to himself in terms one might associate with a narcotic withdrawal:

My life is a cool green shade wherein comes no scorching zenith sun of passion and possession to wither the heart with bitter poisons . . . my life gathers roses, cooly crimson, in sheltered gardens, on late afternoons in love with evening . . . roses heavy with after-blooming of the long, day, desiring evening . . . my life is an evening . . . Nina is a rose, my rose, exhausted by the long, hot day, leaning wearily toward peace. (I. 187)

He becomes the embodiment, in short, of escape.

In line with this function, Charlie becomes a kind of father figure to Nina. She has identified him with her father throughout the play; here she calls him father, and she yields to his love as a daughter would to a comforting father. Yet Nina has also throughout the play protested her rejection of fathers and father figures. She declares any number of times that she no longer believes in God-the-Father but has instead become a believer in God-the- Mother, the provider of nurture and comfort, a conception not far removed from O’Neill’s Earth Mother, especially as she is represented in the goddess-like Cybel. So Nina’s escape in the end into the embrace of a re-incarnation of her father seems contradictory—unless we recall (1) who her real father represented in the play, and (2) the androgynous terms in which Charlie earlier describes himself.

At the start of the play, when Nina could be identified simply as a young O’Neill disguised largely by a change in sex, the Professor by the same token could be identified as a version of O’Neill’s mother. Nina, of course, rejects her guilty father and has difficulty facing his death, as O’Neill rejected his mother and had difficulty facing hers. In her despair late in the play, Nina seeks the forgiveness and comfort of a father—but not the still stained memory of her real father. What she seeks is that father with the stain of his guilt removed. And so O’Neill with the memory of his mother. He sought a mother with the stain of his real mother’s guilt removed. Which is to say, he sought his Earth Mother, and created her in various versions in his plays. Possibly the strangest version of all is Charlie Marsden.

Several things Charlie does and says earlier in the play foreshadow this idea. He clings to Nina the way O’Neill’s thoughts about the past clung to him, and he says he cannot decide whether he is a man or a woman. While the latter may suggest homosexuality, there is nothing notably homosexual about the Charlie of this play. He has lost his lust, he tells us, as the result of an encounter with a whore—an experience which fits a number of O’Neill’s characters, most notably Jamie Tyrone, in whom it would be difficult to identify homosexual tendencies. The point O’Neill seems to be making about Charlie is simply that he is asexual, and that is precisely what he is supposed to be at the end: an asexual, protecting comforter for Nina in her dark, despairing wait for death. Nina’s final gesture in the play is to fall asleep with her head on Charlie’s shoulder. Her much-misunderstood declarations earlier in the play on behalf of ‘‘God-the-Mother’’ are thus finally realized in the triumph of ‘‘good old Charlie Marsden.’’

In dividing Strange Interlude into what I see as its four major episodes, I have sought to cut this sprawling play down to size. Its inordinate length, like that of plays to follow, grows out of O’Neill’s persistent harassment by hostility and guilt, followed by panic and withdrawal. The first two episodes re-enact his familiar set of contradictory responses to his mother’s addiction and his mother’s death. The third and fourth reenact the escape, the third his escape through marital infidelity, and the fourth his desire for total oblivion. The play, like those immediately before and after it, is an extended set of variations on the theme of O’Neill’s hardening despair.

Before going on to the other plays of this most desperate period in O’Neill’s writing, however, I ought to say a word more about the play’s interior monologues and their relation to the theme of kinship. Despite their frequent banality, they at times embody elements of the kind of dialogue O’Neill wrote earlier and would return to later. While the lines the characters speak to one another are usually deceptive or manipulative, the lines they think to themselves, when not simply self-pitying, often recall that antiphony of contradictory feelings O’Neill used so extensively in his earlier plays and would one day make basic to his language of human kinship. But although these rhythms do occur, the more important point is that they are almost always limited to the characters’ thoughts. Rarely do the characters reveal their irrational reverses in feeling to others, and thus rarely are the characters in actual communication. Despite his obvious attempt to make the characters reveal their inner states, there is no true self-revelation in the play because the characters are rarely honest and direct with one another. Having told Nina that he loves her, for example, Ned Darrell thinks to himself that he is unsure that he loves her. It is quite convincing that his feelings might be so divided, but because of his fear of being hurt, Ned never makes this natural division in his feelings known to Nina. The result is the soap opera effect of pointless and ceaseless suspicion and distrust with no one the wiser or better off. There has been little real emotional confrontation, and there is little really ‘‘Freudian’’ about the play at all, despite the supposedly Freudian overtones of the interior monologues.

For contrast, such passages might be set beside encounters between father and son, mother and son, and brother and brother in Long Day’s Journey. Whatever the characters in this later play feel is ultimately spoken aloud, and the result is a good deal of hurt and resentment but also a good deal of enlightenment. Only the figure of Mary, who finally must hide entirely behind her morphine screen, evokes the kind of despair that emanates from practically every scene of Strange Interlude. The men survive at the end of Long Day’s Journey because they have made contact with one another— as do all three characters in A Moon for the Misbegotten. It is all a matter of whether the terrible extremes of human emotion are held in, breeding an aura of human separateness and despair, or whether they are released, breeding an aura of kinship. As O’Neill was far remote from any aura of kinship in his personal life of the late 1920s, so are his plays of that period.

Source: Michael Manheim, ‘‘Strange Interlude and Dynamo,’’ in Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship, Syracuse University Press, 1982, pp. 60–71.

Fortunately, O’Neill had started a return to modified realism and interest in character-drama some half a dozen years earlier with Strange Interlude, which became a great Theatre Guild success in the year 1928. Instead of dealing with metaphysical content and struggles over faith, O’Neill concerned himself here with character dissection and inner conflict. Whatever means he adopted in this play, his schematizations and his recourse to the Elizabethan device of the ‘‘aside’’ on a scale never before attempted on the stage, served the author’s sole objective of portraying a modern woman. O’Neill showed her being driven by the strange life-force in her bloodstream to unconventional relationships, and seeking multiple possession of men’s lives before peace descends upon her at the end of the ‘‘strange interlude’’ of her premenopausal lifehistory. With many details drawn from contemporary manners (the mores of the ‘‘sophisticated’’ 1920’s) and contemporary psychology (chiefly Freudian), Strange Interlude proved engrossing to its New York public throughout the greater part of the long procession of revelations and incidents. The play was in nine acts (in contrast to the usual three-act play), ran from 5:30 P.M. until past 11 save for an eighty-minute dinner interval, and traced the critical relationships of a small number of characters for nearly three decades. Above all the characters stood Nina, the attractive daughter of a possessive university professor, who lost her athlete lover in World War I, regretted not having consummated her love with him, and sought fulfillment in desperate promiscuity. Later, having married a man to whom she would not bear children after being warned by his mother that there was insanity in the family, she gave birth to a son by another man (the neurologist Darrell) but could not bring herself to leave her husband and never could reveal the boy’s true parentage. It takes a husband, a lover, a family friend, and an illegitimate son to fill her womanly life while at full tide. Then, as the vital flood recedes, she loses her husband to death, her emotionally drained lover to science, and her athlete son to a girl of his own age. By then, however, a twilight calm is descending on the central figure of this novel in play form, in which a vital modern woman is observed from many angles and in many situations. The resulting portrait was drawn on the stage by the gifted and resourceful Lynn Fontanne with such conviction that no one was likely to look for hidden meanings while she held the stage, which she did most of the time.

As a matter of fact, there were no hidden meanings in the play; if anything, O’Neill was only too explicit in his spoken and especially his supposedly unspoken dialogue—that is, the asides with which the author outlined the true thoughts and sentiments of the characters at the risk of redundancy. There could well be two strongly contradictory opinions about the recourse to asides. The British theater historian Allardyce Nicoll deplored them as a ‘‘somewhat tedious and fundamentally undramatic elaboration of the quite worthy convention of the ‘aside’ into a pretentious artistic instrument.’’ Others found much to approve in this type of ‘‘interior dialogue,’’ which bore considerable resemblance to the stream-of-consciousness James Joyce employed in Ulysses. In the excellently paced Theatre Guild production of 1928, staged by the gifted director Philip Moeller with an incredibly apt and able cast, there was little cause for complaint except for the decline of interest in the last two acts. In a highly professional New York revival given about a third of a century later by the Actors Studio Theatre, the negative opinion was more or less vindicated. Even then, however, Strange Interlude impressed the majority of reviewers and playgoers as a weighty experiment and, more than that, as a wide-ranging human document. What rigorous criticism was tempted to dismiss in that document as mere cliché overinsistently communicated was redeemed by effective confrontations of the chief characters and by the substantiality of Nina Leeds as a veritable incarnation of das Ewig-Weibliche. Nina, whose grosser and more elemental ancestress may be said to be Wedekind’s Lulu, is a sort of Social Register earth goddess who encompasses during her ‘‘strange interlude’’ the functions of daughter, wife, mother, mistress, and superwoman whom all men find attractive and whose needs no single man is capable of fulfilling, although it is surmised that the untimely lost lover, Gordon, might have been able to satisfy them. Both as a character study and as a dramatic novel Strange Interlude commanded the interest of a large public grateful for an exacting and unconventional drama. And its augmented realism was sufficiently successful to direct its author back to the paths of realism he had followed rewardingly in the early sea and waterfront plays.

Source: John Gassner, Excerpt, in Eugene O’Neill, University of Minnesota Press, 1965, pp. 27–30.

STRANGE INTERLUDE

When I saw O’Neill in June, 1926, he told me about one of the new plays he was working on. The idea sounded preposterous: there were to be nine acts, and all the characters were to speak their thoughts aloud, with no regard for the ordinary conventions of the theater or of normal social intercourse.

‘‘And why not?’’ he asked. ‘‘Everything is a matter of convention. If we accept one, why not another, so long as it does what it’s intended to do? My people speak aloud what they think and what the others aren’t supposed to hear. They talk in prose, realistic or otherwise—blank verse or hexameter or rhymed couplets.’’ Then he went on to outline the story. The actual writing of Strange Interlude was done in Bermuda and Maine in 1926 and 1927.

The Theatre Guild contracted for the play, and early in 1928 it was produced. The Guild people have a way of doing things well. We know from the published letters of O’Neill that the Guild had turned down The Fountain when the prestige of a production by them would have helped immensely, and the royalties have eked out an income that was none too large; and there had been misunderstandings about other early MSS. But to the Guild O’Neill owes adequate, careful, and on occasion superb productions, and it is likely that if that group had not produced Strange Interlude and Dynamo, he might have had a hard time in those years finding other producers willing or able to take chances on them.

Let me begin my remarks on Strange Interlude by saying that the producers and director spared no pains or expense in doing ample justice to the drama. There have been few plays that required more tact and skill and imagination than this ambitious and subtle play in nine acts. Philip Moeller never directed anything that called for greater intelligence and a more sympathetic understanding. He brought into relief as much as was possible in a work that has so little that is conventionally theatrical. There is not much of that ‘‘pointing,’’ straining after effect, that has marred certain other Guild productions.

Strange Interlude is many things, almost as many things as it has been called. The first point to make is that from 5:30 P.M. until after eleven, except for eighty minutes’ intermission for supper, it holds the audience. Yet not primarily by means of theatrical trickery. It is not the story, which could easily have been condensed into three acts; it is not the strangeness of the asides and monologues (that novelty wears off in a few minutes); it is no more nor less than the triumph of O’Neill’s art, his amazing gift for understanding and laying bare some of the complexities of the human mind and heart. He was clearly unwilling to make use of the traditional dramatic form which, in its latest manifestations, does not admit the aside and the soliloquy, and refuses to allow the dramatist much more than two or two and a quarter hours’ time.

He had therefore, with a characteristic disregard of current fashions, elaborated what might otherwise have been a commonplace plot into nine acts, with a total playing time almost twice as long as what we are used to. There is more to hold the attention in Strange Interlude than there is in Parsifal. There is less ‘‘literature’’ but far more drama than there is in Faust. Strange Interlude carries four characters through their chief emotional crises during twenty-seven or -eight years. Nina Leeds, daughter of a college professor, loses her fiancé shortly after he goes to war to be an aviator. Her puritanical father has prevented the consummation of their union, which precipitates her decision to leave home. At first she becomes a nurse, then she seeks other outlets for her more or less imperfectly adjusted desires and aspirations. As she enters the main action of the play she has already begun to take on the appearance and characteristics of woman—with a capital W—to symbolize the Earth Spirit; she is a close relation of Cybel in The Great God Brown; she is mother, wife, mistress, adultress, materialist, idealist. Into her life are woven strands from the lives of many men: of Gordon (a romantic memory and an ideal); of the patient mother-ridden Charles Marsden; of Sam, her husband; of Edmund Darrell, her lover; and later of her son Gordon. For this woman no one man is enough. This epic creature, endowed with an inordinate thirst for life, takes on the proportions of a superwoman. With dreams that can never quite be fulfilled, held in check by inhibitions, forced onward by appetites, she is the incarnation of vitality, a creature that is driven to meddle in the lives of others in order that her own life may be filled to overflowing. No one is a match for her; nothing arrests her progress, nothing but old age. At last she is defeated by time and by that very spirit of youth (in the person of her son) that urged her on to rebel when she was young. The boy Gordon and the girl he is determined to marry leave her, even as she had left her helpless father.

This, essentially, is the ‘‘story’’ of Strange Interlude. There are several plot incidents, absorbing in themselves, but introduced principally to throw the character of Nina into sharp relief. I see in the play no ‘‘moral,’’ no ‘‘intention,’’ indeed very little of any definite philosophy. This in spite of what O’Neill and some of his interpreters have said on the subject. It was O’Neill’s aim to expose imaginatively a chain of events in which a few people exhibit to us their thoughts and motives over a long period of years. Life offers us problems, joys, tragedies; it seems to take shape occasionally as a thing of beauty, but oftener as a senseless and cruel joke; yet it is an exciting process, a great adventure. The puppets we call ourselves are momentarily selfimportant with their little schemes for cheating death and avoiding unhappiness, but ultimately they lose bit by bit their desires and the fierce impulses of youth, declining slowly into a sunset period where peace alone seems worth having. Thus Nina seems to outgrow and cast off her sex, to embody and to be identified with the life instinct. Because she is conceived by the dramatist as a woman, each situation in her life is symbolized by a man, possessing something that she needs, has needed, or will need at last. In the case of Marsden we see her carefully appraising him in the first act and marking him out for use at some future time; at the end of the ninth act, when everything else has gone, she falls into his protecting arms, there to pass peacefully the remaining days of her life.

I have not yet touched on the essential element in Strange Interlude—the thing that makes it, with all its faults, a masterly creation. This is no more nor less than the dramatist’s divination and dramatization of the motives of his people. As I have said, he could easily have told his story in three acts, but he extended it to nine in order that he might not have to say, ‘‘If I had had time, I might have told you everything essential about these people.’’ He did have time, because he took it; he probably took a little too much time, not his own, but ours; there are places where he has insisted on making his characters explain to us what has already been clearly shown.

We are almost immediately let into the secrets of these characters: they tell us a great deal of what they think and feel. Not everything, of course, for that would be impossible and not at all necessary, but enough for the purpose at hand. The thoughts expressed aloud cannot at best constitute more than a fraction of those half-thoughts, hints and shadowings that haunt the subconscious mind, but they are enough for O’Neill. Shakespeare did much the same thing, and so did Goethe. O’Neill has tried to go a little farther, and has used the device somewhat more realistically. If he had been a Shakespeare or a Goethe he could have succeeded where they did, and with less ado. Simple and crude as it is, the device he uses is occasionally very effective. That is why there is no surprise in the ordinary sense; no suspense, and no curiosity of the sort aroused in conventional fiction. O’Neill knows that Strange Interlude is heavy with suspense, and for this reason he throws overboard most of the devices by which dramatists usually create it. He never releases the tension in his pursuit of the motives of human activity; this is his aim throughout. Like a surgeon he cuts deep, knowing always just what he is after.

While he has succeeded in showing a series of events each of which throws into relief some basic characteristic of one or more persons; and while he has conceived largely and written nobly, I feel that Strange Interlude is not the perfect work it might have been. For one thing, the shade of Strindberg hovers too close over it all: there is something strained, a bit diagrammatic and intellectualized in the character of Nina. She is rather too special—too much the female of the species. Woman as a beast of prey is Strindberg’s invention, and I don’t think O’Neill’s vision of the world is as narrow and warped as that of the Swedish poet.

Technically, what of the asides and the nine acts? Is it always necessary in a play to express aloud what one thinks and feels? Cannot the actor occasionally show it? I believe that perhaps half of all the words not intended to be heard by the other characters might have been omitted without the loss of anything essential. O’Neill has overworked his device.

Finally, there is something lacking in the last three acts. They are somewhat repetitious, and might well have been condensed into one.

In these acts we notice again the dramatist’s tendency to get lost in the mazes of his own rhetoric, not because he is trying merely to write for the sake of writing, but because he insists on exploring to the utmost the darkest corners of the mind and heart. In becoming familiar with the shape and color of words every writer has to guard against the temptation to create ‘‘mere’’ literature, or what looks like it, for he too often becomes the slave, as Stevenson and Wilde did, of the thing he thinks he has conquered. Throughout Strange Interlude, particularly in the asides, there are some lapses into ‘‘fine’’ writing. Of course, I am not insisting that one’s thoughts ought not to be well expressed, but good expression does not of course mean ‘‘fine’’ writing, and some of O’Neill’s fine writing is not good expression. In his attempt to avoid the banalities of surface realism he sometimes falls into another sort of error.

Source: Barrett H. Clark, Preface, in Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, Dover Publications, 1947, pp. 111–16.