More Stately Mansions [antikvár]

Prefatory Note The cycle of plays which was to have been the culmination of Eugene O'Neill's career as a dramatist occupied the major portion of the last ten years of his writing life. "A Tale of Possessors Self-dispossessed" was to have traced the fortunes of an American family, the Harfords, examining the effect upon its various members of the corrupting power of material things. Concerning the series, O'Neill wrote in his Work Diary on May 21, 1941: "have not told anyone yet of expansion of idea to ii plays—seems too ridiculous—idea was first 5 plays, then 7, then 8, then 9, now 11!—will never live to do it—but what price anything but a dream these days!" He had then completed first (longhand) drafts of the first four plays and had prepared notes and outlines for the five remaining plays of the nine-play Cycle. But the first two plays were much too long, as he had admitted to himself on October 20, 1940: " both as long as 'S[trange]. I[nterlude].'—too complicated—tried to get too much into them, too many interwoven themes & motives, psychological 8c spiritual". The decision six months later to expand the two plays into four was his desperate solution to the otherwise insoluble problem of how to reduce them to actable length. Although he subsequently prepared notes for this contemplated expansion and actually rewrote parts of the third and fourth plays in accordance with the new plan, sickness, and despair at the state of the world kept him from realizing his dream: he and Carlotta burned the scripts of "Greed of the Meek" and "And Give Me Death," the first two plays of the nine-play Cycle, at Tao House on February 21, 1943. But although O'Neill had failed to achieve his hopes for the Cycle, he had succeeded before 1943 in completing to his satisfaction the third play of the series, A Touch of the Poet (written 1936, pubhshed 1957), and had pardy finished his extensive revision of a third draft of the fourth play. More Stately Mansions* And he had interrupted work on the Cycle plays to write The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, pubhshed 1946), Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1940, pubhshed 1956), Hughie (written 1941, pubhshed 1959—the first of a projected series of one-act plays to be entitled "By Way of Obit"), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (written 1941-42, pubhshed 1952), his last work. * The title is from Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Chambered Nautilus." It will be noted that O'Neill has Simon quote from it in 1841 (Act Three, Scene One) although the poem was not published until 185S. vii