Review of Ah, Wilderness and Days without End

by Eugene O'Neill

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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Reviewed by Thomas McGreevy
Review of the Ah, Wilderness! and Days Without End. By Eugene O'Neill. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) [p.13]

In these, the latest of his plays, Mr. O'Neill still remains the dramatist of promise. Not that he has failed of achievement within the limits he set himself —" Ah, Wilderness!" is one of the two or three best comedies of domestic sentiment of our time. But, in the past, and again here in "Days Without End," Mr. O'Neill has tackled the most serious problems of existence and never quite sufficiently isolated himself to be able to state a wholly personal attitude to them.

No matter what art form a man employs, it is the quality of his mind that counts for most in the long run, and Mr. O'Neill has not, I think, ever shown the sympathetic detachment of the supreme artist. As with the late D.H. Lawrence, the world is always a little too much with him.

In "Ah, Wilderness!" he turns away from the world that exasperates him, and for his material has taken one of the little potential tragedies of family life that, in the event, turn to comedy. The 17-year-old son and brother of an ordinary, kindly American family stays out late in bad company, but he comes to no harm, and everything ends happily.

As a play it is outstanding in that the potentialities of tragedy are faced, and the reader is made to share sympathetically in the awful apprehensions of the parents and the bitter disillusion of the boy. Mr. O'Neill has no use for make-believe, and his bad company is very definitely bad company. On the other hand, I think that in comparison with, say, Lennox Robinson's "Whiteheaded Boy" and Pagnol's " Marius," the two European plays of its own category most likely to be set against it, "Ah, Wilderness!" suffers from the fact that its characters are less sympathetic. The complacency of the American small-town editor is made less absurdly appealing than that of the Irish country shopkeeper or of the Marseilles café proprietor.

It is this same complacency in the chief characters that mitigates against the final success of Mr. O'Neill's much more ambitious "Days Without End".

The wife who is first, complacent in her husband's worship of her and then, when she discovers his momentary infidelity, relentlessly unforgiving, is not a sympathetic character. And when, at death's door, she protests against his resolve to commit suicide and by her protest restores his long-lost faith in Christ, we do not find ourselves reconciled to her or stirred by his conversion. The man's immediate interest plays too important a part in the latter transformation. Any atheist might, in such circumstances, turn for the moment, to whatever gods may be.