O'Neill the "Novelist"

Martin Lamm's assertion — back in 1953, the year of O'Neill's death — that Eugene O'Neill's "gift is for narrative" pinpoints an important aspect of O'Neill's dramatic art; and Larnm's belief that "the one-act plays of his youth are evocative short stories, and his mammoth dramas are half-novels," has received well-documented support from Peter Egri thirty-five years later.' Both of these fine critics, and many others in between and since. recognize the novelistic tendencies of O'Neill and suggest how these tendencies affect O'Neill's dramatic art. I wish to pursue this idea further in order to make the claim that O'Neill's novelistic impulse carried him too far away from his instinctive theatrical strengths, and that only by tempering this novelistic impulse was he able to create his finest work. One should applaud his boldness in attempting to take drama in new directions, but one should acknowledge the failure of his attempts to be a novelist/dramatist. I believe O'Neill finally recognized this failure, and by subduing the novelist in himself the dramatist of the last great plays emerged.