Strange Interview with Mr. O'Neill

Notes Upon the Latest Product of the Gloomy Gene, and Other Literary Phenomena of the Month

JOHN RIDDELL

CHARACTERS

MR O'NEILLBy himself(he prefers to be). MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICEJohn Riddell.

SCENE:The library ofMR. O'NEILL'Shome in a small, suppressed town in Xeiv England.

The room, like life itself, is all bologney; and apparently the sole occupant is aware of this. It is perfectly obvious, from a glance at the furniture, that it is the room of a man who has discovered that Reality is only Flux, and things arc seldom, things seeming what they are, what they seem. The very tables and chairs and draperies make no pretense about being genuine: The rich Oriental tapestries by the window still display their price-tags "$1.60 a Yard", and an antique Louis Quatorze chair is marked plainly "Made in Grand Rapids—the fools! The fools!" The wall is lined with shelf after shelf of leather-bound volumes, against which leans a conspicuous sign: "I may be a Book Case in the daytime, but at night I'm a Folding Bed." There is a Grandfather's Clock in the corner. It is filled with umbrellas.

A light zephyr rustles the imitation lace curtains, filling the dismal room with sunshine and the scent of apple-blossoms as it whispers softly: "I bring you Spring! Gentle Spring! Gentle Spring, my grandmother's left foot, / bring you a nasty head-cold if you listen to me and change to your light underclothes. Gentle Spring, I'm bringing you? Ha, ha, ho ho ho! Oooh, my operation!"

The window-seat is covered with All-Story Magazines, which contain nothing but advertisements. On the sill stands a large aquarium, in which a lone fish swims in languid circles, bearing a sign about his gills: "I am a rare Japanese fan-tail, yes l am, and if I am worth the ten dollars they paid for me, then that newt over there is the Czar of all the Russias." A pathetic little snail clings motionless to the side of the glass, labeled: "As a matter of fact, the snail has been dead two months. I'm only a pebble."

MR. O'NEILL lays down his pencil. The telephone is ringing.

" Ting-ingggggggg!" shrills the telephone. "Wrong number."

MR. O'NEILLpicks up his pencil again, and resumes his writing.

MR. O'NEILL (drearily): ". . . seventeen . . . twenty . . . twenty-three, four, five . . . thirty . . . thirty-six. Fourteen more to go, and I'm half through . . . Fourteen more what?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Fourteen more acts. You ought to know that as well as I do. Here I am swimming around in the stream of your subconscious, without water-wings, and I know more about what you're doing than you do yourself. For instance, right now you're writing."

MR. O'NEILL(dropping his pencil guiltily): "No, I'm not."

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Well, youwere. You can't fool me. I O. K. every idea that comes to you, before you have it. For instance, right now you're going to ask me what you're writing. Go ahead, ask me."

MR. O'NEILL: "What am I writing?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "You're writing a Century Play."

MR. O'NEILL(puzzled): "And why do I call it a Century Play?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Don't you remember? Why, Mr. O'Neill! How you and I were sitting here at the desk just like this . . . it was only yesterday . . . and Nina was playing with a eugenic baby she had just had ... a Eugenic O'Neill Baby, there's a honey . . . little Subconscious has an idea himself once in awhile . . . and poor old Charlie was over in the corner playing by himself . . . and you said to me: 'I'm writing a Century Play!' And I thought to myself: 'I bet he calls it a Century Play because there are going to be a Hundred Acts, and each Act will take a year.' And I was right . . . A hundred years ... I wish I had a shot of gin."

[MR. O'NEILL.pours himself a drink from a bottle labeled "Gordon Gin. (Gordon Gin, my eye!)"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE (smacking its lips as it floats by): "Even if I get it second hand, it bucks me up a lot . . . Whoops! . . . What funny things are beginning to float past me now, in the dim and troubled stream of Mr. O'Neill's subconscious . . . Funny lavender things, with horns . . . Why, they're thoughts . . . I'll be a son-of-a-gun, they're thoughts of me . . . Come here, little thought, come to Papa . . . let's see what you've got to say about me . . . Oh, is that so! Oh, he does, eh! Well, let him shut his mouth, if he's sick of hearing me talk. Let him go take a running leap at the moon, if he feels that way. Tell him he talks too much himself, the big . . ."

MR. O'NEILL: "I heard that."

[He pours himself another drink of Gin.)

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE (gulping): "Oh, he's not such a bad guy at that. He's a pretty good playwright."

MR. O'NEILL (pouring another glass of Gin): "He's the best-playwright in America."

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "He's the best playwright in America with one hand tied behind his back."

MR. O'NEILL: "He's the best playwright in America with both hands tied behind his back."

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Good old Eugene."

MR. O'NEILL: "Good old Eugene."

[He pours himself another drink of Gin.)

MR. O'NEILL: "By the way—one thing that's been sort of worrying me—about this Century Play of mine. If it runs a hundred years, how am I going to find any actors to play in it?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Oh, but this play is going to be a great improvement on all your other plays. This play is going to do away with actors entirely. In fact, you're going to read the whole play yourself."

MR. O'NEILL(still puzzled):"But where am I going to find my audience?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "That's another improvement. You're going to do away with the audience, too. They never understand, anyway."

MR. O'NEILL: "There's one thing still worries me."

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE(sleepily): "What is it, Gene?"

MR. O'NEILL(speaking with difficulty): "If I haven't got any actors . . . and I haven't got any audience . . . then what have I left . . . ?"

MR. O'NEILL'S INNER VOICE: "Eugene!" (It lowers itself confidentially) "We always have each other . . ."

["Treeee-eeee-eeee!" shrills the happy dickey-bird in his gilded cage by the window. "Tweet, tweet, tweet! Boy, O, boy, I only wish the lousy bum who dyed me yellow and sold me for a canary had to get up on this perch every morning and sing soprano. Cheerilie, cheerilie, cheerilie—cripes! I feel like a nance.") "

[MR. O'NEILLpours himself another drink of Gin.)

(STRANGE INTERLUDE,by Eugene O'Neill. Boni and Liveright.)

MR. PROSE AND MR. POETRY

For all practical purposes, Elinor Wylie's Mr. Hodge and Air. Hazard divides people into two kinds in the approximate proportion of Hodges: 1000; Hazards: 1. The Hodges stoke the furnaces, mow the lawns, read newspaper editorials, use hot-water bottles and have dyspepsia. The lone Hazard thinks these things less important than to be man in the image of God. Today, one week after our first meeting, Mr. Hazard is a vivid and constant fire in our mind, and gives every indication of remaining so for many a year. To live for three hours in the mind of Mr. Hazard, one of the very few convincing geniuses in literature, as Miss Wylie permits us to do, is an intense and beautiful experience. One can overlook the fact that the author occasionally couches her visions in a language reminiscent of girl-graduate rhetoric. It is her pleasure to write affected, richly emblazoned books, but in the opinion of one reader Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard is her best, it succeeds in being more than a tour de force, it is the happiest possible presentation of the issues in life which she considers most im portant, it is a blasting tract in defense of the "imponderables". In a setting of much pure prose-poetry and a little too much overripe imagery, the story of Mr. Hazard's material defeats and spiritual victories is the most heartening of indications that Mr. Gutenberg's invention was not altogether a mistake.

(MR. HODGE AND MR. HAZARD, by Elinor Wylie. Knopf.)

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RIOT ON 44th STREET

(This is going to make them see red. Boy, O. hoy, this is going to bring them down around my ears, all right.)

I believe that Mrs. Dorothy Parker is the outstanding woman poet in America today: with the truest feeling for beauty, the supreme irony, the most unfailing technique, the complete compendium of all the superlatives that she, for one, would shake a stick at. And now let the friends of Edna Millay mumble their Renascence in rapid, shocked horror; and let the friends of Sara Teasdale slink away with a hurt bunny-look, and the friends of Elinor Wylie clap one of her novels over each ear . . .

(They don't seem to. Maybe they're not reading this article. All right, then; let's see what this does.)

I believe that Mrs. Dorothy Parker is the outstanding writer of satiric light verse in America today: more than the journalistic patter of Hoffenstein (eeek! that'll make him jump) or the smart sleek rhymes of Adams, or the sedulous imitations of Baird Leonard, more than all these she has the uncanny knack of inserting the brick under the derby hat, of fitting an innocent Cupid's bow with the most deadly darts, of packing as mean a wallop under a fawn suede glove . . .

(All those dandy similes, and not so much as a dissenting voice. Not a throaty murmur, even. This is my last chance to start a fight.)

And I believe that Songs for the Nearest Harmonica is the best book of verse on the market today: the most brilliant, gracious, suave, readable, quotable, requotable, re-requotable . . .

(I don't know why everybody is keeping so quiet. Maybe they all agree with me. And what a sap that makes out of me.)

SONGS FOR THE NEAREST Harmonica, by Dorothy Parker. Boni & Liveright).

IN LESS AND LESS WORDS

MR. WESTON'S GOOD WINE, by T. F. Powys. (Viking). Behind a pretense of being humorously trivial, Mr. Powys calls out the most strange and dark and profound and beautiful forces. God, in the guise of Mr. Weston, comes to a little English village at sundown one evening. The village stands, at the end of the book, like a complete toy village in the reader's mind, and Mr. Weston is probably the most remarkable merchant-god who ever resented his theological apotheosis.

CRUSADE, by Donn Byrne. (Little, Brown). Some more of Mr. Byrne's Golden Buncombe, genuinely thrilling while it lasts and guaranteed to' evaporate completely a half-hour after reading, leaving the mind as blank as before. Miles O'Neill, half-Erse, halfNorman, fights and loves very satisfactorily and finds the Saracens more genteel than the Christians. A touch of religious doctrine does not delay the action much.

AN ARTIST IN THE FAMILY, by Sarah Gertrude Millin. (Boni Liveright). The other side of the coin of Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard. The genius in this case only thinks he's a genius, and everyone else thinks he's a nuisance. A very sound and exciting book, but it does not do quite all that one would wish with a marvellous and rarely touched subject.

TARKA THE OTTER, by H. W. Williamson. (Dutton). A careful, leisurely and evocative story of the private life of an otter. Absolutely one of the best of animal studies.

HOME TO HARLEM, by Claude McKay. (Harpers). Very readable account of life in Harlem from the inside, and if this is literature, we'll shine Mr. McKay's shoes.

THE HEART OF THOREAU'S JOURNALS, edited by Odell Shepard. (Houghton Mifflin). A mosaic of multi-coloured fragments, assembled from the random diaries and letters of Thoreau to form a handsome Memorial Window to one of our truly great minds.

I'LL TELL THE WORLD, by E. V. Knox. (Doubleday Doran). Lilting, rollicking, joyous stuff, gentle spoofs in Mr. Punch's most ingratiating and most sardonic manner; and another bit of bitter, bitter evidence to Americans that most of the sense of humour of the world lies on the other side of the Atlantic. (Chicago papers please copy.)

SAFARI, by Martin Johnson. (Putnam). That old Camera-Phobia seems to have been troubling the Johnsons again. They say Osa is getting so that she shies like a colt.

GREAT DETECTIVES AND THEIR METHODS, by George Dilnot. (Houghton Mifflin). A story of detectives that is more thrilling than a detective story: an actual picture of that amazing cross between a sleek greyhound and a stolid bulldog, the thick, amiable, sentimental, plucky, British deteckatif.

MEET MR. MULLINER, by P. G. Wodehouse. (Doubleday Doran). You will laugh at this newest Wodehouse if you have ever laughed at him before; if, in fact, you have ever laughed before; or if you have never laughed before. He is still about the best there is in farce-writing today.

POEMS IN PRAISE OF PRACTICALLY NOTHING, by Samuel Hoffenstein.

(Boni & Liveright). Mildly entertaining.

HENRY HUDSON, by Llewelyn Powys. (Harpers). From the welter of current biography arises one clean-cut, dramatic, solid book, a tale of mutiny and adventure and daring that is the very spirit of Henry Hudson. Mr. Powys has never written more ably, nor told a more vivid story; and in addition this latest contribution to the "Golden Hind Series" bears the characteristic hall-mark of flawless taste in its formal and mechanical presentation. Altogether one of the worthwhile books of the season.

STRANGERS AND LOVERS, by Edwin Granberry. (Macaulay). A finely done story of the loves of a very poor white girl in the South, which does not suffer from being "compassionate", by a new and exciting writer.

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DELUGE, byS. Fowler Wright. (Cosmopolitan). The best "shocker" we have read in a long while. The author arranges a cataclysm which wipes out civilization and selects a hundred or so survivors who have a hot time keeping up both the birth-rate and the death-rate.

BEASTS AMI SUPER BEASTS and THE TOYS OF PEACE, by "Saki". (Viking). Two more little volumes of short stories by this master of diablerie. To be taken in small doses. "Saki" has been called "the finest liar in literature", and it may be deduced that he is not for readers who insist on mundane veracity and likelihood in their reading.

THE SHADOW FROM THE BOCUE, by Clement Wood. (Dutton). A significant literary document as being practically the low point in mystery story claptrap.