Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  One of my speculations has been about a certain similarity between Mr. O’Neill’s devices in the drama and Henry James’s strategies in his later novels. They have at least one thing in common—an “indirectness of narrative technique,” as Ludwig Lewisohn has called it. Had Mr. James lived another ten years, he might conceivably have got so far away from direct narration that instead of simply telling what occurred when two persons came together, he would have presented it through the consciousness of a Worcester, Massachusetts, lawyer who got it from the proprietor of a café who had overheard two people at a table piecing together a story they had listened in on at a large and crowded party. The difference between the indirectness of James and that of O’Neill lies in the fact that whereas James got farther and farther away from his central character by filtering that central character through the perceptions of other people, O’Neill achieves his remoteness of contact by having his central character get farther and farther away from himself through splitting up into various phases of viewpoint and behavior.

  Of course, O’Neill has not as yet carried out this device to its ultimate expression, and I am very much afraid, therefore, that it is the object of this essay, once it gets going, to suggest and outline that ultimate expression. Let us take, then, a hypothetical play to be called “One Man in His Time,” which is concerned with the splitting up into twelve or fifteen separate personalities of a famous retired surgeon named Gregori.

  This Gregori is a moody, violent man, given to long hours of profound melancholy which explodes at intervals into veritable orgies of ecstatic self-oblivion, on which occasions there appear at his otherwise lonely estate (The Cypresses) seven or eight men friends, all of whom turn out to be himself. I have selected Wallace Beery to play the part of the original and basic ego, Dr. Gregori, whom we meet in the first scene obviously losing his grip on reality. In walks a young lad who is Gregori at seventeen, or rather Gregori’s memory of himself at seventeen. The young lad does not discern in this crumbling man the fine flower of middle age which he aspires to become. On the contrary, he mistakes for his mature self a tutor (played by Leslie Howard) who is tutoring Gregori’s lovely but diverse young ward (played by Miriam Hopkins, Fannie Brice, Margalo Gillmore, Margaret Wycherly, and Katharine Cornell). The tutor (Mr. Howard) is, in reality—that is, such reality as we have— the Gregori that the young lad dreams of becoming, the alter ego which still resides deep within the main Gregori (Wallace Beery). The tutor is handsome but frail, and obviously is not going to be alive at the end of the play’s two tremendously long acts.

  Now the alter ego (Mr. Howard), observing with jealousy that the lovely ward, when she is Miriam Hopkins, is more drawn to the rowdy and dissolute Gregori (Mr. Beery) than she is to him, alternately tries to laugh off his love for her (at which times she becomes Fannie Brice) and to keep her on a kind of platonic and academic pedestal (Margalo Gillmore). The tutor’s desire for the young ward’s lovely body (Miss Hopkins) evokes in him a feeling of guilt (played by Ernest Milton right up to the hilt). This guilt (Mr. Milton) keeps following Mr. Howard around, doing exactly what he does, imitating every gesture, repeating every word, mockingly—but only, however, when Miss Hopkins is also on stage. When Miss Brice is on stage and Mr. Howard enters, he is followed, or “shadowed,” by a Gregorian phase of boisterous devil-may-care (Mr. Bobby Clark), and when Miss Gillmore has scenes with Mr. Howard, there follows him, wherever he moves, Gregori’s sporadic and tortured determination to resign himself to a life of academic tutoring entirely divorced from emotional content (Mr. Laurence Olivier).

  The first act reaches its high point when, after a terrific wrestling bout with Bobby Clark and sharp, high words with Mr. Milton, Mr. Howard throws them both off and takes Miss Hopkins passionately into his arms (terribly hampered by Mr. Milton, who is trying grotesquely to do the same thing). The basic Gregori (Mr. Beery) enters and for the first time sees clearly what the latent best side of himself (Mr. Howard) has become, a man who is about to gave up all intellectual ambitions and obligations for the pleasures of the flesh. He (Beery) tries to ignore the struggle going on between Mr. Howard, Miss Hopkins, and Mr. Milton by getting drunk in a lusty knockabout scene with Miss Brice, at the end of which he flings her, face down, upon a sofa. Beery exits, taking the sense of guilt (Mr. Milton) with him, leaving Mr. Howard and Miss Hopkins in a now completely abandoned attitude of surrender to each other. They are about to fling themselves together upon the sofa when they discover the woman’s form lying there. Miss Hopkins, disentangling herself, pulls the woman off the sofa and the audience sees that she is no longer Fannie Brice but Margalo Gillmore! (This is going to be easier to do in the movies than on the stage.) Miss Hopkins flies at her, but Miss Gillmore, erect and cool and wholesome, bids her, with imperious sweetness, please to go, which reluctantly she does, clenching and unclenching her hands. As the curtain starts down, Miss Gillmore begins to repeat her history lesson to Mr. Howard, in a low, steady voice, while Mr. Olivier, standing behind Mr. Howard, sobs quietly.

  In the second act, Mr. Beery, who has been drinking all night, is discovered, singing and swearing and guzzling, with those seven or eight “friends” who are, as we know but he doesn’t, the seven or eight ugly phases of himself that “come out” when he is in one of his orgies. During this particular orgy, which lasts all of the act, Mr. Howard falls desperately ill. Miss Hopkins, for whom he is calling piteously off stage, ignores him and joins Beery and his guests at their carousing. The ward’s maternal instinct (Miss Wycherly) appeals to Miss Hopkins to go to Howard or at least to quit drinking with Beery, but to no avail. Mr. Milton now comes on, pale and stricken, and begs Beery to come with him. “Dr. Gregori,” says Milton, “if you do not perform an immediate operation, he cannot live!” Beery, in his cups, at first refuses, but at the last, urged by Miss Gillmore, Miss Brice, and Miss Wycherly, all chanting in unison: “You must go, you must go, you must go!,” rises from his chair, girds up his loins, and says he will go. At this moment, his natural indecisiveness (Mr. Henry Hull) steps up, in the costume of a butler, and proffers him a bottle of fine brandy which has just been delivered to his door as a gift. Mr. Beery uncorks it, and tries to pour some of it into a glass. He misses the glass, and spills the brandy on the floor. He gazes at his quivering hands, aghast. He is no longer able to save his better self (Leslie Howard). Cursing the butler, he flings the bottle at him, but hits Mr. Olivier instead. Miss Gillmore rushes to his side. “I’m afraid it’s too late to save him,” she says quietly. “Who?” demands Beery, reaching for another glass. “Does it matter?” asks Miss Gillmore. There is a little groan off stage—from Gregori’s better self (Mr. Howard)—and all rush off except Beery and his seven or eight drunken phases. He turns on them. “You brought me to this!” he roars. “You brought me to this!” they echo, in unison. “I swear to God you did!” he roars. “I swear to God you did!” they echo. In the midst of this, which rises higher and higher, the young ward staggers slowly back onto the stage, a tragic, blasted woman (Katharine Cornell). “Everybody seems,” she says in a slow, hollow voice, which quiets the shouting of Beery and his phases, “to be dead.” The curtain comes down.

  That is as far as I have been able to get with the thing. There is much in my first rough draft that I have had to leave out, including the entrance, at one point, of Mr. Lionel Barrymore and Mr. Ernest Truex, who are joined together at the waist with a linked iron chain. It sounds significant and impressive, but I have forgot just what conflict in Gregori they were supposed to represent. Perhaps it is just as well.

  Is There a Killer in the House?

  I am not what authorities would call an authority on mystery melodramas made from popular detective fiction—my specialities happen to be bloodhounds, holy matrimony, monsters, and modern English misusage—but I have sat through more than a score of such plays in the past thirty-five years, from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Bat, which I saw in Columbus, Ohio, when I was still in my twenties, to Agatha Christie’s
The Mousetrap, which I listened to here in London at a recent Saturday matinee, when I was sixty.

  I began going to plays in Columbus in 1905, at the age of 11, paying ten cents for an unreserved seat in what we called “The Peanut Roost” or “Nigger Heaven,” and I must have seen a hundred dramas and comedies, or about ten-dollars worth, before I was out of my teens. I wasn’t interested in mystery plays then, preferring Western shows, such as The Round Up, The Great Divide, The Squaw Man, and Arizona, and Civil War plays like Dixie, Secret Service, Shenandoah, and Barbara Frietchie. My father occasionally dragged me to see Man tell, Mansfield, and Sothern, but none of them seemed to me so gifted as Maclyn Arbuckle who, at the end of the second act of The Round Up, rolled a Bull Durham cigarette with one hand, thus establishing himself, in my estimation, as the greatest actor of his time. It wasn’t until 1920 that the mystery plays began flowering, or running up like weeds, and in addition to The Bat I saw a dozen others, including The Thirteenth Chair, The Silent Witness, and The Cat and the Canary. (This last was made into a movie in 1939, in which Bob Hope played the hero with an air of such sinister wistfulness that I was convinced he was the murderer, and still stick doggedly to that theory.)

  The maturing mind may be measured, in part, by its changing attitude toward mystery plays. One should begin with a desire to be puzzled, go on to a determination to out-think the playwright, and end up with a healthily morbid hope that something will go wrong during a performance. I was pleasurably fooled by The Bat, easily figured out that the telephone in The Silent Witness was going to be the murder weapon, and enjoyed most of all the lovely mishaps that occurred on the first night of a thing called Shooting Shadows. This one shot itself to death (in New York, in 1926) at the end of the second act, to my vast delight. Two pistols were supposed to go off simultaneously, making a single loud report, one of them on stage and the other off, but the one on stage missed fire and the one in the wings sounded like the last cannon at Gettysburg. The third act was anti-climax of a high order, but it had another wonderful moment, when a woman character, understandably nervous, screamed, “The hand! The hand!,” staring at an eerie clutching human hand that was supposed to be protruding horribly through a drapery. The trouble was that the owner of the hand was still in his dressing room or somewhere, and the drama took on at this point a beautifully unplanned tone of hallucination. Everything unfortunately went all right during the rest of the run, which lasted five nights and one matinee.

  There may be something wrong with a 60-year-old man who attends mystery plays, praying that God will reward him with some manifestation of the untoward, and I began scolding myself at The Mousetrap for this perversely devout attitude and trying to trace its origin. (After all, I had identified the killer at about twenty-five-minutes to six, and had nothing else to do.) I think I traced it, all right. In 1923,1 had written the libretto for a College musical comedy called The Cat and the Riddle, a burlesque of the mystery plays of the period, which died of a strange surfeit of light at its opening performance in Columbus. The stage lights were supposed to black out for ten seconds near the end of Act I, in order to cover up the transfer of a gun and conceal the identity of the killer, but the lights stayed on. The cast of inexperienced University players went right ahead with the business, anyway, and with another act and a full hour still to go, the sheriff was revealed to the audience as the cat in a veritable glare of revelation, and there wasn’t a Riddle any more.

  The distinguished American-Irish author John McNulty, then drama critic for a Columbus paper, sent me a touching note of condolence the following day, which I still remember. “I was hilariously grieved,” he wrote, “to hear that your musical comedy was taken suddenly dead last night at the age of one act. I happened to be weeping for Adonais when I heard the news, but now I am weeping for you.”

  Now that I have so courageously confessed, in public, what is the matter with me at mystery plays, I can return to The Mousetrap in an easier frame of mind.

  Mr. Edmund Wilson, the American literary critic, alienated thousands of detective fiction addicts a few years ago when he manhandled almost all the celebrated mystery novels, in the Book Department of The New Yorker magazine. He found merit only in the works of Raymond Chandler, and discovered nothing to interest him in such notable classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Circular Staircase, Trent’s Last Case, The Yellow Room, and The Murder of My Aunt, to name half-a-dozen which connoisseurs usually consider the finest and most original of the thousands that have been written. Mr. Wilson concluded that the reading of detective stories was a minor vice, comparable to the smoking of cigarettes. (This was before the smoking of cigarettes became a major vice.) I doubt that Mr. Wilson could now remember the plots of any of the books he read at the time, and thus he would probably be unable to determine which of the classic novels The Mousetrap paraphrases—if that is the word for it. This piece becomes a trifle aimless since the rules of the game—and very strict rules they are, too—prevent me from telling. The traditional taboo limits criticism almost to the point of elimination, and it had some singular effects on theatregoing in my home city years ago. I had seen Shaw’s Saint Joan in New York and when it came to Columbus, a cousin of mine there asked me if I thought he would enjoy it, hastily adding: “Don’t tell me how it comes out.” Incidentally, Porter Emerson Browne’s non-mystery comedy The Bad Man disappointed many Columbus playgoers because the man who was obviously the killer turned out actually to be the killer. This confusion was surpassed only during the road tour of The Emperor Jones, when many mystery play fans mistook the old curtain-raiser Supressed Desires for the first act of the O’Neill play.

  I know, to my amazement, a number of persons who have read at least 3,000 mystery novels in the past fifteen years and still remain unconfined in institutions for the mentally upset. They know all the hundreds of different twists of plot and of “gimmick,” including what Hollywood calls the switcheroo and the switcherino, and what I call the switcherissimo. They are experts not only on who did it, but on how it could be done when it couldn’t. The immemorial gadgetry of the mystery medium includes the wolf in police dog’s clothing, the discarnate voice, the would-be killer who changes places with the going-to-be victim, the guilty narrator or homicidal Dr. Watson, the weapon that vanishes, the body that gets up and walks, the two men who are one man, and the one man who is two. Some new variants, such as that of the locked room, are admissible, because ingenuity makes up paraphrase and permutation, but it has always seemed to me that the identity of a few classic types of killer will not stand up under repetition. Even as I write, however, some gifted author may be at work on a mystery play in which you will know it is not the butler all the time, and it turns out to be the butler.

  Agatha Christie does not often fail, and I think that The Mousetrap is the only opus of hers that I ever figured out. Her success is proved not only by the fact that one million copies in all, of ten of her books, were reprinted in 1948, and another million of ten others about five years later, but by the equally astounding fact that The Mousetrap is now in its third year at the Ambassador Theatre. How ingenuity and flexibility of contrivance can stand up under such a flow of fecundity is a marvel to a writer who is hard put to it to invent two or three small plots in a year and a half. Mrs. Christie is, of course, the author of one of the six classics I have listed above, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose central device does not lend itself to reworking by other hands, but other hands have no doubt reworked it. The list of her other inventions would fill a column, and get us nowhere.

  Mrs. Christie is a mystery writer and dramatist content, as a rule, to place narrative above or, if you will, below literature, and she can write so fast as to become charmingly ungrammatical, as in this sentence from The Regatta Murders—I think that’s it—”the guilt lies between one of us in this room.” As a man between whom guilt often lies heavily, I have remembered that line for fifteen-years. But then, on the other hand, she can write a fine c
omic speech, in good English, such as that of Counsel for the Defence in her Witness for the Prosecution which goes like this: “If my learned adversary is going to answer his own questions, I suggest that the presence of the witness is superfluous.” I do not propose, let me say at once, to start an argument with myself about the comparative literary merits of the authors of mysteries. It is common knowledge, however, that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are writers of high ability, each with his unique talent and special forcefulness. No less severe critic than Mr. Elmer Davis selected Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as one of the three books of any kind that interested him most last year. And if you haven’t read Hammett, from The Dain Curse through The Glass Key, you have missed quite a lot.

  I note, with some regret, that one of my favorites, Margery Al-lingham, has abandoned the kind of thing she delighted me with so much in The Case of the Late Pig, for more serious stuff. Bringing literature to mystery stories is a hard trick indeed, and it is perhaps better to bring mystery to literature, as in the case of several of the books of the late Josephine Tey. She does not stick to the stern rules of mystery devices, and sometimes doesn’t even have anybody killed, as in The Franchise Affair, which seems to me a novel of some sociological importance, as well as a wonderfully easy book to read. In The Daughter of Time her Inspector Grant lies on a hospital bed throughout the narrative and really has nothing to do with it. He simply supervises at a vast immobilized distance a process of careful and intricate deduction at the end of which Richard III emerges as a kindly gentleman who never murdered anybody. (This book was partly, but not entirely, responsible for the formation of the American Society, of which I am a member, called “Friends of Richard III.”)