At 09:23 PM 2/11/2005, you wrote:
>Upon Arthur Miller's death -
>
>One word for each - self-defeating maybe -
>
>O'Neill - creative
I think yes, to a point. O'Neill was all over the place for much of his
career. "What do I want to be when I grew up?" I don't quite know how you
wish to define "creative." At the end he seemed to be getting to
it. "Long Day's Journey" is among other things a kind of portrait of the
artist was a young drunk, but it's also a portrait of creative life--the
theater itself--gone directly to hell in the name of a fast buck. Which
makes it a moral as well as artistic exercise. Yes, everyone remembers
Mary Tyrone's drug addiction but James, the father, is a self-confessed
sell-out who has destroyed a promising career on the stage in the tenuous
name of financial security. He has one son who is a terminal alcoholic and
the other seems to be an embryonic writer whose best poetry is reserved for
lushed-up yakking or quoting from Ernest Dowson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
at the parlor table 'round midnight. The authentic his-own poetry in
O'Neill seems hard-fought--yet when it emerges, as in Mary's final
speech. "Oh, I remember...I married James Tyrone and was so happy for
awhile," it's tremendous. "Moon For The Misbegotten" finds its voice in
"found" verses and sentimental songs: "And baby's cries can't waken her in
the baggage coach ahead." Context is all--it's one of the most terrible
moments of self-revelation in American drama.
I don't know if any of this is what you mean.
>Williams - sexual
I don't even think of the plays that much. Okay, there was a theory that
Blanche du Bois gets exactly what's coming to her for busting up a sort of
"paradise," i.e., Stanley is entitled to rape her because she's an intruder
in the bloodstream and he's a white corpuscle. I used to buy that but I
haven't in over 30 years--now, to me, Streetcar is about the destruction of
a human being by human weakness, and that's not a symbolic parable, it's
dreadful to watch regardless of what kind of person Blanche may be.
The writing that strikes me immediately regarding Williams and the sexual
is a piece of fiction from his short story collection "One Arm." It's
called "Desire and the Black Masseur." Reading it is like watching a car
accident.
>Miller - moral
>
>Sticking my neck out?
God yes. I mean Moral, not you sticking your neck out. We lost yesterday
maybe the last of the writers who addressed great moral themes and used
them as the dramatic core. Who does this now: not obliquely, but directly?
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one
that showed up."-- Russell Edson
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