Mon Dieu, but our friend John seems to have a hard fight before him.
It is too bad. Never in my long experience as a teacher have I met a
young man who gave finer promise of becoming a great artist—and I
have taught many who are on the heights today. He has the soul, he has
everything. . . . And behold these worshipers of the golden calf,
these muddy souls, will exert all their power to hold him to their own
level. . . . And I am afraid they may succeed if, as you say, he
loves one of them. He is not one of the strong ones who can fight
against discouragement and lack of appreciation through long years
of struggle. He is all-too-sensitive and finely-keyed. I have noticed
of late how his work has fallen off. It is as if the life and vigour
had departed from it. His mind has not been able to joyfully
concentrate on the Art he loves. (22)
Later,
one of John’s roommates apostrophizes:
It
would be God’s blessing for John if the Old Master were his father
instead of the present incumbent. Why is it fine things like that
never happen? . . . Even his name—John Brown! Isn’t that the hell
of a name for an artist? Look better at the top of a grocery store
than on the bottom of a painting. The only thing recorded in the Book
of Fame about a John Brown is that his body lies moldering in the
grave—nice thought, that! (24)
The
worshipers of the golden calf go strenuously to work. They brush aside
his protests that children are not the possessions of their parents and
return him to his home and to Maud’s arms and a job in her father’s
store.
The
fourth act describes the results of his weakness. John makes the rounds
with Harry, and Maud takes consolation in the company of Edward, who has
loved her over the years. Unable to stand John’s moral decline, she
nags him incessantly. In reply, he tells her that they are “two
corpses chained together” and begs for a divorce. She refuses and
continues to berate him until in a frenzy he leaps at her and begins to
strangle her. Stopping just short of murder, he rushes upstairs and puts
a bullet through his head. At curtain, Maud runs screaming into the
street.
In
several ways, Bread and Butter is
the most uncharacteristic play of the group. There are resemblances, of
course, to the other works: the emphasis on the need for individual
freedom to pursue a creative life recalls certain of the early arguments
in Servitude, and the
animosity displayed toward the materialists has a parallel in the view
taken of the husband in Recklessness and the Business Man in Fog. The play, however, contains none of the concept of ironic fate,
nor the sense that a blind spirit controls the affairs of men. There is
no expression of the Dionysian immersion of the will,* and, for once,
O’Neill does not permit the social context of the play to give way to
private exploration.
Nevertheless,
the play holds in it much that formed O’Neill’s sense of himself.
John Brown is O’Neill’s second attempt at self-portraiture. His face
corresponds in most details to the face of the Poet in Fog
and to O’Neill’s own appearance. John’s association with his
brother Harry parallels Eugene’s own relationship with his easy-living
brother, Jamie, and the initials of one of his loves, Maibelle Scott,
are perpetuated in the name of his heroine. Accounts of that early
romance suggest that O’Neill, as a young, “artistic,”
non-conformist, frequently stepped on the toes of proper New London
society in his pursuit of the girl.10 The specific
biographical reflections are less of concern, however, than are the
qualities with which O’Neill invested his theatrical alter ego.
However
mawkishly, John Brown anticipates the later heroes who waste away in
spirit because they cannot obtain adequate nourishment for their desires
in their world. Robert Mayo of Beyond the Horizon and Dion Anthony of The Great God Brown are cut to the same pattern as John Brown.
Although the later conflicts are more complex, the similarity among the
characters is strong. Each of the three is married to a woman who has a
little beauty but who is incapable of understanding her husband’s
deepest need. Ruth Mayo and Margaret Anthony both fail the test of
sensitivity to which their husbands bring them, as Maud fails John.
Thus
isolated at home, the heroes of the later plays when they move in the
world are brought into conflict with another man who epitomizes
social values hostile to the protagonist. As a foil to John stands his
brother Edward, complacent, self-centered, destructive. In similar
relationship to the later heroes stand Andrew Mayo, Robert’s brother,
and William Brown, Dion’s partner. In Bread
and Butter, the hero’s opponent is scarcely a serious antagonist.
His function is generally to define at close range the world to which
John Brown has committed himself and in which he must move as an alien.
By the light of this figure, the consequences of John’s choice are
fully revealed. He stands condemned as a man who has failed to follow
his destined course and who thus has deserted his sole good. In such
action, delineated sketchily here in the antagonism between the
sensitive and insensitive denizens of a commonplace world, O’Neill was
later to find the central tragic pattern of his early successes.
