The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (34 page)

Politically, O’Neill was drawn to anarchism, and he always maintained a healthy disdain for capitalism, which promoted a “vicious materialism,” an acquisitiveness which invited people to “clutch at everything but holding nothing fast,” and “put the mind to sleep.”
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Nor was he totally sold on democracy, which, he felt, when combined with capitalism, made America the land of desire, where people felt free to “take what they want,” where desire “knows no bounds” (and therefore “the soul knows no rest”); where, in fact, “democracy is the expression of desire,” in which man “is one-tenth spirit and nine-tenths hog.” “Success is still our only real living religion,” he wrote.
27

But we are still only halfway there. As J. P. Diggins explains, “For
O’Neill, as for the modern philosopher, existence may have no meaning, yet the rage to live is stronger than the reason for life.” Desire can mean the need to avenge a wrong, the demand for social recognition, the greed for a piece of property, lust for another’s body, but O’Neill saw power as the ultimate form of desire. Even so, and despite his political interests, he conceived power as the expression of the desire to control and dominate that has more to do with personal relations than with political activity.
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And that is why, probably, although he wrote three plays explicitly about religion—
Dynamo
(science versus religion),
Lazarus Laughed
(the dread of death) and
Days without End
(atheism, socialism, anarchism)—it is his two late masterpieces that most claim our attention (
The Iceman
has often been called a religious play). These works reflect his stated view that “there are no values to live by today.” All the characters have seen better days, and all they have left is to fantasize about the future “as the return of a past more imagined than true.” They need no guidance to recognize that “one can be sentenced to life for simply living it.”

O’Neill shared with James Joyce a passion for finding larger meanings in small things, “to make the rut of everyday life resound with meaning and significance.” And he shared with George Moore the conviction that “all a man’s interests are limited to those near himself.”
29
He liked to say that theatre was a temple “where the religion of poetic interpretation and symbolic celebration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in spirit by their soul-stifling struggle to exist as masks among the masks of the living.”

But above all—and this is where the drama in his plays chiefly lies—he knew that desire and its discontents can be a form of blindness. His plays show characters whose identities are
fixed
(unlike Shaw’s, say), making difficult their attempts to clarify their own feelings and know their own reasons, as people who “refuse to accept excuses as explanation.”

Both
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey
last several hours, and both are talking plays with little action. The characters, and the audience, are trapped in the same room, where conversation is unavoidable.

In
The Iceman
the characters are all assembled in the back room of Harry Hope’s saloon, where they drink and tell each other the same stories day in, day out, stories that are in fact hopes and illusions that will never
see fruition. One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician, a third simply wants to go home. As time goes by, from one thing and another that is said, the audience grasps that even these characters’ far from exceptional aims are illusions—pipe dreams, in O’Neill’s words. Later it becomes clear that they are waiting for Hickey, a traveling salesman who, they believe, will make things happen, be their savior (Hickey is the son of a preacher). But when Hickey finally appears, he punctures their dreams one by one.

O’Neill is not making the glib point that reality is invariably cold. What he is saying is that there
is
no reality; there are no firm values, no ultimate meanings, and so all of us need our pipe dreams and illusions (our fictions, if you like). Hickey leads an “honest” life; he works and tells himself the truth, or what he thinks of as the truth. But it turns out that he has killed his wife because he could not bear the way she “simply” accepted the fact of his numerous casual infidelities. We never know how she explained her life to herself (this is crucial, as we have seen: how we explain our lives to ourselves), what illusions she had and how she kept herself going. But, we realize, and this, too, is vital: they
did
keep her going.

The
Iceman
, of course, is death and it has often been remarked that the play could be called
Waiting for Hickey
, emphasizing the similarities to Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
(which we shall come to, as we shall also return to the concept of waiting and what it means).

Long Day’s Journey
is O’Neill’s most autobiographical work, a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.” The action takes place in one room, in four acts, at four times of the day, at breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime, when the members of the Tyrone family gather together. As already mentioned, there are no great action scenes, but there are two events: Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (who is Eugene’s brother who died) discovers he has TB. As the day wears on, the weather outside turns darker and foggier, and the house seems more and more isolated. Various episodes are revisited time and again in the conversation, as characters reveal more about themselves and give their version of events recounted earlier by others.

At the play’s core is O’Neill’s pessimistic view of life’s “strange determinism.” “None of us can help the things life has done to us,” says Mary. “They’re
done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” Elsewhere, one brother says to the other, “I love you much more than I hate you.” And then, right at the end, the three Tyrone men, Mary’s husband and two sons, watch her enter the room in a deep dream, her own fog. They watch as she laments, “That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

As Normand Berlin has written, it is those three final words of the play, “for a time,” that are so heartbreaking. O’Neill’s relatives hated the play. For him, it was a mystery how one can be in love, and then not in love, and then be trapped forever. In such devastating ways, he is saying, the past lives on in the present, and this is something science has nothing to say about.
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THE SPIRITUAL MIDDLE CLASS AND THE LIFE-LIE

We must allow for the fact that, as Berlin has also said, O’Neill was a “gazer into abysses.” Like Nietzsche, he considered Greek tragedy the unsurpassed example of art
and
religion. Tragedy, he said, “is the meaning of life—and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle classes.” As Egil Törnqvist of the University of Amsterdam has put it, “The struggle of Nietzsche’s ideal man to turn himself into a superman (
Übermensch
) is the struggle also of the O’Neill protagonist. As the playwright himself said in an early interview: ‘A man wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable. But his
struggle
is his success!’” He goes on: “For Nietzsche the tragic spirit equaled a religious faith. . . . Out of the need to justify existence after the death of the old God was born the concept of the superman, the man who welcomes pain as a necessity for inner growth and who, like the protagonists in Greek tragedy, achieves spiritual attainment through suffering.”
31

O’Neill accepted Nietzsche’s argument, and in an often quoted statement commented: “The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it—the death of the old God and the failure of
science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with.”
32
Elsewhere, he said that the only cure for the sickness of today “is through an exultant acceptance of life.”

For him that meant an acceptance of suffering, even within the family,
especially
within the family, and that brings with it the necessity of the “life-lie,” the idea that a man cannot live without illusions—about himself. For O’Neill the riddle of life is insoluble, whether we see our problems as psychological or metaphysical; essentially, the search for the meaning of life is equivalent to finding a justification for suffering.
33
Simon Harford, in
More Stately Mansions
(written in the late 1930s but not produced until 1952), echoes Paul Valéry in asserting that men’s lives “are without any meaning whatever . . . human life is a silly disappointment, a liar’s promise . . . a daily appointment with peace and happiness in which we wait day after day, hoping against hope.”
34

Professor Berlin makes much of the fact that
The Iceman Cometh
was only tepidly received in New York on its first production in 1946, but was much more successful ten years later when it opened two weeks after Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. As Berlin rightly says, the two plays occupy the same metaphysical ground. O’Neill himself felt that he had achieved a lot with
Iceman
. In a letter to Lawrence Langner he said: “There are moments in it that suddenly strip the soul of a man stark naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority, but with an understanding compassion which sees him as a victim of the ironies of life and of himself. Those moments are for me the depth of tragedy, with nothing more that can possibly be said.”
35
Irony and tragedy: this was Paul Fussell’s point in his book about the First World War (see chapter 9).

FORGIVENESS—AND FAITH—IN THE FAMILY

O’Neill believed that illusions must be shared—and be sharable—if life is to be livable; we all have them, and they are no disgrace (though he does refer to philosophers at one point as “foolosophers”).

At a time when, as we have noted, psychology came to replace—or
attempted to replace—religion in people’s lives, it is worth pointing out that, as much as anyone and far more than most, O’Neill hones in on the family as the locus—for most people—of the most “significantly lived experience, complex and deep and passionate.” As J. P. Diggins put it, “The love-hate within a family, the closeness-distance, the loneliness within a togetherness, the guilt and need for forgiveness, the knowing and not knowing a loved one, the bewilderment in the face of a mysterious determinism—this is the human condition.” As
Long Day
draws to a close and Mary enters the room—the center of the lives of her three men—they are sharing the death of hope; but they endure, and the human bond “seems to transcend the stage.”
36

O’Neill’s late plays all show characters seeking a higher ground for human experience, hoping to endow that contemporary experience with transcendent meaning, highlighting the conflict—especially sharp in the United States, O’Neill felt—between materialistic greed and the desire for spiritual transcendence.
37
In
Dynamo
(1929), the search for “God-replacements” (O’Neill’s words) looked at Puritanism versus Science (electricity), which he regarded as no less futile. In America, he thought, even the arts had been taken over by a business ethic, and even the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake had been corrupted by the lure of grants for research. Money and wealth were false gods, and rather than “waste time on the accumulation of material wealth or the illusion of power through the accumulation of knowledge,” America should look to its spiritual health.

In truth, O’Neill saw little hope that this search could be mounted, let alone succeed; but a starting point lay in the recognition that the human condition is “innately contradictory,” that suffering is a big part of it, and that there is no help for it, but we have a capacity for suffering and tragedy which is, by its nature, “both devastating and uplifting.”
38

Again, this measure of self-understanding must be seen against the background of the family. Families, for O’Neill, are full of private spaces, secrets and concealments in which, despite all, understanding and forgiveness must be found. The importance of the family—unlike for Freud—lay not in the way it affected one’s life in the early years, shaping character, but in its
continued
importance throughout life, as the site where our illusions cannot be maintained because fellow family members know too much,
where excuses can never be offered or accepted as explanations. The family is where mutuality is to be achieved, despite everything and in the acknowledgment that intimacy can be as painful as it can be rewarding.

And happiness is no final state, any more than is fulfillment. The only “final” state is self-understanding, and, depending on what has gone before in a life, there is no saying what that may be. It may as easily be negative as positive. We should not expect anything else.

13

Living Down to Fact

O
ne of Virginia Woolf’s most famous statements, made in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), is “on or about December 1910, human nature changed.”
1
The first version of this essay had been written in reply to an article by Arnold Bennett in which he argued that the foundation of good fiction “is character-creating and nothing else,” and asserted that Woolf’s characters “do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.” What Virginia Woolf meant by her remark was that there were so many cultural changes happening simultaneously that they were experienced as a change in nature. She added: “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”

Her remarks arose partly out of her interest in painting, in how it differed from writing, and her interest in psychology, in particular psychoanalysis. The Hogarth Press, which she and her husband, Leonard, had founded in 1917, had begun publishing translations of Freud’s work in the early 1920s. Virginia was impressed by painting’s ability to present details simultaneously, whereas writing was linear, and she was impressed, too, by painting’s other ability—explored in Cubism and Expressionism—to look at an object from different standpoints, often distorting images in the process. Recent science, too, she knew, had insisted on the distortions inherent in human perception.

Her interest in psychoanalysis (fueled by her descents into madness
throughout her life) also told her that people rarely
thought
in linear ways, as Arnold Bennett’s stories implied. Rather, we think in “splashes,” as she put it, verbal splashes reflecting “eddies of feeling” that are anything but linear. It was this, among other things, that she sought to express in her work.

Her awareness of the changes taking place around her was Woolf’s chief strength in the long run—in fact, she never gave up her interest in change. Throughout the 1920s, arguably her most productive decade, one of her self-imposed tasks as a novelist was to describe God “in the process of change.” She was very conscious of the nineteenth-century materialists, as she called them, and their concern with facts rather than with the souls of their characters. She praised James Joyce’s
Ulysses
as an attempt “to find an appropriate modern form of spiritual feeling” (see p. 264 for Joyce’s attitude to fact).

CHARISMA AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Woolf was conscious, as Max Weber was conscious, of the “disenchantment” of the modern world—what he called the “routinization of charisma”—and she sought to bring about what he thought of as the greatest contemporary challenge, “the return of charisma to everyday life.” One answer for Weber was the investment of charismatic authority, an emotional force, in gifted individuals (Hitler being one unfortunate example), but Woolf was much more concerned with the charisma that might be found in the ordinary. She developed a theory that, alongside the everyday—time spent enveloped by, as she put it, “cotton wool”—there were “moments of being,” secular sacred moments “in which experience enters the sublime, moments that transform and energise all the moments of non-being that surrounded them.” It was the business of art to identify these moments, describe them in as memorable a way as possible, and in that way preserve them.

By so doing, Woolf maintained, modern fiction could challenge modern civilization’s preoccupation with material matters “at the expense of other values.” In her books, different sets of values compete with each other and in this way she conceived the modern world as analogous to the
pagan world, with many gods—not one—each representing some aspect of life but not the totality, and reconcilable only temporarily. “The essential challenge for the modern novelist is to produce such moments of reconciliation without imposing a false harmony on the world of brute fact.”
2

The change that Woolf identified meant that the world was no longer perceived by everyone in the same way, there were no longer fixed points of reference, no common grounds of agreement, no shared beliefs or communal experiences—the world was “fragmented, unstable, asymmetrical.” Moreover, this put readers in an era of change, too: “We, as readers, had to synthesise the broken pieces for ourselves. We had to make our own harmony, our own wholeness.”
3
This fitted with her remark about the change she perceived as having taken place in December 1910, in that for her (and, she believed, for others too) “reality was no longer public”—it was private, personal, idiosyncratic, subjectively construed.

It followed from this that, as both Weber and Woolf recognized, spiritual experience in the modern world—without churches, still less cathedrals—could be found only in the intimate sphere; that since communion with God was no longer possible, communion with other people in an intimate embrace was its only replacement. “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today [1917] only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in
pianissimo
, something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic
pneuma
[spirit], which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.”
4

“Pianissimo” is perhaps the crucial word here, for Woolf shared the view of many of her contemporaries that the Great War was the result of materialism and the aggressiveness of a male-dominated civilization. Her idea of a more intimate civilization, a more spiritual world, therefore included a change from what we might call male values to female ones: nurturing, caring, family life.

Weber had famously outlined an overlap between Calvinism and capitalism in his notion of “the calling,” the idea of “vocation,” which had
moved out of the monasteries and into the classic Victorian idea of work as duty, a secularized form of asceticism. What he thought in particular had been lost in this process was the presence, authority and aura of sacred relics and the “mediating fiction” of the priest. Woolf overlapped with Weber in that she thought the task of modern fiction was to reintroduce “vision” into a genre that during the nineteenth century had come to be dominated by fact (itself, of course, an aspect of secularization). This was all the more important for Woolf because she also intuitively agreed with Weber that the advances in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century science, though remarkable, had actually done little to advance “ultimate meaning.”

Woolf believed that literature had taken over some of the functions of religion, in that both were outside mainstream society and that in both it was the job of the cleric or writer to speak out truths, inconvenient or otherwise; to speak up for a set of “spiritual” values that went against the prevailing “materialism.”
5
She saw women as having a special place in this, and it is worth reminding ourselves once more that, alongside the more “metaphysical” ideas of fulfillment and redemption considered in this book, many in the twentieth century—women, homosexuals, racial minorities—underwent a far more practical transformation in their sense of fulfillment as their material and psychological conditions improved. Woolf was alive to—and part of—these changes.

As noted above, both Weber and Woolf saw the modern world as not dissimilar to the pagan, pre-Christian world, in which there were many gods, representing many values, often competing and by no means always reconcilable. Furthermore, both saw that, in such a system, there was always the opportunity (and therefore the danger) for people to follow their own interests to the exclusion of almost everything else: this might well be fulfilling in personal terms but did little for the wider community. It was an individual, solitary—and possibly lonely—form of fulfillment.

A further parallel between Weber and Woolf lies in the former’s argument that whatever advances science had made by then, none of its results had provided humanity “with a sense of ultimate meaning.” Many of Woolf’s characters (in
The Waves
, for instance, or
To the Lighthouse
) are continually searching for an answer to the meaning of existence but, for the most part, come up empty-handed. At the same time, Woolf fills her
books with what Lily Briscoe, the painter in
To the Lighthouse
, calls “daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”; the characters, like Virginia Woolf herself, hoped to “make of the moment something permanent”—an attitude which she says amounted to a manifesto that was “of the nature of a revelation.” “The quest for meaning will find resolution not in a grand gesture that encompasses everything, but in minor daily miracles.”
6

With these concerns as her starting point and with Weber in the background, Woolf gradually came to focus on two aspects of experience that, for her, were of paramount importance and that became, again for her, what we might call a surrogate religion. These two elements were intimacy and “moments of being.” She thought that the great philosophical/emotional/intellectual problem of her day, or any other, was how one mind could know another, how it is possible to
understand
another person’s thoughts and values. “For Woolf,” as Pericles Lewis says, “no communion is possible with God or Christ, but she does seek some form of communion among selves.” For example, she asks herself how we can ever know what other minds think about God.

This, he says, leads us to the episode in “An Unwritten Novel” (1920) where she is on a train sitting opposite a “poor, unfortunate woman.” She gives the woman a fictitious—and somewhat mean—name, Minnie Marsh, and imagines her as an unhappy, childless spinster. She then tries to imagine what sort of God this other woman prays to: “Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o’clock in the afternoon?” She can imagine only an old patriarch in a black frock coat, a bullying parody of Jehovah, someone who resembles “the leader of the Boers”—an old spinster like “Minnie” would surely want “a God with whiskers.” Her point is, of course, that she had absolutely no idea, and when “Minnie” is met at Eastbourne station by her son, all Woolf’s fantasies are exploded.

What is not exploded is her point that, if one person cannot begin to imagine what another person’s idea of God is, or what his or her mental life is, how can we ever share anything? Is not the notion that all Christians, say, believe in the same God bound to be a fiction, an illusion?

As to the second aspect of experience that she regards as central, not all intimacies are the same, of course. Some people are proud, some spend
their time brooding, others despise one another, making intimacy difficult, if not impossible. But in modern times, Woolf suggests, the only authentic spiritual experience is to be found in intense moments of vision, or ecstasy, that it is the specific business of art to identify, preserve and transmit. She contrasts these “moments of being” with “moments of non-being.” “During moments of non-being,” one is, as mentioned earlier, “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton-wool.” In her own case these moments all come from childhood: such as the sudden desire not to fight with her brother, or the vision of an apple tree as somehow connected with the suicide of a family acquaintance.

These moments usually contain a shock or even a blow, and usually promise “a revelation of some order.”
7
They are similar to what James Joyce would call “epiphanies.” And she went on to say something similar to what Rilke said about naming: “From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this . . . a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.”

And somewhat like Rilke, too, Woolf saw herself as a receiver of observations rather than a God substitute imposing patterns on her stories and characters. She was especially attuned, she felt, to observe moments of being, moments of ecstasy, involving “the erasure of the boundaries that typically separate one self from another.”

These moments can be seen as a new form of the sublime, for which nineteenth-century realism had had little use. But in Woolf’s hands the new sublime relates not so much to grand or extraordinary things as to modest, inconspicuous, everyday objects that turn out to open up unexpected worlds. She uses these moments—when someone sees a hat pin worn long ago, or remembers a kiss—to establish an intimate link (sometimes retrospective) between individuals, by means of an overwhelming “oceanic” feeling traditionally associated with something altogether grander—mountains or cathedrals. For her, these episodes constitute the only really sacred moments available to us in a secular world, and it is the writer’s job to draw attention to them, to highlight their value, and to preserve them for us in a permanent—immortal—form.

Lewis again: “The question that each of these ecstatic episodes poses is whether the meeting of minds that the sublime moment offers can lead to sustained communion. For Woolf, the ‘moment of being’ . . . is a type of sacrament appropriate for a world in which no single measure of the sacred obtains, and in which community must result from the always temporary, ironic and visionary merging of competing value systems.”

As Freud’s English-language publisher, Woolf embraced the psychoanalytic approach. She thought that the “oceanic” feeling so sought after by religions and appropriated by them, and the “intimate sublime moments of being” which so attracted her, had their origins in infancy, born of the time when the infant is separated from the mother, the warm embrace of first the womb and then the breast.