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Sullenly, hostilely, they try; they swear off the bottle and go looking for jobs, only to be thrown back on themselves, knowing that they are done for and that Hickey has sown a despair that means death. For the Iceman (in the sense that the loss of illusion means the end for those who have nothing else to lose) is Death.
Then they learn Hickey's own story: he had murdered his wife because her constant forgiveness of his misdeeds had made him feel unbearably guilty. He had faced reality only because he had already resigned himself to death. As the cops snap their handcuffs on Hickey, the bums, reprieved to live a lie once more, go happily back to their drinking.
Slice of Life. It was as a thick (though much too fatty) slice of life—a somber, sardonic, year-long comic strip with a comic strip's microscopic variations—that The Iceman Cometh was most telling. O'Neill's bums were presented flat, with a few mannerisms, a few memories; they repeated their little specialty acts; they never grew more complex, they only grew incredibly familiar, like chickens seen turning over & over on a spit. But collectively they seemed more real and redolent, for O'Neill knew them from his younger days and really cared about them, mingling gusto with his compassion. In the bleary squalor of The Iceman there was none of the piped-in knowledge or condescension of the Ivory Sewer school of writers; in fellow-feeling, though never in intensity, O'Neill might be saying with Walt Whitman, I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.
But this often static, enormously protracted play lacked the depth to match its length. That heavy dramatic undertow which often redeems long plays, and can count for much more than surface swell, was not there. Hickey, who might be a powerfully dramatic figure, wound up a merely theatrical one, peeling off a human skin to serve as a symbol of blight, disgorging in an interminable final speech too much and too lucid self-knowledge. And all that O'Neill seemed to be saying in The Iceman was that men cannot go on living without illusions—a truism that never took on the ring of nascent truth. As theater, much of the play was first-rate O'Neill. But as drama, for all its honest brooding, The Iceman was scarcely deeper than a puddle.
Bright Beginning. But behind the drama on the stage was the greater drama of one of literature's great human ordeals.
Eugene O'Neill was born (1888) in a respectable Manhattan family hotel, but much of his early boyhood was spent in the wings of theaters all over the U.S. His father, James O'Neill Sr., was famed for his role of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (he sometimes earned $50,000 a year). Hence Eugene knew little of actors' boardinghouse hardships. But he came to hate the constant moving around, long, dirty train rides, hotels, living out of trunks, the general rootlessness. He longed for security and stability.