The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill

Complete up to a point

Eugene O’Neill is one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American theatre. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the years, I have enjoyed reading a few of his plays, so I decided to read (or reread) his complete works. Whenever I want to buy a classic author’s work in bulk, I turn to the Delphi Classics. They make the best, most complete ebook collections of classic literature. Because of the United States’ severe copyright laws, Delphi has produced two versions of O’Neill’s oeuvre. The rest of the world gets his Complete Works. The USA, however, only gets the Collected Works—that is, everything up to 1929, the cut-off point for works to fall into the (copyright-free) public domain. Rather than list what this volume includes, it’s easier to list what it’s missing: Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, Days Without End, More Stately Mansions, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hughie, and A Touch of the Poet. Unfortunately, that list includes a few of O’Neill’s greatest works, but we’ll have to wait a few years before their copyright expires. Presumably, Delphi will update their ebook files with additional titles when they become available, as they have done with their other ebook collections.

Delphi’s Collected Works includes all of O’Neill’s one-act plays except for Hughie (1941). Of these twenty short dramas, very few are masterpieces, but overall they provide a revealing look into how O’Neill’s style and choice of themes developed over the years. O’Neill’s one original short story, “Tomorrow,” is also included here, as well as over sixty of his poems. Some additional rare odds and ends, not published until long after O’Neill’s death, are not surprisingly absent from this collection.

Among the full-length plays (say an hour and a half or longer on the stage), the highlights of this collection are The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, Beyond the Horizon, and Strange Interlude. To be honest, the bad outweigh the good in this collection, but if you really want to get an idea of the arc of an author’s career, you have to read the bad as well as the good. Some real stinkers include Welded, Servitude, and The Great God Brown. Although O’Neill is known for realist plays about family dynamics, alcoholism, and the lives of New England sailors, it is interesting to find him venturing out of his comfort zone with experiments like history plays—The Fountain, Marco Millions, and Lazarus Laughed—and kabuki-type masked productions—The Great God Brown and again, Lazarus Laughed. The Hairy Ape and Strange Interlude are two cases where O’Neill’s modernist experimentation successfully paid off.

Since all of the content included herein is in the public domain, you could download all of these writings from the internet for free. It is worth it, however, to spend the three bucks to get them all together in one convenient package from Delphi. Although their ebooks aren’t perfect, Delphi is by far the most conscientious editor and producer of ebook bundles of classic literature. They actually put some diligent research into compiling these collections. Works are arranged chronologically. Some of the more important individual plays get introductory synopses discussing the original stage productions and critical response. Also, the ebook is illustrated with a scattering of photographs picturing O’Neill at different stages in his life, places he lived and worked, and title pages and posters for his plays. In print form, the Library of America has a well-edited and well-produced complete works of O’Neill in three volumes, but those might set you back a pretty penny. In ebook form, The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill is the best an American reader is going to get, and it’s well worth the nominal charge incurred.  

The Devil’s Paw by E. Phillips Oppenheim

World War I spy plot with anti-Red sermonizing

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a very successful author of fiction involving espionage, intrigue, mystery, and crime. From 1887 to 1943, he published over 100 novels. The Great Impersonation (1920) is generally regarded as his best work. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you which of his books are supposed to be good or bad. When I’m in the mood for some Oppenheim, I just pick one at random, based on title. The Devil’s Paw, also published in 1920, is the ninth Oppenheim novel that I’ve read thus far.

Two friends sit before the fire in a hunting cottage near the coast of Norfolk, England. The owner of said cottage is Miles Furley, a parliamentary representative for the Labor Party. Julian Orden is a wealthy aristocrat who lives at his parents’ palatial estate nearby. Mommy and Daddy Orden host a who’s who of aristocrats at their mansion. Among the frequent house guests is the current Prime Minister of England. The year is 1917 or 1918. World War I is underway, and the Americans have joined the fight. Part of Furley’s wartime duties as a coastal landowner is to patrol the shoreline looking for suspicious activity. This evening, however, he injures his leg and asks Orden to cover his shift. While making his rounds on the beach, Orden spies a mysterious figure picking up a canister from the surf, presumably containing a message from a German submarine. Before he can make a move to intercept the spy, however, Orden is struck on the head and knocked unconscious. The next day, he finds evidence that one of his parents’ party guests, a beautiful Russian woman, may be involved in the treasonous act he witnessed on the beach. 

I’ve never been blown away by an Oppenheim novel, but I generally find them moderately entertaining. I wanted to like The Devil’s Paw, but this story kept letting me down. The plot here involves socialists. Rather than proletariats, however, most of the would-be radicals depicted here are wealthy, paternalistic socialists. Oppenheim isn’t really interested in people who work for a living. He thinks that aristocrats are the only people worth writing about, and the only people capable of running the world. Here he pays lip service to the cause of socialism and labor, but one never really gets the feeling that his heart is in it. Orden, the hero of the novel, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just happens to dabble in labor politics. The villain is the guy who wears shabby clothes and doesn’t like opera. The result is a jingoistic propaganda piece in which socialism is portrayed as a scam and pacifism is portrayed as evil.

Although this book was published between the two World Wars, Oppenheim’s fiction is still very much stuck in the Victorian Era of the 1880s or ‘90s. One annoying convention from that age is the idea that women can commit no evil. In Oppenheim’s world, the most heinous crime a man can commit is treason, but if the perpetrator is a beautiful, upper-class female, the gentlemanly thing to do is look the other way. (Of course, if she’s of the servant class, she could be shot or hanged for espionage, no problem.) Oppenheim also tries hard to create some sexual tension between his male and female leads, but that’s awfully hard to do when his characters and intended audience are stuck in an idealized gentility wherein you can’t even kiss someone without being willing to back it up with a wedding ring.

If you know anything about history, you know how the spy plot is going to turn out. Oppenheim can’t change the outcome of the Great War. Thus, the only possible thrills would have to come from having the characters threatened with peril. There’s surprisingly little danger in this thriller, however. It mostly reads like a series of political debates, the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion, given Oppenheim’s monarchical bent. Oppenheim should’ve stuck to writing novels about the rich and powerful and left the socialists out of it. He’s clearly out of his element here.

Deluge by S. Fowler Wright

Ahead-of-its-time post-apocalyptic thriller

S. Fowler Wright (1874–1965) was a British author of genre fiction active from the 1920s through the 1950s. His science fiction novel Deluge was published in 1928. The book was an immediate bestseller and Wright’s first big commercial success. Deluge was adapted into a Hollywood movie in 1933.

The novel opens with a brief prelude that informs us that the Earth has been struck by a catastrophe of unusual seismic activity causing land masses to sink and sea levels to rise. This cataclysm is accompanied by fierce storms delivering pouring rain, stronger-than-hurricane winds, huge rogue waves, and fires caused by broken gas lines. After the prelude, the narrative backtracks to day one of this disaster and follows an English family as their daily life is disrupted by this apocalypse. As the novel progresses, other characters are introduced, their experiences related, and eventually all their storylines become intertwined. England, where this novel takes place, is reduced to a scattering of small islands separated by miles of water. A few buildings remain standing, and some livestock survives. The human survivors of these islands are rapidly forming themselves into gangs that may be the seeds of a new civilization, but the absence of government, law, and essential services has brought out the worst in humanity.

Considering it was published almost a hundred years ago, I was impressed by how bluntly realistic this novel is. Rather than a story from 1928, Deluge reads like it could have been a 21st-century post-apocalyptic thriller. In fact, I found this more intelligent and compelling than many recent movies about dystopian futures. There are no mutants or zombies in Deluge. Wright concentrates on what happens to human nature when mankind is thrust back into Iron Age living conditions. One consideration Wright explores very frankly is what would happen to women in such a situation. They are outnumbered by male survivors, who want to possess and use them like property. Wright doesn’t shy away from the distasteful aspects of this dilemma, but confronts it matter-of-factly. Women of the 1920s, I would assume, enjoyed less independence and had fewer opportunities to kick ass than women of today. Nevertheless, here Wright delivers a realistic female lead who is admirably intelligent, resourceful, athletic, and can hold her own in a battle against men.

The first half of Deluge is excellent as Wright unfolds his vision of what life would be like after such a doomsday scenario. At about the halfway point of the novel, however, Wright goes into some extended action sequences of siege, abduction, and escape that just go on way too long. Like a drawn-out chess game, he examines every facet of these encounters in minute detail. Where is each character standing at a given time? What happens if they move in this direction, or that? Whose carrying what gear on which horse? It’s just too much logistical minutiae. These chaotic action scenes distract from the larger issues of how human nature and morality change when survival becomes the primary motivator. The new society is ruled by might makes right, until a small community decides they want to adopt a form of government. Wright’s wishful-thinking solution to that problem—a variation on the benevolent autocracy of a philosopher/king—is neither believable nor attractive. The ending of the book is also a bit of a let-down in the too-convenient way in which potentially thorny issues are wrapped up neatly.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator of the post-apocalyptic future who occasionally offers up commentary on aspects of our present society: capitalism, women’s rights, capital punishment, environmental devastation, the frivolous entertainments on which we waste our time, and so on. This aspect of the book is very well done. Overall, the strengths of Deluge outweigh its disappointments. I was impressed by Wright’s writing; his sci-fi reads more like our contemporaries (2025) than his contemporaries (1928). A year after Deluge, Wright published a sequel entitled Dawn.

The Misty Harbour by Georges Simenon

Maigret on the Waterfront

The Misty Harbour, published in 1932, is the 15th novel in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels and the 30th book from that series that I have read and reviewed so far. The book’s original French title is Les port des brumes, and it has also been published in English under varying configurations of Death of a Harbor Master. The Maigret books are consistently good but not always excellent. The Misty Harbour is one of the better ones. This mystery grabs you from page one and keeps you gripped until the very end.

As the title indicates, The Misty Harbour takes place in a fog-bound seaside town: Ouistreham on the coast of Calvados, Normandy. This town serves as the seaport to the city of Caen, to which it is connected via a canal. In Paris, where Maigret serves as the superintendant of the Police Judiciaire, a John Doe is found wandering the streets. He has no memory of his identity, appears to have suffered some brain damage, and has lost the power of speech. The man has a gunshot wound to his cranium that appears to have received some medical attention. The Paris police send out newspaper articles to help ascertain the mystery man’s identity. His housekeeper responds, identifying him as Yves Joris, the harbor master at Ouistreham. She has no idea what happened to him or why he’s in Paris. Maigret accompanies Joris and the housekeeper on the train back to Ouistreham to investigate the cause of the harbor master’s injury. Shortly after arriving in the coastal town, Joris drops dead, apparently murdered by poison.

In Ouistreham, social life revolves around the waterfront tavern la Buvette de la Marine. Maigret makes several visits to the establishment to toss back a few beers with the local inhabitants and find out what they know, but nobody’s talking. The population of the town consists mostly of sailors and other working men who make their living from the sea. Many of them speak the Breton language. These men make frequent trips to England, the Netherlands, or Norway to ship goods to and from Caen. A few upper-class inhabitants, who have made their fortunes in the shipping industry, also have homes in Ouistreham. Among these is the town’s mayor, Monsieur Grandmaison, a particularly prickly character who seems to have something to hide. He repeatedly butts heads with Maigret and challenges the inspector’s authority.

Having read so many Maigret novels, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sometimes foresee where Simenon’s mystery plots are going, but this case was sufficiently perplexing that I couldn’t figure out what was going on until all is revealed in the final chapter. Atypical of Maigret novels, this one sports a few action scenes, violence included, in which Maigret gives and takes blows with the rough and tumble sailors of Ouistreham. Sailors and bargemen are frequently featured in Maigret novels. Simenon clearly has an affinity for those who live and work at sea or on the canals of France, as seen in such novels as Lock 14, The Grand Banks Café, The Flemish House, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, and Maigret and the Bum. One of the joys of reading the Maigret books is learning about different aspects of life in France, and The Misty Harbour provides a vivid glimpse into the maritime lifestyle on the Norman coast in the 1930s. In all respects, The Misty Harbour is an exceptional example of Simenon’s and Maigret’s work, one well worth reading for fans or newcomers to the series.

The Child of the Cavern, or The Underground City by Jules Verne

Home sweet coal mine

Jules Verne’s novel Les Indes noires (“The Black Indies”) was published in 1877. It has been published in English under various titles, including The Child of the Cavern, The Underground City, Strange Doings Underground, and Black Diamonds. Unfortunately, some of those English titles reveal more about the plot than they should. This is a science fiction adventure novel about a coal mine, the science in this case being geology.

James Starr was the head engineer at the Aberfoyle Mine near Edinburgh, Scotland. Ten years prior to the start of the novel, that mine was shut down, its resources deemed exhausted. As the story opens, Starr receives a letter from his right-hand man at Aberfoyle, the former overseer Simon Ford. The mysterious message begs Starr to come to Aberfoyle immediately. Although the mine has been inactive for a decade, Ford never left. He lives inside the mine with his wife and 25-year-old son Harry, in a cottage thirty stories beneath the earth. Starr descends into the mine to visit the Fords, and Simon lets him in on his recent amazing discovery. At the end of one of Aberfoyle’s underground passages, Simon has found firedamp (flammable gases) issuing forth from crevices in the rock, a strong indication that a bed of coal exists behind the walls. He speculates that the mine may have some riches left in her yet, in the form of a mother lode of undiscovered coal. Ford and his family may not be the only parties to have made this discovery, however. There is evidence that some mystery person has been wandering in the caverns of Aberfoyle, perhaps with evil intentions.

I’ve always admired the fact that Verne could make a science fiction novel out of just about any field of science. He proved that scientific romances (the 19th-century term for the genre) didn’t have to be about outer space or utopian or dystopian futures. Verne wrote novels about all sorts of scientific phenomena that struck his fancy, from aeronautics (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1873) to paleontology (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1867) to oceanography (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871). I’ve never been fascinated with coal mines, but Verne managed to keep me interested with this subterranean adventure. In fact, he makes coal mines sound like the most wonderful places on earth. All the characters want to live and work in one, so much so that they rarely make trips to the surface. Verne’s books are also known for their geographical content and often educate the reader on exotic locales. In this novel, however, the reader doesn’t really learn a whole lot about Scotland, because so much time is spent underground.

While The Child of the Cavern is grounded in geological fact, this story gets pretty farfetched, even for Verne standards. As previously alluded to, people spend inordinate amounts of time deep underground. God only knows what they’re eating. And don’t get me started on Harfang (a secret better left unrevealed). One must suspend quite a bit of disbelief to enjoy this novel. The plot here is a little like a Scooby Doo mystery, one of the less satisfying ones where the “ghost” unmasks to reveal an unfamiliar character. As is often the case with Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, there is a sinister villain here, as well as a couple of young lovers eager to get married when the crisis is resolved. This is not one of Verne’s greater works. It’s an obscurity, and probably deserves to be so, but if you can get in touch with your inner twelve-year-old, it is a fun ride.

The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

Disturbing trip inside a mind losing grip on reality

Welsh author Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907. Its protagonist, Lucian Taylor, is the son of a clergyman. Lucian and his widower father live on the outskirts of a rural Welsh village named Caermaern. Lucian is very intelligent, but not in the conventional good-grades way. He loves books and enjoys filling his mind with esoteric, mostly useless knowledge. A social outsider, Lucian frequently wanders alone through the countryside. He develops a fascination for the local Roman ruins and all things antiquarian and reads works on the occult. From such subject matter, he creates an interior fantasy world that serves as a paradisiacal refuge from the world of everyday society. Lucian is smart enough to pursue university studies, but he doesn’t have the money to do so. I don’t know enough about the Welsh clergy to understand how a country parson goes poor, but Lucian and his father live in relative squalor. Lucian is caught in the catch-22 of can’t get an education without money and can’t earn money without an education. He decides to become a writer and devotes all of his energies to that goal. The practice of writing becomes almost a religious obsession with him, entwined with his pagan fantasy land. Lucian’s literary career is an uphill battle, however, and he experiences failure and frustration in his chosen vocation.

Through the eyes of this outsider, Machen satirizes the British literary scene and the British class system. The rich residents of Lucian’s town look down on him for his poverty, while they themselves are depicted as pompous, shallow hypocrites. As a writer, Lucian yearns to create a timeless masterpiece for the ages, but he is constantly reminded, by literary critics and well-meaning neighbors, that the insipid popular novel is where success lies. Underlying the story of Lucian’s coming-of-age, The Hill of Dreams is an expression of Machen’s ideas on literature and the arts. His is a bleak and cynical outlook reminiscent of Jack London’s Martin Eden.

Machen is best-known today as an author of horror fiction. (Stephen King is a fan.) Is The Hill of Dreams horror? Not by today’s standards. It’s more of a psychological tragedy with an overall tone reminiscent of the deliberate dreariness of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The novel charts Lucian’s gradual descent into madness. The reader roots for this young man, hoping he’ll find some happiness, but it becomes harder to get behind him as he becomes more and more disturbingly unhinged. Lucian’s story illustrates how someone like a John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Ted Kaczynski might have been created. About 90 percent of this novel, however, happens inside of Lucian’s head, so he never goes so far as to commit actions similar to those aforementioned psychopaths.

Those with antisocial tendencies can’t help but identify to some extent with Lucian. Polite society is replete with superficial pretense. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get along without it? This is a book that speaks to misanthropes and misfits. Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian likewise speaks to that audience, but reassures such misanthropes that there are others out there like you, your narcissism is justified, you are superior to the human herd, and someday you will be discovered by your misfit brethren. Machen offers no such consolation in The Hill of Dreams. We sympathize with Lucian, but there is no doubt he has gone off the rails, beyond the point of reason or justification.

Machen writes brilliant, exquisite prose. There’s hardly a sentence in this book that wouldn’t qualify as a quotable line of poetry. The plot, or lack thereof, does get repetitive and drag on in its relentless chronicling of Lucian’s deranged thoughts. Nevertheless, this is a deep and compelling work. One reading might not be enough to fully appreciate everything Machen put into this.   

Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill

Mature psychological drama slightly overdone

I’ve been gradually working my way through the complete works of American playwright Eugene O’Neill, proceeding mostly in chronological order. It has been a bumpy ride with some true masterpieces scattered amid mediocre offerings, failed experiments, and some real stinkers. Strange Interlude, published in 1928, is one of the good ones. Here O’Neill has reached his mature, Nobel-worthy style. In this play, O’Neill employs a modern technique of stream-of-consciousness soliloquy which was groundbreaking for its time, although it feels tame compared to the later modernist weirdness of avant-garde playwrights like Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco. Strange Interlude won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1928, the year it premiered. The play consists of nine acts and at full-length takes about five or six hours to perform on stage.

The play opens in the home of Henry Leeds, a professor at a New England university. Nina Leeds, his daughter, grieves the loss of her fiancé Gordon Shaw, who was killed in World War I. Nina wanted to marry him before the war, but she suspects her father dissuaded Gordon from pre-deployment nuptials. Thus, she was never able to consummate her union with Gordon, whom she worshipped, and she resents her father for it. A friend of the family, Charles Marsden, has known Nina since childhood and is obviously in love with her, but she has placed him firmly into the friend category. Nina, distraught from her fiancé’s death, leaves her father’s house to nurse wounded soldiers and embarks on several sordid sexual escapades. As a sort of penance, she agrees to marry Sam Evans, an affable boob whom she likes but doesn’t love. Sam’s best friend Ned Darrell, a physician, is also attracted to Nina, and the feeling is mutual. The play is essentially an extended power struggle between these four (and later a fifth) main characters. The three men each love Nina in their own selfish ways, and she manipulates them to satisfy her own neurotic needs. Though Gordon Shaw is deceased before the play begins, his presence looms large in Nina’s memory, and all the men feel they have to compete with the unrealistic ideal he left behind.

The aforementioned technique of soliloquy makes it possible for the audience to know what’s going on in the characters’ heads. In dialogue scenes, the characters speak to each other, but they also speak their thoughts out loud, as if those in the room can’t hear them. In movies, such interior monologue would be done with voice-overs (as in the 1932 film adaptation of Strange Interlude starring Clark Gable), but it’s unclear exactly how this would work on a stage. In the text, the stage directions and punctuation set these soliloquies apart.

For a Broadway play of 1928, Strange Interlude deals with some admirably challenging subject matter: sexual promiscuity, mental illness, infidelity, abortion. It’s refreshing to hear sexuality handled in a realistic manner after the more prudish theatrical conventions of earlier years. In Strange Interlude, O’Neill demonstrates the psychological insight and authenticity that would mark his later masterpieces like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. The dynamics between the characters feel real. Their interactions read like a chess game of wills, desires, and jealousies. Compared to the sexual politics, the discussion of mental illness feels a bit antiquated, and overall, the drama is somewhat drawn-out and repetitive. I don’t know if I’d want to sit in a theatre for five hours to watch this play, but to read it off the page over the course of a week made for a compelling experience.