All the Luck
Eugene O’Neill and a play not about chess
The Game of Chess by Kenneth Sawyer Goodman and Before Breakfast and Hughie by Eugene O’Neill
Two Russian aristocrats are sitting and enjoying a game of chess. The setting is opulent, as only an American’s imagination of the old Russian Empire permits. One of the noblemen — the thinker, the man of affairs — is Alexis Alexandrovitch; and the other is his friend Constantine, a fairly nervous man, a courtier, a hanger-on.
They are playing their regular game of chess — something Alexis Alexandrovitch insists upon — but it is necessarily rushed. Alexis Alexandrovitch, the nobleman of the two of them, he has something else coming on. He looks at his watch. His foot is tapping. He must postpone this game, perchance to finish it later.
Why do I play the game of chess, Alexis Alexandrovitch asks himself and his companion?
I set myself these little challenges, Alexis Alexandrovitch says to Constantine, because other men — men like you — believe I am perhaps past it. I look good, but you suspect I am too old. That I am not what I used to be. You sit there, seeing me hold power, and you doubt me. Doubt my acuity, doubt the plasticity and capacity for planning of my mind.
You think, indeed, you will checkmate me in five moves. But I keep myself in training for just such a moment as this.
Time moves on. I have a little arrangement that I have to conclude, and then we can resume in time our game.
Their game is postponed because of the introduction of Boris Ivanovitch Shamrayeff, a rough man, a peasant, a transparent revolutionary. He is permitted to enter the presence of his excellency, and he has not been searched. What are we the audience to make of this?
This is quite a predictable play. It’s been more than a century since it was written. There is little here that is not obvious. I mention that today because it has some of those things that, on TV or in movies, make me wince. Super-genius characters determined to explain to those with lesser minds how sharp their own reasoning is — and details of its convolutions. Chess as a metaphor not for luck, or even for the grinding application of skill to turn mathematically lost or drawn positions into winning ones, but as a metaphor for life itself. Chess as an invariable signal of brilliance. (Was it Paul Morphy, one of the greatest players ever, in the fine romantic style of the old days, who said that to play chess as well as he did was a waste of man’s finite talents?)
I must admit I did not much care for the play.
In both Before Breakfast and Hughie, Eugene O’Neill ponders luck. Or more specifically, because this is O’Neill, he ponders bad luck. The bad luck, the sole on-stage character of Before Breakfast says, to be married to you. How much I have suffered waiting for you to get a job, to do what you promised, to give up the other girls?
She, our protagonist Mrs Rowland, tiptoes around her unseen husband Alfred, at least for a while. She’s quiet for as long as it takes her to find the gin and to take a big drink first thing of a morning.
Then, after that, she is energised, vivified. Having got her fix, it is Mrs Rowland’s time to wake her husband, by increasing banging and crashing about the kitchen to remind him of her presence. It is as if in every movement around the stage, she is wordlessly screaming ‘I exist! I exist!’ But she doesn’t say it.
Instead, what she says is pure complaint. How come your father never turned out to be as rich as you led me to believe? How come you sit around all day and write your stories and poems, and I have to get a real job? With my health and all.
Alfred, the husband, occasionally groans, unseen, from another room. It appears the morning disagrees with him in all his delicacy.
The barrage continues. What about this letter I’m reading that you just got? Another girl for your collection? And how come you don’t shave? You look like a tramp. Can’t shave if you’re shaking like an alcoholic in the morning, can you? No surprise, too, that your coffee’s cold.
This is perhaps too much to get of one character. It’s an interesting experiment but it cannot always work. Yet O’Neill’s style makes it work. Other writers would, because they could do no better, have made Mrs Rowland a terrible character: dull, limited, irritating. O’Neill, by contrast, makes her a whole world. Her drinking, her betrayal, the implied squalor. The loss of her stillborn child with Alfred. All of these things exist as part of a character and a whole, not as props to make a point.
An even better play, again with limited cast, is Hughie, an O’Neill effort set in a hotel lobby in the graveyard shift or the witching hour (take your pick) of a dump hotel in New York city, where Erie Smith — a nickname — harasses Charlie, the man at the counter, with his life story, and his deep, fearful mourning for the former man at the desk, Hughie, who has just died.
What Erie is has many names. Bullshitter, chancer, con artist, fraud, loser. Yarn-spinner. He has a version — a partial and unimpressive version — of his life story prepared to thrown it onto the table at a moment’s notice. He can say where he came from, where he was born, what he did. All the girls he landed. All the gambling he pursued, the extravagant bets he made, the horses that came in for him. And, he says, he liked to tell old Hughie all about it. He assures the new guy that Hughie loved to hear his stories, even when he was ill. Even when he was hosting Erie with his prissy wife and children. The who did not like Erie one bit.
This is Erie’s story and he’s sticking to it.
Meanwhile Charlie, the desk-man, is physically standing next to Erie, listening to his infinitely long and expanding story, but his face is blank and his mind is elsewhere, astrally projecting itself by force of will around the city.
Do you think firemen have interesting jobs? Charlie wonders (Although however much you might want to burn the city down, there’s too much stone and steel there to allow you to do a proper job. The fire chief might tell you.) What about the really big gamblers? They sure have a swell life, when you really think about it.
What we have, then, are two men almost talking past each other. Only one of them does almost all the talking. This is one of those plays better read than seen, simply because O’Neill’s directions for Charlie are so illuminating. Not many actors could embody all the subtleties of it on stage, not while a showier, more famous man takes on Erie’s part and spends almost the entire runtime monologuing.
Erie is of course a fraud and he is just as obviously very upset about the untimely demise of the man Hughie he took to be his friend. He approaches despair sometimes as the desk-man stares blankly at him, not saying anything. Erie wants to go upstairs to bed but something keeps him there, trying his luck, throwing one more ball to the other man, trying to find a connection between the two of them that’s not superficial, as they while away the hours, the dead time in the city, together.
In the end, that link — the most tenuous, the most superficial — is gambling. Old dead Hughie loved the gambling; he cared about the horses. He wanted to place bets on the ones Erie said he had picked. And he was always game for a throw of the dice. He didn’t even want to check if they were fair.
That’s all Erie wants, really. Not only a target for his stories, but a new mark. A new mark he can charm and get to give him the time of night.
It’s all about luck, you see. Who has it, whose has run out. All the luck in the world can’t make you go on for ever. It’s not chess; it’s cards — it’s dice. But it’s a bent game. One where the house wins and we lose. It’s all about luck — the luck of the draw.