Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
Page 1
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College
Copyright © 2014 by Robert M. Dowling.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dowling, Robert M., 1970– author.
Eugene O’Neill : a life in four acts / Robert M. Dowling.
pages cm
Summary: “A major new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning playwright whose brilliantly original plays revolutionized American theater.”
— Provided by publisher.
Summary: “This extraordinary new biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama. Robert M. Dowling innovatively recounts O’Neill’s life in four acts, thus highlighting how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories. Each episode also uncovers how O’Neill’s work was utterly intertwined with, and galvanized by, the culture and history of his time. Much is new in this extensively researched book: connections between O’Neill’s plays and his political and philosophical worldview; insights into his Irish upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this reveals about his unique dramatic voice; and a startling revelation about the release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in defiance of his explicit instructions. This biography is also the first to discuss O’Neill’s lost play Exorcism (a single copy of which was only recently recovered), a dramatization of his own suicide attempt. Written with lively informality yet a scholar’s strict accuracy, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a biography that America’s foremost playwright richly deserves.”
— Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-17033-7 (hardback)
1. O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953. 2. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3529.N5Z6284 2014
812’.52—dc23
[B] 2014014634
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Mairéad Dowling and Chris Francescani
There can be no such thing as an Ivory Tower for a playwright. He either
lives in the theater of his time or he never lives at all.
—EUGENE O’NEILL, 1926
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE: The Irish Luck Kid, 1916
INTRODUCTION: “Life Is a Tragedy—Hurrah!”
ACT I: The Ghosts at the Stage Door
The Treasures of Monte Cristo School Days of an Apostate Anarchist in the Tropics Exorcism in New York Return to Monte Cristo The (Love) Sick Apprentice It Takes a Village
ACT II: “To Be an Artist or Nothing”
Washed Ashore at Land’s End Below Washington Square “Turn Back the Universe” “The Town Is Yours” Civilization Unmasked The Theatre F(r)eud
ACT III: “The Broadway Show Shop”
Prometheus Unbound Draining Bitter Cups Note to the Ku Klux Klan “God’s Hard, Not Easy” The Novelist behind the Mask “Old Doc” at Loon Lodge The Soliloquy Is Dead! Long Live—What?
ACT IV: Full Fathom Five
Uncharted Seas L’Aeschylus du Plessis The Prodigal Returns “The Game Isn’t Worth the Candle” Pandora’s Box The Tyranny of Time Silence’s End “There’s a Lot to Be Said for Being Dead”
POSTSCRIPT: Journey Into Light
APPENDIX: Selected Chronology of Works (Date Completed)
NOTES
INDEX
Acknowledgments
ABLIZZARD-LIKE STORM has engulfed my hometown of New London, Connecticut, as I type these acknowledgments. New London is the town in which this book’s subject spent the earliest years of his life, and in 1951, a blizzard in effect ended it, on a spiritual level, at Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts. As the majority of those listed below can testify, for the past decade all such roads—literal and associative, biographical and literary—have in some way, like this storm outside my office window, swung my mental focus back around to Eugene Gladstone O’Neill.
The only person who has had a higher claim on my daily thoughts over these last years is my daughter, Mairéad Dowling, to whom I warmly dedicate this book. I would bet that throughout this period Mairéad, now a teenager, has unwittingly absorbed more facts, figures, anecdotes, and judgments about Eugene O’Neill than many avid theatergoers and drama critics have in their lifetimes. Thank you for your patience and understanding, my darling girl.
I would next like to thank my great friend and fellow “hapless architect of the written word,” Chris Francescani, to whom this book is also dedicated. Chris adroitly guided me through the process of how to tell a story, to the best of my ability, as exceptional as O’Neill’s.
My mother, Janet B. Kellock, and my friend, colleague, and coeditor Jackson R. Bryer also read complete drafts of this biography, and each of them offered critical insights and editorial acumen. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my splendid agent Geri Thoma as well as to my former and current editors Ileene Smith, Eric Brandt, and Steve Wasserman, respectively, and editorial assistants Erica Hanson and Eva Skewes for their steadfast enthusiasm and support. My copy editor Robin DuBlanc, project manager Laura Jones Dooley, and proofreader Jack Borrebach took on the heavy lifting of this book’s final hours, and their remarkable fortitude and skill have proved invaluable. I would also like to express my gratitude to the leadership of Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), which has shown abiding interest in my work on O’Neill and provided much-needed resources for this book’s completion.
Throughout various stages of this project I’ve counted on the input and assistance of many other family members, friends, and colleagues, notably my sisters, Susanne Magee and Elisa Olds, my friends Michael J. Peery, Tom Cerasulo, and Yibing Huang, my niece Jenna May Magee and her significant other, Huntley Brownell, my nephews Naoise and Daithi Magee, Burl Barr, Barry H. Leeds, Eileen Herrmann, William Davies King, Kurt Eisen, the late and beloved Deborah Martinson (“Put the man in there!”), Gwenola Le Bastard, Adam Kroshus, Kamal John Iskander, Megan Byrne, Derron Wood, Marc Zimmer, Art Wilinski, Jon and Laura Hexer, and James Scarles, all of whom have read through sections of this book and/or offered essential feedback.
Far too many others to list have lent a hand, but a few more require mentioning: Mary Hartig, for taking on the painstaking work of formatting the text and footnotes of the manuscript; my indexer John Bealle (another magnificent job); George Monteiro and Brenda Murphy, whose original research provided lively anecdotes for this book (I look forward to the publication of theirs); O’Neill’s former nurse Kathryne Albertoni, may she rest in peace, for granting m
e an interview in 2010; my graduate student Erin Sullivan (who, among other things, transcribed the hours-long taped interview of Albertoni); Myles Whalen, whose legal expertise helped me to interpret the mysteries of O’Neill’s first divorce papers; Peter Quinn, Jay Parini, and Gary Greenberg, whose respective enthusiasms for this project were the first three steps toward getting it into print; my fellow members of the Eugene O’Neill Society, for whom I’ve served with pride on the board of directors, and the editorial board of the Eugene O’Neill Review, on which I also serve; those who with such passion run the Tony Award–winning Eugene O’Neill Theater Center of Waterford, Connecticut, and the Flock Theatre of New London; and the other fellows who studied with me under Deborah Martinson at the Norman Mailer Fellowship program.
Countless librarians, curators, and archivists also gave up precious time and resources for this endeavor (some of whom are recognized in the endnotes for specialized advice), but many thanks to Ben Panciera and Nova Seals of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College, Raymond Pun and Jeremy Megraw of the New York Public Library, Edward Gaynor of the University of Virginia’s Special Collections Library, Edward Gaynor of the University of Virginia’s Special Collections Library, Louise Bernard, Melissa Barton, Anne Marie Menta, and Ingrid Lennon-Pressey of the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Mary Camezon of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, and Deborah Herman and Sarah Marek of CCSU’s Elihu Burritt Library. My deep gratitude to all of you.
Prologue
The Irish Luck Kid, 1916
In the rash lustihead of my young powers
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
—FRANCIS THOMPSON, The Hound of Heaven, 1893
If tragedies might any Prologue have,
All those he made, would scarce make one to this.
—HUGH HOLLAND, ELEGIAC SONNET TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1623
Spring 1916, New York City
EUGENE O’NEILL, a despondent twenty-seven-year-old college dropout and ex-sailor, had spent the last six months lost in a whiskey fog of oblivion at a Greenwich Village saloon known as the Golden Swan Café. To the regulars, it was “the Hell Hole,” so named after a passerby glanced inside one day and cringed, “This is one helluva hole.” O’Neill felt right at home.1
The Hell Hole sat on the southeastern corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, the heart of Greenwich Village, and it served hustlers, pickpockets, prostitutes, bohemians, and the Hudson Dusters, a cocaine-fueled Irish gang that had lorded over the neighborhood for years. If you had a hangover, and nearly everyone did, the Sixth Avenue El that passed just outside the front door rattled the three-story brick building with a head-splitting drum roll. The bar’s proprietor, Tom Wallace, hung two massive shillelaghs crossed in the pagan way behind the bar below a photograph of Tammany Hall’s Irish-born strongman, Richard “Boss” Croker.2 Beer was 5¢ a glass in the back room, where O’Neill would retreat to get drunk in relative solitude in the bar’s dark corners, undisturbed by the quivering glow of two gas jets mounted on the wall. Patrons rapped on the door three times, and a bouncer named Leftie Louie glared through a slat before deciding whether to let them in. Women weren’t permitted to smoke in most places in Manhattan, but at the Hell Hole, they were encouraged to light up.3
Just the year before, O’Neill had given himself the nickname “The Irish Luck Kid,” but by now the irony of that roguish moniker had become all too clear. His life to date had been a relentless cascade of hopeless hopes: he was thrown out of Princeton freshman year for poor academic standing and drunkenness; he got married, divorced, and in the process fathered a son whom he still hadn’t seen since infancy; he fled the conjugal life for the teeming jungles of Honduras to prospect for gold and instead contracted a crippling bout of malaria; he survived nine months as a beachcomber in Buenos Aires, working odd jobs, eating scraps, and swilling gin and cheap beer; he contracted tuberculosis, a minor case, yet one that landed him five months at a sanatorium; he studied playwriting at Harvard University, but the “Old Man,” as O’Neill called his father, stopped paying the tuition after two semesters. True, he’d published a book, Thirst and Other One-Act Plays, but his father fronted the production costs, and it hadn’t made a dime in royalties. Most painfully, for the moment, he’d just published a poem dedicated to his girlfriend Beatrice Ashe in which he compared her to Dante’s Beatrice. She was in New London, Connecticut, where they had both grown up, and O’Neill was convinced that she was ready to dump him. (He was right.)
O’Neill was antisocial, alcoholic, a heavy smoker. His father was a domineering overachiever and his brother an underachiever and a world-class drunk. His mother, Ella, had been a morphine addict since the day he was born, all eleven pounds of him.
He’d tried to commit suicide; he’d tried to keep writing. He’d failed at both.
O’Neill shared a room with a sixty-one-year-old anarchist named Terry Carlin in an unfurnished apartment down Fourth Street from the Hell Hole so filthy they called it “the Garbage Flat.” Everyone in the Village knew Carlin, an unapologetic drinker who held court in the Hell Hole’s backroom and shamelessly sponged off O’Neill, who at the time was living on a small allowance from his father, for as long as he was able. (Carlin was able, it turned out, for nearly two decades.) Born Terence O’Carolan in 1855, Terry Carlin was raised in Chicago but had emigrated as a young boy from Ireland; and he looked the part of the rogue Irishman, with his unkempt shock of silvery hair tucked behind the ears, baggy gray suits, and fedora-style hat tilted back on his head as if he were a leprechaun. He spoke rapidly, at an unnervingly high pitch, and was endowed with preternatural wit; he had the hands of a laborer but long ago had vowed never to work for money. There’s a word for what Carlin thought of puritanical drudges who boasted, as O’Neill’s father did, that they never missed a day of work in their lives: suckers.
Few at the Hell Hole took Terry Carlin seriously. But to O’Neill, he was nothing less than brilliant and among the best-read men he’d ever met. Like O’Neill, he was a self-styled “philosophical anarchist,” someone who believed in nonviolently protesting against all forms of institutional power, mostly by ignoring them. (“I am a philosophical anarchist,” O’Neill maintained as late as 1946, “which means, ‘Go to it, but leave me out of it.’”)4 O’Neill resented his father’s unsolicited counsel, but Carlin he listened to. Carlin reciprocated his young friend’s respect, though he had his number better than anyone: “Every soul is alone,” O’Neill would somberly declare. “No one in the world understands my slightest impulse.” “Then you don’t understand the slightest impulse of anyone else,” Carlin would respond.5
Hutchins Hapgood, an anarchist friend of Carlin’s, rented a summerhouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the outermost point of Cape Cod, where he and a group of his friends holed up to keep cool and let loose their creative energies. Hapgood and his wife, the writer Neith Boyce, had formed an amateur drama group in Provincetown the previous summer and were actively seeking new talent. O’Neill’s yearning for a theatrical breakthrough, some political troubles Carlin was up against with New York’s anarchist contingent, and the threat of the city’s summer swelter combined to make it a good time to leave town.
Summer 1916, Provincetown, Massachusetts
Provincetown is situated fifty miles out from the mainland on a continuously fluctuating spit of sand dunes, pine forests, and weathered houses. “Land’s End,” as the peninsula’s called, twists up and around on itself like a scorpion’s tail—east, north, west, south, and east again. Its harbor has a long tradition of attracting pathfinders; and by that time, the seaside village it protects from the brutal storms of the Nor
th Atlantic had become a hothouse of creative energy. Over six hundred artists migrated there that summer; by August, the Boston Globe would run an article under the headline “Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown.”6 O’Neill and Carlin, the two “wash ashores,” as they’d be designated by locals, arrived in late June.
Casting their eyes along the curve of the shoreline, the ragtail Irishmen no longer knew which direction they were facing—and no longer cared. “Sand and sun and sea and wind,” O’Neill wrote later of the rolling dunes and seascapes encircling the town, “you merge into them, and become as meaningless and as full of meaning as they are. There is always the monotone of surf on the bar—a background for silence—and you know that you are alone—so alone you wouldn’t be ashamed to do any good action. You can walk or swim along the beach for miles, and meet only the dunes—Sphinxes muffled in their yellow robes with paws deep in the sea.”7
But O’Neill and Carlin had a more immediate concern on their minds than the picturesque landscape—their lack of money—and Carlin suggested they “put the bite” on Hutchins Hapgood for $10. Nestled among an endless procession of gray-shingled houses on Commercial Street, Provincetown’s sand-strewn access road, Hapgood’s house was located in the arty East End district. Hapgood lent them the money, even though, as he suspected at the time and later confirmed, it would never be repaid.8 O’Neill and Carlin then temporarily moved into the studio of Bayard Boyesen, an outspoken anarchist they knew from Greenwich Village.
O’Neill, with a good word from Carlin, scheduled an audition with the experimental theater group that would soon become known as the Provincetown Players. The reading was to take place at the radical journalist John Reed’s house. Most of the Players knew Carlin from Greenwich Village, but O’Neill was a curiosity, “more unknown then than he’s famed now,” one of them remembered.9 They referred to him as the “son of James O’Neill,” the brilliant actor who’d sold his talent for the easy money of costumed romances and melodrama.10