Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  O’Neill publicly defended anarchists and socialists and railed against racial injustice. He signed a petition for members of the Industrial Workers of the World to be released from Leavenworth prison for their vocal stance against World War I. He supported Jewish refugees fleeing Europe when the Nazis came to power. He wrote a telegram to the Catholic Interracial Council when the National Theater in Washington, D.C., tried to ban African Americans from attending The Iceman Cometh: “I am and always have been opposed to racial discrimination of any kind and I assure you I will insist on a non-discrimination clause in all future contracts. Surely my past record as a dramatist and a producer has shown where I stand on this issue.”16 O’Neill refused, however, to sign an appeal for Ireland to break neutrality during World War II. “It is they who will be massacred by German bombers if they commit this act of war,” he said. “If we could promise our country would fight as an ally of Ireland and defend her independence we might have a right to make this appeal, but as things are I feel we have no right.”17

  O’Neill’s tragedies, in their denial of Americans’ most cherished desire as a people, hinge on the distressing fact that the American Dream seldom realizes itself. O’Neill never lived the dream the way most believe American “success stories” are supposed to play out. He believed it was a fatuous delusion from the start.

  Indeed, one of the more stunning moments in O’Neill’s career was a near-treasonous declaration he gave in 1946 during a press conference to promote The Iceman Cometh—his first such public appearance in more than a decade. At the height of the patriotic triumphalism that gripped the nation in postwar America, O’Neill lambasted the concept of the American Dream, and it’s remarkably easy to imagine the impact of such a statement even today: “Some day this country is going to get it—really get it. We had everything to start with—everything—but there’s bound to be a retribution. We’ve followed the same selfish, greedy path as every other country in the world. We talk about the American Dream and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States, for this reason, is the greatest failure the world has ever seen. We’ve been able to get a very good price for our souls in this country—the greatest price perhaps that has ever been paid.”18

  Many other aspects of O’Neill’s career have been sidelined in the past, often with the best of intentions. While praise over his legacy is inevitable, to omit his difficulties would be deceptive. Perhaps most important among them is that O’Neill was in no sense a natural-born genius. Terms like genius and gifted, so blithely conferred upon our accomplished scientists, artists, musicians, and writers—those with a creative gene—presume a gift of nature handed down rather than a skill to be earned through time and hard work. “A horrible word,” novelist William Faulkner said of “genius” in an essay on O’Neill’s singular contribution to American letters, written well before Faulkner had published his first book.19 The indomitable acting impresario Stella Adler once asked a group of her students, “Do you understand the difference between craft and the result of craft, which is talent? Nobody says ‘I want to play the piano at Carnegie Hall’ before they take some lessons. You can imagine what it would sound like.”20

  O’Neill’s development as a writer was anything but smooth sailing. I have discovered, for instance, new evidence that at the height of his celebrity in the mid-1920s, he planned to give up playwriting and become a novelist. “Crowding a drama into a play,” he grumbled to a friend, “is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub.”21 Though O’Neill became exasperated with the limits of the stage, in the end he refused to abandon it. Instead, he pushed beyond its conventions and forever changed its rules. If Tennessee Williams is the poet of American drama, O’Neill is its novelist, with strong elements of the composer. For this reason, and unlike most dramatic works, O’Neill’s plays are meant to be read in solitude as much as seen in a crowded theater.

  Contrary to the implied ease of a genius at work, O’Neill’s writing life consisted of uneven stretches of creative doldrums punctuated by flashes of staggering brilliance, a heartrending process in which he achieved the highest possible stature as a playwright through sheer force of will. Decades of grueling labor and self-doubt fueled the creation of his late masterworks: The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. And yet his earlier plays are still too often dismissed. O’Neill scholar Jackson R. Bryer told me that while working as a consultant on Ric Burns’s 2003 documentary on O’Neill, he was frustrated to discover that once again the “late great” plays dominated the narrative while O’Neill’s earlier work went largely ignored. “O’Neill won three Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize before he wrote those late plays,” he pointed out to Burns. “He must have been doing something right!”

  In 2004, Tony Kushner professed that “much that an American playwright needs to know can be learned by studying Eugene Gladstone O’Neill’s life and work.”22 Indeed, it is the full sweep of O’Neill’s career, from tyro to titan, that concerns us here. A model for any unformed artist, O’Neill swore as early as 1914 “to be an artist or nothing.”23 And so he wrote.

  “So, why Eugene O’Neill?” My standard line when asked this maddening question—maddening both in its complexity and its rate of recurrence—goes something like this: “Because I’m an Irish-American male who grew up in Connecticut and New York and feels at home in dive bars. I also love plays. And if they’re set in dive bars, all the better.” There’s autobiography in all biography, of course, no matter what purists say. But the deeper question for me is why I feel so reassured in the company of this playwright. It’s a great irony that a man so desperately alienated could conjure the feelings of warmth and compassion that make countless others feel they belong. But maybe that’s why O’Neill’s fans settle into an irresistible comfort zone when we enter his imagination, and also why we don’t find his plays as gloomy as others often complain.

  My mother first discovered her love of O’Neill’s writing in a seminar taught by Professor James Baird, at what was, in the early 1950s, the Connecticut College for Women. (The playwright was alive at the time, wasting away from a neurological illness just a couple of hours north in Massachusetts.) Her bookshelves while I was growing up were stocked with volumes of O’Neill’s plays, many of them first editions, and by the time I was in my early twenties, she took me to my first O’Neill production: the Wooster Group’s masterful revival of The Hairy Ape starring Willem Dafoe as Robert “Yank” Smith. I was sold then and there, forever and for good.

  Like O’Neill, I was raised Irish Catholic. I attended Mass on Sundays and holidays, got baptized, took first Communion, and so on. Monks, nuns, and priests were relatives and friends, welcome guests at the dinner table. But I don’t ever remember, not for one moment, believing in God. (Jesus I believed in, as O’Neill did, not as a divine being but as an advocate for the misbegotten among us.) In order to avoid going to Mass, I even tried to convince my now-deceased father, whom I loved very much but didn’t see eye to eye with on religion, that I was allergic to incense. “That’s ridiculous,” I can still hear him saying. “Get your coat on, we’re going.” I realize now that the emptiness O’Neill felt within him, the desperate lack of a higher power—“without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy,” as his character Edmund Tyrone calls it in Long Day’s Journey, “something greater than my own life. … God, if you want to put it that way” (CP3, 812)—often plagues latecomers to the mindset of the nonbeliever. This spiritual void eternally harassed O’Neill, and it no doubt led to his lifelong battle with alcoholism. But it also explains a great deal about his eventual stature as a writer. O’Neill desperately needed to fill that void with something, anything. Writing plays gave him the opportunity to explore what, in the end, might restore some meaning to his existence.

  My father’s side of the family waxed as romantic about Ireland in my grandpare
nts’ living room as the O’Neills had when Eugene was young. My ancestor Michael O’Rahilly (first cousin thrice removed), known to the Irish as “The O’Rahilly,” was the only officer who died at Dublin’s General Post Office during the Easter Rising of 1916. My family is as proud of our ties to The O’Rahilly as the O’Neills had been about their line to the chieftains of County Tyrone. As late as 1943, when a mysterious neurodegenerative disease arrested O’Neill’s ability to write, one of his favorite new books was Seán O’Faolain’s The Great O’Neill (1942), a biography of “The O’Neill,” the sixteenth-century Gaelic chieftain Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone; the dramatist portrayed his ancestor to the Irish American novelist James T. Farrell as “strong proud and noble, ignoble shameless and base, loyal and treacherous, a cunning politician, a courageous soldier, an inspiring leader—but at times so weakly neurotic he could burst openly into tears (even when sober!) and whine pitiably that no one understood him.”24 One of my own favorite biographies is Aodogán O’Rahilly’s Winding the Clock: O’Rahilly and the 1916 Rising (1991). The O’Rahilly’s rebellion proved futile, as he suspected it would; but the Easter Rising shocked the world just two months before the twenty-seven-year-old playwright’s arrival at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where O’Neill was one of the chosen leaders of another kind of revolution. Both men’s sides would ultimately triumph, if O’Neill, unlike The O’Rahilly, survived to tell the tale.

  O’Neill’s proud testimonials about his Irish heritage—in his diaries and letters, public proclamations and idle chatter—together lay bare the weight his Irishness had on his dramas, and thus on American theater. They also reveal how such immigrants as his parents, and my own ancestors who arrived much later, improve upon and integrate our nation’s cultural fabric rather than pulling it asunder. I’ve since spent a good deal of my life in Ireland, visiting family (my sister and her husband run a dolphin-watching boat at the mouth of the River Shannon) and teaching Irish literature in Sligo. It was during my visits there that I adopted the egalitarian impulse, the mistrust of authority, the laughter at pretension, the devotion to storytelling—traits that made their way across the Atlantic to the United States in no small part in the figure of Eugene O’Neill.

  O’Neill never visited his parents’ homeland, much as he longed to. But paying tribute to the dispossessed on the American stage became a lifelong project for the playwright, one he would explore with his treatment of an unrepentant prostitute in “Anna Christie,” a black Pullman porter in The Emperor Jones, a coal-stoker on a steamship in The Hairy Ape, culminating with his barroom tour de force The Iceman Cometh. With these plays and dozens of others, O’Neill reached broadly across the American social matrix—sailors, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, hustlers, anarchists, socialists, hotel clerks, down-and-outers, black gangsters, tenant farmers, bohemian artists, safecrackers, bartenders, and Broadway “rounders”—unleashing virtually every outcast from America’s misbegotten landscape onto the world stage.

  The Irish playwright John Millington Synge, commenting on his plays, said he found Mother Ireland as she was, not as she wished to be found; O’Neill, like Synge before him, wrote about his own motherland, the United States, as he found her rather than as she wished to be found. And he inspired countless members of subsequent generations, myself included, to do the same.

  Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is not an all-inclusive study of O’Neill’s life and work, nor does it need to be. But for the general audience—loads of converts, with any luck—I will highlight what are in my opinion the most revealing episodes in an attempt to capture an artist’s life with his own medium, drama, in steady view. Each episode shows the ripple effect of this playwright on American theater and culture and how the stories he told interweave with his actual life stories, many of which have lain fallow beneath thousands of pages of scholarship or buried in archives since his death in 1953.

  Every word O’Neill wrote—from amateur poet to master playwright—is part of one tale, and decades of grueling labor produced some of the finest plays ever written. So as not to interrupt the narrative with too many historical digressions (which, as a literary historian by trade and temperament, I’m ordinarily inclined to do), I’ve begun each “act” with italicized vignettes that function something like the program notes of a playbill; each sums up, in broad-brush strokes, the context of American theater writ large overarching the events of O’Neill’s life and career. In this way, I hope to show how O’Neill’s personal experience was intertwined with the revolutionary theater of his time, a theater that he molded and uncompromisingly urged forward.

  I have made use of recent scholarship for this biography, but the book also contributes much that is new to O’Neill studies. Along with bringing to light a wealth of previously overlooked material— including letters, reminiscences, and literary works like his story “The Screenews of War,” which contains the first plot he pitched to the Provincetown Players—this book supplies connections between O’Neill’s plays and his worldview, “philosophical anarchism”; his role in African American cultural history; photographs that have eluded scholars for generations, including a never-before published image of O’Neill and his lover Louise Bryant and pictures of all three dive bars that inspired The Iceman Cometh (Jimmy the Priest’s, the Garden Hotel, and the Hell Hole); commentary and anecdotes from the largest stockpile of opening night reviews of O’Neill’s plays ever assembled; evidence for the fact that O’Neill was determined to give up playwriting and become a novelist, why he made that decision, and what his envy of novelists tells us about his work as a whole; and, in the postscript, revealing evidence about the mystery of why O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta Monterey, might have defied her husband’s wishes and authorized the release of Long Day’s Journey in 1956—this last, despite his proviso, known to the public at the time, that the play not be published until twenty-five years after his death and, what is less known, never produced on stage, screen, radio, or television.

  Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is notably the first biography to discuss O’Neill’s lost play Exorcism, an illuminating prequel of sorts to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, after its recovery in 2011. I was in the research stage of this book when Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which holds the Eugene O’Neill Papers, had the great fortune of acquiring the only known script of Exorcism, O’Neill’s one-act account of his actual suicide attempt in late 1911. O’Neill thought he’d destroyed all copies of the script after its run in 1920, but over ninety years later, Exorcism was brought to light at last; and as biographers and scholars have suspected all along, the autobiographical play holds some remarkable new insights into O’Neill’s most tragic experience as a young man while at the same time deepening our understanding of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey. O’Neill characterizes his avatar in Exorcism, Ned Malloy, who later appears in a more sanitized form as Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey, as bitter and self-absorbed. He’s an emotional bully to friends and family, insensitive to their deep concern for his well-being. In private, O’Neill was so often disgusted with himself and life in general, in fact, that he took his anger out, sometimes cruelly, on those who cared for him most. No document speaks more tellingly to this than Exorcism. But the more we grasp Ned Malloy’s all-too-common personality defects, the more human his creator’s journey becomes.

  The college seminar I teach on Eugene O’Neill ends with two simple questions: Which plays did you enjoy the most? Which the least? Without missing a beat, one student a few years back raised his hand and submitted that O’Neill’s actual life was his finest drama. His classmates all nodded in agreement. Thinking the matter through, I realized that the dramatic structure of O’Neill’s life came into clearer focus when matched to the narrative arc of so many of his plays. Most of us attempt to formulate a meaningful narrative of our lives as they move forward; the difficulty for a biographer lies in comprehending the arc of other people’s lives.

  O’Neill himself pointed out this d
ifficulty of forming a coherent chronicle of his life to his first biographer, Barrett Clark: “The trouble with anyone else writing even a sketch [about me],” he said after reading Clark’s manuscript in 1926, “is that I don’t believe there is anyone alive today who knew me as intimately in more than one phase of a life that has passed through many entirely distinct periods, with complete changes of environment, associates, etc. And I myself might not be so good at writing it; for when my memory brings back this picture or episode or that one, I simply cannot recognize that person in myself nor understand him nor his acts as mine (although objectively I can) although my reason tells me he was undeniably I.”25

  By my count, O’Neill lived through four acts, each with its own, as he himself suggests above, idiosyncratic episodes, characters, and mise-en-scène. (Four was O’Neill’s chosen number of acts in, among other plays, “Anna Christie,” Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.) Within these four acts, O’Neill’s life uncannily follows classical dramatic structure as well: the exposition during his childhood and theatrical upbringing; the rising action as he proves himself as a writer; the climax when he reaches his greatest heights as a theatrical giant, but then flees the country to avoid a scandal over his second divorce; the evident crisis that took place after the catastrophic failure of his 1933 “God play” Days Without End; the falling action after he removes himself from the public eye for twelve long years; and the denouement with the neurological illness that forced him to quit writing at the height of his mental power and led to his untimely death. The postscript covers the posthumous release of O’Neill’s greatest play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in 1956—the catalyst for a “Eugene O’Neill Renaissance,” one of the single most astonishing resurrections in American literary history.