The Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic made up his mind in the third century B.C. to cast off his worldly possessions and live the rest of his days in a bathtub. O’Neill viewed the tedium of life as a teenager at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London as even less exciting than this “Cynic Tub.” O’Neill would read in the morning, swim in the Thames in the afternoon, and read again at night, with little variation for weeks. Although his peripatetic childhood on the road instilled a powerful urge to find a “home” in the truest sense, it also intensified his view of Connecticut’s cultural life as impossibly parochial. At sixteen, he sneeringly claimed that each passing hour in New London was “equivalent to ten in any other place.” “Bored to death” with the dance “hops” at the Pequot House down the road, O’Neill would grumble that at least “in a graveyard there is some excitement in reading the inscriptions on the tombstones.”35
A welcome respite from this drowning ennui arrived in the summer of 1905 in the form of Marion Welch, a well-read teenager from the state capital of Hartford. Visiting a friend in New London that July, Welch was a couple of years older than Eugene, athletically built and, most important, intellectually curious. O’Neill would always think of their days together in his rowboat on the Thames as some of the happiest of his life. The surviving love letters to Marion read like those of a typical lovesick sixteen-year-old boy—thick with sarcasm and braggadocio, more Tom Sawyer than Baudelaire (that would come later). Written to impress more than woo, the letters boasted of joining his wayward brother Jim to bet on the “ponies,” play the slot machines, and carouse generally in upstate New York at Canfield’s Saratoga Club, “a refined name for one of the most fashionable (and notorious) gambling joints in the world.” He regarded Welch as his intellectual peer, and their letters over the course of their short-lived relationship reveal what books they were reading, which they planned to read next, and which weren’t worth reading at all. They shared what plays to see too: “So you went to see the old worm eaten Monte Cristo,” he responded to a letter from Marion. “It may be all right for those who have never seen it before.”36
Graduating from Betts Academy in the following spring of 1906, O’Neill next entered Princeton University, where he was determined to make up for lost time in New London and Stamford. His fellow students remembered him as a “loner,” though sarcastic and “foul-mouthed.” Most college boys in those days drank beer or wine; O’Neill, who was also a heavy smoker by this time, drank hard liquor, a choice his to-the-manner-born classmates associated with “bums.” O’Neill made them cringe with his blasphemy, and he regarded the school’s mandatory Sunday sermons as “so irritatingly stupid that they prevented me from sleeping.” On at least one occasion O’Neill, who by eighteen was nearly six feet tall, stood up on a chair and crowed at the ceiling with arms outstretched, “If there be a God, let Him strike me dead!” (Witnesses to this recalled that his ethnic pride surpassed his atheism, however, and “if anyone spoke disparagingly of Catholicism he would spring furiously to its defense.”)37
For the most part O’Neill kept a low profile during his first semester, when he was a resident of University Hall, now Holder Hall, and few Princetonians could claim they knew him well (though he was nicknamed “Ego” for his lack of humor concerning all things Eugene Gladstone O’Neill). His study was decorated with a fisherman’s net festooned with cork floats and sundry souvenirs, including, according to a fellow dormer, “actresses’ slippers, stockings, brassieres, playbills, posters, pictures of chorus girls in tights … and a hand of cards, a royal flush. But what got me was that among all this stuff he had hung up several condoms—they looked like they’d been used. Very gruesome.” The remainder of his suite contained a simple round table and chairs and a cramped bedroom with an iron cot, a washbowl, a water pitcher, and a commode. He retained his voracious reading habits, and he wrote some poetry, though not of the “highbrow” sort. One typical bit of doggerel composed during his short-lived period at the Ivy League school went something like this:
Cheeks that have known no rouge,
Lips that have known no booze,
What care I for thee?
Come with me on a souse,
A long and lasting carouse,
And I’ll adore thee.38
Pressed by classmates as to why he preferred the “stinking garbage pail” over a vase of fragrant roses, O’Neill replied enigmatically, “Both are nature,” a phrase that brings to mind one of O’Neill’s literary heroes, the French journalist and naturalist author Émile Zola. “When I go into the sewer, I go to clean it out,” the Norwegian “father of modern realism” Henrik Ibsen complained. “When Zola goes into the sewer, he takes a bath.” Zola countered such attacks by citing the physiologist Claude Bernard who, when asked about his “sentiments on the science of life,” responded that “it is a superb salon, flooded with light, which you can only reach by passing through a long and nauseating kitchen.”39
Broadly speaking, “realism” refers to the nineteenth-century revolt against melodrama and romanticism toward dramas that end with calculated ambiguity and reflect the contemporary lives of run-of-the-mill characters who, unlike in naturalism, exhibit free will. (It was this movement, led by Ibsen, that precipitated the end of the soliloquy.) “Naturalism” vaguely connotes a grittier, more perverse form of realism in common theater parlance. But once we remove realistic “slice-of-life” plays that share the “fourth-wall” illusion of most naturalistic dramas, naturalism distinguishes itself as a tradition of tragic endings, the exposure of sublime truths existing beneath surface realities, and the philosophical idea that individuals’ fates are determined by biological, historical, circumstantial, and psychological forces beyond their control. O’Neill’s future dramas would conflate naturalism with other techniques, but the naturalist tradition nearly always predominates.40
On the weekends, O’Neill divided his time between boozing at “Doc” Boyce’s nearby tavern and another local dive on Alexander Street with a noxious atmosphere that only he among his classmates could apparently stomach. But, as he had while at Betts, he also commuted to New York City every chance he got. He attended Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that spring at the city’s Bijou Theatre on ten successive nights. Though as a playwright O’Neill would follow Zola’s naturalist path, Ibsen’s revolt against Victorian convention spoke to O’Neill more than any play he had yet seen: “That experience discovered an entire new world of the drama for me. It gave me my first conception of a modern theatre where truth might live.”41
Louis “Lou” Holladay, a New Yorker O’Neill had met during a sojourn to the city, arrived at Princeton’s campus one weekend armed with a handgun and a quart of absinthe, a potent liquor distilled from the toxins of the wormwood plant. O’Neill was enthralled by the hallucinogenic properties of the soon-to-be outlawed drink; he’d read about it in Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890) by the British novelist Marie Corelli and asked Holladay to bring a bottle down from the city. After consuming too much of the green-hued tincture in his room, O’Neill turned “berserk”—smashing furniture, hurling a chair through his window, and aiming Holladay’s revolver at its owner, then pulling the trigger. Luckily, the gun wasn’t loaded. It took three classmates to pin him down, tie him up, and heave him into bed.42 No lessons were learned, however, and his heavy drinking and unruly behavior only worsened that winter and spring.
O’Neill left the distinct impression among his classmates that he’d derived his cynicism from his “wild” and “worldly” older brother Jim. “There is not such a thing as a virgin after the age of fourteen,” O’Neill told them, sounding much like his brother; although when he dated a local girl from Trenton, the closest urban center to Princeton’s campus, he would “expiate in high dudgeon” if anyone uttered a disrespectful word about her. Once he took a couple of Princeton students to New York’s Tenderloin district, where the notorious Haymarket bar was located on the same block as an assortment of brothels in which he’d been initiated by Jim.
(“Those babes gave me some of the best laughs I’ve ever had, and to the future profit of many a dramatic scene,” O’Neill said later.) His companions got cold feet and hastily retreated back to school.43
Late that spring semester, 1907, O’Neill went on a drunken spree through Trenton with a pack of like-minded students, and they missed the last trolley to Princeton. Instead, they caught the train to New York, which dropped them off at Princeton Junction; but the drawbridge was up, and they had to swim across Carnegie Lake. When a dog started barking on a railroad embankment leading down to a group of houses, O’Neill, drunk as a lord, began hurling stones at the animal. As the dog’s fury grew, so did O’Neill’s, and one of his stones went wide of its mark and crashed through a window of the house. Undeterred, he threw outdoor furniture next, thus rousing from bed the homeowner, a division superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The boys were suspended for three weeks.44
O’Neill’s academic standing had already been declining precipitously, and the incident proved a convenient excuse to end relations between O’Neill and the hallowed Ivy League school. (This would not be a permanent break, as decades later O’Neill would donate to its library a substantial cache of his manuscripts and letters.) “Princeton was all play and no work,” O’Neill said, “so much so that the Dean decided I had, by enormous application, crowded four years’ play into one, and he graduated me as a Master Player at the end of that year.” No love was lost between the two parties, nor was expulsion from college new to the O’Neill family: a decade earlier, Jim had been attending Fordham University, a Jesuit school, when he was expelled for hiring a prostitute, then introducing her to classmates and at least one priest on campus as his sister. At Princeton, O’Neill had been charged with “conduct unbecoming a student.” When asked later by a reporter why he was thrown out, he just chuckled and said, “General hell-raising.”45
Anarchist in the Tropics
James O’Neill landed his unrepentant son a position that summer making $25 a week in Manhattan as a secretary at the mail order house of the New York–Chicago Supply Company. O’Neill held the position for nearly a year but, he said, “never took it seriously.”46 His friend Lou Holladay’s sister Paula, known as Polly, ran a café on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the Village’s burgeoning avant-garde artistic and bohemian set. Without responsibility or purpose, O’Neill referred to this time as his “wise guy” period.47
Along with frequenting Polly’s, O’Neill and Holladay combed the bars and brothels of the Tenderloin district and soaked up the music of the era, O’Neill thus initiating his lifelong obsession with ragtime piano and early jazz. They also formed a close relationship with Benjamin R. Tucker, an iconoclastic publisher and editor of the anarchist journal Liberty. Tucker’s Unique Book Shop at 502 Sixth Avenue near Thirtieth Street was a preferred haunt for the growing cohort of what one reporter characterized as “well dressed, seemingly well-educated young men, whose mental processes have led them into out of the way or unconventional channels.”48 Tucker dedicated his life to promoting intellectual freedom and preached, in opposition to the “Communist anarchism” of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, nonviolent social and political protest. O’Neill thus adopted what became his only self-professed, lifelong worldview: “philosophical anarchism,” also known as “individualist anarchism” or “egoism.”
Philosophical anarchists maintained three chief principles: unconditional nonviolence, one-on-one instruction rather than mass propaganda, and the complete disregard of all social and political institutions (the press, organized religion, government, law enforcement, the military) as “phantasms,” “ghosts,” or “spooks” to exorcise from one’s mind. This last became a unifying theme in nearly all of O’Neill’s work. The anarchist Hartmann in O’Neill’s early play The Personal Equation (1915), for instance, refers to American notions of “fatherland or motherland” as a “sentimental phantom,” and he goes on to say that “the soul of man is an uninhabited house haunted by the ghosts of old ideals. And man in those ghosts still believes!” (CP1, 321). Over a decade later, O’Neill’s character Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude (1927) snarls at her upright friend Charlie Marsden about her desperate attempt to “believe in any God at any price—a heap of stones, a mud image, a drawing on a wall, a bird, a fish, a snake, a baboon—or even a good man preaching the simple platitudes of truth, those Gospel words we love the sound of but whose meaning we pass on to spooks to live by!” (CP2, 669). And by the 1930s, in his Faustian mask play Days Without End (1933), the protagonist’s masked doppelgänger scorns his alter ego’s longing for the “old ghostly comforts” of religion (CP3, 161).49
Tucker’s Unique Book Shop offered over five thousand volumes of what its proprietor advertised as “the most complete line of advanced literature to be found anywhere in the world,” and O’Neill later professed that his access to this eclectic library through this period had unalterably molded his “inner self.” Tucker translated a good deal of this outlaw literature for the first time into English and debuted American editions through his independent press; but he made a point to champion American philosophies as well: Thomas Jefferson’s suspicion of government power, Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience, and the intrepid poet Walt Whitman’s heightened individualism and lyrical call for radical democracy. The good gray poet responded in kind. “Tucker did brave things for Leaves of Grass when brave things were rare,” Whitman said. “I could not forget that. … I love him: he is plucky to the bone.”50
But the most vital source of Tucker’s philosophy could be found in the German philosopher Max Stirner’s radical manifesto The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual against Authority (1844), a volume listed on Edmund Tyrone’s bookshelf in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Tucker had been obsessing over The Ego and His Own at the time O’Neill regularly frequented his shop in 1907, and his imprint published its first English translation that same year. Saxe Commins, the notorious anarchist Emma Goldman’s nephew and later a man O’Neill would identify as one of his “oldest and best of friends,” described Stirner’s book as “an anarchical explosion of aphoristic generalities, defiant and iconoclastic.”51 Stirner railed against “fixed ideas” the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson denounced “foolish consistency [as] the hobgoblin of little minds.” The Unique Book Shop stocked volumes by Proudhon, Mill, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Zola, Gorky, Kropotkin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Shaw, but when O’Neill took his New London pal Ed Keefe to Tucker’s store, according to Keefe, O’Neill breezed past several packed shelves and “made” him buy The Ego and His Own.52
This steady drumbeat of the “self” that resounded through the cafés, barrooms, and alleyways of Manhattan emboldened O’Neill to quit his humdrum desk job at the shipping company. In the summer of 1908, scraping by on $7 a week from his father, he rented a studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway with Ed Keefe, the painter George Bellows, and the illustrator Ed Ireland. Early in 1909, the bohemian cabal also lived for a month on a farm O’Neill’s father owned in Zion, New Jersey. As they cooked for themselves and tried to keep warm, Bellows and Keefe painted while O’Neill, according to him, “wrote a series of sonnets” that were little more than “bad imitations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”53
Bellows was a contributor to the radical organ the Masses and a student of the “Ash Can” painter Robert Henri (pronounced “Hen-Rye”).54 According to another of his students, Henri was considered a sort of mystic who lectured “with hypnotic effect.” He and other philosophical anarchists taught O’Neill and his cohort that by their example of “owning” their lives, Victorian moralists might follow suit and cease their meddling in the lives of others. The famed Ash Can School of painting was Henri’s invention, and he mentored a number of first-rate artists, including Bellows and a young Edward Hopper. O’Neill thus found himself among true believers in his naturalistic “stinking garbage pail” aesthetic—Henri taught his art students that painting must be
“as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.” That year Bellows completed what would be his most famous painting, Stag at Sharkey’s, which featured an illegal boxing match at Tom Sharkey’s Athletic Club, a work of brutal realism meant to capture, Bellows explained simply, “two men trying to kill each other.”55
O’Neill reproduced this art-studio milieu in his first full-length play, Bread and Butter (1914), a tragedy about an artist in desperate revolt against bourgeois tastes. (In this way, Bread and Butter joins the tradition of George du Maurier’s Trilby [1894] and its American counterpart, Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet [1897].) The play’s master painter Eugene Grammont (based on Henri) declaims the philosophical anarchist’s credo to O’Neill’s loosely based alter ego, John Brown: “Be true to yourself … remember! For that no sacrifice is too great” (CP1, 148).
During that summer of 1909, O’Neill made the acquaintance of Kathleen Jenkins, the upright daughter of a respectable Protestant mother. (Her father, an alcoholic, had long ago abandoned them.) George Bellows encouraged the match, certain that O’Neill needed a “nice girl” like her for stability. At first Jenkins was attracted by the idea of a romance with a raffish intellectual like O’Neill, even if he had no job and few prospects for one. “The usual young man sent you flowers, a box of candy, took you to the theater, but mostly,” she said, since O’Neill never had any money, “we talked and walked. … He was always immaculately groomed, in spite of being unconventional; he led a bohemian sort of life. … The books he read were ‘way over my head.’”56 Jenkins was stable but not too “nice,” at least according to the standards of the day. She soon became pregnant, and as a result, they got married in a clandestine ceremony at Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in Hoboken, New Jersey, on October 2, 1909.57
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