Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  James and Ella were soon confronted at their suite at the Prince George Hotel on East Twenty-Eighth Street by Kathleen’s mother, Kate Jenkins, who told them about their children’s secret marriage and demanded to know what they planned to do about it. James was at first startled at Jenkins’s impudence, then infuriated. His solution for ending the relationship was to pack his son off on a mining expedition to Spanish Honduras with a gold-prospecting associate of his, Earl C. Stevens. James and Kathleen accompanied O’Neill to Grand Central Station to see him off on a train to San Francisco, and by his twenty-first birthday, October 16, O’Neill found himself contentedly drifting southward on a banana boat off the coast of Mexico.58

  Eugene O’Neill with Earl C. Stevens on a banana boat en route to Honduras, October 16, 1909, O’Neill’s twenty-first birthday.

  (COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

  After traveling by mule from Amalpa for nearly a hundred unmapped miles through jungles and mountain passes, O’Neill and Stevens’s party finally arrived at the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. He had passed through stunning territory but was harassed, he reported back to his parents, by an endless horde of fleas and ticks “that burrow under your skin and form sores.” And in spite of his predilection for “the stinking garbage pail,” he found the squalor appalling: “Pigs, buzzard[s], dogs, chickens and children all live in the same room and the sanitary conditions of the huts are beyond belief.”59 The tropical climate, on the other hand, suited him just fine. It never went above eighty-five degrees during the day or below seventy at night. He enjoyed listening to the local bands in town squares while observing the “funny way everyone … struts around with a six-shooter and a belt full of cartridges on their hip—just like a 30 cent Western melodrama.” (O’Neill later penned his own cheap western melodramas, the one-act plays A Wife for a Life in 1913, the first play he ever wrote, and The Movie Man in 1914, and the latter’s 1916 short story version, “The Screenews of War.”) He also embraced the languorous pace of life in Central America: “If we don’t do it today why we can tomorrow—that is the way they seem to feel about it.” To fit in, O’Neill loaded himself down “like an arsenal with ammunition, knives, and firearms” and first cultivated what would become his iconic moustache, a disguise meant for circulating in the plazas, with the goal “to look absolutely as shiftless and dirty as the best of them.”60

  O’Neill’s pumped-up spirit of adventure rapidly deflated, however, and after a couple of months he wrote his parents, “I give it as my candid opinion and fixed belief that God got his inspiration for Hell after creating Honduras.” At the same time, the ambiguous nature of his marital responsibilities still nagged at him. “It sure would be some shock to find out I was enduring all this for love,” he wrote them. “Better find out for me.” By Christmas in Guajiniquil, O’Neill was mired in self-pity. He hated the food—the meat rotten, everything fried and wrapped in tortillas, “a heavy soggy imitation of a pancake made of corn enough to poison the stomach of an ostrich”—and inevitably contracted food poisoning; the fleas, gnats, ticks, and mosquitoes had evolved from a mild nuisance to a dreadful plague; and his initial admiration for the Hondurans’ relaxed lifestyle had soured into a bilious contempt: “The natives are the lowest, laziest, most ignorant bunch of brainless bipeds that ever polluted a land and retarded its future. Until some just Fate grows weary of watching the gropings in the dark of these human maggots and exterminates them, until the Universe shakes these human lice from its sides, Honduras has no future, no hopes of being anything but what it is at present—a Siberia of the tropics.”61

  A revolution broke out in Honduras while O’Neill was there, but he reassured his parents that its combatants were “of the comic opera variety and only affect Americans in that they delay the mail.” He begged them to send three pounds of Bull Durham tobacco and some magazines, then ended on a homesick note: “I never realized how much home and Father and Mother meant until I got so far away from them.” O’Neill was bedridden with malaria during his last three weeks in Tegucigalpa. He was given a bed at the American consulate, since the hotels were booked up, and his chills from fever became so relentless that his caretakers draped old American flags over him on top of whatever blankets they could spare. “I looked,” he said later, “just like George M. Cohan,” the American song-and-dance man best known for his performances of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Many years later, O’Neill tersely summed up the ill-fated expedition: “Much hardship, little romance, no gold.”62

  It had been a pleasant afternoon strolling along Fifth Avenue in that May 1910 when Ella O’Neill and a friend saw a nursemaid march by pushing a baby carriage carrying an adorable infant. Her friend instantly recognized the woman as an employee of O’Neill’s mother-in-law, Kate Jenkins. “Did you see that little boy?” she asked, waiting until they’d passed. “That’s your grandson!” O’Neill in fact returned from his exile in the “Siberia of the tropics” right on time for the embarrassingly public arrival of Eugene Jr., on May 5, 1910. Two days later, the New York World ran an article under the exuberant headline “The Birth of a Boy / Reveals Marriage of ‘Gene’ O’Neill / Young Man in Honduras, / Doesn’t Know He Is Dad / May Not Hear News for Weeks / Working at Mine to Win / Fortune for Family.” Another article on May 11 featured a photograph of Kathleen Jenkins with the accusatory caption, “Gene Home, / But Not with Wife.” Kate Jenkins was undoubtedly the source. “It seems impossible,” his mother-in-law was quoted as saying, “that ‘Gene’ is in town and has remained away from his wife and their baby. There must be some mistake, but if there is not, Eugene’s attitude is inexcusable. He knows how we all feel toward him and that he could have come to this house to live any time since his marriage to my daughter. There would have been no ‘mother-in-law’ about it, either, and he knew that. I felt toward him as if he were my own son.” Jenkins then insinuated, not without some basis of truth, that James O’Neill was responsible for keeping the young family apart.63

  Kathleen Jenkins with Eugene O’Neill Jr.

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  With no game plan or prospects for employment in New York, O’Neill joined his father on a boondoggle to St. Louis, Missouri, for James’s traveling production of The White Sister, another of his numerous though commonly forgotten departures from Monte Cristo over the years. O’Neill slogged along as an assistant manager and security man at the ticket counters; but when they arrived in Boston, he once again fled the country—this time as a passenger on the Norwegian bark Charles Racine, skippered by the highly competent Captain Gustav Waage and bound south for Buenos Aires. The voyage cost James O’Neill $75, no paltry sum given that the ship’s crew earned between $13 and $14 a month.64 Once under way, the Charles Racine sailed for weeks with no land in sight,65 during which time O’Neill composed the poem “Free,” his earliest known literary work. (Several years after publishing it in the Pleiades Club Year Book in 1912, he admitted to the club, a hail-fellow-well-met group of bohemian patrons and dilettante practitioners of the arts, that the poem was “actually written on a deep-sea barque in the days of Real Romance.”)66 In the poem, O’Neill acknowledges the deep remorse he felt over his desertion of Kathleen and Eugene Jr. while at the same time revealing a profound spiritual release:

  I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;

  I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;

  But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest of my spirit craves,

  Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,

  ’Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.67

  Time spent with the crew aboard the Charles Racine—“At last to be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind / in our hair”—would instill a lifelong infatuation with a spiritual transcendence he would nev
er achieve again; and the impact of this seminal voyage would find its most lyrical expression in Edmund Tyrone’s monologue from Long Day’s Journey Into Night:

  When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. (CP3, 811–12; emphasis added)

  The Charles Racine carried over a million feet of lumber below decks, and the overload was lashed to the upper decks and hatches with chains and wiring. The trip lasted sixty-five days, an exceptionally long haul for the heavily trafficked lumber route from Boston to Buenos Aires; if it exasperated the crew, for O’Neill the prolonged trip was a boon. Not only did he take in the stories of the men about their ports of call and commit traditional sea shanties to memory, the voyage also offered him a glimpse of the full range of extreme conditions at sea, without the stabilizing force of engine power, from the stillness of a ship becalmed to terrifying hurricane conditions.68

  O’Neill greatly admired the sailors he met onboard, and he later broadened his respect for their straight-talking swagger to include the working classes as a whole: “They are more direct. In action and utterance. Thus more dramatic. Their lives and sufferings and personalities lend themselves more readily to dramatization. They have not been steeped in the evasions and superficialities which come with social life and intercourse. Their real selves are exposed. They are crude but honest. They are not handicapped by inhibitions.”69 “O’Neill was well-liked onboard,” said one of the crew of the Charles Racine. “We thought him an interesting strange bird we all loved to talk to.” “It’s strange,” O’Neill wistfully recalled decades later, as death approached, “but the time I spent at sea on a sailing ship was the only time I ever felt I had roots in any place.”70

  On the afternoon of July 24, 1910, a fierce hurricane pummeled the ship. Captain Waage, alarmed by his barometer’s plummeting descent, noted in his log a “terrific heavy sea. … Some deck cargo—planks—washed over.” From the relative safety of the forecastle alleyway, O’Neill looked on in awe while the crew members relieved one another to stand watch in the crow’s nest. They would pause until a wall of water crashed down on deck, and then, when it had receded into the billowing swells, they sprinted across the slippery deck to the mainmast, while the previous man on watch would climb down and perform the same treacherous maneuver in reverse. The brutal winds had died down by morning only to rematerialize as “violent hurricane squalls” outside Buenos Aires at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, the massive estuary separating Uruguay and Argentina. After this, the deck boy, Osmund Christophersen, asked O’Neill what he thought of the rough weather. “Very interesting,” he replied, “but I could have wished for less of it.”71

  Crew of the S.S. Charles Racine.

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  Once the Charles Racine had docked safely at Buenos Aires in early August, agents scrambled onboard from local bars and brothels to pass around advertisement cards designed to entice sailors eager to blow off steam after weeks of toil at sea: “Come up to my house, plenty fun, perty girls, plenty dance, three men killed last night.” In due course, after O’Neill checked in at the deluxe Continental Hotel, he trailed the swarm of thirsty seamen down Avenida Roque Sáenz Peña toward Paseo de Julio. It wasn’t long before O’Neill ran short of cash and had to swap the downy beds of the genteel Continental for the debauched thoroughfare’s rigid public benches. The Argentine author Manuel Gálvez depicted the Paseo de Julio much as O’Neill must have first seen it for himself: “His artist’s soul forgot for an instant the penury of his life. Because he found this street fantastic, with its high arcades; its cheap, foul shops; its kaleidoscopes with views of wars and exhibitions of monsters; the dark hotels that rented out dirty beds for occasional lovers; the sinister cellars that stunk of grime and where sailors reeking of booze sang; its whores, who were the dirtiest dregs of society; its vagabonds who slept under the columns of the arches; its sellers of obscene pictures; the nauseating stink of human dirt.”72

  For nine squalid months O’Neill worked odd jobs and lived hand-to-mouth, touring the city’s brothels and attending the pornographic “moving pictures” playing in the suburb of Barracas. He ate little and drank all day; if he had enough money, his drink of choice was a jar of gin with a dash of vermouth and soda. If he didn’t, he drank the local beer. “I wanted to be a he-man,” O’Neill said. “To knock ’em cold and eat ’em alive.” Much of his time was spent at a waterfront saloon called the Sailor’s Opera. “It sure was a madhouse,” he recalled. “Pickled sailors, sure-thing race-track touts, soused boiled white shirt déclassé Englishmen, underlings in the Diplomatic Service, boys darting around tables leaving pink and yellow cards directing one to red-plush paradises, and entangled in the racket was the melody of some ancient turkey-trot banged out by a sober pianist.”73

  After a month or so “on the beach” (sailor talk for being stuck in port), O’Neill reluctantly looked for more steady employment. He worked for a time as a longshoreman on another square-rigger, the Timandra, whose “old bucko of a first mate was too tough,” he said, “the kind that would drop a marlin spike on your skull from a yardarm.” (The ship appears as the Amindra in The Long Voyage Home, O’Neill’s 1917 one-act about a shanghaied sailor.) He worked brief stints at several other jobs, including at the Westinghouse Electrical Company, “the wool house of a packing plant” at La Plata, and as a repairman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. La Plata was the worst of them; the worst job, in fact, he would ever have. O’Neill was assigned the odious task of sorting raw hides, while the noxious fumes of the carcasses permeated his hair, clothing, nose, eyes, and mouth. He was about to relinquish his post when a warehouse fire saved him the trouble, and the fetid compound burned to the ground. (“I didn’t do it,” he said, “but it was a good idea.”)74 Working for Singer Sewing Machine was only slightly less demoralizing. “Do you know how many different models Singer makes?” the boss asked him at the job interview. “Fifty?” “Fifty! Five hundred and fifty! You’ll have to learn to take each one apart and put it together again.” O’Neill couldn’t bear the mechanical drudgery for long, and he quit. “And then I hadn’t any job at all,” he recollected, “and was down on the beach—‘down,’ if not precisely ‘out.’”75

  One day a man of O’Neill’s tastes, a socialist and freelance reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald named Charles Ashleigh, walked into a seaman’s café, probably the Sailor’s Opera, and, seeing there wasn’t a vacant table, “picked one where but a single customer was sitting—a rather morose, dark young American.” Ashleigh ordered a schooner of beer and sat quietly listening to a mulatto piano player “pounding out popular tunes.” But after ordering a second schooner, he threw caution to the wind and blurted out, “Good Lord, I’m sick of this. I haven’t talked with a soul all day.” “Nor have I,” replied O’Neill. “Have another drink?” That night they stayed up for hours “talking, talking, talking,” said Ashleigh, about “sailing ships and steamships, Conrad and Yeats, the mountains and ports of South America, politics and the theater.” They also exchanged drafts of each other’s verse “across the sloppy table, read, discussed, criticized.”76

  For decades scholars believed that none of O’Neill’s writing from Argentina had survived. But in the spring of 1917 at a saloon in Greenwich Village, O’Neill showed
Robert Carlton Brown, a fiction writer and editor at the Masses, a poem he said he’d written in Buenos Aires entitled “Ashes of Orchids.”77 Unpublished before now, here is the earliest version of this poem, which O’Neill later revised in the summer of 1917 with the new title “The Bridegroom Weeps!”:

  There are so many tears

  In my eyes

  Burning, unshed:

  There are so many ashes

  In my mouth

  Ashes of orchids:

  There are so many corpses

  In my brain

  Of decomposing dreams—

  And Columbine, also,

  Decomposes!78

  “The Bridegroom Weeps!” is O’Neill’s second known literary effort after “Free.” No doubt the poem, like “Free,” was partially inspired by Kathleen Jenkins, but his guilt over her and Eugene Jr. was now combined with his hopelessly dissolute life in Argentina. O’Neill often recycled his own phrasing from the past, and the title would later inform those of his biblical mask play Lazarus Laughed (1926) and, more important, his late masterwork The Iceman Cometh (1939).

  A more substantial literary legacy from Buenos Aires materialized in the figure of a young Englishman at the Sailor’s Opera, a man the future playwright later mirrored in Smitty, the antihero of his 1917 one-acts The Moon of the Caribbees and In the Zone. O’Neill regularly observed his future inspiration “sopping up all the liquor in sight, and between drunks he’d drink to sober up. He almost caused an alcoholic drought in Buenos Ayres.”79 In his midtwenties, blond, and “extraordinarily handsome,” Smitty was, O’Neill said, “almost too beautiful … very like Oscar Wilde’s description of Dorian Gray. Even his name was flowery.” O’Neill describes him in The Moon as “a young Englishman with a blonde mustache” who speaks to other sailors “pompously” and exudes an attitude of unearned entitlement (CP1, 528, 538); the actual Smitty was similarly an aristocratic, college-educated, former member of a “crack British regiment,” according to O’Neill, who “suddenly messed up his life—pretty conspicuously.”80