Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
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Those just looking for a quiet drink who sat down on a barstool next to Byth would be regaled with tales of his adventures as a war reporter embedded with the Boers (Dutch colonialists). Indeed, Byth had friends on both sides in the conflict, and he worked with them closely in the Great Boer War Spectacle. The show premiered at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, where Byth’s job title was vice president and amusement manager, then traveled to Coney Island the following year. The Great Boer War Spectacle was a spectacularly elaborate battle reenactment that, like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which featured actual cowboys and Indians, included veterans who’d fought viciously against one another in South Africa. The New York press release for the show is attributable to Byth, who wrote that the Boer War Company integrated “1,000 men, including 200 Kafirs, Zulus, Matabeles, and representatives of other South African tribes,” and 600 horses trained to feign death. Because of his close friendship with Byth, O’Neill considered South Africa “a country I have always had a strong yen for because in the distant past I was pals with so many of its people, both British Africanders and Boers and really know a lot about it for one who has never been there.” Two of Byth’s associates from the Spectacle, the Boer general Piet Cronjé and the British captain A. W. Lewis, the general manager of the Spectacle, would appear as Piet Wetjoen and Cecil Lewis in The Iceman Cometh.101
By the spring of 1912, O’Neill and Byth had both managed to find their way into print with “Free” and “Cecil Rhodes” in the yearbook of the Pleiades Club, and their contributions are separated, appropriately enough, by the music and lyrics of the “Pleiades Drinking Song.” Two poems in the same collection appear to have influenced The Iceman Cometh. The first, “To-day’s the Time” by William Johnston, warns its readers against languid procrastination:
ONCE YESTERDAY’S gone, it’s mighty far off,
And TO-MORROW’S still further away.
So whatever there is you want to be doing,
You might as well do it TO-DAY.102
Another poem, “Beside the Road” by Madison Cawein, which directly follows Byth’s reminiscence in the book, concludes,
Of hope, whose light makes bright the road,
And beautifies the lonely hours,
And turns the sorrow of our load
To thoughts, like shining flowers.”103
Thus from this volume and from Byth’s tales of the Boer War and his Spectacle, O’Neill absorbed much of the rich thematic material that informs The Iceman Cometh and represents the most prominent dramatic motif of his career: the hopeless hope for a better tomorrow.104
Byth and O’Neill’s room at Jimmy the Priest’s was adorned with piles of books and was “filthy,” as O’Neill remembers it in his stage directions for Exorcism: “The walls and low ceiling, white-washed in some remote past, are spotted with the greasy imprints of groping hands and fingers. The plaster has scaled off in places showing the lathes beneath. The floor is carpeted with an accumulation of old newspapers, cigarette butts, ashes, burnt matches, etc.”105 Next to them lived a retired telegrapher nicknamed “the Lunger,” a disparaging epithet for someone suffering from tuberculosis; the Lunger appears in O’Neill’s story “Tomorrow,” his one-act Warnings (1913), and his novella S.O.S. (1917). The man would die of the disease, but not before attempting to teach O’Neill the International Code for wireless communication. O’Neill was always too drunk during their sessions, however, and by morning had forgotten everything he learned.106
O’Neill hadn’t always been belly-up at the bar at Jimmy’s over his cycle of “great down-and-outness.” He had a lover for a time named Maude Williams. Most of the information about her comes from Kathleen Jenkins, who testified in court the following year that Williams lived at 123 West Forty-Seventh Street and that Jenkins possessed “information” confirming that O’Neill had “committed adultery” with Williams “at divers times during the months of June, July, August, and September, 1911.”107 Williams was most likely a small-time actress in musical theater by that name who’s listed in several trade columns as having performed in the variety show A Knight for a Day that past April and in the summer for the “beauty chorus” of the musical farce The Countess Coquette.108
Late in December 1911, O’Neill attended a performance of the famed Irish Players from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Produced by his father’s former advance man George C. Tyler, the historic tour included plays by John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, T. C. Murray, Lady Augusta Gregory, Lennox Robinson, and George Bernard Shaw, among others. For O’Neill, the Irish Players were a revelation: “[The Irish Players] first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre,” he said, “as opposed to the unreal—and to me then—hateful theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up.” “As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theatre. It was seeing the Irish players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity.”109
O’Neill also attended political lectures and raucous beer parties hosted by the avant-garde Ferrer School, one of the “Modern Schools” of the prewar period named for Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer. Over the school’s short-lived existence, 1911 to 1915 (when it was shut down for vocally opposing America’s entry into World War I), its advisory board consisted of some of the era’s most notorious political firebrands—Jack London, Hutchins Hapgood, Upton Sinclair, and Emma Goldman, to name a few. The Ferrer was first housed at 6 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, where it conducted evening and Sunday classes for students aged fifteen to twenty. Tuition was 15¢ a week; if you couldn’t afford that, it was free of charge. The school’s philosophy, according to its director Bayard Boyesen, was that “different natures develop differently.” Contrary to their reputation as dangerous socialists and anarchists, its teachers refused to enforce any “ism.” Instead, they encouraged their students’ intellectual self-discovery in their own time, at their own pace. “Our radicalism finds expression in our modes of teaching, not in imposing any doctrines on the children,” Boyesen told a reporter for the New York Times. “However, I must say that I will be disappointed if any child, after having the facts set before him, does not revolt against the iniquity of the system of government in this and every other country.”110
Like O’Neill, Boyesen was a philosophical anarchist. He had been ousted from his post as a Columbia professor for radicalism, which had earned him the status of a minor celebrity. In a speech given at the Ferrer School in the spring of 1912, he’d pointedly made mention of similar academic careers notoriously cut short: Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, Edgar Allan Poe from Virginia, James Russell Lowell from Harvard, James Fenimore Cooper from Yale, and so on. (He might later have added Eugene O’Neill from Princeton.) Boyesen declared that “art above all is unrespectable and unrespecting.” He concluded with a glum appraisal of the state of the arts in the United States, a declaration prophetic of O’Neill’s future as a perpetually banned playwright: “In pure creative art America is giving little or nothing to the world, and if an artist tries to do so it is as likely as not that he will turn some Anthony Comstock [a notoriously powerful moral reformer] loose on him to declare him and all his purposes special creations of the Evil One.”111
O’Neill made lasting friendships among the Ferrer’s habitués, including his later editor Manuel Komroff and future Provincetown Player Christine Ell, and he stopped in at the school regularly with buckets of beer to liven up the meetings. According to one attendee, Ell, who had worked as a prostitute in Denver, boasted at one gathering that a taxi driver tried to rape her on the way over.112 She could well have been telling the truth. Ell later dated O’Neill’s brother Jim, and she served as the model for the oversized female lead Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. O’Neill describes Josie as “five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty,” “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak” (CP3, 857).
To b
e granted a divorce in New York State required proof of adultery provided by witnesses. O’Neill obliged. His divorce trial, which he wasn’t required to attend and did not, on June 10, 1912, in White Plains, New York, where Kathleen had relocated, included several testimonies to substantiate the charge of adultery. The following is a summary of the eyewitness accounts of O’Neill’s infidelity: On the night of December 29, 1911, O’Neill met with the legal counsel of Kathleen’s mother, James C. Warren, and his associates Edward Mullen and Frank Archibold, a friend of Archibold’s named Mr. Reel, and O’Neill’s friend the painter Edward Ireland. The co-conspirators gathered for dinner at Ireland’s apartment at 126 West 104th Street, then commenced a bar crawl at the Campus tavern on the same block. Ireland returned home, and the rest headed to Midtown for more drinks at various watering holes. They eventually landed at a brothel around three a.m. at 140 West Forty-Fifth Street, across from the Lyceum Theatre, a couple of blocks up from where O’Neill was born, at which point Mr. Reel departed. After stalling “a short time” in the lobby, O’Neill selected “some girl there that attracted him,” according to Mullen’s testimony, and followed her upstairs.113 Mullen, Warren, and Archibold waited in the lobby for two hours until O’Neill instructed a maid to call them up, whereupon they found O’Neill naked with the prostitute. They had a drink or two, and then, duties fulfilled, left at around half-past six or seven a.m.114 End of testimony. End of marriage.
But on the next evening, December 30, after the events related in the testimony, or possibly it was New Year’s Eve, 1911, James Byth and another boarder at Jimmy the Priest’s, Major Adams, discovered O’Neill half dead in his room. He’d attempted to kill himself with an overdose of the barbiturate veronal. In October 1919, O’Neill recorded the traumatic experience in his one-act play Exorcism. A prequel of sorts to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Exorcism opens in a room at a downtown boardinghouse (Jimmy the Priest’s) with Ned Malloy, O’Neill’s autobiographical protagonist, possessed by demons after committing an odious act. Having just returned from a brothel, Ned recounts to his roommate Jimmy (Byth) a degrading experience he had with a prostitute, whom he’d visited to provide grounds for divorcing his estranged wife. “You know the law in New York,” Ned mutters. “There’s only one ground that goes.”115
“We arrived in the small hours and I was very drunk,” Ned tells Jimmy. “I must have fallen asleep—almost immediately. When I awoke the room was strange to me. It wasn’t dawn, it was mid-day, but it appeared like dawn, with faint streaks of light shedding from the edges of the green shades and the whole room in a sort of dead half-darkness. … The whole thing was no new experience—but I was afraid!” This depiction of a gray dawn spent with a prostitute recalls similar stories associated with O’Neill’s brother Jim, most vividly in A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Jim Tyrone as the protagonist. Both Ned and Jim describe prostitutes as “pigs,” and Ned awakes to a gray light coming in the windows, just as Jim does.116 “I’ve seen too God-damned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows,” Jim tells Josie in Moon (CP3, 919).
Once alone, Ned swallows a handful of pills, lies down in a fetal position, and mutters, “Well, that’s over.” Several hours later, Jimmy and Major Andrews (Major Adams) find him unconscious and call a doctor. His stomach is pumped, and he’s ordered to walk around the block to revive himself. Ned’s father arrives (though in real life James O’Neill was on tour at the time) and pleads with him to go to a rest cure sanatorium. Surprisingly, Ned agrees and decides that after a period of healing, he’ll move out west to Minnesota. “My sins are forgiven me!” Ned declares. “God judges by our intentions, they say, and my intentions last night were of the best. He evidently wants to retain my services here below—for what I don’t know yet but I’m going to find out—and I feel of use already!” Ned has thus been resurrected from an ignominious end, his demons “exorcised.”117
The discovery of Exorcism in 2011 revealed something buried in Long Day’s Journey Into Night—what’s been missing in Edmund Tyrone, culpability, is all too apparent in Ned Malloy. Ned, a nickname for Edmund, is as autobiographical as Edmund but with considerable differences: Ned is bitter, spiteful, self-absorbed, an emotional bully to friends and family, and insensitive to their deep concern for his well-being. In this way he’s redolent of another close avatar of O’Neill’s, Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown (1925). (Ned’s wife is called Margaret, not coincidentally the name O’Neill later gives Dion’s long-suffering spouse.) Ned, like Jamie Tyrone, uses the word “rotten” to capture the depths of his self-loathing: “Everything I had ever done, my whole life—all life—had become too rotten! My head had been pushed under, I was drowning and the thick slime of loathing poured down my throat—strangling me!”118 Ned, Edmund, Dion, and Jamie Tyrone Jr. in Long Day’s Journey epitomize the O’Neillian archetype of a wounded soul, men so utterly disappointed with themselves and life in general that they take it out on those who love them most—suicide, in Ned and Edmund’s case by pills, in Dion and Jamie’s by alcohol, providing the maximum pain one can inflict upon caring survivors.119 In short, with Exorcism, we are offered a glimpse into the true personality defects of Edmund Tyrone, and thus of O’Neill himself.
For many decades, before the lost script of Exorcism came to light, the only surviving accounts of O’Neill’s actual suicide attempt were those of his friend George Jean Nathan and O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton. Neither has been taken seriously. Their stories are embellished with details of raucous drunken behavior, and both conclude with O’Neill being escorted by drunks at the bar to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. Boulton’s account, when placed beside Exorcism, appears the more legitimate. She quotes O’Neill telling her that upon arriving back from the brothel to Jimmy the Priest’s on the morning of December 30, he’d hoped to find a check from his father. The absent check not only deprived him of the cash he needed to keep his room (and to keep drinking), it also signaled a complete abandonment by his parents—“of this he was sure now.” Boulton adds that O’Neill was troubled that Jim wasn’t there “to talk things over with,” that “he couldn’t stand his thoughts anymore,” that he was disgusted by his night with the prostitute, and that he was regretful for having gotten involved with Jenkins, “who seemed like himself just another pawn of fate.”120 For a man with suicidal tendencies, any of these torments might have nudged him over the edge into attempting to reach the serene finality of death. Combined, they were more than sufficient.
O’Neill told Boulton that he spent what money he had (two drinks’ worth) on veronal tablets from several pharmacies in the neighborhood around Jimmy’s. Then he locked the door to his room with a flimsy hook, swallowed the tablets with “a glass of dirty water,” and passed out cold. “I must have been there twenty-four hours, maybe longer,” he said. “I vaguely remembered coming to, hearing a knocking on the door, then silence. … This happened a number of times, but I paid no attention to it. It didn’t occur to me that I was alive—after all those pills! At first I probably thought I was still on my way, not dead yet, but getting there. Perhaps I didn’t think at all, just felt resentful that the veronal hadn’t yet completely put me out and that I could hear the knocks. … Then a horrible thought came to me—I was dead, of course, and death was nothing but a continuation of life as it had been when one left it! A wheel that turned endlessly round and round back to the same old situation!”121
Ned Malloy in Exorcism tells his roommate Jimmy that he went directly from the brothel to Battery Park and remained there six hours. This would validate the date of his actual attempt as December 30 or 31, 1911 (though the play is set in March, the gateway month to spring and thus rebirth). James O’Neill’s check arrived while Eugene was unconscious, and after the rent had been deducted, “drinks were on the house … Wow! What a celebration.”122 Boulton’s and Nathan’s stories both conclude with a drunken celebration among O’Neill and his saviors, an anticlimactic if joyful tableau that ends both Exorcism (which
was subtitled “A Play of Anti-Climax” at the time of its production in 1920) and The Iceman Cometh.
Kathleen Jenkins never appeared to hold a grudge after the divorce. As O’Neill remarked to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, “The woman I gave the most trouble to has given me the least.”123 But no one document verifies that admittance more than the script of Exorcism. “I wouldn’t forgive or forget the fact that I despise her,” Ned says, to which Jimmy responds, “But didn’t you—don’t you care for her at all?” “Not a damn!” Ned snaps back. “Not a single, solitary, infinitesimal tinker’s damn! I never did! Body—that was what I wanted in her and she in me. And I married her for an obsolete reason—a gentleman’s reason, you’d call it. … That’s all it was, so help me—a silly gesture of honor—and a stunt!” Jimmy then asks if his wife, Margaret, truly wants a divorce. “Of course,” Ned replies acidly. “She’s rich. She’ll be married again within a year. [It would be three years before Jenkins remarried.] Her pinhead won’t even retain a memory of what happened to her two years ago.” And along with the “silly gesture” of marrying her for “honor”—because she was pregnant—he sourly admits that he’d gotten hitched merely “because a perverse devil whispered in my ear that marriage was one of those few things I hadn’t done.” Ned’s then told that Margaret went “out of her mind with grief,” presuming he attempted suicide because she’s suing him for divorce. “Aha!” Ned says, even after his “rebirth.” “So that’s what she thinks! The devil!”124 Ned’s abusive portrayal of Margaret throughout the play, and thus O’Neill’s of Jenkins, must have played a key role—the key role, perhaps—in O’Neill’s resolution to destroy the play. In the distant future, he would discreetly, if also self-servingly, omit Jenkins and his son from Long Day’s Journey Into Night.125