O’Neill’s convalescence had less to do with physical health, given that he only had a mild case of tuberculosis, and more to do with mental and artistic health, as if Gaylord Farm had been a writers’ retreat like Yaddo in upstate New York or the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. It was there that O’Neill chose to pursue drama, acknowledging to himself that his experiences touring with his father would prove invaluable for the genre. O’Neill began reading many of the playwrights who were to become his greatest influences—Irish writers like Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Shaw as well as Ibsen, the Elizabethans, and the Greeks and, perhaps most important, the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. He read the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, an epic poem that an Irish Catholic nurse presented to him in the hopes that it might revive the young apostate’s faith.171 Attracted by the poem’s portrayal of the modernist presentiment of continual flight—from society, from God, from the self—he learned it by heart and later recited it when well soused and deep in reflective thought to friends and lovers in Greenwich Village.
O’Neill’s 1919 play The Straw, based on the friendships he’d made among Gaylord’s patients and staff, also portrays a fleeting romance with a fellow Irish American patient, Catherine “Kitty” MacKay. Like the play’s female lead, Eileen Carmody, MacKay was from a large Irish family (her parents had raised ten children) in Waterbury, Connecticut; her father was as heartless, miserly, and self-pitying as Eileen’s father, Bill Carmody; and Eileen falls in love with the darkly handsome patient Stephen Murray, who like his creator boasts of his literary aspirations and prides himself on his deeply cynical view of life. O’Neill’s portrayal of Eileen in his stage directions faithfully describes the actual MacKay: “Her wavy mass of dark hair is parted in the middle and combed low on her forehead, covering her ears, to a knot at the back of her head. The oval of her face is spoiled by a long, rather heavy, Irish jaw contrasting with the delicacy of her other features,” and her shape is “slight and undeveloped” (CP1, 729). Upon his departure from Gaylord, O’Neill kissed MacKay, promising that one day she would see herself onstage in one of his plays.172 She never would. MacKay died of the disease in 1915, and The Straw wouldn’t premiere for another six years.
O’Neill and MacKay’s relationship ignited an acute preoccupation in the budding dramatist about the devastating results of uneducated working-class women pairing up with educated men from wealthy families. In each case, what the women want—stability, the romantic ideal of the artist—and what they get—volatility, alcoholism, and unwanted exposure to existentialist angst—are devastatingly at odds. O’Neill presents working-class women in his plays as less morally compromised than their male counterparts, as in this sonnet he wrote for MacKay after his return to New London:
Smile on my passionate plea abrupt,
On bended (so to speak) knee I sue
Doubtless my morals are most corrupt,
There is an elegant chance for you.
Why not reform my life? Thru and thru,
Scour and cleanse my soul of the mire,
(A regular Christian thing to do)
Oh come to my Land of Heart’s Desire.
Further on in the love poem, O’Neill refers to tuberculosis as “punishment full and dire. … Penance for sins we’ve paid in advance.”173 He later equated battling the disease with the challenge of life as a whole. “And the harder the patient’s fight has been,” he said, “the more this applies, I should think. After having conquered T.B. by a long grind of a struggle, one’s confidence in coming out on top in other battles ought to be increased ten-fold.”174
Each of O’Neill’s so-called physical and social inadequacies up to that point, the ones that his parents reminded him of—his shyness, his constitutional depression, his stammering speech, his alcoholism, his reputation as a dissolute Irishman among the New London establishment (thus giving beloved Ireland a bad name), his accusations of abandonment by his family, his suicidal tendencies, his loss of Catholic faith—all combined in O’Neill’s imagination in the form of tuberculosis. Determined to make good, his natural impulse would be to overcompensate. “Someday I won’t be known as his son. He will be known as my father,” he boasted at the Telegraph.175 Then it was only bluster, perhaps; but now he’d gained the confidence to make good on the pledge.
The American writer William Saroyan wrote in 1939, at a time when American heroes were sorely needed, that “only the weak and unsure perform the heroic. They’ve got to.”176 A year later, Dr. Louis E. Bisch, one of O’Neill’s psychoanalysts, likened his patient’s widely perceived “human defects” to Conrad’s belated arrival to the English language at age twenty, Beethoven’s deafness, and Paderewski’s frail fingers, among so many other remarkable instances in which overcompensation breeds inspiration: “Shyness, inferiority feelings and self-consciousness, as well as physical handicaps, have served as spring-boards which catapulted individuals to success far greater—in many cases—than they might have achieved otherwise.” “It is the overcompensation that does it,” Bisch said. “Eugene O’Neill did not set out to become a dramatist. The son of actors, he was inclined to resist all things connected with the stage.” But then came his tuberculosis, a disease closely associated in American society with his other “defects,” and “thus was he started on the road to winning the Nobel Prize.”177 O’Neill’s literary idol Friedrich Nietzsche more broadly established this proposition when he wrote, “Out of thy poisons brewedst thou balsam for thyself. … Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. … Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”178
O’Neill had been born to a race of overcompensators. At that very moment in history, the Irish Players of the Abbey Theatre, the vanguard of the Irish Renaissance, had ensured that what had been an abject fantasy in Ireland for eight hundred long years would grow into an undeniable reality in but one generation: retribution. This scheme for retribution, though most pronouncedly carried out by the singular talents of James Joyce, was not only long-sought independence from British rule but a literary counterattack fought with the very language they’d been mandated to speak as their fiercest weapon. The Irish would transform, utterly, the despised, compulsory tongue of their British colonizers into a new and terrible beauty. While at Gaylord, O’Neill, however unwittingly, was formulating a similar plot. He would also strike back against the language he deplored: that of the tawdry, hateful popular theater of his father, the overwhelmingly powerful institution that had denied him his family. But he required a motivational push, which Bisch would quite rightly identify. “It took T.B.,” O’Neill wrote after years of punishing insecurities, “to blast me loose” (CP1, 742).
Within a week of O’Neill’s release from Gaylord Farm on June 3, 1913, he learned of his friend James Byth’s untimely death. On June 5, Byth had plunged from his bedroom window on the third floor of Jimmy the Priest’s down to the paved courtyard below. He was discovered alive but unconscious, with both legs broken and a fractured skull; without regaining consciousness, Byth died in the hospital the following day. The New York Health Bureau listed the death as a suicide, and O’Neill resolutely believed it was.179 Byth, like Driscoll before him, would hold an abiding place in O’Neill’s imagination for the rest of his life: “Always my friend—at least always when he had several jolts of liquor—saw a turn in the road tomorrow. He was going to get himself together and get back to work. Well, he did get a job and got fired. Then he realized that this tomorrow never would come. He solved everything by jumping to his death from the bedroom at Jimmy’s.”180 Subsequently, the British pressman became one of O’Neill’s most significant case studies in self-delusion. In the last scene of his story “Tomorrow,” Jimmy is haunted by his failures as a husband and as a war correspon
dent in Cape Town; from within “Tommy the Priest’s” bar, the O’Neill character, named Art, hears “a swish, a sickish thud as of a heavy rock dropping into thick mud.” A group of the men rush outside to find Jimmy’s body shattered on the flagstones in a black pool of blood. “The sky was pale with the light of dawn,” the story concludes. “Tomorrow had come” (CP3, 966–67).
O’Neill’s low standing among New Londoners as a drunken misanthrope only worsened over that summer, doubly so in his father’s eyes. James implored his New London friend Clayton “Ham” Hamilton, one of the best-known theater critics of the day, to have a serious talk with his wayward son about his future. Hamilton and O’Neill’s first meeting ended badly. Hamilton saw in O’Neill a young man suffering from “a habit of silence, and an evident disease of shyness.” He remembered O’Neill as a more interesting creature to look at, with his “very large and dreamy eyes,” than to listen to: “His speech was rather hesitant and he never said very much.” Having gathered no useful feedback from Hamilton, James stowed his son away for the winter months in New London at the Packard, a riverfront boardinghouse run by the Rippin family at 416 Pequot Avenue just down the street from Monte Cristo Cottage. Hamilton, who frequently boarded with the Rippins, recalled that the exasperated paterfamilias dropped Eugene off, ordered his son “to behave himself,” then skipped town.181
Back in New London late in that spring of 1914, Hamilton was astonished to discover that O’Neill had been writing at a breakneck pace over the winter months, having already composed five plays—A Wife for a Life, The Web, Thirst, Recklessness, and Warnings—a clutch of maladroit yet promising one-acts that O’Neill later referred to as the “first five Stations of the Cross in my Plod up Parnassus.”182 The last four, along with Fog, were published the following year in his first book, Thirst and Other One-Act Plays, for the American Dramatists Series of the Gorham Press of Boston (a volume financed with a $450 payment from his father). O’Neill was still exasperated by the mystifying process he’d devoted himself to and bluntly asked the seasoned critic, “How are plays written?” “Never mind how plays are written,” Hamilton snapped. “Write down what you know about the sea, and about the men who sail before the mast. This has been done in the novel; it has been done in the short story; it has not been done in the drama. Keep your eye on life,—on life as you have seen it; and to hell with the rest!”183
Hamilton pointed out that writers of poetry and fiction like John Masefield, Jack London, and Joseph Conrad, each of whom O’Neill read avidly, had enjoyed enormous critical and popular success with their sea tales. But up to then no American playwright had adopted the sea as a subject. Eugene’s time on the Charles Racine, the Ikala, the New York, and the Philadelphia, combined with his theatrical know-how accumulated over the years touring with his father, made the aspiring playwright a superlative candidate to exploit such a national literary deficit.
O’Neill was way ahead of him: Thirst, Warnings, and Fog all take place either during or just after a shipwreck, and O’Neill’s readership, small as it was, couldn’t have helped recalling the horrific doom of the thousand-foot transatlantic liner Titanic in 1912. One of the many tragic ironies of the Titanic catastrophe was that the steamer Californian was within twenty miles of the foundering vessel before it sank; but the Californian didn’t hear the other ship’s call for help because no wireless operator had been on duty. After the sinking, in which 1,503 souls had drowned, legislation was passed requiring that large ships post a radio operator on duty at all times. Warnings, based in part on Joseph Conrad’s “The End of the Tether,” tells the story of a ship’s wireless operator who goes deaf, misses a warning signal, and commits suicide from guilt after his disability causes the destruction of the ship. Thirst takes place on a life raft with three survivors: a dancer, a businessman, and a West Indian mulatto sailor. The first two are racists and become convinced the mulatto is withholding water. The dancer dies of thirst, but not before devolving into insanity. When the sailor insists that they must cannibalize her to save their own lives, the businessman heaves her remains overboard. The sailor turns on him next, and in the struggle, they fall into the water and are devoured by sharks. Fog is set on a lifeboat adrift off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the Titanic hit the iceberg and where the playwright himself had kept watch while returning to New York on the Philadelphia.184
At the Packard that spring, O’Neill composed another sea play, the Children of the Sea, based on his time on the Ikala and later titled Bound East for Cardiff, and a one-act, The Movie Man, a satire about the Mexican Revolution. He also completed two full-length plays, Bread and Butter, which contrasts small-town life in New London with his time in the Manhattan art studio scene in 1909, and Servitude, a boorish domestic comedy about sacrifices, primarily made by women, for a successful marriage. That spring, he left the Packard for Monte Cristo Cottage after his father returned to New London and was, O’Neill explained to young Jessica Rippin, so “lonely [he] had to solace himself with the comforting presence of his younger mistake.”185 While there, he published a political poem, “Fratricide,” on May 17 in the socialist paper the New York Call and penned another one-act, Abortion, about a superstar college man who impregnates a local girl while attending a school resembling Princeton (which can’t help but bring to mind his actual affair with the Trenton girl), pays for her abortion, then commits suicide after hearing that she’d died during the surgery. When James read these plays, he threw up his hands. “My God! Where did you get such thoughts?”186
Clayton Hamilton, on the other hand, convinced James that his son would do well to attend Professor George Pierce Baker’s renowned English 47 playwriting seminar at Harvard University.
That June in New London, a passionate courtship took place between O’Neill and a local nineteen-year-old named Beatrice Ashe. If Maibelle Scott had been his first true romance (his marital tryst with Kathleen was anything but romantic), “Bee” Ashe—my “Bumble Bee,” as he called her—was his first true love. The depth of his passion has been preserved in more than eighty letters and over a dozen love poems dedicated to her, with titles such as “Just a Little Love, a Little Kiss,” “Just Me n’ You,” and “Ballade of the Two of Us.” One of these, “Speaking, to the Shade of Dante, of Beatrices,” was published in the New York Tribune in July 1915. The poem’s early title indicates O’Neill’s rakish competitiveness with the Italian bard’s adoration of his own great love, “‘My Beatrice’ (Being a few words with that guy Dante who wrote so much junk about his Beatrice)”:
Dante, your damozel was tall
And lean and sad—I’ve seen her face
On many a best-parlor wall—
I don’t think she was such an ace.
She doesn’t class with mine at all.187
Beatrice Ashe and Eugene O’Neill at Ocean Beach, New London, 1914.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
O’Neill gave Beatrice a scarab bracelet as a sign of his deep commitment and told her that he wished he could buy her an ankle-length sable coat and a silk bathing suit as well. (Maibelle Scott remembered Ashe as “breathtaking in a bathing suit.”) Ashe never agreed to marry him, though he asked her often and, according to her, “carried a wedding ring for two years hoping I’d change my mind.” Like Maibelle Scott before her, Ashe was devoted to O’Neill but soon came to recognize unresolvable personality conflicts. For one thing, he was ill at ease around children: “He had a sweet, gentle smile,” she said, “the sort he should have had for children but didn’t.” And though he pontificated ad nauseum about being true to yourself in the philosophical anarchist tradition, she felt it was only to his writing career that he hoped she would be true. Ashe was the soloist soprano at the Congregational church across the Thames, but O’Neill never respected her dream to sing professionally. Eventually, he recognized her frustration over his chauvinism and told her, in reference
to Ibsen’s famous play about women’s subjugation to male power, A Doll’s House (1879), “You are no Doll Girl nor shall our house be a Doll’s House.”188 Unlike Scott, Ashe saved the scores of poems and letters he wrote her, hoping they would offer a window into the inner world of the loving young man whom she knew, “that some one sometime will recognize that sensitive, kind, patient, understanding man who asked so little of God … the Eugene O’Neill I knew and loved—but not enough.”189
Thirst’s sales were paltry, and Clayton Hamilton published the only important review the book received (the others include one in the Baltimore Sun and a few glorifying notices in the New London papers). His critique reads much like thousands of reviews of O’Neill’s later work: “This writer’s favorite mood is that of horror. He deals with grim and ghastly situations that would become intolerable if they were protracted beyond the limits of a single sudden act. … He shows a keen sense of the reactions of character under stress of violent emotion; and his dialogue is almost brutal in its power.” In the years to come, after O’Neill’s celebrity had soared, early efforts like Thirst became immensely valuable, and O’Neill pointed out the irony that Thirst, “the A-1 collector’s item of all my stuff … has sold [for] as much as $150 a copy … the publisher at one time offered me all the remainder of the edition (and that was practically all the edition, for few copies were sold) at 30 cents a copy! With the usual financial acumen of an author, I scorned his offer as a waste of good money on my lousy drama!”190
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 12