Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  O’Neill’s gratitude for Hamilton’s review was effusive, long-lasting, and sincere: “Do you know that your review was the only one that poor volume ever received? And, if brief, it was favorable! You can’t imagine what it meant, coming from you. It held out a hope at a very hopeless time. It did send me to the hatters. It made me believe I was arriving with a bang; and at that period I very much needed someone whose authority I respected to admit I was getting somewhere.”191 He considered this one of two “boons” Hamilton had conferred upon him in that crucial first year of serious writing from 1913 to 1914; the other was an “unvarnished truth” Hamilton had ruthlessly imparted upon meeting him by chance at New London’s Union Station.

  One morning in late summer, O’Neill left Monte Cristo Cottage and went to the train station to mail two scripts to George C. Tyler, his father’s former advance man but now a top theater producer.192 Arriving early to ensure that his package would go out with the first pickup, he bumped into Clayton Hamilton and buoyantly explained what he was up to.193 O’Neill naively expected Tyler to give his plays “an immediate personal reading and reply within a week—possibly an acceptance,” and he asked Hamilton what sort of timeline one might typically expect for a reply. Hamilton responded with a stinging reality check: “When you send off a play remember there is not one chance in a thousand it will ever be read; not one chance in a million of its ever being accepted—(and if accepted it will probably never be produced); but if it is accepted and produced, say to yourself it’s a miracle which can never happen again.”194 Sure enough, George Tyler wrote in his memoir about the plays sent O’Neill to him that morning that he’d “take them in and forget about them, for a while—maybe read a little, but I wouldn’t take an oath I did that often, and I’m certain that I can’t remember at all what they were like.”195 In point of fact, when O’Neill requested the scripts back after Tyler’s Liebler and Company fell into bankruptcy, he received them still sealed in the original envelopes.196

  O’Neill later recalled having felt so self-assured and hopeful just before his ego-deflating tough-love encounter with Hamilton that afterward he’d “wandered off a bit sick.” In hindsight, however, he considered the wake-up call formative for his philosophy as a playwright—from that moment on, he steeled himself for the inevitable defeats of a working dramatist and vowed to “hew to the line without thought of commercial stage production.” “Yes, of all the help you were in those years,” he wrote Hamilton, “I think that bit ranks brightest in memory. It was a bitter dose to swallow that day but it sure proved a vital shock-absorbing tonic in the long run. It taught me to ‘take it’—and God knows that’s the first thing most apprentice playwrights need to learn if they are not to turn into chronic whiners against fate or quitters before their good break comes.” Nearing the end of his life, Hamilton dedicated the last of his books on drama criticism “to Eugene O’Neill, who began his career as one of my apprentices and is now fulfilling it as one of my masters.”197

  It Takes a Village

  James O’Neill gravely doubted his son’s ability to succeed in George Baker’s seminar at Harvard, especially after the disastrous year at Princeton. But he also had great respect for Baker’s renowned skill for cultivating talent. O’Neill himself was thrilled, and going to Harvard would also, with impassioned apologies to Beatrice, have the added advantage of getting him out of New London.198 Hamilton sent a letter of recommendation to Baker but urged his twenty-five-year-old protégé to write a formal letter to ask permission to enter the course, which he did. “Less than a year ago,” O’Neill wrote the Harvard professor, “I seriously determined to become a dramatist. With my present training I might hope to become a mediocre journey-man playwright. It is just because I do not wish to become one, because I want to be an artist or nothing, that I am writing you.”199

  Under separate cover, O’Neill sent Baker two one-acts, most likely Children of the Sea (Bound East for Cardiff) and Abortion, “from which,” O’Neill said, “you will be able to form a judgment as to my suitability for taking your course.”200 Baker accepted him, and by October, after a brief stint in New York trying to market his plays, O’Neill took the train to Cambridge and installed himself as a boarder on the ground floor of a German-speaking Mennonite home.201 To O’Neill’s annoyance, his host family held Bible readings every morning after breakfast and asked the new boarder if he would like to join in. “Imagine it!” O’Neill groaned. “I begged to be excused.” An invitation to join them at Revere Beach was also turned down. “When I found out the children were to be taken along I backed out,” he wrote Ashe. “A long trolley ride with a couple of playful brats is my idea of one of the tortures Dante forgot to mention in the Inferno.”202

  During the fall semester of 1914, O’Neill wrote two comedies, Dear Doctor and The Knock on the Door, and he collaborated with classmate Colin Ford on a full-length play called Belshazzar, about the fall of Babylon. (None of these plays has survived.) He then began a second play on the topic of abortion, this time full length. Professor Baker insisted that no respectable theater company would take on such a hot-button issue and persuaded O’Neill to select a less incendiary theme.203 O’Neill relented, in a way, if one considers violent anarchist revolutionaries combating wage slavery less incendiary.

  That November, while he “mapped out a tentative scenario,” O’Neill boasted that “if it is ever produced—and it never could be in this country—the authorities will cast me into the deepest dungeon of the jail and throw away the key.” Indeed, at Harvard, O’Neill’s political voice had reached a high radical pitch. One classmate in Baker’s seminar described him as “intellectually … a philosophical anarchist; politically, a philosophical socialist.”204 (The latter, of course, would fade away, as philosophical anarchism concerned itself more with inner well-being than the socialist’s creed of effecting change from without.)

  O’Neill’s The Personal Equation, initially titled “The Second Engineer,” was completed that spring. The play contains much of O’Neill’s early social philosophy—his despair over materialism, his belief in the destructive influence of Victorian propriety, and his sympathy for the working class. In the mode of outspoken socialist playwrights of the 1930s like Mike Gold and Clifford Odets, The Personal Equation mostly reads like agitprop, a form of literature O’Neill would come to denounce. (The play was later rejected by the Provincetown Players and never produced in his lifetime.) His most accomplished work from his days at Harvard, The Sniper, won honorable mention in Baker’s one-act play competition. The winning three plays were produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club, and he wrote Beatrice that it was just as well he’d lost: “Those amateur butchers on the Dramat. [Dramatic Club] would murder The Sniper.” Additionally, the three winners were all written by women, and O’Neill quipped with self-conscious envy that the “Harvard spirit and taste runs to the sort of clever plays women usually write. (Sorehead!)”205

  The Sniper takes place in the Belgian countryside, when Germany’s Schlieffen Plan of the previous August 1914 called for an attack on France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Belgium refused to grant permission, so Germany disregarded the threat of international censure and entered the country by force. Few understood what this “Great War” was being fought over, but the “Rape of Belgium,” as it was called, outraged Americans, most of whom were otherwise oblivious to European affairs. “The sniper” of the title is a Belgian villager and expert shot with a rifle named Rougon, whose wife, son, and son’s fiancée are all killed. Rougon demands of the local priest how God could allow the killing of innocents. “God knows,” the priest replies. “Our poor country is a lamb among wolves” (CP1, 298). But he makes Rougon vow not to fight and promises to officiate at his son’s burial the following night. The two kneel beside the boy’s body to pray, but the meaningless words of the rite—“Almighty God,” “merciful,” “infinite justice”— incense Rougon, and he explodes in a fit of grief-stricken rage. When the Germans approach his cottage, Roug
on opens fire and kills two men. He’s eventually detained, and the German captain orders his execution. Asked if he wishes to pray, Rougon disavows God and dies before the priest can administer a benediction.

  Baker applauded The Sniper’s well-wrought structure, timely subject matter, and dramatic power. In fact, he believed it was the best play submitted for the competition; he didn’t “think it judicious,” however, for Harvard to “put on a war play” during actual wartime.206 O’Neill then showed The Sniper to his father, who shopped it around the vaudeville circuit in March 1915. O’Neill proudly wrote Beatrice that the play “has made a big hit with all the people he has had read it,” but James was told that censors would quash the play unless O’Neill “omitted all reference to Prussians, French, Belgians, etc.” Holbrook Blinn, a well-known vaudevillian, did “seriously consider” performing it, but again, only after the war had ended.207

  Over that year, O’Neill’s male classmates looked on with envy as the women of Cambridge vied with one another for O’Neill’s attentions. “There was something apparently irresistible,” recalled one green-eyed student, “in his strange combination of cruelty (around the mouth), intelligence (in his eyes) and sympathy (in his voice). … From shop girl to ‘sassiety’ queen, they all seemed to develop certain tendencies in his presence.”208 O’Neill was immune to their advances and determined to stay true to Beatrice Ashe, “My Own Little Wife.” Though he returned to New London on weekends and holidays, he still mailed her a gush of treacly love letters (“Ah My Own, My Own, how I love you, and how the relentless hours drag their leaden feet when I am not with you!”), many containing love poems dedicated to her. He even sent her a photo of himself in his underwear taken by a Cambridge artist practicing studies in the nude, and he teased her over her refusal to have sex with him. His male biology, he said, ensured that they had done so in his dreams anyway: “Nature has foiled you in your effort to put restraint on the ‘Irish Luck Kid.’ It simply kinnot be did! I can’t keep your picture from my brain.”209

  In the seminar, O’Neill’s manner was largely off-putting. One classmate remembered that “he would writhe and squirm in his chair, scowling and muttering in a mezzo-voce fearful imprecations and protests.” He mostly intimidated his fellow students at first, and “did not invite approach.” Politically, his “savage radicalism” was disconcerting, and his critiques were often terse and unexpected. Once he stormed out after discovering the lesson involved diagramming a play. He loathed Sundays and remained in his room, unspeakably bored, while the other students attended church: “Damn Sunday, say I, for the thousandth separate time.” But they all recognized O’Neill as the most talented among them, remarking to one another with more than a whiff of jealousy, “Well, I wonder how long it will be before he is the country’s greatest playwright?”210

  Eugene O’Neill posing for an art student at Harvard University, 1914. He gave this photo as an unconventional gift to his girlfriend Beatrice Ashe.

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

  “He rarely contributed to the discussion,” a student said of O’Neill’s input in class, “but when he delivered himself of a remark, it was impressive. We felt that Gene had things to write about because he had lived—Greenwich Village, the sea, South America—while the rest of us had led sheltered lives.”211 O’Neill met with Baker regularly to discuss his progress, and one night they even spent hours in the plush study of the professor’s Cambridge home smoking his gold-tipped cigarettes late into the evening (“almost unprecedented to give up a whole evening to one student,” O’Neill boasted to Ashe). Baker asked him if “his preference for grim and depressing subjects was not something of a pose.” O’Neill responded that it wasn’t, that to him “life looked that way” after his years as a sailor and down and out in Buenos Aires and New York. O’Neill told Ashe that Baker had plied him for tales of his “adventures along the Ragged Edge,” and O’Neill “saw that even he was forced to acknowledge that I have knocked about a bit.”212

  In the end, Baker concluded that his pupil demonstrated great promise but also that his skills to “manage the longer forms” required fine-tuning. O’Neill’s trouble lay not so much in creating plausible characters but rather in his tendency to place them amid the entanglements of a melodramatic plot.213 When Charlie Webster, the actor from the tabloid Monte Cristo tour, ran into O’Neill in New York, he asked him whether he’d learned anything from Baker and received an unequivocal no. But by the mid-1930s, O’Neill remarked that Baker had been teaching his playwriting seminar “back in the dark ages when the American theater was still, for playwrights, the closed-shop, star-system, amusement racket.” Only Baker’s students, he contended, could “know what a profound influence Baker exerted toward the encouragement and birth of modern American drama. It is difficult these days … to realize that in that benighted period a play of any imagination, originality or integrity by an American was almost automatically barred from a hearing in our theater. … The most vital thing for us, as possible future artists and creators, to learn at that time (Good God! For any one to learn anywhere at any time) was to believe in our work and to keep on believing. And to hope. He helped us to hope.”214

  Back in New London, Beatrice Ashe was ill with a fever through most of the summer of 1915. This was just as well, as her desire for O’Neill had been steadily cooling. And aside from submitting a few treatments for screenplays (without luck), his writing was going nowhere, and he never returned to Harvard. Baker heard that O’Neill’s “means … made this impossible,” and James O’Neill was in fact out of work, though the New London press made it sound as if producers were knocking down his door. His popular appearances at the Crocker House bar and the exclusive Thames Club never let up, and a few local politicians even tried to convince him to run for mayor. James demurred with his characteristic Irish charm: “Every politician seeking office aspires to the Presidency of the United States. If I were to enter politics, I should want to make that my goal and I can’t be President because I was born in Ireland, God bless it!”215

  That fall, James and Ella checked into the lavish Prince George Hotel on Twenty-Eighth Street, while Jim and Eugene preferred the low-rent Garden Hotel around the block at 63 Madison Avenue on the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street.216 Scandal alluringly permeated the hotel’s atmosphere. America’s preeminent architect Stanford White, designer of the old Madison Square Garden just across the street, was sharing a room there with Evelyn Thaw in 1906, when Thaw’s millionaire husband, Harry Thaw, in one of the nation’s most sensational crimes of passion, unflinchingly shot White three times in the face at a rooftop party at the Garden across the street.217

  The Garden Hotel’s barroom sold 5¢ beers, and during their many extended benders there, the brothers O’Neill made the acquaintance of a colorful gallery of characters, several of whom, like James Byth and his South African associates before this, would resurface as characters in O’Neill’s plays. “There was good food at the Garden, and it was a good place,” O’Neill said. “The circus men who stayed there I knew very well. Not only the circus men, but the poultry men, the horse breeders and all others who displayed their wares at the old Madison Square Garden. Used to meet them all in the bar. One of my old chums was Volo, the Volitant, a bicycle rider whose specialty was in precipitating himself down a steep incline and turning a loop or so in the air. Volo is now a megaphone man on one of the Broadway sightseeing buses. Billy Clark is his real name. Jack Croak was another. He used to work on the ticket wagon of the Willard Shows.”218 O’Neill became an avid fan of the grueling six-day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden’s indoor track, a spectacle of physical and mental endurance that into his later years remained, along with baseball, football, and prizefighting, one of his favorite lifetime diversions.

  The Garden Hotel (center) and the old Madison Square Garden.

  (FRANK M. INGALLS PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, CA. 1901–1930. COURTE
SY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

  O’Neill also drank at O’Connor’s Pub at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, a Greenwich Village hangout patrons called the Working Girls’ Home, best known for its former bartender, the future poet laureate of England John Masefield. O’Neill reconnected with his old friend Lou Holladay too, who by that time was running a bar called the Sixty Club, after its address at 60 Washington Square. Sixty competed with his sister Polly Holladay’s restaurant for being the epicenter of the Village bohemian scene; but on December 29, Sixty was shut down, and Holladay spent several months in jail for operating without a liquor license. After the marshals had served Holladay with a “dispossess” and took him into custody, the New York Tribune ran a piece titled “‘Sixty’ Is Dead; Long Live Polly’s!” (Holladay was to be sentenced that day, but the Tribune reported that his impending incarceration hadn’t prevented his sister Polly and her friends from planning a festive New Year’s Eve costume party at Webster Hall.)219

  Greenwich Village, the storied Manhattan neighborhood south of Fourteenth Street and north of Houston, is best known for its red- and brown-brick townhouses, its picturesque alleyways and side streets, and its closely packed clusters of cafés, restaurants, and saloons. The Enlightenment-era urban planning of Manhattan’s grid pattern, designed in 1811, falls away south and west of Washington Square, where the streets descend back to the cow-pathed chaos of New Amsterdam. By 1915, the Village’s bohemian culture, then thriving among the area’s German, Italian, and Irish immigrants and for which the Village has been legendary for well over a century, had reached its maximum romantic allure. “Some said in those days,” the avant-garde writer Djuna Barnes recalled in the mid-1910s, “that you could not get any nearer to original sin than renting a studio anywhere below Fourteenth Street.”220