Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  John Francis ran a general store on the ground floor of his apartment building, and a sign out front entreated his customers, “Please loaf in the rear!”6 Followers of this edict would find a wood stove set up in a back room around which they could warm up after a swim or a walk and converse. One visitor described the shop as “a great hulking place, heaped high with the miscellany common to old time village shops where one can purchase everything from candy sticks to kerosene.” The welcoming ambiance Francis nurtured for his tenants is immortalized by Provincetown’s “Poet of the Dunes,” Harry Kemp, in a eulogy written after Francis’s death:

  With that slow speech not slow in apt reply,

  With that smile that was too kind to be sly,

  He will surprise us, rising from his chair

  To greet us with his fostering friendship there!7

  O’Neill felt equally tender about the landlord. When Francis’s obituary in 1937 highlighted his friendship with O’Neill, the recent Nobel laureate was sincerely touched: “I feel a genuine sorrow. He was a fine person—and a unique character. I am glad the article speaks of him as my friend. He was all of that, and I know he knew my gratitude, for I often expressed it.”8

  Hutch Hapgood’s wife, Neith Boyce, had cobbled together an amateur theater group the previous summer in Provincetown with Hapgood, the director George “Jig” Cram Cook and his wife Susan Glaspell, an emergent playwright, along with about twenty other writers and artists.9 Their goal was to outshine the Washington Square Players, a thriving but to their mind overly cautious theater group that they themselves had helped found in 1914. Their plays were initially performed at Hapgood and Boyce’s house, the Pinehurst, at 621 Commercial Street. On the first evening, they read Boyce’s one-act Constancy, a farce based on a burning romance between Jack Reed and the Greenwich Village doyen Mabel Dodge. The designer of the set was Robert Edmond Jones, Jack Reed’s roommate from Harvard who was, like O’Neill, a former student of George Pierce Baker. The space was so cramped that the front deck of the house served as a makeshift stage while the audience watched through the living room’s picture windows. For their second play of the evening, Suppressed Desires, Cook and Glaspell’s send-up of faddish bohemian life, the audience sat outside while the players performed within. But as their ambition swelled, the group demanded more space.

  In August 1915, for $2,200, the writer Mary Heaton Vorse, who’d first brought the Hapgoods to Provincetown back in 1911, bought a fish house on Lewis Wharf, a broken-down Grand Banks cod-fishing pier several blocks down from her and her husband Joe O’Brien’s place. The group soon christened it the Wharf Theatre and adopted the name “The Provincetown Players at the Wharf.” The wooden structure was twenty-four to twenty-six feet tall and wide and thirty-four to thirty-six feet long; once they’d cleared out the discarded nets, rusty anchors, and rotted oars and dinghies, it was ideal for a makeshift theater. Carpenters installed a ten-by-twelve-foot stage, and there was a massive rolling door at the back that could be opened if a play warranted the harbor as a backdrop. Scores of wooden planks were set across kegs and sawhorses, for a seating capacity of about a hundred. Before electricity was installed, a few members operated lamps and lanterns with tin reflectors as footlights that projected a flickering glow upon the stage. But with its darkly weathered walls, cracked floorboards, and perpetual draft, the theater was a firetrap; as a precaution, the Players posted sentries during productions with shovels and buckets of sand. Financially, after Vorse’s initial payment, the space was a boon. No production in the summers of 1915 and 1916 ran over $13 in expenses.10

  “Terry,” Susan Glaspell asked Carlin on a stroll along Commercial Street that June of 1916, “haven’t you a play to read us?” “No,” he replied. “I don’t write, I just think. And sometimes talk. But Mr. O’Neill has got a whole trunk full of plays.”11 Terry was hyperbolizing; O’Neill had actually brought with him a copy of Thirst and a wooden box just big enough to carry a half dozen or so manuscripts. On the top of the box were stamped the words “Magic Yeast.”12

  On July 1, Hutch Hapgood sent word to Mabel Dodge, who also spent her summers in Provincetown but decided to remain in New York for a few more weeks, that “Terry Carlin and O’Neill (son of James O’Neill) have taken Bayard’s studio.” “The play fever is on,” he declared, and O’Neill was one of the most “enthusiastic in our circle.”13 Of course, they’d all heard of his father James, the celebrated “Monte Cristo,” but few had made the acquaintance of his young son Eugene. Dodge clearly hadn’t, and, as Jack Reed’s close confidante and ex-lover, she’d made it her business to keep abreast of all the movers and shakers of Greenwich Village.

  The Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, where O’Neill premiered as a playwright in the summer of 1916.

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

  The same day Hapgood established that Eugene O’Neill had become a member of the Provincetown group, July 1, the Players’ famed precursors, the Irish Players of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, had temporarily foundered. Actors were threatening to disband as a response to the high-handed attitude of their more professional-minded stage manager, the playwright St. John Ervine. “Rebellion is in the air in Ireland,” the drama tabloid New York Review reported, referring to the Easter Rising of the previous April during which Sean Connolly, an actor for the Players, had been the first rebel to die, “and it is not strange that The Irish Players should have become infected with it.” The Review continued that Lady Gregory, playwright and patroness for the Abbey Theatre, was feeling “very much grieved over the collapse of the company.”14

  Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the members of the Provincetown group were just beginning to creatively and socially cohere. Together, they sprawled on the beaches and swam in the ocean, congregated at one another’s houses for dinner and drinks and hunkered together at local bars like the Atlantic House—all the while, Susan Glaspell recalled, “talking about plays—every one writing, or acting, or producing. Life was all of a piece, work not separated from play.” The painter Marsden Hartley dubbed this period “The Great Provincetown Summer,” a time in which O’Neill wrote drama, fiction, and poetry, drank lots of whiskey, took long swims in the harbor, and practiced various forms of stagecraft along with playwriting, including his least favorite—acting. He embraced Jig Cook’s idea that “the art of the theatre cannot be pure, in fact cannot be an art at all, unless its various elements—play-writing, acting, setting, costuming, and lighting are by some means fused into unity.” For the Players, the term “amateur” wasn’t a condescending slur; rather, it signaled a break from the “professional” theater, which connoted a witless adhesion to outdated rules of drama that hampered self-expression and artistic innovation. O’Neill’s advice for aspiring playwrights, offered thirty years later, was a pared-down description of what he’d learned from his own humble beginnings in Provincetown: “Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage; light it, learn about it. When you’ve done that you will probably know how to write a play … if you can.”15

  During rehearsals at the Wharf, they would dive into the harbor to cool off, with O’Neill always plunging in ahead of the pack. Mary Vorse compared his swimming prowess to that of “a South Sea Islander.” Reed showed off to his fiancée, the flamboyant political journalist Louise Bryant, by diving forty feet into the water off the peak of the fish house. (Such a stunt could only be safely accomplished during high tide, a lesson Max Eastman, the visiting Masses editor, discovered later that same afternoon—the hard way.)16

  Jack Reed, as Marsden Hartley aptly phrased it, was “one of those rare specimens who crashed through Harvard and came out on the other side ‘alive.’”17 Louise Bryant had just that January left her husband, the dentist Paul Trullinger, in Portland, Oregon, to run off with the radical reporter. Also an Oregonian, Reed had been visiting family in Portland for the holiday season, a
fter which he lured Bryant back to Greenwich Village and then out to Provincetown. A dark-haired enchantress with melancholy eyes and a wistful smile, she was instantly enamored with the taciturn Irishman. He was younger than she by several years, but who could ignore those scorching, soul-piercing black eyes? She also shared O’Neill’s pride in being an Irish American for whom a nonconformist lifestyle had replaced religious faith.

  Reed and Bryant occupied 592 Commercial Street, down the block from Hapgood and Boyce, and they’d hired Hippolyte Havel, the Revolt editor, as their “chief cook and bottle washer.” Max Eastman, who lived across the street, remembered Havel as a “long-haired, owl-eyed, irrepressibly intellectual, and conscientiously irresponsible anarchist.” Terry Carlin, he said, loafed “with the determination of a Navajo brave,” while Havel “outwitted work instead of attacking it head-on.” As a result, given Reed and Bryant’s equal disdain for housework, their home was “barnlike in its physical aspect,” bare of furniture and other amenities. Nonetheless, Reed, Bryant, and Havel always had plenty of food and beds available for guests to sleep off a night’s debauch. “Don’t have anything to do with those two bums,” Havel grumbled when O’Neill and Carlin first arrived at the house, drunk as lords. “You’ll be sorry if you do.”18 Ignoring Havel’s admonition, Bryant ordered him to serve O’Neill and Carlin coffee, but O’Neill’s hands shook so that he could barely keep the cup level. Bryant helped steady it to his mouth and asked where he planned to stay.19 “He said he wanted to get a place where he could live simply,” Bryant recalled later, since he and Carlin had to live on about $20 a month from O’Neill’s father. Bryant suggested they abandon Boyesen’s studio and set up camp for free at a fisherman’s shack on the beach right across Commercial Street from her and Reed.20

  Marsden Hartley, who’d just arrived from Paris and was in town as a summer guest of Reed and Bryant’s, remembered that O’Neill and Carlin lived in their net-strewn fisherman’s shack “like sailors, slept in hammocks and lived most of the time out-of-doors, with their door open to the sea.” Hartley never forgot the image of hoary-headed Carlin standing for hours at his misshapen doorway. “How clearly I see his gnarled profile against the ruffled sea,” he wrote, “ruminating over what indescribable pasts, stroking the surfaces of life with a prophet’s tenderness, gnawed too persistently with hungers rich in emotions, thoughts, and the wiser way of knowing things, earned at what terrible cost.” A sign above O’Neill and Carlin’s door welcomed visitors with three words: “GO TO HELL.”21

  “Terry understood me,” O’Neill mused about his time with the affable old anarchist. “He was always the same. If I was bored it didn’t affect him, he didn’t get bored and unhappy too. If I felt like a few drinks, he felt like a few drinks too.” Carlin could also handle his friend’s black Irish doldrums better than anyone. “Cheer up, Gene,” he’d brusquely declaim, “the worst is yet to come!” Susan Glaspell was so taken by their friendship that she jotted down a play idea titled “Misfits”: “Terry’s philosophy on Gene ‘Every soul is alone. No one in the world understands my slightest impulse.’ ‘Then you don’t understand the slightest impulse of anyone else.’”22

  Terry Carlin in Provincetown.

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

  O’Neill’s choice of The Movie Man, his one-act play about actual Hollywood filmmakers’ cynical gold digging during the Mexican Revolution, as his tryout at Jack Reed and Louise Bryant’s wound up being an unfortunate lapse of judgment. It was a a misfire that he would attempt in the years to follow to wipe from historical memory.23 His decision was surely meant to impress Jack Reed, who in the fall of 1913 had reported as a war correspondent during the Mexican war in a widely hailed series for Metropolitan magazine. O’Neill based his protagonist Jack Hill in The Movie Man on the actor/directors Christy Cabanne and Raoul Walsh, backed by producers Harry E. Aitken and Frank N. Thayer of the Mutual Film Corporation, who filmed Pancho Villa’s exploits across Chihuahua, Mexico, in the spring of 1914. The studio brokered a lucrative deal for Villa: The general was granted 20 percent of the film’s revenue to allow cameramen to be embedded with his troops on rebel raids against loyalist forces.24 “To make sure that the business venture will be a success,” the New York Times reported two days after Villa accepted the deal, “Mr. [Harry E.] Aitken dispatched to General Villa’s camp last Saturday a squad of four moving picture men with apparatus designed especially to take pictures on battlefields.”25 It’s an absurd fiction, however, reported as fact by the press and perpetuated by O’Neill, that Villa agreed to restrict his battles to camera-friendly daylight or that he reenacted battle scenes to accommodate the American camera crews. Titled The Life of General Villa, Aitken’s silent film—part fiction, part gruesome reality—was released on May 9, 1914, just a month before O’Neill dashed off his first and only surviving draft of The Movie Man.

  The Players rejected The Movie Man outright, understandably enough, and O’Neill most likely destroyed this revised draft soon after. But if a long-term lesson had begun to sink in, along with the Players’ subsequent refusal to put on The Personal Equation, it was O’Neill’s ultimate recognition that propaganda had no place in his dramas. Jack Reed was a radical; agitprop was his stock-in-trade. O’Neill was an artist, and he learned that political avowals like the anti-interventionism of his revised Movie Man, however satiric the intent, leave audiences feeling emotionally empty and their views unchanged. Political arrows, he came to realize in the years that followed, kept sharpest when left in their quiver.

  But then, at Cook and Glaspell’s house only a few days after The Movie Man fiasco, July 16 or 17, O’Neill read them Bound East for Cardiff.26 The one-act sea play takes place on a steamship and depicts the round-robin from port to sea and back to port again, where the crew’s meager wages are blown on prostitutes and whiskey. Most of the dialogue concerns a sailor dying in his bunk named Yank, who confides his final thoughts to his long-time shipmate and best friend Driscoll, an Irishman. Yank confesses that he’d always secretly wished that he and Driscoll could start a farm together in Canada or Argentina but had never admitted this to his companion for fear of being made fun of. “Laugh at you, is ut?” Driscoll responds. “When I’m havin’ the same thoughts myself, toime afther toime” (CP1, 196). The relationship conveys strong homoerotic overtones, and in a moment of touching remembrance, Driscoll reminisces about adventures they shared at exotic ports of call: Buenos Aires, Singapore, Port Saïd, Sydney, Cape Town. O’Neill’s word choice “bound” for the title (which he’d changed from “Children of the Sea”) indicates more than their route across the Atlantic to Wales; these sailors are “bound” to the sea without hope of escape. This script the Players accepted unanimously.

  Setting up for Bound East for Cardiff at the Wharf Theatre in July 1916. O’Neill is on the stepladder, Hippolyte Havel is seated at center, and George “Jig” Cram Cook is at right with the pole.

  (COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK)

  On July 28, 1916, Bound East for Cardiff opened on a double bill with Louise Bryant’s morality play The Game. The Game was nearly turned down, but set designers William and Marguerite Zorach improved upon Bryant’s pedestrian work by devising an Egyptian-style set. O’Neill directed Bound East and, in spite of his stage fright, took a one-line part as the second mate who steps into the forecastle and asks, “Isn’t this your watch on deck, Driscoll?” (CP1, 194). Jig Cook was cast as the dying sailor Yank. Seated among the rapt audience, Susan Glaspell remembered the evening well: “There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Drisc of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you’d never see a ship or smell the sea. … It is not merely figurative language to say the old wha
rf shook with applause.”27

  Adele Nathan of the Baltimore little theater group the Vagabond Players (who’d rejected Bound East for Cardiff the previous winter) was there at the Provincetown opening. She asked O’Neill for a copy of the play and found that the “rehearsals had been conducted from a single working script, and that was in sad condition.” O’Neill offered to type up a fresh copy for her but warned her apologetically that he was a terrible typist, and the process would take a while. Nathan gave O’Neill $15 for the retype and the play was produced in Baltimore that fall; given that O’Neill never earned any royalties from Thirst, this paltry sum was notably the first money he received as a working dramatist. It was a fitting play for such an initiation. Bound East for Cardiff, O’Neill said later, was “very important from my point of view. [In] it can be seen, or felt, the germ of the spirit, life attitude, etc., of all my more important future work.”28

  Then it was Susan Glaspell’s turn. Within ten days, she completed Trifles, now a hallmark of modern drama, and the Players produced the one-act on August 8. In the years to come, Mary Vorse placed their achievements that summer among the top innovations of the era: the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell; the first flight of the Wright brothers and Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T; Sigmund Freud’s breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and the achievements of the moguls of the budding Hollywood filmmaking industry.29 Millennia before, Seneca of Rome, a fellow dramatist, had classified “luck” as what happens when preparation meets opportunity. The Provincetown Players, above all the most ambitious of them, O’Neill and Glaspell, now had both.