Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  By the late fall of 1919, though, the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act had made liquor a frustratingly scarce commodity in New York. “Believe me,” O’Neill complained to Boulton, “Prohibition is very much of a fact.” Even the Garden Hotel was “dry as dry.”195 At Jimmy the Priest’s, James Condon’s tolerance for drunkenness at all costs had gotten the better of him: on December 27, 1919, just a few weeks before Prohibition began that January 1920, Condon, then fifty-five, was forced to shut down the bar after four men died while drinking there. One was found dead in the back room, another upstairs in his bed; and two more, one of whom was found on the street outside in a coma, were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where they couldn’t be helped. When the conscious man admitted that he’d been drinking at “Jimmy’s Place” before he died, Condon and his bartender William Nolan were arrested for homicide. They were charged with allegedly serving “coroner’s cocktails,” a wood alcohol moonshine responsible for scores of deaths on the East Coast (and one of Terry Carlin’s favorite beverages through Prohibition).196 Condon and Nolan were taken to Manhattan’s notorious Tombs prison; though they were each released on $1,000 bail after a few days, Jimmy’s Hotel and Café was to be shut down for good. (In 1966, the neighborhood would be razed to make way for the World Trade Center.)

  At the same time, the Provincetown Players had begun hosting “John Barleycorn parties,” which O’Neill attended for the drinks if not the company. Boulton wrote to express her disapproval over his getting drunk with the Players: “The whole crowd is more or less envious and only too glad to drag you down somehow into the dirt. … You know, as well as I do, the shape you get into after much drinking! … You should have had guts enough not to go, at this time when so very much hangs in the balance.” “No more lecture letters, please!” he retorted. “You never used to be a moralist, and I’ve never in my life stood for that stuff, even from my Mother.”197

  Far more satisfying was a night at the Hell Hole when Tom Wallace, Lefty Louie, Joe Smith, and a few prostitutes hanging around got O’Neill loaded on sherry; even without hard liquor it was a gretime, free of the suffocating Village crowd. Louie was delighted that his song “My Josephine,” which he’d long ago concocted for a “tough Wop cabaret,” would be featured in Chris. “This little incident of the song seems to me quite touching in a way,” O’Neill wrote Boulton recounting the edifying night with his old friends, “and I think all the hours seemingly wasted in the H.H. [Hell Hole] would be justified if they had resulted in only this.”198 (Louie’s song would be made far more popular by O’Neill’s revision of Chris, “Anna Christie.”)

  O’Neill’s otherwise bad fortune tracking down hooch in “Dry New York” took another turn after meeting Richard Bennett, the future star and unofficial director of Beyond the Horizon. The two met at John Williams’s office, then retired to Bennett’s Greenwich Village apartment. Bennett’s wife prepared them a dinner of scrambled eggs, then went off to bed, at which point Bennett asked the playwright, “Do you like absinthe?” “Yes,” he replied, putting aside his disastrous initiation to the “green fairies” at Princeton with Lou Holladay, “but what good does a liking do me?” Bennett announced that he had fifty cases of the hallucinogenic liquor. “I knew I was going to like you from the first moment we met,” O’Neill said, and they drank absinthe until seven thirty in the morning while reading the script together line by line.

  Back at his hotel room, O’Neill, still affected by “the subtle fireworks from the queer poison of absinthe,” wrote a prose poem while “the whole world was shot through with White Logic.”199 (“White Logic” was Jack London’s term for the existential angst that drunkenness incurs while paradoxically also making it endurable.) O’Neill’s prose poem testifies to what happens to a mind affected by absinthe: “The golden oranges in the patio dream of the Hesperides. The earth is a sun-struck bee, its wings sodden with golden pollen, sifted dust of sunbeams. … Green parrots in the green of the orange trees gossiping like deaf people—a discord rasps saw-teeth in the keen blue blade of silence,” and so forth. But it eventually concludes with a passionate cry of eternal devotion to Boulton in life and in death.200

  Meanwhile, over the holiday season of 1919–20, the worldwide flu epidemic was claiming thousands of lives and New York residents were brought low for months by one of the worst blizzard seasons in the city’s history. Tempers had also begun to flare at rehearsals for Beyond the Horizon. At one point Bennett and O’Neill “went to the mat,” Bennett said, over the climactic scene in which Robert calls Ruth a “slut.” When Robert finds out that Ruth loves his brother, he responds as O’Neill might have when Bryant broke with him in favor of Reed: “God! It wasn’t that I haven’t guessed how mean and small you are—but I’ve kept on telling myself that I must be wrong—like a fool!—like a damned fool! … You—you slut!” (CP1, 616). John Williams didn’t like the use of the word either. O’Neill refused to back down, even face-to-face with such intimidating professionals. (He was invariably drunk during Macdougal Street rehearsals, but not for these.) “Will you be responsible for the failure of this scene if we play it your way?” Bennett asked O’Neill. The dramatist replied in the affirmative. Bennett finished the scene, then shouted, “By God, you’re right! Let’s have a few more fights and this play’ll pick up 100%.”201

  Such on-the-job anxiety, vitriolic letters from home, and his father’s declining health triggered a paralyzing insomnia, and O’Neill barely made it to rehearsals. At one point he felt compelled to take the sleep aid veronal, the drug he’d used in his suicide attempt. Above all, he feared low attendance at Beyond the Horizon, insisting that Cook and Glaspell release the Players’ subscription list in order to “paper” the house with respectable numbers. Glaspell was agitated by the request and chastised Boulton that lists were “sacred things—secret things.” “Jig feels as I do,” she said. “Gene should have use of the list, but it should not be let out of the office.”202

  But in spite of the feuds and hangovers, his father’s cancer, and the blizzards, his flu, and the insomnia that plagued him through the season, working on Broadway afforded a priceless education for the budding playwright. “I’ve learned a tremendous lot that I wouldn’t miss for worlds,” he told Boulton, “knowledge that will be of real worth hereafter. … This whole experience has been invaluable to me as an artist who ought to know his medium from top to bottom.”203

  Beyond the Horizon’s world premiere, and thus O’Neill’s debut as a commercially viable playwright, took place on the afternoon of February 2, 1920, just north of the Bronx at the Warburton Theatre in Yonkers, New York. This trial performance at the Warburton, a small-time venue that lived up to its self-styled repute as “The Theatre of Constant Surprises” by hosting the first full-length Eugene O’Neill play ever to appear onstage, was a bargain at 50¢ a seat. O’Neill, distressed by several days of poor rehearsals, excused himself from attending, using his incipient flu symptoms as a weak pretext. O’Neill may have had his doubts, but the local Yonkers Statesman reviewed the matinee enthusiastically, if briefly, reporting that “the audience, although not large, was a representative one and liberal with applause.”204

  O’Neill’s Broadway debut took place the following afternoon, February 3, at the Morosco Theatre. James and Ella reserved box seats, while O’Neill was dismayed to find himself seated next to his producer John Williams. He squirmed through all three acts, disgusted with the play and with what he believed, wrongly it would turn out, was a distinct lack of emotional response from the audience. “I suffered tortures,” he wrote Boulton. “I went out convinced that Beyond was a flivver artistically and every other way.” His father wept openly through the performance, though tempered his judgment after the show. “It’s all right, if that’s what you want to do,” he told his son outside on the street, “but people come to the theater to forget their troubles, not to be reminded of them. What are you trying to do—send them home to commit suicide?”205

  That night,
O’Neill received a congratulatory wire from Boulton at the theater: “Three cheers for you and Beyond and much love, Agnes.” Otherwise, isolated on the Cape, she was in no mood to commiserate over his disappointing evening. Earlier that day, she’d written him, “Frankly—you don’t mind my being frank, do you?—it is hell for me that you are not coming—that you are not here now.” Another letter written the same day describes her failed attempt to rein in her fury in his upstairs office: “There I was, staring at the silly, stupid wall paper, and two hundred miles away, Beyond was having its premiere. Well—if a year ago, when we were down in Pt. P. [Point Pleasant] someone had told me I’d be in that room—in Provincetown—alone—and you and Beyond in N.Y.—I suppose I should have rebelled! Certainly, I’d never have believed it—I’d have said—‘I’ll get there somehow’!” “What is the matter?” she persisted over his lackluster responses to her earlier love letters. “Has Louise [Bryant] been writing you—congratulations?”206 Miserable throughout O’Neill’s absence that winter, having been left alone with Shane, Gaga, and Terry Carlin, she still managed to revise Now I Ask You and complete two short stories, “The Hater of Mediocrity” and “The Snob,” both of which would be accepted at the Smart Set.

  Back at the Prince George after the opening, O’Neill collapsed into bed, too dejected to write Boulton. Then, the next morning, the papers arrived. “Lo and behold, in spite of all the handicaps of a rotten first performance, Beyond had won,” he wrote her. “You never saw such notices!” The New York Times hailed it as “an absorbing, significant, and memorable tragedy, so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest meringue.” Those left behind in Provincetown received an exultant telegram from Jimmy Light: “Just saw Gene’s play, a great great play. I am wildly excited, dawn of a new day. Superb acting audience enthusiastic, hurrah … !” The only sustained criticism by seasoned theatergoers was over the play’s alternating scene changes from interior to exterior, which many considered amateurish and distracting. O’Neill fumed to Barrett Clark over the critics’ accusations that the playwright showed “ignorance of conventional every day technique—I, a Baker 47 alumnus!” (Baker had in fact read Beyond the Horizon, he said, and was “delighted with and proud of it.”)207 Such relatively minor complaints aside, few critics failed to point out the great promise of this young dramatist.

  “I felt sure when I saw the woebegone faces of the audience on the opening day that it was a rank failure,” O’Neill told a reporter, “and no one was more surprised than was I when I saw the morning papers and came to the conclusion that the sad expressions on the playgoers’ faces were caused by their feeling the tragedy I had written.” That July 1920, George Jean Nathan described O’Neill in a Smart Set article entitled “The American Playwright” as “the one writer for the native stage who gives promise of achieving a sound position for himself.” After expressing his heartfelt gratitude, O’Neill agreed with Nathan’s estimation that he was still wet behind the ears: “God stiffen it, I am young yet and I mean to grow! And in this faith I live: That if I have the ‘guts’ to ignore the megaphone men and what goes with them, to follow the dream and live for that alone, then my real significant bit of truth and the ability to express it, will be conquered in time—not tomorrow nor the next day nor any near, easily-attained period but after the struggle has been long enough and hard enough to merit victory.”208

  Boulton was openly envious of her husband’s New York adventure and the great triumphs celebrated in her absence. She’d begun to feel abandoned sexually too. “Gene—your little Miss P[ussy] is meowing, and howling and behaving like a perfect devil,” she said. (O’Neill and Boulton referred to his penis, incidentally, as “The Nightingale,” a sobriquet they’d appropriated from Boccaccio’s Decameron.) During the week that followed opening night, they exchanged a burst of acrimonious letters, which only intensified in rancor over those collectively wretched February days. Her mood grew increasingly gloomy, while his more obstinate and defiant. “Your letter was gall when I prayed for wine,” he wrote. If the bickering didn’t stop, he warned, “my only remaining hope is that the ‘Flu,’ or some other material cause, will speedily save me the decision which would inevitably have to come at my own instance. If you and I are but another dream that passes, then I desire nothing further from the Great Sickness but release.”209

  John Williams at first restricted Beyond the Horizon’s run to “special matinees,” given the blizzards and the flu epidemic, which made even the most devoted theatergoers wary of an auditorium’s congested air. But once the reviews arrived, Williams deftly transferred the production to the Criterion Theatre, then arranged for a standard engagement at the Little Theatre. Williams had tried to persuade either Jack or Lee Shubert to take it on; but whichever of the two theatrical power brokers it was, he jerked his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and barked, “Nothin’ doin! It’s got great notices but nix on the tragedy stuff until you show us the old box-office returns.” After 111 performances, the play wound up generating a small fortune in returns: $117,071. “I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know,” O’Neill wrote Nina Moise, “that I am not compromising but ‘hewing to the line,’ and not trying to get too wealthy although, as you can imagine, the opportunities to sell myself have not been lacking of late.”210

  By the spring of 1920, when O’Neill was only thirty-one, his name had appeared in every major newspaper from Boston to Philadelphia. The conservative Irish dramatist and critic St. John Ervine wrote O’Neill that Beyond the Horizon was the first play he’d attended in America, and that he was “proud to think that so beautiful a thing was made by a man with Irish blood.”211 Theatre Magazine profiled O’Neill that April, noting that he even looked the part of the “literary genius.” When the reporter, Alta M. Coleman, said good-bye after their interview, she admitted her worry about feeling disappointed with him after seeing his plays. “But I’m not!” she said. “They’re all there—in your eyes.” “So be prepared to read of my ‘great sad eyes,’” he wrote Boulton after Coleman left him “to cough in peace.”212 Sure enough: “Though not striking in appearance,” Coleman wrote, “Eugene O’Neill is not the usual type. Lack of robustness gives his five-feet ten inches added heighth [O’Neill was five feet eleven]; his clothes, which hang loosely upon his well-proportioned frame, suggest neither dapperness nor the conscious carelessness of the artist. Hands well-manicured and white from a winter indoors; but his face retains a tinge of summer tan. His forehead high and rounded calls to mind pictures of Edgar Allan Poe; it narrows at the temples where his crisp black hair is tinged with white. … Chin and nose are well defined though not aggressive; a narrow black moustache marks his upper lip but cannot hide the extreme sensitiveness of his mouth—a sensitiveness that is intensified in his large brilliant eyes, the whites of an opaque clearness contrasting with the rich glowing brown of the iris. These eyes have seen both the sunshine and suffering of the world—they say ‘Life is a tragedy—hurrah!’”213

  O’Neill’s slow-budding flu symptoms blossomed to full strength after the premiere; what he glimpsed in the mirror looked like a corpse “dug out of the grave by mistake.” His temperature hovered just over a hundred degrees for a full week, and his weight dropped to about 125 pounds. “Stripped, I look like a medical student’s chart, every muscle outlined and every bone and bit of sinew.” Boulton warned him to avoid the infected trains, whose close quarters were known to spread the disease, and be careful in the blizzard—there had been many cases, she reminded him, of the effects of freezing weather lethally compounding flu with pneumonia. Much worse than O’Neill’s flu was that his father James, already wasting away from intestinal cancer, had just suffered a stroke. “Papa, it seems, is doomed,” O’Neill told Boulton. “To have this happen just at the time when the Old Man and I were getting to be such good pals! … I’m all broken up and begin to cry every time the meaning of it all dawns on me.”214

  Far and away the most significant re
sult of this rapprochement for O’Neill was James’s heartfelt confession to his son about the play that had made his fortune and reputation. Monte Cristo, James intoned repeatedly, had been his “curse,” O’Neill wrote of their conversation: “He had fallen for the lure of easy popularity and easy money.” James believed that overall, with his neglected potential and failed investments, “he had made a bad bargain. The money was thrown away, squandered in wild speculations, lost. … The treasures of Monte Cristo are buried deep again—in prairie dog gold mines, in unlubricated wells, in fuelless coal lands—the modern Castles in Spain of pure romance.” “How keenly he felt this in the last years,” O’Neill told George Tyler, “I think I am the only one who knows, the only one he confided in.”215 Before this, of course, James had made this confession to a great many people over his career, including to the tabloid press. But for his son it was a revelation. James’s anguish over his choice inspired O’Neill to write a profoundly illuminating monologue in Long Day’s Journey Into Night wherein James Tyrone divulges his self-loathing to his son Edmund: “I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune” (CP3, 809). “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder,” James asks in somber reflection, “that was worth—” (CP3, 810).