Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
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The couple’s frequent skirmishes that winter, 1922–23, escalated into outright warfare. O’Neill began accusing Boulton of having or at the very least desiring to have affairs. It was the indisputable nadir of O’Neill’s decades-long battle with alcoholism, and in the aftermath of his most abusive episodes, O’Neill would guiltily confess to his wife, according to her, that he’d come to believe that “marriage is a gotdamn thing. You become part of another person, the two of you become one person, and it’s frightening. When you realize that you start trying to beat your way out.” “Then the horrible thing happened,” reported Boulton’s would-be chronicler Max Wylie about an episode she would relate to him personally. “After a lot of unprovoked abuse, [O’Neill] suddenly snatched up a large stack of papers and flung them into the fire. And she knew what he was doing to her: he was burning up her novel! She fought and screamed, but he was too strong for her. He held her until it seemed quite consumed. Then he left.”47
On another occasion, O’Neill cut up photographs of Boulton, then proceeded to maul irreparably what Boulton considered her “greatest treasure”—a portrait of her father, Teddy Boulton, by the renowned painter, and Teddy’s mentor at the Arts Students’ League of Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins. (Teddy and Eakins, among other collaborations, had cast Walt Whitman’s death mask in 1892.) An early snow had just begun to fall that November 1922, as Boulton and Shane were returning home.48 As the two of them proceeded up the walk, Boulton told Wylie, O’Neill “burst out the front door in a rage, full of his seafaring profanity.” He was obviously drunk, so she ignored him; but while putting Shane to bed, she heard from downstairs “the most awful clattering and banging, and a chair turned over.” Then the front door slammed, and from Shane’s window Boulton saw her husband “rubbing something in the snow.”
I was still upstairs when a horrifying thought struck me. I couldn’t credit my own suspicion. I whirled down the stairs, looking up over the mantel. Father’s portrait was not there. Gene was trying to smear off the face in the snow. I ran out but it was too late. The paint was so hard set it wouldn’t smear, and on this fence post he was mercilessly shredding the canvas, banging it up and down till it was a mass of tattered ribbons. … Gene knew I loved this portrait more than anything we’d ever had in our home. … Gene knew how to hurt me. He knew how to hurt everybody. I think he was hurting so much inside himself, that periodically he had to lash out. After such enormities, he was so contrite, he was embarrassing to be around. … If he hadn’t had his plays in which to play out his principal hatreds, I feel very sure he’d have found his way to an asylum before he was thirty.49
Boulton’s telling of this ghastly “enormity” has been met with deserved skepticism.50 Wylie, who related the incident, has elsewhere been proven unreliable; Boulton also contradicted the account in a different interview, saying that O’Neill destroyed the portrait while she was away on a visit to New York.51 It’s therefore been an open question whether Eakins had painted a portrait of Boulton’s father at all. In terms of its existence and destruction, Boulton wasn’t confabulating.
Thomas Eakins’s painting was a small, ten-by-fourteen-inch portrait of Teddy’s head. Teddy’s friend Frances J. Ziegler, also a student of Eakins’s, recalled that Teddy adored the portrait, refusing to sell it even though he was very poor.52 Agnes Boulton held onto the savaged remnants until at least 1931, at which time she informed Eakins’s biographer Lloyd Goodrich that the picture was “badly injured, so much so that I doubt it can ever be restored.”53 Another Eakins portrait of Teddy has survived (and for the first time is published here).54
The stranglehold that alcoholism had taken over O’Neill by the early 1920s is nearly impossible to overstate. Though it’s often been said that once O’Neill finished a play, he would go on a binge, during this period it was precisely the reverse: O’Neill would stop binging just long enough to write a play.55 During this first winter at Brook Farm, O’Neill became so unwound that he appears to have even broken his rule to abstain from drink while writing. “I don’t think anything worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk or even half-drunk when he wrote it,” he told Barrett Clark. “The legend that I wrote my plays when I was drunk is absurd,” he went on. “It was when I was not writing that I drank. I’d drink for a month and then go out and snap out of it by myself. It was during these periods that I wrote.” Welded was almost certainly an exception; but either way, drunk or sober, the script reveals two profoundly fragile egos, and Boulton verified that its fictional marriage was a “carbon copy” of their own.56
A sketch of Theodore “Teddy” Boulton by Thomas Eakins. Another portrait of Teddy Boulton by Eakins was destroyed by O’Neill in a drunken rage at Brook Farm.
(COURTESY OF THE WILLIAM INNES HOMER PAPERS, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, NEWARK)
Welded, in O’Neill’s words, depicts “a man and woman, lovers and married, [who] enact their spiritual struggle to possess one the other. I wanted to give the impression of the world shut out, just of two human beings struggling to break through an inner darkness.”57 The principals are Michael Cape, a playwright, and his wife, Eleanor, an actress. The couple has been married, like O’Neill and Boulton, for five years. Eleanor looks just like Boulton: tall, with high cheekbones and a mass of dark hair.58 Michael is nothing less than his creator’s reflection; this is, revealingly, O’Neill on O’Neill: “His unusual face is a harrowed battlefield of super-sensitiveness, the features at war with one another—the forehead of a thinker, the eyes of a dreamer, the nose and mouth of a sensualist. One feels a powerful imagination tinged with somber sadness—a driving force which can be sympathetic and cruel at the same time. There is something tortured about him—a passionate tension, a self-protecting, arrogant defiance of life and his own weakness, a deep need for love as a faith in which to relax” (CP2, 235).
Over the course of the play, Michael arrives at the revelation that a perfect union is an unreasonable goal, that love and strife go hand in hand, particularly when embodied by two such passionate, artistic-minded individuals as himself and Eleanor. Michael receives this life-altering vision on life and love from a highly improbable source, a streetwalker channeling the marital advice of Friedrich Nietzsche: “You got to laugh, ain’t you?” the prostitute advises Michael about his life’s seemingly intolerable agonies. “You got to loin to like it!” (CP2, 267).
O’Neill derived many of his views on women from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a cult classic of early existentialist thought. “This book,” Boulton said, “had more influence on Gene than any other single book he ever read. It was a sort of Bible to him, and he kept it by his bedside in later years as others might that sacred book.” Nietzsche, she added, “at the time moved his emotion rather than his mind.”59 O’Neill’s destitute emotional health that winter, and the play it gave impetus to, points to one of Nietzsche’s chapters in particular: “Child and Marriage.” The individualist “Superman” Zarathustra preaches to a spellbound acolyte that “even your best love is only an enraptured simile and a painful ardor. It is a torch to light you to loftier paths for you. Over and beyond yourselves you shall love one day. Thus learn first to love. And for that you had to drain the bitter cup of your love. Bitterness is in the cup even of the best love: thus doth it cause longing for the Superman.”60 O’Neill doubtless took Welded’s working title, “Made in Heaven” (as in “a match made in heaven”) from this chapter as well, since it’s there we find Zarathustra sneering at the treacly cliché.61 After his evening with the prostitute, Michael returns home to Eleanor, and his monologue indicates that O’Neill himself had accepted Nietzsche’s dictum that no marriage is made in heaven. But he adds the intrinsically sadomasochistic line that in the coming years, “we’ll torture and tear, and clutch for each other’s souls!—fight—fail and hate again … but!—fail with pride—with joy!” (CP2, 275).
O’Neill and Boulton did strive to keep their marriage intact over the coming years, and would have another child; but
their efforts ultimately failed with neither pride nor joy. The rest of O’Neill’s prophecy held true. In his heartrending breakup letter to Boulton, he told her that their bond had been hopelessly undermined by “moments of a very horrible hate [that] have been more and more apparent, a poisonous bitterness and resentment, a cruel desire to wound, rage and frustration and revenge. This has killed our chance for happiness together. There have been too many insults to pride and self-respect, too many torturing scenes that one may forgive but which something in one cannot forget.” Known as O’Neill’s “I love you, I hate you” play, Welded is built upon these “torturing scenes.” O’Neill inscribed Boulton’s copy with Michael Cape’s closing plea to Eleanor: “I love you! Forgive me all I’ve ever done, all I’ll ever do.”62
Moving in with his brother’s family at Brook Farm was never an option for Jim O’Neill. His famous sibling could neither write nor maintain any semblance of sobriety with him around. Jim had also come to detest Boulton, believing that she’d turned his brother against him. (Boulton, he thought, resented him after he’d been bequeathed sole ownership of some property James had owned in Glendale, California.) Harold de Polo invited him to stay at his house in nearby Darien, Connecticut, a favor that de Polo and his wife Helen almost immediately came to regret. “He had the wittiest, most ruthless tongue I ever knew,” de Polo remembered of Jim’s insufferable disposition when drunk. “He’d find out your weaknesses and play on them all night. The next morning he couldn’t remember what he’d done and would ask, ‘Was I terrible?’ ‘Yes, you were.’ ‘Christ! It’s the old spirit of the perverse in me again.’” Jim’s ruthless tongue wasn’t his only threat to their peace of mind. One night when de Polo was out of town, Jim was smoking a cigarette in bed and accidentally set his mattress on fire; but as he was too inebriated to do anything about it, Helen de Polo had to drag the burning hulk outside herself.63
O’Neill had just added the finishing touches on Welded when he was informed that his brother had been nearly arrested, on February 16, 1923, in Stamford, Connecticut, at a performance of “Anna Christie.” “Stinko profundo,” as usual, Jim had abruptly leapt to his feet in mid-performance and bellowed, “Why shouldn’t my brother, the author, know all about whores!” The actors fell silent and peered out into the dark auditorium. As if trying to steal the limelight while his younger brother Gene was—yet again—the center of attention, Jim then screamed that Agnes Boulton was a whore and, turning to Helen de Polo, rounded off his trade by calling her one too. De Polo put an end to Jim’s outburst by roughly escorting him out of the theater and onto a train to New London. After O’Neill got off the phone with de Polo, O’Neill wired the family’s estate attorney, C. Hadley Hull, about his brother’s “most disgraceful scene” at Stamford: “Any measures however drastic you see fit to take to restrain him in New London will have my full approval.”64
The O’Neills returned to Peaked Hill Bar that summer just before Jim checked into a mental asylum in Norwich, Connecticut. Word around New London had it that he’d been forcibly hauled off in a straitjacket. By August, O’Neill wrote Saxe Commins from Provincetown that although his older brother had been released from the asylum, he soon after went “nuts complete” and was now incarcerated in another sanitarium. This was Riverlawn in Paterson, New Jersey, where Jim regained his sanity but wallowed in the throes of “alcoholic neuritis.” He’d also gone nearly blind from the Prohibition rotgut he’d been swilling by the gallon, and the Riverlawn doctors informed O’Neill that Jim would be lucky to recover 50 percent of his eyesight. “What the hell can be done about him is more than I can figure,” O’Neill wrote Commins. “He’ll only get drunk again, I guess, after he gets out and then he’ll be all blind.”65
Jim had fouled up their family estate too while under the sway of a notorious pair of gamblers he hung around with in New London. Hadley Hull had warned O’Neill about Jim’s association with the swindlers back in mid-November. At first, O’Neill ignored the lawyer’s pleas to intervene; when he responded a month later, he made some petty excuses, then gave up and confessed, “I don’t know what to say … It seems there is nothing I can do about it. The last I heard of him he was in pretty bad shape. In New York, he phoned to me, but I have not seen him. … And I have learned by experience that the more I should urge him toward one course of action, the more obstinate and determined he will be to do the opposite. So what can I do?”66
James O’Neill Jr. died from alcoholism on November 8, 1923, at first with a stroke, then arteriosclerosis and cerebral apoplexy. As a result, O’Neill inherited $140,000,the lion’s share of which was caught up in devalued real estate and outstanding legal and administrative fees.67 But on the same day Jim had died, his “Frankenstein,” as Jamie Tyrone calls his brother Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, had embarked on a serious bender of his own.
O’Neill’s latest spree was instigated by a weekend visit from the writer Malcolm Cowley, his wife, Peggy Baird, and the poet Hart Crane. O’Neill and Cowley knew each other peripherally from the Village, when Cowley had played a black ghost in The Emperor Jones and a white ghost in a revival of Where the Cross Is Made. “Then Gene stopped writing plays with ghosts in them and my stage career came to an end,” Cowley joked later. “It was a minor example of how his decisions affected all of us.”68 O’Neill was deeply interested in Crane’s poetry and invited him to Brook Farm after meeting him in New York the week before. (Crane wouldn’t find out until later that O’Neill considered him at the time the finest poet in America.)69 O’Neill was only thirty-five, though his dark hair had a premature fringe of gray around the ears; yet Cowley already thought of himself and Crane as emissaries to the old guard from the upcoming literary generation.
Cowley’s party was met at the train station by the O’Neills’ chauffeur, Vincent Bedini. Arriving at Brook Farm, they were greeted at the door by a Japanese butler named Kawa and Finn Mac Cool, a massive Irish wolfhound “the size of a three-month-old calf,” that O’Neill had named for a warrior of Irish legend.70 O’Neill was on the wagon, and to the disappointment of his parched young guests, no alcohol was served at dinner. He explained that he was working on a play about New England (Desire Under the Elms) but didn’t want to discuss it further until he was finished.
On Saturday night, O’Neill ushered Cowley and Crane down to the cellar, “the only part of the house,” Cowley thought to himself, “that seems to arouse his pride of ownership.” The playwright motioned into the darkness at a rack of three fifty-gallon casks of cider that Bedini had distilled using apples from their private orchard: hard cider, “the Wine of the Puritans.” “Let’s broach a cask,” Crane suggested. At this, O’Neill became visibly agitated and said he was worried Bedini wouldn’t approve because the cider hadn’t properly fermented. Cowley knew something about cider distillation and convinced his host that early batches often turn out best. Stripped of resolve, O’Neill mounted the stairs to the kitchen and returned to the cellar with a pitcher and three glasses. “Gene takes a sip of cider,” Cowley remembered, “holds it in his mouth apprehensively, gives his glass a gloomy look, then empties the glass in two nervous swallows.”71
The next day, Boulton drove off with Cowley, Baird, and Crane to a friend’s house in Woodstock, New York, and by the time she’d returned, O’Neill was gone. A week’s time passed after his first glass of cider before she found him in a room above the Hell Hole and there informed him of Jim’s death. Though Jim had turned sour toward Boulton, she’d dutifully made the arrangements for his casket, funeral service, and burial. Pleading a hangover, just as Jim had with their mother’s funeral the year before, O’Neill refused to make an appearance at his brother’s sparsely attended funeral on Twenty-Eighth Street. Nor was he present when Jim was buried beside their father, mother, and brother in the family plot.
“It was a shame,” O’Neill wrote a schoolmate later. “[Jim] and I were terribly close to each other, but after my mother’s death in 1922 he gave up all hold on li
fe and simply wanted to die as soon as possible. He had never found his place. He had never belonged. I hope like my ‘Hairy Ape’ he does now.” In this way, Jim’s death led to a kind of catharsis; but it also left O’Neill feeling terribly alone: “I have lost my Father, Mother and only brother within the past four years,” he wrote his Gaylord Farm nurse Mary Clark. “Now I’m the only O’Neill of our branch left. But I’ve two sons to ‘carry on.’ However, neither of them will be pure Irish, so I must consider myself the real last one.”72
Back in the spring of 1922, after the Provincetown Players had silently disbanded, O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones resolved to form a new kind of experimental theater. For one thing, O’Neill insisted that the old model of a communal theater should be thrown out entirely. Macgowan, he said, “ought to be absolute head with an absolute veto. To hell with democracy!” Bobby Jones would design the sets and direct, and O’Neill would write plays, supervise the productions, and make artistic policy. Fitzie Fitzgerald was hired as their business manager,73 Jimmy Light as stage manager, and Cleon Throckmorton would continue his work alongside Jones as technical director.74 They signed the lease to take over the Macdougal Street theater, now officially the Provincetown Playhouse, in the summer of 1923, but only with incontrovertible assurance that the Players never reorganize. Macgowan wanted to co-opt the name Provincetown Players, but O’Neill stridently rebuffed the idea. “I won’t be mixed up in any organization which has to straddle the old and new,” he warned his friend. “Make it an entirely fresh effort! To hell with the old name! Any name will do if you’ve got the stuff.”75
The unexpected death of Jig Cook on January 14, 1924, was followed closely by an acrimonious letter from Susan Glaspell to Macdougal Street demanding that the name “Provincetown Playhouse” be replaced. The internecine war among the former Players had already been ignited in the summer of 1922 by Cook, who considered the hangers-on a voracious flock of “carrion crows after the sweet stink of that carcass.” “Bide time on Gene,” he’d instructed Kenton. “His mood toward us was bad. It is up to him to come to us again—if he needs us. He ought sometime to see a light about [Arthur] Hopkins and us—but he may never see.”76