Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  In this way, O’Neill’s method united Elizabethan soliloquy with twentieth-century psychology: the alternatively called “spoken thoughts, inner monologues, thought asides, double dialogue, poetry of the unconscious, Freudian chorus, and silences out loud,”297 the asides embedded in the dialogue recall the psychological theories and “stream of consciousness” concepts found in William James, Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Yet O’Neill wrote one of the play’s reviewers that “these same ideas are age-old to the artist and … any artist who was a good psychologist and had had a varied and sensitive experience with life and all sorts of people could have written S[trange]. I[nterlude]. without ever having heard of Freud, Jung, Adler & Co.”298

  That the characters’ thoughts are conscious, rather than windows into their subconscious, amplifies the dramatic irony, the point at which the audience knows what some characters do not. And while tension builds on the stage, the audience members become more and more aware that their own lives, even in their most intimate relationships, are all too often based on the very same types of falsehoods. Everyday speech takes up less than a third of the script; the remainder consists of inner monologues masked by the superficiality of public speech, and the stage directions are so intricate that the script reads, intentionally, more like a novel than a play. (During rehearsal O’Neill groused to Lawrence Langner that “if the actors weren’t so dumb, they wouldn’t need asides; they’d be able to express the meaning without them.”)299 These thought asides presented a daunting challenge for the director, Philip Moeller, however: just how, precisely, were actors supposed to represent conscious thought without the audience confusing their asides with actual speech? Spotlighting? Voice-overs? Then one day while Moeller was on a train, the conductor pulled the emergency brake. Moeller instinctively clenched, and he looked around to see the other passengers had frozen up too. He’d stumbled on his solution: when an actor delivered an inner monologue, the others must freeze in “arrested motion” or “physical quiet.”300

  The critics, once again, put up their gloves. The majority considered Strange Interlude “the most significant contribution any American has made to the stage” and “a monument in the history of American dramaturgy.” Nearly everyone understood that it was a novel for the stage; and most agreed didn’t all agree with New York World critic Dudley Nichols’s assessment of the result: “It would seem that he has not only written a great American play but the great American novel as well. This is a psychological novel of tremendous power and depth put into the theatre instead of between the covers of a book. It is a great novel without any of the novelist’s padding.”301

  Naysayers were still legion, and the disputes often turned personal. When St. John Ervine accused O’Neill’s asides of being “either an attempt to prevent actors from acting or a sign of laziness in the author,” George Jean Nathan shot back, “With all due respect to friend Ervine, I have the honor to believe that on this occasion he has pulled what may politely be described as a boner.” While one critic asserted that “nine acts of psychopathic fury may weary, but when Mr. O’Neill is the black magician they do not bore,” another fumed, “There were nine acts and one intermission of one hour, during which we craved for chloroform, but got only—soup. Some of those present wore evening dress in the afternoon and others wore afternoon dress in the evening, and neither mattered. The only thing that did matter was the excessive and glutinous boredom of the thing and its bombastic pretence.” Heywood Broun scoffed that the play’s angel Otto Kahn, the Wall Street millionaire and early backer of the Provincetown Players (whom O’Neill jokingly referred to as “Otto the Magnificent, the Great Kahn”), was a “sucker” for financing it.302

  Theater professionals often think it best to ignore reviews of their plays, good or bad, when the show is still in production. Not O’Neill. He pored over his notices with a vigilance that bordered on the pathological, then collected them in enormous scrapbooks.303 Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune reported this fact in what he described as a casual conversation with O’Neill after Strange Interlude premiered: “Among the notable things about Eugene O’Neill is the fact that he is one playwright who does not pretend that he never sees the notices of his plays. He reads them and is interested in them and, heaven knows, he has his likes and dislikes among the local critics. It is only fair to everybody to add that these judgments of his are not necessarily based on the degree of enthusiasm expressed for his works, even though he would object to being used as a sort of injured Belgium in a war between rival viewers.”304

  World War I, in fact, was a fitting metaphor for the rousing war of words fought in the press over Strange Interlude, and the critics ran afoul of one another as Germany had with the Allies over Belgium. In Europe alliances and counter-alliances redrew the map the way O’Neill redrew the map of American theater. (The appearance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, might be regarded as the Treaty of Versailles, simultaneously ending and renewing the age-old battles over O’Neill’s legacy.) “I’m getting awfully callous to the braying, for and against,” O’Neill wrote a few years later to Nathan. “When they knock me, what the devil!, they’re really boosting me with their wholesale condemnations, for the reaction against such nonsense will come soon enough. These tea-pot turmoils at least keep me shaken up and convinced I’m on my way to something.”305

  By this time, 1928, O’Neill had divided his critics into three classes: “Play Reporters,” “Professional Funny Men,” and “the men with proper background or real knowledge of the theater of all time to entitle them to be critics”: “The play reporters just happen to be people who have the job of reporting what happens during the evening, the story of the play and who played the parts. I have always found that these people reported the stories of my plays fairly accurately. The Professional Funny Men are beneath contempt. What they say is only of importance to their own strutting vanities. From the real critics I have always had the feeling that they saw what I was trying to do and whether they praised or blamed, they caught the point.”306

  O’Neill made it a habit to contact “real critics” after encountering what he considered a particularly keen insight into his plays. Joseph Wood Krutch, for instance, placed O’Neill’s melding of the novel and the drama within the broader context of history: “The drama has always seemed the form of expression best suited to an heroic age and the novel the form best suited to a complex and baffled one, since a certain simplicity of presentation has been inseparable from playwriting. … The stage has seemed destined to remain, perforce, content with simple outlines. It has been, in short, a place where only major chords could be struck even though existing in an age which had lost the power to be moved by any but the subtlest and most difficult harmonies.”307 O’Neill wrote Krutch that his remarks had been “deeply gratifying” to him, “especially that you found that there was something of a novel’s comprehensiveness in [Strange Interlude]. What you say about slightness of even the best modern plays is exactly the way I feel. To me they are all totally lacking in all true power and imagination.”308 But by then he’d relinquished his vow to quit the drama for the novel. “No,” he told Krutch, “I think the novelists are worse than the playwrights—they waste more of one’s time!”309

  The play’s inclusion of sexual promiscuity, infidelity, contraception, prostitution, abortion, atheism, near polyandry, and incest provided a bounty of red meat for censors as well as the critics. Manhattan’s ever-faithful attorney general Joab Banton got back in the game; but he found the Theatre Guild far more accommodating than the Triumvirate had been when it came to such bowdlerizing as replacing the word “abortion” with “operation,” which they did.310

  Mayor Malcolm Nichols of Boston banned a long-planned production in his city, labeling the script a “disgusting spectacle of immorality and advocacy of atheism, of domestic infidelity and the destruction of unborn human life.” To allow the play to be p
roduced in Boston, Langner and Helburn again revised the play, this time without O’Neill’s knowledge and far more drastically. “The deletion of a few pages from a great play cannot destroy the whole,” Langner told the Boston Post. “The play does not depend upon mere words for its effect,” Helburn added, “and we can easily cut out every one of the words that the Mayor wishes deleted.” Publicly, Nichols stood firm that regardless of any deletions or revisions “the play in any version glorifies an indefensible standard of conduct and an abject code of morals.” (Langner later accused the mayor of rejecting it because he’d failed to shake them down for $10,000.)311

  Mayor Thomas McGrath of Quincy, a Boston suburb, volunteered his city as an alternative. (Near the theater was a local restaurant owned by one Howard Deering Johnson, as yet unknown among Boston’s elite, who sold enough meals to begin expanding his business into the nation’s largest hotel and restaurant chain, Howard Johnson’s.) When McGrath entered the theater on opening night, September 30, 1929, he was greeted with a grateful ovation from the “ninety-nine and some tenths percent pure Bostonian” audience.312 After the five-and-a-half-hour performance (with a break for dinner at Howard Johnson’s), the cast received fourteen curtain calls. Mayor McGrath was then bombarded for his opinion of the play. Though a citizens’ jury had also attended that night, its judgment was irrelevant. McGrath proclaimed that what he’d learned watching Strange Interlude was “worth a hundred sermons.”313

  Langner and Helburn left in many of the cuts they’d made for Boston, nevertheless, and made further cuts for Philadelphia and elsewhere.314 Providence still banned the play that April 1930 under its “Chastity and Morality” law, a prohibition on theatricals that a committee of locals believed might corrupt the city’s youth.315

  Overall, the “ayes” had won it for Strange Interlude from the start. Performances of its first run sold out so quickly that for months, in an unventilated theater of about nine hundred seats in record-breaking heat, theatergoers chose to stand in back rather than miss out on what had been billed as the must-see cultural event of the season. O’Neill had suspected that Strange Interlude would be his “big bacon-bringer,” but he never anticipated this. “That trends on fanaticism it seems to me,” he mused that April after hearing there were still standees at the performances. “Myself, I wouldn’t stand up 4 1/2 hours to see the original production of the Crucifixion!”316

  Strange Interlude’s Broadway run alone lasted seventeen months and 432 performances, then more in the multiple touring productions that followed, and the book version topped the best-seller list. The play also enjoyed two successful national tours, and, in 1932, was made into an MGM film starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. O’Neill’s pioneering play-as-novel ultimately made him $250,000 richer and won him his third Pulitzer Prize (the prize money was promptly donated to the Authors’ League Fund).317 After this, O’Neill was no longer spoken of as merely “America’s greatest playwright,” a rather unimpressive title at the time, but now as one of the world’s greatest living writers; over the following year, the Nobel Prize committee on literature, eager to place an American on its roster by the late 1920s, added him to their short list.

  On February 7, O’Neill wrote Boulton to say good-bye. He admitted that the triumph of Strange Interlude had passed him by just as the arrival of his mother’s casket from California had deprived him of reveling in the success of The Hairy Ape: “The trouble with my triumphs is that there’s always so much of my own living on my mind at the time I haven’t got any interest left for plays,” he wrote. “‘So ist das Leben,’ I guess. Or at least my ‘leben.’ The power & the glory always pass over—or under—my head.” He was resolute that they “must not see each other again for a long time,” but ended on a conciliatory note: “All my loving friendship to you always!”318

  Boulton had already written him from Bermuda a few days before receiving this. “I am very much in the dark,” she said. “I received a cable from the N.Y. Times saying you had just left for Europe. … I know nothing.”319 Sure enough, without notifying anyone but a solemnly sworn few, and leaving no trace of their destination behind for Boulton, his children, or the press, O’Neill and Monterey had clandestinely sailed for Europe. Their flight to avoid the combustible reactions of his wife’s acrimony and that of the scandal-mongering press would last for more than three years.

  By the late 1920s and well into the 1930s, American dramatists could claim a leading role in world theater. They’d largely surpassed Europeans in experimental and socially conscious plays, with the singular exceptions of George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey. But two major forces held them back: the Great Depression and Hollywood. Over seventy theaters were built in the Broadway theater district by the late 1920s. But when the economic crash of 1929 dammed the flood of box office sales and drowned out real estate values, many producers shut their doors and resigned themselves to bankruptcy. At the same time audiences, broke as they were, crowded the movie houses for a soothing, relatively inexpensive retreat from reality.

  While many American playwrights did venture west to Southern California, tempted by lucrative contracts with Hollywood studios, the more independent minded of them arose from the Depression and produced socially conscious theater companies such as the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, and the Actors’ Repertory Company. And given that so many of the financial backers of the 1920s had lost their fortunes in the wake of the market crash, after the election of 1932, at the urging of the new first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, government subsidies had begun to fill the void.

  A New Deal initiative called the Federal Theatre Project was established, importantly creating a separate unit, the Negro Theatre Project. For a time, O’Neill disparaged much of this work as charging willy-nilly through “blind alleys—theatre for sociology’s sake, partisan politics’ sake, provincial patriotism’s sake, etc.”; but later, especially after the outbreak of World War II, he’d begun to respect the dramas produced by the project tremendously.

  Throughout most of the Depression and Word War II, O’Neill cloistered himself outside the glare of the public eye for twelve long years, from 1934 to 1946. “There is something to be said for the Mad Twenties,” he wistfully declared in 1941. “They were sometimes crazy in the right way.” O’Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, a time when, astonishingly, he hadn’t yet reached his highest level of artistic achievement. Meanwhile, during O’Neill’s long interlude of silence, the younger generation—Clifford Odets, Sidney Kingsley, William Saroyan, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson—had started to unleash, if in fits and starts, new methods and perspectives onto the American stage.

  O’Neill’s “Mad Twenties” rejection of naturalistic plays as “too easy” turned out to be short-lived, as what he chose to write (or at least complete) through the 1930s and early 1940s belongs in that tradition, while also building upon the psychological turn of 1920s “high modernism.” In response to the Depression and World War II, American drama as a whole increasingly coupled the social torments of the era with their damaging psychological effects. By the 1940s, given O’Neill’s pioneering work and innovations in the fields of physiology, sociology, and psychology, American playwrights rejected the false dichotomies of good and evil, hero and villain, right and wrong—a moral and artistic repudiation O’Neill had always embodied, and one that has pervaded American drama well into the twenty-first century.

  Tennessee Williams’s breakout play The Glass Menagerie was produced in 1944, and sophisticated theatergoers, especially those of the younger generation, cried out for more. Williams, to whom O’Neill wrote a congratulatory note after A Streetcar Named Desire appeared in 1948, would speak of O’Neill, even after the ascendancy of such dramatic talents as Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller, as his only true American superior. “O’Neill gave birth to American theatre,” Williams said, “and died for it.”

  ACT IV: Full Fathom Five

  It was a great mistake, my being born a man,
I would have been made much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

  —EDMUND TYRONE IN Long Day’s Journey Into Night

  Uncharted Seas

  Once aboard the S.S. Berengaria, Neill and Monterey never exited their cabin over the rough transatlantic crossing, his first voyage to Europe since 1911. After scanning the passenger list, O’Neill noted that there were several people onboard who might recognize him; and though he’d already made the precaution of signing on under an assumed name, he still badly wanted to avoid the press. Gazing out the porthole of his cabin, he began to cry uncontrollably, then spoke his thoughts aloud to Monterey, as if enacting a scene from Strange Interlude: “It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “to leave behind so many you love, everything that means anything to you.” “Well, Carlotta,” she thought to herself as he wept, “you’ve let yourself in for it this time.”1

  Safely ashore in Great Britain and as yet undetected, they checked into the Berkeley, a five-star hotel in London. O’Neill reveled in the anonymity far from the “frazzle of New York.” “When we’ll return to U.S. I don’t know,” he reported back to Kenneth Macgowan, “and somehow I can’t seem to care.” After years of uncertainty and despair, O’Neill roamed about the British capital with Monterey on his arm, “foolish and goggle-eyed with joy in a honeymoon that is a thousand times more poignant and sweet and ecstatic because it comes at an age when one’s past—particularly a past such as mine—gives one the power to appreciate what happiness means and how rare it is and how humbly grateful one should be for it.” He now felt a cosmic love for Monterey, “sappy” as he knew it sounded, as if some mystical God had taken pity and was repaying him for the cruel practical jokes of his past.2 “It is all deeply beautiful, this—the dream come true!” he wrote Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. “The Hairy Ape at last ‘belongs.’ That this should come about through the love of the woman who took the part of the girl in that play whose meeting with our hero first jolted him out of himself is a coincidence with an amusing reverse-english, what?”3