Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Monterey took her husband’s drinking in stride at first; it was only beer after all. But things took a turn for the worse at their Christmas Eve “fête.” “We have a bottle of Champagne to drink to Christmas!” she wrote. “Boll + Gene are very gay, play Rosie, sing + dance! I notice Gene keeps going up stairs—finally I go up to see if he is ill—I find him drinking out of a bottle of whiskey!! I nearly wept. This is what I had suspected for weeks! He should never have had any beer or wine—it only leads to whiskey, + whiskey leads to the usual excess—sickness + God knows what! When he sees me he laughs + goes downstairs with the bottle. He and Boll finish the night drinking.”202

  O’Neill kept on drinking whiskey with abandon for weeks. Though he’d first hid it from Monterey, drinking only in his study, by late February 1935, he was defiantly swilling it right in front of her and straight from the bottle. That same winter, a maid at Casa Genotta overheard an argument erupt between her otherwise emotionally remote employers. O’Neill shouted something inaudible, then said, “There’ll be a murder!” For the next two days, the distraught Monterey sat at the dining room table “but wouldn’t eat, with the tears rolling down her face.”203

  On a trip to New York that winter, O’Neill hid bottles in several places in the bedroom, bathroom, and closet of his hotel room. On February 21, he was admitted by his physician, Dr. George Draper, to Doctors Hospital in New York for several days in order Draper bluntly informed Monterey, “to get the whiskey out of him.” “I am a wreck, + ill,” she wrote in her diary. “Haven’t eaten all day + had no real rest for nights. Weeping + can’t stop.”204 (After O’Neill’s death, although only a few episodes can be verified, Monterey swore to a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School that O’Neill never completely stopped drinking as people believed; rather, according to the psychiatrist, Dr. Albert Rothenberg, he “engaged in periodic alcoholic binges” to the end of his life.)205

  That March 1935, O’Neill was back on the wagon at Casa Genotta; but he then began suffering from a series of illnesses, including gastritis, prostate problems, and steadily worsening hand tremors that made writing all but impossible. Marshaling his resolve nonetheless, he resumed work on A Touch of the Poet, a four-act play about an Irish-American immigrant family called the Melodys (a family name O’Neill borrowed from a black prizefighter from Boston, Honey Melody).206 Over the next year and a half, he labored on scenarios and drafts for what he’d begun to call A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed—an immensely ambitious Cycle (which he always spelled with a capital “C”) of historical plays that would include A Touch of the Poet, but mainly follow the progress of a New England family, the Harfords, who intermarry with the Melodys. The guiding theme of A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed originates from one line in the Bible, Matthew 16:26, which for O’Neill summed up the full sweep of American history: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

  O’Neill fervently believed that “success” in the American idiom was merely another word for “possession.” Through this possessiveness Americans had become dispossessed of their authentic selves, only to repeat the process in order to stamp out the painful disenchantment that follows. One draft of the final play, The Hair of the Dog, ends with lines that equate the drunkenness of financial success with actual drunkenness from whiskey: “That’s right! A hair of the dog that bit you! … and they’re all the same dog, and his name is Greed of Living and when he bites you there’s a fever comes and a great thirst and a great drinking to kill it, and a grand drunk, and a terrible hangover and headache and remorse of conscience—and a sick empty stomach without greed or appetite. But take a hair of the dog and the sun will rise again for you—and the appetite and the thirst will come back, and you can forget—and begin all over!”207

  A Touch of the Poet, the only Cycle play O’Neill would complete to his satisfaction, takes place in 1828, the year Andrew Jackson defeated the incumbent presidential candidate John Quincy Adams. The race was culturally significant in that Jackson had been the son of a poor Irishman while Adams was born into one of the most prominent families in Massachusetts. Although O’Neill later stated that “the one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” he appeared to contradict himself in declaring, on a separate occasion, that “the battle of moral forces in the New England scene is what I feel closest to as an artist.”208 A Touch of the Poet reconciles this presumable inconsistency more than any of his works.

  Before the play’s action, O’Neill’s Irish antihero Con Melody has emigrated with his wife, Nora, and daughter Sara to Massachusetts. Melody, an alcoholic, bought a tavern on a plot of land that promised to serve the railroads; but the rails were never laid down and the tavern fell into disrepair. A former soldier for the British during the Peninsular War (1808–14), Melody proudly wears a military uniform to commemorate his feats of bravery at the Battle of Talavera and quotes poetry while bemoaning the treachery of those around him. He puts on aristocratic airs—a “con,” since in fact he’s the son of a swindling Irish “shebeen keeper,” or unlicensed publican—and habitually poses erect before a large mirror reciting, as his creator might, lines from Byron’s “Childe Harold” to bolster his wounded pride:

  I have not loved the World, nor the World me;

  I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed

  To its idolatries a patient knee,

  Nor coined my cheek to smiles,—nor cried aloud

  In worship of an echo: in the crowd

  They could not deem me one of such—I stood

  Among them, but not of them. (CP3, 203)

  Years of acting the part of the landed gentry are shattered when the lawyer of a prominent member of the Yankee establishment named Henry Harford offers Melody a bribe to put an end to Sara Melody and his son Simon’s engagement. Melody storms the Harford estate with a few Irish cronies to challenge Harford to a duel; when a donnybrook ensues, the police arrive, overpower him, and lock him up. Deborah Harford, Simon’s mother, witnesses the brawl from an upstairs window. Just as Mildred Douglas destroys Yank Smith’s inflated ego with the words “filthy beast,” Deborah undermines Melody’s pretense by merely viewing his unseemly behavior. Back at the tavern, Melody’s pose has been stripped away, and he resigns himself to the role of a drunken Irish peasant. In the final scene, Sara, who’d secretly admired her father’s pride in the face of hardship, remarks with dismay, “He’s beaten at last and he wants to stay beaten” (CP3, 279).

  By March 18, 1936, O’Neill had finished a complete draft of A Touch of the Poet but held off reworking it and added to other Cycle plays instead. He’d first envisioned his cycle as five plays, with A Touch of the Poet as the first, then he expanded it into seven, then eight, then nine, then finally eleven plays. With this Cycle, he wanted to mete out, in his words, “the development of psychological characterization in relation to changing times—what the railroads, what the panics did to change people’s lives.”209 The time setting, 1775 to 1930, would cover America’s evolution from the War of Independence to the Great Depression, and the Cycle as a whole would serve as an allegory of American greed. His scheme was to develop a “special repertoire company” to perform the plays at two per season for five and a half seasons. “Try a Cycle sometime,” he wrote Lawrence Langner, “I advise you—that is, I would advise you to, if I hated you! A lady bearing quintuplets is having a debonair, carefree time of it by comparison.”210

  That June, after Eugene Jr. had completed his doctorate in classics at Yale University, which then offered him a teaching position, O’Neill wrote to congratulate his son but also apologize that he shouldn’t expect further financial aid from him. “Whatever income I have from investments,” he said, “is more than abolished by the alimony dole,” and he knew his Cycle wouldn’t improve the situation for several years. “You will also appreciate,” he said, “that I have many low days of O’Neill heebie-jeebies when I feel very old and tired, and doubtful of mys
elf and my work, and wonder why in hell something in me drove me on to undertake such a hellish job.”211

  O’Neill and Monterey, by the summer of 1936, were fed up with Georgia’s climate: “A hell of a hot oppressive summer here,” he wrote in mid-August. “Carlotta and I are neck and neck toward the Olympic and World’s sweating record! We just continually drip and drop.”212 That month, Sophus Winther arrived at Casa Genotta with his wife, Eline. O’Neill deeply admired Winther’s Eugene O’Neill: A Critical Study (1934), which he felt explained his work almost better than he could himself. “What particularly strikes me,” he’d written Winther upon first reading the manuscript, “is that you have so illuminatingly revealed the relationship of the plays to the mental and spiritual background of their time, and shown that background as inseparable from the work—something no one else has so far troubled to do except sketchily, yet which is so essential to any true comprehension of what I have attempted to accomplish.”213

  Before their first day was out, the Winthers had convinced O’Neill and Monterey to abandon Casa Genotta for the cooler climate of their hometown, Seattle, Washington.214 By October the Winthers found a rental, and after a short stop in New York, the O’Neills boarded the Twentieth-Century Limited westward. They arrived in Seattle on November 3 and moved into a house in Magnolia Bluff, a colony on the city’s outskirts overlooking Puget Sound. Soon after they’d settled in, at seven thirty on the morning of November 12, Winther notified O’Neill by phone that he’d just become the second American, after Sinclair Lewis, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first American dramatist, and the last to date, to be awarded the honor.

  Pandora’s Box

  “The morning is a Bedlam!” Monterey exclaimed in her diary on the day of the announcement: “Associated Press, United Press, … International News all call for interviews + photographs—head of the Swedish newspaper—man phones from N.Y.—San Francisco—wires from Geo. Jean, Crouse, Madden, H.W., Cerf, Shane—radio man furious because Gene won’t speak over radio! We are both worn out. It isn’t easy to protect Gene from all these people!”215 O’Neill briefly considered refusing the prize, in part because he feared that the world’s greatest literary honor might lead to complacency and hamper his creativity. The anarchist in him feared a more terrifying prospect: the patina of being labeled an “establishment” writer.

  “Don’t wish the Nobel on me!” he wrote Harry Weinberger back in 1934, after the lawyer had informed him that he was still on the short list. “My strong personal hunch is that it’s a jinx (except for old men), that it puts you on a spot, and that I’ve been made into a too-respectable, stuffed-shirt eminent literary personage already without the Nobel piled on it.” O’Neill did accept it, of course, and with reasonable grace, but he relayed his anxiety over the prize to George Jean Nathan and appealed to his friend to persuade the New York Drama Critics’ Circle not to ask him to appear at its ceremonies and thereby put him in the awkward position of declining. “I feel it’s very punk stuff of me to appear as the Dean of Drama who lays on the hands and contributes the official blessing on the prize-giving. You know what I mean—the venerable Stuffed-Shirt, whom the mobs get to assume is dead because venerated. … [I] am by no means dead yet.”216

  “Naturally, I am happy,” the forty-eight-year-old playwright said to one of dozens of reporters clamoring for an interview. “I feel like a horse that has just been given a blue ribbon.” In a letter to Kenneth Macgowan, however, his equine analogy was applied more truthfully: “I’m like an ancient cab horse that has had a blue ribbon pinned on his tail—too physically weary to turn round and find out if it’s good to eat, or what.” O’Neill also geniunely believed the prize should have gone to Theodore Dreiser. When the announcement arrived, he told the New York Times, “I thought perhaps it would go to Dreiser. He deserves it.”217 Upon receiving a congratulatory note from Dreiser himself, his response was one of heartfelt thanks and a touch of contrition: “You are one of the very few I really wanted to hear from. … I can say to you with entire sincerity and truth, from my head and heart both, that I would take a great deal more satisfaction in this prize if you were among those who had had it before me. As it is, I have a sneaking feeling of guilt—as if I had pinched something which I know damned well should, in justice, be yours.”218

  After seven months of toil on the historical Cycle, O’Neill was too exhausted to attend the Nobel ceremony in December. Besides, he and Monterey had just made the transcontinental journey to the Pacific, and they refused to go through the ordeal in reverse, with a transatlantic crossing on top of that. “I am not physically or mentally up to the strain of being a guest of honor,” he wrote the American embassy in Stockholm. “I would simply crack up badly.”219

  In his acceptance letter to the Nobel committee, O’Neill graciously asserted that the award spoke less about his own career than the evolution of American drama as a whole.220 Though he did feel strongly that the new European acceptance of American playwrights was necessary for them to reach “adulthood,” he also told the playwright Russel Crouse that this section of his letter was “replete with amiable phonus bolonus.” With few exceptions, he said, none of his American colleagues gave him sufficient credit for “[busting] the old dogmas wide open and [leaving] them free to do anything they wanted in any way they wanted. … My U.S. colleagues are, speaking in general, cheap shit-heels!”221 In fact, many top American playwrights did write to congratulate him, including, as well as Crouse, Edward Sheldon, S. N. Behrman, George Middleton, and Sidney Howard. The chief culprit O’Neill had in mind here was the Pulitzer Prize–winning Maxwell Anderson, who hadn’t written, proving, to O’Neill at least, as he told George Jean Nathan, that “that guy is just another cheaply-envious shit-heel … a lousy sport.”222

  O’Neill’s acceptance letter ends with a heartfelt dedication of the prize to his well-acknowledged “Master,” the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. It was a sincere tribute, but had the unfortunate effect of reopening old wounds: his line that Strindberg was the “greatest genius of all modern dramatists” mainly served as an awkward reminder to the Nobel committee that it had never given the prize to its own country’s brightest literary star.223 Along with the Nobel gold medal, O’Neill was awarded $45,000, which was reportedly double what other recipients had received, since there had been no prize for literature awarded in 1935.224

  Although the Nobel committee cited several of his plays, from The Moon of the Caribbees through Days Without End, it was Mourning Becomes Electra that had tipped the scales. The committee singled out the epic Civil War trilogy as “the author’s grandest work … a masterly example of constructive ability and elaborate motivation of plot, and one that is surely without a counterpart in the whole range of latter-day drama.” Though the trilogy had opened in the United States five years earlier, it had remained fresh in the minds of European audiences, running triumphantly in theaters across the continent throughout the 1930s (and then well into the war years). A Swedish production of Mourning Becomes Electra was even enacted at the Nobel ceremonies. Later, when Theresa Helburn excluded the trilogy from the list of the Guild’s finest productions, O’Neill complained to her, “Why, Christ, compared to it, a lot of the plays on your list are, as far as fine drama is concerned, merely things to hang on a hook in a backwoods privy!”225

  O’Neill and Monterey stayed in Seattle for only about a month before heading down to San Francisco, the city of Monterey’s youth. For them, the Pacific Northwest had lived up to its reputation for rainy weather, refreshing though it might have been after Sea Island’s suffocating heat. “Seattle does seem damp,” he wrote Nathan. “I toured to a town, last week, where they usually have 180 inches of rain a year and the milkman frequently makes his rounds in a canoe.”226

  Once checked in at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, O’Neill began suffering from severe abdominal pain, and on December 26 he was admitted for observation to the Merritt Hospital in Oakland. His appendix was remo
ved three days later. “Lucky I didn’t go to Sweden!” he said. “My appendix would probably have burst as I was making my speech at the Nobel banquet, and ruined the occasion.” A swift recovery seemed assured, but then his condition plummeted unexpectedly, first from a prostate-kidney infection, then a burst abscess. The latter, O’Neill said, “so poisoned me that they had to inject everything but T.N.T. to keep me from passing out for good.”227

  Monterey, who’d taken the room next door, was herself struck down by flu and nearly caught pneumonia. During their convalescence at the hospital, they both took a shine to two of the nurses, Kathryne “Kaye” Albertoni and Maxine Edie Benedict; and the O’Neills hired both of them on and off over the following years. “If I was around him,” Albertoni recalled, “I never said do this or do that. I’d always ask him, ‘What would you like to do?’ So I think he respected that. Don’t push. Don’t push. And in the mornings when we had breakfast if he didn’t want to talk, it’s okay. Don’t talk. So maybe he had that respect for me. I think so.”228

  Monterey returned to Sea Island to oversee the sale of the house while O’Neill remained in the hospital. Taking advantage of his brief bachelorhood, he enticed Albertoni to free him from his hospital bed incarceration for a day and accompany him to Jack London’s legendary old waterfront hangout in Oakland, Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon.229 When the doctors finally released him, he’d been in their care for two and a half months.230 Once again, they ordered eight months to a year of compulsory rest. The Cycle would have to wait.