Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
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13. Quoted in Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 34–35.
14. Edmund was of course named for the Irish statesman Edmund Burke (the child’s middle name was Burke), but the fact remains: given that Edmund was referred to as Edmund, James O’Neill made the connection to his stage character singularly clear. He also made it a habit to name his properties in New London after his character, such as Monte Cristo Cottage on Pequot Avenue and Monte Cristo Garage at the top of Union Street, where the words “Monte Cristo” are still inlaid above the garage doors in red brick.
15. Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, 100.
16. Quoted in Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, March 31, 1885, 8.
17. “Autograph Manuscript, 1 page,” Hammerman Collection, www.eoneill.com/manuscripts/27200.htm.
18. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 24.
19. George C. Tyler, Whatever Goes Up: The Hazardous Fortunes of a Natural Born Gambler (Brooklyn: Braunworth, 1934), 92–93.
20. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 671, note “Of the Indian”; Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “Casual Notes on O’Neill, the Writer,” TS with handwritten corrections and notes, 1946, p. 2, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.
21. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Routes,” February 2013, a list compiled at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyo. My thanks to Linda S. Clark, assistant managing editor of the Papers of William F. Cody, whose e-mail (July 8, 2013) responded to my request to verify James O’Neill and William F. Cody’s crossing of paths in Chicago.
22. “In Many Theatres,” New York Dramatic Mirror, March 13, 1893, 9; “Side-Tracked,” New York Dramatic Mirror, April 1, 1893, 9.
23. “Well Rid of a Nuisance: Buffalo Bill Soon to Sail to Europe with the Hostile Ghost Dancers,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, March 14, 1891, 1.
24. Bowen, “Black Irishman,” 84.
25. Sergeant, “Casual Notes on O’Neill,” 1.
26. Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 34.
27. Ann-Louise S. Silver, “American Psychoanalysts Who Influenced Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 29, no. 2 (2001): 315.
28. David Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine,” New York Herald Tribune, August 8, 1926, sec. 8, 5.
29. The complete diagram can be found in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 506.
30. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 164–65. This episode was conveyed to the Gelbs in an interview with Carlotta Monterey. See 675, note “Nearly fifteen.”
31. Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 210.
32. Croswell Bowen, “The Black Irishman” (1946), in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 67.
33. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 101.
34. Carlotta Monterey, interview by Louis Sheaffer, July 29, 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; Dorothy Day, “Told in Context,” ca. 1958, Dorothy Day Papers, series D-3, box 7, file 2, Special Collections and University Archives, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis. This reminiscence was written after Dorothy Day had published her autobiography The Long Loneliness (1952). It was apparently written as an addendum to Agnes Boulton’s memoir, Part of a Long Story, which offers intimate details about Day’s relationship with O’Neill (“Told in Context”).
35. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 11, 14.
36. Ibid., 14, 17.
37. Eugene O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan, ed. Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 116; Warren H. Hastings and Richard F. Weeks, “Episodes of Eugene O’Neill’s Undergraduate Days at Princeton,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 29, no. 3 (1968): 208–15.
38. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 116; Hastings and Weeks, “Episodes”; Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 21; doggerel quoted in Hastings and Weeks, “Episodes.”
39. Hastings and Weeks, “Episodes”; Jordan Y. Miller and Winifred Frazer, American Drama between the Wars: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 32; James T. Farrell, “Some Observations on Naturalism, So-called, in Fiction” (1950), in Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 253.
40. See my essay “Sad Endings and Negative Heroes: The Naturalist Tradition in American Drama,” in The Oxford Handbook to American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 427–44.
41. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 477.
42. Hastings and Weeks, “Episodes.”
43. Ibid.; George Jean Nathan, “The Bright Face of Tragedy,” Cosmopolitan, August 1957, 66–69; Hastings and Weeks, “Episodes.”
44. Bowen, Curse of the Misbegotten, 67.
45. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 114; Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine.”
46. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 170.
47. Quoted in Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 35. The convention at the time was to spell “MacDougal Street” with a lowercase “d,” and I respect that spelling here.
48. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 104.
49. See my essay “On Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’” Eugene O’Neill Review 29 (Spring 2007): 50–72.
50. Charles A. Madison, Critics and Crusaders (New York: Holt, 1947–48), 200; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 102, 103.
51. Quoted in Dorothy Commins, ed., “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 1, 13.
52. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 243.
53. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 499.
54. Drew Eisenhauer, “‘A Lot of Crazy Socialists and Anarchists’: O’Neill and the Artist Social Problem Play,” in Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives, and the Avant Garde, ed. Eileen Herrmann and Robert M. Dowling (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 130, 113.
55. Manuel Komroff, “Manuel Komroff,” in Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, ed. Paul Avrich (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2005), 203; Peter Schjeldahl, “Young and Gifted,” New Yorker, June 25, 2012, 78–79.
56. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 144.
57. The Division and Vital Statistics Administration of the New Jersey Department of Health lists it as October 2 (see Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 255, 683, note “Gilpin officiated”), yet the divorce case, Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene G. O’Neill, gives the date as July 26. The October date is accurate; Kathleen probably claimed the July 26 date to place Eugene Jr.’s conception within the bonds of marriage.
58. Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story: “Eugene O’Neill as a Young Man in Love,” ed. William Davies King (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 166; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 149.
59. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 18.
60. Ibid., 18–19, 173.
61. Ibid., 19–20. O’Neill also referred to it as “the Siberia of the tropics” to his second wife, Agnes Boulton, in the summer of 1918 (see Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 163).
62. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 20, 170.
63. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 337; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 158, 159.
64. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 161.
65. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 170.
66. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 164.
67. Eugene O’Neill, “Free” (1912), in Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 1.
68. See Robert A. Richter, Eugene O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea: Maritime Influences in the Life and Works of Eugene O’Neill (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport,
2004).
69. Quoted in Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 110.
70. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 169; quoted in Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 553.
71. Richter, Eugene O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea, 48, 50; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 503.
72. Richter, O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea 52; Jason Wilson, Buenos Aires: A Cultural and Literary History, Cities of the Imagination Series (Oxford: Signal, 2000), 157.
73. C. J. Ballantine, “Smitty—of S. S. Glencairn,” New York World, January 6, 1929; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 175; Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine.”
74. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 177; Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1947), 10; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 184.
75. Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 36; Olin Downes, “Playwright Finds His Inspiration on Lonely Sand Dunes by the Sea” (1920), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 9. O’Neill later claimed on several occasions that he signed onto a steamer shipping mules to Durban, South Africa. He related that he wasn’t allowed to disembark in Africa because he didn’t have the entry fee of £100. No record of this voyage exists, and when he signed onto the ship that would take him back to the United States, the S.S. Ikala, he called it his “first” ship—that is, his first berth as a working seaman (Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 184).
76. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 182–83.
77. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 526.
78. “The Bridegroom Weeps!” holograph poem signed “E. G. O’Neill,” n.d., Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, New York. The title is underlined by O’Neill. The manuscript was deposited at the Berg on March 27, 1974, and authenticated by his Provincetown companion Elaine Freeman, an artist who evidently spent a great deal of time with him in the summer of 1917. Freeman also gave the Berg, among other items, a letter O’Neill wrote to her from Provincetown on September 19, 1917. O’Neill’s handwriting, which changed over the years, matches both, and they were both written in pencil. In 2011, a later version of this poem emerged, published on eoneill.com, in the handwriting of O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton. A note at the bottom of the manuscript indicates that Agnes committed it to paper in Mt. Point Pleasant, New Jersey, in the winter of 1918–19.
79. “‘Smitty the Duke’ Was a Real Man O’Neill Met,” New York Herald, November 16, 1924.
80. Ballantine, “Smitty—of S. S. Glencairn.”
81. Ibid.
82. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 445.
83. Eugene O’Neill, “Inscrutable Forces,” a letter to Barrett Clark (1919), in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 99.
84. Quoted in Pfister, Staging Depth, 109.
85. Quoted in Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—III,” New Yorker, March 13, 1948, 38.
86. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 145, 188.
87. “‘Whisky’ Kills Twelve More Men in East,” New York Tribune, December 31, 1919, 7; “Two Men Dead, Two Ill from Bad Booze,” Brooklyn Standard Union, December 28, 1919, 4.
88. John H. Raleigh, introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Iceman Cometh”: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 4–5.
89. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 190; Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism: A Play in One Act (1919) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 1; Herbert Corey, “Manhattan Days and Nights,” Binghamton Press and Leader, November 14, 1924.
90. Harry Hope’s bar, the setting of The Iceman Cometh, is based on three of O’Neill’s favorite Manhattan watering holes: Jimmy the Priest’s; the Garden Hotel on the northeast corner of Madison and Twenty-seventh Street across from the old Madison Square Garden; and the Hell Hole, or the Golden Swan Cafe, at Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. But O’Neill had Jimmy’s bar at the forefront of his mind when writing Iceman—in it, the bartender Rocky twice mentions “the Market people across the street and the waterfront workers” who come in at lunchtime, referring to people working around Washington Market, located across from Jimmy’s (CP3, 584, 652). He also specifies that the location is a Raines-Law hotel on “the downtown West Side of New York” (CP3, 563). O’Neill, Poems, 37.
91. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 311; George Jean Nathan, “The Bright Face of Tragedy,” Cosmopolitan, August 1957, 66–69; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 192; Agnes Boulton, interview by Louis Sheaffer, October 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
92. Steffens is quoted in Winifred Frazer’s article “A Lost Poem by Eugene O’Neill,” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 3, no. 1 (1979). In the late 1970s, Frazer first identified “American Sovereign” as the first O’Neill poem ever published.
93. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 194.
94. Quoted in Doris Alexander, “Eugene O’Neill as Social Critic,” in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 393.
95. O’Neill’s time working as a seaman comes from Louis Sheaffer’s estimation (William Davies King, Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010], 254n5); Leonard Lyons, “Lyons Den,” New York Post, November 13, 1936, Doris Alexander Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives. This certificate now hangs on the wall of his study at Tao House in Danville, California. For a more complete understanding of O’Neill’s maritime world, in addition to Richter, O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea, see Patrick Chura, “‘Vital Contact’: Eugene O’Neill and the Working Class” (2003), in Herrmann and Dowling, Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries, 9–30.
96. Mary B. Mullett, “The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O’Neill” (1922), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 31.
97. Louis Kalonyme [Louis Kantor], “O’Neill Lifts Curtain on His Early Days” (1924), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 67.
98. General Register and Record Office of Shipping and Seamen, Cardiff, to Louis Sheaffer, March 1965 (no day given), Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
99. http://www.ellisisland.org and http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/∼colin/DriscollOfCork/Emigration/EllisByResidence.htm.
100. Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 85.
101. Chicago Eagle, July 16, 1904, 2; [James F. Byth], “Boer War Spectacle—Coney Island’s Newest Show,” New York Times, May 21, 1905. Given that Byth was A. W. Lewis’s press agent, I can attribute to him a press release on the Boer Spectacle and its participants that appeared above his friend James O’Neill’s interview, “Mistakes of Shakespeare,” Elmira (N.Y.) Summary, May 27, 1905, 2; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 306.