Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  308. Quoted in Arthur Gelb, “Onstage He Played the Novelist,” New York Times, August 30, 1964, book review sec. 1.

  309. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 247.

  310. Claudia Wilsch Case, “What They Really Saw: Using Archives to Reconstruct the Censored Performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude,” Laconics 5 (2010), http://www.eoneill.com/library/laconics/5/5c.htm.

  311. Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 126; Case, “What They Really Saw”; “Rejects Revision of O’Neill Play: Boston Mayor Says Strange Interlude ‘Glorifies an Abject Code of Morals,’” New York Times, September 24, 1929; Case, “What They Really Saw.”

  312. Quoted in John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115.

  313. Quoted in Edward Doherty, “Boston Bans Strange Interlude: A Look at a Problem of Puritanism,” Liberty, November 16, 1929.

  314. Case, “What They Really Saw.” Regardless of a widespread distaste for Boston’s censorship policies, they would remain in force as late as 1970. Also see Houchin, Censorship, 115.

  315. “Providence Bans O’Neill Play,” New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 1930.

  316. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 125.

  317. Basso, “Tragic Sense—II,” 44; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 297.

  318. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 304.

  319. Ibid., 305.

  ACT IV: Full Fathom Five

  Notes to pp. 349–50: retreat from reality (Eleanor Flexner, American Playwrights, 1918–1938: The Theatre Retreats from Reality [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938]); “blind alleys” (Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 559); “There is something to be said for the Mad Twenties” (O’Neill, Selected Letters, 524); “O’Neill gave birth to American theatre” (Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in United States: Essays, 1952–1992 [New York: Random House, 1993], 449).

  1. Quoted in Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 292.

  2. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 278, 277.

  3. Quoted in 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), 263n21.

  4. “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 174; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 305.

  5. William Davies King, ed., “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 307; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 278.

  6. Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1947), 117.

  7. “The Art of Making Masks Revealed,” Pasadena Evening Post, May 10, 1928, 2.

  8. Kenneth Macgowan, “New Line for O’Neill in Lazarus Laughed,” New York Telegram, January 14, 1927.

  9. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 257, 365.

  10. George C. Warren, “Lazarus Laughed Produced on Coast,” New York Times, April 10, 1928, 33; Katherine T. Von Blon, “Lazarus Written Not from Imagination, but from Life,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1928, C17.

  11. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 365; “Premiere of Lazarus Laughed This Evening to Mark Climax of Preparation at Playhouse,” Pasadena Star-News, April 9, 1928, 9; George C. Warren, “Play at Pasadena Received with Rousing Acclaim,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1928, 1D.

  12. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 313; King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 313.

  13. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 170; King, Another Part of a Long Story, 170.

  14. Quoted in Sally Cline, Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (New York: Arcade, 2004), 125.

  15. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 169; King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 310, 312.

  16. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 314; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 298, 319.

  17. Dorothy Commins, ed., “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 32, 34; O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 182.

  18. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 296.

  19. Ibid., 295.

  20. See ibid., 302, 315. William Davies King argues that the father was likely Boulton’s Breezy Stories editor Courtland Young (Another Part of a Long Story, 189), and this has since been substantiated by Boulton’s niece Dallas Cline in her recent memoir A Formidable Shadow: The O’Neill Connection (eoneill.com, 2014).

  21. Quoted in “Eugene O’Neill’s Wife Sues for Divorce in Reno,” New York Herald Tribune, July 2, 1929.

  22. Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene G. O’Neill, County Clerk’s Index #1673, Supreme Court, Westchester County, Westchester County Clerk’s Office, White Plains, N.Y., 1912.

  23. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 299.

  24. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 301.

  25. Quoted in William Davies King, ed., “The Port Saïd Incident: O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey at Sea,” Eugene O’Neill Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 235.

  26. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 307–8.

  27. Quoted in King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 282.

  28. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 99–102. “I believe The New Masses will bear the same relationship to the commercial press as the experimental theatre does to Broadway,” O’Neill wrote on behalf of the venture. “My blessing and lustiest cheers!” (Quoted in ibid., 410).

  29. Quoted in Virginia Floyd, ed., Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for His Plays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 125. Critics also recognized the thematic and titular parallels between Dynamo and Henry Adams’s chapter in The Education of Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin”; see Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Virgin and the Dynamo,” Nation, February 27, 1929, 264, 266; and see Euphemia Van Rennselaer Wyatt, “Plays of Some Importance,” Catholic World, April 1929, 80–82. O’Neill hadn’t read Adams in years, and it clearly wasn’t in the forefront of his mind at the time of composition (see O’Neill, Selected Letters, 332).

  30. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 126.

  31. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 308. In this same letter, O’Neill suggests that Gold forget about writing short stories and write “a wonderful thing on East Side life … as much or as little disguised as you wished.” Gold followed his advice and immediately began work on his groundbreaking roman à clef about Jewish life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jews without Money (1930).

  32. Eugene O’Neill, “Suggestions, Instructions, Advice, along with Sundry Snooty Remarks and Animadversions as to the Modern Theatre,” September 10, 1928, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London.

  33. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 301.

  34. Ibid., 311.

  35. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 217.

  36. Quoted in Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 40.

  37. Ibid., 33.

  38. Quoted in King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 320.

  39. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 41.

  40. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 170.

  41. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 242; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 336; King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 242.

  42. Although the newspapers identified Renner as Austrian, both Monterey and O’Neill referred to the Renners as Hungarian (King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 244; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 405).

  43. William Weer, “Eugene O’Neill, Fleeing Prying Public Eye, Appears to Be Reverting to Old Days When He Trod the Roads of the World to Romance,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 23, 1928, A7.

  44. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist,
314.

  45. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 337.

  46. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 247, 242. Carlotta Monterey’s diaries are not entirely reliable. Monterey had a tendency to revise the past in her own and sometimes O’Neill’s favor; therefore, as a source these diaries require either corroboration or a higher than usual standard of credibility.

  47. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 314.

  48. Ibid., 315–16.

  49. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 247; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 316–17; King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 247, 248.

  50. “O’Neill Still in Shanghai, ‘Disappearance Act’ Hoax,” New York Evening Post, December 18, 1928, 8; “Eugene O’Neill Admits Identity: Shows Passport at Manila Before Sailing,” New York Sun, December 19, 1928, 41; “O’Neill in Manila, Fails to Find Rest,” New York Evening Post, December 19, 1928, 2.

  51. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 316–18. See also “O’Neill Still in Shanghai.”

  52. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 324; “O’Neill in Manila”; “Eugene O’Neill Admits Identity.”

  53. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 319.

  54. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 252–53.

  55. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 322.

  56. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 323–24.

  57. Ibid., 323.

  58. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 210.

  59. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 249.

  60. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 317, 319–21, 326.

  61. Ibid., 278.

  62. King, “Port Saïd Incident,” 257, 258.

  63. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 322.

  64. Edna Kenton to Carl Van Vechten, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  65. 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.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 90.

  66. Quoted in Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 147.

  67. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 325; George Jean Nathan, “Judging the Shows,” Judge, March 9, 1929, 18.

  68. Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” New York Telegram, February 14, 1929, 2nd ed., 13.

  69. Nathan, “Judging the Shows,” 18.

  70. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 330.

  71. Ibid., 350.

  72. Ibid., 323.

  73. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 88; King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 227–28.

  74. Agnes Boulton to Harold de Polo, May 31, 1929, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

  75. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 336, 338, 333.

  76. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 330; O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 188.

  77. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 165; George Jean Nathan, “The Bright Face of Tragedy,” Cosmopolitan, August 1957, 66–69; “O’Neill Gets Chateau for 13 Years for Bride,” New York Times, July 28, 1929.

  78. This title for the property has caused confusion and misidentification of the château’s actual name among scholars; but along with what I suggest in my treatment of the name in this chapter, Carlotta Monterey’s 1955 diary contains a card from the period in which the home is referred to as “du Plessis.”

  79. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 55.

  80. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 113.

  81. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 61.

  82. Kenneth Macgowan, “Talk of the Town: About O’Neill,” New Yorker, September 28, 1929, 21.

  83. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 73.

  84. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 195–97. Monterey had written Macgowan a similar note directly after the New Yorker article appeared, but that is currently lost.

  85. Ibid., 196, 210.

  86. “Eugene O’Neill’s Wife Sues for Divorce in Reno”; “Eugene O’Neill Wed to Miss Monterey,” New York Times, July 24, 1929.

  87. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 69.

  88. Ibid., 66, 82.

  89. James and Patricia Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, November 16, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  90. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 196–97.

  91. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, November 16, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  92. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 192. Gladys Lewis would lose the suit after it went to trial on March 13, 1931. O’Neill still had to pay thousands in legal fees, and the timing of the trial doomed an offer from MGM Studios to produce Strange Interlude as Lillian Gish’s first sound film.

  93. Lewys v. O’Neill, District Court, Southern District of New York, #49 F.2d 603, 1931.

  94. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 341.

  95. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 130.

  96. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 395.

  97. Ibid., 401.

  98. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 77.

  99. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 102.

  100. “Eugene O’Neill, A Playwright Not without Honor,” New York Evening Post, January 7, 1928, 8.

  101. Shivaun O’Casey, “Sean and O’Neill,” in “Celtic Twilight: 21st-Century Irish-Americans on Eugene O’Neill,” Drunken Boat #12, http://www.drunkenboat.com/db12/04one/ocasey/ocasey2.php.

  102. Quoted in “Shaw Says He’s out of Date; Pokes Fun at U.S. Authors,” New York Evening Post, September 27, 1924, 6.

  103. Quoted in Louis Sheaffer, Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 434.

  104. Selected Letters, 407.

  105. “O’Neill, A Playwright Not without Honor.”

  106. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 102.

  107. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 335, 339.

  108. Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 185–86; O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 168.

  109. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 118; “O’Neill Back in France: American Worked on Next Play during Sojourn in the Canaries,” New York Times, April 15, 1931.

  110. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 357; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 351.

  111. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 102; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 523; “As Ever, Gene,” 102.

  112. Quoted in Tom Cerasulo, “Film Adaptations,” in Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, ed. Robert M. Dowling (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 2:592.

  113. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 191; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 363.

  114. In the past, O’Neill scholars, including myself, have thought the homes along Whale Oil Row were the architectural models for the Mannon house, since it was meant to have been built in 1830. The Shaw Mansion was built in the mid-1750s, as opposed to the 1830s and 1840s, like the houses on Whale Oil Row, but the house has a stone front with white columns and more closely matches O’Neill’s sketch for the set design.

  115. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 386.

  116. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 120.

  117. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 390.

  118. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 118.

  119. Quoted in O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 166–67.

  120. “Ralph Barton Ends His Life with Pistol: Artist in Note Mourns Loss of Third Wife, Carlotta Monterey, Now Wed to Eugene O’Neill,” New York Times, May 21, 1931.

  121. Ibid.

  122. Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 83.

  123. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 374, 375.

  124. Ibid., 375.

  125. Quoted in Ernest K. Lindley, “Exile Made Him Appreciate U.S., O’Neill Admits” (1931), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: Univers
ity Press of Mississippi, 1990), 109.

  126. Ibid., 111.

  127. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 376.

  128. Mourning Becomes Electra was published as a book on November 2, 1931.

  129. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 363.

  130. Thomas Chalmers (who played Adam Brant in Mourning Becomes Electra), interview by Louis Sheaffer, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  131. Quoted in Paul Sifton, “A Whale of a Play,” McCall’s, May 1932, 116.

  132. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 384; Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—III,” New Yorker, March 13, 1948, 44.

  133. John Anderson, “O’Neill’s Trilogy: Playwright’s Latest Work Acclaimed as His ‘Masterpiece,’” New York Evening Journal, October 27, 1931, 26.

  134. Ibid.

  135. John Mason Brown. “The Play: Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s Exciting Trilogy, Is Given an Excellent Production at the Guild,” New York Evening Post, October 27, 1931, 12; George Jean Nathan, “The Theatre of George Jean Nathan,” Judge, November 21, 1931, 16.

  136. Elizabeth Jordan, “Dramatics: Mr. O’Neill and Others,” America, November 28, 1931, 187; Theresa Helburn, A Wayward Quest: The Autobiography of Theresa Helburn (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 263; Brooks Atkinson, “Tragedy Becomes Electra,” New York Times, November 1, 1931, in The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill, ed. John H. Houchin, Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, no. 5 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 126.

  137. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 391.

  138. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 403–4.

  139. Quoted in George Jean Nathan, “Eugene O’Neill” (1932), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 127–28.

  140. “O’Neill Goes Mildly Pirate,” House & Garden, January 1934, 19–21; Helburn, Wayward Quest, 264.

  141. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 377.

  142. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 172.

  143. Quoted in Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” New Yorker, March 6, 1948, 46.

  144. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 139.

  145. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 408.

  146. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 181.

  147. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 136.