By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “What he was doing in that country she doesn’t exactly remember,” O’Neill jeers to Weinberger, “but he wasn’t in the army and he wasn’t a correspondent. The whole story is pretty ridiculous, what? At any rate he got her with child before leaving and she came back to a Connecticut farm and had [her daughter] Barbara. That is all she has ever told me.”

  She has no marriage certificate, O’Neill informs his lawyer, nor has he ever heard any of her family mention the marriage. There is good reason, he adds, to suspect that “no such marriage ever took place.”

  O’Neill guesses Barbara’s father was a Polish farmer then living near Agnes and her family in the Connecticut town of Cornwall Bridge. He tells Weinberger that Agnes, in a brief confessional moment, told him the farmer was her mother’s lover as well as her own. “A nice mess, what? And people think my Desire, for example, is too sordid to be real!” (He is, of course, referring to Desire Under the Elms, produced in 1924, in which a son’s jealous desire for his father’s young bride leads to a sequence of incest and infanticide.)

  O’Neill proposes that Weinberger hire a private detective to look into Agnes’s past in Cornwall Bridge. “I am sure the whole secret is there.” He also suggests that the detective tail Agnes, so that she can be “caught in flagrante,” which would give him “a weapon” that would enable him “to dictate terms.”

  While O’Neill’s accusations are mean-minded and vengeful, research conducted years later turns up clues that somewhat justify his suspicions. It seems that the father of Agnes’s child could quite possibly have been Courtland Young, the well-off editor of Young’s Magazine, who owned a 230-acre farm in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, and to whom Agnes had sold some of her pulp fiction. Young ceded the farm to “Agnes B. Burton” on December 30, 1915, soon after Agnes’s daughter Barbara was born.

  While O’Neill plots, Agnes stonewalls. She dismisses his plea that the divorce proceeding be announced publicly in the manner he has suggested—and she is still in no hurry to leave for Reno. Meanwhile, Carlotta has changed her mind about living openly with a married man.

  For the time being, she and O’Neill accept the fact that their relationship must remain secret. “If only our hearts were at peace!” she sighs in her diary on July 14. They have decided to continue living in Europe as quietly as possible for at least the next two years. But before settling down, they will fulfill O’Neill’s long-held yearning to explore the Far East.

  It is a yearning that dates back to his mid-twenties, when he discovered that his early idol, August Strindberg, had been so fascinated a scholar of Oriental wisdom that he had learned both Chinese and Japanese. O’Neill was further drawn to the mysticism of the East when, at twenty-eight, he read Light on the Path, a treatise crammed with Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist wisdom compiled by the mid-nineteenth-century romance novelist Mabel Collins. And, at thirty, he had expressed his yearning to visit the Far East through the character of Robert Mayo, a partial stand-in for himself, in Beyond the Horizon. Here is Mayo, attempting to explain to his brother why he is drawn to the Orient:

  Supposing I was to tell you that it’s just Beauty that’s calling me, the beauty of the far off and the unknown, the mystery and spell of the East, which lures me in the books I’ve read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden just over there, beyond the horizon?

  O’Neill continued to delve into Far Eastern culture, and in 1923, he began work on his ambitious pageant of the East, Marco Millions. By 1925, he was describing himself as “a most confirmed mystic.” And, shortly before leaving with Carlotta for Asia, he explains to his agent, Richard Madden, why the voyage means so much to him: “It’s been the dream of my life to live there for a while and absorb a bit of that background. It’s going to be infinitely valuable to me in its bearing upon my future work.”

  Carlotta busies herself with inquiries about passage to Hong Kong, and in late July, she and O’Neill commit to sail on October 5 from Marseilles on the André le Bon. But Carlotta is not sanguine about the voyage. “I am, for some idiotic reason, fearful of going to China under present conditions—six weeks is a very long time for Gene to be caged up—worrying about so many things—& I am in a humiliating position.”

  O’Neill prods himself into finishing Dynamo and, on August 18, he notes in his Work Diary that the play is complete except for revisions. “We celebrate!” rejoices Carlotta in her own diary.

  On August 24, during a weeklong motor trip through the French countryside, Carlotta writes that O’Neill is “already beginning to relax—we are away from his past! My darling tries to tell me how much he loves me! It is like getting out of hell! (This price I have to pay!)”

  She is right about O’Neill’s evident euphoria. To George Jean Nathan he writes, two days later, that he finds himself blissfully at home and at peace in the Basque country and plans to settle here “for the rest of my days.” For the first time “in God knows how long,” he says, “I feel as if life had something to give me . . . quite outside of the life in my work.” He has even stopped worrying, he says, about Agnes’s spreading nasty rumors about him and Carlotta.

  “As I approach my fortieth birthday I feel younger and more pepped up with the old zest for living and working than I’ve ever felt since I started writing. . . . I feel as if I’d tapped a new life and could rush up all the reserves of energy in the world to back up my work. Honestly, to me it is a sort of miracle.”

  Carlotta’s mood, however, gradually darkens. Toward the end of August, she has “a strange presentiment” that before their return from Asia she will have gone through hell. “Gene will crack someday—he can’t bear all this nervous strain much longer,” she predicts. “And then, what about me, his mistress?”

  Their lease on the Villa Marguerite expires at the end of September, and when they return from their motor trip on August 30, Carlotta will have ample time to pack. But confronted in the villa by stacks of mail from the United States, she sighs, “My honeymoon is over!” One letter informs O’Neill that no record has been found in Somerset House—where all marriages in England are registered—of a union between Agnes Boulton and Burton. Carlotta’s comment: “So Barbara’s papa didn’t come from where he was supposed to come. Poor Barbara!”

  After O’Neill receives yet another cable from Weinberger listing Agnes’s dissatisfaction with the proposed financial arrangement, Carlotta rails, “This woman is something beyond all imagination! Without any honor, self respect or common decency. Gene is sunk in depression all day.”

  She is cheered on September 17, in the midst of her diligent shopping and packing, to receive from O’Neill a gift she will cherish throughout their years together. It is a stuffed, scrawny, hairy, grotesquely comical stuffed monkey that looks almost alive—a reference to their shared memories of The Hairy Ape. The first gift O’Neill has ever given her, the monkey has long arms, “like Gene,” as Carlotta recalled years later.

  O’Neill christens the monkey Esteban, in memory of a young Spanish nobleman he met in Buenos Aires in 1910, after he’d sailed there as an apprentice seaman. (While O’Neill drifted and drank on the waterfront, the Marquis Esteban de Gonzales, Grandee of Spain, ruined himself with drugs.) Leering wickedly through his whiskers, Esteban is destined to perch in a corner of a sofa or armchair or on a bed in every home Carlotta occupies, until shortly before her death in 1970.

  Three weeks before leaving for China, O’Neill mails Richard Madden a typescript of the completed Dynamo, informing him he’ll be gone for a year and asking him to have copies made for several friends, including Nathan and De Casseres. Madden takes his time arranging for the copies—which is just as well, because both men will ultimately scorn it, and with good reason.

  Doubtless O’Neill’s aim is lofty. But the play is a muddled diatribe of misapprehension, malevolence, and misogyny, its cast verging on caricature.

&
nbsp; As O’Neill himself describes the action of his all but incomprehensible plot: Reuben Light, the befuddled seventeen-year-old protagonist, “electrocutes his bullying father’s God, finds his dead mother again in the dynamo—a mother deified into God this time by the aid of pseudo-science—and is even driven to sacrifice the girl he loves in the flesh, whom his mother was jealous of and hated, to achieve the final return to the mother after he has been unfaithful to her.”

  (It’s tempting to regard O’Neill’s description as self-parody. As Alice observes of the Jabberwocky’s poem, “It seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”)

  Although O’Neill is eager to have the approbation of De Casseres and Nathan, the play’s fate right now is not uppermost in his thoughts as he tries to cope with the flurry of letters and cables that keep arriving from New York, bringing more aggravating news about Agnes.

  He’s also absorbed in Carlotta’s animated preparations for their voyage, and he can hardly help noticing the presence in his home of the costly Louis Vuitton wardrobe trunks—a must for the well-heeled traveler of the era—that Carlotta has bought and is packing with the stylish suits, shirts, silk pajamas, and dressing gowns she’s helped him select. (A far cry from the day when—as an almost penniless twenty-two-year-old apprentice sailor—O’Neill stuffed his meager belongings into a battered sea chest and clambered aboard the Charles Racine.)

  With the packing done and the trunks sent on ahead to Marseilles, Carlotta develops what she calls “the shakes.” On September 24, she notes, “Gene holds me in his arms all night! Says it helps him, too!!—Bless him!” The day before departing Guéthery, she pleads, “We are off on our pilgrimage—dear God—guide us.”

  On September 27, after a leisurely sightseeing car trip to Paris, they check into the Hotel du Rhin, where they will stay until it’s time to head for Marseilles and their October 5 departure. Both make an effort to appear at ease, although they’re apprehensive about what Carlotta views as the possible “treachery” that Agnes might choose to wreak during their journey.

  “Why can’t we live as other people?” Carlotta ponders. “All men make mistakes in their youth . . . why must he be tormented and made ill?” She is comforted by a letter from James Speyer in New York, conveying his hope that when she and O’Neill board the André le Bon, “it will be Le Bon all the way on your journey.”

  “I really do wish I could have gone with you,” he adds, “especially as I have really seen very little of this world and am getting older every day & I feel it. This is only natural and I am not complaining. I cannot tell you how happy I feel that you are so much interested in Gene’s work & doings.” He assures Carlotta she “will be of great constance [sic] and encouragement” to O’Neill in many ways, even if sometimes she “may have a mauvais quart d’heure.”

  Speyer ends with a hope that the divorce will have become “another historical fact” by the time their voyage is over. He signs his letter, “With love as ever, James.” But Speyer’s letter does not divert Carlotta from her fury with Agnes. “I can’t understand any woman asking for money because she lived with a man! Where is her pride, her self-respect? Whores are paid for their bodies,—not wives!” Her own arrangement with Speyer has perhaps slipped her mind—although she can readily rationalize that she did not ask for the income Speyer has bestowed on her.

  Before sailing, O’Neill writes to Shane, who will be nine on October 30. Apologizing for not having responded to a recent letter from his son, he explains how hard he’s been working on Dynamo and chats sympathetically about his son’s various activities.

  “I’m sorry but I won’t be able to come back soon,” O’Neill says, “although I miss you and Oona an awful lot and think of you all the time. I’ve got to go on a long voyage on a ship about some plays I want to write.” He mentions India, Java, China, and Africa as places he might visit, and promises to write to Shane about what he sees and does.

  Enclosing a check for his son’s ninth birthday, he says he has given instructions to his lawyer to turn over his own bicycle and kayak to Shane for his tenth birthday and Christmas. “Kiss Oona for me. I’m writing her a letter too but not such a long one because she’s only little compared to you.” He ends, “Much deep love to you, my son, from Your Daddy.”

  On October 3, two days before boarding their ship in Marseilles, Carlotta again vents her anxiety: “All night we hang on to each other—as though we were in deadly danger!”

  6

  Aboard the S.S. André le Bon on October 5, 1928, O’Neill learns by cable that the Theatre Guild has accepted Dynamo for production next season. In a surge of optimism, he sets to work in his cabin, undeterred for the moment by the worsening heat.

  As always his mind shimmers with possibilities. Some dramatic concepts will survive in his bulging work diaries merely as titles, others will be described in a sentence or two and later discarded; still others will be outlined and then aborted. But a few will germinate and flower, as in the most striking example—a modern version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy.

  “Germ idea use Greek Tragedy plot in modern setting,” he had noted two and a half years earlier. Now, he makes another note for his Greek tragedy, which will emerge three years later as his most impressive work to date, the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra.

  It will be several months, however, before O’Neill brings full focus to this project. As the André le Bon glides from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea (Africa on one side, Arabia on the other), he throbs with ideas for future plays. Without Endings of Days, for which he makes only two brief notes in his Work Diary in October, will evolve five years later as Days Without End, an overwrought religious tract inspired chiefly by his exalted love for Carlotta. He also tinkers with another inspiration, “It Cannot Be Mad,” which will linger in his mind for four years.

  On the André le Bon, Carlotta (who shares a double-cabin with her personal maid), is enthusiastic over O’Neill’s absorption (in his adjoining cabin) in what he is writing. More than ever, as she assures her diary, she has come to realize that “His work is him & he is it.” But even with all her empathy, she will never entirely grasp what O’Neill’s writing means to him, how much more necessary it is to him than even her love.

  Writing serves him “as a suit of armor” against life’s worries, O’Neill once told a young author, when he had begun to make a name for himself at thirty with Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home, The Moon of the Caribbees, and other one-act plays of the sea. To a doctor’s questionnaire asking how much time out he needed for vacations, O’Neill replied he didn’t need vacations. “Writing is my vacation from living.”

  It was a truth that had been revealed to the twenty-four-year-old O’Neill at the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis—in those days often regarded as a death sentence. While his illness turned out to be treatable, it jolted him into an acute self-examination of the savagely destructive life he’d heretofore condemned himself to live.

  He discovered he could vent his anger against his devils by writing about them as imaginary characters, rather than going head-to-head with them in his daily life. It was during his six-month stay at the sanatorium that he began writing one-act plays and, at last, found his justification for existence. He proclaimed his recovery from tuberculosis and his newfound mission as his “re-birth.”

  Carlotta has no inkling of what can happen when O’Neill is thwarted in his writing. Despite having experienced his recent drunken episode in France, she is yet to discover that when he can’t write (and is unable to manipulate the creatures of his invented universe), he hurls himself into perverse physical behavior.

  O’Neill’s mood starts to darken on October 16 when the André le Bon docks briefly in the unrelenting heat of the port of Aden. Carlotta tries to assume a cheerful air, for it is O’Neill’s fortieth birthday. “Rise at ni
ne & give Genie his presents,” she notes. By day’s end, however, malaise has overcome her. She drifts off to sleep and is jolted awake by a nightmare: she’s had a baby and O’Neill has left her.

  By now at sea for eleven days and dazed by the heat, O’Neill has been unable to write. Worried that his grand tour of Asia will be a flop, he’s having waking nightmares of his own. In port at Colombo, Ceylon, he and Carlotta drag themselves ashore and O’Neill, who feels deprived even in moderately warm weather when unable to swim, unnerves Carlotta by impetuously diving into water she regards as dubious.

  They again leave the ship when it reaches Singapore on October 28, and O’Neill, once more desperate for a swim, hurls himself into a stream that Carlotta fears is polluted. A few days later in Saigon, he insists on immersing himself in “a mud hole,” as Carlotta disgustedly describes it.

  “I am certain we are en route to Hell,” she writes. But on her way there, she manages a detour to purchase several yards of the black satin-silk she knows is unique to Saigon. After a brief stop in Hong Kong, she and O’Neill are afloat on the China Sea, en route to Shanghai.

  Plagued by weak lungs ever since his bout with TB, O’Neill begins to suffer from one of his periodic respiratory infections—what he calls “flu”—and both he and Carlotta are once again “in awful state of nerves.”

  On reaching Shanghai, O’Neill agrees to take a break in their voyage and Carlotta, much relieved, settles him in bed at the Palace Hotel. “Am back at my old job of being a nurse,” she writes on November 11. The hotel doctor, Alexander Renner, gives O’Neill a shot against his respiratory infection, and a second shot to calm his nerves. Carlotta grumbles that O’Neill’s swims in the foul tropical waters “didn’t do him any good.”