By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  The agent was Richard J. Madden, a partner in the American Play Company, founded in 1914. Madden, like a number of O’Neill’s male friends, formed an emotional relationship with him. “I saw this gentle, clear-eyed man and I fell in love with him,” Madden told his wife after he and O’Neill met. They never signed a formal contract but Madden, who predeceased O’Neill, remained his agent until death.

  It was no happenstance that Harry Weinberger, the lawyer engaged by O’Neill, also counted Emma Goldman among his clients. Rebel that he was, O’Neill could not but feel kinship with Weinberger, who was saluted in liberal circles for his unorthodox and widely quoted view that “the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong.”

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH POISED ON the edge of success, O’Neill now began to worry about money. The tour of In the Zone was about to end, partly because of flagging interest in the war and partly because the recent flu epidemic was keeping audiences home; and he couldn’t afford to stay in his New York hotel with Agnes to await the December 20 production of The Moon of the Caribbees.

  He and Agnes considered the option of moving into a rambling and somewhat eccentric property in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Called the Old House, it had been bought by Agnes’s family in the late nineteenth century. Her father loved working in the attached studio, which he himself had built and which was hung with his paintings; but her parents did not normally move into the Old House from their Connecticut farm until early spring, so it was available.

  Agnes had spent her childhood in the six-bedroom Old House and regarded it as her own because it was she who had paid off the mortgage with a small inheritance from the great-aunt for whom she was named. Agnes told O’Neill the house was a mere two-hour train ride from New York and would provide a rent-free residence until they could take possession of their new Provincetown home in the spring.

  O’Neill, now eager to leave New York, pressed for an immediate move to the Old House, intending to return only briefly to the Village in December for rehearsals of The Moon of the Caribbees—long-delayed because of the play’s challenging set, which was seemingly beyond the capacity of the tiny stage of the Playwrights’ Theatre. This problem had finally been resolved by the theater’s guru, George (Jig) Cram Cook.

  The Provincetown Players’ inspirational leader since its founding in the summer of 1915, Cook had been a professor of English literature at the University of Iowa and was a scholar of ancient Greece; it was his dream to replicate in America the fourth-century Athenian cradle of art and philosophy—what he thought of as a theatrical “threshing ground.”

  Cook’s wife, Susan Glaspell, already a successful novelist, was among the hopeful playwrights he was guiding, along with O’Neill, at the Playwrights’ Theatre. For The Moon of the Caribbees, Jig Cook had come up with impressionistic scenery conveying O’Neill’s stage direction of “a distant strip of coral beach edged with palm trees, as seen from the main deck of an anchored British tramp steamer.”

  Agnes, having assured O’Neill of the availability of the Old House, wrote of her plan to her mother, Cecil, with whom she’d been out of touch for several weeks, and was quickly confronted with an unforeseen complication.

  It seemed that Agnes’s grandmother had arrived unexpectedly from London to spend the winter with her family, and since the Connecticut farmhouse was too cramped for the old woman’s comfort, the family had been obliged to move prematurely into the more spacious Old House.

  In a panic, Agnes replied that she’d promised O’Neill the house for the winter and they had no place else to go. What was she to do?

  Evidently a woman of angelic and unflappable accommodation, and likely accustomed to her daughter’s flightiness, Cecil now immediately rented a nearby cottage, into which she packed her family of seven (including Agnes’s baby daughter, her own mother, and Agnes’s three unmarried younger sisters).

  Cecil left behind in the Old House only their three pets, which Agnes agreed to care for—at the same time shamelessly requesting that her parents not make their presence in the neighborhood known to O’Neill, whom they’d never met.

  At least Agnes had the grace to feel embarrassed by the arrangement, which she knew would strike the local shopkeepers and other townspeople as both bizarre and heartless.

  O’Neill and Agnes left Manhattan for West Point Pleasant on November 21. Settling uneasily into the Old House, O’Neill, despite his fondness for animals, was not thrilled to find two cats and a small dog named Trixie in residence. He was further daunted by the various coal stoves that not very efficiently heated the house and required constant stoking. And he was annoyed by the noisy windmill that supplied their water.

  It was Agnes who tended the stoves, primed the windmill, and looked after the pets. She also set up a room to serve as O’Neill’s study. Still keeping it secret from O’Neill that her evicted family was living nearby, she now learned that her father had been having trouble selling his paintings and was obliged to work in the local hardware store to help pay for his family’s rented cottage.

  In mid-December, O’Neill received the expected summons to return to New York for rehearsals of The Moon of the Caribbees. He wanted Agnes to accompany him, but she protested that she couldn’t leave the pets, the stoves, or the windmill unattended.

  Disgruntled, O’Neill left for New York alone. Agnes, mindful of O’Neill’s earlier encouragement to continue her own writing, took advantage of his absence to begin a short story.

  • • •

  ON DECEMBER 20, the day The Moon of the Caribbees was to open, O’Neill sent Agnes a telegram demanding she come to New York immediately. Calculating that she could attend the opening and return with O’Neill by the midnight train from Penn Station, Agnes impulsively locked up Trixie and the cats with a supply of food and water, telegraphed O’Neill of her planned arrival, bought a round-trip ticket, and entrained for New York.

  She arrived at the Playwrights’ Theatre after the curtain had already gone up on The Moon of the Caribbees, the first of three one-act plays (the last two by other authors). O’Neill, who had not received Agnes’s telegram, was not at the theater, but she found him around the corner, very drunk, sitting with an even drunker Jamie in the Hell Hole. At his feet lay a large white dog.

  O’Neill embraced Agnes and introduced her to the dog, who sat up and licked his hand. O’Neill drunkenly explained that he was bringing the hound he’d named “Brooklyn Boy” back with him to New Jersey. Agnes protested that they had more than enough pets to care for. When O’Neill made no response, Agnes hoped he had dropped the idea.

  Agnes then reminded O’Neill of the absolute necessity of catching the last train from Penn Station to West Point Pleasant. But O’Neill, who had foresightedly tucked a bottle of whiskey into his coat pocket for the ride home, wanted to have a few more drinks with Jamie in the Hell Hole.

  Fearful of missing the train, Agnes somehow managed to marshal O’Neill, Jamie, herself, and the dog into a taxi, suggesting in a whisper to Jamie that they drop him and the dog at the Garden Hotel, while she and O’Neill continued on to the station.

  O’Neill guessed what Agnes had in mind, and with a drunkard’s slyness, he waited for the traffic light to turn green, then snatched up the dog, let himself out of the taxi, slammed the door behind him, and stepped into the traffic.

  Helplessly, Agnes watched as he and Brooklyn Boy headed back downtown. She arrived at the station barely in time to board the Night Owl.

  Sometime before dawn at the Old House, she was awakened by loud voices in the kitchen. She found O’Neill, triumphant—and drunker than ever—sitting at the table with the trucker who had given him and Brooklyn Boy a lift home.

  Finally sobering up five days later, O’Neill made it plain that he did not care to celebrate the arrival of Christmas; he reminded Agnes that because his parents invariably were on a theater tour during holidays, t
he family had rarely taken note of Christmas or any other holiday. Agnes understood but, herself nostalgic about Christmas, she managed to slip away for a surreptitious visit to her family in their rented cottage, taking with her a glass angel surrounded by a bouquet of flowers as a gift for her three-year-old daughter, Barbara.

  “I could only stay a few minutes for I knew Gene would be restless at home,” Agnes wrote in her memoir, making no mention of the quality of her reunion with the child she hadn’t seen in months.

  • • •

  RESTLESS AND ANXIOUS though he was about the fate of Beyond the Horizon, O’Neill during the early months of 1919, was at work outlining two new full-length plays, The Straw and Chris Christophersen.

  Intended as tragedy but more often emerging as melodrama, The Straw (first called “The Cough”) was the tale of an ill-fated love affair between a young woman dying of tuberculosis and a male patient on the way to recovery. It harked back once again to O’Neill’s own illness and recalled the Connecticut sanatorium where he had a brief (and necessarily perfunctory) love affair with Catherine Mackay, a twenty-three-year-old patient who actually did die after he himself had recovered.

  He saw the play as “a tragedy of human hope,” fully aware that both subject and setting were alien to anything currently on the American stage. Not even Puccini’s La Bohème (which had beautiful music to redeem it) was as determinedly graphic in its portrayal of a dying tubercular heroine.

  In Chris Christophersen, O’Neill, still mesmerized by his own youthful days at sea, portrayed a middle-aged Swedish-born sailor, once a clipper ship’s bo’sun, who blames “dat ole davil sea” for having deprived him of a family life. The plot revolves around Chris’s efforts to save his well-brought-up young daughter from marrying a sailor and suffering the same fate as her mother, whom Chris abandoned for a life at sea.

  • • •

  AS THE MONTHS went by in the Old House, O’Neill and Agnes sensed an increasing hostility from their neighbors and other townspeople. Agnes had noticed a stiffness in the attitude of the jitney drivers she occasionally employed to take her on errands.

  • • •

  BUT NEITHER SHE nor O’Neill realized how deep the animosity ran—until one day they found the corpse of Brooklyn Boy on their front lawn, his throat slashed.

  Agnes thought that perhaps this hostility was due to the fact that the Boulton family had moved out of their home without explanation, while Agnes, accompanied by a taciturn stranger, had replaced them. And apparently this stranger was truly an enigma; one of their neighbors, an elderly woman, had recently asked Agnes if her husband was a drug addict.

  Inevitably, O’Neill learned the truth of how Agnes had dispossessed her family. One day, on one of his rambling walks, accompanied by Trixie, he lost his way and asked a man chopping wood for directions. It was apparent Trixie knew the woodsman, so O’Neill began to chat with him and the truth came out.

  Once home, O’Neill chided Agnes for concealing that her family lived nearby. Still, he made it plain he had no wish to meet any of them. Nonetheless, Agnes told her family that secrecy was no longer necessary although failing to communicate O’Neill’s sullen wish to avoid them; it wasn’t long before two of her sisters paid an unannounced visit. As Agnes greeted them, O’Neill ducked into a closet, and they left without meeting their brother-in-law.

  But O’Neill was unable to avoid a formally announced evening visit from Agnes’s seventy-year-old grandmother. To his surprise, he was much taken with her. “Granny,” as Agnes called her, chatted about everything from the imminence of Prohibition to Woodrow Wilson’s presidential style.

  Agnes’s pleasure at having effected a rapport between O’Neill and a member of her family was displaced by dismay when she learned that March that she was pregnant. She returned home from a visit to her doctor, having been told to expect the baby in early October. She found O’Neill in a jubilant mood. He had written the words “The Curtain Falls” on the last page of the manuscript of The Straw.

  Agnes wasn’t eager to convey her own news. She knew O’Neill had not forgotten their oft-reiterated views on the sanctified exclusivity of their union. Indeed, in her memoir, she herself had emphasized her vow that hers and O’Neill’s “aloneness” was to be inviolate. She postponed telling him until the following day.

  O’Neill’s first reaction, Agnes recalled, was that “the doctor had made a mistake.” His second reaction was “silence.” And that, more or less, was it. According to Agnes, there was no recrimination, no “how could this possibly have happened?” All was resolved; as Agnes would have it, O’Neill—at least for the moment—stoically accepted the shattering of his dream that there would be just the two of them—“Us always!” (Nowhere does she attempt to explain or rationalize this slipup.)

  The truth being unknowable, it’s tempting to offer an educated guess at what Agnes left unsaid. There must have been a confrontation, given both hers and O’Neill’s sworn commitment to a childless marriage (even to the point of ignoring their already existing offspring). Very likely, Agnes’s pregnancy was due to an episode of heedless passion fueled by alcohol.

  It’s easy to conjecture why Agnes chose in her memoir to gloss over the friction that was doubtless engendered by the baby’s imminent arrival. She was, after all, writing from the vantage point of 1958, when their son, Shane, was thirty-nine and knew himself to have been irreparably wounded by his father’s neglect. Surely, even though she herself had been a sometimes careless mother, Agnes would not have wished to hurt Shane further by suggesting that, from the first, he’d been unwanted by his father.

  To his parents and friends, O’Neill in his new role as father appeared solidly committed to his marriage. And yet, however subtly, the accident of Agnes’s pregnancy was soon to mark the start of the slow but certain unraveling of the marriage.

  Ambivalent as always, O’Neill was destined to grope and stumble his nervous way through the next few years with Agnes, dependent on her, often clinging to her with desperate passion, and at other times eaten by resentment. Although he took refuge in his writing—which flourished even during domestic upheavals—he saw himself year by year growing ever more disillusioned in his marriage.

  Not only in his plays (replete with alienated parents and dead children) but in numerous letters, O’Neill reveals his lack of interest and his increasing disappointment (despite moments of forced attentiveness) in both Shane and the daughter, Oona, who followed. His disaffection was a trait that dismayed even the most loyal of his friends, who spoke, after his death, about the ultimate heartlessness of his behavior.

  And while Agnes tried in her memoir—which ends with the birth of Shane—to make light of this defect, she couldn’t help resenting the self-absorption that turned O’Neill to stone when confronted with the demands of fatherhood; his paternal compassion was reserved for his plays—the children of his imagination.

  Four months pregnant by mid-May and still optimistic about persuading O’Neill to accept his fatherhood, Agnes returned with him to Provincetown, where the ever-obliging John Francis handed over James O’Neill’s wedding gift—the deed to their summer home, known as Peaked Hill Bars; it was fronted on the north by the Atlantic Ocean and bounded on the east, south, and west by shifting dunes, described in the document as “land unknown.”

  It was all the isolation O’Neill could have wished for and the closest thing to living on a ship without actually heaving anchor. It was accessible only by foot on a crude trail called Snail Road, over three miles of scrub wood and dune—and by the Coast Guard’s horse-drawn wagon, which paid sporadic visits with mail and supplies.

  Their closest neighbors were the Coast Guardsmen who had abandoned their former quarters—now the O’Neills’ home; fearing the sea’s steady encroachment, with its threat to sweep their station into the Atlantic, they had established a new lifesaving station half a mile away. This stretch of coas
t was so hazardous, particularly in winter, that ships were pounded to kindling within hours of running aground. Agnes and O’Neill knew that corpses had often been laid out in what was now their living room.

  By contrast, nothing could equal the serenity of a midsummer evening, with its purity of light and air, the setting sun reddening the sea, and a ceaseless hissing wind that held no sting.

  The house, like the French castle O’Neill could never have dreamed he’d inhabit ten years later, had no electricity or central heating. Kerosene provided fuel for cooking and lit the lamps of the two-story structure at night, while a huge fireplace gave a modicum of warmth on chilly days; the house became unlivable in the late fall, when storm-driven sand began to pile up against its outer walls like snowdrifts, soon burying two-thirds of the front door and encrusting the windowpanes, which had to be replaced every spring.

  Everything about his new home enchanted O’Neill. Shortly after moving in, he described his delight:

  The stairs are like companionways of a ship. There are lockers everywhere. . . . The big boat room, now our living room, still has the steel fixtures in the ceiling from which one of the boats was slung. The look-out station on the roof is the same as when the coast guards spent their eternal two-hour vigils there. . . .

  The place has come to mean a tremendous lot to me. I feel a true kinship and harmony with life out there. Sand and sun and sea and wind—you merge into them, and become as meaningless and as full of meaning as they are. There is always the monotone of the surf on the bar—a background for silence—and you know that you are alone—so alone you wouldn’t be ashamed to do any good action. You can walk or swim along the beach for miles and meet only the dunes—Sphinxes muffled in their yellow robes with paws deep in the sea.

  That September 1919, O’Neill wrote a long prose poem, exulting in his newfound surroundings, “O sea, which is myself! How I love to reveal my nakedness to the sun on solitary beaches!”