by Arthur Gelb
He characterized O’Neill as “a playwright of real power and imagination,” adding, “the play has greatness in it and marks O’Neill as one of our foremost playwrights [and] one of the most spacious men to be gifted and tempted to write for the theater in America.”
Broun, slightly more restrained, called Beyond a “significant and interesting play by a young author who does not yet know all the tricks.” Most of the other critics, while thrilled by the play’s originality, were almost apologetic about endorsing it, warning that it could not be a popular success.
They were wrong. When Bennett’s vehicle, For the Defense, closed, Williams moved Beyond—with Bennett—to the Criterion Theatre, where on February 23 it began regular evening performances. The play attracted audiences until June 26, when it closed after 111 performances. O’Neill’s share of the $117,017 gross was $6,264—not the highest of royalties, but far more than he’d ever earned before (and which he and Agnes spent as quickly as it was paid). O’Neill had achieved his goal of forcing Broadway to accept him on his own terms.
After reading the extraordinary reviews of the first matinee, he rejoiced, as never before, over his critical success. “It’s positively stunning!” he crowed to Agnes on the day following the opening. “Whatever it may or may not do in a financial way, it has done all I ever expected of it already—and more.”
13
His joyful rush dissolving, O’Neill gave way to his recurrent longing for Agnes. He wanted her at his side to share his triumph, to coddle him in his exhaustion, to assuage his inevitable sense of post-opening letdown.
Forgotten were their venomous squabbles; Agnes was once again his cherished soul mate. In a letter of frustration and yearning, he fell back on a coy game of sexual wordplay they had devised: He was “Mr. N.”—code for the “Nightingale” of Keats’s “Ode.” Agnes was “Miss P.” for pussy (an evolvement of the sixteenth-century “pussie,” a lusty euphemism he was to bestow years later on Carlotta Monterey as well).
“Mr. N.,” he wrote, “demands that he be put into instant communication with Miss P., or at least, poor lonely bird that he is!, that he send a message by me to her which you are to tell her in the still hour before you fall asleep [that] if you find it HELL to be away from me then I find it triple-plated HELL not to have you beside me in the long, lonely nights!” Then abandoning his cat-and-bird frolic, he cried out, “Oh, My Own, My Darling Agnes, My Own Little Wife, I want you, and need you, and love you so!”
His parents, he said, were being solicitous of him, “but they are not You.” Desperate to return home, he reminded Agnes of Robert Mayo’s lines in Beyond: “‘It’s hard to stay—and harder to go, sometimes.’ You are my life!”
Agnes had earlier declared her own loneliness in what might have been the most candidly lustful letter she ever wrote him: “We have lived together too long to be separated like this! It seems as if I couldn’t stand it, I want to love you so! There—do you hate me for being so frank? Gene—your little Miss P. is meowing and howling and behaving like a perfect devil. . . . I’m in such a funny, vibrating physical state, it almost frightens me.”
Now, three days after the opening of Beyond, she described her regret at not having shared his moment of triumph, of not having witnessed his flash of pride and joy, for she knew it would quickly fade and become, as she put it, “an empty bauble.”
Conscience-bound to remain in New York for the production of Chris Christophersen, O’Neill was tempted to send for Agnes. But he foresaw the difficulties of her traveling alone with a breast-feeding infant and of finding her an inexpensive place to stay.
George Tyler had promised to release O’Neill after one more week, and while waiting out each endless day, he was buoyed by the prospering of Beyond despite a flu resurgence and a heavy snowfall. On February 6, he bragged to Agnes that the day’s matinee had had a record attendance and he was being asked for photographs to accompany newspaper and magazine interviews.
“Only a few days more!” he told Agnes, who was stranded in their Provincetown cottage in the midst of a savage blizzard. Fervently, she replied, “I want no other religion, no other belief, it is all there in you—in us.”
On the day she mailed her letter, O’Neill came down with the flu, which he believed he caught from his mother, who was confined to bed with severe symptoms. Dr. Aspell diagnosed Eugene’s case as mild, but cautioned him to stay indoors for a few days. Agnes was alarmed. She reminded O’Neill of the recent deaths of several young Provincetowners who, weakened after recovering from flu, had died of pneumonia. “Now you must not do anything to get cold after you are better,” she pleaded.
In spite of her eagerness to have him back home, she implored him not to take any chances, “for my sake, and poor Shane’s, for I swear if anything happens to you I will not live in this world without you—I simply couldn’t.”
She was resigned, she said, to waiting a little longer. She sounded very much like O’Neill himself in regretting past misbehavior; and she assured him that once they were reunited, she would be “so much nicer—so much more understanding.” He was her “perfect husband-lover,” and she wanted to make their home “the most beautiful place in this world—in a spiritual sense.”
It was now a week and a half since Beyond the Horizon had opened—sufficient time for O’Neill to have shrugged himself back into his periodic mantle of gloom. Worn down by illness, unhappy about the coming production of Chris Christophersen, concerned about both his parents’ health, and missing Agnes, he had lost his elation over the triumph of Beyond.
Even a flattering letter from John Williams, telling him, “The Town is Yours,” failed to cheer him. He sneered to Agnes, “They can keep it. Success has meant to me the meaningless futility I always knew it would—only more so.”
When O’Neill still had not recovered from the flu by February 13, Agnes felt she must go to him; she begged him to take a room for her and Shane in his hotel. But he wrote back that there was a long waiting list at the Prince George, and he didn’t have strength to look elsewhere and, besides, he thought it unwise to expose Shane to New York’s flu epidemic. Then, unable to suppress his spasmodic resentment of his son’s intrusive presence, he sulked, “It would all be so simple, if Shane were not in our midst, or if you only had him weaned.”
The following day O’Neill suffered a severe attack of neuralgia. He was, according to his doctor, “worn down to the last notch, without resisting power, open hospitably to all ills.” His nearly six-foot frame was skeletal; he weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds. “I want you—need you—” he wrote Agnes, “and yet, with Shane, what is the use of my heart crying. It’s all so impossible.”
Three days later, he reported he was having trouble sleeping, had no appetite, and had developed a brutal cough. “Haven’t been out of hotel yet. Doc. won’t allow me to go to Chris rehearsals. I’m really in awfully bad shape—and can’t seem to pick up.”
O’Neill and Agnes had been apart for seven and a half weeks and there was worse to come. On February 27, James O’Neill, recovering from his earlier minor stroke, had a second stroke that brought him close to death. His doctor “just managed to keep life in Papa,” O’Neill wrote Agnes. “Then he told Mama and me the truth. Papa, it seems, is doomed. He has a growth in the intestines which is bound sooner or later to prove fatal.”
The growth was cancer, and it was deemed inoperable. His father’s heart was so bad, wrote O’Neill, “he would die at the first sniff of ether.” Torn between concern for his father and sympathy for his mother, Eugene most of all was overwhelmed by a childlike confusion and pity for himself. “Mama and I,” he told Agnes, “have to go around nursing him,” and “pretending to kid him and cheer him up! Can you imagine it?”
James, resilient and optimistic during most of his life, had, even before his accident, been gradually sinking into depression. More than once, Eugene had heard him mutter about �
�doing as his father did, deserting family, going back to Ireland to die.” (This was a reference to Edward O’Neill, the banshee-bedeviled paternal grandfather O’Neill never knew who, in 1856—responding to ethereal Celtic voices—left his immigrant family to fend for themselves in Buffalo, New York, and returned to Ireland, where, soon after, he died of poison under suspicious circumstances.)
O’Neill complained to Agnes that, as he couldn’t leave the Prince George to attend Chris rehearsals, he was instead obliged to work with the play’s director at the hotel every morning. “As if I gave a damn about ‘Chris’ or any other play now! To have this happen just at the time when the Old Man and I were getting to be such good pals! I’m all broken up and begin to cry every time the meaning of it all dawns on me.”
Waiting unhappily to depart for the March 8 opening of the Chris tryout in Atlantic City, O’Neill received word that Agnes had fallen ill. Certain that once he’d arrived in Atlantic City, Tyler would press him to stay on for who-knew-how-many days of rewriting, O’Neill seized the excuse of Agnes’s illness to duck the out-of-town opening; he hastened instead to Provincetown, where he found Agnes already recovering.
But when he received a summons from Tyler to come at once to Atlantic City, where the play was not going well, he refused. In a wire to Tyler he lied that Agnes was very ill and he could not leave her and the baby. He did, however, send Tyler a lengthy rewrite of a crucial scene.
Chris Christophersen was bound for Philadelphia on March 14 but O’Neill was unwilling to budge, even though Agnes had completely recovered. She was “still very weak and unable to be out of bed yet,” he again lied to Tyler. (On the same day, he wrote to a Provincetown Players colleague that Agnes was “quite herself again.”)
O’Neill followed up with a message that further jolted Tyler. Ever since rereading the script in Provincetown, he said, he’d realized that Chris needed to be completely rewritten; cockily, he advised Tyler to “throw the present play in the ashbarrel.” He had “inklings” of how to rework it; he would “keep without change only the character of Chris” and would create “a real daughter and lover, flesh-and-blood people—and the underlying idea of the sea.” However, he did not think he would be able to complete such a rewrite until the following fall.
Tyler admitted defeat. He closed Chris in Philadelphia and turned his attention to The Straw, which O’Neill now averred was the best play he’d ever written—even better than Beyond the Horizon. It was not the first or last play he would initially trumpet as his “best,” only to acknowledge its faults after it had been produced—and failed.
O’Neill spent much of the next two months squabbling with Tyler over how and where The Straw should be presented. They couldn’t resolve the problem and the production was indefinitely postponed.
Lifting O’Neill’s spirits during the quarrelsome back-and-forth with Tyler was the March 10 publication of Beyond the Horizon by Boni & Liveright; all 1,250 copies of the first printing were wrapped in orange dust jackets containing a blurb from Alexander Woollcott.
Beyond, O’Neill’s first full-length play to be published, contained a formal dedication to Agnes, but he saluted her more elaborately on the flyleaf of the copy he gave her: “In memory of the wonderful moment when first in your eyes I saw the promise of a land more beautiful than any I had ever known, a land of which I had dreamed only hopelessly, a land beyond my horizon.”
Agnes was having her own bit of publishing luck. She sold two stories to The Smart Set, bringing in some welcome cash to add to the modest proceeds from both the production and publication of Beyond. In late April, even though their expenses, as always, exceeded their budget, the O’Neills decided it was time for Agnes to take Shane on brief visits to both sets of grandparents—and for Agnes finally to attend a performance of Beyond the Horizon.
Agnes would have liked to take Mrs. Clarke with her to help with Shane, but felt she couldn’t afford the extra expense. Besides, Mrs. Clarke was needed in Provincetown to look after O’Neill.
Agnes did not have an easy time of it in New York. To save on expenses, she lived in a friend’s one-room cold-water flat, where she had to bathe Shane in the kitchen sink (in which she also washed his diapers). When she saw the pleasure that Ella and the ailing James took in meeting their grandson, however, she felt rewarded for the inconvenience. Although reporting to O’Neill that his father did not look well, she wrote that both his parents “were smitten with Shane.”
After at last attending a performance of Beyond, on April 26, Agnes, as instructed by O’Neill, recorded her impressions; she thought Bennett’s performance was “great” but otherwise found much to disapprove of—mostly the bad acting of other cast members. She urged him to sit through a performance and see if he couldn’t get director Williams to make some improvements.
While working in Provincetown that June on his new version of Chris and monitoring bulletins about his father’s sinking health, O’Neill received a telegram from Columbia University, informing him he’d won a prize he hadn’t known existed. The Pulitzer Prize, established three years earlier, had been awarded only once (in 1918) in the category of drama, when it went to Jesse Lynch Williams for a play called Why Marry? (The prize was withheld in 1917 and 1919.)
The award cited Beyond the Horizon as an “original American play” that best represented “the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners”—not exactly a fit for O’Neill’s dark tale of thwarted love and smothered hope. As he himself jested to Nina Moise: “Can you imagine me at the point where Columbia University actually confers one of its biggest blue ribbons on me?”
His first impulse, as he later recorded, “was a disdainful raspberry, ‘Oh God, a damned medal! And one of those presentation ceremonies! I won’t accept it.’ (I have never been fond of medals or ceremonies.) Then a wire from my agent arrived which spoke of a thousand dollars and no medal and no ceremony. Well, I practically went delirious! I was broke or nearly. A thousand dollars was sure a thousand dollars! It was the most astoundingly pleasant surprise I’ve ever had in my life, I think.”
On June 10, O’Neill’s joyous mood turned somber when he learned that his terminally ill father had been transferred from his hospital in New York to the Lawrence Memorial Hospital in New London. James, after more than fifty years of ceaseless touring, had come home to die in the only place for which he had any nostalgia.
His doctor shocked Ella when he told her the end might be only days away. Jamie, who accompanied his mother to New London, sent his brother the stark prognosis: “I believe he’s going to die—and soon—but that he’ll linger some time yet.”
After worrying about how much the care was costing and how it would “leave Mama on the rocks,” Jamie momentarily put aside his disdain for the father he’d always blamed for his mother’s drug addiction, and blurted his sorrow to his brother; he wept, he said, and felt horribly grief-shaken when he “really believed the end was at hand, and Ma was on the verge of a breakdown, staying up purely on her nerve.”
O’Neill and Agnes were in the midst of arranging their annual move to Peaked Hill Bars for the summer when, in early July, a telegram warned that James was rapidly failing. Leaving Agnes to cope as best she could, O’Neill sped to New London to take up his bedside vigil with his mother and brother.
Agnes called on friends and hired help to assist in the always cumbersome trek to Peaked Hill Bars. She piled herself, Shane, Mrs. Clarke, and their baggage onto the Coast Guard’s horse-drawn wagon for the arduous journey over the great dunes to their ocean-front retreat. She reported her achievement to O’Neill—at the same time chiding him for not sending any news of his father.
As he sat at his dying father’s bedside, O’Neill was tormented by memories of his years of youthful rebellion, egged on by Jamie: the times he’d echoed his brother’s mockery of their father’s high-flown acting style;
his father’s blind loyalty to all things Irish; his rote obeisance to Catholic ritual; his pleasure in staking his sponging barroom cronies to drinks; his parsimony in wearing his clothes until threadbare; his compulsion to skimp on household necessities while sinking money into often worthless real estate.
Eugene remembered the family lore about his own birth in a Broadway hotel room, when his father summoned the cheap hotel doctor to attend his wife, whose delivery was not easy. He thought about his father’s immigrant peasant superstition that called for a spoonful of whiskey as a remedy for an infant’s nightmares.
He dwelled sullenly on the summer when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His father, presuming in his ignorance that Eugene had been handed a death warrant, sent him to a state farm rather than seek the costly medical help that might cure him. Nor did Eugene forget how he subsequently shamed his father into reversing his decision and sending him to the sanatorium where he recovered. Then there was the time his father withdrew his promise to pay for his second year at the Harvard playwriting course he longed to complete.
As he watched his father’s withered face in the hospital, Eugene also remembered all the mean and callous things he’d done to him: how he hurt him by refusing as a teenager to ever again accompany him to Sunday Mass; how, to embarrass his father, he had flaunted an adolescent fondness for whores; how he’d got himself expelled from Princeton for carousing during his freshman year and failing to take his final exams; how he had derided his father’s choice of popular and lucrative roles in hackneyed melodramas like The Count of Monte Cristo rather than developing his gift as a Shakespearean actor; how he pained his father by his flagrantly irresponsible first marriage.
Thinking back, Eugene remorsefully acknowledged his father’s well-intentioned efforts on his behalf. He had sent Eugene to an excellent preparatory school (Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut) and to Princeton; he had tried to place him in self-sustaining jobs; he’d given him an allowance, well into his thirties, that kept him from starving; he’d bought him a home in Provincetown; and, in spite of sustained ingratitude, his father had never abandoned him.