By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Even so, it was only in recent years that O’Neill had come to feel compassion for his father. As he once told a writer who was researching James O’Neill’s career, “My father’s parents were extremely poor. When he was only ten years old he had to start working in a machine shop for fifty cents a week.” O’Neill, at that time, was creating the character of James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, based, of course, on his father, for whom he wrote a heartbreaking monologue about the travails of his impoverished life as an immigrant child.

  Sitting at his father’s deathbed, Eugene was engulfed in regrets. Despite everything, he knew his father was a decent and well-meaning man. How few would have had his father’s endurance and compassion, or his determination not to withdraw his support from his two dysfunctional sons.

  “My father and I hadn’t got along so well,” he mused in an interview many years after James O’Neill’s death. “We had had a running battle for a good many years, and I know there were times when he’d just about given me up. Not that I can blame him. If anything, he was too patient with me. What I wonder now is why he didn’t kick me out. I gave him every chance to. And yet, as sometimes happens, we were close to each other—we were a very close family. My father, somehow, managed to believe in me.”

  O’Neill at last responded to Agnes with a harrowing letter:

  Am writing this at the hospital. Papa is lying in bed watching me, his strange eyes staring at me with a queer, uncanny wonder as if, in that veiled borderland between Life and Death in which his soul drifts suspended, a real living being of his own flesh and blood were an incongruous and puzzling spectacle.

  I feel as if my health, the sun tan on my face contrasted with the unearthly pallor of his, were a spiritual intrusion, an impudence. And yet how his eyes lighted up with grateful affection when he first saw me! It made me feel so glad, so happy I had come!

  The situation is frightful! Papa is alive when he ought to be dead. The disease has eaten through his bowels. Internal decomposition has set in—while he is still living! There is a horrible, nauseating smell in the room, the sickening, overpowering odor of a dead thing. His face, his whole body is that of a corpse. He is unspeakably thin and wasted.

  Only his eyes are alive—and the light that glimmers through their glaze is remote and alien. He suffers incredible tortures—in spite of all their dope. Just a few moments ago he groaned in anguish and cried pitifully: “Oh God, why don’t You take me! Why don’t You take me!”

  And Mama and I silently echoed his prayer.

  But God seems to be in His Omnipotent mood just now and not in His All Merciful.

  One very pitiful, cruelly ironic thing: He cannot talk plainly any more. Except when he cries out in pain it is impossible to understand him. And all through life his greatest pride has been in his splendid voice and clear articulation!

  His lips flutter, he tries so hard to say something, only a mumble comes forth—and then he looks at you so helplessly, so like a dog that has been punished it knows not why.

  Death seems to be rubbing it in—to demand that he drink the chalice of gall and vinegar to the last bitter drop before peace is finally his.

  And, dear God, why? Surely he is a fine man as men go, and can look back to a long life in which he has kept an honorable faith and labored hard to get from nothing to the best attainment he knew. Surely the finest test of that attainment is the great affection and respect that all bear him who knew him. I don’t believe he ever hurt a living thing intentionally.

  And he certainly has been a husband to marvel at, and a good father, according to his lights. I know those are the conventional virtues that are inscribed on tombstones—but he is the one person in a million who deserves them. Perhaps these virtues are so common in cemeteries because they are so rare in life.

  At any rate, looking at it dispassionately, he seems to me a good man—in the best sense of the word—and about the only one I have ever known. Then why should he suffer so—when murderers are granted the blessing of electric chairs.

  James dozed fitfully as O’Neill, in a corner of the hospital room, sat pouring out his anguish to Agnes. Suddenly, James awakened and beckoned his son to his bedside.

  Gasping for breath, in hesitant, barely audible words, the old actor delivered the lines of his heart-wrenching confession.

  It was, Eugene later told Agnes, “like a dying dialogue in a play I might have written.” Indeed, had O’Neill chosen to add a transcription of his father’s last words as an epilogue to Long Day’s Journey Into Night they would have served as a stunning epitaph.

  “He made a dreadful effort to speak clearly and I understood a part of what he said,” O’Neill wrote.

  Glad to go, boy—a better sort of life—another sort—somewhere”—and then he mumbled. He appeared to be trying to tell me what sort—and although I tried my damndest I couldn’t understand!

  This sort of life—froth!—rotten!—all of it—no good!” There was a bitter expression on his poor, sunken face. And there you have it—the verdict of a good man looking back over seventy-six years: “Froth! Rotten!”

  But it’s finally consoling to know he believes in a “better sort—somewhere.” I could see he did—implicitly! He will die with a sigh of relief. What queer things for him to say, eh?

  James sank into a coma; the “weak” heart diagnosed by his doctor, which had precluded an operation, ironically proved strong enough to keep him alive for twelve more days.

  Ella and her two sons kept a stoic vigil at James’s bedside. Always prone to dwell on the past, Ella might have drifted wistfully to her wedding day on June 14, 1877, when, as a lace-curtain Irish bride of twenty—pretty, educated, sheltered, and still mourning the loss of her own beloved father—she stepped trustfully into the cauldron that was to be her marriage.

  Gazing at James’s desiccated, pain-wracked face, perhaps Ella saw the exuberant, worldly, self-made thirty-two-year-old matinee idol she’d married—the handsomest and most romantic man she’d ever dreamed of as a husband. She would always remember the ceremony at St. Ann’s Church on East Twelfth Street in Manhattan, known as “the beau monde parish,” the locale for most of New York City’s chic Catholic weddings.

  James died on August 10, 1920, three days after Ella turned sixty-three. Agnes joined O’Neill in New London for the funeral. James was buried beside his infant son, Edmund, in St. Mary’s Cemetery, where Ella’s mother also was buried.

  After the funeral, to Agnes’s distress, O’Neill and his brother went off to get drunk. But no amount of drinking could banish the valiant old actor’s ghost.

  “My father died broken, unhappy, intensely bitter, feeling that life was ‘a damned hard billet to chew,’” wrote O’Neill to George Tyler. His father’s dying words, O’Neill said, were “seared on my brain—a warning from the Beyond to remain true to the best that is in me though the heavens fall.”

  14

  Reunited in late August 1920 with Agnes and Shane in Peaked Hill Bars, O’Neill continued to ponder his father’s “warning from the Beyond.” He hoped to dispel his grief with disciplined concentration—sometimes devoting as many as eight hours a day to his writing. But it seemed James O’Neill would forever be looking over his son’s shoulder.

  Inspired by his father’s dying words, O’Neill, some months later, forged a credo that would guide him through his life’s work. The New York Tribune was so impressed with the nobility of O’Neill’s uncompromising vision, as well as with his rising eminence, that it published his lofty statement under the two-column headline, “Eugene O’Neill’s Credo and His Reasons for His Faith”:

  To me, the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth. It is the meaning of life—and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising
insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been! The man who pursues the mere attainable should be sentenced to get it—and keep it. Let him rest on his laurels and enthrone him in a Morris chair, in which laurels and hero may wither away together.

  Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for—and so attain himself. He with the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness is nearest to the stars and the rainbow’s foot.

  It had taken Eugene some time to understand that his father was hostage to the fearsome deprivation of his childhood, a childhood that catapulted him from Ireland’s Great Potato Famine to the terrifying milieu of the impoverished Irish immigrant community of Buffalo, New York, where his starving family landed in 1851.

  James grew up with a horror of the poorhouse that was ingrained; it compelled him to acquire as much cash and real estate as he could, as a hedge against the poverty he always saw lurking.

  Eugene knew that when his father, on his deathbed, pronounced his life as “froth!—rotten!—all of it—no good!” he was deploring his abandonment of a talent that had promised to equal Edwin Booth’s as a great Shakespearean actor; he had done so to accumulate the easy riches from his endlessly popular vehicle, The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Touring from coast to coast, season after lucrative season, in the facile role of Edmond Dantes, James found himself trapped. When from time to time he tried to shove aside the count for a more substantial role, his audience fell off; in an instant he saw the poorhouse looming, and hastily resurrected Monte Cristo, which by then he had come to think of as his albatross. O’Neill grieved that his father had failed to learn what he himself had always believed: that the endless pursuit of material gain shriveled the soul.

  • • •

  WHILE SILVER-TIPPED WAVES slapped the sandy beach of the O’Neills’ front yard at Peaked Hill Bars, Agnes, too, resumed her writing; she could rely on Mrs. Clarke to relieve her of Shane’s supervision, as well as of many household chores. Mrs. Clarke soon would be christened Gaga by nine-month-old Shane, who adored her, much as O’Neill had treasured his own nursemaid, Sarah Sandy, as a second mother.

  Almost without exception, the O’Neills were viewed by their friends as a romantic, if high-strung couple—Agnes with her sculpted cheekbones and luminous blue-gray eyes, O’Neill with his swimmer’s physique and poet’s soulful gaze—both slim as saplings and burnished by the sun. None questioned their passionate mutual attachment. It was clear to all, however, that their love was anything but tranquil.

  Agnes was often irritated by O’Neill’s rigid intolerance of any disruption to his concentration. Like many a writer’s wife, she decried his inaccessibility when she craved his advice or solace; and she was always on edge, awaiting the emotional setback, however minor, that might lacerate his precarious nervous system. She tried to balance his needs with her own sporadic writing, her distracted mothering of Shane, and running a household. Invariably, it was his needs that took precedence, for it was he who had become the rapidly rising star.

  Wrapped in work and family, O’Neill was disinclined to busy himself with his widowed mother’s efforts to resolve her husband’s business affairs. His love for her was ever at war with the rancor crouching beneath that love, and he was guiltily relieved that Jamie had assumed responsibility for her. Jamie, jobless and unmarried at forty-two, exulted at the chance to replace his father as Ella’s devoted attendant.

  Staying with relatives in New London, Ella was attempting, with a surge of newfound energy, to sort out her husband’s chaotic local investments; she’d been informed by James’s lawyer that his estate, built on invested royalties from his lucrative acting career, might be substantial—worth perhaps more than $100,000. But not much of the estate was available in cash, and gradually it became clear that separating James’s good investments from the bad would not be easy.

  “The truth is,” O’Neill later explained, “he did lose a fortune, and a big one, during his whole career, but ‘Monte Cristo’ enabled him to afford his losses. He was an easy mark for anyone with a spare gold mine, zinc mine, coal mine, silver mine, pieces of real estate, etc.—and he rarely guessed right. But he never went into anything so heavily it could ruin him.”

  It fell to Ella to liquidate at least enough property to provide her with an income, and the complex negotiations were a merciful distraction, leaving her little time to mourn her husband. “She is developing into a keenly interested business woman who seems to accept this unfamiliar responsibility with a great sense of relief,” O’Neill wrote to Tyler. “Under her hand, I honestly have a hunch that some dividends may finally accrue from the junk buried on the island of M[onte]C[risto].”

  Jamie was there to help in any way he could. He had always adored his mother and had long since smothered the pain she’d inflicted on him in his early childhood and adolescence. From infancy, he’d traveled with his parents during his father’s acting tours, living with them in closest intimacy on trains and in hotel rooms across the country. Deprived of companions his own age, he was preternaturally attached to and dependent on his mother.

  Unsurprisingly, he had been acutely jealous when, at five, he was confronted with the intrusion of a baby brother. Ella found it too difficult to tour with both Jamie and infant Edmund, and mostly stayed behind in The Richfield, a family hotel on Forty-third Street just west of Broadway, that for a time was the O’Neill home in New York.

  Jamie was not yet seven and Edmund not yet two when Ella, in January of 1885, succumbed to her husband’s plea to join him on his western tour. She was torn about leaving her young children, but she missed James as much as he missed her and, apprehensively, she left the boys in her mother’s care and set off by train for Denver.

  In mid-February, not long after reuniting with James, Ella received a telegram from her mother; Jamie had come down with measles. Ella wired back, cautioning her mother to keep Jamie away from the baby. But Jamie, disregarding his grandmother’s warnings, went into Edmund’s room—possibly out of curiosity, possibly out of malice—exposing the baby to his own case of measles.

  On February 27, a second telegram informed Ella that Edmund had measles. She immediately entrained for New York. But on March 4, just before her arrival, Edmund died. In her grief, she first blamed herself for having left him; she then blamed her husband for enticing her away; then her mother for her carelessness; and finally she accused Jamie of having deliberately infected Edmund.

  Jamie, devastated, was soon banished to boarding school. But typical of the child who helplessly loves the parent who abuses him, Jamie clung to his mother.

  • • •

  NOW, WITH HIS father’s death, Jamie was so infatuated with his new role as his mother’s constant companion that he vowed, for her sake, never again to take a drop of liquor. Jamie and Ella became an inseparable couple, dining together, attending the theater together, and, in tandem, visiting their relatives in New York and New London.

  After receiving regular reports from New London of his mother’s progress in resolving James’s estate, O’Neill felt obliged to invite her and Jamie to spend what O’Neill called “a Thanksgiving rest” with him and Agnes in the rented winterized house in the village of Provincetown to which they retreated when their unheated Peaked Hill Bars home became unlivable.

  At sixty-three, Ella, outfitted with a wardrobe of stylish black dresses and accessories, was more self-possessed than her son Eugene had ever seen her. He decided that mourning suited her—spiritually as well as physically. The striking image of Ella O’Neill, blooming as she mourned, would later imbue his portrait of Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra.

  While he admired his mother’s resourcefulness, he seemed not to feel any surge of renewed warmth toward her. His feelings may be surmised from the wording of his inscription in the copy he gave her of the newly published The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays of the Sea. Whereas a typical
O’Neill inscription to even a casual friend was apt to pulse with warmth and sentiment, to Ella he wrote with wintry reserve: “To my Mother from Eugene” (adding nothing more than “Provincetown, Mass, Thanksgiving”).

  • • •

  THAT NOVEMBER 1920, O’Neill had nearly completed Gold, an expansion of Where the Cross Is Made, in which a deluded whaling captain, shipwrecked on a coral island and crazed with thirst, discovers a chest of trinkets he takes for gold.

  After he and three mates bury the “treasure,” they are rescued and return home, where the captain lives in hopes of going back to the island and retrieving the buried treasure. His inability to do so eventually drives him insane; as in Where the Cross Is Made, he is hounded to his death by the ghosts of his drowned mates. (In Where the Cross Is Made, the ghosts actually confront the captain, causing him to drop dead, whereas in Gold, the ghosts are seen only in the captain’s mind.)

  George Jean Nathan, to whom O’Neill sent the script, said he liked it even better than Beyond the Horizon. Nevertheless, in an article praising O’Neill’s work in general, the critic chided him for seeing “life too often as drama,” pointing out somewhat cryptically, “The great dramatist is the dramatist who sees drama as life.”

  O’Neill’s response was good-humored and respectful, acknowledging that he was “familiar enough with the best modern drama of all countries to realize that, viewed from a true standard, my work is as yet a mere groping.” He added that he rated himself “as a beginner—with prospects.”