by Arthur Gelb
O’Neill hoped that in rural Connecticut he would escape the distractions of city life, and yet be within an easy train or car ride to Manhattan when he needed to attend rehearsals. He was also close enough to New London to keep an eye on the family property, as well as on Jamie, whose behavior was escalating ever more out of control.
To friends aware of his love for the sea, O’Neill explained that a recent medical checkup had showed a “smoky” lung condition. Always fearing a recurrence of TB, he said he was taking his doctor’s advice to switch to country air.
Brook Farm had fifteen rooms and was set on thirty-one acres of wide lawns, pasture, and woodland. There was a spring-fed swimming pond, a fish pond, vegetable and flower gardens, a four-car garage, a stable, and a barn. Surrounded by ancient elms, oaks, and pines, the house was a traditional white clapboard New England colonial, with a paneled center hall and a library enhanced by a beamed ceiling. A thirty-foot-square living room with French doors led to a covered patio. Upstairs were four large bedrooms, two with fireplaces, and the servants’ quarters.
While O’Neill’s penny-pinching father would have disdained such a home as conspicuously wasteful, it was just the sort of house his mother had dreamed of living in (even while knowing herself too incapacitated to manage it).
Brook Farm signaled a radical change of lifestyle for O’Neill, who heretofore had shown no tendency to see himself as a country squire. During his boyhood, when New London was still a fashionable summer resort, he had always sneered—in common with Jamie and his father—at gentrified estates like Brook Farm. But O’Neill appeared to revel in his new persona, going so far as to acquire a pedigreed Irish wolfhound—the breed of Irish kings—which he dubbed Finn, later adding an Irish terrier named for Mat Burke, the sailor in Anna Christie. To complete his new image, he splurged on a custom-made, so-called touring car with six seats and a convertible top, designed for family outings.
He seemed to have forgotten his self-righteous pronouncement of two years earlier, while roughing it among the dunes at his oceanfront home on Peaked Hill Bars. It was then that he told a newspaper interviewer he was “a person to whom Rolls-Royces and similar titillations mean less than nothing, and who desires no greater extravagance than food.”
He still sincerely believed himself to be scornful of a lifestyle of luxury. But he had, after all, worked hard, and been true to his ideals; his increasing success as a dramatist gave him a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn’t he live as well as he could?
Although O’Neill hoped Brook Farm would be a home in which he and Agnes could live companionably, it didn’t work out that way. The initial elation of furnishing the house and hiring servants proved to be just an interlude between bouts of hostility. Despite their still-passionate (if intermittent) lovemaking, their disagreements about how they should conduct their lives were exacerbated.
Agnes was eager to entertain at her grand new home, and to attend parties both locally and in New York. O’Neill was willing to see a few chosen friends now and then, but, as ever, he craved quiet and seclusion for his writing. Agnes’s social propensities got on his nerves.
“Gene was doing a lot of drinking around that time,” Kenneth Macgowan remembered. “He telephoned me one day in New York from his house in Ridgefield. He asked me to bring him a bottle of whiskey on the way to my home in Brewster. When I got to Ridgefield, Gene met me at the door. All he said was ‘I don’t like Agnes.’”
Eben Given, who had gone house-hunting with the O’Neills in Connecticut (and who later bought the Mark Twain estate), believed O’Neill’s conflict “stemmed from the fact that [he] was roaring ahead artistically, and he had to be kept free from social demands.” Agnes’s daughter, Barbara, an occasional visitor, recalled that “lots of people were always coming for weekends from New York.”
Louis Kantor, conceding that Agnes’s social yearning was one of the obvious causes of friction between the two, suggested there was an even more fundamental problem. It hinged, Kantor believed, “on the question of equality.” It’s true that Agnes felt herself as much entitled to pursue her preferred way of life as was O’Neill to pursue his—an attitude that O’Neill, rapidly growing in stature, found unconscionable. He expected Agnes—more so now than ever—to find her raison d’être in him and his work.
He demanded to be pampered, waited upon, obeyed. It angered him when Agnes seemed unable to understand that the importance of his work entitled him to deference. Every time she challenged his supremacy he was shattered anew. And yet, while he didn’t “like” her—and longed to change her—he missed her unbearably when they were apart. And Agnes continued to respond in kind—although stopping short of unconditional surrender.
“I have a heartache all the time I am away from you,” she wrote soon after the purchase of Brook Farm. “My dear dearest, I want to write my soul out for you, telling the way I feel about you.”
Conflict was the air O’Neill breathed. It wasn’t only his feelings for Agnes that stifled him. His refractory brother had become an intolerable burden; it was all but impossible for O’Neill any longer to feel charitable toward him. To the lawyer for his mother’s estate, who was having difficulty getting Jamie to sign some necessary documents, O’Neill wrote in exasperation from Brook Farm at year’s end:
I don’t know what to say to you regarding my brother. The last I heard of him he was in pretty bad shape . . . I have learned by experience that the more I should urge him toward one course of action, the more obstinate and determined he will be to do the opposite. So what can I do?
After a protracted struggle, Jamie consented to enter a drying-out facility in Darien, not far from Ridgefield. But he soon left to embark on a drunken rampage. O’Neill desperately wired the family lawyer:
HE HAS BROKEN LOOSE AGAIN IS ON HIS WAY TO NEW LONDON AFTER MOST DISGRACEFUL SCENE IN THEATER STAMFORD LAST NIGHT WILL BE ARRESTED THERE IF HE RETURNS ANY MEASURES HOWEVER DRASTIC YOU SEE FIT TO TAKE TO RESTRAIN HIM IN NEW LONDON WILL HAVE MY FULL APPROVAL.
In fuming over his brother’s tantrums, Eugene seemed to have forgotten his own years of self-destructive drinking—or, for that matter, his own still-unresolved addiction to alcohol. He was too incensed to feel compassion for the older brother he’d worshipped from early childhood, the brother he’d admired for his worldliness and literary sophistication, and whose cynicism he’d trustingly tried to imitate. For most of their lives they’d been as close as any two brothers of legend. But O’Neill had run out of patience.
On May 20, 1923, Jamie, in an advanced state of delirium tremens, was admitted to the Riverlong Sanatorium in Paterson, New Jersey, an expensive rehabilitation center paid for out of his share of his mother’s estate. At forty-five, Jamie’s hair was white and he was losing his eyesight.
O’Neill was kept apprised of Jamie’s condition by his sanatorium doctor and by a few visiting relatives and friends from New London and New York. Among them was Frances Cadenas, the married sister of the Madison Square Garden circus acrobat Bill Clarke, Eugene and Jamie’s drinking crony from bygone days.
Jamie talked to Cadenas of his love for his younger brother. He had been hospitalized for a month when she was informed by his doctor that his condition had grown critical. “The pain is not only in his limbs but in his hands this week,” Cadenas wrote to O’Neill. “He does not like the place, the food is wretched, and he cannot sleep during the night.”
She went on to describe his treatment for what had been diagnosed as “alcoholic neuritis”: gradual withdrawal from alcohol by “giving him ten drinks of whiskey during the day and some other kind of drink before the whiskey, which burns like fire and acts as a purgative.” Jamie, she said, “was very skinny, pale, trembles a great deal and of course weak.
“I read him a little part of your letter and he was very happy to hear a message from you. He cannot read or write and he asked me to write for him and to tell you about his condition. He
also expressed a great desire to see you.”
She promised to continue visiting Jamie and would telegraph O’Neill if there was any change. “I’m sure a letter from you would be very bracing,” she prodded gently.
O’Neill rarely wrote to Jamie and never visited the sanatorium. In a letter to Saxe Commins, he confided that Jamie was “almost blind from bad booze. . . . What the hell can be done about him is more than I can figure. He’ll only get drunk, I guess, after he gets out and then he’ll be all blind.”
Jamie never did get out. It took him three more months to die. According to a cousin, Phil Sheridan, Jamie was “out of his mind” during his final days. Death came on November 8, 1923.
O’Neill did not attend the service at St. Stephen’s, on Twenty-ninth Street, a few blocks from the church where his mother’s funeral Mass had been held. Agnes told friends her husband was ill with the flu; other friends heard he was drunk—as Jamie had been during his mother’s funeral service less than a year earlier. The most cruelly blighted of the tragic O’Neills, Jamie was buried in New London beside his father, mother, and baby brother.
Memories of his uncharitable treatment of Jamie festered in Eugene’s mind. Years later, still hugging his grief and guilt, O’Neill answered a query about his brother from Joseph McCarthy, his former roommate at their Catholic boarding school. “No, my brother is not alive. . . . Booze got him in the end. It was a shame. He and I were terribly close to each other.”
Almost two decades after Jamie’s death, O’Neill wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten, a play that was, in effect, a requiem for his brother. He struggled to complete it, fearful that encroaching illness soon would silence his writing forever.
Begun in 1941, it was O’Neill’s final and most brutally tragic work, completed in 1944 when he was gravely ill. Beneath its splendor as theater, A Moon for the Misbegotten was O’Neill’s despairing attempt to understand and (at least conditionally) forgive Jamie for the outrageous conduct that was precipitated by his mother’s death.
The play is set on a ramshackle Connecticut farm, recognizable as property owned by James O’Neill near New London. In the play, as in real life, the farm is part of the older son’s inheritance. And in the play, it is operated by a disreputable tenant farmer, Phil Hogan, and his daughter, Josie.
While Hogan is based on an actual pig farmer named John Dolan, known as “Dirty Dolan” by old-time New Londoners, Josie, a voluptuous, bigger-than-life Earth Mother, is a character of O’Neill’s invention. She is endowed by him with the nurturing qualities possessed by both Dorothy Day and Christine Ell, who had soothed him during his anxious Greenwich Village days.
The time is “early September 1923,” two months before the real Jamie’s death. As in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the character based on O’Neill’s brother is called James Tyrone Jr. But while the Tyrones of Journey address him by his nickname Jamie, in Moon he is called Jim—as the real Jamie was known to many outside the family. The nickname “Jamie” had been given to him in early boyhood by his mother to avoid confusion with his father, whom she had always called Jim.
Unlike O’Neill’s harsh early notes (ultimately scuttled) for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which he described Mary Tyrone as an “alien demon,” he now made fanciful notes about Jim Tyrone as a mere “alien”; when he was born, wrote O’Neill, the first thing he did was “look around at the round earth and realize” he had been “sent to the wrong planet.”
“God had double-crossed him,” O’Neill elaborated in his scenario for the play, “and so he began to curse . . . and he reached for a bottle of whiskey and said to himself, By God, I’ll show you! Try and catch me now. And so he lived on cursing & drinking, being slapped on the back and no one ever caught him.”
O’Neill had, of course, already depicted his brother as a misanthropic second-rate actor—alcoholic but still functional at thirty-three—in his recently completed Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which was set in 1912. In Moon—set eleven years later—O’Neill portrayed his then forty-five-year-old brother as a depressed, guilt-ridden, alcohol-sodden failure who is aware he is at death’s edge.
Rather than inhabiting the realistic family setting of Long Day’s Journey, the James Tyrone Jr. of Moon materializes from a twisted fable that is part tragedy, part raucous comedy, and part miracle play.
At the time we meet this older fictional Jim Tyrone on Hogan’s farm in Moon, the real Jim was actually in the New Jersey sanatorium, nearly blind, recently having suffered a stroke, and in the terminal stage of alcoholism. A Moon for the Misbegotten, a wish fulfillment on O’Neill’s part, afforded him a second look at his brother’s life and death.
In one sense, the play was a belated offering of redemption for his brother as well as expiation for his own guilty lack of compassion during Jamie’s terminal suffering. It was as though O’Neill was conjuring a Mass for the long-dead brother who had once been his hero.
It is in the climactic third act scene that Jim Tyrone, seeking atonement, tears from himself an agonizing confession about his own unforgivable behavior. It is based on Jamie O’Neill’s drunken confession to his brother of his debauched five-day train trip from California to New York with his mother’s casket. O’Neill had listened to the confession with disgust and fury.
Jim’s confessor in the play is the earth-motherly Josie Hogan, described as “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak—5 feet 11 in her stockings and weighs around 180,” but who, beneath a mock-bawdy exterior, possesses a saintly gentleness and compassion.
O’Neill wished Josie to be seen as Jim’s savior, the one person to whom he could reveal his betrayal of his mother and be given absolution in his mother’s name. A Moon for the Misbegotten is essentially a religious play, rooted in the Roman Catholic doctrine that O’Neill never entirely left behind. A startling aspect of the play is how little O’Neill chose to alter the bare facts of Jamie’s raw account of his mother’s last days and his horrifying five-day train ride bearing his mother’s remains from California to New York.
“When Mama died,” Jim Tyrone begins, “I’d been on the wagon for nearly two years. Not even a glass of beer. Honestly. And I know I would have stayed on. For her sake. . . . She’d always hated my drinking. So I quit. It made me happy to do it. For her. Because she was all I had, all I cared about. Because I loved her.”
He goes on to recall the onslaught of his mother’s illness in California. “The docs said, no hope. Might never come out of coma. I went crazy. Couldn’t face losing her. The old booze yen got me. I got drunk and stayed drunk. And I began hoping she’d never come out of the coma, and see I was drinking again. That was my excuse, too—that she’d never know. I know damned well just before she died she recognized me. She saw I was drunk. Then she closed her eyes so she couldn’t see, and was glad to die!”
He found he “couldn’t feel anything,” nor could he cry. “All I did was try to explain to myself, ‘She’s dead, what does she care now if I cry or not.’” She was “happy to be where” he “couldn’t hurt her ever again.”
Jim describes how, in the train bringing his mother’s body east, he’d hidden himself in his drawing room “with a case of booze,” but drunk as he was, nothing could make him forget his mother in the baggage car.
“I found I couldn’t stay alone in the drawing room,” he tells Josie. “It became haunted. I was going crazy. I had to go out and wander up and down the train looking for company.”
He grew so boisterous, the conductor threatened to lock him into his compartment. But he had glimpsed a woman passenger “who was used to drunks and could pretend to like them, if there was enough dough in it.” He describes her as “a blonde pig who looked more like a whore than twenty-five whores, with . . . a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear’s feet.”
Jim Tyrone goes on to tell a horrified Josie Hogan that he bribed the porter to give the woman a message, and that n
ight she sneaked into his compartment; he paid the whore “fifty bucks a night,” he goes on, and to Josie’s shocked response, “Oh, how could you!” he shrugs helplessly.
“I suppose I had some mad idea she could make me forget—what was in the baggage car ahead. . . . It was like some plot I had to carry out. . . . It was as if I wanted revenge—because I’d been left alone—because I knew I was lost, without any hope left—that all I could do would be drink myself to death.”
But, he says, he didn’t forget “even in that pig’s arms!” Exhausted, he ends his story: “Well, that’s all—except I was too drunk to go to her funeral.” Josie, after her initial dismay, tries to comfort Jim. She realizes he is dying, and—in his mother’s name—she pardons and blesses him. As he takes his final leave of Josie, “her face sad, tender and pitying,” she gazes after him.
“May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling,” she says, “may you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.”
Unlike the fictional Jim Tyrone, Jamie O’Neill had no Josie Hogan to absolve him.
• • •
IN A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, there is no mention—as there is in Long Day’s Journey Into Night—of the events of Jamie’s early life that led to his final tragedy. At the age of ten and still in exile (at Notre Dame’s elementary boarding school in South Bend, Indiana), Jamie seems to have outgrown the jealousy he’d felt three years earlier at the intrusion into his family of an unwanted sibling; he accepted with good grace the arrival of his new brother, Eugene. Perhaps, amid the friends he’d made and his busy academic and extracurricular school life, he had become resigned to living apart from his parents and no longer felt the need to vie for his mother’s daily attention—although he did yearn for her school visits.
If O’Neill’s early scenario for A Moon for the Misbegotten is taken literally, Jamie also drew profound solace from the religious belief in which he was raised. “There was once a boy who loved . . . purity and God with a great quiet passion inside him” reads a line in the scenario describing Jim Tyrone; indeed, wrote O’Neill, Jim had actually contemplated giving up “self & the world to worship of God.”