By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  He was popular with his fellow students at Notre Dame’s elementary school and something of a teacher’s pet. He appeared in dramatic productions and played shortstop on the baseball team. No one who knew this bright, ingratiating, high-achieving boy would have predicted anything but the rosiest of futures for him.

  His spiral downward began at fourteen when, during a school vacation, he stumbled on his mother injecting herself with morphine—a discovery duplicated by Eugene a decade later.

  When Jamie returned to school, his behavior turned erratic. He still exhibited bursts of exemplary scholarship and literary achievement, but he had lost heart. He left his boarding school just short of his sixteenth birthday and, in quick succession, attended two other schools, performing with sporadic brilliance, but often misbehaving.

  He enrolled at St. John’s University in New York (later Fordham University), but less than halfway through his senior year he was expelled for what he thought was a grand joke: he brought a prostitute onto campus and tried to pass her off to the Jesuit faculty as his sister—an episode recounted in A Moon for the Misbegotten.

  It was then that Jamie began the decline from which he would never spring back.

  19

  I have lost my Father, Mother and only brother within the past four years,” O’Neill wrote to Mary Clark, the nurse who had cared for him in the Connecticut TB sanatorium in 1912 and on whom he based the character of the nurse, Miss Gilpin, in The Straw. “Now I’m the only O’Neill of our branch left.”

  Since neither of his two sons were “pure Irish,” he added with a self-dramatizing flourish, “I must consider myself the real last one. It makes me feel old and weary sometimes.”

  O’Neill did not mention that his weariness was caused to some degree by the dismal failure of Welded. O’Neill had temporarily shrugged off his mantle of mourning—not quite four months after Jamie’s death—to immerse himself in this Strindberg-inspired play.

  Welded was an almost literal depiction of his fractious marriage to Agnes.

  Typical of their perverse and higgledy-piggledy marriage, O’Neill and Agnes were currently reveling in a renewed intimacy. Agnes treasured Welded as her play, and they clung to each other as rehearsals got under way in early March 1924. Seated together at rehearsals in the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre west of Broadway, she and O’Neill gloated over the dialogue—by turns vicious and adoring—that the husband, Michael Cape, and his wife, Eleanor, spat or cooed at each other.

  The director, Stark Young, was aware that the O’Neills’ personal life was not, as he put it, “all smoothness” between “two such vivid temperaments”; he perceived Welded as somewhat of a “confession and a benediction” for both O’Neill and Agnes.

  A respected writer and critic, Young had agreed to stage the play even though he’d cringed at some of the script’s excesses; he later sarcastically described O’Neill and Agnes at rehearsals, “sitting side by side there in the third row and listening to every speech, good or bad, and taking it all as bona fide and their own.” They believed “every word of the play,” he added, “—those vulgar speeches, God!”

  With narcissistic insight, O’Neill had conceived Michael Cape as a virtual mirror image; he is, like O’Neill, thirty-five and a successful playwright: “His unusual face is a harrowed battlefield of super-sensitiveness . . . the forehead of a thinker, the eyes of a dreamer, the nose and mouth of a sensualist. One feels a powerful imagination tinged with somber sadness—a driving force which can be sympathetic and cruel at the same time. There is something tortured about him . . . a self-protecting, arrogant defiance of life . . . a deep need for love as a faith in which to relax.”

  Subjective as it is, it’s not an inaccurate snapshot of the author himself.

  Nor is O’Neill’s description of the playwright’s wife an erroneous rendering of Agnes’s personality—although Eleanor, an actress rather than a writer, has made her name as a leading lady in her husband’s plays. “Her face,” wrote O’Neill (presumably with Agnes’s approval and possibly with her assistance), “with its high, prominent cheekbones, lacks harmony. It is dominated by passionate, blue-gray eyes, restrained by a high forehead from which the mass of her dark brown hair is combed straight back. The first impression of her whole personality is one of charm.”

  Within minutes of the beginning of Act I, Scene I, Cape and Eleanor are heavy-handedly excoriating each other; their exchange (almost certainly) approximates a typically tedious conversation between their two married prototypes:

  CAPE: You feel the need of what is outside. I’m not enough for you.

  ELEANOR: (pleadingly) Haven’t I a right to myself as you have to yourself?

  CAPE: You fight against me as if I were your enemy. . . . At every turn you feel your individuality invaded—while at the same time, you’re jealous of any separateness in me. You demand more and more while you give less and less. And I have to acquiesce. Have to? Yes, because I can’t live without you! You realize that! You take advantage of it while you despise me for my helplessness!

  ELEANOR: You insist that I have no life at all outside you. Even my work must exist only as an echo of yours. You hate my need of easy, casual associations. You think that weakness. You hate my friends. You’re jealous of everything and everybody. (resentfully) I have to fight. You’re too severe. Your ideal is too inhuman. Why can’t you understand and be generous—be just!

  It befell two respected players, Doris Keane and Jacob Ben-Ami, to deliver these overwrought lines. Before the end of the first week’s rehearsals, Keane told Stark Young she could not act the role of Eleanor. Pronouncing the play “a vulgar, stupid dogfight,” she pleaded with him to let her withdraw. Although embarrassed on his star’s behalf, Young—out of loyalty to O’Neill—appealed to her gallantry and persuaded her to stay. “I’m still ashamed of myself for letting Doris Keane play the role,” he later confessed.

  Ben-Ami, who also had misgivings, agreed to stay with the play because he realized O’Neill “was in a bad way emotionally” and all concerned “had been breaking their necks to keep him sober.”

  Welded landed with a thud on March 17. It was unanimously dismissed by the critics as one of O’Neill’s misguided high dives. Before even reading what they had to say, O’Neill, in his Work Diary, had pronounced it “A Flop!”

  “Two back fence cats in debate” was how Woollcott dismissed it, while other critics found it “repetitious,” “prosy,” and “dull.”

  O’Neill complained sarcastically to the critic Oliver Sayler that the play might have “shone through” had it been done without its cast; yet, several years later, in a characteristic about-face, he scorned Welded as too painfully bungled to be worth producing at all. It closed after twenty-four performances.

  Agnes, cheated of the epiphany she’d envisioned, could only hope that the public airing of her and O’Neill’s marital perplexities would in some measure prove cathartic. As for O’Neill, it is ironic that he, in his initial pique, chose to blame the failure of Welded on its cast, since he himself, as a part producer, had approved the actors.

  • • •

  WELDED WAS THE initial venture of a recently formed triumvirate consisting of O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones. They had taken over the Provincetown Players in June 1923, shortly after O’Neill chose Arthur Hopkins as the producer of The Hairy Ape, bypassing Jig Cook, who was still living in Greece after having left the foundering Provincetowners to survive as best they could.

  O’Neill had seized the chance to solve a dilemma he had in common with most of his peers: how to get his work onto the stage under auspices that would allow him the final say on all aspects of production. He was certain he could count on Macgowan and Jones to accommodate unequivocally his soaring vision for his future work.

  As he had predicted at the start of 1922, while flush with the success of The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, his work
was likely to change in both form and content. At that time, answering questions posed by Malcolm Mollan, his onetime city editor during his ephemeral reporting stint on the New London Telegraph in 1912, O’Neill said, “I intend to use whatever I can make my own, to write about anything under the sun, in any manner that fits or can be invented to fit the subject. And I shall never be influenced by any consideration but one: Is it the truth as I know it—or better still, feel it? If so, shoot, and let the splinters fall where they may. If not, not. . . . There is no temptation for me to compromise.”

  Three months later (in April 1922), O’Neill—albeit with tongue in cheek—expressed his implausible dreams of an Ideal Theater to Oliver Sayler: “The Higher Man of the theater will be a playwright. He will have his own theater for his own plays, as Strindberg had his Intimate Theater in Stockholm.” Surrounding the playwright would be imaginative craftsmen who would find their inspiration in interpreting his work. But before that could happen, O’Neill jested, the theater as it existed, must be destroyed.

  Let us then first—oh sweet and lovely thought!—poison all the actors, then guillotine the managers, hang the playwrights—with one omission—feed the critics to the lions (except you, of course), and as a final act of purification, call upon a good God to send a second flood to wipe out the audience, root and branch. Being a just God, and a Great Producer, he will no doubt spare the two of us; and we can then rehearse this dialog on Mount Ararat as a first step toward the Theater of the Future.

  Reiterating his conviction that he’d outgrown what he considered Jig Cook’s didactic control and zealous amateurism, O’Neill declared himself equally fed up with the foibles and caprices of Broadway potentates like John Williams, George Tyler, and even Arthur Hopkins. In a stroke of luck for O’Neill, part of the solution to his problem came from Cook himself; he unexpectedly decided to prolong his stay in Greece with Susan Glaspell and on June 19, 1923, he cabled his wish that the Provincetown Players be terminated. He bluntly spelled out his reasons in a letter to Edna Kenton, a veteran official of the Players:

  “Since we have failed spiritually in the elemental things, and the result is mediocrity, what one who has loved it wishes for it now is euthanasia—a swift and painless death.” Cook implied his decision was based on O’Neill’s truculence: “Our richest, like our poorest, have desired most not to give life but to have it given them.”

  With Cook out of the picture at the Provincetown, O’Neill next set about ridding himself of his Broadway producing tyrants. Since there was “no one else,” as he wrote to George Jean Nathan, “I’ll have to help create a new outlet—or remain gagged.”

  It was his determination not to remain gagged that had motivated him to invite Macgowan and Jones to join him in the producing triumvirate that would replace the argumentative and haphazard committee system initiated by Cook. The triumvirate would operate with what Macgowan called “a firm, dictating hand.” With reference to no one’s opinion but their own, the three would choose when, how, and where to produce O’Neill’s upcoming plays; in addition, they would fill the Provincetown Playhouse with experimental productions of established classics and modern European dramas, along with fresh new American work.

  By the beginning of 1924—two months before the triumvirate’s production of Welded—Cook was dead. Not yet fifty, he died in Greece on January 14 of glanders, an animal disease rarely transmitted to humans, but mystifyingly contracted by Cook from his pet dog. O’Neill was stunned.

  “When I heard of his death, Susan,” he wrote to Glaspell in a letter of condolence and appeasement, “I felt suddenly that I had lost one of the best friends I had ever had or ever would have—unselfish, rare, and truly noble! And then when I thought of all the things I hadn’t done, the letters I hadn’t written, the things I hadn’t said, the others I had said and wished unsaid, I felt like a swine, Susan. Whenever I think of him it is with the most self-condemning remorse.” Not long after Glaspell’s return to America, she resumed her friendship with O’Neill and Agnes.

  Not until twenty years later—at the end of his writing career—did O’Neill publicly give Cook his due, saluting him in 1945 as “imaginative in every way,” and adding that Cook “was against everything that suggested the worn-out conventions and cheap artificialities of the commercial stage. It’s hard to say how much we owe him.”

  • • •

  AFTER HAVING USED Welded to probe, ad nauseam, the reasons for his unflagging battle with Agnes, O’Neill went on—still in Strindbergian mode—to explore the even more convoluted marriage of his parents.

  All God’s Chillun Got Wings was a play O’Neill would not have dared to write while his parents were living. Indeed, he’d had to wait for the death of his brother as well, for he wouldn’t have risked Jamie’s condemnation. But once he felt freed to express his true feelings about his family, he became a galactic vacuum sweeper; he began to suck up the painful fragments of his life and redistribute them into one cosmic retelling after another.

  Written between October and December 1923, All God’s Chillun was O’Neill’s first attempt to delve into the character of his unstable mother, whom he would continue to portray in one guise or another to the end of his career. In a series of semi-expressionist scenes, the play zeroes in on the stifling marriage between an emotionally unstable woman and her well-intentioned husband, who strives to rise above his humble background, but is ultimately reduced to the role of his wife’s caretaker. Like Ella and James O’Neill—and like Strindberg’s tormented couples madly dancing to their deaths—the man and wife in All God’s Chillun are irrevocably locked together.

  “I can’t leave her. She can’t leave me,” says the play’s husband to his sister, who has asked why he and his clearly incompatible wife don’t separate. “And there’s a million little reasons combining to make one big reason why we can’t. For her sake—if it’d do her any good—I’d go—I’d leave—I’d do anything—because I love her. . . . But that’d only make matters worse for her. I’m all she’s got in the world! Yes, that isn’t bragging or fooling myself. I know that for a fact!”

  Craftily camouflaging All God’s Chillun as a meditation on miscegenation, O’Neill buried the fact that his parents were his real-life models. So secure was he (now that his brother was gone) that their disguises were impenetrable, he audaciously called the couple by his parents’ actual first names—Jim and Ella—(though giving them the fictitious last name of Harris).

  He disguised his father (the impoverished Irish immigrant actor avid for stardom) as a slum-born New York black man striving to rise above his background by passing the bar exam and practicing law. And he disguised his mother (the sheltered Irish princess Ella Quinlan) as a raddled white child of the same New York slum, who becomes Jim Harris’s unhinged wife.

  Not surprisingly, O’Neill was having far more difficulty coming to terms, postmortem, with his once-morphine-addicted mother than with his perplexed if well-intentioned father. His portrayal of Ella Harris was censorious, based on childhood memories of his mother’s inexplicable and terrifying switches from maternal warmth to what sometimes appeared to young Eugene as insanity.

  At play’s end, Jim realizes he will never pass the bar exam and Ella Harris is clinically insane. Cursing her stricken husband as a “nigger,” she threatens him with a carving knife—much as Ella O’Neill (although not wielding a knife) sometimes cuttingly derided her husband as an ignorant Irish peasant.

  O’Neill’s symbolic concept of his mother, when in morphine’s grip, was later to be embedded in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The notes that O’Neill made about Mary Tyrone applied equally to Ella Harris in God’s Chillun: a woman who could switch in an instant from loving wife to “a hard cynical sneering bitterness with a bitter biting cruelty and with a coarse vulgarity in it.”

  O’Neill imbued Ella Harris with an uncontainable fury at her isolation, which she blamed on her marriage to a black man
who was socially snubbed for his daring but futile attempt to become a lawyer. This was O’Neill’s symbolic substitute for Ella O’Neill’s distress at the isolation she suffered as a result of her marriage to an actor, in a day when actors were often snubbed as little better than vagabonds and prostitutes. Moreover, he implied, a contributing cause of Ella Harris’s depression stemmed, as did Ella O’Neill’s, from the loss of an infant.

  As All God’s Chillun was being readied for production, O’Neill tried to avoid a mistake he believed he’d made with Welded; he had come to realize that the heightened dialogue in Welded was contravened by the play’s realistic setting.

  “My notion,” he said, “was to have a man and a woman, lovers and married, enact their spiritual struggle to possess one another. I wanted to give the impression of the world shut out, just of two human beings struggling to break through an inner darkness.

  “But the sets which I described in my stage directions were so ‘natural’ that they inevitably conjured up all the unimportant paraphernalia of living, daily existence, to stand between the life of my characters and the lives in the audience.”

  Whether a more abstract set would have saved Welded is doubtful. Nevertheless, O’Neill, avoiding a realistic setting for All God’s Chillun, called instead for an expressionistic design to represent the Brooklyn apartment in which Jim and Ella gradually smother each other. And so, the Harrises’ living room shrinks with each act, its walls closing in, its ceiling descending, its furnishings looming ever larger and more menacing. If anything could have distracted O’Neill and Agnes from the humiliating failure of Welded—not to mention the continuing agitation of their faltering marriage—it was the rumble of controversy about the impending production of All God’s Chillun Got Wings. As he’d often done with previous plays, O’Neill released the script for publication ahead of production (in The American Mercury, the newest Nathan/Mencken magazine venture, in February 1924).