by Arthur Gelb
“Hum!” Abbie responds gloatingly. “It’s purty—purty! I can’t b’lieve it’s r’ally mine.”
Cabot reproves her: “Yewr’n? Mine!” Then, relenting: “Our’n—mebbe! It was lonesome too long. I was growin’ old in the spring. A hum’s got t’ hev a woman.”
Abbie, possessively: “A woman’s got t’ hev a hum!”
Eben’s fears are confirmed. Attracted to his stepmother against his will, he determines to shun her. At twenty-five—a stand-in for a young Eugene O’Neill—Eben is “tall and sinewy,” with “defiant, dark eyes” reminiscent of “a wild animal in captivity.” His “fierce repressed vitality” matches Abbie’s.
As for Ephraim Cabot, he is seventy-five, hard-bitten, “tall and gaunt, with great, wiry, concentrated power.” He is a brutish, self-centered farmer wedded to his land. Although O’Neill dreamt Desire whole, he had been shaping an Ephraim-like character for years. He had, in fact, conceived a forerunner for Ephraim in his 1918 one-acter, The Rope, the trivial melodrama whose protagonist, Abraham Bentley, shares some of Cabot’s crotchets: he is a mean Bible-spouting old farmer who has driven his wife to her death and whose son hates him.
While living with the Ephraim Cabot of 1850 in his mind all through the winter and early spring of 1924, O’Neill, always attuned to nature, was absorbing his rustic environment of the present. His Brook Farm estate still retained enough traces of the working farm it had once been to serve as a model for the old New England farm that forms the setting of Desire.
For O’Neill, Brook Farm brought back memories of his father’s hardscrabble farm in New London, purchased in the conviction that land was the only financial security. As a young child, James had been traumatized by his family’s forced abandonment of their farm in Kilkenny when they were driven from Ireland, along with a million others, during the Great Potato Famine that began in 1845, the year of James’s birth. The O’Neills arrived in Buffalo destitute.
It was only after years of deprivation that James, at last prospering as an actor, started to buy land; Eugene well-remembered a derelict farm in Zion, New Jersey, where he and two friends, the then unknown artists George Bellows and Ed Keefe, had camped during part of a freezing January and February in 1909.
His father and the farm. Together they gave birth to craggy old Ephraim Cabot, who in some ways was yet another exaggerated dramatization of James O’Neill. Ephraim is given to quoting from the Bible and he churlishly denounces his son as “soft,” as taking after his mother; at times Ephraim is a near caricature of James, who was fond of quoting (and at times adapting) Shakespeare to disparage Eugene (“a poor thing but mine own”).
Farms were a motif in O’Neill’s plays almost as persistent as the sea; Anna Christie and the early one-act sea plays are peopled by inveterate sailors longing for the farms to which they know in their hearts they will never return. And then there are the farm settings of Beyond the Horizon (as O’Neill’s career was taking off) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (at his career’s end). If O’Neill was the sea-mother’s son, he also was the son of the farmland-father.
O’Neill told a fan who asked for an “explanation” of Desire that it was “a tragedy of the possessive—the pitiful longing of man to build his own heaven here on earth by glutting his sense of power with ownership of land, people, money—but principally the land.”
One day, nearing the end of his work on Desire, O’Neill took his newly employed typist, Bernard Simon (a Provincetown Players recruit), for a walk through the woods of Brook Farm. O’Neill and Simon paused before a wall of stones standing amid weeds. It was the sort of wall he was writing about, O’Neill informed his impressionable young assistant. It had once been part of a fence that marked the boundary of tilled soil.
Walls like this one, which ran for acres through his property and that of his neighbors’, O’Neill told Simon, were representative of the New England farmer’s age-old roots; they were reproachful relics of the farmers who left their fields to go west, where there were no stones and where farming was less of a struggle.
Falling into the role of Ephraim, O’Neill dramatically began to quote the old man: “When I come here fifty-odd year ago this place was nothin’ but fields o’ stones.” O’Neill’s audience of one listened in awestruck silence as the dramatist went on in Ephraim’s words to describe how he had been tempted to abandon the farm after two years of battling the heavy stones. But after trying his hand at farming in the West, “whar the soil was black an’ rich as gold” with “nary a stone,” and where he could have easily become a rich man, he heard God’s voice telling him this life was not worth living, and commanding him to return home.
“I got afeerd o’ that voice an’ I lit out back t’ hum here, leavin’ my claim an’ crops t’ whoever’d a mind t’ take ’em.”
O’Neill paused briefly in his recitation. Then, clearly expressing his own profound conviction, delivered Ephraim’s verdict: “God’s hard, not easy! God’s in the stones! . . . I picked ’em up and piled ’em into walls. Ye kin read the years o’ my life in them walls.”
In Desire, O’Neill was setting off sparks of his most basic and essential belief. It was his goal, he declared, to illuminate “even the most sordid and mean blind alleys of life.” To that end, he had attempted to “give an epic tinge to New England’s life-lust, to make its inexpressiveness poetically expressive, to release it.”
• • •
WHILE O’NEILL WORKED on the play, his vacillating moods of antagonism and passion for Agnes pushed him into periodic escapes into alcohol. In one such episode, he disappeared from Brook Farm after a night of drinking with the writer Malcolm Cowley, who had come on a visit to gather material for an article about the genesis of Desire.
Agnes went to New York in search of him; for a week, she scoured his haunts in the Village. When at last she found him in the Hell Hole, she reported her success to the worried Cowley, telling him, “The proprietor confessed to her that Gene had sat in the back room and drunk himself into a coma.”
Bernard Simon also picked up vibrations of domestic turbulence during the ten days he lived at Brook Farm while typing Desire (a job made doubly difficult by O’Neill’s cramped handwriting and the need to get the synthetic New England dialect right).
“One day,” recalled Simon, “O’Neill, Agnes, and I were having lunch. The table was always beautifully set, and the food very good, but the meals tended to lapse into embarrassing silence. Agnes would try to make conversation, for my sake, I guess, and O’Neill didn’t always seem to care for the topic she chose.” On one such occasion, Agnes ventured a political opinion that elicited O’Neill’s ill-concealed contempt. “He muttered something,” said Simon, “and they almost came to an open quarrel.”
Exasperated beyond discretion, O’Neill later complained to Simon that Agnes was “capitalizing” on his reputation. He griped about her inviting “social people” from New York for weekends at Brook Farm. “What in Christ have I got in common with them?” O’Neill sputtered. “Sometimes I come back from a walk on Friday afternoon and find guests all over the house. Agnes tells them she wants them to meet her husband.”
It was at such times, Simon said, that O’Neill would take to the barn with a bottle, staying away from the house overnight—much as Ephraim Cabot, a man uneasy in his home, escapes to his barn to sleep with the animals who are more understanding of him than his contemptuous wife. “I have always loved Ephraim so much,” O’Neill once told Kenneth Macgowan. “He’s so autobiographical!”
Agnes disputed her husband’s plaint. “Sometimes he did drink in the country,” she allowed, but usually it was in the company of friends of his—Hart Crane, Louis Wolheim, Jimmy Light, and Harold de Polo—who themselves liked to drink. “And,” she added, “this would almost always be when he had come to a stopping point in his work.”
• • •
DESIRE TRUMPETS O’NEILL’S skill in
seizing the dynamics of Greek tragedy to express his own dramatic outlook; themes from Euripides’s Hippolytus (a woman in love with her stepson) and Medea (a mother committing infanticide) are unabashedly on display in Desire Under the Elms.
In the swiftly thickening plot of Desire, Abbie betrays Eben by seducing him to conceive a child; she plans to present the child to the elderly Ephraim as his own, thereby displacing Eben as the heir to the farm and securing it for herself. But after becoming pregnant, Abbie perversely falls in love with Eben.
When the child is born, Ephraim proudly claims him as his own. Eben doesn’t believe Abbie’s protest that she abandoned her scheme to acquire the farm when she fell in love with him; he turns on her, blaming the birth of the infant for changing his love for her to hatred, and he vows to leave her and the farm forever. Abbie, desperate to keep Eben, determines to prove her love for him by smothering the baby in his crib.
It’s all too tempting to read this plot as a reflection (and almost a parody) of O’Neill’s conflicting feelings toward Agnes. At the time he was writing Desire, O’Neill, always ready to see himself as a victim of woman’s treachery, regarded Agnes’s increasingly offhand behavior toward him as one more betrayal.
Still, the play’s ending suggests that despite O’Neill’s anger and disappointment with Agnes, he still loves her enough to attempt an entente. He does, after all, cause Desire’s Eben Cabot to realize that he must share the blame for Abbie’s infanticide (just as O’Neill realizes, however reluctantly, that he must share the responsibility for Shane’s existence).
Eben, reaffirming his love for Abbie, gives himself up to the sheriff and joins her in whatever fate awaits them. As for old Ephraim Cabot, O’Neill allows him to have the last ironic say:
“Ye make a slick pair o’ murderin’ turtle doves! Ye’d ought t’ be both hung on the same limb an’ left thar t’ swing in the breeze an’ rot—a warnin’ t’ old fools like me t’ bar their lonesomeness alone—an’ fur young fools like ye t’ hobble their lust.”
Eben and Abbie go off with the sheriff and Ephraim resigns himself to his lonely life on the farm. “I’m gittin’ old, Lord—ripe on the bough. . . . Waal—what d’ye want? God’s lonesome, hain’t He? God’s hard an’ lonesome!”
• • •
IN A STAGE DIRECTION THAT—even for O’Neill—is hypernovelistic, he introduces two “characters” who are not flesh and blood. They are the enormous menacing twin elms of the title and they “appear to protect and at the same time subdue. There is a sinister maternity in their aspect,” writes O’Neill, “a crushing jealous absorption. . . . They brood oppressively over the house. They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles.”
O’Neill intended the trees to deepen the play’s fraught atmosphere; he emphasized that the trees played “an actual part in the drama,” along with the farmhouse, and “might almost be given in the list of characters.”
His description of these “characters” comes as close as he ever would to an explication of his conflicted feelings about the women in his life. While O’Neill might not have been entirely aware of the revelatory nature of his description, he did know that this sort of elaborate novelistic characterization was impossible to convey to an audience, given the limited Broadway stagecraft of his day. He had an intimate knowledge, from touring with his father, of what would and would not work onstage from a purely mechanical viewpoint.
He often sketched ground plans for his plays—indicating the placement of doors, windows, and furnishings. “I know more about a trap door than any son of a bitch in the theater,” he was fond of boasting to his directors. He obviously believed that his stage directions about the elms would instill in the actors and director a heightened sense of the play’s portentous mood. And he was right. (A failed Broadway revival in 2009 did away with the elms—a notion as perverse as silencing the drums in The Emperor Jones or the fog horn in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.)
• • •
WITH THE SUMMER HEAT oppressing Brook Farm in inland Ridgefield, the O’Neills moved to their ocean-side retreat in Provincetown on July 11. Between restorative swims, O’Neill edited Welded and The Straw for the published versions of his most recent collected works, which was being readied by Boni & Liveright, the first American firm to publish Sigmund Freud; while its list also included Hemingway, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, and Robinson Jeffers, O’Neill was the firm’s favorite author.
“At Liveright, they liked dead authors, or those who seldom came to the office—and O’Neill rarely came to the office,” said his then editor, Manuel Komroff, who acted chiefly as liaison. “No one ever touched a word of his plays while I was there.” The firm had published five collections of O’Neill’s plays by the end of 1923. He was one of those rare dramatists whose work had a devoted readership, although his royalties from book sales, up to that point, were not princely.
“Most authors would pester us,” Komroff said. “They wanted to know why their books weren’t selling as well as Dreiser’s, or why we didn’t advertise them. O’Neill never asked us to advertise or demanded anything special.” From time to time, Horace Liveright would ask Komroff, petulantly, “Why doesn’t O’Neill ever come in?”
O’Neill knew the new volume would not yield much income; with Welded a flop and Desire not set to open until late fall, he and Agnes were once again feeling pressed for cash.
“There has been nothing coming in of any account now in over a year and my back is beginning to creak under the strain,” O’Neill complained to Kenneth Macgowan. He was still awaiting the settlement of Jamie’s estate; he owed an income tax installment and a payment for Eugene Jr.’s schooling. He quipped to Macgowan that he was “homesick for homelessness and irresponsibility,” averring that “philosophically at any rate” he’d been “a sucker ever to go in for playwriting, mating and begetting sons, houses and lots, and all similar snares of the property game.”
Amid his griping, he worked on Marco Millions (all about the snares of the property game) throughout August, September, and the first half of October, taking a week off with Agnes to visit his friend, the writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, in Nantucket.
Even while trying to relax, he was nervously anticipating rehearsals for Desire Under the Elms, set to open November 11 at the Greenwich Village Theatre, which the triumvirate was leasing on a seasonal basis (and where The Straw had played two years earlier).
Walter Huston, who became one of O’Neill’s most fondly regarded actors, was cast as Ephraim Cabot; he had given up a career as an engineer to become a vaudeville performer and had made his Broadway debut only a year earlier in a long-forgotten melodrama, Mr. Pitt. Mary Morris, a little-known young actress, was chosen to play Abbie; she had impressed O’Neill when she appeared in a recent hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s 1845 satire, Fashion. Charles Ellis, one of the original Provincetown Players, was cast as Eben. The play was designed and directed by Bobby Jones.
After celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday on October 16 at Peaked Hill Bars, O’Neill, together with Agnes and Shane, departed for Brook Farm. A day later, leaving his family in Ridgefield, O’Neill went on to New York for the start of Desire rehearsals. He checked into the Lafayette Hotel, planning to join Agnes and Shane at Brook Farm when he could find time.
The next day, he also began supervising rehearsals of a long-held dream project—an evening of his four one-act sea plays written between 1914 and 1917 (as combined under the title S.S. Glencairn). So bound up in rehearsals was he—Desire in the mornings and afternoons, Glencairn in the evenings—he could not spare time to be with Shane at Brook Farm on October 30, the boy’s fifth birthday. (“Wonderfully received,” O’Neill commented in his Work Diary on November 3, the night S.S. Glencairn opened at the Provincetown Playhouse.)
On November 11, O’Neill note
d in his Work Diary that the opening-night audience had given Desire “a fine reception.” But while the play came to be regarded as a landmark American tragedy, at the time it actually received only lukewarm critical praise.
Heywood Broun griped that O’Neill “laid his hand last night upon the shoulder of his finest play and then passed by on the other side . . . as this new tale of vengeance clicked into certain old and well worn grooves.” But Stark Young, in The New Republic, plainly was relieved by the play’s patent superiority to Welded; he was particularly impressed with the third-act party scene, in which Ephraim celebrates the birth of the son he believes is his (while his guests snicker behind his back), commenting that it was written “with such poetry and terrible beauty as we rarely see in the theater.”
Despite the mixed critical response, Desire filled the Greenwich Village Theatre for two months. It was moved to Broadway in February 1925, first to the Earl Carroll Theatre and then to the George M. Cohan, where it flourished until October 26, for a total of 208 New York performances.
Once, when asked if he thought the critics in general knew what he was driving at in his plays, O’Neill parried:
What do you mean by critics? They can be divided into three classes: Play Reporters, Professional Funny Men and the men with the proper background or real knowledge of the theater of all time to entitle them to be critics.
The play reporters just happen to be people who have the job of reporting what happens during the evening, the story of the play and who played the parts. I have always found that these people reported the stories of my plays fairly accurately.
The Professional Funny Men are beneath contempt. What they say is only of importance to their own strutting vanities. From the real critics I have always had a feeling that they saw what I was trying to do and whether they praised or blamed, they caught the point.
But O’Neill contradicted himself to the theater historian Arthur Hobson Quinn, who was planning a comprehensive article about him as a “poet and mystic.”