by Arthur Gelb
“Most of my critics don’t want to see what I’m trying to do or how I’m trying to do it,” O’Neill began. “But where I feel myself most neglected is where I set most store by myself—as a bit of a poet who has labored with the spoken word to evolve original rhythms of beauty where beauty apparently isn’t.”
Citing as examples The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms, he went on to explain that he was “always, always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character.” In his mysticism, he added, he was “acutely conscious of the Force behind—(Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery, certainly)—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression.”
• • •
EVER HOPEFUL OF settling into some sort of domestic tranquillity, Agnes saw, perhaps even more clearly than her husband, that living at Brook Farm was not the solution. For one thing, O’Neill’s drinking had worsened since moving there.
Once again, O’Neill grasped at his family doctor’s advice to try another climate change—this time back to sea air and to a place more isolated from New York City. He finally acknowledged he must give up drinking to assure his continued artistic growth. With a change of environment—so he believed—he could bury himself in his work.
Agnes had little choice but to accede to yet another move. After Provincetown, West Point Pleasant, and Ridgefield, it would be her fourth shift of residence since her marriage to O’Neill just seven years earlier.
In truth, she was finding it not much fun anymore being married to her “poet.” She had recently learned she was pregnant again and she had no reason to believe a second child would be any more welcome to O’Neill than the first. While she wanted a certain amount of independence, she also wanted a sympathetic husband and an attentive father to her children—not just a needy child-husband who now and then spared her a few moments of passion and companionship amid his other preoccupations.
O’Neill had persuaded himself that his own wants were Spartan. He told Macgowan he craved a “neat life with a pattern.” He joked that he would like “ten walled acres in Siberia with a flock of Siberian wolfhounds to guard them, and broken glass on the walls.”
Instead, however, he chose Bermuda, a two-day sea voyage from New York. It’s a puzzle as to why he believed Bermuda was the place where he would find peace of mind—and sobriety. Evidently, he saw no irony in the circumstance that the old Provincetown friend who persuaded him to settle in Bermuda was the short-story writer Harold de Polo, himself an unapologetic drunkard.
The O’Neills planned to rent a house through at least the spring of 1925, after Agnes had given birth. Before leaving for Bermuda, having struggled in vain to conquer his destructive drinking habit, O’Neill had begun seeing Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, a prominent psychiatrist of commanding personality and culture. Bobby Jones had introduced O’Neill to Jelliffe, whose patients included, along with Jones himself, Arthur Hopkins, John Barrymore, and Mabel Dodge.
Although wary of being psychoanalyzed, O’Neill was always receptive to sympathetic medical advice. He visited Jelliffe sporadically during 1923 and 1924—not to be “deeply psychoanalyzed,” according to Dr. Jelliffe’s widow, Belinda, but to receive therapeutic help for “a variety of specific problems.”
Belinda Jelliffe retained a blurred memory of the day in late November that O’Neill and his pregnant wife, together with five-year-old Shane and Agnes’s ten-year-old daughter, Barbara, used her house as a place to assemble prior to their departure for Bermuda:
There was O’Neill, Agnes, and, I think, two children, all with my husband in his secretary’s office, and I had the feeling when I went in that I had stumbled into a suspended tableau. Agnes looked vague and distracted, O’Neill looked worried, and the children were pale and woebegone.
Dr. Jelliffe was speaking of tickets—steamship tickets to Bermuda—which apparently had been lost or misplaced. I offered to go back to their hotel and look for the tickets. I vaguely remember getting into a cab with O’Neill.
At the hotel, we scratched around in bureau drawers and I guess we found the tickets, because I remember later saying good-bye to them all as they left for the pier.”
“Off to Bermuda” was O’Neill’s terse comment in his Work Diary on November 29, 1924.
21
O’Neill could no longer delude himself. If he continued to disrupt his writing with bouts of destructive drinking, he would never achieve the greatness to which he aspired.
Bound for Bermuda on the steamship Fort St. George, he confronted his alternatives. Would he shuffle off into the oblivion that had overtaken his brother? Or would he vanquish his bottled demon and fulfill his grand creative dream?
Struggle as he might, sobriety eluded him during his initial seven months’ sojourn in Bermuda. While there were intervals when he managed to stay aboard a wobbly water-wagon, his resolve, all too often, gave way to his unforgiving addiction.
In 1924, O’Neill had begun keeping notebooks he called his Scribbling Diaries, in which he jotted ideas for plays, and commented briefly on the daily events in his life. The 1925 diary minutely records his on-and-off struggle with alcohol, as well as his emotional flip-flops with Agnes; a truly singular document, it is an unsparing and self-revelatory portrait of an alcohol-addicted writer trying to wring himself dry.
The diary begins on January 1, a month after O’Neill rented a small compound in Paget West, Bermuda. Called Campsea, it encompassed two cottages—one for family living, the other for O’Neill’s writing.
In his first entry, he speaks of his determination to taper off—always a wretched process, as he well knows. Writing a d in the margin to indicate it’s a day on which he will drink, he admits to feeling unwell and shaky. “To keep from thinking,” he reads old copies of the Saturday Evening Post provided by Agnes (who by now has nursed him through numerous such withdrawals); the weather is “clear & warm,” but the suffering sea-mother’s son has “no ambition to swim.”
On January 2 (this entry also preceded by a d in the margin), he is no better, and seems “to have acquired bleeding piles”; he goes for a short swim in the late afternoon and spends the rest of the day loafing and reading. Still drinking, he perks up on the next day after some checks arrive in the mail; he swims and exercises with Agnes. They meet a neighbor on the beach, a Mrs. Barbour, “and her beautiful sister,” Alice Cuthbert.
On January 4, O’Neill is “cutting down a bit but still too miserably disorganized to really make it . . . no swim today.” On the fifth, to soothe his bothersome piles, he takes two swims and exercises, then retires with his Saturday Evening Posts, calling them his “favorite narcotic”; he notes that he drank “nothing but ale after dinner.”
On January 6, also a d day, he begins to “feel a bit more human—out of the woods—but still disorganized.” And on the seventh, which finds him “better,” he requires two drinks before lunch and three before dinner. By the eighth, he has traded his magazines for Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay; he feels “much better,” and takes only one drink before lunch and two before dinner.
On the ninth, strolling on the beach, he and Agnes again run into Alice Cuthbert. This time he admires Alice’s “athletic swimmer’s figure” and describes her as “a peach.” Although aware of Agnes’s jealousy, he flirts with Alice. On the tenth, he has only “1/2 drink before dinner,” and the next day he quits drinking “except ale with meals.” Seemingly poised on the brink of victory over his demon, and resolved to be more sensitive to Agnes’s feelings, he enters what will be a shaky stretch of sobriety.
But to Agnes’s mortification, O’Neill, tentatively sober, begins a ritual of rigorously clocked daily swims in tandem with the athletic and peachy Alice Cuthbert.
Agnes, now in her fifth month, resents her husband’s attention to the unencumbered and shapely Alice.
“Agnes very sore,” O’Neill recorded on January 13, adding that in the fight that ensued, she “stabbed” a screen door. But he didn’t give up his morning swims with Alice, insisting they were strictly for exercise. As a gesture of peace, however, he added to his schedule an afternoon swim with Agnes. But Agnes was again “sore!” when, on February 3, O’Neill brought Alice home to lunch, bragging they had achieved a “220 double-crawl” side by side for almost a third of a mile.
Ignoring Agnes’s sulk, O’Neill swam with Alice again after lunch. Trapped by her pregnancy, Agnes was helpless against her husband’s baiting even though it was almost always followed by repentance of one sort or another; that evening he invited her (with their dog Finn) to a moonlight walk on the beach.
Agnes had no evidence that O’Neill’s rapport with Alice went beyond swimming and mild flirtation. (She may or may not have been aware of a poem entitled “For Alice,” in which O’Neill wrote, “You, the sun, & sea, Trinity! Sweet spirit, pass on / Keep the dream / Beauty / Into infinity.”)
• • •
LIFE IN BERMUDA was becoming something of a muddle for Agnes. Her husband was faltering, and she doubted he would ever quit drinking.
Once again, she was carrying a child he didn’t want. Unsure if the island was to become her permanent home, she was trying to adjust to an ever-grander lifestyle with an uncertain income to support it.
Among other concerns, she was frustrated by how little time she could find for her own writing, and when she did manage occasionally to have a short story published, it was, of course, overshadowed by her celebrated husband’s output. Deprived (as she believed) of a career as a writer, she did not fit the role of muse and respected partner; she felt belittled as the wife of an unstable man who at one moment needed her desperately and at the next was barely aware of her presence.
O’Neill, sober in late January, found himself fascinated by an article entitled “Alcohol and the Nervous System,” by the preeminent British neurologist Sir James Purvis-Stewart. It had been sent to him (on January 22) by his Bermuda neighbor, Dr. Louis Bisch, with whom O’Neill had discussed his drinking problem. “Very interesting & applicable to me,” O’Neill wrote in his diary.
O’Neill had no trouble recognizing himself in Purvis-Stewart’s description of the “paroxysmal dipsomaniac” who had a “marked neuropathic heredity” (in O’Neill’s case, a functioning-alcoholic father and a drug-addicted mother). Nor could he disavow any of the other symptoms inherent in the “dipsomaniac individual who sometimes drinks himself into a state of acute alcoholic poisoning.” The condition, O’Neill read, was well understood by neurologists to be “a recurrent psychosis consisting of attacks during which the patient has an irresistible impulse to take alcohol in excess.”
O’Neill knew only too well that (as Purvis-Stewart explained) “antecedent to each outburst of dipsomania, there is a short premonitory or incubation stage of restlessness and mental depression” and that practically all such “alcoholists” (as the doctor termed them) “before they happen to acquire the habit of paroxysmal excessive drinking, have had previous neuropathic symptoms, such as phobias, obsessions, emotional depression, visceral discomfort, etc.” Step by step, O’Neill continued to read about his own symptoms:
“Whatever be the special condition which is the starting-point of the dipsomaniac outburst, the patient discovers that he can mask his deficient will-power and ‘drown his sorrow’ by a dose of alcohol, which comforts him for the time and gets rid of his emotional depression.”
Seemingly, there was little that Purvis-Stewart did not know about the condition so piercingly familiar to O’Neill:
He drinks heavily for a few days until his bout is brought to an end by alcoholic gastritis, with its attendant vomiting, so that he has nausea—for food or drink of any kind, including alcohol.
His attack then subsides and he is free from alcoholic craving, and full of good resolutions, perhaps for weeks or months, until his next attack. But his psychosis inevitably recurs and he is irresistibly drawn to it once more. Unlike the chronic alcoholic soaker [e.g., Jamie O’Neill] the dipsomaniac individual usually realizes his own failing, and feels his degradation keenly: he is thus more willing than the chronic alcoholist to accept treatment for his malady.
It was, all in all, a graphic and horrifying depiction of O’Neill’s ingrained syndrome.
O’Neill began truly to dread the damage his drinking could wreak on his creative ability. Far from secure in his present sobriety, he despised his imprisonment by alcohol. What had become of his long-ago statement that writing was his “vacation from living”? Once again, he questioned himself: Did he really want to trash his dream of greatness? He decided not. Even so, it would be another year before he was willing to propel himself into treatment for his malady—and to emerge with a new weltanschauung.
• • •
ONCE O’NEILL HAD paused in his drinking—and it was only a pause—he went back to work on Marco Millions. Aware the elaborate pageant would be too expensive for the triumvirate to produce, he was hoping to sell it to David Belasco, his father’s old theater colleague and one of the few Broadway producers who could afford to mount it.
Belasco, as a brash young producer in San Francisco forty-six years earlier, had presented a clumsily written but extravagantly produced version of the Passion play, in which James O’Neill was cast as Jesus. Believing he would make a dramatic sensation in the role, James was blind to the production’s vulgarity. The pageant caused panic in the theater, followed by street rioting and the jailing of James’s entire humiliated company; they were ultimately fined and released. (Eugene might have been hoping that Belasco would espouse Marco as a sort of belated reparation for having led James into fiasco.)
While awaiting word from Belasco, O’Neill, on January 28, embarked on the first scene of a new play, The Great God Brown. A daring leap at the moon, the play was also a moan of despair lamenting O’Neill’s fear of being measured and misunderstood; it decried a world of conventionality and materialism, a world in which he was forced to wear a figurative mask in order to conceal his own idealistic vision of life. More than anything, Brown mirrored O’Neill’s relentless tug-of-war with his own divided self. The play, in fact, was an absurdist rendering of the schizophrenic jig O’Neill was then dancing in his mind.
To say the plot is difficult to follow is a laughable understatement; at times it is all but impenetrable. Despite O’Neill’s oft-stated insistence that he never attempted to write when he was drinking, The Great God Brown may well be his one exception.
Nevertheless, the play is a touchstone of O’Neill’s oeuvre. He himself cherished it, once confiding (in a letter to Carlotta), “There is so much of the secret me in it.”
Complexities notwithstanding, it’s clear that the play’s undercurrent throbs with O’Neill’s intense and pervasive mourning for his parents and brother. In a sense, he was writing his family’s epitaph (including his own); the play’s fictional parents and son are all dead by play’s end.
While the nameless parents make no more than a brief appearance (as shadowy, symbolic echoes of James and Ella O’Neill), their only son—as he sprang from O’Neill’s tortured imagination—is a split personality whose two personas, Dion Anthony and William Brown, dominate the play; each stands for an aspect of O’Neill’s own conflicted personality, and they are portrayed by two separate actors.
Dion is “a stranger, walking alone . . . dark, spiritual, poetic, passionately supersensitive, helplessly unprotected.” He is an artist, a creator, with “a childlike, religious faith in life.” Set apart from his fellow man, he is unable to make meaningful contact with family or friends. He is locked in a lonely struggle to find God and the meaning of life’s mystery and, inevitably, he knuckles under to the callousness of an unheed
ing and materialistic society.
Dion’s alter ego is William (Billy) Brown—“a fine looking, well dressed, capable college-bred American businessman” with a “boyish engaging personality.” Billy is Dion’s sometime friend, sometime rival, a man whom Dion addresses as “brother.” He is both loved and hated by Dion. A potentially fine soul, Billy has grown stunted and envious and destructive.
He and Dion (along with several other of the play’s characters) have an unsettling tendency to clap masks over their faces when signaling a wish to conceal their innermost secrets; conversely, they doff the masks when in the company of those they trust.
Dion, for example, feels obliged to wear his mask before his wife, Margaret, knowing she can’t comprehend the torment of his naked soul; but he goes unmasked before the prostitute Cybel, who is an understanding earth mother.
Although O’Neill had used masks in The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, the masks in The Great God Brown were more of an integral dramatic device. He once explained his conviction that masks could “be made acceptable to the modern audience—as they were in ancient times—but in a new sense.” He believed people “did recognize, from their knowledge of the new psychology, that everyone wears a mask—I don’t mean only one, but thousands of them.”
That sounds straightforward enough, but even Freud would likely have been stumped by the manner in which O’Neill gleefully masks and unmasks his suffering protagonists in The Great God Brown. When Dion Anthony and Billy Brown are swapping personality traits (and masks), it’s sometimes hard to know which of them we’re listening to. Is it Dion? Or is it Billy wearing Dion’s mask? Obviously, that was just what O’Neill intended.
“The audience won’t know if it’s walking backwards or forwards by the time it’s ready to leave,” O’Neill once crowed to Dr. Bisch.