by Arthur Gelb
Happily, not everything in the play is a riddle. It’s clear, for instance, that O’Neill wants his audience to realize that Dion’s parents understand neither their son nor each other, nor can Dion summon the means to reach them. In a gripping autobiographical speech, Dion mourns his father: “What aliens we were to each other! When he lay dead, his face looked so familiar that I wondered where I had met that man before. Only at the second of my conception. After that, we grew hostile with concealed shame. What aliens we were to each other!”
The befuddlement begins to mount in the play’s later scenes, when Billy Brown—“inwardly empty” and representing (in O’Neill’s words) “our new materialistic myth”—permanently steals the identity of Dion, who by now has died (apparently due to an extended alcoholic binge). Billy proceeds to live his life alternating as himself and Dion. This necessitates a maniacal whipping on and off of masks during a series of confrontations with (among others) Dion’s wife, who doesn’t realize Dion has died and been secretly buried by Brown.
It is Billy to whom O’Neill has given the play’s juiciest snippet of dialogue:
“This is Daddy’s bedtime secret for today. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!”
On March 25, the day he completed the play, O’Neill jotted in his Work Diary, “I think it really marks my ‘ceiling’ so far.” He would tell Carlotta nearly two years later that The Great God Brown was his “pet of all the published plays.”
But for now, it was Agnes whose approbation O’Neill sought, and to whom he read excerpts from the newly completed manuscript; she “seemed much moved by them,” O’Neill gratefully noted in his Work Diary.
Agnes must have been willing to overlook (or dismiss) O’Neill’s unsympathetic portrait of Dion Anthony’s wife, who reflected aspects of Agnes’s personality that O’Neill most resented: Margaret is not selflessly devoted to nurturing her husband; and she chastises him for venting his jealousy of her love for their three symbolic sons, who are unnamed and identified only as “Eldest,” “Second,” and “Youngest.”
These sons are of little importance to Dion (and just as expendable as all the other children in O’Neill’s plays). In their brief appearance in Brown, they are mere window dressing: mechanical prigs, confirming that Margaret is a mother who is unhappy that their father ignores them. It’s hard to see how Agnes could have empathized with those scenes.
Still, before he dies, Dion begs his wife’s forgiveness for having “sinned against her,” for his “sick pride and cruelty,” and for his “solitude.” On all these sentiments Agnes could not help but bestow her approval.
22
At the end of February 1925, with the production of The Great God Brown still a long way off and with Agnes in her sixth month of pregnancy, she and O’Neill found themselves tentatively at peace.
They were enjoying the surge of income from the extended run of Desire Under the Elms and were awaiting O’Neill’s inheritance of $73,593 (in a time when personal income was still only moderately taxed) from the long-delayed liquidation of Jamie’s estate.
Enclosing a long-overdue check to his Provincetown landlord, John Francis, O’Neill wrote to explain he’d settled in Bermuda because of the year-round swimming and would return to Peaked Hill Bars in the late spring. His wife, he told Francis, “expects to present me with another heir in April,” adding they both had fond memories of the cottage where Shane (nearly five and a half years earlier) was born.
Agnes shared O’Neill’s ironic amusement when, two months into the play’s run, they heard from Kenneth Macgowan in New York that Desire had become a cause célèbre, and together they followed its ludicrous course. This time, the would-be censor was Joab H. Banton, New York’s conservative Southern-born district attorney, who was intent on cleansing the Broadway stage.
Banton demanded that Desire be shut down, along with three other “immoral” hit plays: David Belasco’s productions of Ladies of the Evening and The Harem, and William A. Brady’s A Good Bad Woman. Belasco, on Friday, February 20, promised (presumably with a straight face) that he would rewrite both his plays and have them “moral” by the following Tuesday. Brady, not to be outdone, informed the press (with mock gravity) that if Belasco could have his “filthy plays” ready by Tuesday, he would rewrite his play by Monday.
Banton did not suggest Desire be rewritten. He admitted he’d not seen the play, but even so, he knew it was “too thoroughly bad to be purified by a blue pencil” and if it was not closed by Wednesday, he threatened to put the matter before a grand jury.
“We do not intend to accede to any peremptory demand to take the show off the stage by Wednesday,” Macgowan told the press. “If we are indicted, we will defend the play in the courts.” He followed up by distributing a pamphlet quoting eminent writers, who argued that “the forced withdrawal of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms by repressive actions of any kind would be against the best interests not only of artists but of good citizenship.”
At Macgowan’s request, the Play Jury (that self-appointed committee formed to combat political censorship) attended a performance of Desire and voted that it should be neither suppressed nor rewritten. Macgowan cabled the news to O’Neill, who cabled back that he’d been sure of the outcome all along—although he’d earlier acknowledged to friends that he was surprised the play had fought its way to the top in New York. “Fancy that, with infanticide,” he quipped to Macgowan.
O’Neill told Macgowan he’d “thought of several wicked cables” he could “send to friend Banton which would make him feel like the cat’s arse for a gangrened moment or two.” But he thought better of it. “I’m too detached about this,” he said, “to get ‘my back up’ really—it isn’t so much being out of touch as the fact that I’m so chuck full of Brown that Desire seems out of my range of worry.”
On March 30, as if determined to contravene his stance regarding visits from children, O’Neill welcomed Eugene Jr., now almost fifteen, for a six-day visit to Campsea. Two days earlier, he had written “Finished!” (thrice underlined) to The Great God Brown. At first, all went well. O’Neill and Agnes picnicked and sailed with Eugene and shopped with him for clothes. But four days after Eugene’s arrival, the attempt at family togetherness imploded. In his diary, O’Neill again began to place a d (for drinking) before the date of each daily entry. The d continued after Eugene’s departure, appearing daily until nearly the end of April.
While O’Neill was, in a semidetached way, proud of Eugene and willing to help pay for his education, his feelings fell short of devoted fatherly commitment. His detachment was evident when, a year earlier, Eugene fell from his bicycle near his house in Long Island and fractured his skull. Kathleen rushed him to the hospital and then telephoned O’Neill, who, at the time, was in New York and about to leave for Provincetown. O’Neill told her his bank account was at her disposal; he arranged for a specialist and asked Kathleen to keep him informed of Eugene’s condition by collect daily telegrams. But he did not postpone his trip to Provincetown. Eugene was in the hospital for five weeks, part of that time in critical condition. O’Neill never visited him.
For all of O’Neill’s prolonged dismay over the neglect and pain his parents had inflicted on him, he appeared blind to the fact that he was inflicting a similar hurt on his own child.
He felt no need to be perpetuated by children; he liked to describe his playwriting as “birth pangs.” It was clear to his friends that his plays were his children and that he was both father and mother to them. His claim to immortality rested upon his plays; flesh-and-blood children were at best the inevitable appendages of domesticity and at worst irritating hindrances to his work.
On April 11, still drinking, O’Neill nervously moved with Agnes, Shane, and Mrs. Clarke to a larger cottage called Southcote, there to await the birth of Agnes’s baby, expected later that month. Agnes and O’Neill celebrated their seventh weddin
g anniversary on the twelfth. In his diary, O’Neill noted, “Agnes’s Chinese shawl for present has not come yet but expected soon.”
On May 1, although O’Neill complained to Macgowan that the waiting was getting on his nerves, he managed to stop drinking—perhaps pacified by Agnes’s calm; he must be experiencing “couvade,” he joked to Macgowan.
O’Neill had to endure the discomforts of couvade for two more weeks. It was not until May 14 that Agnes produced her baby. “It’s a goil. Allah be merciful,” O’Neill cabled Macgowan. ACCORDING TO INDICATIONS WILL BE FIRST LADY ANNOUNCER AT POLO GROUNDS. PREDICT GREAT FUTURE GRAND OPERA. AGNES AND BABY ALL SERENE.
Both Agnes and O’Neill had been certain it would be a girl, and Agnes had written to the wife of the Irish poet Padraic Colum, asking if she and her husband could suggest a feminine Irish name that would go well with O’Neill. “We suggested Oona, the Irish translation of Agnes,” Colum later recalled.
O’Neill and Agnes wished to escape the hot Bermuda summer and, having agreed that Peaked Hill Bars was too rustic and remote for comfort with an infant, they rented a house in Nantucket through September.
But first—still not drinking—O’Neill shepherded his newly expanded family to New York for a week’s stay at the Lafayette Hotel. On the day of their arrival, June 29, O’Neill noted in his diary, “To Bisch in the afternoon to start treatment.” Evidently, Dr. Bisch, after listening in Bermuda to O’Neill’s problem with drinking (among other concerns), had offered to act as O’Neill’s therapist.
“O’Neill was very moody,” Bisch recalled many years later. “He explained he would become greatly depressed after finishing a play, because it never turned out to be what he really wanted.”
That was when O’Neill would go on a bender, Bisch said. “He seemed to be suffering from both overwork and worry—particularly about financial matters. He also worried about the time it took him to answer his fan mail; he said he couldn’t afford a secretary. I asked why he didn’t just ignore those letters; he said he couldn’t, that he just had to answer his mail.”
If O’Neill did actually begin therapy with Dr. Bisch, it was short-lived.
After noting his appointment with Bisch, O’Neill made no entries in his Work Diary until a week later when, on July 7, he wrote, “A. left for Nantucket”; he didn’t mention that the children and Mrs. Clarke accompanied Agnes, nor did he give any reason why he stayed behind at the Lafayette.
The next ten days in his diary are blank. On July 17, O’Neill entered a small d, before noting he’d been to Harlem with Paul Robeson and some others. “Up all night,” he wrote, adding, “Disaster.” His curt entries on the four days following—each preceded by the capital letter D—spoke of more carousing with friends late into the night followed by hungover bed rest during the day.
At last, on July 22, feeling “punk,” he retreated to Kenneth Macgowan’s home in Brewster to taper off, spending three days (small d’s) “mostly in bed reading.”
He also took time to write to Agnes of his loneliness and—surprisingly—of missing Oona: “I really love her! Never thought I could a baby! And I love you, my dear wife and pal, more than I have power to say!”
(He later thanked Macgowan and his wife, Edna, for their comfort. “I must have been a pretty sorry sight to have about the house and by no means a welcome addition to any family retaining their sanity. You were as kind as you could be and I shall never forget it.”)
It was on his return to the city from Brewster on July 25 that O’Neill next mentioned Dr. Bisch in a diary entry. “Saw Bisch at hotel. Gave me stuff [veronal]. To bed and to sleep early.” (O’Neill did not mention that veronal was the sleeping medicine with which he’d attempted suicide in 1912 at Jimmy the Priest’s.)
“Practically no booze,” O’Neill wrote in his diary on July 26, the day he left New York to join his family in Nantucket. At month’s end (as he wrote to Macgowan), he was “very much on the old cart again, and feel as well now as I ever did, what with swimming, boating and the rest of it.” Less than a week later, he confessed: “Off! But not serious.”
It was the arrival in Nantucket of O’Neill’s old New London friend Ed Keefe that set him off again. Keefe, now a successful architect, had arrived in Nantucket on a schooner with two friends.
“Gene was glad to see me and joined my friends and me for dinner on shore,” Keefe remembered. “Then the four of us rowed to the schooner, which was anchored quite a way out in the harbor, and drank and drank and drank. After a while, the two other guys went to sleep. Gene and I kept on drinking. At one point Gene stood up in the hatchway and let his wristwatch fly against the hatch—he was being dramatic about something. Finally we went to our bunks and I fell asleep.”
Keefe was awakened by the steward. “I think your friend is overboard,” he said. Keefe followed the steward out on deck and, in the bright moonlight, saw O’Neill in the water, fully dressed and still roaring drunk. Keefe and the steward pulled O’Neill back on board, stripped him, and put him into a bunk. The steward woke Keefe again as dawn was breaking. “There’s a lady alongside in a rowboat,” the steward announced. It was Agnes.
“She had rowed out to collect Gene,” Keefe said. “We got him into a raincoat and some slippers and eased him over the side into the rowboat. I watched Gene and Agnes draw away, Gene trying to sit up straight in the boat, Agnes rowing. The sun was coming up as they headed in to shore.”
Writing in his diary in September, O’Neill was uncommunicative about both his activities and his state of mind, making abrupt references to his work on scenarios for Strange Interlude and a new play, Lazarus Laughed, and noting his daily swims. Centered on his own problems, he made no mention of Agnes or his children or of Agnes’s daughter, who spent some time with them in Nantucket.
Agnes for her part was occupied (in her habitually haphazard fashion) with preparing Barbara for her return to boarding school. She sent her daughter back to her mother’s care, asking her sister Marjorie (“Budgie”) to please have Barbara’s clothes washed and mended. “I don’t want her to go back to school with things in bad shape,” Agnes wrote, enclosing a check for her daughter’s expenses.
Agnes and O’Neill would shortly be returning to their Connecticut estate for the late fall and early winter, wrote Agnes, and she proposed that Budgie, who was looking for a job, come to live with them and help take care of Shane (soon to turn six) and act as “a governess”—a job neither Gaga nor Agnes had the time for; Agnes suggested “a business arrangement of $50 per month” (in addition to room and board). Budgie would give Shane “an hour’s lesson every day, take him for a walk, see to dressing & undressing him (which is not so much, as he does it himself now) and in fact, do what a governess does.”
Budgie’s additional duties would consist of typing Agnes’s business correspondence, paying monthly household bills, and accompanying the family to Bermuda later that winter. “It would mean a lot to me to have you with us,” Agnes coaxed. “Gene thinks this would work out very well, too.” Budgie agreed to the arrangement.
• • •
THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER, O’NEILL continued to struggle with alcohol and the intermittent shakiness of his marriage. On October 4, he left Nantucket with his family, stopping briefly in New London to check on the state of the remaining unsold O’Neill property.
The capital letter D appeared on October 5, the day he visited his vacant family vacation home on Pequot Avenue. “Decay and ruin—sad,” he wrote in his Work Diary.
He attended a party that night at the home of a former mentor, Joseph “Doc” Ganey, noting, “Everyone blotto.” Although he felt sick the following morning (another D day), he drove with his family to New York, checking into the Lafayette Hotel in the evening, and recording, “Fight with Agnes.”
The next day, also a D, he drove with Agnes, the children, and Mrs. Clarke to Brook Farm, there to await the triumvirate’s producti
ons of The Fountain, scheduled for December 10, and The Great God Brown, finally set for January 23 (1926). He was also hoping for Belasco’s half-promised production of Marco Millions.
After exercising and walking in the woods during his first few days at Brook Farm, the D shrank to lowercase and by October 11, it was gone—although, as he noted, he remained “disorganized mentally.”
On his thirty-seventh birthday five days later, there was a startling entry in the Work Diary: “Bisch came out—much talk about divorce.” It was as yet no more than talk—an ominous aside in the drama of the O’Neills’ up-and-down marriage. He and Agnes were to endure two more years of venomous quarreling, alternating with fervent reconciliations and punctuated by the entrance of “the Other Woman,” before O’Neill tore himself from Agnes for good.
After a week of idle reading, letter-writing, and clearing brush in the woods, O’Neill began “to feel fine again.” He had been working on the new play, Lazarus Laughed, which he had begun to write in Nantucket; but, too fidgety about the upcoming rehearsals for The Fountain in early November to concentrate, he invited his older son to spend a few days with him.
Eugene Jr. was infatuated with the small aggressive Irish terrier, Mat Burke, that O’Neill owned along with Finn, his gigantic slobbering Irish wolfhound. Mat Burke had been terrorizing the neighborhood, chasing chickens and challenging any and all local pets and children to combat, from which he invariably emerged victorious. Weighing Eugene’s affection for the terrible terrier against the distress of his neighbors, O’Neill conceived a plan to satisfy all parties. A few days after Eugene returned to his mother’s home in Long Island, a huge crate arrived for him. Kathleen, to whom her son had said nothing about the impending gift, opened the crate and, with some misgivings, tethered its contents to a tree in the yard.
When Eugene came home from school, Mat Burke was gone. He returned later that evening, bruised and bloody, having established himself as the boss of his new neighborhood. The Pitt-Smiths kept him until his death from old age several years later.