By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  During November 1925, O’Neill frequently commuted between his Connecticut home and the Lafayette Hotel in New York to attend rehearsals of the long-delayed The Fountain. From the start, he thought the play (which he later condemned as one of his worst) looked “wobbly.” The Fountain—particularly in its portentous final scenes—was O’Neill’s initial attempt at a style of pageantry that owed much to the resplendent church services of his boyhood; but these scenes are lackluster, probably because O’Neill, in his never-ending struggle with his Catholic conscience, had lost his enthusiasm for church ritual.

  “Disgusted” with the production, he consoled himself with yet another reckless drinking spree, this time with the eminent critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson and his then wife, the actress Mary Blair.

  The next day, he shrank back to Brook Farm, seeking whatever comfort he could coax from Agnes. Gloomily awaiting the play’s doomed opening, he worked in the woods, drank, and sulked. “Too bored,” he keened. “Ridgefield is no home for me! Dull as Hell.”

  As O’Neill had expected, the reviews for The Fountain were lukewarm. Woollcott (in the World) praised the lavish production, but observed that “the spark of life was missing a good half the time.” Most of his colleagues agreed, and the play closed after twenty-four performances.

  More edgy than ever, O’Neill again sought Dr. Bisch’s advice—this time, according to the doctor, to ask if he really thought psychoanalysis helped people.

  “Apparently,” Bisch recalled, “he had talked to some of his friends about my ideas.”

  Not long after, O’Neill invited Bisch to join him for lunch with Kenneth Macgowan and Bobby Jones.

  Bisch recalled:

  One of them telephoned me and asked if they could consult me about O’Neill, but not to mention this to him. I invited them to my office. They said they thought analysis might be good for O’Neill, but were afraid it could harm him as a dramatist. They were worried that it might destroy his genius, inhibit his artistic freedom. I told them I didn’t think it would, that, on the contrary, it might make him even freer.

  But I warned them that O’Neill would be a difficult man to analyze because he had such a strong ego. Most people who are very shy, I told them, have strong egos; they are certain of their own powers but afraid others won’t recognize those powers. I felt analysis of this would help him; I said it would probably enhance, rather than repress, his genius.

  Macgowan believed it had become a matter of considerable urgency to find someone who could effectively treat O’Neill’s drinking problem. Dr. Bisch would have enjoyed psychoanalyzing O’Neill to see whether the theories he held as an observant friend could be supported, but O’Neill ultimately selected someone else.

  Dropping in on an early rehearsal of The Great God Brown, still set for a January 23 opening, O’Neill commented in his Work Diary (after placing a small d in the margin), “Looks fine, must say. Did lot of work in spite of being bit corned up.” On Christmas Eve, he attended a “big party” (which earned a capital D in his diary). And on Christmas Day he was in bed at Brook Farm, “sick & melancholia.”

  Agnes’s description of how she coped during the final days of December with her husband’s bumptious binge is recorded in a sporadically maintained diary of her own; as candid and detailed as O’Neill’s portrait of himself as a drunkard, Agnes painted an unwitting self-portrait of the prototypical enabler.

  On Christmas Day, she wrote:

  He drank quite a lot and stayed in bed all day . . . finished the Scotch . . . ate very little . . . nausea . . . by nine p.m. he had nothing left to drink . . . began to get very upset that he would be awake suffering, something must be done . . . said he would go to New York . . . finally, I decided to go to town ten miles away, got two bottles Scotch, concealed one, gave him couple of drinks . . . Saturday he felt very sick.

  Must have drinks. Gave him one. Refused to eat. Insisted he must have two more and then would promise to eat decent breakfast. Did this . . . He kept waking me up saying I would not sleep if he could not, but I did not give in. Finally he took veronal and went to sleep . . .

  Next a.m. [Sunday, Dec. 27] stuck to my plan. Gave him one drink . . . said he was sick. Couldn’t eat . . . finally he shaved, dressed, ate some breakfast and seemed sober for the first time. Gave him two drinks before lunch . . . followed by soup . . . and three before dinner . . . Took veronal . . . very good sleep.

  On that same Sunday, Macgowan made what turned out to be a crucial intervention on O’Neill’s behalf. He arranged for O’Neill and Agnes to join him and his wife, Edna, as participants in a research program headed by the prominent psychiatrist Gilbert V. Hamilton. It was designed to probe the problems of sexual adjustment in the marital relationship.

  “In our circle the interviews were the table topic of the day,” recalled Macgowan. (Macgowan became a close friend of Hamilton’s, with whom he later co-authored a book called What Is Wrong With Marriage?)

  “A ray of hope amid general sick despair,” wrote O’Neill in his Work Diary after learning of the appointment with Hamilton.

  The program had been funded in August 1924 by a committee of unidentified scientists, permitting Dr. Hamilton to select the small sample of one hundred married men and one hundred married women (not all of them married to each other) to whom he presented more than three hundred questions designed to elicit information about their premarital, marital, and extramarital sex lives. (This pioneer program preceded by ten years the research by Alfred C. Kinsey, whose much wider study corroborated the findings in Dr. Hamilton’s book, A Research in Marriage, published in 1929.)

  None of the subjects in Dr. Hamilton’s book are identified by name; all responses to his research questions are anonymous. But it’s easy enough to spot O’Neill as the male who responded to card number 15, question 8, about “the chief source of friction” between his parents; the choices were “Mother’s nagging,” “Mother’s sexual inadequacy,” “Mother’s interest in other men,” and “Mother’s drug habit.” Can there be any doubt it was O’Neill who checked the last?

  In his first tabulation, Hamilton posed the question, “What is there in your marriage that is especially unsatisfactory to you?” and then listed sixty-seven possible answers. It’s a pretty safe guess that Agnes was one of the three women who checked answer number 47: “Husband’s alcoholism.”

  Most likely Agnes was among the six women who checked number 19: “Husband’s inadequacy as a father,” along with number 32: “Unsatisfactory social life for which the marriage or the spouse is held responsible,” as well as number 40: “Husband is too much the ‘clinging vine,’ or ‘too infantile’ in his emotional relationship to his wife.” And can there be any doubt that O’Neill was the single male who checked number 22: “Their young children interfere with the spouses’ enjoyment of one another.”

  Of far greater importance to O’Neill than the results of the research was the fact that he could now take advantage of the gratuitous analysis offered to all the participants in the program—an analysis that in O’Neill’s case would focus on his problem with alcohol.

  Hamilton sought Agnes’s help in assessing her husband’s drinking patterns, and she showed him some of her notes made during times when he was frighteningly out of control. At a preliminary session, Hamilton advised O’Neill not to quit drinking abruptly and when he returned home, pleased with the doctor’s advice, he immediately took a stiff drink and continued drinking until, hours later, he staggered to bed.

  On December 28, O’Neill began tapering off with a mere five drinks; he had three the next day and only one on the thirtieth. Two days later he wrote in his diary, “Feel much better but nerves all shot to hell. Have to go down for Brown rehearsals soon. Must get in shape.”

  On December 31, he tossed aside the old year, noting, “On wagon. Goodby—without regret—1925 (except for a few months in Bermuda).”

  That was n
ot, however, the final entry in his remarkable long-hidden 1925 diary. He found himself skipping ahead to the beginning of the coming year.

  In a surge of optimism, he dated his final entry January 1, 1926: “Welcome to a new dawn, I pray!”

  23

  O’Neill’s six therapeutic weeks with Dr. Hamilton, which began in early January 1926, hardly qualified as a classic psychoanalysis even though Hamilton had him lie on a black leather couch in traditional Freudian style.

  From the start, O’Neill grasped Hamilton’s drift, familiar as he was with the writings of both Freud and Jung. When the sessions ended, he assured Kenneth Macgowan he had no trouble understanding that he both hated and loved his father and mother and was suffering from an Oedipus complex. (As O’Neill later told his friend, the critic Joseph Wood Krutch, “Without ever having gone in for a complete analysis myself . . . I am enormously interested to see what will emerge as science out of all these theories.”)

  In those early days of psychoanalysis, Dr. Hamilton apparently felt no ethical qualms in explaining to Macgowan that his friend O’Neill harbored “a death wish”—hardly a difficult inference for anyone familiar with O’Neill’s work; he’d shouted his preoccupation with death in more than a half-dozen plays so far; in the fifty (or so) plays that would comprise his legacy (depending on who’s counting), his characters suffered violent or otherwise unnatural deaths: suicide, poison, disease, mangling, strangling, hanging, suffocation, knifing, drowning, electrocution, incineration, and gunshot.

  Presumably with Hamilton’s guidance, O’Neill drew a soul-searching, self-analytical diagram of his family history, which suggested the root of his tug toward annihilation and destructive drinking. The handwritten diagram free-floated the stages of his growing up: birth was “Nirvana,” followed by “mother love,” “weaning,” and then “nurse love” (a reference to his nurse, Sarah Sandy, who nurtured him during his preschool years and whom he adored as a second mother); at seven, he viewed his father as “indefinite hero—not dangerous rival”; there followed an indelible memory:

  “At early childhood Father would give mild whiskey and water to soothe child’s nightmares cause[d] by terror of dark,” adding, somewhat obscurely, “This whiskey is connected with protection of Mother—drink of hero father.”

  In the diagram’s second stage, O’Neill blamed his father for causing “break with Mother” by sending him away at seven to boarding school. Still continuing his painful free association, he wrote: “Reality faced and fled from in life of fantasy and religion in school—inability to belong to reality.”

  By adolescence, the third stage, O’Neill’s “resentment against father” became “hatred and defiance of father”; this paralleled “discovery of Mother’s inadequacy.”

  While O’Neill was brooding over his diagram, he also helped Agnes make a list for Dr. Hamilton of dates and durations of various drunken episodes and ensuing periods of sobriety (including his “38 days not drinking [during] rehearsals Desire”).

  O’Neill’s first three weeks on the couch coincided with rehearsals for The Great God Brown. His immersion in this death-obsessed play obviously fed the analytic process. He told Hamilton (as he’d told Bisch) about the typical letdown following an opening night and the drinking binge that inevitably came after.

  With clinical curiosity, patient and shrink awaited the opening of Brown on January 23. Would all that therapeutic counseling enable O’Neill, this time, to circumvent the booby trap? To Hamilton’s satisfaction and to O’Neill’s somewhat awed surprise, it did. He was now convinced that John Barleycorn had been annihilated and—for a long time—it seemed he was right. (“I haven’t had a drink in nearly five years! So help me!” O’Neill cheered to an old friend at the end of 1930. “Booze was getting sick of me. After a long huddle with my liver and lights I decided to throw in the sponge—and mean it. Life since then has lacked the uproarious but I must admit I feel better.”)

  But at least one cynic was laughing up his sleeve. When the Theatre Guild’s Lawrence Langner reported to George Bernard Shaw that O’Neill had sworn off drinking, Shaw responded, “He’ll probably never write a good play again.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL’S NEWLY EARNED equilibrium was boosted by the reviews of The Great God Brown, which were more compassionate and intelligent than he had dared expect. Brooks Atkinson and Richard Watts saluted O’Neill’s overall achievement despite being discomfited by the play’s sporadic incoherence.

  Atkinson (now theater critic for the Times) wrote that O’Neill “succeeded in placing within the reach of the stage finer shades of beauty, more delicate nuances of truth and more passionate qualities of emotion than we can discover in any other single modern play.” In the Herald Tribune, Watts, while faulting O’Neill’s submission to “the mad ghost of Strindberg,” nevertheless declared the play “a fascinating, half-mad enigma . . . as eloquent and stirring and richly imaginative as anything that has come from the pen of this foremost of our dramatists.”

  Somewhat troubled that these two discerning and supportive critics found his play confusing, O’Neill hoped to clarify its intent for them, as well as for his puzzled fans, and he made several halfhearted attempts to explain what he characterized as the play’s “hidden theme.”

  Three weeks after the play’s opening, O’Neill sent a letter to the New York Evening Post (also published in the Times and other papers):

  I had hoped the names chosen for my people would give a strong hint of this. “Dion Anthony”—Dionysius and St. Anthony—the creative pagan acceptance of life fighting eternal war with the masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity as represented by St. Anthony—the whole struggle resulting in this modern day in mutual exhaustion—creative joy in life for life’s sake frustrated, rendered abortive, distorted by morality from Pan into Satan, into a Mephistopheles mocking himself in order to feel alive; Christianity, once heroic in martyrs for its intense faith now pleading weakly for its intense belief in anything, even Godhead itself.

  Clear so far? What followed was even less so:

  I realize that when a playwright takes to explaining he thereby automatically places himself “in the dock.” But where an open-faced avowal by the play itself of the abstract theme underlying it is made impossible by the very nature of that hidden theme, then perhaps it is justifiable for the author to confess the mystical pattern which manifests itself as an overtone in The Great God Brown, dimly behind and beyond the words and actions of the characters.

  O’Neill was a bit more articulate a few months later in a letter to Carlotta Monterey, with whom he had recently fallen in love. Torn between his love for her (the temptress unknown) and his dependence on Agnes (the devil he knew), he voiced his sense of a divided self: “If I could only live at the same time in two worlds! But what a shamefully inadequate gift of half to offer you—or Agnes. And yet each of those halves is really a whole me! See Brown. I am two—absolutely!”

  The Great God Brown ran for 278 performances—first at the Greenwich Village Theatre, then at the Garrick (on West Thirty-fifth Street), and finally at a Broadway theater, the Klaw (on West Forty-fifth Street); it was the seventh O’Neill play in six seasons to tally more than a hundred performances—a benchmark in those days for a Broadway hit.

  Audiences by now had learned to appreciate O’Neill’s willingness to bare his innermost fantasies. Even if they couldn’t follow all of his concepts all of the time, they could follow some of them much of the time. They had come to understand and respect his fearlessness in trying to stretch beyond his own limits, to reach for what he idiosyncratically defined as “a bigger and better failure.”

  Although compelling for its time, The Great God Brown is seldom revived. Superseded during the more than eighty years since its premiere by a plethora of ever more absurdist, expressionist, and abstract plays, Brown has lost its impact. But it remains major in O’Neill’s canon as not only
an intensely personal revelation, but also as an example of his artistic daring when Broadway was—as he justifiably persisted in castigating it—mere “show shop.”

  Agnes and O’Neill retreated to Bermuda a month after the opening of Brown, this time renting a grand dwelling in Paget East, appropriately named Bellevue. It was “a real peach of a house,” O’Neill wrote to Macgowan, “lots of room—beautiful grounds, private beach [and] all at a big bargain price.” What most appealed to him and Agnes was the separate quarters for the children and guests, and detached quarters for the help.

  For neither the first time nor the last, O’Neill believed he had found the ideal combination of beauty and peace. To Louis Kantor, he confided, “Next to Peaked Hill in the old days, I believe this is the most satisfying habitat I’ve struck. It really has the feeling of home to me who usually feels in most houses like a Samoan in an igloo.”

  O’Neill now resumed writing Lazarus Laughed, a work that was to share the ill fate of The Fountain. A newly imagined saga of the biblical Lazarus’s second life on earth following his resurrection, it derived its title (as he once told the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant) from the “Jesus wept” story of the Gospel.

  Boiled down to its essence, Lazarus, although filled with the exultant laughter of its hero, was a grim attempt to deny the death wish O’Neill had flaunted in Brown. But with all his lip service to the joyousness of life and the fearlessness of death, O’Neill sounded unconvinced by his own argument. His Lazarus simply protests too much. “There is no death,” his followers chant over and over and over during four acts (occasionally substituting such minor variants as “Death is dead”).

  O’Neill, however, was oblivious to the play’s pretensions. “Lazarus coming bigger and bigger!” he bragged to Macgowan toward the end of March. “Certainly it contains the highest writing I have done. Certainly it composes for the theater more than anything else I have done.” Growing ever more operatic, he suggested that the role of Lazarus be acted (in his native Russian!) by the famed operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin. But he knew the triumvirate didn’t have the budget to mount the epic, and was beginning to wonder if it would ever find a producer.