by Arthur Gelb
“God how I miss you!” O’Neill wrote to Agnes, immediately after seeing her off on the steamer. “I actually broke down on the bed in our room in a fit of hysterical crying.” Admitting the absurdity of his outburst, knowing Agnes was to be gone only a week, he confessed to having lost his “whole control”; his “inner being” was “in pretty shattered shape.” He needed her more intensely, he said, than ever before in their married life.
O’Neill had told Agnes, just before she left, that he was no longer in love with Carlotta. Perhaps, as he’d recently told Carlotta, he’d persuaded himself that she truly had become a dream. More likely, he simply hadn’t the energy to disrupt his life. Although tempted by Carlotta’s overpowering sexual allure, he was unsure if he could meet her deepening demands as a lover, nor could he any longer delude himself that she would agree to be merely his mistress.
Tempestuous as his life was with Agnes, he was used to her, and he did depend on her. And he could always count on her forgiveness when he misbehaved. Going to bed with the bewitching Carlotta was exhilarating, but courting her took an effort he preferred to devote to his writing.
Had Carlotta been privy to the contents of O’Neill’s lovesick letter to Agnes, she might well have lost hope of ever capturing O’Neill. As it was, she was growing disillusioned with his dithering. She vented her frustration in a letter to her childhood friend Gene McComas in California.
She was weary of being “crucified again & again,” she wrote, and she deplored the injustice of being “game”; peevishly she added that “some natures get their greatest strength & self confidence in watching us wriggle!” Renouncing marriage, she declared she wanted “no more the responsibility of the home.” But did she mean a word of it?
• • •
WHILE CARLOTTA STEAMED, Agnes rejoiced. In a second letter to her, O’Neill reiterated his devotion. “For over nine years I have loved you and you alone, loved you with my whole being, without reservation given you my life.” He wrote of his love for Spithead, “indissolubly intermingled with my love for you,” describing it as their “haven,” where they would live their “dreams with a sense of permanence and security that here we do belong.”
• • •
HE WENT SO far as to describe his affair with Carlotta as “an outcrop of childish vanity”; he had never been in love with her, he insisted. “One hair of your head is more to me than the whole body and soul, liver and lights, of any other woman. If I lost your love, I’d go mad with grief!”
Abruptly, he mocked himself as “a virginal Casanova,” adding with a sudden flash of acute self-knowledge, “It is an awfully adolescent, undeveloped nakedness I am revealing to you!” He wished her now to laugh at his former infatuation with Carlotta and to see it clearly for what it was.
“Was!” he stressed. “‘Dead for a Ducat, dead!’ as Hamlet says.”
He needn’t have doubted Agnes’s empathy; even before receiving his letter aboard ship en route to New York, she wrote to him tenderly, assuring him “it was awful, seeing you fade out—waving.” But although she missed him, she thought perhaps she might benefit from the time their separation would give her for “some amount of introspection.” Still, she wished he was there with her, “so I could tell you how much I love you!”
After a two-day visit with her father at the sanatorium, Agnes checked into the Wentworth in New York, where she attended to various errands for O’Neill. She learned there had been no offers to buy Brook Farm; she met with Lawrence Langner, who said the Theatre Guild would soon have a decision about Strange Interlude, and suggested that O’Neill come to New York for a face-to-face meeting with the Guild’s board; and, carrying out one rather peculiar commission from her husband, she arranged to meet with the astrologist Evangeline Adams, whose clients included J. P. Morgan and Enrico Caruso, and whose specialty was the prediction of financial trends.
“Adams says ‘liquidate,’” Agnes solemnly reported back to O’Neill, “get all overhead expenses cut down, predicts bad financial slump for next year for the U.S.A. Your financial status will pick up about October.”
Agnes then cabled O’Neill (on April 2) to say she needed to delay her return to Bermuda for another week, to help straighten out a crisis within her family.
O’Neill’s response was stony.
He was in bed with “a rotten sore throat,” he wrote back. He’d been “counting the days” for Agnes’s return to Bermuda; he was dejected about the apparent unsalability of Brook Farm, “and financial worry in general”; he wailed that their “tough luck would never break” and that they were “heading for a most frightful cropper” unless something turned up soon.
And why did she have to involve herself in her family’s problems, he scolded, warning her not to commit him to any monetary aid beyond what he was already doing for her father in his illness. If they needed money, they should sell their house in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey: “My foot is down . . . in self-preservation. I’m doing all I can or will do.”
Moreover, O’Neill went on, Agnes’s absence had completely disrupted his life, he hadn’t written a line, and saw no hope of doing so until she came home and life got back to normal.
• • •
THE DAY BEFORE Agnes returned to Bermuda, O’Neill received a cable from Langner saying the Guild wanted to option Strange Interlude. This longed-for news did little to lighten his gloom. Upon Agnes’s arrival on April 26, O’Neill listened impatiently as she reported her conversations with Langner (of considerably more interest to him than her family’s problems). Then, peremptorily, he declined the proffered option, insisting on a definite commitment.
As he was pressed for cash, he informed Langner, he would have to offer the play elsewhere if the Guild would not commit to producing it during the coming season. He was concerned that with too long a delay, the play’s methodology (its use of asides) would “leak out” and another playwright might copy the technique before Interlude opened.
Sympathetic to all of O’Neill’s concerns, Langner invited him to come to New York to stay with him and his wife, Armina Marshall (also a member of the Theatre Guild’s board), while discussing the details of a production.
When O’Neill sailed from Bermuda on May 14 (which happened to be Oona’s second birthday), he was aware that Carlotta had not yet left for Europe. His most recent letter to her, in late March, had been cool and chatty, with scarcely a word of endearment, seeming to underline his intention of dropping the affair. To Agnes, as he was approaching New York on his second day at sea, he wrote, “You can absolutely trust me to keep my word to you. So don’t worry, Dearest! I love you and I don’t love anyone else and that’s all there is to it.”
Once again, however, no sooner had O’Neill unpacked his suitcase at the Langners’ home in Greenwich Village on May 16 than he sought out Carlotta. And, day by day, he contrived to meet her for lunch or tea and—when not obliged to dine at the Langners’—for dinner as well.
On May 23, the day before O’Neill was to return to Bermuda, Langner invited Theresa Helburn, one of the Theatre Guild’s founders, to meet O’Neill at dinner. It turned out to be the day Lindbergh landed his single-engine monoplane at Le Bourget, and discussion about production plans for O’Neill’s plays was swept aside. Instead, the talk, as Helburn recalled, centered on “what lay behind the apparent simplicity of that amazing flight, behind its clean-cut success, its almost poetic precision.”
As O’Neill offered his thoughts, Helburn was struck by his empathy for Lindbergh’s feat: “I can imagine no one more sensitive to all its implications than O’Neill with his sense of the romantic and the dramatic, with his memories of lonely nights at sea. . . . I have often thought that Gene is a good deal of a lone eagle in his chosen field—daring new and, God knows, long enough flights on his dramatic Pegasus.”
Although O’Neill spent at least part of his final three days in New York with Carl
otta, her sorcery was not yet potent enough to pin him down. He sailed back to Agnes on May 24, and Carlotta, momentarily thwarted, sailed for Europe.
27
After revising Strange Interlude in Bermuda during June and most of July (1927), O’Neill was ready to pronounce it “finally finished.” But the play’s completion on July 25 did not relieve his malaise.
“I have been in a strange disorganized state,” he wrote to Carlotta, who was still abroad, “where it seemed as if it were impossible to concentrate on a single thing outside of my writing.” He had labored on Strange Interlude “with a sort of feverish intensity,” he said, “as if that were the anodyne for all the instability and drab insecurity of the reality of my everyday existence.” He had been betrayed “even by the sea,” he lamented. “It is such a tepid, lukewarm ocean now, there is no life or sting to it.”
Part of his unease might have been attributed to the approach of his thirty-ninth birthday—and the more significant hovering of his fortieth. He tried to keep from weighing his nine-year marriage to Agnes against his adulterous affair with Carlotta. If he had been backed into a corner like this in days gone by, he likely would have escaped into a drinking binge. Now, determined to stay sober, he felt forced to take stock of his life.
Inevitably, O’Neill saw his personal dilemma in terms of stage drama. Among the ideas and outlines for new works noted in his diary before he left Bermuda for New York in late August, two were particularly germane to his present quandary.
The most grandiloquent of these projects, entitled The Sea-Mother’s Son, aspired to be the odyssey of a man of forty—O’Neill’s own looming age—lying on his deathbed and confronting his life’s story, beginning with his childhood. It was, in his own words, “based on autobiographical material.” O’Neill envisioned it as “the Big Grand Opus” of his career. In form, the “Opus” was neither a novel nor a traditional play; but it would, he believed, have “greater scope than any novel.” In fact, it would dwarf Strange Interlude, making that novel-play seem “a mere shallow episode!” If he could shape the idea into what he pictured, he told Macgowan, “it will make a work that I flatter myself will be one of those timeless Big Things.” His somewhat sententious subtitle was to be The Story of the Birth of a Soul and, he said, “it will be just that.”
Expanding on the summary of the plot in his Work Diary, O’Neill reemphasizes the play’s autobiographical derivation, and describes his protagonist, at play’s end, as able to accept the suffering he has endured, to conquer his death wish, to “say yes to his life,” and—in O’Neill’s own phantasmagorical rhetoric—to “give up the comfort of the return to Mother Death.”
It’s plain that Ella O’Neill haunts the Opus. (As O’Neill once wrote to Carlotta, “The sea is a woman to me . . . pagan and physically exultant.”) As always, that oceanic female entity nibbles at O’Neill’s conscious and unconscious mind. She was the seductive, capricious mother who had tried to abort him, who—when poisoned by morphine—blamed him for her drug addiction and told him he should never have been born.
The Sea-Mother’s Son was never written as such, but a similar concept eventually would emerge—a soaring, all-encompassing novelistic panorama, inspired by his family history, which, by 1939, would grow into a projected eleven-play cycle with the panoptic title A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.
Partly responsible for stirring up O’Neill’s intense introspection during that steamy Bermuda summer were his recent sessions with Dr. Hamilton. During his analysis, O’Neill had written an 858-word fragment detailing his parents’ incompatibilities and their attitudes toward him as a child. This document—an expansion of the self-analytical diagram of his psychological history that he drew for Hamilton—may be read as a partial blueprint not only for The Sea-Mother’s Son, but also for the far-off autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Crammed onto a single page, the document ruthlessly strips away, layer by layer, all the anguished stages of O’Neill’s journey into night.
Describing his mother as “spoiled before marriage,” O’Neill takes note of her “lonely life after marriage.” He tells of the devastating death of her infant son, Edmund, and her guilty vow never to have another child, which led her—a pious Catholic woman—to submit to a “series of brought-on abortions.” And he asks, “Did this mark beginning of [her] break with religion, which was to leave her eventually entirely without solace?”
While her wish to have no more children was thwarted by the unwanted birth of Eugene—and despite her growing dependence on the morphine initially prescribed for her postpartum pain—she focused a “fierce concentration of affection” on him and he was “spoiled from birth.” According to O’Neill, this affection “must have been further intensified by the fact that at age of 2 he nearly dies from typhoid.”
Startling as is the document’s reference to Ella’s abortions, its concluding revelation—concerning Ella’s relationship with Eugene’s nursemaid—is almost equally bizarre; according to O’Neill, the nursemaid became her “companion in beer & stout drinking” and, after Eugene was sent to boarding school, “in whiskey drinking & probably messenger for obtaining drugs(?)”
O’Neill also lists the traits Ella found most upsetting in her husband: his parsimony “due to his childhood experience with grinding poverty”; his refusal to provide her with a proper home, and his “dependence on barroom companionship.”
• • •
THE SECOND PLAY IDEA that tugged at O’Neill while he sweated out his enforced final August at Spithead was titled Without Endings of Days. Plainly spurred by guilt toward Agnes, it symbolically probed the anguish of a religious man’s adultery.
The play’s unnamed protagonist has been having an extramarital affair, and when his wife dies, “All his sins against her of omission & commission come back on him,” writes O’Neill. He feels he has unfairly misunderstood her, that “he must confess, that he has sinned,” and he craves absolution from the Church.
• • •
WHILE THE PLAY’S THEME is tied to O’Neill’s earthbound dilemma, it also reflects the spiritual confusion that has recently reentered his consciousness.
The play’s protagonist, like O’Neill, is a man who is constantly fighting against the tug of his early Catholic indoctrination—a man hounded by his half longing to return to his childhood belief in immortality, and his fear of one day being seduced into turning back to the Church for solace.
O’Neill, in the play, vicariously projects the struggle going on in his own mind. His protagonist, guided to a church, kneels before the cross, where “his intellect and emotions fight.” Eager to confess, he approaches a priest, who asks if he is a Catholic, and he responds, “I am—was—am—was.”
Then, stepping toward the confession box, he whips out a revolver and shoots himself. As he is dying, the priest gives him the last sacrament, asking, “Do you believe?” To which the joyful answer is “Yes, I believe,” and the priest gives him absolution. But even then, “with a last sardonic defiance,” the nameless protagonist asserts, “All the same, I don’t believe.” (Six years later, O’Neill would continue his argument with himself when he revised Without Endings of Days as Days Without End.)
• • •
O’NEILL HAD NEVER made a secret of his repudiation of Church doctrine. He could trace his loss of faith to the events of a summer night in New London twenty-five years earlier—the night that sparked the battle with God that led to his apostasy. It was the time when Eugene, not yet fifteen, finally confronted the truth of his mother’s withering illness.
Ella O’Neill, dressed for bed and craving a fix, discovered she’d let herself run out of morphine. In a panic she rushed from the house in her nightgown, determined to throw herself into the Thames River from the family dock that fronted the O’Neill cottage. It’s unclear who stopped her and brought her back to the house; but there was no way that the dis
turbance could be concealed from Eugene, and it was then that his father and older brother told him the truth.
• • •
REFERRING TO THE EPISODE in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill has his alter ego, Edmund Tyrone, say, “It was right after that Papa and Jamie decided they couldn’t hide it from me any more.”
It was a dreadful shock to Eugene, although, with hindsight, an episode three months earlier might have prepared him; that was when he’d accidentally walked in on his mother in the family’s rented apartment off Central Park West in New York, just as she was giving herself an injection. Eugene, bewildered by her fury at being discovered, had questioned his father and brother, but they’d brushed aside his concern, believing him too young to be told the truth.
By the time the full implication of his mother’s illness sank in, and his repeated prayers for her recovery went unanswered, Eugene had lost his faith. Determined to stop attending church, he braced himself one Sunday morning for the inevitable confrontation with his father, with whom he ritually attended Mass.
When James saw Eugene descending the stairs from his bedroom in their New London home, he told him to get ready to accompany him. Eugene stopped where he was and told his father of his decision. James started up the stairs, shouting angrily and grabbing his son by the shoulders, and attempted to shake him into submission.
With Eugene trying to twist out of his father’s grip, the two lurched to the bottom of the stairs, where they paused, out of breath, glaring at each other. James was rigid with fury but Eugene held his ground and James stomped off to church alone. Ella had long since given up attending church and her plea to her son to reconsider was no more effective than James’s. Eugene argued that religion had proved of little service to them, why impose it on him?