by Arthur Gelb
• • •
WHILE BOTH CARLOTTA and O’Neill tried to ignore the world of intrigue in New York, it seemed constantly to intrude. Carlotta, who bore such encroachments less stoically than O’Neill, was greatly upset when she read an item in the September 28 issue of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town column that, to her oversensitive ear, sounded ill-natured. Attributed to “a friend of Eugene O’Neill’s just returned from a visit to him,” the item declared that “flamboyant descriptions of the chateau he has rented in France have exaggerated its grandeur.”
The New Yorker item went on to explain that Le Plessis was “not a showplace,” that the rent was “about half of what a four room apartment rents for in New York,” and that it had no electricity and only one bathroom.
Though it was hardly an attack, Carlotta was deeply upset by the piece and told the magazine so. She “nearly dropped dead,” as she put it, when informed by the editor, Harold Ross (whom she knew through Ralph Barton), that the quoted “friend” was none other than Kenneth Macgowan. Carlotta knew Macgowan was concerned, on O’Neill’s behalf, over increasingly malicious gossip in New York about the O’Neills’ highfalutin lifestyle abroad, amid the growing Depression in America, and that his comment was well intended.
She felt compelled to rebuke him, nonetheless. Sputtering like a clueless Marie Antoinette, she shot Macgowan a letter demanding to know why she and O’Neill should apologize to anyone about whether they had “thirty servants or no servants” and scolding him for being so “fussed,” just because “a lot of failures, sore heads, drunks, and would-be-artists (in one line or another) thro’ envy, disappointment and jealousy criticize a man because he lives in the manner that all middle class people (have they the money!) live?”
Carlotta was impatient to return to the quiet life she’d promised O’Neill, and after helping him through one of his all-too-frequent marathon dental procedures, necessitating a three-week stay in Paris, she could finally report in her diary that O’Neill had re-embraced his Electra trilogy and was once again beginning, in his words, to feel his “bean working.”
“I am at last off on the right foot,” O’Neill wrote the next day to George Jean Nathan. “It should come with a rush from now on.”
30
While O’Neill was engrossed in his Electra trilogy, Carlotta redoubled her efforts to rule her castle as a sanctuary for his work; she surrounded him with subservient silence during his creative mornings, with peaceful afternoon walks in their woods, meals impeccably served, and discreet intervals of lovemaking, all set against a background of serene beauty.
He was, after all, writing her play, as he’d announced six months earlier when, in bed together on May 11, he’d outlined his blueprint for Mourning Becomes Electra. Referring to the play in his mind as, variously, his “Electra idea,” his “Greek tragedy plot idea,” and his “Life of Aeschylus idea,” he saw it as a monumental work that would rattle the ancient bones of the Agamemnon saga.
In words similar to those he’d used to describe the long-since-shoved-aside “Grand Opus” of The Sea-Mother’s Son, he envisioned Electra as grander in its sweep, more advanced in technique, and far deeper in its tragic vision than anything he’d yet written.
“I don’t promise by a long shot that after it gets ground down by my inadequacies it will prove any such lofty stature,” he wrote to the critic Joseph Wood Krutch, “but at least this time I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I failed at something big, and thus be a success in my own spiritual eyes. If I fail! I have hopes, damn it!”
If, in O’Neill’s own view, he was not yet at the top of Mount Olympus, he was nearly there, and Carlotta was more than happy to share his aerie. He felt at home within the heaving currents of the Electra legend; he saw aspects of his own dysfunctional family all too clearly reflected in the Aeschylus tragedy of the fourth century BC. The clash between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the rivalry of Orestes and Electra for their parents’ approval, the family’s disillusionment, their hard deaths and grieving, all resonated for O’Neill.
With his parents and brother often on his mind, he transported the Greek legend from the city of Argos to a small New England coastal town (based on New London, where his family had lived out its own Oresteia). The time was 1865, just as the Civil War was ending. O’Neill reimagined Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and their children as the Mannon family—oedipal complex and all.
This setting, O’Neill noted, was the “best possible dramatically for Greek plot of crime and retribution chain of fate—Puritan conviction of man born to sin and punishment.”
The play would begin on the day of General Lee’s surrender, when O’Neill’s nineteenth-century Agamemnon, a brigadier general in Grant’s army (and formerly the town’s leading citizen), was about to return home. O’Neill placed the Mannon family in a “neo-Greek” house of the type popular in the early 1800s—“this fits in well and absolutely justifiable, not forced Greek similarity,” he noted.
Drawing on his knowledge of New London’s history and architecture, he described the Mannon mansion: its facade was a “white Greek temple portico” fronted by “six tall columns,” which he modeled in part on three white Greek Revival houses built in the 1840s by prosperous whaling captains; embellished with imposing Corinthian columns, those houses were landmarks on what was once known as “Whale Oil Row” in the center of New London.
O’Neill wished to retain the flavor of the Greek names for his New England characters without their sounding forced. Agamemnon became Ezra Mannon; his wife, Clytemnestra, was renamed Christine; and their son, Orestes, became Orin. For their daughter, Electra, O’Neill hesitated over Eleanor, Elena, and Elsa, and finally settled on Lavinia, explaining it was a loose approximation of Homer’s Laodicea.
While O’Neill deviated from the Oresteia of Aeschylus when it suited his purpose, he retained much of the legend’s twisted tragedy, as well as its melodrama. From the expository scenes of Electra, we learn that while General Mannon was away fighting in the Union army, his wife, Christine, fell in love with Adam Brant (derived from the Oresteia’s Aegisthus), the captain of a clipper ship anchored at a wharf in east Boston. Christine dreads her husband’s return; but return he does, and she at once sets about to plot his death.
Knowing that the Mannon family doctor has diagnosed Ezra as having a weak heart, Christine poisons him, confident his death will be diagnosed as a heart attack. O’Neill explains Clytemnestra’s hatred of her husband in terms of sexual frustration—“[Agamemnon’s] Puritan sense of guilt turning love to lust.”
In the rapidly thickening plot, Lavinia/Electra—who worshipped her father and has always been jealous of her mother—suspects her mother’s role in her father’s sudden death; she has guessed her mother’s love affair with Adam Brant (to whom she herself is secretly attracted); when her brother, Orin (who adores his mother and hates his father), returns from the war soon after, she enlists him as an ally in spying out their mother’s treachery.
Lavinia and Orin, after confirming their mother’s guilt, avenge their father’s death by murdering Adam Brant, driving Christine to suicide. After various twists of plot including hints of incestuous love between Lavinia and her brother, Orin takes his own life. The body count is now four (Ezra, Adam, Christine, and Orin). Only Lavinia is left standing.
It is she who is the play’s true protagonist (as the title, of course, suggests). To O’Neill, the Greek Electra was “the most interesting of all women in drama.” But he believed the legendary Electra had been denied the heroic fate to which she was entitled and he set himself to rectify that failure. In his reinvention of her as the doomed Lavinia Mannon, she became in many ways (never mind the gender) a stand-in for O’Neill himself.
“Give modern Electra figure in play a tragic ending worthy of Greek plot idea,” he wrote. “In Greek story she peters out into an undramatic married banality. Such a character contained too much tragic fate
within her soul to permit this—why should Furies have let Electra escape unpunished?”
In O’Neill’s revisionist telling, Lavinia, overwhelmed by guilt, condemns herself to a life locked away from the world; she is inextricably bound, as she declares, “to the Mannon dead,” just as O’Neill felt himself bound to—and haunted by—his own dead.
“I’m the last Mannon,” says Lavinia at the trilogy’s end, echoing O’Neill’s own mournful cry following his brother Jamie’s death: “I’m the only O’Neill of our branch left . . . the real last one.”
Lavinia’s final speech is one of the most soul-baring O’Neill ever wrote; it incorporates both his own consuming preoccupation with the act of suicide and his mordant belief in the inevitability of an even crueler self-punishment.
“I’m not going the way Mother and Orin went,” declares Lavinia. “That’s escaping punishment. And there’s no one left to punish me.” It is Lavinia’s destiny to punish herself.
Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison. I’ll never go out or see anyone! I’ll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! (With a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self-torture) I know they will see to it I live for a long time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!
In his Work Diary, O’Neill explained that in the play’s title he was using the word becomes in its old sense of the word. “It befits—it becomes Electra to mourn—(it is her fate)—also, in usual sense (made ironical here), mourning (black) is becoming to her—it is the only color that becomes her destiny.” (O’Neill did not mention in his diary that this concept was imbued with the memory of his mother as a widow and his notion that, spiritually as well as physically, mourning had “suited” her.)
O’Neill pensively recorded the difficulty he’d undergone (a difficulty presumably not encountered by Aeschylus) in plotting the scenario’s crimes so that his criminals could escape detection: “Even history of comparatively recent crimes (where they happen among people supposedly respectable), shows rural authorities easily hoodwinked—poisoning of Mannon . . . would probably never be suspected (under same circumstances) even in New England town of today, let alone 1865.”
That degree of violence did not, of course, exist in O’Neill’s life, even though both he and his mother had each once attempted suicide; but it is significant that O’Neill causes Lavinia to lose, in rapid succession (and in the same order as O’Neill), first her father, then her mother, then her brother.
O’Neill endowed Christine with the beautiful hair his mother had had as a young woman—“partly a copper brown, partly a bronze gold, each shade distinct and yet blending with the other, beautiful hair that hangs down to her knees.” And he gave Christine his mother’s snobbish attitude toward the small stuffy town where she spent her summers.
After identifying the town in an early scenario as the New London of his childhood, O’Neill wrote, “Christine has always hated the town of N.L. and felt a superior disdain for its inhabitants”—echoing Ella O’Neill’s own disparaging attitude. (In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Ella O’Neill’s stand-in, Mary Tyrone, declares, “I’ve always hated this town and everyone in it.”)
While Ella O’Neill lent a sprinkling of her essence to Christine Mannon, Carlotta’s influence was more pronounced. In O’Neill’s description of Christine, she is, like Carlotta, “French and Dutch descended”; strikingly attractive, she is, at forty, Carlotta’s age; and, like Carlotta, “she appears younger.” O’Neill’s bewitchment by Carlotta is reflected in Christine’s passionate romance with Adam Brant. It is her love affair (as well as the murder of her husband) that drives the play’s narrative.
While refining the first draft of the trilogy in early December 1929, O’Neill had hinted in a letter to Lawrence Langner about his newest project. Considering the phenomenal success of Strange Interlude at home and abroad, O’Neill expected the Theatre Guild to snap up his Electra. He gave no details about his new work, but said it involved “a lot of hard labor—more than there was in Interlude.”
As O’Neill envisioned it, the project encompassed three full-length plays: Homecoming (four acts); The Hunted (five acts); and The Haunted (four acts). “It is magnificently done,” Carlotta told her diary on December 17, after O’Neill had read aloud Act III of Homecoming, and again assured her that Electra was her play. “I can’t hear this without weeping—it is my play! & he loves me!”
• • •
TO BEGIN THE New Year of 1930, Carlotta and O’Neill treated themselves to the gift of a second dog—a handsome Gordon setter named Ben Lomond (ordered, like Blemie, from a London breeder). As Ben was being let out of his traveling box, a jealous Blemie bit him on the nose. “Not a gentleman’s idea of a welcome!” Carlotta quipped. From then on, the two dogs were enemies. “They had to be kept in separate rooms when they were in the house,” Carlotta remembered, “but they made a truce out of doors.”
She and O’Neill each walked one of them until they reached the woods, where they were released from their leashes. “They’d have a wonderful time stalking rabbits together,” Carlotta said, “but the minute they got back to the house, they became hostile and had to be separated again.”
The relationship between Ben and Blemie was further complicated when, one day, a small mongrel bitch from a neighboring farm wandered onto the O’Neill property. “The bitch was in heat,” recalled Carlotta, “and Blemie kissed her politely and followed her off into the woods.
“Some time later one of our French maids told me she’d heard the bitch had had puppies, and didn’t we want to take Blemie over to the farm to see his children. I asked Gene, and he grinned and said yes. So we all trooped over to the farm, Gene, I, Blemie and several of the French servants.” O’Neill’s grin grew wider when he saw the puppies; they all looked like Irish setters. Poor Blemie walked back home with his head down.
While Ben lived mostly in the servants’ quarters when not outdoors, Blemie led a more privileged life. “He acted as host at Le Plessis,” Lillian Gish recalled. “He would receive you at the door, follow the servant who brought in your breakfast tray. When a guest left, Blemie would throw himself on the floor with a sigh of relief, as though saying, ‘Thank heavens, they’re gone’; he behaved exactly as though he were worn out with having performed the duties of a good host.” Blemie was trained to respect his master’s need for quiet. “Like the servants,” according to Carlotta, “he went around on tiptoe when Gene was working.”
• • •
BLEMIE AND the rest of the household continued to tiptoe throughout the cold and rainy winter of 1931, while O’Neill, in his writer’s tower, struggled to come up with an ideal language and style for his masterful trilogy. He had tried out and discarded one stylistic concept after another. Should he butter his dialogue with “rhythm derived from Biblical prose (?)” as he’d asked himself on August 15, 1929; “no go,” he’d answered, five days later; August 26 found him “playing around with mask technique notion,” but three days after that, he concluded, “not right—give up for present.”
He was, as he later wrote to Nathan (in early January 1930), monkeying around “with schemes for dialogue and ideas for production” until his head ached. But, as he assured his friend, the story he had to tell “made all such stuff seem futile.
“I finally settled down to the direct and least noticeable way,” said O’Neill. “And I find I can get everything said about these characters’ souls, hearts, and loins that can be said.”
Nonetheless, O’Neill continued to monkey around. He made three more attempts at embellishment six months later. The first was the insertion of “Strange Interludean” asides; but by July 18, 1930, he realized that they, too, must go.
Unfazed, he decided tw
o days later to replace the asides with “stylized soliloquies.” That idea was also soon discarded; he noted (on July 25), “am convinced stylized soliloquies won’t do,” and he determined then and there to write a third draft of the trilogy “with neither asides nor soliloquies.”
He was finally convinced, two months later (September 20), that his use of half masks must also be eliminated. Despite what O’Neill had told George Jean Nathan at the beginning of 1930, it wasn’t until he was going over his fifth draft in April 1931, still revising, cutting, reconstructing, that he was finally convinced he’d found the right way to tell his story naturalistically—without recourse to imitation Bible-speak, stage asides, masks, or self-conscious soliloquies.
Carlotta worried about her husband. “Watching Gene’s tenseness and fatigue does something ghastly to me,” she wrote in her diary on January 17, 1931. And two days later: “His spirit is torn by fatigue of his work. He always has told me he lives through everything he writes—all his strength goes into work—which leaves him physically and emotionally exhausted.”
In appreciation of Carlotta’s patient understanding, O’Neill had given her an early notebook depicting the characters and story line of the trilogy’s first two plays. “These first fruits (very unripe) of my work in Our New Year,” he’d written on January 15, 1930, “with all my deepest love and gratitude for all you have meant to me!—and all your help!”
By mid-1931 O’Neill was not only stressed by the challenge of his trilogy, but also worried about where he and Carlotta would live when their lease on Le Plessis expired. They were hoping to find a permanent home where there was sunshine, he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune; it rained in France month after month, nine days out of ten, he said, and the dreary weather had worn him down. “It’s a beautiful country, but a terrible climate.”
Typically, it hadn’t taken O’Neill long to find fault with the dream home he’d earlier extolled to Saxe Commins. His idyllic castle, the “real home” where he’d found seclusion and inspiration had turned into a gingerbread house.