by Arthur Gelb
“Oh, we can sublet that,” parried O’Neill.
“In Depression times?” retorted Carlotta.
“Don’t you want a home of your own?” demanded O’Neill.
To which Carlotta could only respond, “Of course I do!”
At once they began a hunt for beachfront lots, aware they had to make a quick decision; they would soon have to return to New York to dutifully await their children’s Christmas visits. The Sea Island Development Company assigned George Boll, a personable young bachelor who was to become the O’Neills’ trusted adviser and friend, to show them what was for sale; they promptly bought oceanfront land and engaged the highly recommended architect Francis Abreu.
Their commitment was not made lightly; their home would be costly and laborious to build. But, as Carlotta averred, they were convinced it was to be their “home until the end!”
The shared design and building of a home from scratch was, for Carlotta, a thrilling adventure replete with symbols of her sustained closeness to O’Neill. He, too, craved the assurance of an endless all-consuming love as symbolized by this commitment—and, with that craving, came a resurgence of longing for the comfort of his childhood Catholic faith that, in turn, revived thoughts of Without Endings of Days, in which he had described his protagonist-self as tethered to “the rational world of fact—but always fighting against his deeply religious pull.”
Disregarding the fact that that had initially been prompted by his guilt over leaving Agnes, he now thought he saw a way to twist the plot into a new play that would be a paean to the sanctity of his rapturous marriage to Carlotta.
Still struggling with his own perturbing indecision about whether he could re-embrace his early Catholic beliefs, he would retain the original predominating theme of a man’s conflicted quest for spiritual reassurance through a return to his abandoned (if never forgotten) Catholic faith.
The newly envisioned play would (as previously planned) depict the deadly yes-and-no battle within the protagonist’s mind, as represented by two separately acted selves. It would, in fact, be powered by O’Neill’s own yearning for a belief in the eternity of his and Carlotta’s sacred love.
O’Neill envisioned it as a “modern miracle play,” intended to depict a “modern” man who, in his search for truth, “is forced back to his old God and thereby regains his lost soul.”
But he was about to blunder into writing one of the more hapless plays of his career. Falling far short of O’Neill’s hyperexalted hopes, it was to turn out as limp and unconvincing as The First Man, Welded, and Dynamo; it was deservedly dismissed by the Broadway critics, and O’Neill himself ultimately acknowledged “it wasn’t any good.”
If the play is unworthy of O’Neill the dramatist, it does provide a rare insight into the man. At the time of its writing, he was himself in the midst of a profound spiritual crisis; he was again living his protagonist’s conflict at the same time that he was trying to make a play about that conflict. The result is a work that in its way (and despite its muddled narrative) is at times more revealing about his spiritual self than even Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which was written at a great distance from the events it portrays. The action of O’Neill’s modern miracle play (ultimately entitled Days Without End) is, on the other hand, set in the present and mirrors his own ongoing real-life dilemma; it was almost as though he were keeping a personal diary of his emotional ups and downs.
The back story is readily recognizable as O’Neill’s own (with only minor variations). He describes the protagonist of Days Without End as a young boy who, like himself, loses the Catholic faith in which he was raised when God fails to respond to his prayers for his mother’s salvation; he has spent his life (sporadically pursued by the Hound of Heaven) in a frantic if often unconscious search to regain that faith. (Several lines from the Francis Thompson poem are, in fact, quoted in the play’s text.)
Starting in his early teens, the boy, like Eugene himself, has been subject to a spiritual confusion that has driven him by turns to drown himself in alcohol, to thoughts of suicide, to the joyous rebirth of becoming a writer, to plunges into perceived treacherous love affairs and an abandoned marriage—never free of his hungering for the motherly love denied him as a child.
Although in real life O’Neill has convinced himself that in Carlotta he has at last found his lost mother, and has forever shed his wounded self, he believes their love has no meaning unless it can somehow be locked in for eternity. A return to the spirituality of his Catholic roots seems to be the answer (except when it isn’t).
This was O’Neill’s tormenting dilemma—a dilemma he mistakenly thought he could shape into a play even as he was living it day by day. His overwhelming personal confusion forced him to ponder at length each step of the play’s narrative; he worked only in fits and starts, and he allowed other events in his life to tide him over to his next creative step; it would be many months before he completed the play—and even after it was produced, he believed he’d chosen the wrong ending.
• • •
THE PLAY’S BEWILDERED protagonist is John Loving, a split personality (as in The Great God Brown) personified by two actors: John, the well-intentioned idealist, and his diabolical alter ego, Loving, who is dressed to look like John and wears a mask with John’s features—but distorted by a permanent sneer.
This bedeviled creature is married to Elsa, who looks like Carlotta and who has something of her history, notably a recent marriage to a man who betrayed her with other women.
The idealistic John, determined (like the idealistic O’Neill) to imbue his marriage with eternal meaning, believes this can be achieved only by repossessing his lost religious faith. The masked and diabolical Loving (a conflation of O’Neill’s detached intellectual self and his cynical brother Jamie) jeers at John and malevolently opposes his intention.
It turns out that John has recently indulged in a thoughtless onetime adulterous fling with a friend of Elsa’s, and he is desperately eager not only to conceal this slip from Elsa, but to be absolved for committing it. (O’Neill seems to have been thinking here of his faithlessness to Agnes; there is no evidence that he had been unfaithful to Carlotta.) Loving mocks John’s “sacred” love for Elsa and sneers at his “deluded” belief in the concept of expiation.
Elsa learns of the adultery, cannot forgive it, and deliberately causes herself to fall ill with pneumonia by walking about in the freezing rain while still recovering from influenza. As she lies near death, she senses John’s suicidal despair and forgives him—upon which he summons the courage to overcome Loving’s opposition and rushes out to find a church.
There, in a scene that reads like Theater of the Absurd, John spiritually vanquishes Loving, who dies. These are O’Neill’s stage directions: “John Loving—he, who had been only John—remains standing with his arms stretched up to the Cross, an expression of mystic exaltation on his face. The corpse of Loving lies at the foot of the Cross, like a cured cripple’s testimonial offering in a shrine.”
The curtain falls on the last words of the reassembled John Loving: “Love lives forever! Death is dead! . . . Life laughs with God’s love again! Life laughs with love!” Foolish as the plot may be, O’Neill, during its construction, was in torment over whether he himself could, or should, rejoin the Church.
O’Neill worked on a first draft of his modern miracle play in a Sea Island cottage rented by the week from the realtor George Boll while he awaited the completion of his new home. During the next two years, he would, in his own words, “sweat blood” over this play, whose final title derived from the Book of Common Prayer: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
Carlotta encouraged O’Neill in his perfervid religious reflections. Although herself not a Catholic, she was religiously inclined, having basked as a girl in the mystique of her C
alifornia convent-school milieu. But for now, she was less engaged with his emerging play than in once again meeting the challenge of creating the ideal home for their sacred marriage.
“The trouble with me,” noted Carlotta, “is I am good at making homes (if I do say it!). It is an awful job—but worth it, if you know what you want & get it!” She told her architect precisely what it was she wanted: “an austere Spanish house—thick, brick walls painted white outside and inside. Gothic shaped doors, arched, tiled roof and floors (imported old tiles).”
The day after her return to New York with O’Neill in mid-December, Carlotta excitedly reported their purchase and plans to Ilka Chase. The house would have twenty-two rooms (half that of the number at Le Plessis) and a fraction of the grounds, but it would be an imposing mansion with its own spacious beachfront.
Carlotta kept in almost daily telephone contact with Abreu and, for the third time since her marriage to O’Neill, she shopped for furnishings for a new home. As if desperate to get at least some of her money’s worth from her soon-to-be-abandoned Park Avenue duplex, she proceeded to hold an almost manic round of luncheons, teas, and dinners.
It was the sort of ambiance O’Neill had found intolerable while married to Agnes. But he knew it would soon be over and, in fact, it provided him with the proof, once and for all, that it was impossible to work in the city. He resigned himself to intermittent brooding over the slowly evolving miracle play.
Both Carlotta and O’Neill, concerned about a new stock market plunge, spoke earnestly of reducing expenses. Yet soon after their return to New York, they instructed George Boll to buy an adjoining $5,000 oceanfront lot to ensure their privacy in Sea Island; and O’Neill ordered a $2,500 motorboat.
If not for his adoration of Carlotta, for whom the holidays had always held meaningful family obligations, O’Neill would gladly have ignored the holiday season. But he allowed himself to be swept up in Carlotta’s fleeting maternal zeal. Along with arranging visits in New York with Shane and (finally) Oona, the time had now come for Carlotta to reunite with her own neglected daughter. Cynthia, accompanied by Carlotta’s mother, Nellie Tharsing, arrived in New York from California two days after the new year. As the Park Avenue duplex had no guest room, Carlotta engaged a suite for them at the Mayfair House, two dozen blocks down Park Avenue at Sixty-fifth Street.
Cynthia, not quite fifteen, dined at the duplex on the evening of her arrival, along with her grandmother, who for some time had been urging Carlotta to relieve her of the burden of Cynthia’s care. But Cynthia was unresponsive to Carlotta’s efforts at regaining her affection and trust. She was unhappy with her mother’s plan to take over her care, and resisted her mother’s wish that she attend a boarding school on the East Coast.
When Carlotta, hurt by Cynthia’s recalcitrance, hesitated over how to deal with her, O’Neill stepped in. It was an astonishing gesture of paternal solicitude in a man who gave so unwillingly of himself to his own children. Carlotta was overcome with amazement and gratitude. So deep was O’Neill’s devotion to Carlotta that he took it on himself to decide she “must keep Cyn here for at least six months no matter what!”
With O’Neill’s approval, Carlotta busied herself with her reluctant daughter. In early January, she outfitted Cynthia for school, and guided her to museums and theaters, including a performance of Mourning Becomes Electra. She also introduced Cynthia to thirteen-year-old Shane and seven-year-old Oona at a family luncheon, to which O’Neill lent his presence.
On January 10, O’Neill, still ducking a return to his intractable miracle play, insisted on joining Carlotta and her daughter on the tedious journey to Cynthia’s new boarding school in Washington, Connecticut. Continuing in family mode after Cynthia had been bundled off to school, O’Neill, in early February, joined Carlotta at lunch with Shane and Oona, and then accompanied them to the Bronx Zoo on an outing that did not end felicitously. “Coming home,” recorded Carlotta, “Oona is ‘sick’ all over the car, herself & the fur rug! Poor child! Clean her up—give her tea and send them home.” (Oona would not see her father again for nearly another two years.)
When Cynthia, five months later, chose to return to California, O’Neill wrote her of his respect and admiration “quite apart from my step-fatherly affection for your mother’s daughter”; he invited her to regard his home as hers to come to always “by right of the love I bear you!” She was, he said, “a brave girl and a true one,” and he was proud to be her stepfather.
• • •
BETWEEN DAILY telephone briefings from Sea Island about the progress on his house, and New York’s inescapable social life, O’Neill now and then tinkered with his neglected play. What he seemed to have forgotten was that as a resident of Manhattan he was accessible not only to the friends and acquaintances who lived there but also to the writers, artists, and musicians from abroad who asked to meet him. Although he was flattered to be sought out, after a time it became a burden.
Following an obligatory dinner hosted by the Theatre Guild on March 15 in honor of Gerhart Hauptmann, the German playwright and novelist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1912, O’Neill was on the edge of a cave-in. Unable to sleep, he entered Carlotta’s bedroom with what she described as “one of those ghastly nerve attacks.” She held his shaking body close, speaking to him soothingly; holding him through the night, she succeeded in calming him.
At April’s end, O’Neill once more turned his back on city living. Leaving much of the final packing up for a later date and not yet having sublet their duplex, he and Carlotta departed for Sea Island in the early morning of April 29. It was none too soon for O’Neill. “Farewell to 1095 Park Ave. (and damn glad of it!)” was his snarling comment to his Work Diary. Now, perhaps, he could get back to his play. Assured their Sea Island home would be ready before the end of June, O’Neill and Carlotta once again rented a cottage. Before returning to New York for the final packing, Carlotta noted, “I am trying to make it a perfect house.”
In early May, O’Neill read his first draft of Without Endings of Days to Carlotta. But her mind was preoccupied with the horrendous news that the baby of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been found murdered, and in her own crowded diary entry she failed even to mention the play.
It’s possible her silence was due to bemusement. Not that she didn’t appreciate that the play’s conflict was prompted by O’Neill’s love for her; nor did she fail to understand and sympathize with the concept of that conflict as a duel between the characters representing his two selves. But his abstract method of telling the story was not always easy to follow. O’Neill knew he was falling far short of what he meant to convey about his own ongoing spiritual conflict. He wrote and rewrote, but the appropriate ending continued to elude him.
He was desolate when Carlotta left for New York on May 16. She was to be away for two weeks, during which she would finish packing up the contents of 1095 Park Avenue and also attempt to resolve the disposition of its sublease.
“Longest time we’ve been separated,” he confided to Saxe Commins. “I miss her like hell!” Carlotta missed him equally, but was consoled by being reunited with Blemie, who had been left at the duplex with a housekeeper.
She was relieved at last to find a tenant for the duplex, albeit at a considerable loss; the sublessee would pay only $4,000 a year for the apartment that was costing the O’Neills more than $7,000. “When the lease is over,” she complained, “it will mean about $10,000 down the drain!”
In his rented Sea Island cottage, O’Neill poured out his pent-up longing to Carlotta, hailing her as his savior; she was a goddess who embodied the mythic love denied him by the all-too-mortal women who had come before:
“Mistress, I desire you, you are my passion, and my life-drunkenness, and my ecstasy, and the wine of joy to me! Wife, you are my love, and my happiness, and the word behind my word, and the half of my heart! Mother, you are my lost way refound, my end and
my beginning, the hand I reach out for in my lonely night, from my ghost-haunted inner dark, and on your soft breasts there is a peace for me that is beyond death!”
O’Neill’s wine of joy was reduced to dregs by the time Carlotta boarded the train for her overnight trip back to Sea Island on May 29. She was staggering from the exhaustion of packing up the duplex. With Blemie on a leash, she oversaw the porter’s disposition in her drawing-room compartment of her hand luggage and three cages of birds. Blemie, shaking uncontrollably, looked on. Carlotta was aware that the hypersensitive Blemie was bewildered by what was happening to him, and it frightened her to see his eyes popping, his tongue hanging out. As she arrived with him at the baggage car, he collapsed.
Shuddering at the sight of four coffins in the otherwise vacant car, Carlotta—careless of her impeccable travel outfit—plunked herself down on the filthy floor and took Blemie in her arms. After two hours, a porter arrived and helped her to her feet. Together, they contrived a makeshift bed for the prostrate Blemie, and the porter held his paw until he fell asleep. His disheveled mistress dragged herself to her compartment for a nap, after which she returned to the baggage car to minister to Blemie.
When O’Neill met her train the following evening, he was startled by her state of disarray. That night, after coaxing Blemie back to a sense of well-being, Carlotta tucked him into his bed. And then she went to her husband’s bedroom and “slept in Gene’s arms.”
Three weeks later, O’Neill and Carlotta moved into their new home. “Wonderful feeling that this is house We have built—never built one before,” O’Neill exclaimed in his Work Diary on June 22. On the same day, in her own diary, Carlotta for the first time mentioned the name they had chosen for their new home: “Casa Genotta.” This melding of their two first names was a rather fanciful designation to apply to a modern Spanish mansion set in the deep American South and occupied by an Irishman and his Dutch-French-Danish spouse.