By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  • • •

  AFTER THE BOUNCE of O’Casey’s visit, O’Neill slid back into gloom, condemned to struggle with the chokehold of his deteriorating health. He was forced to acknowledge that the damage he’d inflicted on his body during years of drunken dereliction had caught up with him. On top of a genetic nervous disorder, manifested in a recurrent tremor of the hands, he was now, at forty-six, experiencing some of the physical frailties of a much older man, and Carlotta found herself more frequently in the role of nurse; she tamped down her fear that O’Neill, always trembling at the edge of a breaking point, might be propelled back into drink.

  O’Neill, in truth, was secretly terrified he might lack the vigor to realize his newest and loftiest dream, a concept far grander than any so far. It was to be an all-embracing fictionalized imagining of the forces that had shaped him; its characters would personify a theme that had long perturbed and preoccupied him: the gradual deterioration of morality in the American soul; he would dramatize the process by which that soul, from generation to generation, had been corrupted by the lust for ever more personal wealth.

  Idealist that he was, O’Neill had once held high hopes for his country’s cultural and social blossoming. America, he believed, had been given “everything, more than any other country.”

  Tragically, however, as O’Neill saw it, his countrymen had not acquired any real roots. Instead, the early idealistic immigrant, arriving here with his dream of freedom and his hope for his own bit of land, had all too soon been overtaken by a baser dream—the insatiable lust for more.

  “We’ve followed the same selfish, greedy path as every other country in the world,” said O’Neill, pointing out that Americans liked to boast about “the American Dream,” but that dream, in most cases, was “the dream of material things.”

  “I sometimes think,” he went on, “that the United States, for this reason, is the greatest failure the world has ever seen. We’ve been able to get a very good price for our souls in this country—the greatest price perhaps that has ever been paid—but you’d think that after all these years, and all that man has been through, we’d have sense enough—all of us—to understand that the whole secret of human happiness is summed up in a sentence that even a child can understand.

  “The sentence? ‘For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”

  The soaring work O’Neill now envisioned was similar in scope to his earlier multi-play concept for The Sea-Mother’s Son (that autobiographical saga of the middle-aged man, supine on his deathbed, pondering his origin).

  But this new project was even more grandiose: a cycle of five or six plays tracing the history of an Irish American family corrupted by greed. The cycle’s ultimate title was to be A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

  As much as O’Neill identified with the global scope of the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, he also felt a kinship with the magisterial reach of Wagnerian opera. (Whereas his jazz recordings gave him an instant high, O’Neill could readily surrender himself to classical music; he was a devoted radio listener—beginning in 1937—to the weekly concerts performed by the orchestra created for Arturo Toscanini by the National Broadcasting Company.)

  A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed would be O’Neill’s Ring des Nibelungen. If Wagner could command a stage for the four double-long evenings required to present his overpowering Ring cycle—itself a parable for his disillusionment with a nineteenth-century society corrupted by greed—why should not O’Neill strive for a similar achievement for his own century (albeit without the glorious music)? Thus began O’Neill’s years-long struggle to create the opus he was destined never to complete.

  After several false starts, O’Neill sketched the idea for the cycle’s first play, The Calms of Capricorn, which unambiguously set forth his intent: an unsparing scrutiny of power and greed in America, as told through the lives of a plutocratic, avaricious Yankee family named Harford, intermarried with a prideful immigrant Irish family named Melody.

  As so often before, O’Neill began by digging deeply into his own family dynamic. The cycle would be haunted by James O’Neill’s deathbed howl of remorse, fifteen years earlier, at having exchanged his early artistic idealism for the pursuit of money. Eugene would never forget, when shaping his cycle, how his father’s early poverty had driven his thirst for wealth; or how his compulsive parsimony had shattered his wife’s dreams of domestic tranquillity.

  O’Neill now declared himself ready to devote at least six years to the cycle’s creation. At Casa Genotta on New Year’s Day, 1935, he congratulated himself in his Work Diary on the “wonderful characters!” he was shaping. He boasted of the cycle’s vast outreach to friends, forgetting that eight years earlier he had extolled The Sea-Mother’s Son in much the same language. “Suffice it that the possibilities are Gigantic, Epic, Colossal, Enormous,” he wrote to Lee Simonson.

  His various illnesses momentarily forgotten, O’Neill jubilantly attacked his awesome task, spewing notes, outlines, drafts, and scenarios with a feverish scramble of frustrated stoppages and manic mood swings.

  In the months and years ahead, the cycle would grow and grow—its chronology drifting backward, its separate plays shifting places in the cycle’s sequence, over-length single plays being split into two, their often lurid plots contorting, their flamboyant titles twisting, their characters suffering psychic jumps—until O’Neill himself could barely keep track of who was seducing, betraying, or murdering whom; who would succeed or fail in his or her craftily chosen endeavor; which of his characters would die a natural (if miserable) death; and which character was destined to take his or her own life.

  In The Calms of Capricorn, he would introduce four Harford brothers—Ethan, Jonathan, Wolfe, and Honey. He depicted them at the beginning of their careers, their lives roughly paralleling those of America’s nineteenth-century robber barons—ruthless tycoons like Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and Collis Huntington, who made their often illicit billions in banking, railroading, shipping, and politics.

  O’Neill planned to trace the careers of each of the Harford brothers in the cycle’s sequential plays, building on his overall theme of the soul-destroying lust for money.

  The setting for Capricorn is the luxurious passenger clipper ship Dream of the West (which O’Neill modeled on the fabled Flying Cloud). The play’s plot promised to be as savage and over-the-top as anything O’Neill had yet written.

  All four Harford brothers, along with their father, Simon, and their mother, Sara (née Melody), are aboard the ship, which is bound from Boston to San Francisco via the treacherous passage around Cape Horn. Also aboard are Nancy, the youthful wife of the ship’s aging captain, Enoch Payne, and the ship’s owner and his daughter.

  Three of the brothers are traveling west in search of lucrative careers. Honey Harford plans to join the California gold rush; Wolfe hopes to find a job in banking; Jonathan will work his way up with a railroad company.

  The fourth brother, Ethan, a sailor, is Dream of the West’s first mate. He is at spiteful odds with Captain Payne, who opposes his reckless determination to make the coming voyage an historic event and advance his own career. Ethan means for the ship to beat the record run from Boston to San Francisco (a record set in real life seven years earlier by Flying Cloud).

  Ethan slyly lets out sail while Captain Payne sleeps, straining the graceful clipper beyond her capacity, and when discovered, he is threatened with dismissal. When Captain Payne falls ill, Ethan suffocates him, aided by Nancy, with whom Ethan has fallen in love.

  Sanctioned by the unsuspecting ship’s owner, Ethan takes over command of the clipper and—almost defeated in his purpose by the calms of Capricorn—in the end picks up enough wind to achieve his goal of beating the Flying Cloud’s record. Ethan has seriously damaged Dream of the West, however, and the owner fires him—after which he and Nancy commit suicide.

>   • • •

  IN HIS SECOND PLAY for the cycle, O’Neill attributed aspects of Jay Gould’s persona to Jonathan Harford, who becomes the family’s railroad executive, calling that play Man on Iron Horseback, a reference to the term “iron horse,” coined in the mid-1800s for the steam locomotive.

  Similarly, Wolfe Harford was to be the protagonist of a play entitled The Earth’s the Limit, in which he becomes a prosperous banker partly modeled on J. P. Morgan. As for Honey, the youngest son, he was to represent the family’s political ambitions in a play with the ironic title, Nothing Lost Save Honor.

  Amid all of O’Neill’s creative and often anguished thrashing, Carlotta was his steadfast confidante and—when he was under duress—his principal victim. But O’Neill’s children also felt the sting of his tension. He had little patience for fifteen-year-old Shane during his visit to Casa Genotta in early January 1935—when the cycle was uppermost in O’Neill’s thoughts.

  Shane, who was not doing well in school, had exasperated his father a few months earlier by asking for a $400 outboard motor. “I can’t afford it and you ought to know I can’t,” snapped O’Neill. “It’s about time you realized I am an author and not a millionaire business man.”

  He told his son he had “a lot of nerve to ask for such an expensive present”; not until Shane showed he had some brains and dug down and got to work would O’Neill be willing to do things for him—things he could afford beyond the money he allotted Shane’s mother for his private-school education.

  “But until you do this,” warned O’Neill, “don’t expect anything from me except the usual birthday and Christmas presents or you will be disappointed.”

  Shane found an advocate in Herb Freeman, among whose chores it was to look after the boy and his older brother during their visits to Sea Island. Infrequent as these visits were, Oona’s were nonexistent. “It is all right for Shane to visit here in the summer, because he is so much more grown than you,” O’Neill had written to his eight-year-old daughter in the summer of 1933, “but I am afraid the sudden change to this climate would not be a good thing for you until you are a little older.”

  O’Neill was content to invite Oona to lunch that September while in New York for rehearsals of Ah, Wilderness! She would not see her father again for nearly five more years.

  As for O’Neill’s older son, Eugene Jr., Freeman sensed an unease between him and his father, which he felt was due to the youth’s newly formed antagonism toward Carlotta. Eugene, recalled Freeman, made no attempt to conceal his resentment of Carlotta’s autocratic posturing; prompted by loyalty to his employer, Freeman once presumed to caution Eugene to “knock it off,” but was rebuffed. “[Eugene] had a hot temper and he let it go,” Freeman recalled.

  Freeman got on better with Shane. After gently boxing with him one day, Freeman grew concerned about the boy’s ebbing strength. “Here you are a young man and you can’t even handle an old buck like me,” he scolded. “Why don’t you straighten up and quit your cigarettes and make something of yourself?”

  All in all, Freeman declared himself content with his life at Sea Island. “All I can say is both Mr. and Mrs. O’Neill were good to me, as if they’d been my own parents—even better.” But, he added, “I felt so sorry for them kids. They loved their daddy and their daddy loved them. Yet they were held apart. I’d sit there and look at it . . . there was nothin’ to do.”

  Carlotta felt slightly more sympathy for Shane than did O’Neill. She found him “so like Gene—in looks and mannerisms—says so little.” Shane, she noted, “never says what he is really thinking about!” She fussed over him, although she, like O’Neill, sought to convince him that his father was not a rich man. By the time Shane left, O’Neill had softened. “Fine kid!” he commented in his Work Diary.

  It was no exaggeration when O’Neill (due to his own extravagance) claimed to be far from rich. Even with “Papa” Speyer’s guidance, the worth of his investments, in the deepening Depression, had dwindled, as had Carlotta’s; that January she learned her principal had shrunk to $200,000, half its original value. Naively, she and O’Neill asked each other, “How (between us) we could have spent $70,000 this past year!”

  Despite filial and financial distractions, by February 1935, O’Neill had decided to add a sixth play to the cycle. “He was always working on several of the plays at once,” said Carlotta. “He would work on one until he felt he was stuck, get a thought about another one, and work on that.”

  In addition to propelling the Harford brothers forward in time, O’Neill had decided they needed more back story; accordingly, he outlined two plays to precede the 1850s setting of The Calms of Capricorn. The first of these plays, eventually entitled A Touch of the Poet, was set in 1828; it dramatized the love affair of the brothers’ parents—the Yankee scion Simon Harford and his wife, Sara Melody, whose Irish immigrant father was the delusional Cornelius Melody.

  The second play, More Stately Mansions, set in the decade between 1832 and 1842, continued Simon and Sara’s story as a married couple contending with Simon’s fractious mother, Deborah Harford, while resolutely raising their four sons.

  After reaching that point in mid-April, O’Neill—always nervous when guests were expected—braced for a visit from old friends, the writer Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Eleanor. The visit was congenial but Anderson sensed a tension beneath O’Neill’s habitually courteous manner.

  “I know you are always after something not too easily comprehended and that you continually have to go through your own little hells,” Anderson wrote to O’Neill a few days after his visit, adding, “You have always been a man I have looked up to as one of the few great figures of the time and I am sorry that I cannot see more of you.”

  Anderson was more candid in a letter to a friend, in which he deplored O’Neill’s marriage to “the actress Monterey—reputed to be one of the really beautiful women of America. I thought her cold, calculating. Certainly she is not one of the women who make a house warm.”

  Regarding the cycle, Anderson expressed both wonder and doubt about O’Neill’s vast design for what he explained would be a series of connected plays to be presented “night after night, the same characters coming and going” throughout. Conceding it was an “ambitious enough scheme,” Anderson wondered if O’Neill would ever pull it off.

  “He is a very sweet fine man,” Anderson concluded, “but I did feel death in his big expensive house. He has drawn himself away, lives in that solitary place, seeing practically no one. He needs his fellow men. I felt him clinging to me rather pitifully.” And to Theodore Dreiser, Anderson wrote: “Say, Ted, write a nice note to Gene O’Neill. I’ve a hunch he is just now a down pin.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL CONTINUED WORK on the cycle during the spring of 1935, but Carlotta sensed he was not pleased with his progress. However cold and calculating Anderson might have found her, she repeatedly assured herself in her diary that she loved her “Genie” and could not imagine living without him. She also knew that, regardless of his moods, he needed her with all his being. But it wasn’t easy to be married to someone as demanding, as self-involved, as illness-prone as her husband.

  That May, Carlotta indulged in one of her frequent threnodies (always expressed in more or less the same words). She privately bewailed her unhappiness and concern: “There is ‘something’ wrong with Gene—NO doctor has ever been able to name it—They take the easy way & call it nerves! . . . I love him so deeply I pray I can be of some help & comfort to him.”

  She was, and she wasn’t.

  That sizzling July, sounding not at all like the down pin Anderson had described in May, O’Neill wrote a perky letter to Robert Sisk, sketching the cycle’s concept so far. Sisk would have been dismayed had he seen his old friend seated naked at his desk in Casa Genotta on a huge folded bath towel, perspiring into its four thick layers.

  With the cycle n
ewly expanded from six plays to seven, O’Neill told Sisk that the work now encompassed a century-long history of the interrelationships among five generations of the family, with the first play beginning in the mid-1800s and the last ending in 1932.

  “Two of the plays take place in New England,” he elaborated, “one almost entirely on a clipper ship, one on the Coast, one around Washington [D.C.] principally, one in New York, one in the Middle West.”

  As in Electra, he said, there would be an overall title for the cycle and separate titles for the individual plays. “Each play will be, as far as it is possible, complete in itself while at the same time an indispensable link in the whole.” O’Neill added that “each play will be concentrated around the final fate of one member of the family but will also carry on the story of the family as a whole.”

  The cycle, he further confided, would be “less realistic than Electra in method,” and, he hoped, “more poetic.” It would deeply probe the characters’ “intermingling relationships” and would contain “symbolical” undertones. He said he had already written scenarios of 25,000 words each for the first three plays, had outlined the fourth, and begun the fifth (not mentioning the status of the sixth and seventh).

  “I won’t start actual dialogue on the first play,” said O’Neill, “until I’ve completed the scenarios of all—that means, late next fall at the rate so far.” He added that he probably would not allow the first play to be produced until he had completed three plays and written first drafts of the rest.

  Feeling it imperative to reach further and further back in time, O’Neill was examining the effect of one generation’s greediness on the next—“the Harford curse,” as one of the cycle characters calls it, mindful of the biblical sins of the father being visited on the sons.

  If his time had not run out, O’Neill’s search for an answer in the past might well have carried him, as it did Shaw, back to Methuselah. “If you keep on going back,” Carlotta chided her husband, “you’ll get to Adam and Eve.”