By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Although Louise had shunned alcohol in their days together and tried to stop O’Neill from drinking, by the time she returned to the Village, she had herself become an alcoholic, and had been drawn into a series of sordid, petty scandals, at least one of which resulted in a court case. Returning to Paris, she drank and took drugs until her death. (Had she stayed married to Bullitt for three more years, she would have found herself back in Russia as the wife of Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.)

  Now, briefly, Louise was alive again in O’Neill’s mind. Along with his unmotherly mother, the reluctantly motherly Agnes, and the over-mothering Carlotta, Louise (too self-involved to mother anyone) would lend her aura to the conniving women of his cycle.

  One of the darkest days of Carlotta’s marriage to O’Neill occurred early in January 1936, as he returned from his dentist to their suite at the Madison Hotel. Carlotta spotted him trying to conceal a bottle of bourbon as he removed his overcoat. “Mother of God—now what?” she exclaimed to herself.

  During the next three and a half weeks, Carlotta silently suffered as O’Neill continued his visits to the dentist and intermittently locked himself into the bedroom of their hotel suite, pretending to write. Then, on February 20, he approached Carlotta, his hands shaking uncontrollably, pleading for help. About to leave for his dental appointment, he found himself unable to comb his hair or knot his tie.

  The next day, even before his morning coffee, O’Neill openly began drinking from the bottle. “I am frantic with fear & heartache,” scribbled Carlotta.

  O’Neill’s binge had already lasted four months, and Carlotta believed the time had come to enlist the help of a doctor. Unfortunately, Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton, who had pulled O’Neill from his whiskey-soaked doldrums nine years earlier, was no longer accessible; in 1928, he had moved to Santa Barbara, California (where he maintained a private practice until his death in 1943).

  Carlotta turned instead to O’Neill’s trusted internist, Dr. George Draper. It took some persuasion, but O’Neill finally permitted Dr. Draper to admit him to Doctors Hospital on February 21, “to get all the whiskey out of him,” as Carlotta put it. She spent a miserable night alone in the hotel, weeping, and frightened for the future. (Yet—trust Carlotta—the next morning she had herself a haircut, wave, and shampoo.)

  During O’Neill’s five-day hospital stay, Carlotta, searching their suite at the Madison, found empty and half-empty whiskey bottles in O’Neill’s bedroom clothes closet and bathroom.

  She asked the hotel manager (not without some embarrassment) to get rid of the bottles. Then, asking herself if “real love is a blessing or a curse!” she collected her dried-out husband from the hospital and, a day later, the ever-forgiving mother and her wayward genius of a child entrained for Georgia.

  “Good to be home,” O’Neill noted in his Work Diary on February 28. “N.Y. trip was one long siege of troubles & bad luck!” The good luck was that he’d made up his mind one more time—even without the help of Dr. Hamilton—to quit drinking.

  Carlotta, thinking back to O’Neill’s drunken episodes in France and Shanghai, could congratulate herself on the patient nurturing that had enabled her, once again, to help rehabilitate her blackest of Black Irishmen. O’Neill made it clear he was equally pleased to have been rescued when, some time later, he wrote to Lee Simonson, applauding his friend’s recent decision to give up alcohol.

  Somewhat softening the facts of his own slip, O’Neill told Simonson that—although he himself had been on the wagon so long he’d “lost count”—he did “at one time for a short period try a temperate light wine and beer schedule,” but that “it was no dice” and “no fun,” merely inflicting indigestion and “low spirits.” Skipping over his brief foray into hard liquor, O’Neill said he found he was “no longer interested, anyway,” and “that was finally that.”

  O’Neill had made scant progress on his cycle three months later despite being back on the wagon. “Getting nowhere,” he recorded on May 31. And in June he wrote of his dilemma to Eugene Jr., telling him of his many exhausting “days when I doubt myself and my work, and wonder why in hell something in me drove me on to undertake such a hellish job when I might have coasted along and just written some more plays, as a well-behaved playwright does.”

  More than pleased that Eugene had recently passed his PhD oral exam and had begun teaching in Yale’s classics department, O’Neill found comfort in having him as a confidant. Earlier he’d complained to Eugene that the cycle stretched before him “into a future of seemingly endless hard labor,” and it now looked “as if there would have to be still another play—a ninth which will carry me back to 1770.”

  That play (as O’Neill described it twelve years later to the writer Hamilton Basso for a profile in The New Yorker) was actually set in 1775 and dealt with an Irishman who joins the British Army to come to America, where he deserts. Seeking escape from the “slavery of agricultural life in Ireland,” he heads for the wilderness determined to live his life “as a truly free man.”

  His dream is thwarted when, having paused at an isolated farm for food, he finds himself ensnared by the attractive young widow who offers him shelter. It isn’t long before he has forgotten his dream of living “as a truly free man” and talked himself into accepting the “slavery of agricultural life” in America.

  Writing (as a courtesy) to Lawrence Langner about his progress on the cycle, O’Neill cautioned him not to expect “an American life” in the accepted sense. “I mean,” he explained, “I’m not giving a damn whether the dramatic event of each play has any significance in the growth of the country or not, as long as it is significant in the spiritual and psychological history of the American family in the plays.”

  The cycle, he said, was “primarily just that, the history of a family. What larger significance I can give my people as extraordinary examples and symbols in the drama of American possessiveness and materialism is something else again.

  “But I don’t want anyone to get the idea that this cycle is much concerned with what is usually understood by American history, for it isn’t. As for economic history—which so many seem to mistake for the only history just now—I am not much interested in economic determinism, but only in the self-determinism of which the economic is one phase, and by no means the most revealing—at least, not to me.”

  Bewailing the difficulties of his task, he added: “Try a Cycle sometime, I advise you—that is, I would advise you to, if I hated you! A lady bearing quintuplets is having a debonair, carefree time of it by comparison.”

  At the end of August, O’Neill put aside a second draft of the play that would emerge as A Touch of the Poet, enjoining himself to let it “rest as is” for the time being. He would tweak it from time to time during the next seven years, but it was already a work of considerable power.

  As the only cycle play O’Neill was destined to complete, A Touch of the Poet is crucial to an understanding of his tragically unfulfilled vision for the cycle as a whole. It is also significant as the first play O’Neill completed after Days Without End, for it continued his search, amid an increasingly materialistic society, for a spiritual faith that would give meaning to his life.

  Although the play’s title seems to suggest the touch of Irish blood injected into the Yankee Harford family through intermarriage with the Irish Melodys, it is actually the young, idealistic Simon Harford to whom it applies. O’Neill’s Irish Melodys turned out to be every bit as susceptible to the lust for money and power as the detestable Yankee Harfords—starting with Sara, Simon’s wife-to-be.

  Sara is the beautiful, self-willed daughter of the play’s protagonist, the Irish immigrant Cornelius Melody, whose own father was a saloon keeper. The father connived and cheated his way up the social scale in his native Ireland, managing to buy himself the castle in which his only son, Cornelius (known as Con), grew up.

  Encouraged to assume th
e airs of a gentleman, the youthful Con Melody was quick to take offense and more than eager to challenge to a duel anyone who scorned him for his origins. Handsome, arrogant, a ladies’ man, Melody acquired a commission in the British Army, fighting (and swaggering) his way through the war with the French in Spain, achieving the rank of major, and being commended for bravery.

  Melody’s career, however, ended in disgrace after a Spanish nobleman caught him making love to his wife and challenged him to a duel during which Melody fatally shot the Spaniard. (All this is expository dialogue.)

  When the play jumps to life in 1828, Con Melody is established in a village outside of Boston as the proprietor of a tavern, above which he lives with his wife, Nora, and twenty-year-old Sara.

  Despite the trimmings of the backstory, Melody (although he is an ex-soldier turned saloon keeper rather than a touring actor) is readily recognizable as yet another version of James O’Neill. Like James, Con enjoys the limelight, speaks with a studied lyricism, is popular with his barroom cronies, and is a drinker who (with rare exceptions) can carry his liquor.

  O’Neill describes Melody’s forty-five-year-old body as “heavy-boned” and “bull-like” with an “impervious strength” and “a tough, peasant vitality.” Just as James O’Neill felt wounded by his snobbish New London neighbors, Melody smarts under the contempt of the aristocratic Harfords, whose Boston estate is nearby the Melody tavern.

  Harford’s name and background were suggested by a blend of two of O’Neill’s pet villains, both descendants of robber barons: Edward S. Harkness, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune who occupied a forty-two-room mansion on a 235-acre estate in New London known as “Eolia”; and Edward C. Hammond, a railroad mogul, who lived in comparable splendor on a nearby estate called “Walnut Grove.” (O’Neill would again draw on both tycoons for the ridiculed character of T. Stedman Harder in A Moon for the Misbegotten; Harder is also comically disparaged in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.)

  Melody is given to theatrical posturing and reciting lines from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to his own mirror image (“I have not loved the World, nor the World me.”) and he regales his barroom claque with highly colored anecdotes of his past. In moments of extreme emotion, he lapses into the brogue that he, like O’Neill’s father, has disciplined himself generally to suppress. Melody’s greatest vanity—a beautiful thoroughbred mare he can ill afford to stable—might well have been O’Neill’s metaphor for his father’s pride in his chauffeur-driven (if secondhand) New London–based Packard touring car.

  It’s true Melody’s wife, Nora, bears no resemblance to Ella O’Neill—except for having won his heart by her fetching looks. Daughter Sara is described by O’Neill as bossy and single-minded and possessing “a curious blending” of “aristocratic and peasant characteristics.” While some scholars assume from this description that Sara is “based” on Carlotta, her character can also be seen as a stand-in for the two O’Neill sons; she taunts and belittles her father, much as Jamie and Eugene taunted and belittled James. And their quarrels are just as quickly regretted—with phrases like “it’s the poison talking” and “it was the drink talking.”

  Sara Melody is also recognizable as a blood sister to Abbie Putnam, the covetous, scheming young bride of Desire Under the Elms—a character conceived well before O’Neill fell in love with his part-aristocrat, part-peasant Carlotta. Like Abbie, Sara connives to marry a man (Simon Harford) who can raise her status socially and financially. Although Simon is an offstage character throughout the play, we learn that not only is he the heir to the Harford fortune, but also young, attractive, and a dreamer—and much attached to his mother. Not content to be merely a rich man’s son, Simon, we are told, has built himself a cabin near a lake in the woods that surround Melody’s tavern, where he plans to write a book “denouncing the evil of greed and possessive ambition.”

  On a recent walk in the woods, Sara has discovered him by the lake suffering from a fever and chills. She persuades him to return with her to the tavern and he gratefully allows her to nurse him. Throughout the play, Simon—constantly spoken of but never seen—is confined to bed in an upstairs room of the tavern.

  Further evidence that O’Neill had his father in mind when inventing Con Melody was his comment to George Jean Nathan that there was no contemporary actor who could do justice to the role. What it needed, said O’Neill, was “an actor like Maurice Barrymore or James O’Neill, my old man. One of those big-chested, chiseled-mug, romantic old boys who could walk onto a stage with all the aplomb and regal splendor with which they walked into the old Hoffman House bar, drunk or sober.

  “Most actors in these times lack an air. If a playwright doesn’t work up entrances fifteen minutes long for them and have all the other characters describe them in advance as something pretty elegant, noble, chivalrous and handsome, the audiences wouldn’t be able to accept them for much more than third assistant barkeeps, if that.”

  O’Neill’s imagination, however, soars well beyond the autobiographical in A Touch of the Poet—particularly in the way in which Melody finally accepts his loss of illusions. True, there is an undertone of the real-life scene in which James, at last accepting that his life has been “froth” and “rotten,” is “glad to go” to a “better sort of life—somewhere.” But ever the inspired dramatist, O’Neill invented a more graphically shattering end to Con Melody’s delusions.

  Melody’s disassembling begins when he readies his barroom friends for his annual celebration of the Battle of Talavera. In reliving this triumphant moment of his vanished youth—when the Duke of Wellington publicly commended him for his bravery—it is his custom (derided by his daughter) to dress himself in the resplendent major’s uniform he wore during that engagement and which he has preserved in an attic trunk.

  Melody’s self-esteem gradually diminishes when, while awaiting the evening’s revels, he unexpectedly encounters young Simon’s mother, Deborah Harford. She has come to pay her son a sickbed visit, but Melody mistakes her for an aristocratic traveler stopping at his inn for refreshment.

  Deborah, as O’Neill describes her, resembles both his own mother and Carlotta; like Carlotta, she is middle-aged “but looks to be no more than thirty,” and like Ella, she has “thick, wavy red-brown hair”; like both women, “her face is beautiful.” But her persona is overwhelmingly Ella’s—“remote and otherworldly.” Indeed, she is the most enigmatic of all O’Neill’s fictional women.

  Already buoyed by drink, Melody presumes to flirt with Deborah, but she disdainfully rebuffs him and asks Sara (who has witnessed the rebuff) to take her to Simon’s room. Melody, shaken by his gaffe, is further humiliated when, during his celebratory dinner that evening, an emissary from Deborah’s rich, autocratic husband arrives at the inn.

  Evidently Simon has told his mother he is in love with Sara and Deborah in turn has informed her husband, who has dispatched his lawyer with an insulting offer to Melody of $3,000 to remove himself and his family at once to some distant state.

  In a fury, Melody and one of his cronies, Jamie Cregan (who served with him as a sergeant at Talavera), rough up the lawyer and hustle him out to his waiting carriage, instructing him to notify Harford that Melody plans to “call him out” if he does not apologize for his insult. Still fuming, Melody hires a carriage and races off with Cregan to Boston, where they force their way into Harford’s mansion and battle his servants—but are, of course, denied access to Harford.

  The police are summoned, and after a bloody free-for-all, Melody and Cregan are subdued and thrown in jail. Harford, fearing public embarrassment, soon orders them released, and they return to the tavern, where Melody, in the depth of humiliation, at last crumbles.

  Clutching the two dueling pistols he had intended to use on Harford, he staggers to the stable and shoots his treasured mare. He had planned to shoot himself with the second pistol but he is all-too-aware that in shooting the mare—the emble
m of his deluded self, he has already committed a symbolic suicide.

  With the death of that deluded self, Melody abandons all material aspiration. Castigating himself as “the late lamented auld liar and lunatic, Major Cornelius Melody, av his Majesty’s Seventh Dragoons,” he gratefully reverts—brogue and all—to his Irish-peasant self; he humbly re-embraces the devout and loyal wife he has disdained during all these years of their marriage. He has regained his soul, and his spirit is finally at rest.

  • • •

  O’NEILL OBVIOUSLY WAS recalling the never-to-be-forgotten scene at his father’s deathbed when James, denouncing his own hollow career in pursuit of material gain, deplored the wasting of his great talent as a Shakespearean actor, choosing instead to posture as a matinee idol in the shallow, crowd-pleasing role of the Count of Monte Cristo. Like James, O’Neill’s Con Melody threw away a noble career (in his case as a heroic soldier) to pursue superficial self-aggrandizement.

  In spiritually redeeming Melody, it would seem that O’Neill, in his mind, was posthumously granting redemption to his father. Moreover, it would appear that this vicarious redemption of his father was one more step in O’Neill’s quest for his own spiritual salvation. Having rocketed many moons beyond the clumsiness of Days Without End, O’Neill, in A Touch of the Poet, had dramatized that quest with skill and subtlety.

  • • •

  WHILE O’NEILL INTENDED each of the cycle’s plays to stand alone, A Touch of the Poet, despite its emotional power, feels incomplete. The problem is Deborah Harford. Although intrinsically captivating, she is unintegrated into the play’s narrative, for she has completely fulfilled her dramatic purpose by the end of the second of the play’s four acts, when she precipitates Melody’s disassembling.

  But O’Neill causes her to linger onstage (after her offstage visit to her son’s sickbed) in order to deliver (to Sara Melody) a lengthy, rambling, dreamlike monologue that sounds more like a foretelling of cycle plays yet unwritten than an inherent part of Poet. (She does, in fact, reappear in the sequential cycle play, More Stately Mansions—as a major and scary presence—to battle Sara, now her daughter-in-law, for dominance over Simon.)