by Arthur Gelb
In her monologue Deborah confides to a wary Sara that her son has inherited a tendency to be “an inveterate dreamer” like herself; she then hurtles through the branches of the Harford family tree, reciting the history of its eccentric members, both male and female, as far back as the Battle of Bunker Hill, spilling minute and often horrifying details about how they have been variously corrupted by their lust for wealth and power.
Recounting the details of her honeymoon in the winter of 1804, Deborah reveals that her husband’s entire family accompanied them to Paris to witness Napoleon’s coronation as emperor, and that she herself, after her marriage, used to dream she was Josephine.
After delivering her outlandish (if hypnotic) monologue, Deborah departs, never to reappear in A Touch of the Poet, leaving the audience (and reader) with a sense of the play’s incompleteness.
37
After much agonizing, O’Neill and Carlotta made up their minds in July 1936 to sell Casa Genotta.
They confided their decision to their houseguests at the time, the academic Sophus Winther and his wife, Eline. Winther had published the laudatory work Eugene O’Neill: A Critical Study two years earlier, and the two men had become friends. Now the O’Neills told the Winthers of their tentative plan to go west. O’Neill wanted to absorb atmosphere for the cycle’s West Coast branch of the Harford family, and Sophus urged him to begin his trek by first renting a place near their own, on the outskirts of Seattle. The plan suited the O’Neills and they asked the Winthers to find them a furnished house.
Carlotta hadn’t the courage until nearly two months later to tell George Boll of their decision to sell, after which she fell into a fit of weeping. O’Neill had fewer regrets. In his diary, he grumbled: “Will be glad leave this place—hope we can sell it soon—climate no good for work half of year—and feel am jinxed here.”
Debilitated from stress, Carlotta and O’Neill lumbered back again to New York to be doctored. This time they checked into the Lowell Hotel, on East Sixty-third Street (perhaps because they felt embarrassed over their last stay at the Madison). After administering X-rays and blood tests, Dr. Draper told O’Neill the “whole person” was sick, but there was “no definite organ to pin it on.” He advised “absolute change—rest—forget work.”
Carlotta’s own doctor wanted to put her into the hospital, but when she demurred, insisting her husband needed her to take care of him, he compromised by administering a series of injections to bolster her weakened condition.
Both O’Neills were on edge, anticipating their imminent abandonment of Casa Genotta, and could summon little gaiety when Eugene Jr. and various friends dropped in at the Lowell on October 16 to mark O’Neill’s forty-eighth birthday.
• • •
A LATE AFTERNOON in October found O’Neill and Carlotta boarding the 20th Century Limited bound for Chicago on the first leg of their trip to Puget Sound—once again in search of their Erewhon. For the sixth time in his adult life, O’Neill was turning his back on a home that had failed to live up to his expectations. Provincetown had been too crowded, Ridgefield too close to Manhattan, Bermuda too social, Tours too rainy, Manhattan too distracting, and Sea Island too hot.
After an overnight stay at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, they entrained for Seattle on the Great Northern Empire Builder. Carlotta was cheered to see that O’Neill was already looking and feeling much better.
They were greeted by the Winthers as they stepped down into the Seattle railroad station at eight in the morning of November 3. Word had somehow leaked of their arrival, for there was a reporter present; he accompanied them to the rented house at 4701 Ruffner Street that was to be the O’Neill home for the next two months, and he interviewed and photographed them there.
O’Neill was pleased with their house and its views of Puget Sound’s choppy waters and the snowcapped Olympic Mountains, describing it as “comfortable” with “beautiful grounds.” It was staffed with a housekeeper, cook, and maid. That evening, after listening to the election returns on the radio with the Winthers, O’Neill was gratified to learn that President Roosevelt had easily won a second term.
They were barely settled when O’Neill, on November 10, received telegrams from Russel Crouse, Richard Madden, and Harry Weinberger, all telling of rumors that he had won the Nobel Prize. O’Neill refused to credit the hearsay. “This happened before,” he remarked in his Work Diary, referring to similar rumors about him when Luigi Pirandello had won the prize in 1934—and even earlier, in 1930, the year Sinclair Lewis became the first American writer to be so honored.
O’Neill had not forgotten Lewis’s generosity in telling the Swedish Academy that Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O’Neill deserved the prize as much as he did; he had cited O’Neill as the man who “utterly in ten or twelve years” had “transformed the American drama from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness.” O’Neill’s reply was equally embracing. Lewis, he said, was the writer who “had seen life as something not to be neatly arranged in a study, but as terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible, a thing akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a devastating fire.”
O’Neill was both grateful for Lewis’s praise and amused by his invective. (“I was tickled to death with the whole address,” he later told George Jean Nathan.) Disappointed once again when Pirandello won in 1934, O’Neill now shrugged the whole thing off, remarking in his diary that he didn’t care either way, as the prize was “a jinx for [the] middle-aged.”
On November 12, at 7:30 in the morning, Carlotta answered a phone call from Sophus Winther, informing her that the Associated Press had verified that O’Neill had won the prize. “The morning is a Bedlam!” she recorded. “Associated Press, United Press & International News all call for interviews & photographs—head of the Swedish newspaper etc. It isn’t easy to protect Gene from all these people.” Because no prize had been given in literature the year before, O’Neill received a very welcome accrued-cash award of more than $40,000.
To reporters, O’Neill said he hadn’t thought the award would go to an American so soon after Sinclair Lewis received it in 1930, adding that he’d thought if any American writer merited the honor, it might be Dreiser. Later in the day, after receiving formal notification from the Swedish consul, he expressed his regret that he would be unable to arrange his affairs in time to be in Stockholm for the presentation on December 10.
When a reporter from the Seattle Daily Times asked him about the subject of his next play, O’Neill described the Harford family that moves “from the East Coast to the West Coast, back to the East Coast and ends in the Middle West.”
“Is that why you’re in the West—to get atmosphere?”
“Something like that. I have to live in a place before I can write about it. I have to have the feeling of living there. Of course, the western part of the play takes place in 1870, but I’m going to travel all around the West. Just looking and talking to tradespeople—that’s the way I get the feel.”
“Is it a very long play?”
“Oh yes. It goes on forever.”
Then, ignoring his recently expressed determination to withhold production for years to come, he perversely chose to announce, “I hope it will start next October. With one play a season, people can go on seeing it forever. And when all eight plays are produced I hope they will run them all off on successive nights—that ought to knock the audience cold. They’ll never want to see another play.”
When the flurry of interviews and congratulatory telegrams at last receded, the O’Neills sat down to dinner with the Winthers, who, at O’Neill’s insistence, were to dine with them frequently during what would be their five-and-a-half-week stay in Seattle.
It wasn’t until Sophus and Eline departed after dinner that Carlotta and O’Neill were at last left to themselves to absorb the day’s momentous event.
For O’Neill—out of the lime
light for the past three years, still smarting from the fiasco of Days Without End, shakily recovering from his lapse into alcohol, and trying to gain a foothold on his mountain of a cycle—it was a godsend to be recognized by the Swedish Academy as the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize.
As for Carlotta, by nightfall she was still in a delirium of delight. To her diary, she confided, “Gene takes me in his arms & says, ‘Don’t forget how much I love you!’ I thought that wonderful of him considering all the excitement.”
The day after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, The New York Times, on its editorial page, applauded, “He deserves it:” The editorial continued, “Although American playgoers have had to bear with him during two or three periods of transition, and have had to suffer two or three disastrous plays from his pen, he has long dominated our theater on the basis of vigorous work performed. His successive days of wrath have yielded a stout library of malevolent tragedies that include several masterpieces.”
The Times confirmed what it described as “a general respect and admiration” among O’Neill’s fellow writers: “For years he has been the boldest influence in our drama, grimly reaching out after big themes and, in his best work, dominating them by the power of his imagination and the depth of his feeling. None of the practical considerations of journeyman playwriting has ever drawn a compromise from him. He has repeatedly cracked the old molds by the largeness of his dramatic vision.”
Gratified as he was to be heralded in radio bulletins and newspaper stories as his country’s first playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature, O’Neill, inevitably, was thrown into turmoil. Instead of finding his hoped-for respite in Seattle, he was drained by the need to respond to the congratulatory messages and demands for interviews. He was weary from seven months’ work on his “damned cycle,” as he wrote on November 15 to Kenneth Macgowan (who, like Robert Sisk, was now producing movies in California):
“So it is not an unmixed blessing. In fact, so far, I’m like an ancient cab horse that has had a blue ribbon pinned on his tail—too physically weary to turn round and find out if it’s good to eat, or what.” On the same day, in his Work Diary, he muttered about the continuing intrusions on his privacy and, predictably, declared himself close to a breakdown.
He brightened when he read some of the praise from abroad, led by George Bernard Shaw: “An excellent decision. I always thought that this year’s prize should go either to Upton Sinclair or O’Neill.” O’Neill was even more pleased to read a joint message from William Butler Yeats and Lennox Robinson, expressing their delight with “this European recognition to such a worthy recipient.”
In response to a request from the American legation in Stockholm, on November 17, O’Neill pulled himself together long enough to write a brief speech to be read for him at the upcoming presentation ceremony.
After a few obligatory if insincere remarks about “sharing” the honor with all his equally worthy fellow American playwrights, O’Neill got down to his true feelings, expressing his gratitude “to that greatest genius of all modern dramatists, your August Strindberg,” whose influence “runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see.”
Enclosing a copy of his speech to Russel Crouse, O’Neill wrote Crouse a personal note that was a scathing attack on his fellow dramatists for their lack of honesty and courage.
“You will note,” wrote O’Neill, “that the first section [of the speech] is replete with more than a little amiable phonus bolonus about my American colleagues.” Then he swung into a petulant tirade:
“Why the hell I should be so amiable I don’t know, for few, if any of them, have ever had the decency to admit that my work had ever meant a thing to American drama or to them, or that my pioneering had busted the old dogmas wide open and left them free to do anything they wanted in any way they wanted. (Not that many of them have had the guts to try anything out of the ordinary, but they could have.)”
Complaining he’d been congratulated by only three or four of the “home front playwrights,” he vilified them as mostly “cheap shit-heels!”
While excoriating his American colleagues, O’Neill tolerated the disapprobation of a few scattered theater critics both at home and abroad.
One particularly vitriolic attack came from Bernard De Voto, the newly established editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.
Smugly acknowledging he was in the minority, De Voto had pronounced O’Neill undeserving of the prize because he fell short “both absolutely and relatively” of being “an artist of the first rank.” In fact, he contended, O’Neill had been foisted on the public as a figure of literary importance by the Theatre Guild. He clinched his argument by asserting the award was largely due to O’Neill’s “prestige and publicity,” which neither the critics nor the public dared to dispute.
O’Neill told George Jean Nathan he was not displeased that there had been at least a few scoffers. “If the praise were unanimous, I should feel very, very Eminent and dead.” But, he wondered, “Who in hell is De Voto?”
• • •
DURING THE REST of November and the first two weeks of December, O’Neill tried to absorb atmosphere for his cycle, the ostensible reason he’d come to Seattle.
He and Carlotta took long sightseeing walks through different neighborhoods, and he accompanied Winther on several trips, among them a drive around the Mount Olympus Peninsula with an overnight stay at Lake Quinault and an all-day drive encompassing Whidbey Island and Bellingham.
Much as the O’Neills enjoyed the Winthers as neighbors, they concluded that Seattle, with its long spells of fog and rain, wouldn’t do as a permanent residence. Northern California, where Carlotta grew up, seemed “best in many ways,” Carlotta wrote to Lawrence Langner. “But, we’ll just look everywhere and be very sure.” Yet less than two years previously, when declining an invitation to visit Kenneth Macgowan in his new West Coast home, she had told him, “We won’t go to California. I loathe the place—always have.” Her somewhat garbled reason was that she “never drank, played bridge or golf” and “loathed the country clubs.”
Presumably, her real reason for avoiding California at that time was that her mother and other relatives lived in the San Francisco Bay area; they knew she had not inherited money from her aunt, and Carlotta feared O’Neill might discover this deception, and probe for the true source of her income. For whatever reason, Carlotta now decided to chance it.
• • •
THE O’NEILLS LEFT Seattle on December 14, heading south.
Cynthia had volunteered to drive them the eight hundred miles to the San Francisco Bay area in her Ford. Divorced after a brief marriage at sixteen, Cynthia was now, at eighteen, engaged to marry Roy Stram, a Californian, with whom, much to Carlotta’s disapproval, Cynthia was eager to have a baby.
Four days later, they reached San Francisco. Although somewhat uneasy about being back in the city of her “birth and early childhood,” Carlotta nonetheless noted that she was “deeply moved” by her return.
O’Neill struggled through the festivities of Christmas Day, exchanging gifts with Nellie, Cynthia, and her fiancé, but on December 26 an attack of increasing abdominal pain drove him to seek medical help. He was examined by Dr. Charles A. Dukes, whom Carlotta called “Dukie” and who had removed her appendix seventeen years earlier. Dr. Dukes diagnosed appendicitis aggravated by a prostate condition, and ordered O’Neill into Merritt Hospital in Oakland.
While chatting with Carlotta, Dr. Dukes discovered that she herself was running a fever and he put her in the hospital as well. It turned out she had the flu. “A fine pair we are!” sighed O’Neill. December 28, Carlotta’s forty-eighth birthday, found them confined to beds in adjoining hospital rooms. The following day, Dr. Dukes removed O’Neill’s appendix.
O’Neill appeared to be making a normal recovery during the first week of January, but on the tw
elfth, he took a sharp turn for the worse. He had developed a “prostate-kidney infection” that, in Carlotta’s words, “meant fevers (out of his head), chills & pain.” She was once again frantic with worry.
In graphic shorthand, O’Neill himself described his near-fatal illness, day by day, in his Work Diary (doubtless reconstructing it with the help of Carlotta and his nurse, Kaye Radovan, on whom both O’Neills had come to depend):
January 12—temp up to 102—chill—caffeine, adrenalin, codeine, morphine, atropine!—they give me the works!—Carlotta & nurses up all night—Dukes at 4 am—bad sinking spell with everyone worried but I feel too sick and ratty to give a damn whether I croak or not.
January 13—temp 103.2.
January 14—101.4—feel a little better—Carlotta goes to Fairmont to pack.
January 15—bad again—temp 103—sinking—delirious Carlotta rushes back to hospital.
By January 17, O’Neill’s temperature was down to 100 and he felt “better but very weak.” Three days later, Carlotta wrote indignantly to Macgowan: “Gene’s N.Y. doctors are so full of the ‘mental’ they couldn’t see his abused insides. This prostate has been kicking up for years.”
As O’Neill himself later elaborated to Macgowan, the appendix operation had been “the cinch part of it.” But it had weakened him and brought on “an interior abscess which burst and flooded my frame with poison so that I was off my nut for a few days and had the medicos worried.”
Now, Dr. Dukes has told O’Neill he will have to rest for at least eight months. “It holds up my work on the Cycle,” O’Neill told Macgowan, “and I want so much to get back on the job.” With an invalid’s morbid obsession, seasoned with his own black humor, he was still describing his illness to friends months later; he wrote to the critic Barrett Clark that “an abscess in my inside burst and so poisoned me that they had to inject everything but TNT to keep me from passing out for good.”