By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  The visit marked the beginning of Eugene Jr.’s gradual meltdown, and hardened the now-open antagonism between him and Carlotta.

  After his son left, O’Neill tried to return his attention to Mansions, but the European crisis kept intruding. Carlotta (after her own skewed fashion) spoke for them both when she worried in her diary, “The World waiting for Hitler’s Nuremberg speech. Dear God, how Britain has lost face! And to an ex-house painter!” (It’s doubtful she spoke for O’Neill when, later that month, she expressed her disapproval of Mrs. Roosevelt’s reported disinclination to curtsey to the king and queen of England on a state visit. “Oh, Politesse! Shame!” noted the old Tory.)

  On September 8, despite his distress over world events, O’Neill completed his draft of More Stately Mansions, noting it was “as long as Strange Interlude!—but don’t think will be able to cut length much.” Permitting himself to slow down, he spent the next four months editing the manuscript, but he couldn’t bring himself to pluck more than a line or two of precious dialogue from among its four acts and nine scenes.

  The war news was growing ever more ominous. On September 9, listening to radio reports from Prague and Berlin, Carlotta noted that President Roosevelt was “trying to pave the way for negotiations to keep the peace! It is frightening!” O’Neill himself rarely mentioned the impending European war in his Work Diary, but had earlier remarked to Nathan that “the Hitler jitters” were affecting him.

  Then, on October 12, O’Neill suffered a sudden collapse. Carlotta summoned Dr. Dukes, who brought in O’Neill’s urologist; together they concluded—according to O’Neill—that it was a “sinking spell & flare-up of same old infection—pains in back, fever.”

  After further consultation, Dukes telephoned Carlotta to inform her that “all the leg, arm & back pains are caused from the infection in the prostate.” While both O’Neill and Carlotta frequently took note of O’Neill’s chronic prostate condition—a not uncommon ailment known as prostatitis—neither ever referred to its effect on their sex life. In fact, according to the prominent New York urologist Dr. Aaron E. Katz, who had access to O’Neill’s 1953 autopsy report, as well as to O’Neill’s and Carlotta’s diary entries, “the painful disease can affect the physiological functioning of the penis, and lead to erectile dysfunction.” There can be pain during sex, Dr. Katz noted, and this can increase for several days after sex. Moreover, “the orgasmic sensation normally associated with pleasure can be replaced by pain and discomfort, leading to depression, anxiety, and feelings of despair.”

  While O’Neill’s symptoms could be temporarily relieved by massage, they invariably recurred. (It wasn’t until some years after O’Neill’s death that doctors began treating prostatitis with antibiotics.)

  On his fiftieth birthday, O’Neill, although still weak, rallied sufficiently to work in spurts on More Stately Mansions. Responding to the Carl Van Vechtens, who sent him birthday greetings, O’Neill wrote cheerfully: “Blemie remarked to the cat: ‘The Old Man doesn’t look a day over 183.’ And he was right. I didn’t feel a bit older than that, either.” By the end of December, although suffering from a mild attack of neuritis, O’Neill had managed to devote all or part of thirty-one working days to revising More Stately Mansions.

  During their first year at Tao House, in their determination to pursue “the right way of life,” O’Neill and Carlotta had managed—at least in Carlotta’s mind—to strengthen the bond of their nine-year marriage. In an emotional outburst confirming this conviction, she described in her diary how she and O’Neill celebrated the arrival of the new year.

  Early on the evening of December 31, they retired together to her bedroom and, ensconced in Carlotta’s spacious Chinese bed, they listened on the radio to New Year’s Eve celebrations throughout the country. At midnight, she wrote, “Gene takes me in his arms and tells me how much he loves me . . . we together can take anything!!! I’ll stick—no matter what! Then I weep, like a fool, hanging on to him! God knows why! But I do know I love this mad Irishman!”

  About to put aside his draft of Mansions for later revision, O’Neill wrote to Kenneth Macgowan of the play’s tortuous odyssey; it had been the most difficult of the cycle plays so far, he said, because it was “psychologically extremely involved and hard to keep from running wild and boiling over.”

  What he did not tell Macgowan was that the character of Deborah Harford—only tentatively suggestive of his own mother in A Touch of the Poet—had amassed more and more of Ella O’Neill’s characteristics in More Stately Mansions; nor did he hint at how grotesquely he had exaggerated some of those peculiarities. Macgowan would have been shocked.

  The unrevised and vastly overlong draft begins with a brewing conflict among its three principal characters—Deborah; her son, Simon; and his wife, Sara; but it soon splinters into a schizophrenic nightmare that far exceeds the surrealistic jumpiness of even The Great God Brown. O’Neill, in fact, had been quite unable to stop himself from letting his story run wild and boil over.

  In no play he’d ever written had he slashed away with such naked fury at the perceived injustices he’d suffered in his early life; never had he sought so mercilessly to avenge what he saw as his mother’s betrayal.

  Innumerable scenes of More Stately Mansions resound to the raw agony of his hatred for the mother whose love he so desperately needed.

  The action of the play opens in 1832 (four years after the action of A Touch of the Poet) and ends ten years later. It is set in various houses occupied by Simon Harford and Sara Melody after their marriage, as well as in Deborah Harford’s garden at her late husband’s mansion in Boston. Continuing the story begun in Poet, O’Neill depicts the previously offstage Simon Harford as yet another embodiment of the tormented American male. Simon is torn between his idealist’s dreams and his lust for material success.

  The now-widowed Deborah is teetering on the edge of insanity, gradually morphing into a Sycorax of a mother-in-law. When not daydreaming in her garden’s summerhouse about being Napoleon’s mistress, she spars with Sara—whom she secretly despises as a greedy Irish peasant slut—for dominance over Simon.

  At the play’s beginning, Sara is a loving wife to Simon and the mother of their four boys—the future grown-up Ethan, Jonathan, Wolfe, and Honey of The Calms of Capricorn (the play O’Neill has now designated to chronologically follow More Stately Mansions). Sara sympathizes with Simon’s conflict between idealism and greed, but is hopeful he will succumb to the latter. Sure enough, it’s not long before Simon does realize his baser dream, and Sara, with equal alacrity, is on her way to becoming a powerful matriarch.

  Her only problem is her mother-in-law. At times, Sara allies herself with Deborah against Simon; more often, though, she is at war with Deborah for Simon’s love and loyalty (which Deborah doesn’t really even want).

  The most conflicted of the three is Simon, who swings like an erratic pendulum between mother and wife. At one moment, he is consumed by a need for his distant mother’s love—a need that is invariably twinned with mistrust of his wife; the next moment, he is overwhelmed by hatred of his treacherous mother, a hatred accompanied by an irresistible need for his nurturing wife. In O’Neill’s fevered brain, the love-hatred among the three antagonists of More Stately Mansions grows more and more twisted, as O’Neill seems about to send all three spinning into limbo.

  By play’s end, however, it is only Deborah who fails to survive. She has willed herself into a state of psychotic oblivion, inevitably evoking an image of Ella O’Neill’s escape into a morphine-induced never land. If Deborah sounds deranged, that is what Eugene, as a boy, believed his mother to be (as he’d earlier indicated in All God’s Chillun Got Wings with his disguised version of his mother as Ella Harris, a defeated wife driven to insanity).

  But in Deborah Harford, he drew a more detailed and vengeful portrait of a woman who, O’Neill seems to be saying, was fated for the punishment inflicted on her by
both God and man. It is a vicious indictment by a son who could not forgive his mother for wishing him dead at birth.

  “I was glad to be rid of him when he was born,” Deborah spitefully tells Sara, speaking of Simon. “He had made my beauty grotesquely ugly by his presence.” And later, thinking aloud while watching Simon: “How I cursed the night you were conceived, the morning you were born! How I prayed that you would die.”

  Deborah Harford is (unsurprisingly) one more O’Neill heroine (or antiheroine) consigned to a joyless end. In her case—taunted into madness by Sara—she is metaphorically murdered, even as Christine Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra is actually murdered by her son, Orin, and as Evelyn Hickman (in the soon-to-be-written The Iceman Cometh) is murdered by her husband, Theodore “Hickey” Hickman. Considered along with the many other characters O’Neill polished off, it’s surprising that none of his now-long-gone psychiatric mentors seem to have diagnosed his obsession with death as not only suicidal, but homicidal as well.

  Once Deborah has been dismissed into madness, Simon turns to Sara as his new “mother,” a role Sara is only too eager to fill. She declares she will be not only his mother, but also his “peace and happiness”; indeed, she promises to be everything he will “ever need in life.” It doesn’t take a Sigmund Freud to intuit that O’Neill is writing here about the transference of his filial love to Carlotta.

  During November and December, O’Neill flailed his way through a second handwritten draft of More Stately Mansions, with Carlotta typing each act as he completed it, and on the first day of 1939, he began making revisions on the typed manuscript.

  Shortly thereafter, he answered a telegram from The New York Times theater reporter Sam Zolotow, requesting an update on the cycle. O’Neill responded he had five plays “still to go, which means five years at present rate.” O’Neill liked Zolotow, who had always reported accurately what O’Neill told him, and now gave him a bit of exclusive gossip for his column:

  “Possible I may write play outside of Cycle in meantime if I can keep the Elephant opus out of my mind long enough, but no definite idea on this and it isn’t probable.” Zolotow couldn’t know he was being given the first hint of the soon-to-come Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

  • • •

  IT’S NO EASY TASK trying to interpret the unfinished, structurally chaotic Mansions, which O’Neill might (or might not) have resolved. But it’s tempting to read the script as a surreal precursor to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, with Deborah the garishly distorted model for Mary Tyrone, and Simon as her amorphous son Edmund Tyrone.

  In looks, Deborah Harford, at forty-five, is a younger version of Mary Tyrone. Too obvious to be overlooked, the resemblance between Deborah Harford and Mary Tyrone (despite the difference in their ages) begins with O’Neill’s stage descriptions: Deborah’s face is “framed by a mass of wavy white hair”; she has “a full lipped mouth,” a high forehead, beautiful eyes that are “black, deep-set, beneath pronounced brows”; her hands are small, with “thin, strong, tapering fingers”; when first we meet her she is dressed “with extreme care and good taste” and her manner is marked by “a nervous tension and restlessness, an insecurity, a brooding discontent and disdain.”

  Mary Tyrone, at fifty-four, could be Deborah Harford nine years later. Her “high forehead is framed by thick, pure white hair,” and she has the same “full lips” as Deborah; her “dark brown eyes appear black” and are “unusually large and beautiful with black brows”; her hands (now twisted by rheumatism) “were once beautiful . . . with long tapering fingers”; she is dressed “with a sure sense of what becomes her” and, like Deborah in her first appearance, she is unable to control “her extreme nervousness.”

  Both women exhibit a striking narcissism in their rejection of a baby son at birth; compare Deborah’s “He had made my beauty grotesquely ugly by his presence” with Mary’s subsequent rueful reminder to her husband that she didn’t have “a single gray hair” until her son Edmund’s unwanted birth—when her beautiful reddish-brown hair “began to turn white.”

  And finally, there are the methods by which Deborah Harford and Mary Tyrone escape from their unbearable lives—Deborah into self-induced insanity and Mary into a self-inflicted dreamland of drugs.

  • • •

  BY THE END of 1938, O’Neill and Carlotta were beginning to wonder if their serene, remote aerie had, after all, been purchased at too great a cost. The difficulty of running a well-staffed home in what most experienced servants regarded as a wilderness was proving to be an insuperable problem. The shrinking of their foreign investments due to the unforeseen threat of war abroad, coupled with the continuing Depression at home, was putting a severe strain on their accustomed lifestyle.

  On January 7, with no prospect of income from a new Broadway production and in light of the continuing worldwide recession, Carlotta had actually gone so far as to suggest they trade Tao House for a smaller, more easily managed residence. But O’Neill had vetoed that idea.

  Added to their other insecurities, Carlotta was suddenly confronted with a serious medical problem of her own. She was suffering from deteriorating vision and severe headaches, and was scheduled for an exhaustive diagnostic test and possible operation at the end of January. She’d had trouble with her eyes since early childhood (“They began operating when I was 5”) and she was terrified. She believed the cause of her deteriorating eyesight was her typing of O’Neill’s manuscripts over and over. “He would change a few words and add a few commas and make me type the page over again,” she said.

  O’Neill was prepared to shoulder the blame for her condition. On January 30, he accompanied Carlotta to a specialist in San Francisco, who advised an operation and made a second appointment for them both to discuss the details.

  “How he’ll loathe that!” Carlotta noted, with what sounded rather like grim satisfaction. “He detests being put in any position where he must make a decision or shoulder any responsibility—outside his work!”

  She was hospitalized for twelve days in February, during which she arranged for a distraught O’Neill to dine out with various friends while Freeman looked after him at home. Her recovery was painful, but her chief complaint was that her long lovely eyelashes had been cut off.

  O’Neill described Carlotta’s recuperation to George Jean Nathan at the end of February: she was “wearing an arrangement of bandages and goggles which only permits her to see straight ahead through a tiny peep hole of dark glass over the sound eye,” he wrote, adding she was brave and uncomplaining; but he had been profoundly worried about her.

  He then fell into what Carlotta described as “gray, unhappy” spirits, and by mid-March was once again suffering from exhaustion. Carlotta, herself not fully recovered, feared she might not have the strength to cope. “How am I to keep well enough—discipline myself to not let him see how physically exhausted I am—how disturbed mentally—how fearful I am for the future, and to slip into the mood of that person he needs, at that hour! Wife, mistress, mother, nurse, friend, secretary, his ‘buffer’ to the world. God help me!”

  Her stoicism was rewarded—as she joyfully recorded a week later—when, after finishing a supper she’d prepared on the cook’s day off, O’Neill “puts his arms around me & says, ‘Pretty good cook, aren’t you? Did you ever hear how much I love you & need you & want you?’ And he kisses me! I’m struck dumb with surprise and happiness!”

  Carlotta didn’t mind cooking for O’Neill on the servants’ days off, for she and O’Neill were now being well fed and looked after by a dignified and efficient black couple, Will and Naomi. They had replaced a Japanese couple (who left because of the wife’s illness) and who, in turn, had replaced a slovenly pair whose service Carlotta and O’Neill had endured for far too long.

  O’Neill described that couple in his diary as “the two world’s worst servants,” characterizing them in a letter to Nathan as “an Irish lady
cook married to a Greek—a sour combination!—and believe me, toward the end of their period of strictly faithless service, we never knew what we would get for dinner, if any, or how.” He added, “We stood them as long as we could take it, on the theory that bad is better than none, for it isn’t so easy to get anyone to work in the country here.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL WRESTLED WITH his cycle while Carlotta, her eyesight sufficiently healed, patiently typed and retyped his revisions and notes. Nothing in his routine hinted at the radical change of creative direction shortly to come.

  39

  Eight months past his fiftieth birthday, in June 1939, still treading water with no sign of landfall, O’Neill despaired to the writer Richard Dana Skinner, “I work and work and time passes, while, in relation to the whole work, I seem to stand still.”

  He’d been closeted with his symbolic Irish American family since 1935 and he yearned for a respite. In fact, since telegraphing the Times’s Sam Zolotow four months earlier, he’d decided he would like nothing better than to give his “Elephant opus” a rest. Confirming what he’d hinted at to Zolotow, he now told Skinner, “I may try writing a single play which is quite outside [the cycle’s] orbit.”

  On June 5, he tore up his most recent draft of The Calms of Capricorn after judging it “no good,” and then made a momentous decision.

  “Feel fed up and stale on Cycle after 4½ years of not thinking of any other work,” he jotted in his Work Diary. “Will do me good lay on shelf and forget it for a while—do a play which has nothing to do with it.”

  A day later, after reviewing his notes for possible future plays, he outlined not one, but two plays outside the cycle: the first was based on a blend of three saloons where, over several years, he had often drunk himself into a stupor; the second play—to be set in New London—he described in his notes as “N. L. family one.”