by Arthur Gelb
Whatever constellation had commingled in the heavens over California on that day in late spring, it seemed designed to hoist O’Neill from his doldrums and drop him sure-footedly onto the rainbow bridge that led to the creation of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It would take him less than two years (a year and nine months, to be precise) to complete two plays the world eventually came to acknowledge as masterpieces.
As O’Neill later explained, “I felt a sudden necessity to write plays I’d wanted to write for a long time that I knew could be finished.” His confidant was the critic Clayton Hamilton, a friend of his father’s who sometimes vacationed in New London, and one of Eugene’s earliest mentors. He told Hamilton that the impending global war had made him feel “there was not enough recognizable future in sight to go on with something that might take four or five more years.” He further confided (to Dudley Nichols, who had become a friend after he reviewed Strange Interlude for the New York World and who was now a Hollywood screenwriter) that the ideas for both plays had been brewing “for years.”
What he did not mention to Hamilton was an even greater concern: he feared that the often uncontrollable tremor in his hands might soon curtail his ability to write. The tremor sometimes made it a torment to grasp his pencil, and writing with a pencil was the only way he could express his thoughts, which seemed to him to course from his brain through his arm and onto the page.
There was yet another likely reason for O’Neill’s tentative abandonment of the cycle; his mythical Harford family was losing its grip on his imagination and was gradually being replaced by images of his real-life family. He had tried to persuade himself that his father, mother, and older brother were finally at rest after he’d arranged for their tombstones; but it seemed that the months of haggling with cemetery functionaries over a suitable monument for their graves had torn open all the old familial wounds, so that they were still overwhelmingly alive in his mind.
O’Neill suddenly found it more urgent to dramatize the search for his spiritual roots in the immediacy of his actual family history rather than through his cycle’s mythical lens.
The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night would encompass his search with far greater impact than anything he’d so far written for the cycle. No one appreciated the drama of his own life as did O’Neill himself.
Both The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night were plucked from the depths of his personal experience and, in his mind, were inseparably entwined. Although these two plays are entirely disparate in social content, venue, and characters, they are locked together sequentially. Each play portrays crucial aspects of O’Neill’s life when, down and out at twenty-three, he was on the brink of his spiritual awakening.
In Iceman, he depicts a world of hopeless castoffs on Manhattan’s downtown waterfront, reflecting the derelict life he himself was then living. Long Day’s Journey pulls him from that world, in which he’s drowning, and returns him to his family’s summer home in New London, where he is once more ensnared in the stressful family conflict he had tried to escape—but is soon to emerge from as a writer.
So that there could be no mistake about the connection between the two plays, O’Neill set them both in 1912—the year that in his real life transformed him from a lost and aimless youth into a man with a lofty mission. In Long Day’s Journey, he managed to compress this transformation into one long day beginning at 8:30 a.m. and ending at midnight. For Iceman, he needed two long days in which to deliver the prologue for the young O’Neill’s spiritual awakening.
A leitmotif of each play is O’Neill’s attempted suicide in the winter of 1912 when—broke, depressed, and rotgut-debilitated—he lived in a rented cubicle above Jimmy the Priest’s, the sleazy saloon on Fulton Street close by the Hudson River and near the Battery; among his fellow outcasts was a burned-out newspaperman, a former commander in the Boer War, and a onetime captain in the British Infantry.
It was O’Neill’s failed suicide at Jimmy the Priest’s (an act whose nonconsummation he intermittently regretted) that returned him to the bosom of his estranged family in New London in the spring of 1912. His father helped him land a job as a cub reporter on the New London Telegraph that summer. It’s true that his shaky career ended only a few months later, in October, when he was diagnosed with a mild case of TB. But he speedily recovered after spending six months in a Connecticut sanatorium, where he claimed to have found himself “reborn” as a neophyte playwright.
In the impressionistic Iceman Cometh, O’Neill’s own unsuccessful suicide at Jimmy the Priest’s is symbolized by the successful suicide (at the same saloon) of one of the play’s lost souls; in the more realistic Long Day’s Journey, wherein O’Neill barely disguised his own family, his suicide attempt is briefly mentioned and continues to lurk beneath the surface along with the rest of the family’s miserable secrets.
Long Day’s Journey depicts a condensed version of the critical events immediately preceding O’Neill’s “rebirth.” There is, however, no hint in the play that Eugene (thinly disguised as Edmund Tyrone) will survive TB to emerge as the burgeoning dramatist who became Eugene O’Neill. The play, on the contrary, implies that Edmund (Eugene) will likely die of his illness. The play, after all, is a tragedy.
For his 1912 setting of Iceman, O’Neill transported some of the clientele of two other saloons of the era, neither of them as disreputable as Jimmy the Priest’s. “The dump in the play,” he once confided to Kenneth Macgowan, was “no one place, but a combination of three in which I once hung out.”
One was the bar at the Garden Hotel, where both his father and brother often did their drinking and where O’Neill’s circus friends from the then-nearby Madison Square Garden congregated. The other was the Hell Hole in Greenwich Village, which O’Neill continued to frequent well into the 1920s, along with his fellow Provincetown Players and Jamie, as well as assorted gangsters, gamblers, crooked cops, and prostitutes.
Giving birth to Iceman was creatively exhilarating if, at the same time, emotionally shattering. O’Neill was not only revisiting the site (and year) of his suicide attempt; he was also compassionately resurrecting the whiskey-soaked, deluded has-beens who at the time were his chosen compeers and on whom he had depended for survival.
O’Neill had spent hours, sometimes days, sitting in Jimmy’s back room listening to the life stories, the maudlin dreams, the ruined hopes of these rootless friends. As one of his characters describes it, “It’s the No Chance Saloon. It’s Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe, The Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller! Don’t you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? That’s because it’s the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go.”
O’Neill once remarked that, compared with Jimmy the Priest’s, Gorky’s inn in A Night’s Lodging was “an ice cream parlor.” On another occasion—with nostalgic relish—he said the building “was almost coming down, and the principal house-wreckers were vermin.”
He had often, since coming to prominence in his thirties, spoken of his fascination with his down-and-out comrades at Jimmy’s—and of why he believed it was his mission to portray the lives of such people on the stage rather than writing about “people whose ways are bright and easy,” and who “are dramatized frequently and continuously.”
“It is life as I see it,” he said, dismissing the argument that plays about such people were depressing. “We should feel exalted to think that there is something—some vital unquenchable flame in man which makes him triumph over his miseries—over life itself. Dying, he is still victorious. The realization of this should exalt, not depress.”
O’Neill believed himself a spiritual brother to the derelicts among whom he lived in 1912; like them, he had no ambition to change his surroundings. His one preoccupation was getting and staying drunk—especially when his dollar-a-day allowance from his father ran out. On
e way he and his sailor friends picked up drinking money was to amble down to the waterfront, where they could sometimes earn a few dollars carrying mail sacks on or off the ships. Alternatively, they could “lower the boom on the live ones,” which meant putting the touch on sailor friends arriving on incoming ships.
O’Neill raced through his four-act outline for Iceman, beginning on June 9 and completing it by June 24. Even while sketching his saga of drunken delusion, he was already afire with twists of the plot for the next play, the one he was basing on his New London family. He shared his onrushing thoughts with Carlotta on June 21.
“Gene talks to me for hours about a play (in his mind) of his Mother, his Father, his brother and himself (in his early 20’s) in New London—! (Autobiography) A hot, close, sleepless night—An ache in our hearts for things we can’t escape!”
With barely a pause, beginning on June 26, O’Neill completed a four-act outline of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in just one week. Then, deciding he would first write the full-length scenario of The Iceman Cometh, he put the Journey outline aside.
“Gene feels beastly!” Carlotta observed on July 10, the day before O’Neill began developing his Iceman characters. The following day, she reported he had passed another restless night and he “yearns to get away from here.” She believed he wished to dodge the coming intrusions of his children’s visits. But he could also have been expressing a veiled wish to escape the rush of painful memories he was calling up for his two entwined plays. After dining with friends in San Francisco on July 11, Carlotta found O’Neill in such low spirits that she was moved to remark, “Thank God, Gene didn’t start drinking again!”
On the following day, submerged in his suicidal past, he said to Carlotta, “If you and I could only go to sleep together and never wake up.” The next day, he began writing the dialogue for Act I of Iceman.
O’Neill anticipated an intensive new stretch of work, and was wishing he could avoid all interruptions, particularly his responsibilities as a father.
There was seldom a time, however, when he did not feel put-upon by his responsibility to his children. The insensitive way he treated all three of them was an ongoing vexation for his close friends. They struggled with the cosmic question of whether a great artist is entitled to a pass when it comes to standards of morality; does the value of the artist’s creative gift to the world cancel out the damage he inflicts on his offspring?
To argue an unequivocal no—at least in O’Neill’s case—is to ignore the relentless expenditure of self that it cost him while shaping a play; any intrusion during this creative process was a torment. It was innately impossible for him to be both an attentive father and a visionary dramatist. (Facetiously speaking, one solution to this cosmic question might be to genetically identify all potential genius-artists at birth and neuter them.)
In any event, O’Neill felt obliged to interact with all three of his children that summer, beginning with Shane. O’Neill had been boiling with anger since February when Harry Weinberger informed him that his younger son, soon to be twenty, had again quit school.
“I am disgusted but not surprised,” O’Neill had told his lawyer, once again invoking his despised ex-wife and describing Shane as “just naturally dumb and shiftless like all of [the Boultons], where education and books are concerned.” He protested (and doubtless believed) that he had “done all, and a good deal more, for him than he has deserved.” Until Shane proved himself “not to be a parasitic slob of a Boulton,” he vowed he would do no more. As of now, raged O’Neill, “he simply does not interest me as a human being. Nor as a son.”
That July, however, O’Neill was provoked into a confrontation with his wayward son when Shane sought advice about a possible career as a horse breeder. It would have been obvious from that letter to anyone but his father that Shane was pitifully immature and floundering, much like O’Neill himself at that age.
It did not help that O’Neill at this time was actually in the process of recalling (in Long Day’s Journey) his own deplorable behavior as a jobless twenty-three-year-old college dropout and alcoholic derelict dependent on his father’s dole.
“This will get you exactly nowhere,” admonished O’Neill. “You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own.” (He boasted to Weinberger that he had written to Shane without “the usual fatherly crap.”) A month later, Shane gave up horses and decided to pursue a career as a commercial artist.
Next, O’Neill mustered a welcome for his formerly stable scholarly older son, who, a month earlier, had married his third wife, Sally. (On learning of the marriage, Carlotta had snippily observed, “Elizabeth the first was a nice girl! I hope Sally the third will last!”)
O’Neill was not impressed with Sally, whose mother, Marjorie F. Hayward, was curator of the historic American Revolutionary site Pardee House in New Haven, Connecticut. The nine-day visit was uncomfortable, as both Carlotta and O’Neill had anticipated. In a letter to Macgowan, O’Neill described his new daughter-in-law as “rather disappointing,” and further disparaged her as “a stalwart stout young woman” of “an all-too-familiar Connecticut small-city type.”
On July 16, the day of Eugene and Sally’s departure, Carlotta’s son-in-law, Roy Stram, was hospitalized with a severe attack of rheumatic fever. “Poor Cyn,” Carlotta wrote, “she is to meet Dukie at the hospital—& be told the true facts”—that Roy would “always be an invalid—Cyn at 22! With a baby, no money & no profession!”
A few days later, O’Neill and Carlotta were distracted by the ominous news from abroad.
“Russia & Germany sign a non-aggression pact!! My God!” Carlotta exclaimed in her diary on August 21. And three days later, after more grim news: “We sit at the radio until late at night! Gene is pale & drawn & furious that Man has learned nothing—he can’t be taught that in today’s world no country can win!”
• • •
WITH NO TIME to recover from their recent weeks of stress, the O’Neills now awaited a visit from Oona on August 26. O’Neill had finally (guiltily) invited his daughter—whom he hadn’t seen in five years. With effort, Carlotta offered a cheerful welcome to her stepdaughter, whom she and O’Neill met at the airport. O’Neill was in far better spirits than his wife, for he had just finished the scenario of Act II of Iceman, happily describing it in his Work Diary as “long but grand!” Thus fortified, he was prepared to be won over by his fourteen-year-old daughter. “Seems darned nice kid,” he noted in his Work Diary. Carlotta concurred. “She is nervous of course, but has nice manners & seems very sweet.”
O’Neill left Oona to be mostly entertained by Carlotta while he continued to work on The Iceman Cometh; but he did join them on a visit to the San Francisco World’s Fair, and a sightseeing trip to Chinatown.
As was their custom, O’Neill and Carlotta listened to after-dinner news broadcasts and, on August 28, they stayed up until 3:00 a.m. listening to Hitler’s guttural speech declaring war against Poland, after which O’Neill cursed him in disgust as “a ham actor!” On August 31, when English and French civilians were about to evacuate London and Paris, Carlotta noted: “France calm—& ready to fight for personal freedom”; she said she was “moved beyond belief” and had “a queer feeling that all this is really the beginning of the end of all happiness for me!”
Carlotta pronounced herself “a wreck” after listening to another harrowing night of news. She lamented in her diary: “Germans bombing Polish towns—troops have gone over the border! No sleep.” Trying to soothe her nerves, she was sitting on her patio darning O’Neill’s socks when Oona joined her, looking “very much amused,” as Carlotta later reported their conversation.
OONA: I thought the darning-socks wife went out with Queen Victoria.
CARLOTTA (a bit surprised but trying to appear amused): Never mind, you’ll be darning your husband’s socks in a few years!
O
ONA: Not I. I’m not the sock-darning kind.
Then, noted Carlotta, “We had quite a woman-to-woman talk. She is 14!” Later, Carlotta amended (in her diary) that Oona, “with a curled lip,” had said, “You’d never catch me dead doing a thing like that. I’m going to marry a rich man.”
On September 3, Oona’s father and stepmother saw her off on her flight home with what Carlotta called “a fat cheque” in her handbag. Carlotta and O’Neill had again stayed up late listening to the war news and O’Neill, according to Carlotta, was “in a ghastly state of nerves.” With England and France at war with Germany, he noted, “Now hell starts! Spengler was right.”
Carlotta attributed O’Neill’s jitters as much to exasperation about his children as to concern about the war; Eugene Jr.’s visit with his disdained third wife “upset him terribly,” Carlotta observed, and “Oona’s visit disturbed him because he felt (as a dramatist!) she had been rehearsed in how she was to act with him—she was not herself!” Carlotta, dreading the onset of a breakdown, herself felt “old—tired—fearful.” All they had dreamed of and worked for, she sighed, now seemed useless and inconsequential.
A week later, O’Neill had recovered from his physical and mental weariness and, despite the war news, was again working on Iceman. In retrospect, he seemed to have persuaded himself that Oona was, after all, a daughter to be proud of. In the same letter to Macgowan that disparaged his new daughter-in-law, Sally, O’Neill wrote glowingly about Oona, describing her as not only intelligent, but “really a charming girl, both in looks and in manners.” He had even softened enough as a father to answer a letter from Shane with a minimum of lecturing, in which he remarked that he and Carlotta had found Shane’s sister “loveable.”