by Arthur Gelb
(Although O’Neill, after winning the Nobel Prize, had publicly praised Dreiser as a writer who himself deserved the award, he must have been annoyed that Dreiser had given the name Eugene to his own alter ego in The Genius, and perhaps O’Neill was indulging in a bit of revenge.)
Hickey’s arrival is eagerly anticipated by the outcasts of Harry Hope’s saloon; at play’s beginning, on an early summer morning, they are slumped separately or in clusters at each of seven adjacent round tables in the saloon’s back room, where liquor can be legally served after the adjoining barroom has closed to the public—which in this case means all night long.
They sometimes doze, heads on tables, intermittently coming up for air and muttering a few words, hoping that Harry, who has joined them from his upstairs flat, will treat them to a drink while they await Hickey’s arrival. Hazily, they reminisce about fancied past achievements and exchange pipe dreams of how, one day soon, they will sober up and resurrect their broken lives, regaining long-lost jobs and reconnecting with influential friends.
First, though, they will help Hickey celebrate Harry Hope’s birthday, as they do every year. Hickey, they remind one another, is always well-heeled and high-spirited, bursting with a repertory of jokes and wisecracks. He will keep the drinks coming and will himself drink along with gusto. He is the one bright and hopeful diversion in their fog-filled lives.
When Hickey at last arrives, the benumbed, whiskey-soaked regulars are momentarily galvanized. But he is not the Hickey they know. Although still jovial and affectionate, and lavish with his alcoholic treats, he himself is cold sober. The drinks are on him, he says, but he won’t be drinking with them; he has found his spiritual salvation by facing his own delusions and no longer needs to seek peace in a bottle.
Thinking Hickey has come up with an elaborate joke to play on them, the barroom regulars uneasily try to go along. But they turn resentful when Hickey begins prodding them (however merrily) to confront their pipe dreams, insisting that is the only way for them to find peace. Hickey is trying to sell them a salvation for which they have no use, and their resentment turns to anger when he urges them to leave Harry Hope’s saloon and reclaim their former lives—not tomorrow, but today.
Even as they sullenly question his motive, they are too weak to resist Hickey’s slick salesmanship. And Hickey, knowing they will never follow through, nonetheless cajoles and bullies, propelling them, one by one, out the front door—all except for two: the certifiably loony Hugo Kalmar, and Larry Slade who, although rattled, resists Hickey’s taunts.
The first to return is Harry Hope. According to O’Neill’s early notes for Iceman, Hope—like his real-life counterpart, Tom Wallace (the proprietor of the Hell Hole)—had not set foot outside his saloon “since [his] wife’s funeral” twenty years earlier; the truth was that she had “nagged him to death and he was relieved when she died.”
Transposed to Harry Hope, this stance, putatively a tribute to his undying love for his wife, Bessie, was mocked by Hickey, who told Harry it was time to give it up: “I know better and so do you. . . . She was always on your neck, making you have ambition and go out and do things, when all you wanted was to get drunk in peace.” And, after Harry’s cringing return and his angry warning to Hickey to “close that big clam” of his, he astounds himself by snapping, “Hickey, Bejeez, you’re a worse gabber than that nagging bitch Bessie was.”
It isn’t long before all the others have slunk back to the saloon, so defeated they can’t even get themselves drunk; to their dismay, the kick has gone out of the booze.
Hickey is baffled that their aborted forays haven’t liberated them from their pipe dreams. He had expected his barroom pals to feel the exhilaration he feels. But Hickey, believing in his own deluded mind that he has faced the truth about himself, has merely replaced one pipe dream with a more lethal one.
Confronting his barroom cohorts in a long rambling monologue, Hickey attempts to justify his expectations for their redemption, explaining the source of his own salvation.
He has earlier told them of the recent sudden death of his long-suffering wife, Evelyn, to whom he has been consistently unfaithful, and who, he has assured them, is finally at peace.
Now, he confesses that it is he himself who has provided her with that peace. He has shot her, he says, out of his great love and pity for her. He knew she would never stop loving him and forgiving him and pretending to believe his lies that he would change. He also knew that although he loved her dearly, he would never stop betraying and lying to her. The only way to end her suffering was to kill her.
“I’d always known that was the only possible way to give her peace and free her from the misery of loving me,” he says. “I saw it meant peace for me, too, knowing she was at peace. I felt as though a ton of guilt had been lifted off my mind.”
But then, trancelike, Hickey blurts his true feelings as he recalls the vengeful final words he spat at his dead wife, thereby revealing himself as the most deluded of them all: “I remember I stood by the bed and suddenly I had to laugh. I couldn’t help it, and I knew Evelyn would forgive me. I remember I heard myself speaking to her, as if it was something I’d always wanted to say: ‘Well, you know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch!’”
Horrified, he stammers a denial: How could he possibly have said that? He loved Evelyn. He must have been insane, he cries, pleading with his “old pals” to accept this explanation. Muttering to one another, they are only too happy to do so; at last he has let them off the hook.
Hickey, prepared to take his punishment for the “mercy killing” of his wife, had earlier notified the police where to find him, and two plainclothes detectives have slipped into the saloon, unnoticed by him, in time to hear his confession. As they arrest him and prepare to take him away, Hickey again begs Harry to believe he is insane.
The detectives attempt to silence him, cautioning Harry Hope and the others that Hickey is trying to establish an insanity plea. But Harry defends him to the detectives, assuring them that Hickey is not bluffing and is entitled to plead insanity; all of Hickey’s old pals are only too eager to agree and, as one, they contentedly begin to drink themselves back into their pipe dreams.
• • •
THE STORY OF murder and insanity that can keep an audience breathless with suspense now gives way to the denouement of the play’s secondary plot, which is centered on Larry Slade and his recently repudiated anarchist connections.
The only back-room dipsomaniac who professes to have no pipe dreams and who has resisted Hickey’s relentless prodding, Slade, from early on, has suspected something deviant in Hickey’s behavior and he is unsurprised by the manic salesman’s confession. Determined, however, to maintain his equilibrium as a disinterested observer of life, he has kept his suspicions mostly to himself.
His more urgent concern is a recently arrived boarder at Harry Hope’s named Don Parritt, by whom Slade feels threatened; their private confrontation is dramatized at intervals during the noisier tug-of-war being waged among Hickey and the other barflies.
The eighteen-year-old Parritt has come to the flophouse to seek Slade out, but Slade wants nothing to do with him, and he angrily resists the young man’s pull on his emotions. Parritt, however, will not leave Slade alone. Although Parritt (in O’Neill’s stage description) is tall and good-looking, he has an “unpleasant” personality; there is “a shifting defiance and ingratiation” in his eyes and “an irritating aggressiveness in his manner.” It soon becomes clear he has sought out Slade because he has something to confess.
While Parritt is, like Hickey, an amalgam, there is no mistaking Slade as a stand-in for the man who for so many years was O’Neill’s spiritual mentor, and who saturated the young O’Neill with tales of his life in the philosophical anarchist movement. Described by O’Neill in Iceman as a “one-time Syndicalist-Anarchist,” he is (as was Terry Carlin) “tall, raw-boned, w
ith coarse straight white hair, worn long and raggedly cut.”
Slade’s connection to Parritt peripherally suggests the long-ago relationship between Terry Carlin and Louis Holladay; O’Neill always remembered his dark suspicion that it was Carlin who knowingly supplied Holladay with the requested dose of heroin that killed him. Parritt, like Hickey, has his “background of fact,” as O’Neill once explained in an interview in The New York Times.
Parritt’s character was largely based on a young man named Donald Vose, whose mother, the anarchist Gertie Vose, was a close friend of Emma Goldman’s. Through his mother, Donald Vose had entree to her anarchist cell, and he was the stool pigeon whose information enabled William J. Burns, of the International Burns Detective Agency, to arrest two long-wanted anarchists, Matthew A. Schmidt and David Caplan, who had collaborated with the McNamara brothers in the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times.
O’Neill’s description of Parritt’s betrayal of his mother was partly suggested by Emma Goldman’s vilification of Donald Vose in her magazine Mother Earth after he testified in the trials of Schmidt and Caplan in 1915 and 1916. Goldman derided Vose as “the Judas Iscariot” whose sellout of the two men had in effect been a betrayal of his mother, whom Goldman pitied for having raised “that cur.”
But there is also a whiff of Jamie O’Neill’s essence hovering about Parritt, which is hardly coincidental; Jamie was seldom out of O’Neill’s mind (as would soon become evident with his horrifying portrait of his brother in A Moon for the Misbegotten); like the real Vose and the fictional Parritt, Jamie had arrived in New York after betraying his dying mother in Los Angeles.
In O’Neill’s concept for Iceman, Larry Slade was once in love with Parritt’s mother, Rosa, a leader in the anarchist movement that Slade had then espoused. He has heard that she is now in prison and he suspects it was Parritt who betrayed her. Vehemently resisting Parritt’s attempts to draw him into reminiscences of his past love for Rosa, Slade insists he has resigned not only from the movement but from life itself.
Despite Slade’s repeated rebuffs, Parritt keeps spilling bits of information about himself—in much the same way that Hickey drops hints about the events leading to the death of his wife. Parritt tells Slade what he has already guessed: that he, Parritt, is the turncoat who was paid to inform against two of his mother’s colleagues.
Parritt at first says he did it for the money; he had never intended to betray his mother, believing she would be safely out of the way when the men were apprehended. He loves his mother, he insists; he has always loved her—despite her dedication to the movement, which often caused her to neglect him—and despite the various lovers with whom he had to share her attention. Can’t Slade understand he would never have betrayed his mother? And that he grieves over her incarceration?
Then, like Hickey, he spits out the truth—(“in a low voice in which there is a strange exhausted relief”): “I may as well confess, Larry. There’s no use lying anymore. You know, anyway. I didn’t give a damn about the money. It was because I hated her. . . . Her and the old Movement pipe dream!”
Slade finally cannot contain his horror at what Parritt has done. Abandoning his own pipe dream of passive withdrawal from life, he gives Parritt what he wants: “Go! Get the hell out of life, God damn you, before I choke it out of you!”
Soon after, Slade hears, through the back-room window, “the sound of something hurtling down, followed by a muffled, crunching thud.” Parritt has jumped to his death from the fire escape of his upstairs room.
Slade has, in effect, become Parritt’s executioner.
• • •
SLADE’S PERSONALITY IS based almost literally on Terry Carlin, who had become a second father to the eighteen-year-old Eugene when they’d first met in 1906 at the anarchist Benjamin Tucker’s bookstore.
• • •
EUGENE WOULD LIVE under Carlin’s spell, on and off, for the next twenty years, and The Iceman Cometh is in a sense a tribute to Carlin, who died in 1934.
O’Neill, in his days of worst despair, when he had cut himself off from his family and was all but penniless, clung to Carlin. As a perpetually homeless parasite, Carlin had learned innovative survival techniques, which he passed on to O’Neill. The two often stayed up all night, alternately drinking, talking philosophy and radical literature, and napping with their heads on a back-room table, usually at the Hell Hole. One of Terry’s skills was exorcising O’Neill’s DTs.
The young O’Neill could not help but admire a man who had actually given up all worldly ambition to regain his unsullied soul—a man who, moreover, often relied for his existence on the Irish charm and eloquence he could summon at will. Carlin had managed to acquire a small circle of adherents among the more prosperous writers and artists of Greenwich Village; even practiced storytellers such as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser, enraptured by the lilting, mythic quality of Carlin’s yarns, were happy, now and then, to help keep him in liquor and food and, like Eugene, were willing to overlook some of his nastier foibles.
It was Carlin who had accompanied O’Neill to Cape Cod in the summer of 1916, seconding John Reed’s earlier invitation to join the recently formed group of tentative playwrights, artists, and amateur actors soon to emerge in Greenwich Village as the Provincetown Players.
• • •
CARLIN (WHO HAD shortened his name from O’Carolan) sprang, like O’Neill’s father, from Irish peasant stock, and his family, like O’Neill’s, immigrated to America when Terry was a boy. The O’Carolan family, including mother, father, and seven children, settled in New York in the mid-1860s and tried to subsist on the father’s salary of eight dollars a week. Terry went to work at an early age in a sweatshop—as had James O’Neill.
Terry’s thoughts soon turned to the social injustice he saw around him; long before he embraced anarchy as a creed, his thinking was socialistic. In his teens, as a journeyman tanner and currier, while excelling at his trade, he spent his spare time with books, acquiring a radical education.
Like the O’Neill family—often described by Eugene as being “too close”—the O’Carolans were an emotionally interdependent clan.
“We clung desperately to one another long after the necessity was past,” Terry informed the journalist Hutchins Hapgood, who traced his life in a 1909 volume called An Anarchist Woman, which O’Neill devoured.
Like Eugene, Terry had a dearly loved brother named Jim, whom he described as “my other ego”—but who, unlike the cynical, drunken sometime actor Jamie O’Neill, had a good job with a Pittsburgh tannery and owned $25,000 worth of stock in the company.
It was an episode involving Jim O’Carolan that led to Terry’s final disillusionment. Then in his thirties, Terry had already adopted life as a social exile. He’d given up a well-paying job as an expert in leather manufacturing and was living a carefree life in a Chicago slum with a woman named Marie, whom he’d rescued from a career of prostitution; he worked rarely, and only to provide himself and Marie with the bare necessities.
Terry would not have given up his contented life for anyone but his brother. But Jim needed Terry’s help in Pittsburgh, where the firm that employed him was losing thousands of dollars a week because of a flaw in the manufacturing process that Jim believed Terry, with his expertise and ingenuity, could pinpoint and correct.
“It was with the utmost repugnance that I quit my happy slum life,” Terry later explained in a letter to Hapgood, “but I loved Jim, and it was the call of the ancient clan in my blood. When I arrived in Pittsburgh, without a trunk, and with other marks of the proletarian on me, Mr. Kirkman, the millionaire tanner, showered me with every luxury—every luxury except that of thought and true emotion. Never before did I realize so intensely my indifference to what money can buy. My private office in the shop was stocked with wines and imported cigarettes: but I was not so well off as in my happy slum.”
After toiling for
a month, Terry found the source of Kirkman’s trouble in an obscure process, and advised him how to correct it, thereby saving the firm a fortune. “I had put no price on my services,” Terry continued. “For Jim’s sake, I had worked like a Trojan, physically and mentally. . . . With unlimited money at my disposal, I had drawn only twenty dollars altogether, and this I sent to Marie, to keep the wolf away.”
Kirkman offered Terry the job of running the shop at a large salary and with the option to buy $2,000 worth of stock. But Terry replied he would not exploit the workers, who earned only $7 or $8 a week, and that he would not permit any worker to be discharged for “incompetency”; he had never met a man he could not teach, he told Kirkman.
Not even Jim could persuade Terry to stay, and he departed with nothing but his railroad fare back to Chicago, although Jim assured him that Kirkman would send him between $500 and $1,000 for his services. But within a few days, Jim found that Kirkman, angry that his offer had been spurned, had no intention of sending Terry a cent; he used the excuse that no written or verbal contract had been made for Terry’s services.
Jim resigned from the firm in protest, in spite of the fact that he had a wife and children to support. Terry was crushed by the chaos he had brought on Jim and by the lopsidedness of a world in which love of money could play such a vindictive role.
“Mr. Kirkman thought all the world of Jim and could not run the shop without him. Nor could he recover from the blow, for he loved my brother, as everybody did,” Terry wrote to Hutchins Hapgood. “Mr. Kirkman died a few weeks afterward, and a year or two later the firm went into the hands of a receiver. All this happened because of a few paltry dollars, which I did not ask for, for which I did not care a damn—and this is business! I heartily rejoice, if not in Mr. Kirkman’s death, at least in the dispersion of his family and their being forced into our ranks, where there is some hope for them.”