by Arthur Gelb
• • •
THESE WERE SENTIMENTS the young Eugene O’Neill had readily shared as he harked back to his contempt for the uppity New London neighbors—the despotic millionaire monopolists Edward Stephen Harkness and Edward Crowninshield Hammond—whom he would later parody in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Between Terry and Eugene, there was also an area of sympathetic understanding regarding their vaporized Catholicism; O’Neill was especially struck by Jim O’Carolan’s deathbed words, as repeated by Terry in response to the proposal that a priest be summoned: “I hire no spiritual nurse,” said Jim.
No one could have been more receptive than O’Neill to Carlin’s world-weary lament, as Carlin wrote to the awed Hapgood in 1909: “There must be some meaning for all this ancient agony. Oh, that I might expand my written words into an Epic of the Slums, into an Iliad of the Proletaire! If an oyster can turn its pain into a pearl, then, verily, when we have suffered enough, something must arise out of our torture—else the world has no meaning. . . . It cannot be that I came up out of the depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, I might perhaps tell the truth. But only a High Silence meets me, and I do not understand.”
Terry left it to O’Neill to pierce his heart and write with red lines. And O’Neill, in his writing, did in a way become Terry’s missionary, especially in his early portrayals of the inarticulate underdog. Many years before he met O’Neill, Terry had pondered, “How be a mouthpiece for the poor? How can art master the master-problem? They who have nothing much to say, often say it well and in a popular form; they are unhampered by weighty matters. It takes an eagle to soar with a heavy weight in its grasp.”
Notable among O’Neill’s own half-formed insights, advanced by Terry as he started writing, was Terry’s singular compassion for prostitutes, which O’Neill tried to balance against Jamie’s sneering condescension for them. Terry believed that marriage for a woman was often a form of prostitution. “Selling your body for a lifetime is perhaps worse than selling it for an hour or for a day,” he once told a desperate woman friend who was weighing the choice between domestic drudgery and street walking.
The streetwalker’s life, Terry warned, was “very terrible practically,” for it could lead to “frightful diseases which will waste your bodies and perhaps injure your minds.” The choice between street walking and domestic drudgery, he conceded, was “a choice of evils”; but if forced to choose, he would advise prostitution. “It may be worse for you but, as a protest, it is better for society, in the long run.”
Good-hearted prostitutes continued to thrust themselves into O’Neill’s plays long after he created Anna Christie—and The Iceman Cometh was no exception.
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Into his Iceman tapestry of dipsomaniacal outcasts, O’Neill lovingly wove a roster of subsidiary misfits. The rapscallion Hugo Kalmar is one of the most diverting; he is closely modeled on Hippolyte Havel, a friend from O’Neill’s old Greenwich Village days who, like Slade, was a onetime anarchist.
While Hugo does little to further the plot, his function is to give an early comic lilt to the play’s lower depths; he also serves to emphasize O’Neill’s fascination, undimmed all these years later, with the radical politics of the early 1900s, and the absurdist aspects of the anarchist movement.
Hugo is deep in a drunken sleep at the beginning of Act I, when Slade makes some derisive comments about the anarchist movement to Rocky, the skeptical night bartender; he then mischievously rouses Hugo from his drunken slumber to back up his comments. Peering groggily at Rocky and Slade, Hugo blurts, “Capitalist swine! Bourgeois stool pigeons! Have the slaves no right to sleep even?”
With Hugo’s anarchist bona fides established, O’Neill then uses him to depict a phase of a drunkard’s often infantile behavior, with which O’Neill himself was all too familiar. Hugo’s “manner,” writes O’Neill, “changes to a giggling, wheedling playfulness, as though he were talking to a child: ‘Hello, leedle Rocky! Leedle monkey-face! Vere is your leedle slave girls?’” Reverting to a bullying tone, he barks, “Don’t be a fool! Loan me a dollar! . . . Buy me a trink!” Abruptly overcome by drowsiness, he drops his head into his arms and is instantly asleep again on the table.
O’Neill had long been beguiled by Hippolyte Havel’s history and personality; a close colleague of Karl Marx’s in Germany and one of Emma Goldman’s many lovers, Havel had edited, in Chicago, the anarchist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung.
At the time O’Neill met him in the Hell Hole, Hippolyte was doubling as lover and cook to Polly Holladay (sister of O’Neill’s friend Louis, who died of a drug overdose in 1918). Hippolyte was famous for his drunken temper tantrums during which he was apt to denounce Polly’s customers as “bourgeois pigs.”
• • •
ALSO NOTEWORTHY AMONG the habituées of Harry Hope’s saloon was James Cameron, a character based on James O’Neill’s theater press agent, James Byth. (Devoted O’Neill fans have met this Byth character before, under the name Jimmy Anderson, in O’Neill’s short story “Tomorrow”; but in that story, Byth/Anderson jumped to his death from the fire escape outside the upstairs cubicle of his flophouse; so it’s something of a surprise to meet him again as the Byth/Cameron character in Iceman.)
O’Neill was evidently so taken with Byth that he couldn’t resist resurrecting him for Iceman and slipping him (renamed) among the rest of his deluded inebriates. O’Neill gave both Anderson and Cameron (in Iceman) the nickname “Jimmy Tomorrow.” But unlike Jimmy Anderson in “Tomorrow,” James Cameron does not commit suicide, since O’Neill has assigned that fate to someone else in Iceman. James Cameron, instead, is consigned the gentler fate of returning, along with the others, to the futility of his pipe dreams.
As for the character O’Neill called Joe Mott, he reflects O’Neill’s concern with both the personal and the societal atmosphere of the era. Mott, described as a “one-time proprietor of a Negro gambling house,” is significant for being yet another of the well-drawn black characters who populate O’Neill’s tragedies—joining Jim Harris (of All God’s Chillun Got Wings) and Brutus Jones (the would-be emperor); in this, O’Neill was many years ahead of his time.
Mott prides himself on having been (before his decline) the only Negro accepted in “whites only” Manhattan gambling parlors, and he is the only black man who drinks at Harry Hope’s saloon. O’Neill described the Joe Mott character as “hard and tough if it were not for his good nature and lazy humor.” It is Mott’s pipe dream that he can readily reenter that “whites only” outside world any time he wishes.
Mott was based on Joe Smith, one of O’Neill’s black friends in Greenwich Village. In his forties when O’Neill knew him, Smith was light-skinned with Caucasian features. A watchman for an auction company, he was suspected by his friends of supplementing his income with a pair of loaded dice. He was married to a white woman known as Miss Viola, a big blonde who blazed with putatively “hot” diamonds, which she pawned whenever she and Joe were hard up.
On several occasions when O’Neill had drunk himself insensible, Joe took him to his sister’s home, where she nursed him back to sobriety; more than once, Joe fed him during a lean period. After his wife died, Joe moved into a second-floor flat in an old frame building on Cornelia Street. “You’re as welcome as the flowers in May” was Joe’s habitual greeting to whomever climbed the stairs to his rooms.
At the Hell Hole, O’Neill found amusement in Joe’s relationship with the pig that the saloon’s proprietor, Tom Wallace, kept in his cellar, fattening it on garbage and planning to cook it for Christmas. As the holiday approached, O’Neill and his friends sometimes fetched the pig from the cellar and offered it whiskey. When drunk, it rushed about the back room, upsetting chairs and behaving a bit like O’Neill when he had exceeded his limit; because of the pig’s eccentricity, the barflies called it “O’Neill’s son.” Only Joe Smith could s
ubdue the creature by crooning in its ear; he’d explain, “You got to reason with him.” (It is perhaps not surprising that two years after writing Iceman, O’Neill, in a notebook, jotted an idea for a one-acter—“Pig of the Hell Hole play.”)
• • •
ANOTHER SUBSIDIARY BUT significant Iceman character is Willie Oban, based on the son of Al Adams, a crooked securities dealer of the era, notorious for having served time in Sing Sing; but Oban seems as well to have been designed by O’Neill to represent Jamie, who was a dissipated thirty-four at the time Iceman takes place. Oban, a troubled Harvard Law School alumnus, is resentful of his overpowering father, while at the same time dependent on him, as was Jamie on his father.
Oban, when jolted awake from an alcoholic dream, is given to crying out pathetically, “It’s a lie! Pappa, Pappa!” Further emphasizing Oban’s resemblance to Jamie, O’Neill has him deliver a boozy, self-pitying account of his early history to Parritt, from whom he is trying to cadge a drink; it includes the fact that his father pushed him to attend an Ivy League college.
“He was an ambitious man,” Oban whines. “Dictatorial, too. Always knowing what was best for me.” But, continues Oban, he outsmarted his father. Although starting out as a brilliant student, Oban “discovered the loophole of whiskey” and escaped his father’s jurisdiction. (This characterization would prove to be a jumping-off point for the full-fledged portrait of Jamie O’Neill’s downfall in the soon-to-be-written A Moon for the Misbegotten.)
Among other minor characters in Iceman, Pat McGloin, a “one-time police lieutenant,” represents the busted crooked cops from the semi-underworld of Manhattan that O’Neill and his friend Louis Holladay joyfully had explored in their late teens; they rarely missed a Saturday-night visit to the Tenderloin, the site of Manhattan’s numerous gambling dens, as well as its red-light district. Its main attraction for the two boys was the three-story Haymarket on Sixth Avenue near Thirtieth Street which, with its racy dance hall and upstairs peep show, was a hunting ground for prostitutes and pickpockets (and where police graft was rampant). Cops like McGloin, after they were rooted out of the force, used to hang out in the Hell Hole, where O’Neill got drunk with them and listened to the stories of their misadventures.
Two other minor characters—Piet Wetjoen (described as “The General,” and a “one-time leader of a Boer commando”) and Cecil Lewis (“one-time Captain of British infantry”) seem to have been dropped by O’Neill into Harry Hope’s saloon partly to fill in the inevitable fraught silences and partly (like Hugo Kalmar) for comic relief. They serve their purpose, but O’Neill “knew” them mainly from the bawdy stories told him by his father’s press agent, James Byth, who did know them well.
Absent from Iceman is a version of O’Neill himself. Although he undeniably drank with the regulars at Jimmy the Priest’s and shared their dismal living quarters, he was a vagabond manqué, with options they did not have. Alienated from his family, O’Neill nonetheless knew his father would rescue him if he wanted to be rescued; he was, in fact, leading a double life.
Who among his decrepit barroom pals could have slipped uptown to the theater district from time to time, as O’Neill did, to see the newly arrived members of the Abbey Theatre, imported for the first time from Ireland by James O’Neill’s old friend and producer, George Tyler; O’Neill periodically picked up his father’s dole at Tyler’s office, where he had no trouble obtaining tickets to Broadway performances of plays by Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and Lennox Robinson.
A comment O’Neill later made is an indication that his state of mind at that time was not entirely hopeless: “It was seeing the Irish Players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity.” He went to see everything in their repertoire. “I thought then and I still think that they demonstrated the possibilities of naturalistic acting better than any other company.”
Also unlike his barroom brethren, whose only concern was where the next drink was coming from, O’Neill, between his own drinks, was attuned to the avant-garde world that lay just a few blocks north of Jimmy the Priest’s. He was well aware that the streets of Greenwich Village thrummed with young writers and artists fleeing the intellectually stunted lives of their hometowns, swarming into the Village’s cheaply rented rooms and welcoming cafés and bars, free at last to pursue careers as writers, painters, poets, actors, musicians—and finally unafraid to speak their minds about everything from radical politics to free love.
O’Neill also was more than fleetingly aware of the strides being made by the socialist movement and the IWW (International Workers of the World) among the searching young Villagers; he himself, along with a million other voters, was rooting for the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, in an election in which Woodrow Wilson defeated not only Debs but also the incumbent, President William Howard Taft, and the Progressive candidate, Theodore Roosevelt.
• • •
THE ONLY WOMEN who appear onstage in Iceman are the three streetwalkers who are adjuncts of the play’s two bartenders. They are Pearl and Margie, who belong to the night bartender, Rocky Pioggi, and Cora, who belongs to the daytime bartender, Chuck Morello.
All five have pipe dreams of their own. Because Rocky earns a salary and takes his girls’ money only as a sideline, he is not a “pimp,” and Pearl and Margie, therefore, call themselves “tarts” rather than “whores.” Chuck and Cora are engaged to be married; as soon as Chuck gives up his periodic drunken binges (any day now), Cora will stop soliciting and they will settle down together on a farm in New Jersey.
This quintet provides much of the often underrated comedy with which O’Neill peppered Iceman. But while the three tarts are the play’s only visible females, it is the two offstage women—Evelyn Hickman (the all-forgiving wife) and Rosa Parritt (the negligent mother)—who possess their men and drive the play’s action.
In contrast to O’Neill’s affectionate portrayal of his drunken barroom friends, there is vitriol in his portraits of Evelyn and Rosa that unavoidably brings to mind his feelings toward his own all-forgiving wife and his own negligent mother (possessive types we have met before in other of O’Neill’s women-driven dramas).
Evelyn Hickman, with her over-mothering and her limitless forbearance, literally drives her husband crazy enough to murder her—and he is in turn himself destroyed; and Rosa Parritt, by her self-absorption and egregious neglect of her son, engenders in him such hatred he is goaded into killing her symbolically by his betrayal—leading to his self-destruction.
Granted that the mind of a creative genius is essentially unknowable and that the most well-informed guesswork is still guesswork, it’s hard not to leap to certain assumptions in the case of The Iceman Cometh.
It would be surprising, for example, if O’Neill, in depicting the mother-son dynamic, wasn’t thinking back to Jamie’s self-punishment after betraying his mother by getting drunk as she was dying, and then compounding his betrayal by his outrageous behavior on the train that bore his mother’s casket back to New York. For that matter, there was O’Neill’s own betrayal of his mother—not only in his depiction of her as a madwoman in More Stately Mansions, but also in exposing the long-kept secret of her morphine addiction in the family play he had already outlined and was soon to write. Like Hickey, who finally could no longer tolerate his wife Evelyn’s self-sacrifice, O’Neill at times found it hard to bear Carlotta’s endlessly patient and all-forgiving dedication to his neediness and (often enough) his emotional abuse. Surely there were occasions when he fantasized about getting her off his back. And it’s not too far-fetched to speculate that, being O’Neill, his fantasy took him a step further: to thoughts of the revolver he kept in a bureau drawer, and of using it to put Carlotta (and himself) out of her misery. (He’d bought the gun years earlier to protect his Bermuda household after a half-witted native exhibitionist had plagued a friend’s nursemaid on the same beach where Shane swam.)
&nbs
p; If it’s a guess that O’Neill sublimated his fantasy by letting Hickey do the wife-shooting for him, it’s a fact that in the not-too-distant future, when his writing had come to a halt, he would brandish that revolver in Carlotta’s face with murderous intent.
The Iceman Cometh has been lengthily analyzed in print from psychiatric, religious, and metaphysical viewpoints; it appears to be well on its way to accumulating as large a body of scholarly discourse as Hamlet. One of the most illuminating analyses of the play was provided by Dudley Nichols in a letter to Irving Hoffman, a close friend at The Hollywood Reporter.
O’Neill had respected Nichols ever since 1928, when his enthusiastic review of Strange Interlude ran in the New York World. Nichols had gone on to become a well-respected film writer and had recently completed a film adaptation of O’Neill’s early one-act sea plays.
As Nichols observed:
The iceman of the title is, of course, death. I don’t think O’Neill ever explained, publicly, what he meant by the use of the archaic word, “cometh,” but he told me at the time he was writing the play that he meant a combination of the poetic and biblical “Death Cometh”—that is, cometh to all living—and the old bawdy story, a typical Hickey [and Jamie O’Neill] story, of the man who calls upstairs, “Has the iceman come yet?” and his wife calls back, “No, but he’s breathin’ hard.”
Even the bawdy story is transformed by the poetic intention of the title, for it is really Death which Hickey’s wife, Evelyn, has taken to her breast when she marries Hickey, and her insistence on her great love for Hickey and his undying love for her and her deathlike grip on his conscience—her insistence that he can change and not get drunk and sleep with whores—is making Death breathe hard on her breast as he approaches ever nearer—as he is about “to come” in the vernacular sense. It is a strange and poetic intermingling of the exalted and the vulgar, that title.