By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  The truth of the play, as O’Neill explained to Nichols (and, later, to a few other chosen friends), was that Hickey had long ago begun to harbor a murderous hatred for his wife; she represented his own punishing conscience.

  “God, how Hickey had begun to hate his wife!” wrote Nichols.

  When he gave her a venereal disease, and she forgave him—he wanted to kill her then, deep down in his unconscious. But of course the idea couldn’t enter his conscious mind—because he “loved” her, as she “loved” him. He’d been on that hop for years. So, when he finally had to kill her, knowing he had to be true to his own nature and go off to Harry’s saloon for a shot of Hope, a big drunk and a week with the tarts and bums, he first had to cook another pill of opium and grab the beautiful pipe dream that he was killing her for love—so she wouldn’t suffer any longer from his incurable debauchery.

  Hickey’s delusion vanishes when he discovers that with Evelyn’s death he no longer has the desire to go off on a drunk; he is forced to grasp at a new pipe dream—that his release from a guilt-ridden marriage has cleansed him and removed the need for debauchery.

  “How fiendishly clever the human mind is!” said Nichols. “When one dream is punctured, when we are finally brought face to face with ourselves or with ‘reality,’ the mind jumps to another pipe dream and calls it truth—calls it facing reality!”

  But Hickey’s new pipe dream also vanishes when he discovers that his friends in Harry Hope’s saloon will not buy it; they are appalled when they discover he has murdered his wife and regard it as the act of an insane man. Hickey, forced to seize still another illusion, convinces himself that his friends are right—that he is insane.

  “I don’t see the play as pessimistic,” continued Nichols. “It’s surely not a gloomy play. O’Neill himself delighted in its laughter. He’d chuckle over the tarts and the others—he loved them all. He didn’t feel that the fact that we live largely by illusion is sad. The important thing is to see that we do. The quality of a man is merely the quality of his illusions. We like illusioned people. No happy person lives on good terms with reality. No one has even penetrated what reality is.”

  Another of the play’s enchantments is its religious symbolism, starting with the seating of the characters in Act II (for Harry Hope’s birthday celebration), which is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. In an article written two years after the play’s Broadway premiere in 1946, the O’Neill scholar Cyrus Day first called attention to the fact that “Hickey as saviour has twelve disciples,” and after they drink wine, “Hickey leaves the party, as Christ does, aware that he is about to be executed.” Moreover, as Professor Day notes, “the three whores correspond in number to the three Marys, and sympathize with Hickey as the three Marys sympathize with Christ.”

  Day goes on to note the many resemblances between Don Parritt and Judas Iscariot:

  He is the twelfth in the list of the dramatis personae; Judas is the twelfth in the New Testament of the Disciples. He has betrayed his anarchist mother for a paltry $200; Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver.

  He is from the far-away Pacific Coast; Judas was from far-away Judea. Hickey reads his mind and motives; Christ reads Judas’s. Parritt compares himself to Iscariot when he says that his mother would regard anyone who quit the “Movement” as a Judas who ought to be boiled in oil. He commits suicide by jumping off a fire escape; Judas fell from a high place (Acts 1:18) or “hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5).

  Day argues that these resemblances can hardly be coincidental: “They are no more than an undertone, to be sure—one of many undertones or subordinate layers of meaning—but they are consistent with the main theme of the play, and they account for some of its otherwise unaccountable features; for example, the emphasis on midnight (see Matthew 25:5–6) as the hour appointed for Harry Hope’s party, and the unnecessarily large number of derelicts in Hope’s saloon.”

  For the final moments of Iceman, O’Neill contrived an audacious and coruscating tableau to capture the deep inner contentment of the saloon’s inebriates when they have regained their lost pipe dreams. Hickey’s former disciples, writes O’Neill, “are all very drunk now, just a few drinks ahead of the passing-out stage, and hilariously happy about it”; Harry Hope cries out, “Bejeez, let’s sing! Let’s celebrate! It’s my birthday party! Bejeez, I’m oreyeyed! I want to sing!”

  Then, writes O’Neill, “he starts the chorus of ‘She’s the Sunshine of Paradise Alley,’ and instantly they all burst into song. But not the same song. Each starts the chorus of his or her choice.” And O’Neill, with his vast and loving knowledge of popular and folk ballads of the era, spins out a list ranging from “A Wee Deoch an Doris” through “Waiting at the Church” to “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”—with Hugo Kalmar bellowing the French Revolutionary “Carmagnole.” The curtain descends on the singers’ pounding their glasses on the table and roaring with laughter.

  • • •

  “AFTER ALL, what I’ve tried to write, is a play where at the end you feel you know the souls of the seventeen men and women who appear—and the women who don’t appear—as well as if you’d read a play about each of them,” O’Neill explained to Kenneth Macgowan, who admired the script but found it somewhat repetitious. “I couldn’t condense much without taking a lot of life from some of these people and reducing them to lay figures.

  “You would find if I did not build up the complete picture of the group as it now is in the first part—the atmosphere of the place, the humor and friendship and human warmth and deep inner contentment of the bottom—you would not be so interested in these people and you would find the impact of what follows a lot less profoundly disturbing.”

  After intensely studying The Iceman Cometh, José Quintero was staunchly in agreement when he directed the play’s first revival off-Broadway in 1946. “O’Neill,” he said, “knew that life is repetitious, but he did not merely echo this fact; he employed repetition to reveal progressively more of his characters and situations.”

  A far more empathetic director than O’Neill ever had in his lifetime, Quintero noted about Iceman, “There is a different mood with each repetition, giving it a new meaning, orchestrated as music is orchestrated.” As an illustration, he cited the thematic line about “the kick” having gone out of “the booze,” which, he said, is repeated a half-dozen times and “moves from exposing the reality of a simple drink to the reality of a life lost.”

  Actually, there are at least seven variations of the line (within fourteen pages of Acts III and IV): “What’s wrong with this booze? There’s no kick in it”; “What did you do to the booze, Hickey? There’s no damned life left in it”; “I’ve lapped up a gallon, but it don’t hit me right”; “I can’t get drunk right”; “We all know you did something to take the life out of [the booze] . . . We can’t pass out”; “All we want is to pass out and get drunk . . .” ; “What did you do to this booze? . . . There’s no life or kick in it now.”

  In summation, said Quintero, “O’Neill was too dedicated an artist with too great a sense of purity to use anything, including repetition, as a meaningless mechanical device.”

  42

  Want to do this soon,” O’Neill promised himself on January 5, 1940, after rereading his outline for the play he had initially entitled “A Long Day’s Journey,” was now calling “The Long Day’s Journey,” and would ultimately call Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But after the high of completing Iceman and its subsequent letdown, he mistrusted his ability to keep his emotional balance.

  As he’d confided to Carlotta, he was feeling hounded by his “nervous mental condition.” Trying to do anything at all outside his ordinary routine, he told her—even something as trifling as writing a Christmas card to a friend—would hang over his head and fill him with dread.

  “The Long Day’s Journey” loomed as far more daunting than The Iceman Cometh. O’Neill foresaw in his Work Di
ary it would “have to be written in blood.”

  Not quite ready to shed that blood, he put off his confrontation with Journey and revisited his disjointed and tentatively abandoned cycle. He tinkered with it for a month, but by the beginning of February, overwhelmed by the burden of work it still demanded, he let it go; he was forced to acknowledge that he would never again be the same man he was before his long hospitalization three years earlier. He could hope for periods of remission that would allow him to work, but he knew he could not outrun his unappeasable deterioration. At fifty-two, he often felt like a very old man.

  “Even here, in the most healthy environment,” he wrote to Nathan, “I get sudden setbacks of complete exhaustion when I have to stay in bed for several days. (I’m enjoying one right now—am writing this in bed).”

  Among O’Neill’s collection of sometimes misdiagnosed ailments were the periodic seizures that ambushed him, seismically rattling his body. His pencil would sometimes fly from his trembling fingers while he was seated at his desk; at other times, when taking a step forward, his leg might unaccountably tug him backward. It was only his irrepressible need to write that kept him from surrender; he still had something to say to a world that he believed was sliding into a soulless slough.

  He felt sturdy enough on February 22 to make a few notes for the play he had finally renamed Long Day’s Journey Into Night; but, as he told his Work Diary in early March, he was “too low physically now for long stretch work.” And when, soon after, his blood pressure plummeted, he had no choice but to succumb to his ailing body.

  In mid-March, Dr. Dukes put him on a regimen of unspecified “new shots” that perked him up, enabling him to work “short shifts.”

  Early April found O’Neill momentarily in high spirits; he’d just read the screenplay that Dudley Nichols had adapted from S.S. Glencairn, and that he was calling The Long Voyage Home, after the best-known of the four early one-act sea plays that comprised S.S. Glencairn.

  O’Neill had sold the rights to Fox Films in February (for the welcome if modest fee of $20,000); the movie was to be directed by John Ford, whose outstanding credits included The Informer and Stagecoach.

  After inviting Ford and Nichols to Tao House to talk about the screenplay, O’Neill recorded in his Work Diary, “Like them both a lot.” Never a film enthusiast, and always (justifiably) dissatisfied with the movies made from his plays, O’Neill believed Nichols and Ford were on the right track.

  “I can see the grand picture it will be,” wrote O’Neill on April 27, thanking Nichols for sending the finished script for his approval. Facetiously, he offered “a new love interest angle which would bring box office queues ten miles long.” Referring to the sailor Yank, O’Neill suggested he go over the side of the ship down to the anchor.

  “And what do you think he finds caught on one of the flukes? A blonde! And by her panties! It seems she has fallen off a yacht—or something. . . . And then—but hell, what’s the use of talking to a coupla guys like you what ain’t got no practical theater sense. Go on and make a fine picture if you’re that nuts!”

  The film’s artistic, low-key style earned not only O’Neill’s warm approval but turned out to be the most successful of all the movie adaptations of his plays (doubtless aided by its provocative billboard, which announced, “The Love of Women in Their Eyes. . . . The Salt of the Sea in Their Blood!”). Its cast was headed by John Wayne (who had finally reached stardom a year earlier with Stagecoach), along with Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Mildred Natwick, and Ward Bond.

  After weathering a dislocated sacroiliac and one of his frequent respiratory ailments in early May, O’Neill was again thrown off stride, confessing he had “no ambition for work” on Long Day’s Journey. And when, on May 10, Hitler launched his attack on Western Europe, O’Neill groaned to his Work Diary, “To hell with trying work—it’s too insignificant in this madmen’s world.”

  Dr. Dukes called in a specialist from the Mayo Clinic when O’Neill failed to regain his strength. The two doctors advised a “stronger schedule of shots, one a day for 3 weeks, give it real tryout.” The shots (ingredients unspecified by O’Neill) had “a fine effect—feel much better than in years—blood pressure up,” noted O’Neill in mid-June; but, unable to take his mind off the war, he grew distraught over the plight of France, which he’d come to sentimentalize as the cradle of his romance with Carlotta.

  To Nathan, who had inquired after his health, O’Neill conceded he was feeling “pretty fit again—physically.” However, he wrote, “Mentally, spiritually, and creatively I feel like a dead clam—a nerve-ridden, dead clam, if you can imagine such a paradoxical bi-valve.”

  He said he’d been unable “to write a line for the past couple of months, or take the slightest interest in work,” adding he’d become especially demoralized after learning of the fall of Paris: “We may soon hear they are fighting for Tours, which is like an old home town to us, as you know. Perhaps Le Plessis will be blown to pieces! This war is hitting us where we belong, so to speak.”

  He went on to ask rhetorically if “an author who tries to remain an artist” should “forget history, forget philosophy, forget the last war and what it did to this country, forget that it was the stupid, double-crossing greed and fear of democratic politicians—(particularly the swinish British Tories whom the O’Neill in me loathes, anyway)—that conspired with Hitler to create Nazi Germany, forget all this and everything else a free intelligence should remember, because one loves France in spite of its politicians?

  “And then feel it’s one’s duty to devote one’s work to a hymn of hate? Well, although I hate Nazism as bitterly as anyone, I can never do that in my work.”

  • • •

  REGARDING HIS WORK, it was his problematic cycle, rather than Long Day’s Journey, that was now on his mind. “My main selfish worry is that now the Cycle recedes farther and farther away, until I cannot imagine myself ever going back to it. It isn’t that anything that’s happening or may happen can affect the main theme of the Cycle. Quite the reverse! It proves it!”

  He ended with a despairing cry of self-condemnation:

  It is I who am lacking, who has been affected to the point where I cannot believe the Cycle matters a damn, or could mean anything in any future I can foresee. And if I become convinced it is not in me to go on with it, I shall destroy all I have done so far, the completed plays and everything else down to the last note. If it cannot exist as the unique whole I conceived, then I don’t want it to exist at all.

  Finally, however, after he and Carlotta had wept over the French government’s acceptance, on June 22, of the collaborationist Vichy government, O’Neill recognized the futility of brooding about “the future of individual freedom.” Returning at last to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he reread his first draft of Act I.

  To Nathan, in mid-June, he had already confided a summary of the plot of this most personal of all his works; and now he found himself once again fully engaged. “Convinced I can make it one of my best,” he noted in his Work Diary on July 4.

  Long Day’s Journey, he’d told Nathan, was “the story of one day, 8 a.m. to midnight, in the life of a family of four—father, mother and two sons—back in 1912—a day in which things occur which evoke the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its interrelationships.

  “A deeply tragic play, but without any violent dramatic action. At the final curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget.”

  Very likely, O’Neill’s earlier hesitation in tackling the play had an unconscious cause beyond either his fluctuating health or his preoccupation with the war; after so pointedly leaving himself out of The Iceman Cometh, he was now, in his family play, dreading the torment of depicting hims
elf as one of the quartet of principals, and reliving his tragic entanglements with his dead parents and two dead brothers. Nonetheless, once he’d brought himself to begin, he worked on Long Day’s Journey almost nonstop for the next four months.

  He was briefly distracted in mid-July when he received an anxious letter from Lawrence Langner, who had somehow learned about the completed script of The Iceman Cometh. An embarrassed O’Neill replied that he’d been planning to let him read the script but had been waiting until they met, so that he could explain in person his reasons for withholding production until after the war.

  Carlotta was convinced the leak had come from one of O’Neill’s friends who had been sworn to secrecy; she was furious about the aggravation it was causing O’Neill, believing he had misguidedly brought the problem on himself.

  “My beloved is a magnificent dramatist but a child about the business of living,” she complained in her diary, her motherly forbearance momentarily deserting her. Recalling other instances of O’Neill’s perverse behavior, she let loose her long-suppressed resentment, sounding surprisingly like Mary Tyrone when baiting her husband:

  “Maybe it is the Irish peasant in him,” she scolded. “He can turn on the charm as he can turn on the sadistic cruelty—he recognizes no law, no God, and doesn’t know what ‘playing the game’ means—unfortunately he hurts himself more than others!”

  On their eleventh wedding anniversary that July, O’Neill wrote Carlotta a placatory note, putting (what for him) was an optimistic spin on their downwardly swirling life: “Time falters, civilization disintegrates, values perish, the old beauty becomes a gutter slut, the world explodes, the income tax rises, the years grow heavy on us and Blemie—But still! There is love that does not die, and there is your [inked silhouette of a pussycat] which is the most beautiful [silhouette of pussycat] in the world—so what the hell!”