By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “I will never write another play and there is no use kidding myself that I will,” he writes soon after to Aronberg.

  • • •

  ACTUALLY, THE CURTAIN went up on Act III of the O’Neills’ “Little Drama in the Home” a few months earlier—in late April—with a deceptively benign hiatus during which Carlotta and O’Neill—living on cautiously good terms—went shopping for the “permanent” home that must be secluded, yet within convenient reach of medical attention in Boston.

  It takes them only a month to find a “little gray house on tip of Marblehead Neck,” reads Carlotta’s diary entry on May 13. The notation is accompanied by one of her pussycat silhouettes.

  “Gene and I feel happy about having house,” she writes two days later. “New era!” This entry also is emblazoned with a pussycat; she and O’Neill appear to have convinced themselves they are blissfully at one. At month’s end they are discussing the rewriting of their wills to reaffirm that each is the other’s sole beneficiary. And on June 1, another pussycat blossoms in Carlotta’s diary.

  In spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both the O’Neills are still unwilling to confront the brutal fact that O’Neill’s writing days are at an end. They appear to be heedless of the fault line on which they teeter: If he can’t write, O’Neill will have no escape from Carlotta’s suffocating watchfulness; and without the escape into his insulated realm of creativity—a realm where Carlotta dares not intrude—surely he will not survive. And it follows that Carlotta—if no longer needed as muse and guardian of O’Neill’s creativity—will grow resentful and snappish in her constricted role of mere nurse and housekeeper.

  The O’Neills have given their new home no fancy designation, just plain Number Four, Point O’Rocks Lane—a two-story, six-room house perched on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, about twenty-five miles from Boston. Separated from Marblehead proper by a long causeway, the neck is an exclusive, affluent summer resort and a haven for yachtsmen, but mostly deserted during the winter. The O’Neill house is on the outermost curve of the neck.

  With workmen putting in overtime, the little gray house is expected to be livable by the first of August and, on June 30, in happy anticipation, O’Neill and Carlotta sit on their terrace overlooking the water. Entranced by the passing sailboats and circling gulls, they have decided to convert the terrace into a thirty-five-foot glass-enclosed porch. Europe lies in a straight line over the horizon. Cape Cod is to the south, Cape Ann to the north, and the treacherous waters of Marblehead harbor are guarded by a bit of O’Neill’s favorite scenery, an offshore lighthouse.

  “The house was so much on the water,” Carlotta once recalled, “that it was tied to rocks by steel cables and when the storms came up they came right up over our heads—we expected to go out to sea at any moment.”

  Between visits to supervise the work on their new home, O’Neill receives treatment for his mending arm; and Carlotta, who complains often of feeling ill—her eyes, her back, her arthritis, her nerves—visits various doctors. Both are routinely dosed (if not overdosed) with multiple drugs for their various chronic ailments, including some dubious sedatives to which they react badly.

  They both complain often of the hot, humid weather; but throughout June and July the pussycats continue their parade through the pages of Carlotta’s diary. On July 11, O’Neill presents Carlotta with the published version of The Iceman Cometh, lovingly inscribed:

  “To Carlotta, my love and my life—out of great sorrow, and pain, and misunderstanding, comes a new vision of deeper love and security and above all, serenity, to bind us ever closer in our old age. Sweetheart, all my love and all of me.”

  The handwriting is cramped but has barely a trace of tremor. It has shrunk a week later when, on their wedding anniversary, he writes Carlotta a note accompanying his gift of a volume of Christina Rossetti’s poetry.

  “Nineteen years ago in Paris,” his note begins, “each with knees knocking together, you said ‘Oui’ and I said ‘Oui,’ not boldly but with frightened happiness.” Now, he goes on, with “chaos looming over the world, I want to say to you—‘You are my love—forever my love, Sweetheart!’”

  The one thing Carlotta hopes she can count on is that O’Neill has sworn off drinking forever. The consequence, however, is an overdependence on his prescriptive “nerve” medications.

  In addition to not drinking, he promises to do his “utmost” to banish all “selfishness or thoughtlessness” that could possibly hurt her; he wishes only to make her happy, “for your happiness is my happiness!” His handwriting is now so minuscule as to be barely legible and this time there is a noticeable tremor in the date and in the signatory “Gene.”

  Writing (presumably behind Carlotta’s back) to Saxe Commins in late July, O’Neill describes their “good luck” in finding the Marblehead house “right on the ocean.” It is “a tiny house,” he writes, “with little rooms, the upstairs ones with sloping eaves—built in 1880.” It reminds him, he says, of the first home his father bought in New London when he was “a kid.” Carlotta, he confides, has paid for the house “out of her reserve fund.” (The total cost of the house, which he does not reveal to Commins, is Carlotta’s initial $48,000, supplemented by an additional $25,000 of O’Neill’s.)

  The house requires considerable modernizing and insulating to make it a livable year-round home. “Our last,” continues O’Neill in his letter to Commins. “Everything to cut down overhead and make it a cinch to run with just a cook.” The aim, he emphasizes, is to “simplify living and gain as much security for our old age as is possible.” In his optimism (his hopeless hope, his pipe dream), O’Neill has decreed that one of the four small upstairs rooms adjoining his bedroom be furnished as a study.

  He rejoices in again having “some roots—of seaweed—with my feet in a New London sea. It is like coming home, in a way, and I feel happier than in many years.” He adds that both his and Carlotta’s health has improved (since New York), although his arm is not expected to be fully mended for another six months.

  • • •

  O’NEILL AND CARLOTTA are amid preparations for their move to Marblehead when, on August 13, they are rattled by a phone call from Winfield Aronberg; Shane has been arrested for drug possession.

  Aronberg arranges for him to plead guilty and he receives a two-year suspended sentence on condition he enter the federal hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, for treatment. The fact that Shane will avoid jail does not mollify Carlotta. “Gene does not in any way deserve this last heartache,” she deplores to her diary.

  The news is enough to put a crack in the thin veneer of O’Neill and Carlotta’s tentative compatibility; indeed, a few days later it sends O’Neill into a paranoiac spin and he accuses her of “concealing” or “destroying” a letter to him from Aronberg. Although the letter turns up in the afternoon, Carlotta keens, “A day of nerves, tears & collapse—All my joy & hope flies out the window. I don’t fancy ‘accusations’ beginning again—an unhealthy sign.”

  A week later, O’Neill, sunk in gloom, suffers (in Carlotta’s words) “the worst attack of Parkinson’s I have ever seen. His whole body needs extra sedatives . . . watch him all night.”

  On September 12, O’Neill instructs Aronberg to make it clear to Shane “that he cannot ever expect money from me.” Shane has “his interest in Spithead,” writes O’Neill, and should appeal to his mother for financial help. Then, crying poor (like his father), O’Neill says that after paying for his new home he is so broke that “we can’t even afford a car!” O’Neill never saw Shane again.

  Carlotta’s diary for the troubled year of 1948 breaks off with a final entry on September 14; on that date, she and a temporary housekeeper move into the “little house” for a final inspection and to unpack. O’Neill arrives to occupy his new home on the following day.

  • • •

  O’NEILL ANSWERS A LETTER from Dudle
y Nichols in early December, two months after settling in: “This is our home—our last since we can never afford to have another, or stand the strain of moving—the terrible sheer strain of it.” The “old Western Ocean” is crashing on the rocks beneath his study window, he writes. “There is peace here for me, and for Carlotta too.”

  When Sophus and Eline Winther visit early in 1949, O’Neill shows them the second-floor study adjoining his bedroom; it is neatly set up with notebooks, paper, and pencils. “It’s a hell of a thing,” O’Neill confides, “to want to write, to have everything but control of the hands.”

  It was “the saddest moment of all the years I had known O’Neill,” recalled Winther.

  The Winthers, at O’Neill’s urging, check into a nearby hotel so as to prolong their visit to several days. Winther described an evening in Marblehead, sitting on the porch “with the full moon hanging in a faint mist,” when O’Neill tells him his life “has come full circle.” Suddenly, O’Neill looks up and says, “Goodbye Old Moon. Fall out of the sky. I don’t need you anymore.”

  As always, both Winther and O’Neill have a lot to say; every now and then, after deploring a bygone or recent event, one or the other facetiously quotes Ephraim Cabot from Desire Under the Elms: “God’s hard, not easy”; it’s a catch phrase they adopted five years earlier in San Francisco. On the night of Sophus and Eline’s last visit, when O’Neill once again quotes that line, Winther thinks it has “an ominous ring.”

  As they sit on the porch, O’Neill points: “Straight across the Atlantic, right over there, is Ireland,” he says, adding, “My critics have never recognized how much my work is indebted to the Irish in me.” O’Neill, observed Winther, “seemed to be filled with a longing for his ancestors.”

  • • •

  AT THE END OF 1949, O’Neill gives Eugene Jr. a full report of his deteriorating condition. His legs are now so badly affected, it takes all his willpower to walk without weaving about. “I’ve been a guinea pig for several of the new concoctions which are alleged to help some people [with Parkinson’s] but all they do is make me much sicker.”

  He tells Eugene that on his second day of the most recent medication, he passed into “a strange state of benumbed sickliness” he can’t describe; on the third day, his “eyes looked like a maniac’s, bright as polished ebony encased in reddish eyeballs”; he could hardly see and was “so sick and feeble” he had to abandon the “cure,” and swore his “guinea pig days were over for good!”

  His one hope, he says, is that a lot of research is being done to determine whether all tremors are in fact Parkinsonian and, ipso facto, incurable.

  O’Neill’s tremor has continued to plague him, he informs George Jean Nathan some months later. “As for writing, that is out of the question. It is not only a matter of hand, but of mind—I just feel there is nothing more I want to say.”

  O’Neill sits in his study or on his glassed-in porch and broods, staring for hours out to sea through a pair of powerful binoculars. He reads desultorily, dipping most often into Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

  With work no longer filling his life, and love no longer a reliable palliative (much as he tries to persuade himself to the contrary), O’Neill is pathetically happy to see such friends as are still persona grata to Carlotta; in addition to the Winthers, they include the Crouses, Charles O’Brien Kennedy, Bobby Jones, Dudley Nichols, Macgowan, and Mai-mai Sze.

  Charles Kennedy recalls O’Neill’s tremulous welcome when he visits, bringing tomatoes picked from his sister’s garden in the nearby Massachusetts town of Waltham. The two men sit on the porch in companionable silence, as O’Neill, with trembling hands, removes each tomato from its individual paper bag, then peels away its cellophane wrapping, studying it in silent appreciation. Kennedy can’t help but be touched by his friend’s pleasure and saddened by his isolation.

  On another visit, he and O’Neill sit looking out at the boats in the harbor. “It was a beautiful scene, and I knew, in his heart, Gene would have liked to be on one of those boats. He said very little, but once in a while he’d drop a word, and the longing was evident. I would never want to repeat those heartbreaking visits.”

  Also warmly welcomed by O’Neill, and distressed by his barren existence, is a local doctor, Frederic B. Mayo, who is called in frequently to treat his patient for colds and other minor ailments.

  Mayo is a tall, crisp-mannered New Englander, with a long-legged stride and a hesitant, boyish smile. His initial reaction to O’Neill’s situation is shock at the famous writer’s lack of contact with the outside world. Mayo knows little of O’Neill’s personal background, but falls quickly under the spell of his charm.

  Like Dr. Shirley Fisk in New York, Mayo responds to O’Neill’s seeming need to be rescued from his isolated life, and from Carlotta’s over-protectiveness. He makes several efforts to rouse O’Neill from the apparent apathy in which he is immersed; he can’t bring himself to accept O’Neill’s sedentary resignation to his illness. But his well-meant attempts to get his patient out of the house for a change of scene are aborted.

  At one point, he invites O’Neill for an outing on his family’s yacht, which O’Neill accepts with delight; Carlotta dissuades her husband, however, probably after learning that Mayo’s in-laws will be aboard and worrying O’Neill will find that stressful.

  Dr. Mayo resigns himself to personally supplying O’Neill with the companionship he seems to crave. At O’Neill’s invitation, he often extends his professional visits to include an hour or more of talk, or a session of listening to jazz, of which Mayo himself is fond.

  Once, he brings his patient a newly issued Louis Armstrong record and O’Neill, after listening appreciatively but not uncritically, says, “Louis can’t hit that high C any more.” Mayo notes that Carlotta has looked on sullenly and is clearly irritated by the loud music that reverberates throughout the small house, and from which she cannot escape, as she could in Tao House.

  Mayo, of course, is unaware that O’Neill initially had agreed with Carlotta that the Marblehead house was too confined to accommodate either the player piano, Rosie, or his vast record collection; in June 1948, when listing the items they wished to have with them in Marblehead, Carlotta had noted, “Gene doesn’t want gramophone or records sent for a year or so, if ever” and, a week later, “Gene’s gramophone & records to be stored.”

  To Carlotta’s displeasure, O’Neill changed his mind. Annoyed with him though she might be, she seldom leaves O’Neill’s side, for his food has to be cut, his cigarettes lit, and many other homely chores managed for him.

  She doesn’t even let him sleep unsupervised. Her bedroom is directly across a narrow hall from his; at night, she always keeps her door open and makes sure his bedroom door is open too, so she can keep an eye on him from her bed.

  Carlotta nurses O’Neill tenaciously and, although she sometimes complains of the grueling job in letters to friends, she refuses to engage anyone to help. They have in their employ a discreet Japanese houseman Carlotta calls “Saki,” who lives in, and a cook, Doris Manning, who comes in daily from the nearby town of Salem to prepare and serve their meals.

  There are occasional rumors in the press about O’Neill’s having recovered from Parkinson’s and being at work on a new play, and, as a result, he has been receiving mail from dozens of afflicted persons asking him to share the secret of his successful recovery. Distressed at being the unwitting source of false hope, he instructs Carlotta to make a formal statement about his health to the press at the end of 1949.

  “He hasn’t worked for three years—and God only knows if he ever will be able to,” she tells The New York Times. “It’s terrible. It gets worse. The hands tremble and then the feet.” Explaining that O’Neill is obliged to live in seclusion, rarely seeing anyone but herself and a servant, she adds, “It makes him nervous to have someone in the house.”

  Added to O’Neill�
��s woes are the nasty attacks on his reputation being launched by literary detractors both at home and abroad.

  “Among the untragic tragedians the most spectacular is Eugene O’Neill,” jeers the prominent American critic Eric Bentley in his book on modern drama published in 1946. “At everything in the theatre except being tragic and being comic he is a success . . . the good clean fun of a Hitchcock movie is better.”

  In 1962, Bentley, after reading his quoted comment in the just-published biography O’Neill, wrote to the authors, protesting that he was “anti-O’Neill” only “in part” and only “sometimes”; he pointed out that his preproduction review of The Iceman Cometh in The Atlantic Monthly in 1946 “was not anti, nor (on the whole)” was his “brief survey of O’Neill’s career” in a recently published book, Major Writers of America, which, Bentley regretted, “came out too late to be of any use to you.”

  The prolific and acerbic Mary McCarthy, after seeing The Iceman Cometh, has scorned O’Neill’s body of work as “maudlin,” “crude,” and, of course, “repetitious.”

  She criticizes him for knowing nothing about how real drunkards behave—he who is a walking encyclopedia of firsthand knowledge of drunks; she labels him a playwright who cannot write. (Like most of the critics, she did not discern that the production was clumsily directed and badly acted. And, like Bentley, she later somewhat softened her overall view of O’Neill’s work.)

  From London’s The Times Literary Supplement in April 1948 comes an attack so scathing the New York newspapers feel obliged to report on it.

  “Mr. O’Neill is as puritanical as Mr. [G. B.] Shaw, but his puritanism, unlike Mr. Shaw’s, unlike Milton’s, unlike Andrew Marvell’s, has no grace or geniality,” writes the anonymous critic for the most important of Britain’s literary publications. O’Neill’s characters, he goes on, are “ineffectual egoists” and his stage tricks are “the sort of stuff that might be written by an earnest sophomore.”