By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  And there is more, much more.

  O’Neill takes what consolation he can from Brooks Atkinson’s lengthy response in The New York Times on April 25, 1948. Atkinson, while vigorously defending O’Neill and mocking the anonymous English critic, does not hesitate to point out O’Neill’s weaknesses, along with his great strengths.

  “The Literary Supplement . . . has gone to some scholarly pains to prove that Eugene O’Neill is humbug,” Atkinson begins, citing the critic’s disparagement of O’Neill as “not equal to Shakespeare or Aeschylus” and inferior to Somerset Maugham.

  “Even for a critic [these] animadversions are excessively obtuse and prejudiced,” writes Atkinson. Himself believing that The Hairy Ape is “one of the most powerful plays in the language,” Atkinson scorns the English critic’s disparagement of it as “the sort of stuff that might be written by an earnest sophomore who has listened too long to professors of dramatic literature at chautauquas in the Rocky Mountains.

  “Yes, that’s what he says,” chaffs Atkinson. “It’s there in plain print on fairly good paper.”

  Conceding the futility of trying to convince “the Cato of the Literary Supplement” to like O’Neill, Atkinson backs into what will ultimately be a resounding tribute, but first he concedes, “As a prose stylist he has always been curiously inadequate. He cannot wrap his singing robes about him, like Milton.” Atkinson allows that “many Americans do not like him at all” and that “even his best friends do not conceive of him as perfect.”

  Soon, though, Atkinson can’t help but submit to the power of O’Neill’s genius, which, he writes, lies in “the raw boldness and the elemental strength of his attack upon outworn concepts of destiny.” He is “a moral writer,” who “thinks the spiritual glories of America have been sold out for materialistic gains. . . .

  “He came into our theater at a time when most plays were aimless, post-prandial charades. A pioneer in method, he broke a number of the old molds, shook up the drama as well as audiences and helped to transform the theater into an art seriously related to life. . . .

  “The peevish article in The Times Literary Supplement overlooks the one thing in O’Neill that is inescapable: the passionate depth and vitality of his convictions. Nothing said about him is worth the paper it is printed on unless it recognizes the vitality he has brought into the theater. Nobody is so impervious to vitality as a writer who has none.”

  Like Atkinson, other critics at home and abroad believe they are evaluating the final and complete O’Neill. They know he is too ill to write another play and they think they have a handle on his body of work. But, of course, they are all, including Atkinson, as yet unaware of the global reach of this unpredictable genius.

  The fact is that in 1948, only The Iceman Cometh, among O’Neill’s four final plays, has even had a Broadway production—and Iceman will not be recognized as a masterwork until it is brilliantly revived off-Broadway nearly a decade after O’Neill’s death.

  As for the other three plays, the initial production of A Moon for the Misbegotten was aborted (at O’Neill’s own request) before any but a minuscule provincial audience had a glimpse of it; and A Touch of the Poet was withheld from production, due to O’Neill’s failing health. (Moon will not receive its iconic production until 1974, when Quintero directs it with Robards playing the dying Jamie Tyrone opposite Colleen Dewhurst as the earth mother Josie Hogan. And A Touch of the Poet, first staged on Broadway in 1958, as of this writing has still not received its definitive production.)

  But most important, virtually no one at this time knows of the existence of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

  Even without being able to refer to these defining works, Atkinson, in his 1946 tribute, helps somewhat to reaffirm O’Neill’s stature, as does a revival of the S.S. Glencairn plays at New York’s City Center on June 12, 1948. Lawrence Langner suggests to O’Neill that a production of A Touch of the Poet or a new attempt to present A Moon for the Misbegotten would be a healthy thing both for the theater and for O’Neill’s reputation. But O’Neill cannot make the effort. “I don’t believe I could live through a production,” he tells Langner.

  By the winter of 1949, the O’Neills’ snug home on Point O’Rocks Lane has become a virtual prison. Marblehead Neck, bustling during late spring and summer, is something less than cheerful during late fall and winter, when most of the homes are closed and the neck is a desolate landscape of shuttered windows and wind-torn naked trees. The O’Neills rarely venture beyond their own property. When they do, it is to Boston to consult specialists and, once in a very great while, to attend a movie in Salem; on those occasions, they are driven by Saki (in his own car).

  There is not the slightest chance that O’Neill will accept Arthur Miller’s cordial and respectful invitation (in a letter on February 22, 1949) to attend a performance of his new play, Death of a Salesman, which opened to great acclaim on February 10. Miller has recently learned from Kenneth Macgowan that O’Neill has questioned him about the structure of Salesman. Macgowan has also told Miller of O’Neill’s crippling physical condition.

  As Miller recalled, he issued his invitation as “probably more a salute than anything else,” and also “as a sort of refusal to recognize the reality.”

  In his letter, Miller wrote, “I have long wished to speak with you and I take this occasion to ask whether we might get together for an afternoon or an evening. Will you let me know if and when you could see the play and whether a meeting is possible at this time.” Miller had been “deeply affected” by The Iceman Cometh despite, as he later wrote, “that first awful production.”

  “I can’t say that O’Neill’s work was a direct influence on me,” Miller reflected some years after O’Neill’s death.

  It was his personality and relation to theater that always moved me. His personality and his uncompromised dedication to his art. Dimly as I understood everything in those days, I did realize that to him the theater was a life’s dedication despite all its silliness and trivialities.

  O’Neill ennobled theater; in his hands playwriting was a vocation almost in the religious connotation of the word—an engagement in the holy search for some ultimate order in the chaos of existence. O’Neill, the most troubled of men, did triumph in one sense at least—he transformed his most personal spiritual dilemmas into roles for actors in plays that an audience bound by the illusions of materialism could take to heart.

  He opened the door to the invisible dimensions of life. He made it seem possible for others as well to fight the Broadway mountain and survive with an armful of works that told the tale. In that particular his example was inspiring.

  O’Neill’s reply to Miller (delayed because it had been forwarded from two addresses in New York) was equally cordial; but, as Miller expected, his invitation was declined. O’Neill expressed himself as “deeply grateful” for Miller’s “expression of esteem” for his work in the theater.

  “There is nothing I would like better than to have a long talk with you,” O’Neill went on, “or to accept your kind invitation to see Death of a Salesman. But I am afraid both are impossible now. I am really too sick to go anywhere. My tremor is now so bad it makes me unfit for practically everything. I tell you this because I want you to understand.

  “But I don’t mean that the chance of the talk is entirely off. I hope sometime you will have to come to Boston, and then we can arrange for you to come out here.” He added that he had an order in for Death of a Salesman “as soon as the book appears,” and he would surely be able to add his “cheers to all the others.” The two never did meet.

  • • •

  WITH HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT to Carlotta in 1949, O’Neill writes, in a shaky hand: “To ‘Mama’—and still as over all the years, ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘Darling’ and ‘Beloved Wife’ and ‘Friend,’ too!—in these days of sickness and despair.”

  Carlotta’s own health is consistently poor
. The constant strain of caring for her husband is sapping her strength. She and O’Neill are both “in very low spirits,” she writes to his boyhood friend Joseph McCarthy in the spring of 1950.

  She doesn’t mention that O’Neill speaks of being once again tempted to take that long swim into the moon’s wake, nor does she tell McCarthy that he has recently joined the Euthanasia Society of America. A pamphlet issued in 1949 bears O’Neill’s name as a member of the society’s American Advisory Council (along with, among others, Max Eastman, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, and Robert Sherwood).

  The pamphlet lists some “Typical Tragedies,” in which a wife or husband gave or attempted to give the gift of annihilation to a suffering spouse. (Ironically, mercy killing is one of the few methods of death-dealing O’Neill has never got around to in a play.)

  • • •

  ONE OF CARLOTTA’S self-imposed duties is shielding her husband from telephone calls; rarely if ever has he answered the phone in any of their homes, and never in Marblehead.

  And so, late in the afternoon of September 25, 1950 (two years since moving into the little house at Point O’Rocks Lane), he sits by silently when Carlotta picks up the ringing phone in their living room.

  It is Aronberg on the line; he says (according to an account by Saxe Commins published many years later), “Hello, Carlotta. This is Bill Aronberg. I have terrible news for you. Try to be brave and break this gently to Gene. Young Gene has just committed suicide.”

  Carlotta answers, according to Commins’s account, “How dare you invade our privacy?” and slams the receiver down. “That,” writes Commins, “was the entire conversation,” as Aronberg reported it to him in a voice “blazing with anger.”

  Carlotta gives a very different account:

  “Gene was sitting in a chair right across from me. The lawyer told me, ‘Eugene has killed himself.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘I don’t believe it,’ but he repeated, ‘Well, I’m sure,’ and this and that. Well, I hung up the phone and you can imagine what I felt like, and I sat down, Gene watching me with those black eyes of his.”

  “Well, come out with it, what is it?” O’Neill demanded.

  “Eugene is ill, very ill,” Carlotta replied.

  “When did he die?” asks O’Neill.

  “I don’t know, the lawyer didn’t give me the exact time,” said Carlotta.

  “Come on, let’s talk sense,” said O’Neill. “Is he dead? He surely wouldn’t ring you up if he wasn’t.”

  Then, said Carlotta, O’Neill “lapsed into silence and he never mentioned Eugene again.”

  Whatever the truth of how the message was delivered and received, O’Neill must have known that he had wounded his son when he allowed Carlotta to keep him at a distance. O’Neill’s last words to Eugene, written seven months earlier, in answer to a letter from him, had been all but a total rejection.

  “No, I don’t think the idea of dropping in here this summer is good. In fact, it’s bad.” O’Neill suggested instead that they meet in the adjoining town of Salem, where he made periodic visits for medical treatment—“arranging a meeting beforehand,” presumably at a time when he would be unaccompanied by Carlotta. (The letter was typewritten, doubtless by Carlotta; no such meeting took place.)

  • • •

  EUGENE JR. HAD bought a small house on acreage adjoining the property of his friend Frank Meyer, in the bohemian colony of Woodstock in upstate New York. “He loved the outdoors and enjoyed chopping wood,” recalled Meyer. “He told me his father had co-signed a bank loan for the payment on the property. He also told me soon after his father left New York for Boston, that he didn’t think he’d be seeing him any more. His relationship with Carlotta had deteriorated, he said.”

  Eugene told Meyer that during a bedside visit at Doctors Hospital in New York, his father had told him, “I have to go back to her; I can’t live without her.” Eugene had interpreted this as a farewell. He inferred his father was telling him Carlotta had given him a choice between his son and herself, and his choosing Carlotta meant Eugene’s exclusion in the future.

  It had been Eugene’s routine to spend several days a week in New York City in scattered teaching jobs, earning barely enough to support himself. He and his lover, Ruth Lander, lived together frugally, and not in tranquillity; Eugene was unfaithful to her and occasionally struck her.

  “His hands often trembled, especially when he was shaving the side of his face and trimming his beard and mustache,” Ruth recalled. “His tremor was worst in the morning. He thought he was getting Parkinson’s like his father. He told me that he knew he needed a psychiatrist, but that, as he put it, the daddy of them all—the only one who could have understood him—was dead.

  “One morning, he said to me, ‘As of today, I can commit suicide any time.’ He explained he had just gotten a special clause written into his life insurance policy. He told me he had tried to kill himself once, in New Haven.”

  Ruth walked out on Eugene in the summer of 1949. According to Meyer, the incident set Eugene off on a year-long orgy. “He had eighteen girls during that period,” Meyer recalled. “He also started drinking heavily, more than I realized at first—although I never saw him really drunk.”

  By the summer of 1950, Eugene, who was now forty, persuaded himself he truly loved Ruth. He asked her to marry him, and that September she agreed. “He told me we’d have a baby, and I could leave my hair blond, although he preferred me as a brunette,” Ruth said.

  Eugene conveyed the good news to Meyer. “I told Gene to stop worrying about women and get back to serious work,” Meyer recalled. “Gene said he had to have someone to work for. I told him he had himself to work for and asked him if he couldn’t make the effort to get back on the right track.” Eugene answered, “I’ve slipped too far. I can’t get back.”

  The reconciliation with Ruth did not last long.

  “I had told Gene I’d marry him, after he’d pounded me about it for three hours,” Ruth said. “I was slightly hysterical by the time I said yes. But when I went back to his house with him, later, I told him I couldn’t go through with it. I felt sorry for him. He had been rejected by everyone—first by his father, then Yale, then his father again, then me—but I couldn’t stay with him. There was insanity in his eyes.”

  Late on Saturday night, September 23, a common friend of Eugene and Meyer’s telephoned Meyer to tell him that Eugene had been seen in various bars around town talking of Ruth’s desertion and declaring he was going to commit suicide.

  “I didn’t think Gene would kill himself over Ruth,” Meyer said, “but I knew he was capable of suicide. We’d discussed the subject many times and we were thoroughly agreed that in a case where things became intolerable for a person he should kill himself. Both of us were against the Christian viewpoint of suicide being sinful.”

  Meyer and his wife, Elsie, went in search of Eugene, but failed to find him in any of the bars or in his home. “I even searched his land, to see if he’d tried to hang himself from a tree,” Meyer said. Finally, early on Sunday morning, the Meyers gave up their search and went to sleep.

  Eugene telephoned them late Sunday morning. Meyer and his wife drove down the road a quarter of a mile to visit him at his house.

  “He looked beat,” Meyer said. “I didn’t want him to be alone and asked him to come to us for dinner. He didn’t want to, at first, but he finally said he’d drive over in a little while.

  “At dinner we talked about our worry of the night before. Elsie told Gene he shouldn’t speak of suicide, and added, ‘Of course, you’ll never kill yourself.’ I said I realized now I had been foolish to worry, that I should have known he would never commit suicide impulsively, but would take time to plan it properly.”

  Then Eugene, in perfect seriousness, told the Meyers that he had been thinking, the night before, of using the chain that hung acr
oss a private lane adjoining his and the Meyers’ property to hang himself. “I thought you’d plan something more thorough than that,” said Meyer uneasily.

  Eugene left the Meyers’ house at eleven. He’d had a few drinks before dinner and some beer after. He seemed relaxed, but he was unusually quiet and his face was gray.

  “I went to bed at three but couldn’t sleep,” said Meyer.

  Around 3:30, Gene came back. He said he’d slept, but was wide awake now and wanted a drink; he had no liquor in his house. I had half a bottle of bourbon, and each of us had two stiff drinks. We sat talking for about two hours, mostly reminiscing.

  He mentioned at one point that perhaps he had been wrong about suicide, that maybe the Christian viewpoint was the right one, after all. Elsie was in bed in the adjoining room and she didn’t get up, but she and Gene exchanged a few words through the door. He told her, “I’m a man of iron if I come through this.”

  He had a teaching engagement in New York later that day—it was now 5 a.m. Monday—so he decided to get a few hours of sleep on my couch. He asked me to leave the bottle where he could find it, and I did. There wasn’t enough left in it to make him drunk.

  I went to sleep, and when I got up at eleven, Gene was gone and so was the bottle. I guessed he had followed his usual routine of driving to Poughkeepsie, from where he would take the train to New York.

  An hour later, Ruth telephoned Elsie Meyer.

  “She said Gene had given her permission, before she left, to go back to his house and pick up her clothes,” Elsie recalled, “but she claimed she was afraid to go alone, because she couldn’t be certain Gene had gone to New York, and if he was home he might hit her. I was positive Gene was in New York, but I said I’d pick her up and go with her to the house.”

  Elsie put her five-year-old son, John, into the car, and started out. She had to pass Eugene’s house to fetch Ruth and was startled to see his jeep parked in the driveway. He must have felt ill and canceled his teaching appointment, she thought. She parked, told her child to wait in the car, and knocked at the front door.