By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

At his feet lay a large white dog. Part of a Long Story.

  while she and O’Neill continued on to the station. Ibid.

  “I could only stay a few minutes for I knew Gene would be restless at home,” Agnes wrote in her memoir, Ibid.

  His second reaction was “silence.” Ibid.

  pregnancy was due to an episode of heedless passion fueled by alcohol. Judging by some expository dialogue EO later slipped into Strange Interlude, that might be what he came to believe. Except for the dialect, this could be Agnes talking: “We’d swore we’d never have children, we never forgot to be careful for two whole years. Then one night we’d both gone to a dance, we’d both had a little punch to drink, just enough—to forget—driving home in the moonlight—that moonlight!—such little things at the back of big things!” That is Nina Leeds’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, explaining the unwanted birth of her son Sam (not, in her case, because she and her husband chose to be childless, but because of a family history of insanity).

  “Sphinxes muffled in their yellow robes with paws deep in the sea.” “Eugene O’Neill,” by Pierre Loving, The Bookman, Aug. 1921.

  “How I love to reveal my nakedness to the sun on solitary beaches!” The ms. of the complete poem is at Beinecke. It continues: “How I love to play unconsciously, dancing like another heat-wave to its own rhythm, freed from the fretting, lukewarm glance of yielding kinship of sand which molds my own image, to relax and drown in my silent depths deep in the heart of steadfast, simple tides flowing from eternity to eternity as the cloud shadows march across the world from mystery to mystery.”

  (Even with her mother’s supervision, Agnes forgot to buy a crib.) Part of a Long Story.

  and not a little impressed that he was the son of a famous actor. A/BG interviews with KJP.

  believing, as did her mother, that O’Neill wanted to marry her. Ibid.

  they were secretly married in Hoboken Trinity Church in New Jersey. A/BG interviews with KJP, & Division of Vital Statistics & Administration, NJ State Dept. of Health; see LWMC.

  “We could never have made a go of it,” she subsequently conceded. A/BG interview with KJP.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  he’d had “a sudden clear vision of the day at the Happy Home when Shane was born, of my holding your hand, remember?” 4/8/28, Harvard, SL.

  “Oceans of love to Agnes, baby, and the biggest baby of the three You.” dated “Sunday,” probably 11/1/19, Yale.

  an aging woman, “who can taunt with a biting cruelty, as if suddenly poisoned by an alien demon.” O’Neill’s notes, Beinecke.

  “His voice already carries further than the Old Man’s.” 11/1/19, Princeton.

  O’Neill handed over Exorcism for production on March 26, 1920. A/BG interview with JL.

  he was served with the divorce papers. details of the divorce proceedings, from Westchester County Archives—Supreme Court, White Plains, NY, File #1673 (1912), County Clerk’s office.

  production had opened in New Orleans on January 22. It was reviewed 1/23/12 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

  told a writer researching his father’s career many years later. letter, 1/15/40, to Lawrence Estavan, of the Writers’ Program of the WPA in Northern California, published in San Francisco Theater Research, Vol. 20, James O’Neill (1942).

  Eugene slunk back to Jimmy the Priest’s. A/BG interviews with NW, RC, & JMcC, among others, to whom O’Neill told versions of this story.

  He was, in his own words, “sick in body, brain and soul.” O’Neill’s autobiographical short story, “Tomorrow.”

  he had changed his mind about wanting to die A/BG interview with LB.

  a gesture aimed largely at his father. Among the differing versions of this story was the one published in George Jean Nathan’s The Intimate Notebooks (Knopf, NY, 1932). In Nathan’s version an unconscious O’Neill was sped by ambulance to Bellevue, worked over by two interns, and revived three hours later. Nathan ended the story with Eugene’s friends rushing to James O’Neill and returning four hours later with part of the $50 they had received from him for medical expenses; they divided what was left with O’Neill.

  O’Neill and his brother were fond of quoting EO to AB, 11/30?/19, Harvard, SL.

  more substantial and sympathetic woman than the self-portrait she inadvertently draws in her memoir. Most of the letters written by EO to AB did not see print until 2000. Her memoir does make use of information gleaned from some of O’Neill’s letters, which she kept despite his demand that she return them to him. O’Neill’s own letters were not published collectively until 1988 (Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer) although A/BG managed to gather many of them in time to quote from or paraphrase them for their previous biography, O’Neill (Harper & Bros., NY, 1962).

  “The feeling of emptiness you speak of nearly drove me crazy this afternoon—before I got your letter.” 12/1?/19, Harvard, “Wind.”

  he bought a hat and shoes. EO to AB, 12/2/19, Harvard, SL.

  planned to spend the rest of his time in the city “right under their wing.” letter, 12/1/19, Harvard, SL.

  assured her he was being “a good, good boy.” Ibid.

  “Believe me, Prohibition is very much of a fact.” letter, 12/2/1919, Harvard, SL.

  misdeeds that she actually “knew were not true,” and asked his forgiveness. letter, AB to EO, Tuesday, 12/2/19, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “There was just enough kick in the wine to make everyone feel jovial and that’s all,” he reported to Agnes. Tuesday a.m., 12/2?/19, Harvard, SL.

  Ruth Atkins, the girl both brothers fancy. Lesser roles in Beyond were filled by Louise Closser Hale, Mary Jeffery, and George Rodell of the cast of For the Defense.

  Beyond, she wrote him, “is nearer to me, somehow, than anything you have done.” 1/14/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I get a great deal of pleasure and excitement myself out of imagining you at all your interviews and appointments.” 1/15/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “Good advice, maybe,” wailed O’Neill to Agnes, “but how the hell can I keep it at this stage of the game?” letter to AB, 1/14/20, Harvard, SL.

  “However, I feel so keyed up I could work 24 hours a day without eating, I think.” 1/15/20, Harvard, SL.

  “I knew I was going to like you from the first moment we met,” he told Bennett. letter, EO to AB, 1/17/20, Harvard, SL (misdated 1919).

  “We were both dead.” Ibid.

  he went to bed and slept all day. Ibid.

  “Everyone I’m associated with does—Tyler, Williams, Bennett . . . and they’d simply think me a prig if I didn’t.” Ibid.

  deliberately put himself “in the way of this happening.” 1/21/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  that slave “has something actuating him that they can never understand.” 1/22/20, Harvard, SL.

  “You always have kicked me when I was down—do you realize that?—you did not mean to, of course, but you always have.” 1/25/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I tried my best, and I’m no director, God knows, and whether my talking will result in any improvement I don’t know.” 1/27/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I have a dreadful feeling that when the inevitable success does come there will be something to spoil it all for us.” 1/31/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “To my eye they are the last word in everything they shouldn’t be.” 2/2/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  insisted he sit beside him in the orchestra. EO to AB, 2/4/20, Harvard, SL.

  watched as his father, in his box, “wept his eyes out.” EO told this to numerous friends and later to CM.

  “hell,” he reported to Agnes the following day. 2/4/20, Harvard, SL.

  “What are you trying to do—send them home to commit suicide?” The New Yorker, Hamilton Basso, Profiles, Part I, 2/28/48.
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  “All the same, I think he was pleased.” Ibid.

  play was “a flivver” artistically and “every other way.” letter, EO to AB, 2/4/20, Harvard, SL.

  “No one was more surprised than was I when I saw the morning papers and came to the conclusion that the sad expressions on the playgoers’ faces were caused by their feeling the tragedy I had written.” NY Tribune, Philip Mindil, 2/22/20.

  “Whatever it may or may not do in a financial way, it has done all I ever expected of it already—and more.” letter, 2/4/20, SL.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Oh, My Own, My Darling Agnes, My Own Little Wife, I want you, and need you, and love you so!” 2/4/20, Harvard, SL.

  “You are my life!” Ibid.

  “I’m in such a funny, vibrating physical state, it almost frightens me.” 2/2/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  knew it would quickly fade and become, as she put it, “an empty bauble.” 2/6/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I want no other religion, no other belief, it is all there in you—in us.” 2/7/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  any chances, “for my sake, and poor Shane’s, for I swear if anything happens to you I will not live in this world without you—I simply couldn’t.” 2/11/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  make their home “the most beautiful place in this world—in a spiritual sense.” Ibid.

  “Success has meant to me the meaningless futility I always knew it would—only more so.” 2/12/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “It would all be so simple, if Shane were not in our midst, or if you only had him weaned.” 2/15/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “It’s all so impossible.” 2/16/20, Harvard, SL.

  “I’m really in awfully bad shape—and can’t seem to pick up.” 2/19/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  mutter about “doing as his father did, deserting family, going back to Ireland to die.” self-analytical document written by O’Neill during his psychoanalysis in 1925.

  returned to Ireland, where, soon after, he died of poison under suspicious circumstances. see LWMC.

  “I’m all broken up and begin to cry every time the meaning of it all dawns on me.” 4/1/20, Harvard, SL.

  lengthy rewrite of a crucial scene. letter to Tyler, 3/10/20, Princeton, SL.

  he again lied to Tyler. 3/14/20, Princeton.

  Agnes was “quite herself again.” to Pauline Turkel, 3/14/20.

  complete such a rewrite until the following fall. letter to Tyler, 3/17/20, Princeton, SL.

  dust jackets containing a blurb from Alexander Woollcott. March 1920, first edition. Liveright had become a publisher after failing as a manufacturer of toilet paper (marketed as “Pick Quick Papers”). After splitting with Boni he acquired—as Horace Liveright, Inc.—an author list including Hemingway, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, and Freud.

  “In memory of the wonderful moment when first in your eyes I saw the promise of a land more beautiful than any I had ever known, a land of which I had dreamed only hopelessly, a land beyond my horizon.” The Curse of the Misbegotten by Croswell Bowen (McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, Toronto, and London, 1959).

  kitchen sink (in which she also washed his diapers). letter to EO, 4/25/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  both his parents “were smitten with Shane.” 4/24/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  if he couldn’t get director Williams to make some improvements. 4/27/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  (The prize was withheld in 1917 and 1919.) In the category of the novel, Ernest Poole won in 1918 for His Family, and Booth Tarkington won in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons. No award was made to a novel in 1920.

  “Can you imagine me at the point where Columbia University actually confers one of its biggest blue ribbons on me?” letter, 8/29/20, Yale, SL.

  “It was the most astoundingly pleasant surprise I’ve ever had in my life, I think.” letter, EO to R. W. Cottingham, 5/12/44, Yale, SL.

  he “really believed the end was at hand, and Ma was on the verge of a breakdown, staying up purely on her nerve.” 5/21/21, Yale.

  chiding him for not sending any news of his father. 7/12 & 7/13/20, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “When he was only ten years old he had to start working in a machine shop for fifty cents a week.” EO responding, 1/15/40, to Lawrence Estavan, who was preparing a monograph: History of the San Francisco Theater, Vol. 20, James O’Neill, SL.

  “My father, somehow, managed to believe in me.” The New Yorker, Profiles, Part I, Hamilton Basso, Profiles, Part I, 2/28/48.

  “own flesh and blood were an incongruous and puzzling spectacle.” 7/29?/ Harvard, SL.

  “Then why should he suffer so—when murderers are granted the blessing of electric chairs.” Ibid.

  Eugene later told Agnes, “like a dying dialogue in a play I might have written.” Ibid.

  “What queer things for him to say, eh?” Ibid.

  father’s dying words, O’Neill said, were “seared on my brain—a warning from the Beyond to remain true to the best that is in me though the heavens fall.” 12/9/20, Princeton, SL.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “He with the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness is nearest to the stars and the rainbow’s foot.” The Credo, published 2/13/21, was part of a written statement by O’Neill pegged to the 12/27/20 production of his play Diff’rent.

  “But he never went into anything so heavily it could ruin him.” letter to Lawrence Estavan, 11/15/40, SL.

  “Under her hand, I honestly have a hunch that some dividends may finally accrue from the junk buried on the island of M[onte]C[risto].” 12/9/20, Princeton, SL.

  and set off by train for Denver. A/BG interview with CM.

  accused Jamie of having deliberately infected Edmund. O’Neill’s Self Analytical Notes (see LWMC); early draft of LDJIN, Acts III & V, Beinecke; & Edmund’s death certificate, Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives.

  rented winterized house in the village of Provincetown, letter, EO to Tyler, 11/28/20, Princeton, SL.

  “To my Mother from Eugene” (adding nothing more than “Provincetown, Mass, Thanksgiving”). Beinecke.

  “The great dramatist is the dramatist who sees drama as life.” letter, EO to GJN, 6/20/20, Cornell, SL.

  express his “real significant bit of truth” and thereby “merit victory.” Ibid.

  wrote both Diff’rent and The Emperor Jones during the fall of 1920. letter to the critic Richard Dana Skinner, July(?) 1934, Yale, SL.

  eight scenes onto three sheets of standard typewriter paper. Ms. is in Princeton Library; the play was labeled “expressionistic” when produced in Germany, much to O’Neill’s annoyance. He felt he was being accused of imitating the contemporary German dramatists. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I had never heard of expressionism until long after the play was written. Its technique grew naturally out of my own problems.” Interview with Malcolm Cowley, Brentano’s Book Chat, July/Aug. 1926.

  “How would this sort of thing work on an audience in a theater?” NY World, Charles P. Sweeney, “Back to the Source of Plays,” 11/9/21, & New York Sun, “A Eugene O’Neill Miscellany,” 1/12/28.

  “I’m a very religious man, but after Sunday I lay my Jesus on the shelf.” A/BG interviews with EK & AMcG.

  left the production entirely in his hands. A/G interview with JL.

  theater company in New York had taken such a bold step. The cast included Harold Simmelkjaer as “Dreamy” and Ruth Anderson as his grandmother.

  cost of the production, cyclorama and all, was $502.28. NY Daily News series, 1/24 to 1/30/32.

  “Where do I go from here?” A/BG interview with KM based on a scrapbook clipping.

  compared with the previous year’s three hundred. A/BG interview with KM.

  “I’m going to beat you up.” Ibid.

  “I’m ‘off’ him and the result is he will get no chance
to do it in London.” (May? 1923), Dartmouth, SL.

  not someone who would “lose his head if he makes a hit—as he surely will.” Ibid.

  “That actor was Charles Gilpin the Pullman porter in The Emperor Jones.” NYT Magazine, 9/15/46; Gilpin’s drinking led to his losing his voice and his career; he died at fifty-one on 5/6/30.

  it was a flop. The First Man was produced at the Neighborhood Playhouse by Augustus Duncan, 3/4/22.

  (But to what?) The First Man was not produced until March 1922.

  during the two weeks it would take to do the job. letter, A/B to EO, 5/4/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I want to lay my head on your breast for comfort, as always when in trouble or pain.” 4/21/21, Harvard, SL.

  pining love letter O’Neill expected. (probably April 22), 1921, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “I have a poignant pain of emptiness inside.” 4/22/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “Good night my own dearest thing, I love you so—and miss you so,” she wrote in her next letter. 4/24/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  he’d “destroy” that play, claiming it had been too hastily written. New York Sun, 5/14/30.

  “That was when,” according to Given, “he grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag her off. She yelled, but no one interfered.” A/BG interviews with EG.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Your happiness means mine,” he assured her. 8/8/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  Shane, who “performed no end of antics and extemporized dances in honor of the sun and sea.” 8/9/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “They are nice girls and it’s rather refreshing—the chatter of youth about the place—when one is lonely.” 8/11/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  abscess in her arm that was causing her severe pain. 8/11/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “He knows there is no home without you.” 8/12 & 8/13/21, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “You know,” Agnes wrote back, “that beneath it all, we do deeply, and eternally love one another—so let’s forget and forgive the silly bickering . . . and start again.” 1921, Harvard, “Wind.”

  “These days crawl sufferingly like futile purgatories.” 8/21/21, Harvard, “Wind.”