By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “Gene tells me he loves me & couldn’t live without me!!” CM diary, 12/30 & 12/31/37.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Dear God, let this be our real & final home!” 12/28/37, 1/2/38, & 1/12/38.

  once they were settled and he’d fully regained his health. WD, 1/9/38.

  if he could manage it “without winding up in the poorhouse.” 2/13/38, Yale, SL.

  seizure of neuritis that rendered his writing arm “practically useless.” WD, 1/8 & 1/12/38.

  she was at a loss for how to help him. CM diary, 2/14 & 1/26/38.

  (“Hitler raising hell in Europe,” Carlotta had exclaimed in her diary a few weeks after moving into Tao House.) CM diary, 2/21/38.

  “I haven’t yet learned to take that extra punishment and go on regardless.” letter, 9/27/37, Yale, SL.

  had him eating corn out of his hand A/BG interview with Charles O’Brien Kennedy.

  enjoyed playing the old pianoforte in their New London home. Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays (Robert McBride, New York, 1929).

  turned, in something of a panic, to Harry Weinberger. 9/27/37, Yale, SL.

  to the cemetery to assess the situation. Ibid.

  O’Neill’s father, who had bought the plot in 1882. 10/21/37, Yale.

  prices in writing, before ordering the stones? 10/24/37, Yale, Beinecke.

  stones and installation to total “within five hundred dollars.” 11/6/37, Yale, Beinecke.

  price different grades of granite. 11/15/37, Yale.

  “It simply follows [the] pattern of [a] cast of characters in a play, which is absolutely appropriate for an actor’s family.” 3/8/38, Yale, SL.

  O’Neill disparaged as his “ranch school in Colorado.” WD.

  “What he will eventually do, God knows, but for once in his life he’s genuinely self-confident and enthusiastic—about horses and stock-raising, not scholastic pursuits, I might add.” letter, April 1938, Yale, SL.

  “Gene feels better—his brain full of work—thank God.” CM diary.

  pool, which was built into the side of their hill. WD, 5/12/38.

  “I am no longer silent!” WD, 5/12/38.

  “[Blemie] says he can’t understand it, that something he drank must have disagreed with him.” 5/29/38, letter to GJN, As Ever, Gene.

  “Deborah fights Sara for her son’s love with charm and subtlety, while Sara fights with her body.” A/BG interview with CM.

  the play was “full of evil.” A/BG interview.

  whispering in his ear, “You shall not finish this play.” CM diary, 7/5/38.

  “Holds me close in his arms—while I weep my heart out.” CM diary, 7/14/38.

  “God give Cyn the strength and the courage to face life with this new burden,” Carlotta prayed. CM diary, 7/15/38.

  “His work eats into him—life itself seems to absorb him.” CM diary, 7/27/38.

  expected to finish a first draft “in another month or two.” letter, 8/2/38, California, Yale, SL.

  wouldn’t be “nailed for alimony at the last moment.” 4/22/38, Yale, SL.

  “The look on Gene’s face!” she exclaimed. CM diary, 8/18 & 8/20/38.

  O’Neill characterized “the Communist Party in this country as a foreign-controlled, traitor organization.” letter to HW, Yale, SL.

  “And to an ex-house painter!” CM diary, 9/1/38.

  “Oh, Politesse! Shame!” noted the old Tory. CM diary, 9/22/38.

  noting it was “as long as Strange Interlude!—but don’t think will be able to cut length much.” WD, 9/8/38.

  “It is frightening!” CM diary, 9/25/38.

  “the Hitler jitters” were affecting him. 9/5/38, As Ever, Gene.

  a “sinking spell & flare-up of same old infection—pains in back, fever.” WD, 10/12/38.

  inform her that “all the leg, arm & back pains are caused from the infection in the prostate.” CM diary, 10/15/38.

  “the painful disease can affect the physiological functioning of the penis, and lead to erectile dysfunction.” Dr. Katz, author of Guide to Prostate Health, is the chairman of urology at Winthrop University on Long Island, where he continues his two decades of research into prostate disease and cure, begun in 1993 at Columbia University’s New York–Presbyterian Hospital.

  work in spurts on More Stately Mansions. WD, 10/16/38.

  “I didn’t feel a bit older than that, either.” letter shown to A/BG by CVV.

  “But I do know I love this mad Irishman!” CM diary, 12/31/38.

  it was “psychologically extremely involved and hard to keep from running wild and boiling over.” 12/28/38, “TTWWF.”

  “He had made my beauty grotesquely ugly by his presence.” Act III, Scene II.

  “How I prayed that you would die.” Act IV, Scene II.

  began making revisions on the typed manuscript. WD.

  (“They began operating when I was 5”) CM diary, 1/30/39.

  “He would change a few words and add a few commas and make me type the page over again,” she said. A/BG interview with CM.

  January 30, he accompanied Carlotta to a specialist WD.

  “He detests being put in any position where he must make a decision or shoulder any responsibility—outside his work!” CM diary, 1/31/39.

  he had been profoundly worried about her. 2/27/39, As Ever, Gene.

  “God help me!” CM diary, 3/19/39.

  “I’m struck dumb with surprise and happiness!” CM diary, 3/29/39.

  “We stood them as long as we could take it, on the theory that bad is better than none, for it isn’t so easy to get anyone to work in the country here.” 10/5/38, letter to GJN, As Ever, Gene.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  he yearned for a respite. June 1939, Yale, SL.

  “I may try writing a single play which is quite outside [the cycle’s] orbit.” Ibid.

  “Feel fed up and stale on Cycle after 4½ years of not thinking of any other work,” he jotted in his Work Diary. “Will do me good lay on shelf and forget it for a while—do a play which has nothing to do with it.” 6/5/39.

  second play—to be set in New London—he described in his notes as “N. L. family one.” WD, 6/6/39.

  made him feel “there was not enough recognizable future in sight to go on with something that might take four or five more years.” letter, 3/25/41, copied from from Mrs. Hamilton’s collection.

  ideas for both plays had been brewing “for years.” letter, 10/13/40, Beinecke.

  “The dump in the play,” he once confided to Kenneth Macgowan, was “no one place, but a combination of three in which I once hung out.” letter, 12/15/40, “TTWWF.”

  Gorky’s inn, in A Night’s Lodging, was “an ice cream parlor.” New York World, 11/9/24, by Charles P. Sweeney.

  the building “was almost coming down, and the principal house-wreckers were vermin.” NYT, 12/21/24, by LK.

  “The realization of this should exalt, not depress.” Theater, June 1924, “Eugene O’Neill—The Inner Man,” by Carol Bird.

  “An ache in our hearts for things we can’t escape!” CM diary.

  outline of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in just one week. WD, 7/3/39.

  day before O’Neill began developing his Iceman characters. CM diary, 7/10/39.

  “Thank God, Gene didn’t start drinking again!” CM diary.

  “If you and I could only go to sleep together and never wake up.” CM diary, 7/12/39.

  began writing the dialogue for Act I of Iceman. WD, 7/13/39.

  “Nor as a son.” letter to HW, 2/27/39.

  “You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own.” 7/18/39, Yale, SL.

  written to Shane without “the usual fatherly crap.” Virginia, 7/22/39, SL.

 
“Elizabeth the first was a nice girl! I hope Sally the third will last!” CM diary, 6/8/39.

  disparaged her as “a stalwart stout young woman” of “an all-too-familiar Connecticut small-city type.” 9/10/39, Yale, SL.

  “With a baby, no money & no profession!” CM diary, 8/25/39.

  cursed him in disgust as “a ham actor!” WD.

  had “a queer feeling that all this is really the beginning of the end of all happiness for me!” CM diary.

  “No sleep.” 9/2/39.

  Oona joined her, looking “very much amused,” as Carlotta later reported their conversation. CM diary, & A/BG interview with CM.

  “She is 14!” Ibid.

  “I’m going to marry a rich man.’” A/BG interviews with CM.

  “Spengler was right.” WD, 9/3/39.

  “Oona’s visit disturbed him because he felt (as a dramatist!) she had been rehearsed in how she was to act with him—she was not herself!” CM diary, 9/3/39.

  not only intelligent, but “really a charming girl, both in looks and in manners.” 9/10/39, Yale, SL.

  found Shane’s sister “loveable.” Ibid.

  “now a patriarch of twelve but still going strong.” 10/1/39, Cornell, SL.

  “Every time I think of making that trip East to face casting, rehearsals and all the rest of the game, I feel a great bored weariness and reluctance, as if I’d had quite enough of that for one life.” Ibid.

  it had “flowed right along, page after page,” as he later told an interviewer for The New York Times. interview with Karl Schriftgiesser, 10/6/46.

  smashed her knee in an auto accident. WD, & CM diary, 10/20/39.

  would be hospitalized for many weeks and would “probably be lame.” CM diary, 10/20 & 10/30/39.

  a symbol she continued to draw from time to time during the next several years. CM diary.

  after a session of pillow talk, he “remains all night!” CM diary, 11/17/39.

  declaring it “one of [the] best plays I’ve ever written!” WD.

  “I couldn’t let this play be done without being there every minute, and I simply don’t feel up to that ordeal now.” letter, 10/16/41, Tao House Library.

  happy reminder to them both of a brief remission from prostatitis. envelope and note reproduced in Inscriptions.

  likened the play’s lunges into the labyrinthine dark to “getting in an elevator and going down to the basement, thinking that’s as far as you can go, and then one night you get in and see there are three more buttons leading to sublevels you hadn’t seen before.” NYT, 6/17/12.

  modeled (in part) on Jimmy the Priest’s. WD, 5/7/39.

  “But never until a year or so ago, did it take definite line and form as a play in my mind, its many life histories interwoven around a central theme.” 2/8/40, Cornell, As Ever, Gene.

  all of them were “drawn from life, more or less.” Ibid.

  “All these people I have written about I once knew.” EO interview with Karl Schriftgiesser, NYT, 10/6/46.

  they were “free of social hypocrisy.” interview with Mary B. Mullett, The American Magazine, Nov. 1922.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “The actor playing Hickey is pure gold.” AG, at that time a member of Atkinson’s staff, was present.

  who used to “make that typical drummer crack about the iceman, and wept maudlinly over his wife’s photograph, and in other moods, boozily harped on the slogan that honesty is the best policy.” letter, 2/8/40, Cornell, SL.

  “He is all of them, you might say, and none of them.” letter, 12/20/40, “TTWWF.”

  not to mention Hickman’s first name, Theodore. “The ‘Genius’ as Iceman: Eugene O’Neill’s Portrayal of Theodore Dreiser,” American Literary Realism, Winter 2002, by Brenda Murphy, professor of English at Connecticut University.

  she had “nagged him to death and he was relieved when she died.” Beinecke.

  Parritt, like Hickey, has his “background of fact,” as O’Neill once explained in an interview in The New York Times. 10/6/46.

  whom Goldman pitied for having raised “that cur.” Emma Goldman’s monthly magazine Mother Earth, Jan. 1916, “Donald Vose: The Accursed.”

  a tribute to Carlin, who died in 1934. letter, CM to KM, 2/14/34, “TTWWF.”

  exorcising O’Neill’s DTs. A/BG interviews with CM & various Village friends, including JL & JJM.

  “My private office in the shop was stocked with wines and imported cigarettes: but I was not so well off as in my happy slum.” An Anarchist Woman. (Duffield, New York, 1909).

  he had never met a man he could not teach, he told Kirkman. Ibid.

  “I hire no spiritual nurse,” said Jim. Ibid.

  “It takes an eagle to soar with a heavy weight in its grasp.” Ibid.

  desperate woman friend who was weighing the choice between domestic drudgery and street walking. Ibid.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  apt to denounce Polly’s customers as “bourgeois pigs.” A/BG interview with JL.

  “hot” diamonds, which she pawned whenever she and Joe were hard up. A/BG interviews with NW, JL, & JJM.

  jotted an idea for a one-acter—“Pig of the Hell Hole play.” O’Neill notebook entry, 2/3/42, Beinecke.

  tickets to Broadway performances of plays by Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and Lennox Robinson. The six-month tour began 11/20/11 at Maxine Elliott Theater, West 35th St., with cast led by Sara Algood, Maire O’Neill, Cathleen Nesbitt, Arthur Sinclair, and J. M. Kerrigan.

  “I thought then and I still think that they demonstrated the possibilities of naturalistic acting better than any other company.” Charles Merrill, Boston Sunday Globe, 7/8/23.

  native exhibitionist had plagued a friend’s nursemaid on the same beach where Shane swam. SD 1925.

  analyses of the play was provided by Dudley Nichols in a letter to Irving Hoffman, letter copied by Hoffman for A/BG.

  “‘No, but he’s breathin’ hard.’” Ibid.

  “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.” Ibid.

  “No one has even penetrated what reality is.” Ibid.

  Professor Day notes, “the three whores correspond in number to the three Marys, and sympathize with Hickey as the three Marys sympathize with Christ.” Modern Drama, May 1958; Day was Professor of English at the University of Delaware.

  “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.” Ibid.

  “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.” 12/30/40, “TTWWF.”

  “repetition to reveal progressively more of his characters and situations.” A/BG interviews with JQ.

  “There’s no life or kick in it now.” Harry Hope, p. 678; Hope, p. 680; Chuck, p. 682; Rocky, p. 684; Hope p. 689; Hope, p. 691; Hope, p. 692 (page numbers, Complete Plays—1932–1943, Library of America).

  “O’Neill was too dedicated an artist with too great a sense of purity to use anything, including repetition, as a meaningless mechanical device.” A/BG interviews with JQ.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  hang over his head and fill him with dread. CM diary, 1/1/40.

  it would “have to be written in blood.” 1/5/40.

  overwhelmed by the burden of work it still dema
nded, he let it go; WD, 1/6/40.

  “(I’m enjoying one right now—am writing this in bed).” 2/8/40, Cornell, As Ever, Gene.

  he was “too low physically now for long stretch work.” WD, 3/3/40.

  had no choice but to succumb to his ailing body. WD, 3/8/40.

  adapted from S.S. Glencairn, and that he was calling The Long Voyage Home, WD, 4/7/40.

  “Like them both a lot.” 2/12/40.

  “Go on and make a fine picture if you’re that nuts!” Yale, SL.

  confessing he had “no ambition for work” WD, 5/8/40.

  doctors advised a “stronger schedule of shots, one a day for 3 weeks, give it real tryout.” WD, 5/17/40.

  “This war is hitting us where we belong, so to speak.” 6/15/40, Cornell, SL.

  “Well, although I hate Nazism as bitterly as anyone, I can never do that in my work.” Ibid.

  “If it cannot exist as the unique whole I conceived, then I don’t want it to exist at all.” Ibid.

  recognized the futility of brooding about “the future of individual freedom.” WD, & CM diary.

  he reread his first draft of Act I. WD, 6/25 & 6/26/40.

  “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.” 6/15/40, As Ever, Gene.

  almost nonstop for the next four months. WD, & A/BG interviews with CM.

  “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!” 7/17/40.

  “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!” 7/22/40, Inscriptions.

  dealing with the “present world collapse & dictatorships,” which would be “timely but timeless spiritually.” WD, 8/15/40.

  he described as a “timeless, timely ventriloquist play.” WD, 8/17/40, & Memoranda ff 8/31/40 entry.

  a “duality of Man play—Good—Evil, Christ—Devil—begins Temptation on Mount—through to Crucifixion—Devil a modern power realist—symbolical spiritual conflict today and in all times.” WD, 8/30/40.