“Jack” Reed loomed large in O’Neill’s imagination, even while O’Neill felt an unconquerable desire for Louise Bryant, Reed’s future wife. The journalist had gained notoriety three years earlier when he covered the Mexican Revolution and embedded for four months with the populist Mexican general Pancho Villa and his rebel army. O’Neill, hoping to impress Reed, got to work revising his one-act play The Movie Man, a vaudeville-style satire based on an actual 1914 Hollywood venture in the Mexican war, during which filmmakers had paid General Villa to let them film his battles.
On the night of O’Neill’s tryout, the brief walk from his new shack on the beach to Reed’s cottage must have seemed like a mile. The daunting assembly gathered there included Reed and Bryant, Hapgood and Boyce, labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, playwright Susan Glaspell, director George “Jig” Cram Cook (Glaspell’s husband), set designer Robert Edmond Jones, Provincetown’s “poet of the dunes,” Harry Kemp, and the enthralling red-haired actress Mary Pyne (Kemp’s wife). The Players had been growing restless; they aimed at nothing less than to upend the stale conventions of American theater. Expectations were high over this newcomer, scion of one of the most legendary matinee idols in America.
The night was a disaster. For nearly an hour, the Players’ eyes rolled as O’Neill muddled through The Movie Man. After he’d finished, the group eviscerated the work as “frightfully bad, trite and full of the most preposterous hokum.” Later, Harry Kemp scoffed at its abysmal plot: “Something about an American movie man who financed a Mexican revolution for the sake of filming its battles. One of the scenes depicted the hero’s compelling the commanding generals on both sides—both being in his hire—to wage a battle all over again because it had not been fought the way he liked it!”11 Not only was the story absurd, the script was borderline racist.12 Reed must have deplored it more than anyone. He knew Mexico and its struggling people well from firsthand reporting. O’Neill knew next to nothing about the country beyond what he’d learned from barrooms, newspapers, and movie house newsreels, and it showed.
O’Neill was highly sensitive to criticism at the time. The editor of the New London newspaper where he’d worked as a cub reporter four years earlier remembered young “Gene” as the temperamental sort who would “grieve like a stricken collie if you so much as looked an unkind thought at him.”13 Although surely devastated by his defeat, O’Neill wasn’t yet beaten.
By mid-July he was ready for a second audition, this time at Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook’s house, where he arrived clutching the script of Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act sea play based on his real-life experiences working on tramp steamers. The same players had assembled, and O’Neill must have sensed a heavy air of doubt. Near prostrate with dread, he sat stock-still in a wicker chair and slowly began to read, one of the Players recalled, “in his low, deep, slightly monotonous but compelling voice.”14 The Players listened silently—this time utterly enthralled.
“There was no one there during that reading who did not recognize the quality of this play,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse years later. “Here was something new, the true feeling of the sea.”15 O’Neill’s dialogue was written exclusively in seamen’s banter and foreign dialects, and his stage directions offered, in intimate detail, a porthole into the stifling atmosphere of the seamen’s living quarters. Bound East for Cardiff signaled to the Players a radical departure: in it, O’Neill conveyed the sublime power of the sea through a profound sympathy for a working-class type that up to then had been voiceless on the American stage—and, fundamentally, in society at large. “We heard the actual speech of men who go to sea,” Harry Kemp recalled breathlessly. “We shared the reality of their lives; we felt the motion and windy, wave-beaten urge of a ship. This time, no one doubted that here was a genuine playwright.”16
Over the next forty years, O’Neill would go on to attain four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize—the only American dramatist to be awarded that honor. Those triumphs and a great deal more can be traced back to that single midsummer evening in a crowded New England cottage where what has to be the most legendary story of discovery in American theater history had just come to pass.
Introduction
“Life Is a Tragedy—Hurrah!”
I’m an O’Neill fanatic. … If you’re a playwright, you go to O’Neill as the source. There’s really not much in the way of serious American theatre before he came along. He proved it could exist. He’s the father of us all, the first to stake a claim nationally and internationally for American dramatic literature.
—TONY KUSHNER, 2011
Call me a tragic optimist. I believe everything I doubt and I doubt everything I believe. And no motto strikes me as a better one than the ancient “Hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may!”
—EUGENE O’NEILL, 1925
TRAGIC. Bitter. Pessimistic. Fatalistic. Gloomy. Take your pick from the run of adjectives trotted out to describe Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, the Irish American “master of the misbegotten,” “dean of dysfunction,” “black magician,” “apostle of woe,” “poet laureate of gloom.”1 O’Neill’s plays express profound suffering; no one can dispute that. If it’s uplift you’re after, he’s not your man. But O’Neill himself took umbrage when drama critics and celebrity profilers portrayed him in such morbid terms. In one telling letter written in 1923 to Mary Clark, a nurse at the sanatorium where he’d been treated for tuberculosis a decade earlier, we find a genuine instance of O’Neill’s warm-hearted and self-effacing personality, traits that offer a startling contrast to the lugubrious existential being of popular lore: “I know you’re impervious to what they are pleased to call my ‘pessimism’—I mean, that you can see behind that superficial aspect of my work to the truth. I’m far from being a pessimist. I see life as a gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent, splendidly-suffering bit of chaos the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous significance, while without his losing fight with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal. I say ‘losing fight’ only symbolically for the brave individual always wins. Fate can never conquer his—or her—spirit. So you see I’m no pessimist. On the contrary, in spite of my scars, I’m tickled to death with life! I wouldn’t ‘go out’ and miss the rest of the play for anything!”2
This candid self-assessment to his friend and former nurse offers us a far more authentic representation of O’Neill’s worldview than his prevailing image. In art as in life, O’Neill embraced suffering as an avenue toward exaltation, and he rejected the label “tragic pessimist,” coining for himself the keen phrase “tragic optimist” instead. Just before O’Neill won his first Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Horizon in 1920, an unusually insightful feature story on the rising theatrical star appeared, and the physical description it provides, as with so many reminiscences about him, emphasized his lustrous dark eyes: “These eyes have seen both the sunshine and suffering of the world—they say ‘Life is a tragedy—hurrah!’”3
On the stage and off, O’Neill confronted tragedy head-on throughout his life. All too often this playwright stood terrified, angry, and alone. But he rarely lost sight of the possibility of escape, that sense of belonging to something larger and more meaningful than himself. “The philosophy,” O’Neill said, “is that there is always one dream left, one final dream, no matter how low you have fallen, down there at the bottom of the bottle. I know because I saw it.”4 O’Neill had faith that in time he might arrive at that small blue circle of sky, a dream of salvation he held onto tenaciously. Suffering, for the Irish, is almost an art form, in which psychic and physical pain conjure their greatest adversaries—hope and spirit. Such “pipe dreams,” as O’Neill called them—or “abject illusions” or “hopeless hopes”—are prerequisites for enduring the trials of life.
Per aspera ad astra—through difficulties to the stars. James Joyce’s memorable evocation of the Latin expression in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) may best encapsulate O’Neill’s life and plays. It’s a cli
ché, undoubtedly, but each theme that cycles over and over in O’Neill’s writing—his rejection of accepted morality and social institutions, his disdain for what he regarded as the “eternal show-shop” of Broadway, his intense empathy for outcasts, his Irish pride, his sense of the past informing the present and future—all fall under this central concept. Through difficulties to the stars. “The point is that life itself is nothing,” he once said. “It is the dream that keeps us fighting, willing—living! Achievement, in the narrow sense of possession, is a stale finale. The dreams that can be completely realized are not worth dreaming. … A man wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable. But his struggle is his success! … Such a figure is necessarily tragic. But to me he is not depressing, he is exhilarating!” O’Neill’s autobiographical character Robert Mayo’s dying declaration in Beyond the Horizon presents the case with stark clarity: “Only with contact with suffering … will you—awaken.”5 In the telling of O’Neill’s life, this blend of suffering and awakening, forged in the heat of struggle and the light of the stage, will be shown as the starting place from which to arrive at a sincere understanding of this perennially fascinating man.
There’s a sizable constituency of literary critics who have made great sport by sullying, with a dogged persistence, Eugene O’Neill’s literary reputation as somehow handicapped in the writing department. This is particularly true as compared to other modern authors like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Faulkner. He never quite reached his potential, they say, because he was too self-absorbed, too tortured by familial and conjugal relations, or simply too drunk to do so. It is my hope that Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts will dispel this presumption. Indeed, having scrutinized virtually every review of his premieres, I can say that O’Neill likely received more bad reviews than any other major American author. But even so-called real clunkers—The First Man, Welded, Dynamo, Days Without End—were still credited by many as breakthroughs in subject matter and form that had never before been attempted on the American stage.
A cursory glance over some of O’Neill’s titles (he was one of the great title makers of his generation or any other) evokes with startling clarity this playwright’s expansive vision: “Anna Christie,” The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness! A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. These plays are readable, teachable, and spellbinding when done right. But as any actor will tell you, to perform them “right” is not easy. Brian Dennehy, who’s acted in countless productions of O’Neill’s plays and has become one of his greatest interpreters, understands this well: O’Neill “gets a rap for being not a good writer in the sense of not writing poetry, which is crap,” Dennehy remarked in 2009. “He’s a beautiful writer, a beautiful writer. … It’s like Shakespeare. … None of us are really familiar with that kind of writing. But we all know it’s beautiful, and your job as an actor is to make it work. … You have the emotional response, the proper one, and the proper intellectual response, and it’s usually the result of an enormous amount of work. Same with O’Neill.”6
Actor Nathan Lane made a similar observation during the Goodman Theatre of Chicago’s 2012 production of The Iceman Cometh. At the time, Lane was playing the Iceman’s leading role of Theodore “Hickey” Hickman, and he wrote to actress Laurie Metcalf, who was then in London playing Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s autobiographical masterwork Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “The amazing thing about O’Neill,” Lane said, “is that he’s daring you to go as far as he does, to jump off the cliff with him into the deepest and darkest of places. And if you’re brave enough, you will soar. If you don’t give yourself over to him, if you try backpedalling him at times, that’s when it feels melodramatic or old-fashioned.”7 Nearly a decade earlier, the British actress Helen Mirren identified her role as Christine Mannon in O’Neill’s Civil War–era trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, which she’d played for the British National Theatre in 2003, as “one of the really, truly great roles for a woman in literature in the English language.”8
Theater people aren’t the only ones drawn in by O’Neill’s inexorable pull. On the fiftieth anniversary of O’Neill’s death in 2003, Cornel West, a prominent African American literary theorist and philosopher, called him “the great American blues man of the theater.” West went on to compare O’Neill to three other trailblazers: first, Martin Luther King Jr., because O’Neill’s plays were meant, like King’s speeches, “to redeem the soul of America”; then jazz great Charlie Parker, because he too created his art in “blood, sweat, and tears”; and third, the producers of the Matrix films, the Wachowski brothers, because, like them, O’Neill was a white artist “preoccupied with the humanity of black people.” The Emperor Jones, with its bold elevation of a black protagonist, had forcefully dramatized what West aptly called the “unmasking of civilization.” O’Neill recognized the fact, he went on, that “race is constitutive of American civilization. It’s not additive; it’s not an appendage. It’s integral to American life. Eugene O’Neill affirms that in the way in which Faulkner does, Toni Morrison does, Thomas Pynchon does.” T. Coraghessan Boyle, a fiction writer who was first dazzled by O’Neill’s plays in college, also demonstrates how the playwright’s work transcends artistic genres: “I read them apart from classes, for the sweep and power and enjoyment of them. … And I will forever be indebted to his influence, as so many of us are, whether we work as poets, novelists or dramatists.”9
Much earlier, in 1930, when novelist Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (O’Neill would become the second in 1936, but the only one for drama to date), Lewis told the Swedish committee in his acceptance speech, “Had you chosen Mr. Eugene O’Neill, who has done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly … from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor and fear and greatness, you would have been reminded that he has done something far worse than scoffing—he has seen life as not to be neatly arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent, and often quite horrible thing akin to the tornado, the earthquake, the devastating fire.”10
To this day, O’Neill’s plays demand a great deal of self-examination from audiences. They are not passive entertainment. As was the case for his contemporary audiences, his work forces us to confront tough issues that remain divisive flashpoints of our own time: abortion, war, immigration, prostitution, addiction, the theory of evolution, Western materialism and imperialism, wage slavery, interracial marriage and racism. And yet with all of this, the enduring, misleading image remains: O’Neill was a lost poet howling in the wilderness, an isolated misanthrope who obsessed over “universal” themes and left the contemporary political world to its own devices. (O’Neill himself, as we will see, took the term “universal” to task, particularly with regard to the ancient Greeks.) But this perception of his remove from politics has been challenged by, among other law enforcement and government agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the aftermath of the Red Scare of the late 1910s and early 1920s, after which time O’Neill publicly declared the United States to be “the most reactionary country in the world,” an agent from what was then called the Bureau of Investigation sent out a memorandum on O’Neill dated April 22, 1924. Submitted one month before J. Edgar Hoover took over as acting director, the memo was filed under Classification 61: Treason. The Bureau had grasped O’Neill’s agenda all too well and took particular note of his preoccupation with racial inequality, “a favorite theme of O’Neil’s [sic].”11
O’Neill resolved early on to avoid open propagandizing; but along with race plays like The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape aroused the Bureau’s interest because it “possesses inferential grounds for radical theories” that even surpassed revolutionary Europeans like the Czech writer Karel Čapek, whose play R.U.R. (1920), the Bureau s
aid, “has lately been adopted by the radical fraternity.”12 (Čapek would join O’Neill as a Nobel Prize winner in the 1930s.) O’Neill’s resistance to propaganda, however, infuriated outspoken Communist playwrights of the 1930s and 1940s like Mike Gold, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller. But to dismiss politics as a by-product of O’Neill’s dramas leads to false conclusions, as Arthur Miller came to acknowledge. In his autobiography Timebends (1987), Miller expressed frustration over seemingly apolitical writers like O’Neill who appeared to write for “the mystical rich, of high society and the … escapist ‘culture.’” Then he attended the 1946 premiere of The Iceman Cometh: “I was … struck by O’Neill’s radical hostility to bourgeois civilization, far greater than anything Odets had expressed. … It was O’Neill who wrote about the working-class men, about whores and the social discards and even the black man in a white world, but since there was no longer a connection with Marxism in the man himself, his plays were never seen as the critiques of capitalism that objectively they were.”13
O’Neill was politically outspoken throughout his life, always siding with the disempowered. “I care only for humanity,” he said. “I wish to arouse compassion. For the unfortunate. The suffering. The oppressed. … If people leave the theatre after one of my plays with a feeling of compassion for those less fortunate than they I am satisfied. I have not written in vain.”14 He believed that agitprop from activist-playwrights would change little and weaken the impact of their drama. “My quarrel with propaganda in the theatre,” he wrote Mike Gold in 1926, “is that it’s such damned unconvincing propaganda—whereas, if you will restrain the propaganda purpose to the selection of the life to be portrayed and then let that life live itself without comment, it does your trick. I advise this in the name of flesh & blood propaganda!”15
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 2
