Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Smitty had escaped to Buenos Aires to evade a scandal at home, and though armed with letters from British dignitaries to Argentine counterparts, he was deathly afraid that someone might offer him a job, so he kept the letters to himself.81 One drama critic quipped that O’Neill’s fictional character was “an uninteresting young man,” but this was precisely O’Neill’s point.82 The true hero of The Moon of the Caribbees, chronologically the first of his S.S. Glencairn series of one-act sea plays, was not Smitty, O’Neill clarified, but rather “the spirit of the sea—a big thing.” Smitty went to sea to forget his past, and he drinks to forget it too. But everything the sea offers in the play—the drink, the music, the local women, the moonlight—combines to become a potent reminder of a life half lived. Oblivious to the beauty of the sea and the other sailors’ unselfconscious revelry, Smitty’s “silhouetted gestures of self-pity are reduced to their proper insignificance.” For O’Neill, he’s a hollow “insect” ineffectually buzzing amid the wonder of nature’s “eternal sadness.” Smitty lives his life “much more out of harmony with truth, much less in tune with beauty, than the honest vulgarity of his mates.”83 With the notable exception of Smitty, O’Neill’s maritime plays express nothing but admiration for the seamen he encountered. “I hated a life ruled by the conventions and traditions of society,” O’Neill said. “Discipline on a sailing vessel was not a thing that was imposed on the crew by superior authority. It was essentially voluntary. The motive behind it was loyalty to the ship!”84

  In due course, O’Neill became fed up with the vagabond lifestyle of a penniless beachcomber, “sleeping on park benches, hanging around waterfront dives, and absolutely alone.” At one point, he was tempted to partner up with an out-of-work railroad man to hold up a currency exchange at gunpoint. O’Neill considered the proposal seriously but turned the hopeless robber down. “He was sent to prison,” he said, “and, for all I know, he died there.” The capture of his would-be accomplice served the future playwright as a keen reminder of life’s fragility in the hands of pitiless circumstance: “There are times now when I feel sure I would have been [a writer], no matter what happened, but when I remember Buenos Aires, and the fellow down there who wanted me to be a bandit, I’m not so sure.”85

  Exorcism in New York

  O’Neill shipped out of Buenos Aires aboard the tramp steamer S.S. Ikala in March 1911, but this time as a seaman, not a passenger. After a brief stopover at Port of Spain, Trinidad (the harbor of which inspired the mise-en-scène for The Moon of the Caribbees), the Ikala docked in New York on April 15. As his poems “Free” and “The Bridegroom Weeps!” indicate, O’Neill’s guilty feelings still lingered over Kathleen Jenkins and Eugene Jr., and by telephone he arranged with Jenkins to stop by and visit his one-year-old namesake. The reunion between husband and wife was civil but awkward; of the few words spoken by O’Neill, none of them justified his behavior over the last year and a half. After a brief stay, he left in silence. O’Neill wouldn’t see Eugene Jr. for more than a decade, and Jenkins he never saw again.86

  Given his time in Buenos Aires, O’Neill was far more at home among the denizens of Manhattan’s Lower West Side waterfront district than the respectable uptown neighborhoods his parents and brother inhabited in New York. So he checked in at a boardinghouse and saloon near the docks at 252 Fulton Street, around the corner from where he’d worked as a supply clerk. The other boarders referred to the bar as Jimmy the Priest’s (and a few years later Jimmy’s Place), though officially it was listed as Jimmy’s Hotel and Café.87 Such a name for a low saloon like Jimmy’s was doubtlessly intended to boost the perception among the municipal authorities that Jimmy’s was a compliant Raines Law hotel. New York’s Raines Law provided a loophole for serving liquor after hours and on Sundays at establishments located on the ground floor of tenement buildings, but only if they offered rooms for rent on the upper floors and served food. The Raines Law was signed in 1896 as a measure to curb working-class drinking habits and deviancy, but for the most part it had the opposite effect. By requiring that there were rooms that could be used for sleeping off a drunk or conducting illicit assignations, the moral-reform legislation had inadvertently enabled in equal measure binge drinking and prostitution.

  James J. Condon, the eponymous proprietor, was a reserved but very tough Irishman. A ship chandler who worked in the building next door recalled that “Jimmy feared nothing. In most bars if a customer turned nasty, the bartender would first try to calm him down, but not Jimmy. The moment he smelled trouble, he’d grab the man, no matter how big he was—Jimmy was tall but thin—and give him the bum’s rush through the swinging doors. He did it so fast he bowled over the toughest characters. There were two steps at the entrance, high stone ones, and sometimes the man would stumble and land flat in the street, yet Jimmy never looked over the doors to see if he was hurt or anything. He’d just return behind the bar, looking as cool as ever—he was a real poker face. I never heard him raise his voice, but you could tell when he had his Irish up.” O’Neill portrayed Condon as a character in “Anna Christie” in similar terms, as a “personage of the waterfront [who], with his pale, thin, clean-shaven face, mild blue eyes and white hair, a cassock would seem more suited to him than the apron he wears. … But beneath all his mildness one senses the man behind the mask—cynical, callous, hard as nails” (CP1, 959).

  O’Neill described Jimmy the Priest’s as “a saloon of the lowest kind of grog shop.” To rent a bed upstairs cost $3 a month, which O’Neill paid for out of a dollar-a-day allowance from his father, and the saloon on the first floor served free soup for lodgers and a shot of whiskey or a schooner of beer for a nickel.88 Condon’s signage was a yellow painted glass of beer on the window out front with the words “SCHOONER—5¢.” “I lived there for a time,” O’Neill told a reporter. “You lived down there while you gathered atmosphere?” he was asked. “Hell no,” O’Neill replied. “I was flat.”89

  Jimmy Condon and his bar did provide the future playwright with an abundance of material, however. O’Neill soaked up Jimmy’s dissolute world the way Jack London had earlier the San Francisco waterfront saloons, as immortalized in one of O’Neill’s favorite books, London’s chronicle of alcoholic despair John Barleycorn: “Alcoholic Memoirs” (1913). O’Neill’s autobiographical character Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night mentions Jimmy’s by name, and the bar also served as the setting of his short story “Tomorrow” (1916) and his plays Chris Christophersen (1919), Exorcism (1919), “Anna Christie,” (1920) and, along with two other bars in New York, The Iceman Cometh. In an early poem, “Ballad[e] of the Seamy Side” (1912), O’Neill rhapsodizes over the freewheeling mode of living at Jimmy’s and its neighboring dives and dance halls:

  Where is the lure of the life you sing?

  Let us consider the seamy side. …

  Think of the dives on the waterfront

  And the low drunken brutes in dungaree,

  Of the low dance halls where the harpies hunt

  And the maudlin seaman so carelessly

  Squanders the wages of a month at sea

  And maybe is killed in a bar room brawl;

  The spell of these things explain to me—

  “They’re part of the game and I loved it all.”90

  By and large, the men at Jimmy’s and those loafing and working around the docks nearby were a “hard lot,” as O’Neill remembered them: “Every type; sailors on shore leave or stranded; longshoremen, waterfront riffraff, gangsters, down and outers, drifters from the ends of the earth.” But O’Neill developed a deep respect for these men: “They were sincere, loyal and generous. In some queer way they carried on. I learned at Jimmy the Priest’s not to sit in judgment on people.”

  In less than a year, at least two of the men at Jimmy’s would save his life.91

  Upon returning to the Unique Book Shop that spring, O’Neill learned of the anarchist Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, and Goldman, along with her chief editor, Bayard Boyesen
, agreed to print O’Neill’s first published work, “American Sovereign.” That May, the Supreme Court had ruled that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was in violation of the Antitrust Act, and the title of O’Neill’s poem refers to a phrase from a speech made by the “muckraker” Lincoln Steffens, one of the first of a dauntless cohort of fire-eating journalists who in the early decades of the twentieth century denounced the nation’s wealthiest classes and corrupt politicians. The previous December in Greenwich, Connecticut, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in the United States, Steffens asserted the muckraker doctrine that “American sovereignty has passed from our political establishment to the national organization of money, credit, and centralized business.” In “American Sovereign,” O’Neill addresses the vexing riddle of why working-class Americans vote for politicians with only upper-class interests in mind: “This is all the Working Class has reaped—Their efforts help their leaders get the Dough.”92

  Jimmy the Priest’s, 252 Fulton Street in New York City, where O’Neill attempted suicide in late 1911. Its official name was Jimmy’s Hotel and Café.

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  On July 22, 1911, O’Neill again put his literary aspirations on hold and signed onto an American Line passenger steamer, the S.S. New York. But as with his time on the S.S. Ikala, the transatlantic voyage on the New York offered none of the high romance O’Neill had experienced on the sailing ship Charles Racine, and he later characterized the berth as an “ugly, tedious job, and no place for a man who wanted to call his soul his own. … There was about as much ‘sea glamor’ in working aboard a passenger steamship as there would have been in working in a summer hotel. I washed enough deck area to cover a good-sized town.”93 The New York arrived in Southampton, England, to find that dock laborers and transportation workers had gone on a nationwide strike. O’Neill’s early full-length The Personal Equation depicts the anarchist movement’s involvement in this strike, which was supported by the American labor union the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as “the Wobblies.” Coal stokers and seamen, in an unusual show of solidarity, rose up to support the workers in a brief but reverberating protest that would be remembered by posterity as the Great Labor Strike of 1911.

  Stokers and seamen didn’t generally fraternize in this way; in fact, a shipboard class division existed between the two groups that created strains of bitter animosity. And their clash of temperaments as well as job status informed O’Neill’s lifelong conviction about the dehumanizing pitfalls of modern industrialization. In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1921), for instance, which explores this rift among modern-day seaman, an Irishman named Paddy contrasts a sailor’s life in the sail-powered past to the demoralizing slavery of the industrial present:

  Oh to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and days! Full sail on her! … ’Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ’Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one. (Scornfully) Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank—black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks—the bloody engines pounding and shaking—wid devil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air—choking our lungs with coal dust—breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole—feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along with the coal, I’m thinking—caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo! (CP2, 127)

  Once engine designers had introduced triple-expansion engines, shipping costs lowered, and the steamships were three times faster than sail-powered ships. But like Paddy, O’Neill believed that in the days of sail—in contrast to the thankless toil on steamships like the Ikala, the New York, and the ship he took on his return to the United States, the American Line’s S.S. Philadelphia—sailors valued “the spirit of craftsmanship, of giving one’s heart as well as one’s hands to one’s work, of doing it for the inner satisfaction of carrying out one’s own ideals, not merely as obedience of orders. So far as I can see, the gain is over-balanced by the loss.”94

  S.S. Ikala.

  (COURTESY OF THE PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM, SALEM, MASS.)

  By the time of O’Neill’s return voyage to New York on August 26, he’d earned the rank of able seaman, or AB, an achievement that, though his tenure as a working seaman was little more than six weeks total, filled him with pride for the remainder of his life. “Do you want to see something I prize very highly?” O’Neill asked a friend years later. “Wait. I’ll show you.” Shoving aside two gold Pulitzer Prize medals, he produced a tattered AB certificate. “Here it is.”95 Another cherished possession from his days at sea was his blue American Line sweater, an item of memorabilia he saved and wore proudly in the years to come as a reminder of a happier, more liberated time.

  Back at Jimmy the Priest’s, O’Neill plunged headlong into a self-described cycle of “great down-and-outness.” He took another room above the bar, this time with a hardened Irish sailor named Driscoll. Driscoll was an American Line “fireman,” or coal stoker, who had served with O’Neill on the S.S. Philadelphia, and he’d appear as the Irishman Driscoll in his S.S. Glencairn series, Lyons in the short story “Tomorrow” and, most notably, as the Irish American antihero Robert “Yank” Smith in The Hairy Ape. “I shouldn’t have known the stokers if I hadn’t happened to scrape an acquaintance with one of our own furnace-room gang at Jimmy the Priest’s,” O’Neill said. “His name was Driscoll, and he was a Liverpool Irishman. It seems that years ago some Irish families settled in Liverpool. Most of them followed the sea, and they were a hard lot. To sailors all over the world, a ‘Liverpool Irishman’ is the synonym for a tough customer.”96

  Driscoll occupied a grandiose place in O’Neill’s imagination: “a giant of a man, and absurdly strong. He thought a whole lot of himself, was a determined individualist. He was very proud of his strength, his capacity for grueling work. It seemed to give him mental poise to be able to dominate the stokehole, do more work than any of his mates.”97 Not much has been uncovered about Driscoll’s past; even his first name has remained a mystery. A few clues have surfaced, however: the initial of Driscoll’s first name was J, and he was five feet seven. He was born in Ireland, not Liverpool, in 1878, and he moved to New York, where he gained American citizenship.98 The only Driscoll that passed through Ellis Island and fits this profile is John Driscoll, who arrived in New York in 1899 from Cromore Village in Northern Ireland. Politically, this makes a good deal of sense, given that Yank Smith regards his Protestant Northern Irish engineer on the steamship as a “Catholic moiderin’ [murdering] bastard” (CP2, 137). John Driscoll also had a sister living at 44 Broad Street in New London, O’Neill’s hometown, which might have served as a handy conversation piece between the men at the bar.99

  No one was more shocked than O’Neill when he heard a few years later at Jimmy’s that on August 12, 1915, at age thirty-seven, Driscoll leapt overboard into the middle of the North Atlantic while bound west as leading fireman on the S.S. St. Louis on one of its regular round-trip crossings from Liverpool to New York. (This route might explain the confusion about Driscoll being a “Liverpool Irishman.”) Driscoll’s suicide inspired O’Neill to write a short story in 1917 titled “The Hairy Ape,” since lost; and he later revisited the idea in his 1921 play of the same title, this time replacing Driscoll’s actual Irish, a brogue we find in the Glencairn plays, with the accent of a Brooklyn man of the waterfront.100

  O’Neill’s next important roommate at Jimmy’s after Driscoll had gone back to sea was a former press agent of James O’Neill’s, James “Jimmy” Findlater Byth. The forty-four-year-old newspaperman and O’Neill had formed a close friendship while drinking at the Garden Hotel bar around 1907, when James first hired Byth, who at the time was working in New York as a Coney Island amusement park operator. A recurrent figure in the O’Neill ca
non, Jimmy Byth would serve as the model for James “Jimmy” Anderson in “Tomorrow,” the drunken roommate Jimmy in Exorcism, and, most famously, as James “Jimmy Tomorrow” Cameron in The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill’s first title for this much later play was also “Tomorrow”).

  Byth’s character in “Tomorrow” lived in a “dream of tomorrows,” while Iceman’s “Foolosopher,” Larry Slade (based on the Irish anarchist Terry Carlin), refers to Jimmy as “the leader of our Tomorrow Movement” (CP3, 584). In his stage directions for Iceman, O’Neill describes Byth as having a face “like an old well-bred, gentle bloodhound’s. … His eyes are intelligent and there once was a competent ability about him. His speech is educated, with a ghost of a Scotch rhythm in it. His manners are those of a gentleman. There is a quality about him of a prim, Victorian old maid, and at the same time of a likable, affectionate boy who has never grown up” (CP3, 567). Byth was a hack writer as well as press agent who shared O’Neill’s predilection for drink but none of his literary ambition, though he did manage to publish a reminiscence during this period, “Cecil Rhodes,” which recounts his time as a correspondent during South Africa’s Boer War (1899–1902).