After a few months at the Telegraph, however, O’Neill had convinced himself that the humble pursuit of small-town journalism was to be his true calling. If nothing else, it might provide the requisite financial stability to marry his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Maibelle Scott. Scott lived with her sister Arlene and her husband, who had moved into a property of his father’s known as the Pink House, where the O’Neills lived before moving into Monte Cristo Cottage two doors down. Maibelle and Arlene were the daughters of John Scott, a grocer who lived a block away, and Eugene had known the family for years. But to reintroduce himself in a more romantic light, he arranged to cover a wedding Scott was attending for the Telegraph. Pretentiously donning one of his father’s black capes, he bowed before her and spluttered with inept gallantry, “At last we meet!” Later that night, at eleven o’clock, the tranquility of the Scott household was disturbed by the jangling of the telephone. It was Eugene O’Neill. Could he speak to Scott to ask her out for a date?154 Maibelle would later be the model for the fifteen-year-old Muriel McComber in his 1933 comedy Ah, Wilderness! (though the play takes place in 1906, not 1912). Richard Miller, O’Neill’s loosely based fictional counterpart, sends Muriel love letters and racy poetry, just as his creator did Scott. O’Neill gave her the original manuscript of his poem “Free” and wrote her over two hundred love letters, a unique store of material from this period in his life that calamitously, for posterity, Scott burned after she’d become engaged to another man a few years later.155
O’Neill and Scott met each other secretively on and off for the rest of the fall, as neither of their mothers was pleased to hear of the liaison. One night, after O’Neill saw her home after a showing of The Bohemian Girl at the Lyceum Theatre, Scott’s mother informed her that she would “shoot him” if he ever showed his face there again. For her part, Ella warned another local girl on the phone, wrongly assuming it was Scott, “You’d better stay away from him. He isn’t a good influence for you or any other girl.” Mary Tyrone, Ella’s fictional double, similarly chides her son, “No respectable parents will let their daughters be seen with you” (CP3, 739). But Ella’s disapproval of Eugene’s behavior was equaled by her disapproval of Scott as a match for him—she had little enthusiasm for her handsome young son’s marrying a grocer’s daughter.156
Maibelle Scott was perplexed by Eugene’s reputation in town as an unseemly roustabout. “He was always a gentleman around me, never drunk or anything like that,” she recalled, “and I couldn’t understand why people talked against him, including his own parents. I felt that he was very much misunderstood.” She was nevertheless surprised to see him ill at ease at parties and other public gatherings, exhibiting an all-too-commonly reported “sad streak in him, a what’s-the-use sort of attitude.” She later acknowledged that this depressive attitude prevented her from truly falling in love with O’Neill. “When I met my husband, I realized the feeling was different. I knew then that I had never loved Eugene but had only been fascinated.”157
As well as conducting Romeo and Juliet–style romances, O’Neill and Richard Miller from Ah, Wilderness! also shared left-wing views considered unsuitable for consumption by respectable young women. Like his creator, Richard disdains the Fourth of July as a “stupid farce”: “I’ll celebrate the day the people bring out the guillotine again and I see Pierpont Morgan being driven by in a tumbrel!” “Son,” responds his tolerant father, Nat Miller, a character recognizable to New Londoners as O’Neill’s editor Frederick Latimer, “if I didn’t know it was you talking, I’d think we had Emma Goldman with us” (CP3, 13).
Notwithstanding his father’s relative wealth and celebrity, O’Neill experienced anti-Irish bigotry firsthand in New London, and his Irish characters would lay bare their creator’s emotional and political affiliation with “shanty” or “bogtrotter” Irish against the capitalist classes, Puritan morality, and the hypocrisy of the socially ambitious “lace-curtain” Irish. “The one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” O’Neill would later say. “And, strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.”158 The ethnic tensions in New London and across New England between defiant Irish Catholics and establishment Yankee Protestants left O’Neill with a profound sympathy for America’s disenfranchised populations writ large. When he voted in the presidential election, he cast his very first ballot for the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who’d run his campaign from a jail cell, despite O’Neill’s belief that American party politics was “the acme of futility.” “I voted for Debs,” he glibly remarked, “because I dislike John D. Rockefeller’s bald head.”159
O’Neill openly and enduringly despised the Yankee families who represented the New London elite. The Chappell family, for instance, would later appear as the offstage Chatfields in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and he portrays Mary Tyrone as harboring a deep-seated jealousy of this clan whose lives appear somehow more meaningful than those of her own Irish Catholic family. In one scene, Mary peers out a window and notices her older son Jamie ducking behind a hedge he’s trimming as the Chatfields drive by. Jamie is embarrassed to be seen engaged in menial work, while casually dressed James Tyrone bows with dignity to the passing car. The episode sparks a revealing conversation between Edmund and Mary about the town: Edmund likes it “well enough. I suppose because it’s the only home we’ve had.” “Jamie’s a fool to care about the Chatfields,” he scoffs. “For Pete’s sake, who ever heard of them outside this hick burg?” Mary agrees: “Big frogs in a small puddle.” “Still, the Chatfields and people like them stand for something,” she says. “Not that I want anything to do with them. I’ve always hated this town and everyone in it” (CP3, 738).
More widely known targets of O’Neill’s Irish begrudgery were Edward C. Hammond, a wealthy member of the local gentry, and Edward S. Harkness, whose father had been a partner in John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire. These men were more crocodiles than big frogs in that small puddle. O’Neill lampooned Harkness later as the stuffy millionaire T. Stedman Harder in A Moon for the Misbegotten: “Not unpleasant … he is simply immature, naturally lethargic, a bit stupid … deliberate in his speech, slow on the uptake, and has no sense of humor” (CP3, 884) and offstage as Harker in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But O’Neill’s characterization was perhaps more accurate of Hammond than of Harkness. The latter, over the course of a generously philanthropic life and later through bequests, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various universities and museums, including $1 million to establish Yale University’s celebrated Theatre Department. (In an ironic twist, it was through that department’s influence that Yale chose O’Neill for an honorary doctorate in 1926. Edward C. Hammond’s former estate also became the current location of another renowned theatrical organization—the Tony Award–winning Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.) O’Neill nevertheless immortalized Harkness, from the playwright’s earliest years as a scribbling reporter to the last play he ever completed, A Moon for the Misbegotten, as the archetype of the well-heeled but vapid Protestant oppressor.160
The Harkness and Hammond properties were adjacent to one another, just west of New London on Long Island Sound. Between these two massive estates lay a strip of land owned by James O’Neill and rented by an Irish-born tenant named John Dolan. Dolan made a lasting impression on Eugene in 1912, and he would straggle on as a tenant of the O’Neill family’s into the 1920s. Nicknamed “Dirty” in reference to the permanent state of his feet, Dolan would appear as the offstage Shaughnessy in Long Day’s Journey, then as Phil Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. In fact, O’Neill first conceived of A Moon for the Misbegotten as his “Dolan play” before his brother Jim took it over. O’Neill describes Dolan as fifty-five years old, short in stature, thick-necked and muscular, with a voice that was “high-pitched with a pronounced brogue” (CP3, 862). Phil Hogan’s quick-witted sense of humor—grounded in laughing off life’s difficulties, rapid ton
e reversals, and word play—is all Irish. His other traits associated with Irishness, however (pugilistic, drunken, conspiratorial), badly offended “lace-curtain” Irish audience members when A Moon for the Misbegotten was first produced in 1947.
Edmund Tyrone shares a story with his family in the opening scene of Long Day’s Journey that their tenant Shaughnessy (Dolan) had told him the previous night at a local inn. Offering a comic parable of the tensions between the Irish and the Yankees, Shaughnessy delights Edmund with his triumph over the Standard Oil magnate: Harker had accused Shaughnessy of tearing down the fence that separates their land in order for the farmer’s pigs to bathe in his ice pond. The Irishman retorted that it was Harker who was tampering with his fence, thus nefariously exposing his unsuspecting pigs to pneumonia and cholera. “He was King of Ireland, if he had his rights,” Edmund laughs, “and scum was scum to him no matter how much money it had stolen from the poor.” Shaughnessy then ordered the millionaire off his land and threatened legal action for Harker’s vandalism. James chuckles at the joke on the recognized sachem of the Protestant gentry, then abruptly resumes the role of an outraged landlord—“The dirty blackguard!” Fearful of trouble arising from the harassment of one of the town’s leading citizens, James attacks Edmund for his “damned Socialist anarchist sentiments” against Standard Oil; but the whole family knows that deep down, as Edmund says, James is “tickled to death over the great Irish victory” (CP3, 726).161
The (Love) Sick Apprentice
At first O’Neill felt as if he just had a nasty cold that October of 1912, a wretchedness he’d foolishly exacerbated by bicycling to his job at the Telegraph in a rainstorm. Then the family physician, Dr. Harold Heyer, concluded that he had pleurisy, but by November, he’d upgraded his diagnosis: tuberculosis.162 The lung disease, commonly referred to as “the Great White Plague,” was perceived at the time as more of a moral than a physical affliction, because it appeared to originate in the congested urban slums. (O’Neill blamed his contracting the disease on Jimmy the Priest’s, where he’d shared quarters with “the Lunger.”) Ella also relapsed that fall back into her own morally charged affliction, having poisoned her system with so much morphine that she too required medical attention. This confluence enabled Mabel Reynolds, a young nurse in training whom Dr. Heyer first assigned to the family, a rare window into life at Monte Cristo Cottage.
When Reynolds arrived at the door, she heard male voices shouting back and forth inside. She was already frightened of Jim, whom New Londoners spoke of as “a problem, always in some kind of scrape.” Someone eventually heard her knocking and ordered her in. The three O’Neill men were hunched over a round table in the living room with a whiskey bottle and glasses. No one got up to greet her;they simply waved her upstairs. What she found there horrified her. “[Ella O’Neill] was in bed and looked terrible,” Reynolds remembered. “She looked—this is a horrible expression but it will give you the idea—she looked like a witch, with her white hair and large dark eyes. She was rocking back and forth, wringing her hands. ‘My son, my son,’ she kept repeating, and tears were running down her face.”163
The dreadful commotion of the O’Neill men shouting downstairs never let up, and Reynolds must have heard Ella sob, “My son, my son,” a hundred times, though it wasn’t clear whether she meant Eugene or her dead child Edmund. It especially shocked her that Ella, such a proper lady in public, could behave this way. It took hours to calm her, during which time Reynolds gave her an alcohol rub, exposing the track marks on her arm. None of the men came upstairs, and they were gone the next morning when Reynolds left for home. Her impression was that “they were terribly upset that [Ella] had gone back to the addiction.” “No,” Reynolds told her interviewer, “I never went back.”164
Dr. Heyer then dispatched Olive Evans, whose experiences were less nightmarish than Reynolds’s. She did hear Ella crying as she rocked in her chair. “It was a whimpering sound, like a kitten. I once said to Eugene, ‘Shouldn’t I go downstairs and see about your mother?’ He told me not to; he was very insistent about it, and said I was never to go unless invited. I never was.” Ella later dressed Evans down for delivering messages between Eugene and Maibelle Scott: “I know what’s been happening. There are many reasons why we don’t want this affair to go on, and religion is the principal reason.” Evans further recollected that O’Neill wanted nothing to do with his father James, referring to him acidly as “the Irish peasant.” “Oh, please, Geney, don’t call Papa that,” Ella would plead hopelessly. Once, when James poked his head into his son’s room to ask how he was feeling, O’Neill hardly looked up from bed.165
On December 9, 1912, O’Neill endured a painful aspiration procedure to relieve the fluid in his thoracic cavity.166 He was then accompanied by Olive Evans to New Haven, where they were met by James, who’d been in New York overseeing legal issues regarding a film version of Monte Cristo. (James’s film was released the following year, but not before a rival company had dampened moviegoers’ interest by releasing its own adaptation.)167 For the paltry sum of $4 a week, James checked his son into the Fairfield County Home for the Care and Treatment of Persons Suffering from Tuberculosis in Shelton, Connecticut, a state-run sanatorium that, in contrast to its grandiose title, consisted of a farmhouse and two shacks that served as makeshift infirmaries. (This is the scorned institution reffered to in Long Day’s Journey Into Night).
Monte Cristo Cottage at 325 Pequot Avenue in New London. The small addition at the left is where the complete action of Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
James O’Neill, like most Irishmen before the discovery of antibiotics, regarded tuberculosis as nothing short of a death sentence. “If Edmund was a lousy acre of land you wanted, the sky would be the limit!” Jamie Tyrone pillories his father in Long Day’s Journey: “What I’m afraid of is, with your Irish bog-trotter idea that consumption is fatal, you’ll figure it would be a waste of money to spend any more than you can help.” “I have every hope Edmund will be cured,” James retorts. “And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland! You’re a fine one to sneer, with the map of it on your face!” (CP3, 730, 761).
Eugene checked himself out of the Fairfield County Home after only two days and took a train straight to New York to confront his father about paying for a better facility. James then consulted with several New York specialists, one of whom, Dr. James Alexander Miller, encouraged him to send Eugene to Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut. Gaylord Farm was a well-funded treatment center, one that at the time, though it cost only $7 a week, had an exemplary reputation (as it still does to this day).
O’Neill was admitted on the first day he was notified that there was a vacancy: Christmas Eve, 1912. Explaining later that the medical staff considered him “an uninteresting case, there was so little the matter,” O’Neill insisted that the only element of heroism to be found in his tale of woe was that he’d checked in on Christmas Eve—“at least, some folks thought it so, not knowing that to an actor’s son, whose father had been on tour nearly every winter, Christmas meant less than nothing.” In fact, O’Neill had never experienced the disenchantment many children feel after discovering that their beloved Kris Kringle is just a holiday myth; he’d never had reason to believe in Santa Claus from the start.168
Gaylord Farm, it turned out, offered a profound respite from the chaos of the last several years within its nurturing walls. O’Neill hit it off with several patients and nurses there, but he also discovered a replacement father figure in his attending physician, the sanatorium’s superintendent, Dr. David Russell Lyman. O’Neill affectionately describes his character based on Dr. Lyman, Doctor Stanton in The Straw (1919), as speaking with a slight southern accent; he is “a handsome man of forty-five or so with a grave, care-lined, studious face lightened by a kindly, humorous smile. His gray eyes, saddened by t
he suffering they have witnessed, have the sympathetic quality of real understanding” (CP1, 747). O’Neill and Lyman corresponded for years after his case was deemed arrested, and their letters reveal the kind of mutual respect and intimacy one might associate with a devoted father and adoring son rather than a physician and his patient. More than a year after his release, O’Neill wrote Dr. Lyman, “If, as they say, it is sweet to visit the place one was born in, then it will be doubly sweet for me to visit the place I was reborn in—for my second birth was the only one which had my full approval.”169
Thanks to the warm-hearted atmosphere cultivated by Lyman and the head nurse of his infirmary, Mary Clark, O’Neill indeed experienced a transformative intellectual and psychological “second birth” at Gaylord Farm. Ten years later, though, he gently corrected a reporter who referenced the growing legend that O’Neill had decided to become a writer while convalescing there. No, he said, he’d discovered his vocation while writing for the Telegraph. However, he added, “It was at Gaylord that my mind got a chance to establish itself, to digest and valuate the impressions of many past years in which one experience had crowded on another with never a second’s reflection. At Gaylord I really thought about my life for the first time, about past and future. Undoubtedly the inactivity forced upon me by the life at a san forced me to mental activity, especially as I had always been high-strung and nervous temperamentally.”170
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 11
