In retrospect, then, it’s just as well O’Neill hadn’t returned to Harvard that fall. His time in the Village was not about writing, per se (though he did submit Thirst and Bound East for Cardiff to the Washington Square Players, an ambitious new drama group that summarily rejected both)—rather, it was more about abandoning the child-self that had possessed him for too long. In a pleading letter to Beatrice Ashe the previous March, when she had threatened to break up with him for another man, O’Neill referred to himself as “your tearful little boy.” And when a couple of weeks later she expressed mother love for him as opposed to romantic passion, he said, “Why not? … I promise to always be your child. Where you are concerned, like Peter Pan, I shall never grow up.”221 But that winter, the Village would teach Pan to believe in himself before he could learn to fly.
O’Neill soon became a regular at the Golden Swan Café on the southeast corner of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, a dive bar its patrons referred to as the Hell Hole. In the back room, gaslights “flickered wanly, both startling and inadequate,” as one observer put it, and out front, a moth-eaten stuffed swan on painted lily pads collected dust in a glass display case. Food was ordered and retrieved through a jagged hole in the wall—the sandwich or bowl of spaghetti or stewed tomatoes you could get were all pretty good, considering the orifice they had come out of. Leftover scraps were dispatched to a pig that the bar’s Irish American proprietor Tom Wallace kept in the basement for garbage disposal. To order a beer, customers had to buzz a bell about a half dozen times until they heard one of the bartenders roar Wallace’s name, at which point they could be sure their order was on its way.222 Women were required to use a discreet “family entrance” on Fourth Street, but they did so under a glare of scowling disapproval from Wallace’s two bouncers, Lefty Louie and John Bull, who didn’t like women in the bar; believing they “brought trouble and police.” Louie and Bull would appear in O’Neill’s late masterwork The Iceman Cometh as Chuck Morello and Rocky Pioggi, and Wallace himself would be immortalized as Harry Hope, the local Tammany politician and owner of Harry Hope’s Bar, where O’Neill’s epic tragedy takes place.223
The Golden Swan Café, a.k.a. “the Hell Hole,” at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, circa 1900. The Hell Hole was razed in 1928 and is now site of the Golden Swan Garden.
(PHOTO BY ROBERT L. BRACKLOW. COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
“Much of [O’Neill’s] best work came from the time when he was bumming around,” wrote O’Neill’s friend and future collaborator the labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. “When he was the companion of sailors and when he sat in the Hell Hole with a bunch of bums. … He liked the people from the lower depths.” “There was a smoky quality,” she remarked of the Hell Hole’s interior, “Something at once alive and deadly.” At the bar in front, truckers often bragged to O’Neill about crates of contraband they’d “pinched,” and he befriended Joe Smith, a professional gambler and the black crime boss of “Cocaine Alley” around Cornelia Street. Mary Vorse remembered Smith with admiration as “a chieftain though a small man and shabby. Not bothering to be flashy but about him was the authentic air of a ruler.” Agnes Boulton, soon to meet O’Neill at the Hell Hole and become his second wife, described Smith as “the boss of the Negro underworld near the Village … [whose] tales were startling.” Smith’s white spouse would often be seated next to him, and the pair were gracious to outsiders. Smith, a Village native, first ran a gambling house, then became legit with a day job as an auctioneer for the Wise Auction Company.224 But it was for his close friendship with and influence upon O’Neill that he’d be remembered best, and he’d later be portrayed in Iceman as the good-hearted gambler Joe Mott.
It was also at the Hell Hole that winter that O’Neill befriended the Hudson Dusters, an infamous West Side Irish gang that claimed the bar as its headquarters. The Dusters included the likes of “Knock-Em-Dead” Bolan, “Big” Kennedy, and “The Rabbit” Crosby, a revolver-toting mob of “cocaine crazed young men,” as one journalist labeled them, whose exploits were scrutinized closely by the police and sensationally covered in the New York press. According to Agnes Boulton, the Dusters thought highly of O’Neill as “a two-fisted drinker, one of their own kind,” and Mary Vorse recalled that the gangsters “all accepted him as an equal and didn’t question him.”225 O’Neill recited poetry to the Dusters at the Hell Hole, typically The Hound of Heaven, and they became so devoted to the aspiring writer that they once offered to steal a coat for him when he was cold. All they needed was his size. He politely declined.
“One remembers the Hudson Dusters,” wrote the New York writer Harry Golden in a satiric sketch of the organization’s rise and fall, as “a gang of toughs who hung out in Greenwich Village. The Dusters terrified the Bronx. They were the scourge of the Palisades. The police precincts always had their eye out for the appearance of the Dusters. What happened to the Dusters was that the Bohemians began to move into Greenwich Village. These poets and artists and writers thought the Dusters were charming fellows. The Bohemians used to recite their poetry aloud at Duster meetings whether the Dusters wanted to hear or not. Eugene O’Neill found their conversation stimulating. … When the Dusters realized none of these painters and writers and poets were afraid of them, sullenly the gang broke up and the Dusters all found gainful employment.” As comical as this association between gangsters and bohemians must have seemed to an astute observer like Golden, the Dusters were a public menace. “In spite of the Rabelaisian quality of Wallace and his companions,” Vorse said, “the Hell Hole was sinister. It was as if the combined soul of New York flowed underground and this was one of its vents.”226
Wanting to live closer to the crowd at the Hell Hole, O’Neill moved from the Garden Hotel into a boardinghouse at 38 Washington Square West. He was soon kicked out for not paying his rent, however, and the landlady retained his trunk of extra clothes and books as collateral until he returned with the $46 he owed. That spring, after countless nights spent with heads down on a table in the Hell Hole’s back room, O’Neill and a new friend, an older Irishman named Terry Carlin, found an apartment just down the block from the Hell Hole, which they shared with the journalist Jack Druilard and affectionately dubbed “the Garbage Flat.” (Druilard, O’Neill said, “was momentarily—and miraculously—‘in the bucks,’” so he could pay the first month’s rent.) Decades later, O’Neill remembered the Garbage Flat “fondly and vividly. … It continued to be unfurnished except for piles of sacking as beds, newspapers as bed linen, and packing boxes for chairs and tables. … Toward the end of our tenancy, there was a nice even carpet of cigarette butts, reminding one of the snow scene in an old melodrama.”227
Terry Carlin wasn’t a writer (that involved too much exertion), but he was a world-class talker steeped in philosophy. Jack London knew Carlin well from their early days as activists in California, and he thought of Carlin as a kind of mystic, as did many of the anarchist contingent in America at the time, though just as many others thought of him as a laughable crank. O’Neill and Carlin whiled away their hours drinking and smoking and reading Friedrich Nietzsche and volumes of Eastern philosophy that Carlin recommended, like Mabel Collins’s Light on the Path (1885); but time and again O’Neill found himself too swamped in the miasma of drink and its aftereffects to do any serious writing. “After I’d had a quart and a half of bourbon,” he told a reporter in 1946, “I could walk straight and talk rationally, but my brain was nuts. If anybody suggested that I climb up the Woolworth Building, I’d be tickled to death to do it.” Instead, he took advantage of this nearly year-long hiatus in playwriting to methodically train his mind to think like a dramatist, first in dialogue, then scene changes, then acts, based on the scores of plays he’d read by this time—Strindberg, Ibsen, the Greeks, even romances and melodrama.228
O’Neill did muster enough wherewithal to volunteer for Revolt, an anarchist weekly helmed by another Hell Hole associate, Hippolyte Havel. The paper had offices in the basem
ent of the soon to be defunct Ferrer School, but it was shut down after three months, along with the Ferrer, for its vocal opposition to World War I. O’Neill reveled in the romance of political rebellion, bragging to Ashe about his abbreviated tenure at Revolt that he was “one of the group that helped get the paper out every week. We all narrowly escaped getting a bit to do in the Federal pen.”229 Meanwhile, Terry Carlin had attracted big trouble from the opposite direction—the anarchists themselves. Carlin had been falsely accused of colluding with the federal government, informing agents of the whereabouts of the anarchist group that had bombed the Los Angeles Times Building in 1910, taking twenty-five lives in the process. The actual snitch, Donald Vose Meserve, was Carlin’s friend, and evidence had been found in Meserve’s apartment pointing to the connection between them.230
The whirl of accusations against Carlin from the nation’s radicals prompted author and journalist Hutchins “Hutch” Hapgood to publish an impassioned plea in Revolt that February titled “The Case of Terry.” Hapgood was a respected authority on such matters: over the previous two decades, he’d penned sketches and book-length studies on anarchists, socialists, labor unionists, immigrants, bohemians, free-love advocates, prostitutes, and thieves. He’d published a book back in 1909 chronicling Terry and his ex-girlfriend Marie’s vagabond life together called An Anarchist Woman, which became something of a bohemian manifesto and solidified Carlin’s legacy as an anarchist folk hero. Eventually counting among his cohort the philosophers William James and George Santayana; painters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; fiction writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway; political activists, John Reed, “Big Bill” Haywood, and Emma Goldman; and, of course, O’Neill himself, Hapgood appears, Zelig-like, on the ground floor of nearly every major intellectual achievement of the modern era. (In 1920, after cavorting together for several years, Hapgood and O’Neill found themselves together on an overnight train; O’Neill reported that the pair of them “sat up in a deck stateroom and theorized the universe to sleep until about midnight. I have grown to love Hutch. He’s a peach!”)231
Despite Hapgood’s best efforts, however, Carlin continued to be hounded over his damning association with Meserve. “When Donald was suspected,” Hapgood wrote, “but before his guilt appeared openly by his testimony on the witness stand, Terry clung to the idea of the boy’s innocence. It was a terrible shock to him. His faithful soul would not suspect, until the definite proof came.” Carlin’s alleged collusion with the Feds would harass him and taint his reputation, such as it was, to his death; as Hapgood remarked of the accusations, “The human mind tends to harbor a doubt once suggested. Such is the terrible character of suspicion.”232 The controversy over Carlin and Meserve would later serve as the models for the tormented relationship between Larry Slade and Donald Parritt in The Iceman Cometh.
For his part, O’Neill had reached a dead end finding a theater group to produce his plays in New York; and writing while living hand-to-mouth and perpetually drunk in the Garbage Flat and at the Hell Hole had proved impossible. It was time for a change.
Hapgood rented a summerhouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he headed with his family that May. As well as Hapgood and his wife, the writer Neith Boyce, the journalist Jack Reed, and Hippolyte Havel were planning to go there that summer. Reed had met with a few of the former Washington Square Players, including George “Jig” Cook, at the Working Girls’ Home that winter. Together, Reed and Cook intended to carry on with an experimental drama group launched in Provincetown the previous summer.233 That’s where O’Neill and Carlin would go.
“Now that I look back on it,” Eugene O’Neill mused in 1923, “I realize that I couldn’t have done better for myself [as a playwright] if I had deliberately charted out my life.” Indeed, O’Neill’s experiences in New York, New London, at sea, and on the vaudeville circuit shaped his future ideas, plots, and characters, and thus equipped him, along with his determination to “hew to the line,” to forge a modern American drama. Whether college dropouts, prostitutes, war veterans, vagabond sailors, has-been revolutionaries, or members of O’Neill’s own family, these ghosts at the stage door brought philosophical and psychological depths that even the most open-minded American theatergoers might never have believed possible.
Before O’Neill, producers had been painfully slow to accept such characters as these on the stage, given their hidebound view of theater as a profit-making industry, what O’Neill disgustedly referred to as “the closed-shop, star-system, amusement racket.” Few American plays had yet to transcend the Victorian tastes of the era—historical romance and melodrama. And the most powerful commercial force of the time was the contract and booking duopoly run by the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shubert Brothers.
Managed by booker Charles Frohman, the Syndicate reflected the growing industrial order by standardizing plays based solely on profit potential, privileging melodramatic plots that pit good against evil, with good always winning out. The understood requirement for booking a production through Frohman was, above all else, a happy ending. The Syndicate, also known as the “Trust,” was founded in 1896, and for more than a decade it often stymied the impassioned efforts of playwrights like Clyde Fitch, James A. Herne, Percy MacKaye, Rachel Crothers, and even the theatrical giant David Belasco, to produce a lasting American drama. The Shubert Brothers, according to one observer, “aimed at and almost succeeded in controlling the American theatre by coercion, bribing critics, boycotting newspapers, blackballing actors, and hogtying managers and owners of theatres.” Finding themselves “debarred” time after time at venues across the country, theater professionals “finally succumbed one by one, the playwrights listened to their commercial dictators, managers of minor theatres became their henchmen.” In this way, the majority of American plays between the Civil War and World War I were written and produced with moneymaking stars in mind, and playwrights were viewed as hired guns rather than artists, much as screenwriters were soon to be regarded during the reign of the Hollywood studio system.
By the 1910s, what became known as the “Little Theatre Movement” boldly answered the modern call for a distinctly American drama, confronting head-on the cultural and political debates then roiling in both smaller communities and the nation at large. Baltimore’s Vagabond Theatre, Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse and Comedy Theatre, the Chicago Little Theatre, and the Boston Toy Theatre soon inspired copycat venues throughout the United States in truly off-off-off Broadway locales like Ohio, Indiana, and even South Dakota. Then, in the fall of 1916, after two summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the members of the experimental theater group known as the Provincetown Players introduced Greenwich Village, and soon the world, to their two greatest dramatic discoveries: Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. The Players’ defiant mission was “to establish a stage where playwrights of sincere, poetic, literary and dramatic purpose could see their plays in action and superintend their production without submitting to the commercial manager’s interpretation of public taste.”
ACT II: “To Be an Artist or Nothing”
The stupidity of our theater at the present time, with but little qualification, is of an excellence so signal and arresting that it is certain to reawaken the latent interest in the playhouse. By virtue of its very astounding magnitude it is certain to attract again to the theater such erstwhile rebels as, exasperated by merely mediocre plays and merely mediocre mummering, until now have remained steadfastly away.
—GEORGE JEAN NATHAN, 1916
The great hope of the future lies in the fertilization of the large by the little theater, of Broadway by Provincetown … in the region of Washington Square and Greenwich Village—or ultimately among the sand dunes of Cape Cod—we must look for the real birthplace of the New American Drama.
—WILLIAM ARCHER, 1923
Washed Ashore at Land’s End
O’NEILL AND TERRY CARLIN stepped down off the Dorothy Bradford’s gangplank onto Provin
cetown’s Railroad Wharf in late June of 1916. Slick with seagull droppings and cod guts and strewn with tangled nets, the Railroad Wharf functioned as a fish-wagon railway stretching at least one hundred meters out into Provincetown Harbor. Fishing was the town’s only cash source, and the briny fumes of the daily catch steamed up off the harbor’s more than fifty wharves.
The Dorothy Bradford, named for a Mayflower passenger who, in the winter of 1620, toppled overboard into the black maw of Provincetown Harbor and drowned, was a four-tiered iron ferry that carried up to 1,650 passengers daily from Boston’s Rowe’s Wharf to Railroad Wharf.1 The heartrending tale of the vessel’s namesake mirrors much of O’Neill’s thematic territory: the horror of an untimely death, the legacy of Puritan New England, the treacherous nature of life at sea, and, in terms of the ferry itself, the soul-destroying transition from the sail power of old to the factory-like steam engines of the modern age. The Mayflower’s crew had estimated, before setting sail for Plymouth Rock, that within the protected water of the Provincetown Harbor “a thousand sails may safely ride.” A more accurate estimation, from 1875, was three times that.2
The two Irish “wash ashores” scored $10 from Hutch Hapgood, then moved into a sailmaker’s loft overlooking the harbor on the “East End” of the main thoroughfare, Commercial Street. The vacant space was usually inhabited by Bayard Boyesen of the Ferrer School. Hapgood was a friend of Boyesen’s, as he was of all anarchists, and O’Neill and Carlin had known him from the Ferrer. (He’d also been a contributing editor at Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine when O’Neill published his first poem, “American Sovereign,” in May 1911.)3 The loft’s owner, John Francis, was a portly man whose mother was Irish and whose father was a Portuguese fisherman “with rings in his ears.”4 Francis didn’t drink or smoke himself but was a tolerant, generous host to impoverished bohemians, like O’Neill and Carlin, who did a great deal of both. “Twenty-five dollars till the snow flies,” Francis told his tenants at 377 Commercial Street, known as Francis’s Flats. “This loft won’t be warm in winter.”5
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 14
