Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  On the train ride back to New York early that October 1916, after his triumphant premiere in Provincetown, O’Neill stopped over at New London for a brief visit with his parents. Never one to let go of a bad idea, O’Neill rewrote The Movie Man that week in New London as the short story “The Screenews of War.”61 Bryant joined him there, and the elder O’Neills approved of her if only because she’d evidently curtailed O’Neill’s drinking.62 O’Neill’s friend Jessica Rippin remembered Bryant wandering around New London barefoot wearing a pair of O’Neill’s trousers. “After the way he’d raved about her,” Rippin said, “I expected something special, but she was a mess, she looked like a Greenwich Village character who needed a bath.”63

  By the time O’Neill was back in New York, Jig Cook had located the Provincetown Players’ next stage: 139 Macdougal Street, an 1840 brownstone for $50 a month just south of Washington Square. O’Neill proposed naming it the Playwrights’ Theatre, to which the Players voted a resounding “yea,” to highlight the new role of playwrights as controlling artists rather than Broadway lackeys. The cramped auditorium was built in the first floor parlor, with only a couple of feet left behind the stage for scenery changes. Because of fire laws, there was no box office, so ticket revenue could be collected only through seasonal subscriptions. The second floor housed dressing rooms, a lounge, an office, and a restaurant run by Christine Ell.64

  O’Neill, with Lou Holladay and the freelance journalist, restaurant worker, and future speakeasy proprietor Barney Gallant, rented for $3 a month an unfurnished flat at 38 Washington Square, which reeked of horse dung from a nearby stable.65 Gallant, like so many others, felt on edge around O’Neill, but understood over time that whenever O’Neill shared a tale from his past, “he was already shaping his plays; he was like a painter trying to fix a scene in his mind. He would watch us closely, gauging the effect his stories were having on us—we were, you might say, the audience.”66

  Over their six seasons of operation, the Provincetown Players produced works by an astonishing lineup of literary lights: along with O’Neill and Glaspell, Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, Mike Gold, Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other writers who were prepared to face off against the moral certitude of the American genteel tradition, with its stifling and arbitrary censorship laws, and the Theatrical Syndicate and Shubert Brothers’ systematic commercialization of Broadway. For this reason, they intentionally discouraged reviewers from attending their performances and sloughed off the age-old convention of offering them complimentary tickets.

  “People drifted down to Macdougal Street because it was something of a lark,” Clayton Hamilton told an audience of three hundred at Columbia University in 1924; the makeshift venue was “a sort of intellectual substitute for going slumming.” “To go to the New Amsterdam Theatre and see ‘The Follies’ was mainly an expense,” he said, “but to go down to Macdougal Street and see the Provincetown Players was not an expense but an adventure.”67 During one performance, for instance, a gang of Italian kids threw open the stage door, shouted “Go fuck yourselves!” and ran off down the block. The actor Charles Ellis, watching from the edge of the stage as perplexed audience members got to their feet, refused to allow his show to be so easily interrupted. Holding a shovel, a prop that his part required, high above his head, he broke the “fourth wall” and bellowed, “If anybody makes a move, you don’t listen to me, I’ll bury you all!”68

  For a clubhouse to hold meetings and gather after performances, the Players appropriated Nani Bailey’s Samovar, a renowned Village café around the corner in a second-floor loft space and former art studio above a junk shop at 148 West Fourth Street. They painted the tables and chairs an assortment of colors and the crumbling brick walls and enormous rafters a rose red. The center of the restaurant featured an enormous working samovar to tap glasses of tea and wash down Bailey’s famously savory cheese sandwiches.69 O’Neill’s frequent absence was a frustration. “Someone’s got to go and rake Gene out of the Hell Hole!” one of the Players would yell. “But it happened often,” Mary Vorse recalled, “that whoever went ‘to rake Gene out’ himself also had to get raked.” One Player after the other would go to the Hell Hole, just two doors down on Sixth Avenue, until the whole troupe had transferred to the bar.70

  The long stretches of time Jig Cook spent with his protégé O’Neill were often tense, even when the encounters were generously lubricated with beakers of Fish House Punch or quarts of Old Taylor bourbon, O’Neill’s preferred blend. O’Neill’s perpetual uneasiness, especially when sober, had a grating effect on Cook. In a letter to Glaspell that October, he grumbled that O’Neill’s temperament was irritably contagious: “O’Neill’s nervous tension is a thing that I feel instantly when I see him. I mean that I instantly catch it from him—I feel it myself in myself. Sort of anxiety complex. He likes to be with me since he discovered that I feel what he feels. But it isn’t good for me.”71

  Cook also came to interpret O’Neill’s painful self-consciousness as a form of narcissism. “You’re the most conceited man I’ve ever known,” he said as he observed O’Neill staring, once again, at his reflection. “No,” O’Neill replied, “I just want to be sure I’m here.”72

  O’Neill’s unique skill as a playwright, in fact, was in large part due to his ability to drive people, both onstage and off, into the shadows of his own psychic torment, and he used it to advantage in his next play, Before Breakfast. An American version of August Strindberg’s The Stronger, Before Breakfast involves alcoholism, suicide, an extramarital affair, two illegitimate pregnancies, a miscarriage, and a housewife who quite literally nags her husband to death. “O’Neill didn’t care about the success of the play,” Provincetowner Edna Kenton said. “He cared only about the reaction of the audience to monologue, trick shocks, trick relief. It was a deliberate experiment for a definite result—the endurance of the audience.” “How much are they going to stand of this sort of thing,” O’Neill wondered before the December 1 opening, “before they begin to break?” O’Neill himself played the offstage hand of Alfred Rowland, a bohemian artist from a well-to-do family who reaches through the bathroom door for his shaving cream and then slits his throat. Having seen O’Neill in his biggest part, the mulatto sailor in Thirst, Harry Kemp joked that the playwright “was fonder of his part in ‘Before Breakfast.’” “The audience sees only the hand, which according to the script is long-fingered, sensitive, slender. Later a groan is heard. There’s a part that calls for delicacy, restraint and finish. To coordinate the hand and the groan. … Well, O’Neill did the hand and the groan, and a fine performance it was.”73 (This would be the last time O’Neill, or any part of his anatomy, would appear onstage.)

  “My son,” O’Neill’s father James implored, “why don’t you write more pleasant plays?”74 James had begun taking an active interest in his younger son’s budding theatrical career, and he stopped by to view a rehearsal or two of Before Breakfast. A resplendent contrast to the frayed white and gray woolens and cotton garments the Players wore, James conspicuously sported a fur-collared coat, a gold-headed cane, and an outsized sparkling diamond ring. Eugene was deferential to his father and consulted him, reported a bystander, William Carlos Williams, “when there was some point they had to solve about the play itself or its presentation.”75 James interrupted the Irish beauty Mary Pyne, who starred as the sole onstage character, to coach her, “with the voice and gesture of Monte Cristo,” in his old-fashioned methods of acting. As the actor departed the theater that night, a few of the Players complimented him on his son’s “gifts and promise.” “Yes, yes,” James responded. “I think the boy has something in him.”76

  Before John Reed’s kidney operation that fall, Bryant left O’Neill behind in the village and traveled with Reed to Innisfree, a cottage they’d found in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. After her departure, even Jim O’Neill began to worry about his brother’s excessive drinking, and he contacted Bryant to help talk him down off the ledge. Bryant tracked hi
m down at the Hell Hole, looking filthier and more steeped in booze than she’d ever seen him, and coaxed him onto a bus to dry out with his parents. The elder O’Neills were staying at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights instead of their usual suite at the Prince George in Manhattan. They were most likely seeking the assistance of the Sisters of Charity convent nearby, where Ella had kicked her morphine habit in 1914. (In the fall of 1918, Ella would undergo a mastectomy, an experience that resulted in her temporarily returning to the drug.)77

  Reed and Bryant married in secrecy in Peekskill, New York, before Reed traveled alone to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on November 12 to have his kidney removed. During Reed’s convalescence, O’Neill and Bryant occupied his apartment on Washington Square. Bryant became unwell that November, and the gossips among the Villagers postulated that her illness was due to complications that had resulted from aborting O’Neill’s child. She relied upon the freethinking Village doctor Harry Lorber, who was known to treat such delicate matters as abortions, venereal diseases, and even the odd drug overdose with discretion.78 Bryant and Reed both recuperated after a few weeks, but she carried on with her passionate affair with O’Neill.

  The Players next put on O’Neill’s one-act Fog on January 5, 1917. Composed a year after the Titanic’s disastrous voyage in 1912, Fog is set on an oarless lifeboat lost off the Grand Banks. The principals, a poet and a man of business, argue over the poet’s assertion that success (material or otherwise), survival, and happiness can only be obtained when less fortunate souls are subjected to their opposite. O’Neill’s stage directions were highly ambitious for a theater as small as theirs—the play requires fog, a rising sun, falling ice, rolling swells, and two boats, among other special effects. The Sniper, O’Neill’s drama of World War I, was then staged on February 16, two weeks after the United States broke diplomatic ties with Germany. The Players put on The Sniper for precisely the same reason that Professor Baker and his father’s vaudeville friends had rejected it two years earlier, because of its timely subject matter, and they advertised The Sniper and two other antiwar plays as their “war bill.”79

  The Players’ self-assured and capable new director, Nina Moise, first met O’Neill at the Samovar while O’Neill was talking to a few people about The Sniper. Moise was unimpressed: “He was so inarticulate I wondered how he ever thought he could write a play.” “Then I read ‘The Sniper,’ which was not,” she recalled in hindsight, “a very good play, but even so I remember my thrill when I read it—it had such vitality.” Though O’Neill found it nearly impossible to articulate his ideas to actors at this time, for directors, Moise said, “his scripts are fool-proof. The director can follow his stage direction and never go wrong.”80 (For the 1917–18 season, Moise would direct his one-acts The Long Voyage Home and Ile in the fall and The Rope that spring.)

  That March 1917, O’Neill stole himself away from the heady distractions of Greenwich Village and returned to Provincetown to write in peace. He was joined by the hard-drinking pulp fiction writer Harold de Polo, and they took a room at the Atlantic House while John Francis refurbished a suite of rooms for them in his apartment building. O’Neill had met de Polo at Lou Holladay’s bar Sixty in 1915, before it was shut down and Holladay went to jail. O’Neill had overheard de Polo scoff with some others at the bar that the bohemian Village crowd was a bunch of out-of-town exhibitionists. O’Neill interrupted to counter defensively that he was born on Broadway, and the ensuing conversation marked the start of an intimate bond with de Polo that would last for well over a decade. (They became such fast friends that de Polo was one of the few to whom O’Neill admitted that his mother’s aloofness was the result of her morphine addiction.)81

  During this stay at the Atlantic House, where the owners hung a sign on the veranda, “Dogs and Artists Not Allowed!,” O’Neill completed what was to become his first hit play for a wider audience: In the Zone. Cashing in on a rampant fear of German invasion, the one-act takes place on the British tramp steamer Glencairn, the setting of Bound East for Cardiff but now loaded down with stores of dynamite and ammunition as it passes through a German U-boat zone. The paranoid crew, discovering that one of the seamen, Smitty, had stowed a black box in the forecastle, suspects it is a bomb and that he is a German spy with designs to destroy the ship.

  It was thus an uncanny coincidence that O’Neill and de Polo were themselves arrested and charged with espionage on March 27. The local Provincetowners, whose wariness matched that of O’Neill’s fictional crewmen, had grown suspicious after observing O’Neill and de Polo taking long, meandering walks on the beaches and through alleyways of their village. Convinced the strangers were scoping possible German landing sites, a few residents reported them to the authorities, noting that one of them carried a mysterious black box (possibly O’Neill’s “Magic Yeast” box or a typewriter case). Officer Reuben R. Kelley soon arrested them at gunpoint while they were eating dinner at the New Central Hotel. “What for?” de Polo asked. “You know what for!” Kelly shouted back. They’d been seen “prowling around” the radio station in the nearby town of North Truro, he said, and, though the initial charge was vagrancy, they were suspected of espionage. Secret Service agent Fred Weyand of the Department of Justice was then called in from Boston to interrogate them in the Town Hall lockup. They were held for over twenty-four hours without access to a lawyer, but O’Neill’s identity as the son of James O’Neill was soon verified, and the young men were released. (The reaction among the locals wasn’t merely the result of unfounded wartime paranoia; a German U-boat was in fact spotted and fired at after it breached off Provincetown’s shoreline the following summer, 1918.)82

  O’Neill, unaccustomed to demoralizing interrogations, left the station in equal parts infuriated and scared. Two of the detectives assigned to the case were staying at the Atlantic House as well, and they’d been tasked with monitoring O’Neill’s mail. “Well,” one of them would goad O’Neill at breakfast, “you got a letter from your mother, Gene, but your girl’s forgot you today, but someone sent you a knitted tie just the same.”83 The incident as a whole was later revisited by the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, while it was investigating O’Neill for treasonous political activity.

  This story so closely approximates the plot of In the Zone it was nearly impossible to believe that O’Neill wrote the play prior to his discomfiting experience; nevertheless, O’Neill and de Polo insisted that it had already been written by the time of their arrest. O’Neill’s likely source for the play was a story printed in the New London Telegraph on September 9, 1912, when he was on staff there. Entitled “Box Mystery Alarms Many until Solved,” the article reports that an Italian shopkeeper in New London grew suspicious about a black box left in his care. Believing it might belong to the Black Hand terrorist organization, he notified the police. Upon inspection, the box was found to contain some men’s clothing and was duly retrieved by its owner.84 Much later, in O’Neill’s 1940 work diary, he sketched out the plot of a comedy, “The Visit of Malatesta,” based on the life of Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta. In it, Malatesta visits a fictional version of New London. Although Italian Americans in the play consider him a regicidal hero, the mastermind behind the assassination of Umberto I in 1900 (actually killed by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci), the character, O’Neill writes, “denies he had anything to do with [the assassination]—terrorist group fanatics—true anarchism never justifies bloodshed.”85

  Wartime intrigues aside, O’Neill’s stay at the Atlantic House was one of the most industrious periods of his career. Along with In the Zone, he completed Ile and two more Glencairn plays, The Long Voyage Home and The Moon of the Caribbees. Ile is the story of a whaling captain’s wife who’s driven to insanity by her husband’s myopic pursuit of oil (the “ile” of the title). Based on the actual 1903 polar expedition of Captain John A. Cook and his wife, Viola Fish Cook, the fictional couple in Ile, David and Annie Keeney, are also clear stand-ins for James and Ella O’Neill. The Moon of
the Caribbees, though, was O’Neill’s unrivaled darling of the group. First titled “The Moon at Trinidad,” the play takes place off the coast of Port of Spain, where his ship the Ikala had anchored en route to New York from Buenos Aires. With virtually no plot, more than twenty speaking roles, and no melodramatic elements that might have made for a box office hit, The Moon of the Caribbees was a radical departure even for O’Neill. “No one else in the world,” O’Neill told Nina Moise, “could have written that one.”86

  O’Neill appeared “thunderstruck,” according to Louise Bryant, when she surprised him with an unannounced visit in mid-May. Jack Reed had been in Washington, D.C., conducting antiwar protests—and, it turned out, the occasional affair. Bryant, enraged in spite of her own blatant infidelity and claims of adherence to the free love movement, chose this as her breakout moment but only stayed with O’Neill for a week. Back in New York, she attained her journalistic credentials, with Reed’s help, just as the United States decided to join the weakened alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia against the German war machine. Now a certified, if untested, war correspondent, Bryant sailed to France under constant threat of U-boat attacks.87

  O’Neill wasn’t as keen for a firsthand observation of the Great War as Bryant or many other American writers of the time, such as Reed, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and Edith Wharton, to name a few. Once the draft was in place, he attempted to join the navy but was turned down for “minor defects which will not count in the draft.” He then sent a letter to Dr. Lyman at Gaylord Farm asking for a medical excuse to avoid the draft, given that “conditions in the camps and at the front are the worst possible for one susceptible to T.B. Is this so?” “I want to serve my country,” he said, “but it seems silly to commit suicide for it.”88

  That summer O’Neill submitted The Long Voyage Home and The Moon of the Caribbees to the Smart Set, a journal that advertised itself as dedicated to “enlightened skepticism” and was run by H. L. Mencken, the notorious enfant terrible of American letters. “I want these plays,” O’Neill wrote Mencken, “which to me are real, to pass through your acid test because I know your acid is ‘good medicine.’” Mencken published The Long Voyage Home in October 1917; he also accepted Ile that winter and published it the following May. Another prominent literary journal, the Seven Arts, published O’Neill’s short story “Tomorrow” in June, whetting O’Neill’s appetite to continue writing fiction as well as drama. The journal’s editor Waldo Frank didn’t like the story, although he published it at Louise Bryant’s behest (nor did he like O’Neill’s poem “I Am a Louse on the Body of Society,” since lost, which Bryant also passed along to him). He insisted upon significant changes, including the elimination of a melodramatic postscript. O’Neill envisioned “Tomorrow” as the first of a series of short stories based entirely on his life at Jimmy the Priest’s, “yarns in which the story-teller was to hog most of the limelight—a sort of Conrad’s Marlow.” But he couldn’t find a sustainable plotline, so he abandoned the series altogether.89 (He would return to the concept decades later, in dramatic form, as The Iceman Cometh.)