Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Terry Carlin arrived in Provincetown to join O’Neill that spring, and the two moved into another “Garbage Flat,” as they again named their quarters, this time at John Francis’s. O’Neill hung a sign on their door for passersby, “May wild jackasses desecrate the grave of your grandmother if you disturb me.”90 On the rafters, he and Carlin etched their own adaptation of the guiding tenets of Mabel Collins’s book of mystical thought Light on the Path:

  Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears!

  Before the ear can hear, it must have lost it’s sensitiveness!

  Before the voice can speak, it must have lost the power to wound!

  Before the soul can fly, it’s wings must be washed in the blood of the heart!91

  Once settled into the new Garbage Flat, O’Neill wrote at a breakneck pace, completing his one-act comedy The G.A.N. (a reference to Henry James’s waggish pet name for the ever-elusive “Great American Novel”), which he later destroyed, his short story “The Hairy Ape,” and the novella S.O.S. (based on his 1913 one-act play Warnings). “Sent my long story [‘The Hairy Ape’] to the Saturday Evening Post Monday,” he wrote a friend in September. “They might really take it and if they do it will mean some honest-to-Guard money. I’m pretty sure it will sell some place any way in the long run.” He’d written his most mature dramas to date over the previous months in Provincetown, but still sought the quick cash of popular fiction. “Here’s hoping!” he said just before sending off S.O.S., “I can certainly use a little money, divil a lie av ut!”92

  O’Neill evidently had a minor fling that summer with Elaine Freeman, a painter associated with Independent Artists, the avant-garde cohort that included Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, and Helene Iungerich, one of Freeman’s roommates in Provincetown. “Living in the Big Town on an author’s shoe-string, and a beggar’s mite extracted from a reluctant Pater,” he complained to Freeman about the prospects of another winter in New York, “is not my dream of the Perfect Life. It’s sure hell to nourish the instincts of a real artist in these degenerate days. The Coast, moreover, is a long step nearer the South Seas of my Visioning.” O’Neill gave Freeman an autograph manuscript of his Buenos Aires poem “The Bridegroom Weeps!” and wrote her several letters after her departure in September. In these unpublished letters, he details the state of his health (strong), his economic condition (weak), and the progress of his work (solid, but fiction, so ultimately futile). Lou Holladay had invited him to an apple orchard in Oregon owned by his fiancée, Louise Norton, who suggested he go out there to work and dry out if he wanted to marry her, and de Polo was hunting for a place for them to “bunk” in the New England countryside as well. Both propositions had their “charms,” he told Freeman, “as [de Polo] and I are lenient toward each other’s sins—as I and Lou are for that matter—and get along like real pals.” O’Neill also dreamed of moving to the South Sea islands and playing, for the rest of his life, on his “spiritual fiddle while modern civilization is destroyed by flames.”93 Instead, he plunged back into the roiling conflagration of Greenwich Village.

  Upon Louise Bryant’s arrival back from Europe on August 13, Jack Reed, wearing a white shantung suit and Panama hat to shield himself from the sweltering sun of a terrific heat wave, met her as she disembarked at the pier in New York. They had four days, he informed her, to pack before they steamed back across the Atlantic. The signs all indicated that a socialist revolution in Russia was a near certainty, and they were going to cover it. Bryant’s sojourn in France had largely been an uneventful disappointment, so she eagerly agreed to return.

  O’Neill was devastated by the blow, but Bryant assured him that she could never stop loving him even while she was as far away as Russia. He promised to stay true to her, but that he would only remain so until November. Bryant wouldn’t return until March. O’Neill wired her cable after lovesick cable, but she rarely responded; when she did, her tone struck him as “cold and indefinite.” He began drinking more than ever, “all I could,” he informed her. “I refused to endure the ache, and drink drugged me to an indifferent apathy.” He conducted numerous one-night stands, he said, “in a spirit of revenge, against you, all women, myself for being heartbroken, and life in general.”94

  It wasn’t long before O’Neill eased his yearning for Bryant with a strikingly beautiful, intellectually precocious nineteen-year-old political activist named Dorothy Day.95 A recent college dropout, Day had just begun writing about labor issues for the Masses and the socialist newspaper the New York Call. O’Neill admired Day’s ability to drink with the best of them, sing “Frankie and Johnny” and, as she said later, quoting the nineteenth-century English poet Ernest Dowson, “fling roses riotously with the throng.” (But she denied the writer Malcolm Cowley’s future claim that she could drink longshoremen under the table. Cowley meant this a compliment, but Day considered it a malicious bit of libel that dogged her throughout her career.) The left-wing novelist and playwright Mike Gold, to whom Day was briefly engaged, had introduced her to O’Neill that fall, 1917, and regretted it immediately. Gold likened Day’s adoration of the burgeoning playwright to an adolescent’s crush on the high school rebel. She wanted more than anything to be a writer, and O’Neill was one of the Village’s most radiant new literary lights. Moreover, his evident love for Bryant made him all the more attractive to women in their circle. Still, though captivated by his intellect, Day felt he was not “really physically exciting.” She claimed they never slept together, that he never even tried to kiss her. Sometimes he would ask, “Don’t you want to lose your virginity?” but appeared glad when she rebuffed him.96

  Rehearsals and performances at the Playwrights’ Theatre that season reliably concluded with the cast and crew trotting around the corner to the Hell Hole. “No one ever wanted to go to bed,” Day wrote of those autumn months, “and no one ever wished to be alone.”97 By this time, the Hell Hole’s back room was as saturated with talk of Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Nietzsche, and Francis Thompson as it was tobacco smoke and the sour stench of stale beer. O’Neill could recite Thompson’s epic poem The Hound of Heaven by heart, all 182 lines of it:

  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him, down the arches of years;

  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

  Day had never heard the poem before, and she would stare at O’Neill enraptured while he sat with “his elbows resting on the table, chin cupped in hand, eyes looking inward and seeing none of us listening.”98 She noted that he placed particular emphasis on a line that spoke to his doomed obsession with Bryant: “And now my heart is as a broken fount, wherein tear drippings stagnate.”99 O’Neill delivered the poem “in his grating, monotonous voice, his mouth grim, his eyes sad,” she wrote in her autobiography, and his recitations, she added in an unpublished reminiscence, “Told in Context,” galvanized “an intensification of the religious sense that was in me.”100 The spiritual awakening that followed inspired Day to begin attending St. Joseph’s Church in the Village.101 (Subsequently, she became a renowned leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, and her name has since been mentioned at the Holy See for canonization.)

  Day recalled that by this time O’Neill was “surrounded by admirers.” “He was beginning to feel his powers,” she said, “and exult in them.” “One of the fine things about Gene was that he took people seriously, more seriously than the rest of us did,” Day remembered. “He took Terry Carlin seriously. He took Hippolyte Havel seriously, and almost no one else did. … Hip would get up in the center of the room, when he’d been drinking, and whirl around in exuberance. … We laughed at him, but not Gene.” Havel, for instance, was smitten with a lesbian named Rick Hornsby and used to chirp in his goofy way, “I’m her little doggie,” but O’Neill berated anyone who sneered at Havel’s oddball behavior. “This man has been in every prison in Europe. He’s suffered.” “We were revolutionaries,” Day said,
“and were supposed to sympathize with the unfortunate, and we did en masse. Gene was very responsive to people who suffered.”102

  Maxwell Bodenheim, “the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians” and a contributing playwright for the Provincetown Players that season, quoted O’Neill intoning his political credo that fall in the Hell Hole while flanked by two Hudson Dusters: “If the proletariat and the intellectuals and artists would only get together, they could rule the world. I mean the real ones—not the fake slobs on either side. The gangsters, gunmen, and stokers, joined to the few, important rebels among artists and writers, would make a hot proposition. … They’re all aristocrats in a different way, and they’re all outcasts from the upper worlds of society; and if their eyes ever open up to these resemblances, well, it’ll be goodnight government and middle classes! … This world will always be ruled by somebody, and the only trouble is that the sharpest minds and the strongest fists have never come together to polish off the job.”103

  “Turn Back the Universe”

  The uptown production of In the Zone, O’Neill’s second Glencairn play, was greeted with high praise by almost everyone but its creator. Too much the mainstream thriller for the Playwrights’ Theatre, the one-act was accepted by the Washington Square Players, whose premiere on October 31, 1917, at the Comedy Theatre received a flood of glowing reviews. While the Provincetowners actively discouraged critics from attending performances, the Washington Square Players just as actively encouraged them, and In the Zone was the play that, according to Edna Kenton, “sprang [O’Neill] into the Broadway limelight.” Among other notices, it roused the New York Times to run a feature story with the tantalizing headline, “Who Is Eugene O’Neill?”104

  The Times story celebrated the arrival of O’Neill, just as his early mentor Clayton Hamilton had predicted only a few years before, as the Jack London and Joseph Conrad of American theater: “He knows the haunts of the men when they are on shore, and he swaps yarns with them, not as an outsider but as one of themselves.” Although there were four short plays performed back-to-back at the Comedy Theatre, In the Zone took up three-quarters of the New York Times’s review of the evening, and the Globe and Commercial Advertiser gushed over the audacious newcomer as well: “I don’t know where this young man got his knowledge of the speech, character, and characteristics of seafaring men, but this is the second play he has written about them with remarkable power and penetration. He makes the sailors in the forecastle of a tramp steamer passing through the submarine zone live for you with a vividness that is quite astonishing. Not only that, but the thing is at various times intensely exciting, thrilling, pathetic, and ironical. … A young man who can write such a piece has a marvelous gift.”105

  O’Neill initially rejected a deal for a vaudeville tour, on the grounds of artistic integrity, but then decided that he couldn’t afford to turn down the $200 advance and $70 royalty a week (which he split with the Washington Square Players). They were the first royalties of his career and nicely supplemented the weekly $15 allowance he continued to collect from his father. The tour lasted thirty-four weeks but ended as the market for war stories wound down with the war itself, along with the rise of the 1918 flu pandemic.106 (The flu claimed three times more lives worldwide than the war, with a death toll of 50 million, and the Provincetown Players weren’t immune; among the 675,000 Americans who succumbed to it were Hapgood and Boyce’s son Harry in 1918 and O’Neill’s New London pal and Provincetown leading man Hutch Collins the following year, 1919.) Seven Arts also paid O’Neill $50 for the script. Though the journal folded before it could appear, he still got paid the money, enough to keep him and Carlin well marinated at the Hell Hole and afford the down payment on one of John Francis’s flats in Provincetown summer.107

  That fall, 1917, an Ohio State University graduate, James “Jimmy” Light, a handsome, blond twenty-two-year old with a dashing mustache and self-satisfied way of tilting his hat, had been accepted on scholarship into a master’s program in English at Columbia University and moved in with Charles Ellis above the theater at 139 Macdougal Street. As Light began to unpack, he heard hammering below and went downstairs. There he discovered three men shooting craps while a fourth hammered away at a shoddily built set of wood benches. One of the players was O’Neill, his dark eyes following the dice as they jounced across the floor. When Light criticized the workmanship of the benches, a saw was thrust into his hand. “I started sawing immediately,” he said. Then, as he was walking up to his flat with a load of books, the Players “tapped” him for the role of the English instructor in Susan Glaspell’s newest play Close the Book. Light was a quick study; by 1925, he had acted in thirty-four plays with the Players and had directed, reported the New York Times, “more plays by Eugene O’Neill than anyone else in America.”108

  Close the Book appeared on the same bill as O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home (just three days after In the Zone), a one-act play that’s set in a waterfront dive in London and dramatizes the perilous fate of sailors on shore leave. (James Oppenheimer’s Night concluded the evening.) The New York Tribune’s drama critic arrived too late on opening night to be admitted. Standing outside on Macdougal Street, he heard a ruckus within, “consisting chiefly of breaking tableware, punctuated at intervals by guttural male tones and the strident shrieking of a woman.” Inside the house was the Boston Evening Transcript’s reviewer, who averred of The Long Voyage Home, “The substance is the merest penny-dreadful tale, and if it did not carry clear illusion of reality it would be thrown into the rubbish-heap as melodramatic bosh.” “Even the hardened newspaper man,” he wrote, “is not likely to know that there are so many distinct and individual kinds of drunkenness as are here disclosed.” The inevitable result of this kind of sordid talk was that the Players’ subscription requests expanded to such an extent they had to begin performing seven nights a week. O’Neill’s sea play Ile opened next, on November 30, and once again, theater critics hailed O’Neill as American drama’s answer to Conrad and for exuding, like Jack London, a refreshingly masculine literary voice, but for the stage, a medium that up to then overwhelmingly catered to a female audience: “This writer, a son of the noted actor, James O’Neil [sic], has the faculty of writing ‘man stuff’ drama that, while gray in tint, is tense and gripping.”109

  O’Neill exulted in his notoriety at first, but became weary of it before long. “It’s like everything else, I guess,” his character Stephen Murray in The Straw remarks of newfound literary success. “When you’ve got it, you find you don’t want it” (CP1, 783). Similarly, a few years later, O’Neill responded to Maxwell Bodenheim’s letter of congratulations by explaining his avoidance of Bodenheim’s beloved Greenwich Village scene: “Well, the saddest part of the ‘acclaim’ you mention is not that I take it seriously but that other people do, one way or another. Some hate me for it, or envy me, or like me, or use me, or flatter me—all for it—while they seem absolutely unable to see the me they knew ever again. Yet I’m sure I’m still that ‘me,’ and that I’m lonely, and that it is these stupid folk who change me by their suspicions into a suspicious one. Not that I don’t realize all this is inevitable—but it’s distressing and I’ve learned for my sensitive skin’s sake to duck and dodge.” O’Neill went on to Bodenheim that as his fame grew, he felt punished for it, always “eternally apologetic and self-consciously cringing, seeming to say: forgive me, good people, for having had my name five times in the Evening Journal.”110

  Even worse than the jealousy stewing among the Village “branch of swine,” he complained to Louise Bryant, was the chattering, “serpent-tongued” innuendo of what he referred to as the “‘How is Jack’ tribe”: “How is Jack?” “Have you heard from Louise?” “Are they married yet?” “Is it true they married here before they left?” He could play their pretentious games, expertly when necessary, he told Bryant, but he’d come to loathe the “Tarantulas of the Village.” Most of the damning gossip involving O’Neill’s romantic conquests Bryant had heard was
true, however. “Occasionally,” he admitted, “just to show I could and romance their thread-bare souls a bit—hence my reputation for indiscriminate love-making. Love? Great God, what a title you give it! You reminded me of the fact that we are both Irish, and yet you cannot be lenient to—blarney!”111

  Jim O’Neill swore that his little brother Gene was wasting his talent by not working on Broadway; but this didn’t prevent him from enjoying such rewards of downtown life as Christine Ell’s beguiling company. Hutch Hapgood considered Ell, with her great height and carrot-colored hair, a character out of Dostoevsky (the Players’ unrivaled literary idol) and described her as “the Perfect Lioness.” Ell was married to the stagehand and amateur actor Louis Ell, who one night in late November 1917, stormed into the Hell Hole. Not finding Christine there, he shouted that he would divorce her, then marched out, slamming the door behind him. When Ell finally arrived at the bar, she announced that she was there to meet her latest lover—Jim O’Neill.