O’Neill received a copy of this final judgment, but the philosophical anarchist in him evidently chose to ignore it.140 He didn’t even inform Boulton that he’d been married or had a child until that August. When he broke this news, he claimed that “any consequences such as divorce, money or anything else—I never thought of it. I guess … I just didn’t consider myself a married man. I left everything to Papa. He was grim-lipped and said nothing about anything.” O’Neill’s contravention of the judge’s order aside, Kathleen Jenkins, who at one point admitted she’d been “deeply in love” with him, had little reason to contest her ex-husband’s marriage. She’d married George Pitt-Smith in 1915, and the two were raising Eugene Jr., who was almost eight, in Little Neck, Long Island. They’d even changed the boy’s name to Richard Pitt-Smith. “No,” Jenkins recalled, “we never saw each other again [after O’Neill’s return from Buenos Aires]. Why should we? We were two people ignoring one another’s existence.”141
During the previous summer in Provincetown, 1917, O’Neill chanced upon the title for his first mature full-length play. One evening while he was perched on a dock awaiting the arrival of a local fishing boat, a slow-minded local boy named Howard Slade sat down beside him.142 “What’s beyond the ocean?” Slade asked. “Europe.” “What’s beyond Europe?” the boy persisted. “The horizon,” O’Neill said. “What’s beyond the horizon?”143
O’Neill completed his tragedy Beyond the Horizon in his and Boulton’s studio that spring of 1918 and dedicated it to Boulton. Robert Mayo, the play’s autobiographical protagonist, lives with his parents and older brother Andrew on a New England farm. But Robert dreams of experiencing life “beyond the horizon,” a metaphor he repeatedly invokes. His wanderlust is quashed by the more powerful drive to explore a romantic relationship with a local girl, Ruth Atkins, whom everyone had assumed would marry his more practical brother Andrew, an able farmer. In this way, Robert condemns himself to an ironic fate in that he pursues the life of rural domesticity meant for his brother; and Robert’s decision to marry Ruth and remain on the farm goads Andrew into taking his brother’s place at sea. Andrew’s fate is thus also tragic—by following Robert’s path, he falls into a materialist trap bereft of the spiritual meaning he once knew on the farm. The draw of sex and the power of jealousy impel both brothers to enact a role reversal that ends, fatalistically, in love lost for Ruth (who discovers she loved Andrew after all), the death of their child, Mary, emotional and financial bankruptcy for Andrew, and the release of death for Robert.
O’Neill conceived this plot while recalling a Norwegian sailor from his time aboard the Charles Racine who pined for his family farm and cursed the day he first signed on to a ship (the character Olson in The Long Voyage Home is also based on him). O’Neill sensed that the Norwegian’s complaints were disingenuous, since in his twenty years at sea, he’d not once returned to Norway. O’Neill asked himself, “What if he had stayed on the farm, with his instincts? What would have happened?”144 “But I realized at once he never would have stayed. … And from that point I started to think of a more intellectual, civilized type … a man who would have my Norwegian’s inborn craving for the sea’s unrest, only in him it would be conscious, too conscious, intellectually diluted into a vague, intangible, romantic wanderlust. His powers of resistance, both moral and physical, would also probably be correspondingly watered. He would throw away his instinctive dream and accept the thralldom of the farm for—why, for almost any nice little poetical craving—the romance of sex, say.”145
Fortuitously, O’Neill sent the script to the well-connected Smart Set editors H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Nathan, the celebrated “father of American drama criticism,” forwarded it on to the powerful Broadway producer John D. Williams. Williams loved it. It was precisely the kind of script he’d been searching for—an authentically American tragedy—and he wrote O’Neill a check to option the play for six months. “I have been trying to get [Joseph] Conrad to do a play for me,” Williams affirmed. “His stories of the sea are so marvelous, but he simply cannot write a play. I wanted something with a feeling of the sea, without the sea scenes. … In Beyond the Horizon the farm is played against the sea, and is the adventuring spirit of the latter. It is the most honest tragedy I have ever seen. … It is utterly devoid of ‘stage English,’ and is the only play by an American author I have ever seen which is.”146
O’Neill and Boulton were in a festive mood and decided to spend their recent windfall on an informal honeymoon in New York. It was there, with Jim at the Garden Hotel, that Boulton witnessed for the first time the true severity of her husband’s alcohol problem.
O’Neill oversaw rehearsals of The Rope but otherwise avoided the Village “tarantulas.” (Louise Bryant, not incidentally, was sighted at the Hell Hole dressed in a flashy embroidered red jacket and high black boots from Russia demanding to know where he was.) O’Neill was also determined to stay sober: “I will never, or never have written anything good when I am drinking,” he told Boulton, “or even when the miasma of drink is left.” He’d also grown “terrified” about the damage alcohol was inflicting on his brain. A doctor told him that the brain had the texture of raw egg white, and alcohol “toughened” the tissue like it was cooked.147 Nevertheless, if O’Neill wasn’t writing, he was drinking, especially when Jim was around.
From New York, Boulton took the train down to New Jersey, where her family had returned after leaving the farm in Connecticut. Her father needed help with the upkeep of their family home, known to the Boultons as the Old House, where she had grown up, about seventy miles south of the city in West Point Pleasant. When she returned to New York, her husband had finished his work on The Rope with the Provincetown Players and, to her delight, had remained sober. Not wishing to tempt fate, they planned to leave for Provincetown the following day. When the next day came, however, he accepted a drink from Jim, a backslide that began innocently enough with a pull from a bottle of Old Taylor. That pull stranded them in their hotel room for over a week. “What I did not know then,” Boulton said, “was that after one drink the cycle must be fulfilled.”148
The brothers drank pint after pint of Old Taylor, starting from when they awoke late in the morning to when they passed out in the early hours of the following day. Jim ate his meals at a nearby restaurant, but O’Neill never left his room and survived on soup and brandy-laced milkshakes from the bar downstairs. After a few days, only the milkshakes would stay down. Boulton repeatedly traveled uptown to Grand Central Station to buy tickets back to Massachusetts; and just as repeatedly, O’Neill would wake up, initiate the day’s souse with what he called a “hooker,” or a large shot, emptying whatever was left in the bottle from the previous night. He mulishly ignored her pleas to leave, but eventually she got him onto a train, this time with Jim conspicuously in tow. At the transfer in Boston, Jim wandered off and reappeared with a flea-bitten mongrel he named Bowser, arguing with the conductor until the dog was allowed to travel in the luggage car. For the length of the journey, Jim swayed up and down the corridors obstreperously demanding the company of a “big blonde with bad breath.”149
Upon their return to Provincetown, O’Neill and Boulton moved into O’Neill and Carlin’s old apartment in Francis’s Flats, where the rafters still heralded their mantra from Light on the Path, and Jim was installed in a room down the hall.150 The Provincetown arts crowd was now in awe of the rising theatrical star. In less than two years’ time, he’d written over twenty plays, eight of which, after The Rope opened that April, had already been produced in New York. The fact that O’Neill rarely appeared at cocktail parties and didn’t join any social clubs only added to his mystique; he’d also developed a reputation for being one of the hardest-working artists in the bohemian beach community, where loafing was the accepted summer pastime. He routinely ended his work day by crossing Commercial Street and spending long hours in deep consultation with Susan Glaspell, exchanging playwriting ideas (a ritual that deeply incensed Boult
on).151 Glaspell’s handwritten notes for a talk she’d give later about her time working with O’Neill in Provincetown convey briefly but tellingly O’Neill’s unique style in the years to come: “Hands himself everything—sea—fate—God—murder—suicide—incest—insanity. Always the search for new forms. Because necessary to what he would express.”152
O’Neill and his brother’s bender at the Garden Hotel that spring made O’Neill’s first couple of weeks in Provincetown a torturous exercise in self-control; but once he’d succeeded in “tapering off” and shedding the “miasma” of drink altogether, he worked at a feverish pace. He began with a daring one-act called The Dreamy Kid, a dialect play about the early years of black migration and one of his first of several forays into the African American experience. Prior to his and Boulton’s hard-won departure from Manhattan, O’Neill had reunited with a cadre of drinking cronies at the Garden who were unaffected by the venom of the Village gossips. Joe Smith from the Hell Hole was there, and he told O’Neill about a black gangster in New York with the street moniker “Dreamy.” O’Neill spoke the name lovingly. “Dreamy,” he laughed. “A Negro gangster named Dreamy. … Why Dreamy?”153 (The Players rejected The Dreamy Kid for the fall season but would produce it the following year, a white company with an all-black cast, making it yet another first.)
O’Neill had also decided that spring, in his words, to “cut loose from paternal aid,” the $10 a week from his father, “not in anger but in confidence of independence which is liable to prove premature.”154 This last point was true enough: when Harold de Polo and his wife, Helen, arrived in Provincetown in May, they found that the O’Neills had left for New York. (De Polo later claimed that they’d gone for Boulton to obtain an abortion.)155 De Polo soon received a wire from Fall River, Massachusetts, begging for $25 for a return ticket to Provincetown, as O’Neill had drunk away their money for the connecting train. De Polo wired the cash, then received another frantic wire from Boulton: Gene was “dying.” De Polo didn’t take this seriously; he knew Boulton wasn’t yet savvy about O’Neill’s drinking habits. But he acknowledged that his friend was “probably a damned sick lad due to his custom of refusing to eat when drinking heavily.”156
When de Polo embarked on his rescue mission, a lonely stranger took the seat next to him, though the train was nearly empty. He apologized but said he “just had to talk.” This was the writer Sinclair Lewis, then laboring on his breakout novel, Main Street. Lewis joined de Polo when they got off at Fall River, and the two men discovered O’Neill and Boulton at the Hotel Mellen. As de Polo had suspected, O’Neill was “gloriously and happily drunk.” They went out for three more pints of “bottled-in-bond bourbon” and stayed up drinking and talking until five in the morning, de Polo said, “a particularly wonderful time, with great conversation being had by all.”157 Lewis then spared them the ticket price and drove them back to Provincetown in his car.
“I was at a snooty temperamental stage of souse,” O’Neill told the playwright Sidney Howard years later, “where I’d be damned if I’d descend to travelling on a dirt plebian railroad train.” Lewis, he added, “rescued me from a week’s binge in Fall River … and volunteered to bear the remains to Provincetown.” O’Neill wrote this just prior to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the second American do to so after Lewis himself. When Howard threatened, in fun, to publish this letter, O’Neill replied, “As for your dire threat to ruin Nobel majesty with my letter about Lewis’s rescue work in Fall River, all I can say is, go to it with my grateful blessing! This being Eminent, even if it’s only for a few days, is a most godforsaken pain in the neck.”158
Safely back in Provincetown, O’Neill and Boulton were still tormented by their shortage of funds. They both acknowledged that fiction was the most reliable moneymaker, so de Polo shopped around O’Neill’s story “The Screenews of War,” which he’d written in New London back in 1916, at a couple of “smooth-paper magazines.” “It didn’t, alas, sell,” de Polo admitted, “hanged if I know why.” O’Neill grinned after the second rejection notice and told him, “To hell with it. Throw it away if you want.” (De Polo didn’t share O’Neill’s predilection for destroying literary work, whatever the quality, and “The Screenews of War” was brought to light in 2007.)159
Boulton, an accomplished fiction writer, was herself struggling over several pieces that summer, including a short story she entitled “The Captain’s Walk”: “Old Captain Curtis … cannot let go, in spite of his age, his uselessness. The sight and sound of the sea awake in him a passionate longing for something more tangible. His lost ship on which his thoughts dwell becomes the symbol of all this. … After prowling for a while through the silent house he always winds up by going up to the walk and keeping watch there for the boat that does not return.” O’Neill read the piece with interest, but bluntly informed her it wasn’t dramatic enough. Boulton explained that she meant it as “a story of atmosphere and obsession,” like The Moon of the Caribbees, but O’Neill co-opted the project and titled it Where the Cross Is Made. In the spirit of exchange, he offered her his full-length satire Now I Ask You to rewrite. “It’s not my sort of stuff,” he said, “but it’s a damn good idea for a popular success.” He suggested she make it a novel or improve the play, but instead she turned her attention to a new story of hers titled “The Letter.”160
Time and again to clear their heads after a morning’s work, O’Neill and Boulton found themselves rambling on long hikes through the pine forests and sand dunes to Peaked Hill Bar, a converted life-saving station on the peninsula’s northern shore. Locals called the region “the outside,” as Glaspell documented in her play by that title, “an arm that bends to make a harbor—where men are safe … [where] dunes meet woods and woods hold dunes from a town that’s shore to a harbor.” The station had been sold to the financier and art collector Sam Lewisohn by the U.S. Life-Saving Service, and Mabel Dodge supervised its renovation into a picturesque summer bungalow. “This is the house you and I should have!” O’Neill proclaimed to his new wife. “We would live like sea gulls, two sea gulls coming home at night to our home.”161
For their next New York season, 1918–19, the Provincetown Players removed themselves to a larger space at 133 Macdougal Street, an old horse and carriage stable called Claflin’s three doors down from the Playwrights’ Theatre. Once again, they were hard up for cash; but a theater “angel,” Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (best known for popularizing Argyrol, a treatment for gonorrhea), offered the Players $1,000 to renovate the building if they could raise enough to match the gift. They did so, thanks to their new secretary M. [Mary] Eleanor Fitzgerald, known as “Fitzie,” a political activist associated with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who had an unparalleled flair for down-to-the-last-minute fund-raising. The Players now had a box office and dressing rooms in the basement, and the house seated nearly 200, up from 150. Christine Ell’s restaurant went with them, though the odor of cooking from the second floor intermingled, audience members complained, with the former stable’s “faint, pungent aroma of horses and manure.”162
Jack Reed’s passion for the theater of dissent never subsided while he covered the Russian Revolution. Just after his return, he regaled his friends at the Harvard Club with tales of the political theater he’d attended: “You know, right behind the lines, they’re doing a production of Hamlet—and you ought to see it, it’s the greatest production of Hamlet I’ve ever seen. And it’s announced as Hamlet: A Study in Danish Imperialism!”163 Reed insisted that the Players keep an old cross tie ring screwed firmly into the auditorium’s right wall. This would remind them, he said, of their populist roots. About the ring, one of the Players’ designers, Donald Corley, painted in striking letters a rousing motto for their new playhouse: “Here Pegasus was Hitched.”164
The meaning and provenance of that inscription has remained a mystery over the years. But a lighthearted exposé penned by the illustrator and hack writer W. Livingston Larned had circulated in the popular theate
r tabloid, the New York Review, just after the Players had transferred to Greenwich Village in November 1916. In this droll account, “Below Washington Square,” Larned pokes fun at the epidemic of idleness among the Village’s bohemian crowd:
It goes with poetry and sich,
To loaf around the flowing bowl;
A genius, somehow, hates to hitch
Pegasus up—th’ lazy soul.
Bring on another jug of wine;
Th’ garlic’s running fine, tonight.
“Say … read this little jig of mine;
And … won’t you buy a chap a bite?”
(Larned credited these lines to A Merchant of Venice, act 4, scene 3. There is no act 4, scene 3 in Shakespeare’s play.) “Look ’em over,” Larned said of the Village gadabouts, “these young folks, sooner or later, awake to the wastefulness of their funny Bohemia and climb out and up to safety. While they’re wading around in the dregs, however, they’re interesting.”165
The Players debunked such stereotypes by hitching Pegasus up at 133 Macdougal with unbounded creative energy and personal sacrifice. Once the proper permits had been acquired from the Tenement House and Building Department, the Players—galvanized by Jig Cook, who slept on the stage after working hours—constructed an inclined auditorium floor to maximize the audience’s view and fashioned comfortable seating with padded cushions and backs. They painted the walls a “rich tawny orange,” the ceilings a “deep blue,” and the proscenium a “dark smoke gray.” Houselights and a control board were installed, and the new curtain opened and closed with silky effortlessness. Lacking the advantage of fly lofts above the stage, brawny stagehands would extract and replace the sets, without pulleys, through a slot in the floor that led to their basement set-construction shop. Although the name wouldn’t be official for a couple of years, Cook began “The Provincetown Players Fund,” and they hung a painted shingle out front that read simply, “Provincetown Playhouse.” 166
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 20
