George Tyler’s production of Chris was scheduled to open on March 8 at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City, but O’Neill decided to return to his wife and son in Provincetown a few days earlier. Tyler pleaded with O’Neill to come back to New York and help him at the rehearsals, but was flatly refused. Chris opened to a horde of “tango lovers and chewing gum sweethearts,” O’Neill griped after reading the bad reviews, and it then moved to Philadelphia, where its equally lukewarm reception squelched any hopes for a New York run. O’Neill wasn’t in the least surprised; he recognized that “the last scene is weak and that the love affair in the play is piffling and undramatic.” He accepted most of the responsibility and informed Tyler that he’d “write a completely new script” and advised him to “throw the present play in the ashbarrel.”216
O’Neill had delivered his one-act Exorcism to the Players the previous December, and it opened the same month as Chris, on March 26, at the Provincetown Playhouse for a standard two-week run.217 The Players’ program listed the perversely autobiographical one-act depicting O’Neill’s suicide attempt as “A Play of Anti-Climax”—and so it was.218 Jasper Deeter, who played Ned Malloy, recalled that O’Neill “wrote both ‘Exorcism’ and ‘Diff’rent’ [the following year] as exercises in anti-climax, experiments, not exercises, because so much in our lives is anti-climax, and he wanted to put it into the theatre.” M. A. McAteer, who played Jimmy, remembered that O’Neill, justifiably, appeared “more than normally worried about the play during rehearsal.”219 “When the curtains opened on the second scene,” Deeter said, “I felt like this: Here we are trying to do something impossible for a man who thought that nothing was impossible. ‘Let’s go.’”220
After Exorcism’s final appearance in April, O’Neill contacted Eleanor “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, now the Players’ dependable business manager, to request all copies of the script. He destroyed them upon receipt, presumably more sickened over his treatment of Jenkins than proud of his redemption with Shane. After that, there was little remaining evidence of the play’s existence—a page of notes, a playbill, a couple of interviews with actors, and a handful of reviews running the gamut from the near rhapsodic (New York Times) to the patently disappointed (New York Tribune).221 In 1922, when Frank Shay, Greenwich Village bookstore owner and publisher of the Provincetown Players’ plays, inquired whether O’Neill would be interested in publishing Exorcism, O’Neill replied, “‘Exorcism’ has been destroyed … and the sooner all memory of it dies the better.”222 (Memory of it refused to die, however: the script was found more than ninety years later, in 2011, among the papers of the Academy Award–winning Hollywood screenwriter Philip Yordan. It was a Christmas gift from Boulton and her subsequent husband, Morris “Mac” Kaufman. The accompanying greeting card reads, “Something-you-said-you’d-like-to-have Agnes + Mac.”)
O’Neill’s prolonged absence that winter ruptured his bond with Boulton irreparably. “I just feel as if I don’t really know anything about you or your plays anymore,” Boulton wrote him. And she resented his victory—or at least her peripheral role in it. Just as the stellar notices for Beyond the Horizon had begun to roll off the presses, Boulton admitted that she could hardly write him at all: “I’d start—write a few stupid words. Then a curious rage—resentment, something that—yes, really!—made me tremble, would overcome me. Against all the circumstances that keep us apart now, just when we should be together! … For, oh Beloved, I have been with you when you were suffering, when despair and loneliness were upon you, and I needed to be with you triumphant! … I wanted to see you happy, proud, elated, secretly intoxicated with this success, which so soon—for such are you!—I’ll see you drop as an empty bauble.” Her prophecy came true soon enough. When John Williams sent a get-well note to O’Neill that cheered exultantly, “The Town is yours,” O’Neill replied acidly, “They can keep it. Success has meant to me the meaningless futility I always knew it would—only more so.”223
O’Neill had never heard of the Pulitzer Prize, a national honor first awarded just two years before in 1918, and accepted the news that he’d won it with a Bronx cheer. “Oh, God, a damn medal! And one of those presentation ceremonies! I won’t accept it.”224 Back in Provincetown, his tune changed when he heard that it came with $1,000, at which point he sprinted down the beach swirling his arms with joy.
Clayton Hamilton had served on the Pulitzer committee that season and championed Beyond the Horizon, thwarting the opposition of novelist and literary lion Hamlin Garland. Garland argued that to reward O’Neill for his “violent and turgid” style, his “ruthlessness for the sake of ruthlessness,” would merely cheapen the award’s gravitas.225
Eugene O’Neill running down the Provincetown beach in 1920 after hearing he won $1,000 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, aware of O’Neill’s unquenchable thirst for liquor, summoned him to the offices of the Smart Set for a “surprise.” When he arrived with Jimmy Light during a brief visit to New York, Nathan and Mencken presented him with a cheap medal to honor his Pulitzer, complete with an outsized safety pin to attach it to his lapel. A bottle of Napoleon brandy and four glasses were placed enticingly on a tray atop a table in the center of the room. When O’Neill grabbed for the bottle, it wouldn’t budge. They’d glued it and the glasses to the tray, which was itself glued to the table. “We have to be going,” they said, straight-faced, then walked out.226
Upon receiving word that his son had won the award, James O’Neill boasted to his friend Clayton Hamilton, “My boy … Eugene; I always knew he had it in him! Remember how I always used to say that he would do something big some day? People told me he was wild and good-for-nothing; but I always knew he had it in him,—didn’t I?” Hamilton laughed, well remembering what James had really said: “The boy would never amount to anything.”227
On June 10, 1920, James, whose condition had declined precipitously, transferred from a New York hospital to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London. O’Neill took the train down from Provincetown and wrote Agnes from his father’s deathbed. “The situation is frightful! Just a few moments ago he groaned in anguish and cried pitifully: ‘Oh God, why don’t You take me! Why don’t You take me!’” During long hours at his bedside, O’Neill found his seventy-six-year-old father, by then speechless with agonizing pain, a “very pitiful, cruelly ironic thing … [since] all through his life his greatest pride has been in his splendid voice and clear articulation!” “He seems to me a good man, in the best sense of the word,” O’Neill said, “and about the only one I have ever known.” But then he acknowledged the mordant irony that the last words he’d heard his father utter sounded “like a dying dialogue in a play I might have written.” “Glad to go, boy,” James told his son, “a better sort of life—another sort—somewhere. … This sort of life—froth!—rotten!—all of it—no good!,” words that impressed his son as “a warning from the Beyond to remain true to the best that is in me though the heavens fall.”228
James O’Neill died on August 10, 1920, at four fifteen in the morning. “Helluva time for the old man to die,” Jim grumbled after he’d dutifully supported his mother in the wretched days before and after his father’s death (aside from the occasional drinking jag with Eugene and old friends in downtown New London). James O’Neill’s funeral was a monumental affair for the residents of New London, as they watched crowds of theater people, members of the Knights of Columbus (a fraternal organization in which James had long been a member), various Irish American notables, and community leaders file into St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church to say good-bye to their city’s most famous, if not always most respected, citizen.229
O’Neill found no consolation in the new family he’d created. Upon his return to Peaked Hill Bar, O’Neill, who’d fawned over Shane at first, now considered the child an obstacle t
o healing his ruptured relationship with Boulton as well as disruptive to his work. O’Neill had never demonstrated any interest in fatherhood before Shane, nor did he pretend to. He complained that the “old sea flavor” of their home had been replaced by the stench of dirty diapers and milk. He put the blame that Boulton hadn’t been with him in New York to celebrate his success and nurse him during his bout of flu squarely on the baby. “It would all be so simple,” he’d written her, “if Shane were not in our midst, or if you only had him weaned.”230
O’Neill turned violent that summer too. Boulton, though no shrinking violet, characterized him during such episodes as “more like a madman than anything else—a strange being who was not the real Gene at all.” She realized that there were moments, all of them alcohol related, of “sudden and rather dreadful outbursts of violence, and others of bitter nastiness and malevolence.”231 Boulton’s thickly applied makeup didn’t fool anyone in Provincetown. O’Neill had been hitting her. “The promiscuities and the experimental narcotics didn’t interest him,” wrote Provincetown native Hazel Hawthorne of O’Neill at the time. “His sins were not the little ones but the savage ones of hard drinking and wife beating.”232
Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that during this period O’Neill worked up a treatment for his play The First Man, the story of a workaholic anthropologist who revolts against his wife’s longing for a child. But he then turned to his revision of Chris, now retitled “The Ole Davil,” in which he transformed Anna, at Boulton’s suggestion, from a prim English typist to a sexually abused, streetwise prostitute; and he’d already put the finishing touches on Gold, the full-length version of Where the Cross Is Made. With two unproduced plays ready to send off, O’Neill was moved to turn out something unexpected, something unique to American theater. He had just the thing.
Back in O’Neill’s days at the Garden Hotel, the “old circus man” Jack Croak (the model for Ed Mosher in The Iceman Cometh) had returned from a boondoggle in Haiti and told O’Neill the story of the murderous dictator Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. He’d duped the Haitian people by spreading a legend, O’Neill said, “to the effect that Sam had said they’d never get him with a lead bullet; that he would get himself first with a silver one,” and he promptly jotted down the “story current in Hayti.” Croak also gave him a Haitian coin stamped with Sam’s visage, a talisman O’Neill carried in his pocket as a reminder of the idea’s inception.233
O’Neill at first titled the eight-scene drama “The Silver Bullet” after the Haitian dictator’s scam, but settled on The Emperor Jones. A portrait of one man’s horrifying descent into his racial past, Jones, along with its bold elevation of a black protagonist, signaled a radical departure in American theater: rather than showing life “as it is,” this play would dramatize the stripping away of society’s false trappings and expose humanity at its most primal.234
Civilization Unmasked
By early October 1920, O’Neill had completed The Emperor Jones, the first play to open American audience’s eyes to European expressionist theater.235 Characterized by grotesque exaggerations of character and setting and the enactment of distorted psychological fantasies, expressionistic dramas project their heroes’ inner conflicts not only through dialogue but through the scenery as well. “King Lear is given a storm to rant in,” Jimmy Light explained, whereas “the Expressionist hero in anger walks on a street, and all the perspectives of the walls, windows and doors are awry and tortured.”236 For O’Neill, at least, expressionism wasn’t meant simply to entertain or edify; it was meant to induce in his audiences an altered state of consciousness.
O’Neill’s title character, Brutus Jones, is a former porter on the Pullman passenger trains, a convicted murderer, and a fugitive from the law. Jones escapes prison and flees to a Caribbean island, only to betray his race (hence the name “Brutus”) by adopting the role of a white colonialist. An assassination attempt on Jones by a gunman hired by his political rival, the island native “Old Lem,” fails when the gun misfires. After Jones shoots the assassin dead, he declares to the bewildered crowd—made up of those Jones considers “low-flung, bush niggers,” as a white colonialist would—that only a silver bullet can kill him. Jones has a silver bullet crafted for him, proclaiming to the natives, “I’m de on’y man in de world big enuff to git me” (CP1, 1036). He then crowns himself emperor and enacts self-serving, punitive laws that raise taxes from his impoverished subjects. Perched eagerly at his side is a small-time British crook named Smithers, a ferretlike white man whom Jones treats with open disdain. Smithers is greedy, treacherous, and lazy, not coincidentally, in O’Neill’s reversal of the widely held racial beliefs of his time, the characteristics associated with blackness by American white supremacists. Smithers informs Jones what an old native woman has told him—that a rebellion led by Old Lem is brewing in the hills above the palace. The faraway sound of tom-toms softly fills the air. Jones knows his game is up.
Having foreseen a coup against his reign, Jones had memorized the island’s labyrinthine jungle paths, stored caches of food along the way, and made plans to evade the rebel band by escaping to Martinique in a French gunboat. Once informed of the impending revolt, he makes his getaway. “So long, white man,” he bids Smithers farewell, and plunges into the jungle forest (CP1, 1041). During his flight through the jungle, Jones encounters a series of phantasmagoric apparitions that start off as “Formless Little Fears,” then grow more specific to African American oppression—chain gangs, slave auctions, the horrifying “Middle Passage” of slaves crossing the Atlantic, and lastly the banks of the Congo, where Jones meets his reckoning in the form of a crocodile god conjured by an African witch doctor. In the final scene, Jones has been tracked down by island natives who gun him down offstage with specially prepared silver bullets.237
O’Neill’s early schooling in philosophical anarchism with Benjamin Tucker dictates the play’s moral logic. The philosophy’s founding father, Max Stirner, had denied the existence of good or evil, since murder and other crimes are acceptable so long as the state deems them legal. “According to our theories of penal law,” Stirner wrote, “they want to punish men for this or that ‘inhumanity’; and therein they make the silliness of these theories especially plain by their consistency, hanging the little thieves and letting the big ones run.”238 O’Neill adopts precisely this language to describe the criminal life Brutus Jones embraced after a decade working on the Pullman trains “listenin’ to de white quality talk”: “Ain’t I de Emperor?” he asks Smithers. “De laws don’t go for him. … Dere’s little stealin’ … and dere’s big stealin’. … For de little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks” (CP1, 1035). (The 1933 Hollywood film retains Stirner’s language: “Dere’s little stealin’ like you does, and dere’s big stealin’ like I does.” But the suggestion that it was white businessmen on the trains who taught Jones how to steal “big” was, predictably, omitted.)
The play also unmasked an escalating political fiasco: the American government’s disastrous involvement in Haiti. In the fall of 1919, when O’Neill decided to write up Croak’s “story current in Hayti” as a play, the U.S. Marines had just crushed a guerrilla uprising against the protracted American occupation there (1915–34). By the end of the rebellion, approximately three thousand Haitian men, women, and children lay dead. (This was the My Lai Massacre of its time.) As such, O’Neill’s preface to The Emperor Jones coyly identifies the setting as “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines,” a sarcastic taunt aimed at the absurd legality of “big stealin’” by American business interests abroad (CP1, 1030, 1035).
The Emperor Jones therefore takes place just prior to 1915, a tumultuous political phase for Haiti when four “emperors” ruled its people in as many years before the U.S. Marines took control of the island. Before completing the first year of his dictatorship in 1915, the Haitian dictator Sam, l
ike Jones, was hunted down by insurgents and executed (Jones gets gunned down in the jungle; Sam was torn apart limb from limb in the streets of Port-au-Prince). Sam held close ties with American financial interests, specifically the National City Bank of New York. Thus on the afternoon of the insurgency and Sam’s execution, July 28, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Marines, then patrolling the coast in a warship, to seize the country by force. O’Neill’s original draft, “The Silver Bullet,” specifies that Brutus’s island is “as yet self-determined by the U.S. Marines,” a detail changed to the less explicit “White Marines” in the final play. In so doing, O’Neill partially disguised his politically charged setting.239
In late winter 1920, the NAACP dispatched the African American writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson to Haiti to investigate the military occupation from a black perspective. Given the lack of reporting in the white press about Haiti and its majority-black citizenry, the American public’s response up to then had been largely indifferent. From August 28 to September 25, 1920, Johnson published a series of four articles in the left-wing journal the Nation, which O’Neill and Boulton read often in Provincetown, wherein Johnson reported in gruesome detail on the atrocities perpetrated by the Marines against the Haitian people.240 With this series, if only for a brief time, Johnson single-handedly placed the otherwise ignored occupation of Haiti on the front pages of newspapers nationwide. The title of the series, “Self-Determining Haiti,” substantiates the connection with O’Neill’s West Indian island “as yet not self-determined by White Marines,” and O’Neill wrote The Emperor Jones from late September to October 3, 1920, one week after the final installation of Johnson’s exposé had appeared.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 23
