Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  And here we sit!

  You and I—

  In the Congo of the soul

  All the reverberating tom-toms

  Of everlasting infancy

  Are drumming out the boom-boom-boom—

  (The presence of God in one’s ear-drums)

  Until one’s atheism

  Shrieks in the Dark

  And cowers on a heap of dung

  To pray!268

  Not all African American critics decried O’Neill’s approach. When the West Indian American “father of Harlem radicalism” Hubert Henry Harrison reviewed The Emperor Jones for the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, he noted regretfully that when Boni and Liveright published the book that April (with Diff’rent and The Straw), the publisher had foolishly advertised the play as “a study of the psychology of fear and of race superstition.” “A censorious critic might cavil at the propriety of the last four words,” Harrison admitted, “but the rest of the statement is quite correct. It is pre-eminently a psychological study.” Singling out Gilpin’s performance in particular as “a work of genius … [that] stands on its own feet and justifies itself,” Harrison countered what he otherwise thought a “commendable racial pride” from other black critics: “Mr. O’Neill, in portraying the soul of an ignorant and superstitious person of any race could not be so silly as to put in that person’s mouth the language of a different sort of person. He did the best he could—and he did it very well.” “The fault, dear Brutus,” he said, quoting Shakespeare while alluding to O’Neill’s protagonist, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”269 Harrison would later compare Marcus Garvey’s demagoguery to Brutus Jones’s after Garvey had been convicted in 1923 for, Harrison noted in his diary, “using the mails to defraud his ‘fellow-men of the negro race.’”270 “He gave them what they wanted,” Harrison wrote in a damning critique of Garvey and his followers. “And at this point I am reminded of ‘The Emperor Jones’—a fine picture of the whole psychology of the Garvey movement.”271

  On June 9, a few days after Harrison’s review of The Emperor Jones was published, O’Neill responded to its author with deep gratitude for his interpretation, “one of the very few intelligent criticisms of the piece that have come to my notice.”272 In this unpublished letter, O’Neill expressed his desire that Gilpin’s talent might inspire black playwrights, and he again argued that propaganda meant to “elevate” the disenfranchised doesn’t “strike home”: “I am glad to see you remonstrate with those of your people who find fault with the play because it does not ‘elevate.’ Such folk do not realize that the only propaganda that ever strikes home is the truth about the human soul, black or white. Intentional uplift plays never amount to a damn—especially as uplift. To portray a human being, that is all that counts. … And, by the way, that same criticism of ‘Jones’ which you protest against is a very common one made by a similar class of white people about my other plays—they don’t ‘elevate’ them. So you see!”273

  “I am hoping in the time between now and the end of the play’s career,” O’Neill continued, “to write another Negro play which I have in mind—in which case my association with Mr. Gilpin, always a pleasant one from the very start, may be continued and his ‘Where do I go from here?’ may find a solution to his liking. He is a wonderful actor and should not go playless.” The other “Negro play” O’Neill had in mind, about his friend Joe Smith from the Hell Hole, was going to be titled either “White” or “Honest Honey Boy.” His 1921 work diary reads: “‘Joe’—tragic-comedy of negro gambler (Joe Smith)—8 scenes—4 in N.Y. of his heyday—4 in present N.Y. of Prohibition times, his decline.”274 (His next “Negro play,” also related to Joe Smith’s life, would be All God’s Chillun Got Wings, produced in 1924, but the original idea would be more fully realized as the background for Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh.)

  O’Neill nevertheless recognized that he was writing as an outsider and saw the need for the black experience to be written from within. “Don’t you think the writers among your people should be encouraged—and urged—to try and write plays for [Gilpin]?” O’Neill wrote to Harrison. “Something very fine for the Negro in general might evolve from such an attempt.” Indeed, black writers, artists, and musicians were just then emerging from Harlem, and for them Brutus Jones’s white tyranny might also be read as a cautionary tale: while serving as a judge for a Harlem playwriting contest, O’Neill counseled its participants to ignore white literary authority. “Be yourselves,” he advised. “Don’t reach out for our stuff which we call good!”275

  By the close of the 1920–21 season, Charles Gilpin had become the first African American listed by the Drama League of New York as one of the top ten people who had done the most that year for American theater. The League traditionally honors its chosen few at its annual gala; but a public outcry erupted over the invitation of a black man to the exclusive gathering, and the Drama League hastily, if contritely, withdrew Gilpin’s invitation. In spite of a growing dislike for his leading man, O’Neill, also on the list, was revolted by the League’s pandering to its racist membership, and he and the critic Kenneth Macgowan, the League’s former director with whom O’Neill had developed close ties during Beyond the Horizon’s run, together petitioned the other recipients to turn down their invitations—which they all did. Gilpin’s invitation was promptly reinstated and the event was a great success. A decade later, James Weldon Johnson wrote that the affair had already taken on “an archaic character. It is doubtful if a similar incident today could provide such a degree of asininity.”276

  Gilpin originally thought he’d make an appearance at the gala of “about four minutes.” He proudly admitted that after his performances he wouldn’t go “hobnobbing” with the white theater crowd either, instead returning to his “little circle of friends” in Harlem, “where I belong.” But after receiving the night’s longest standing ovation, he said, “I stayed for four hours and had the time of my life. No, it didn’t take much nerve to go and face the crowd. I could count on the artists treating me fairly, and I didn’t care a hang about the others. They could sit there and stare at me as though I were some kind of a prize monkey and it wouldn’t disturb me at all.”277

  The NAACP awarded Gilpin the Spingarn Medal in 1921 for “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the preceding year or years,” and President Warren Harding invited him to dine with him at the White House. But O’Neill said in April of that year that Gilpin was ultimately edged out of the production in early 1922 because of “the effect of too much alcohol and actor’s swell head [egotism].” At one point in New York, he’d reasoned with Gilpin, one alcoholic to another: “Charlie, if you won’t keep a bottle in your dressing room, we’ll let you have a drink after each scene.” Gilpin accepted the terms, and the Players served the actor a shot after each scene, making it seven shots total before the last scene, when Jones’s lifeless body is carried onstage by the natives who’d gunned him down. Whether because of or in spite of such measures, Gilpin’s drinking problem continued to spiral out of control, and Paul Robeson agreed to replace Gilpin for the London production in 1923. Robeson by then had come to see Brutus Jones as a “great part” and the play “a true classic of the drama, American or otherwise.” O’Neill was equally impressed with Robeson, who became a cherished compatriot in the years to come. From the first, O’Neill thought the actor a “wonderful presence & voice, full of ambition and a damn fine man personally with real brains—not a ‘ham’”—like Gilpin.278

  Though after this humiliating dismissal, Gilpin was hired for the occasional role, including several revivals as Brutus Jones, his acting career never fully rebounded. In 1930, he died in poverty on a chicken farm in New Jersey at age fifty-one. His death notice in the black press lamented that after his breakout performance in The Emperor Jones, Gilpin had been “the envy of the theatrical world. If America had been a fully civilized country, he would have gone on to greater fame—he would have electrifi
ed the stage as Othello. But the chance never came, and one of America’s great actors was left to die broken-hearted.”279

  The Emperor Jones marked the beginning of the end for the Provincetown Players, too, at the same time, paradoxically, it had launched them into the public eye. “Values had shifted overnight, astonishingly,” Edna Kenton later wrote. After the notoriety of The Emperor Jones, most of the Players would no longer settle for less than Broadway greatness: “To go uptown with our first success was higher honor than to stay down town with our experiments. It was human; it was natural … we were a little drunk with the wine of applause and we lost our balance and fell.” Kenton believed that their only savior from ruin was Jack Reed; but then the tragic news arrived. Reed had died of typhus in Russia, with Bryant at his side, less than two weeks before the opening night of Jones, and he lay buried, after a Soviet hero’s funeral, inside the Kremlin walls. “If Jack could have risen from his grave in the Red Square at Moscow and come back to us for just one night—that night,” Kenton said, “when we decided to go uptown with The Emperor Jones. … But Jack was lying in his tomb at Moscow and Jig was an old prophet, saying over and over again familiar words that held no meaning any more for most of us. He knew it.”280

  In truth, Cook’s ideas, however inspiring, were often incomprehensible to the other Players. “It was a kind of drunkenness that is beyond recall,” the writer and Provincetowner Djuna Barnes reminisced over Cook’s heady notions of community theater. “Jig who could inspire divergent minds to work together for one idea, an ideal that was never quite clear to him, or if clear to him, one that he could not make clear to me nor to a number of others, sent his actors on a scent of no man’s rabbit. It was, I think, Jig’s rabbit, Jig’s conjuring trick; he knew the passes, he spoke the formula, he had the hat, but—was he too proud, or was he too wise, or was he too limited to produce the hare? Who knows?—but it made good hunting.”281

  The Theatre F(r)eud

  By the time O’Neill sent The Emperor Jones off to Macdougal Street the previous October of 1920, he’d already completed his next play, Diff’rent. The Players opened the two-act on December 27, the day The Emperor Jones moved uptown. Diff’rent, like its predecessor, also moved to several uptown theaters (the Selwyn, the Times Square, the Princess); but unlike its predecessor, it received a tepid critical response. Kenneth Macgowan applauded O’Neill’s gifts but lamented that “the unescapable impression of anyone who remembers ‘The Emperor Jones’ and its fine imaginative quality, its color, and its spiritual power, and compares it with ‘Diff’rent,’ must be that the newer play is a step backward for its author.” Barrett Clark joked the play was a box office flop, “even with the help of the censor who tried to stop it.” Following his enormous successes with Beyond the Horizon and The Emperor Jones, O’Neill shrugged off the failure: “Well, this is rather reassuring. I had begun to think I was too popular to be honest.”282

  Based loosely on a story Fifine Clark told O’Neill about a local Provincetown woman, Diff’rent portrays a repressed middle-aged woman who seeks a degenerate younger man’s sexual attention in a coastal New England town. The posters stapled on the billboards around Manhattan thus announced the play lasciviously as a “daring study of a sex-starved woman.”283 As a consequence, O’Neill grumbled, the play “aroused the ire of all the feminists against me.”284 He forcefully denied their accusations that his heroine, Emma Crosby, was meant to reflect all women: “She is universal only in the sense that she reacts definitely to a definite sex-suppression, as every woman might. The form her reaction takes is absolutely governed by her environment and her own character. Let the captious be sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she would act.”285

  Worse yet, the news media forged an intellectual pairing that would hound O’Neill to his grave: Sigmund Freud, the celebrated German psychologist, had gained a wide following in the United States, and many critics believed O’Neill was peddling bandwagon psychoanalysis. The New York Sun fired a warning shot: “There is a tendency among the Provincetown Players to present plays that turn their stage into a Freudian clinic. This inclination should not be overplayed unless these ambitious and successful players desire their little Macdougal street playhouse to become known as the Theatre Freud.”286

  The New York Tribune’s drama critic Heywood Broun, a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, who generally thought of O’Neill as punching above his intellectual weight, also happened to be the husband of feminist writer Ruth Hale. Glaspell warned O’Neill that Hale “objected strongly” to the play’s sexist implications and gave him the impression that Broun was prepared to publish his wife’s review of Diff’rent under his own byline.287 Whichever of them did write it, the notice took the other criticisms a step farther. Not only had O’Neill written a trendy Freudian play, he also didn’t know what he was talking about: “O’Neill seems ill informed of the more searching theories of sex psychology. He does not understand that repressed instincts tend to burrow deeper and deeper and without some adequate explanation the sudden impulse of the heroine to translate into actuality the desires which she has long suppressed, or perhaps sublimated, is not convincing.”288 Within two weeks, the Tribune printed a self-restrained but pointed riposte by O’Neill. Any channeling of Freud’s work into his own was incidental, he insisted. As far back as the Greeks, Freud’s postulations had been available to anyone “intuitive” enough to grasp them.289 “What has influenced my plays,” he said, “is my knowledge of the drama of all time—particularly Greek tragedy—and not any books on psychology.”290

  In fact, in 1920 his reading of Freud was limited to Totem and Taboo (1913).291 (He would later read Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1925 to assist in his effort to quit drinking.)292 He’d also read Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) after it was translated to English in 1916. “If I have been influenced unconsciously,” he admitted later, “it must have been by [Jung’s] book more than any other psychological work.”293 “The Freudian brethren and sisteren seem quite set up about it and, after reading astonishing complexes between the lines of my simplicities, claim it for their own. Well, so some of them did with ‘Emperor Jones.’ They are hard to shake!”294 “Whether it is psychoanalytically exact or not,” he said, “I will leave more dogmatic students of Freud and Jung than myself (or than Freud and Jung) to decide. It is life, nevertheless. I stick out for that—life that swallows all formulas.”295

  That winter, O’Neill swore a “New Year’s oath” to quit drinking and went back to work on The First Man. If he’d felt cowed by the feminist or Freudian backlash caused by Diff’rent, this play didn’t show it. In what itself might have been read as a four-act Freudian slip, The First Man exposes O’Neill’s actual hostility toward the whole-cloth demands and limitations of family life. His marriage to Boulton doesn’t appear to have been the problem, at least not yet. On April 12, 1921, he’d arranged for friends in New York to buy and ship a longed-for kimono for their third anniversary, and he missed her terribly whenever events conspired to separate them—for the first few days, at least.296

  In late April, the chronically bad state of O’Neill’s teeth induced him to travel up to his friend Saxe Commins’s new dental practice in Rochester, New York. (Commins’s first name is pronounced like the instrument, but O’Neill referred to him as “Sox.”)297 O’Neill had met Commins, Stella Ballantine’s brother, back when the Players produced Commins’s play The Obituary in 1916 during their first season in New York. Both reticent men among outgoing thespians, they’d bonded over their quiet ways; but after this trip to Rochester, a friendship was forged that would endure through O’Neill’s final years.

  But after more than a week of excruciating root canals and extractions, O’Neill longed to be back with his wife: “God, how I wish you were here! I love you so! It is truly love that passeth all bounds, beyond which there is nothing. I am You. So take care of the real me whilst this poor ghost is haunting dental parlors!”
298 The flurry of love letters back and forth tapered off after a week or so, however, replaced by the commonplace matters of domestic and professional life—Shane’s health, bills, Provincetown gossip, Terry Carlin’s drunken antics, production schedules, the condition of Peaked Hill, and so on. Later that summer O’Neill felt miserable and neglected as he labored on his writing while Boulton went off for the month of August on a whirlwind tour to visit friends in Boston, Jim and Ella O’Neill in New London, members of her own family in Litchfield, Connecticut, then down to West Point Pleasant and back up to New York and Westchester County to hunt for a winter residence.

  While she was gone, he’d finished The First Man and revisited his “Fountain of Youth” play, The Fountain, about Juan Ponce de León’s quest for eternal life in the New World. “If I really believed that The Fountain were as rotten as it seems to me now I’d hang the script out on the hook in the toilet,” O’Neill wrote to Boulton. “Either it is a dead thing or I am. … Come home and bring my life back! These days crawl sufferingly like futile purgatories.”299

  After a frustrating week of false starts and delays, O’Neill’s four-act Gold opened at New York’s Frazee Theater on June 1, 1921. Once he’d attended rehearsals with its notoriously histrionic star, Willard Mack, O’Neill knew it would be a catastrophic failure. Several rehearsals in, he recused himself and “got good and ‘pickled’ to chase the memory of it away.” Having absorbed toxic amounts of Prohibition rotgut, O’Neill made his way back to Provincetown in order, he said, “to regain sanity and await the crash.”300 Boulton went down on her own to oversee the final rehearsals and report back on the opening night. O’Neill remained at Peaked Hill to lick his wounds and continue work on The Fountain, but was soon buoyed by news that producer Arthur Hopkins had optioned “Anna Christie,” his revised version of Chris, for production that fall.