John D. Williams, the financial muscle behind Beyond the Horizon and now Gold, was an alcoholic in his own right, and he might have been more “pickled” than usual when he approved Gold’s press release: “Eugene O’Neill’s greatest drama … the greatest dramatic event of the year!!”301 The absurd hyperbole of this statement was laid conspicuously bare on opening night. “Talky, balky, tiresome and impossible,” brayed Variety.302 The Nation accused O’Neill of beginning to sound like a broken record—another charge, like Freud and misogyny, that has withstood the test of history: “We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that we have heard all this before.”303 When George Jean Nathan told O’Neill that he actually liked aspects of Gold, even its author responded with terse finality, “You’re wrong. It’s a bad play. I’m telling you.”304
Heywood Broun was goaded by the play into calling for a moratorium on the “great-great-grandchildren of Ophelia.” “Madness, to be sure,” he wrote, “is a stage convention much abused. Ophelia can hardly have died in any such untimely manner as Shakespeare pretends. She has left too many grandchildren to the dramatists of all succeeding centuries.” In a later review, Broun added, “Ophelia really ought to have heeded the advice of Hamlet and got her to a nunnery. She has bequeathed a tiresome strain to the theater. The defective drama is too much with us.”305 After this, O’Neill’s low opinion of Broun curdled into a rancid hatred. To the playwright, Broun was now “a proper yellow son of a bitch. … A faker and liar, envious, etc.”306
O’Neill hadn’t yet admitted it to himself, but Broun wasn’t far off the mark. He denied Freud’s influence to the very end; but he did feel shackled by the constraints of dramatic realism, which concealed what he called “the submerged mountain” that shaped human behavior. The realist movement, thanks for the most part to Henrik Ibsen, had mercifully given the vaudevillian hook to the cheap romances and tawdry melodramas of James O’Neill’s generation; but it had also dragged the soliloquy offstage along with them. This was the problem he had to contend with as a dramatist. Up to then, the only solution to match the depth of the soliloquy or the novel that had presented itself, in Jimmy Light’s words, was “psychopathic raving,” which was “still realism and not passé dramaturgy if the heroine is psychotic and the lines do make literal sense.”307 Susan Glaspell had also employed mentally unhinged women in her one-acts Trifles (1916) and The Outside (1917) as well as in The Verge, a full-length the Players would produce that November 1921, but Glaspell’s women had conveyed a deeper understanding at work. “And that is called sanity. And made a virtue—to lock one in,” her protagonist Claire Archer in The Verge says to her husband, then declares, “No, I’m not mad. I’m—too sane!” Or perhaps, Claire reflects, Emily Dickinson–like, “Madness … is the only chance for sanity.”308 Though Diff’rent and Gold were critical failures because of their purposeful use of psychic malfunction, O’Neill would revisit Ophelia’s descendants over the years with a racist white woman driven to madness by her marriage to an ambitious black man in All God’s Chillun Got Wings; a fantastical treatment of the Oedipal complex in More Stately Mansions; and, most poignantly and self-consciously, his drugged mother in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “The Mad Scene,” Jamie Tyrone scoffs when Mary descends the stairs in a morphine-induced haze. “Enter Ophelia!” (CP3, 824).
The First Man, which O’Neill copyrighted that October 1921, on the same day as The Fountain, was originally conceived as a modern recounting of Jason and the Argonauts’ quest for the Golden Fleece (the protagonist’s surname is “Jayson”). Instead, the play wound up being O’Neill’s first intentional foray into the gender wars. He’d complained about feminists giving him a hard time after Diff’rent, “as if the same theme could have been woven with equal truth about a man, with a different reaction, of course.”309 This time, he had his female counterpart in the form of Susan Glaspell, who was writing her own gender play, The Verge, that same summer in Provincetown.
Glaspell’s Claire Archer offers a singular window into the literary cross-pollination between Glaspell and O’Neill. Like O’Neill’s protagonist Curtis Jayson, Claire also balks at the constraints of parenting in favor of self-actuation. In the final scene, she rejects her conformist daughter and husband and murders her lover, all of whom she views as symbols of social and psychological entropy. O’Neill, in his early play Servitude, had written a neglectful father and husband in David Roylston, a character who would have gotten under a female audience’s skin had it been produced; with The First Man, likely emboldened by Glaspell’s work in progress, nakedly exposed his jaundiced view of domestic living.
What appears to have inspired The First Man more than his marriage was the imprisonment of fatherhood. O’Neill’s protagonist Curtis Jayson is an ambitious anthropologist searching the globe for evidence of “the first man.” He and his wife, Martha, have lost two children to pneumonia before the action of the play, a tragedy that brings about a ten-year world tour and a compact between them to have no more children. When Curtis turns on Martha for getting pregnant without his permission and defends their child-free existence, he sounds eerily like O’Neill at the time he was courting Agnes Boulton:
CURTIS: Haven’t we been sufficient, you and I together? Isn’t that a more difficult, beautiful happiness to achieve than—children? Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I need you so terribly—for myself, for my work—for everything that is best and worthiest in me?310
O’NEILL: You [Boulton] had seemed to me alone and virginal and somehow—with nothing but yourself. I wanted you alone … in an aloneness broken by nothing. Not even by children of our own.311
BOULTON: To be alone with me—that was what he wanted; we had everything—work, love and companionship. Never, never let anything interfere with work or love!312
Martha Jayson dies in childbirth in a tragic final scene, complete with blood-curdling shrieks of agony offstage that would appall audiences when it eventually opened in March of 1922. Martha’s infant survives to be raised by nurses until Curtis returns from his expedition.
Late that summer, Boulton felt certain she’d become pregnant again and took, she said, “strong medicine” to end the pregnancy. In mid-August, during her visit to Litchfield, she wrote O’Neill assuring him that she was monitoring her periods closely (September 11 being her next “Red-letter day”). “The joke of it is,” she told him, “I came sick on the day which was O.K. according to my second set of calculations—so there wasn’t much chance of anything being wrong. Hereafter, let’s hang a calendar in the bedroom! (You’d enjoy that!)”313
“Anna Christie” opened on November 2, 1921, at the Vanderbilt Theatre, the day before The Straw’s out-of-town New London premiere. Nearly everyone loved it, aside from, as was the case with In the Zone, its creator. (A predictable exception to the general acclaim was Heywood Broun: “After seeing ‘Anna Christie’ we cannot escape feeling that Eugene O’Neill has not yet lifted himself out of being ‘the most promising playwright in America.’”)314 The curtain opened to reveal Robert Edmond Jones’s much praised rendering of the interior of Johnny “the Priest’s,” a bar based on O’Neill’s old hangout Jimmy the Priest’s. In the stage directions, O’Neill describes the bar in minute detail, and his dialogue re-creates the common slang and defiant attitudes of the waterfront figures he knew intimately. Anna Christopherson, a young prostitute, has arrived in town to reunite with her seafaring father, Chris Christopherson (O’Neill’s friend from Jimmy’s), and Anna agrees to sail with him on his barge from New York to Boston. Trapped in a fog bank off the Massachusetts coast, they rescue a shipwrecked, Driscoll-like Irish sailor named Mat Burke, and he and Anna fall in love. Chris doesn’t approve of the union, as he believes that the sea, embodied for him by the Irishman, is an “ole davil” responsible for annihilating his family back in Sweden. Now his daughter has fallen under its spell.
“Anna Christie” garnered even larger box office returns than Beyond the Horizon or The Emperor Jones. The drama crit
ic James Whittaker proclaimed, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that with “Anna Christie,” “Eugene O’Neill has turned New York into what is known in stage vernacular as a ‘dog town.’” (“Dog town” was theater argot for smaller cities where tryouts are held before a play moves to New York.) “He has bewitched those flinty mercenaries, the managers,” he wrote in mock disbelief. “For him all the vulgar preliminaries to production are dispensed with. … He does not have to peddle script on the Broadway curb. He does not have to have a letter from a Senator to pass through doors. And he does not have to travel to Wilmington, Del., to see his play staged in secret, and lend a humiliated hand to its stealthy rewriting.”315 Tongue-in-cheek as Whittaker’s pronouncement sounds, the truth behind it was undeniable. Clayton Hamilton’s warning at the New London station that when a dramatist submitted a script there was “not one chance in a thousand it will ever be read; not one chance in a million of its ever being accepted” was a rule that no longer applied to Eugene O’Neill.
Audiences confounded O’Neill by cheering the notoriously gloomy playwright’s “happy-ever-after,” and very few critics departed “Anna Christie” with the sense of tragic fate he’d intended. When George Jean Nathan read the four-act play the previous winter, Nathan prophetically warned his friend that the final scene would be regarded as a “happy ending,” whereas O’Neill, he knew, wished to evoke the sea’s “conquest of Anna.” O’Neill insisted that the moment when Mat discovers Anna is non-Catholic—not religious at all, in fact—the integrity of her “oath” to forget the past and never return to prostitution is slippery at best. But the “weak-minded” arm of the press had latched on so firmly to the idea of the happy ending that he was moved to publish a denial in the New York Times: “In this type of naturalistic play, which attempts to translate life into its own terms, I am a denier of all endings. Things happen in life, run their course as the incidental, accidental, the fated, then pause to give their inevitable consequences time to mobilize for the next attack. … The curtain falls. Behind it their lives go on.” “Lastly,” he concluded, “to those who think I deliberately distorted my last act because a ‘happy ending’ would be calculated to make the play more of a popular success I have only this to say: The sad truth is that you have precedents enough to spare in the history of our drama for such a suspicion. But, on the other hand, you have every reason not to believe it of me.”316
O’Neill wrote the final scene of “Anna Christie” to act as a figurative “comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten.” At one point, he even toyed with naming it Comma.317 But almost no one got this. Burns Mantle, for instance, summed it up in his Evening Mail review: “When the record of his playwriting achievements is written, ‘Anna Christie’ will likely be pointed to as the first Eugene O’Neill play in which the morbid young genius compromised with the happy ending all true artists of the higher drama so generously despise.” Nathan railed against such critics who “snicker self-satisfiedly that he has arbitrarily stuck a theatrical happy ending onto his play. In them the poison of the showshop has worked so long that it is simply impossible for them to consider him as an autonomous artist.” Among the critics, Alexander Woollcott of the New York Times was a notable exception: “O’Neill seems to be suggesting to the departing playgoers that they can regard this as a happy ending if they are short-sighted enough to believe it and weak-minded enough to crave it.”318
That American audiences would applaud a respectable marriage as a happy ending for a “girl gone bad” was a remarkable development nevertheless.319 Even the quotation marks around the name (rarely respected as part of his title) are meant to accentuate that “Anna Christie” is a prostitute’s street name. Beyond that, the play contained unmistakably feminist overtones: when Anna’s father and lover argue over who will control her future, she stops them, delivering what can only be read as a feminist’s decree: “Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture! … I’ll do what I please and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do! I ain’t askin’ either of you for a living. I can make it myself—one way or other” (CP1, 1007).
Kenneth Macgowan crowed that with this play O’Neill had made “dramatic history”: “It is hard to think of any American play that is the superior of Eugene O’Neill’s newest work in truth of life or in dramatic force.”320 O’Neill himself soon publicly renounced it, not only for the widespread belief in its happy ending but for its “naturalism,” which he defined simply as drama that’s “true to life.”321 “Naturalism is too easy,” he told a reporter. “It would, for instance, be a perfect cinch to go on writing Anna Christies all my life. I could always be sure of the rent then. … Because you can say practically nothing at all of our lives since 1914 through that form. The naturalistic play is really less natural than a romantic or expressionistic play. That is, shoving a lot of human beings on a stage and letting them say the identical things in a theatre they would say in a drawing room or a saloon does not necessarily make for naturalness.” “It’s what those men and women do not say,” O’Neill said, “that usually is most interesting.”322
O’Neill’s The Straw premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in New London on November 3, then moved to the Greenwich Village Theatre a week later. The Straw, about his time at Gaylord Farm, would always remain one of O’Neill’s personal favorites. As he told George Tyler, its producer, he considered it “the best play I have written—better even than Beyond the Horizon.” Most critics dismissed it, however, as decent in quality of dialogue but grimly clinical in theme and setting. One reviewer described it as “the most lugubrious and depressing play that could possibly be encountered within theatre walls.” “We wish Mr. O’Neill would stick to the sea as his background,” said another. “His salt water dramas never make us seasick, but this play sort of makes us landsick, as it were. … This particular sanitarium may cure a patient when there is the straw of love and hope to cling to, but it is likely to kill the audience.” Yet another chided O’Neill for his “tuberculosis Romeo and Juliet,” suggesting that the dramatist “will probably write a musical comedy around cancer later on.” When Jimmy Light had first read it, he’d found the love story impossible to believe. O’Neill replied, “Something like that happened to me once.”323
O’Neill’s tragic heroine Eileen Carmody dies from her disease, just as Kitty MacKay, O’Neill’s “kitten,” had two years after O’Neill’s release from Gaylord Farm; but the tragedy doesn’t shake O’Neill’s faith in the bobbing “straw” of hopefulness that might rescue him and the other drowning souls he’d met. “It is for this reason,” Barrett Clark wrote of The Straw, “that I have always considered O’Neill at bottom an optimist. He never leaves us feeling that life is not worth living. If he were as pessimistic as he is often said to be, in the first place he would not have gone to the trouble of trying to prove the futility of existence.”324 When Ed Keefe, O’Neill’s friend from New London, wrote to say how much he enjoyed the play in New London, and O’Neill responded that he’d hoped to make the opening but hadn’t been able to: “It was a rather hectic, nerve-wracking time for me,” he said, though he thought it amusing that The Straw opened in New London since “there is so much autobiographical stuff in it connected with that town.”325 What O’Neill failed to say was that the concurrent productions weren’t the only issues wracking his nerves that fall.
The previous August 1921, Kathleen Jenkins’s lawyer had notified O’Neill that she expected him to finance their son’s education. O’Neill agreed to pay $800 the first year, $900 the next, and then $1,000 each year thereafter until Eugene Jr. turned twenty-one. After eleven years, Jenkins also believed that Eugene was old enough to reveal to him the identity of his true father—the famous playwright Eugene O’Neill. Hearing this, the boy desperately wanted to meet him. O’Neill was apprehensive, though not averse to the idea (no diapers, less milk). As he’d written at the time in The First Man, Curtis Jayson (O’Neill) would be able to
embrace fatherhood only once the newborn is “old enough to know and love a big, free life” (CP2, 116).
That fall, Kathleen’s mother Kate accompanied Eugene Jr. to the lobby of O’Neill’s apartment building at 36 West Thirty-Fifth Street. Kenneth Macgowan stood at O’Neill’s side to help out if the meeting took an awkward turn. In fact, according to Jenkins afterward, “They hit it off so well” she felt she was losing her son’s allegiance to her ex-husband.326 Father and son were both great baseball fans and connected strongly with that, most likely discussing the relative merits of the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. (O’Neill, it must be said, was a Yankees fan.)327
Surprisingly, O’Neill and Jenkins appear to have gotten back in touch much earlier than has previously been thought. On January 14, 1919, when O’Neill was commuting from West Point Pleasant to Macdougal Street and back, he sent his ex-wife a lengthy, amiable letter from New York. Written in pencil and warmly signed “Gene,” a sign-off reserved only for his closest friends and relations, this tightly written eight-page communiqué is now presumably secure in private hands. Sotheby Parke-Bernet, a highly reputable auction house, sold this missing document to an unknown buyer in 1977. Its catalogue of sales describes the letter in startling terms, especially given it’s been widely assumed they’d cut off all correspondence: “Unusually fine long early letter, full of information on his activities in the theater, the last page on social and family matters, with a loving conclusion.”328 (Jenkins’s later discretion over the letter’s existence in some ways parallels Boulton’s decades later regarding Exorcism.) At the time O’Neill wrote this, he’d achieved neither fame nor fortune. But by the summer of 1921, when Jenkins requested money, he had both. O’Neill agreed to pay for Eugene’s education, was granted visitation rights, and invited his son out to Peaked Hill for the following summer.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 26
