Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  The voyage from New York to Bermuda took two days on the S.S. Fort St. George, a steamer that weekly ferried passengers the seven hundred miles out to the British island. O’Neill and Boulton disembarked in Hamilton, the capital, on December 1, with Shane, Gaga, Cookie Burton, Finn Mac Cool, and a new bull terrier named Bowser after his brother’s story. The famed couple made a spectacle as they extracted themselves, their entourage, and their dogs from customs to the New Windsor Hotel. Oleander and hibiscus were in bloom, dappling the colonial town in pink and scarlet. In 1925, Bermuda’s population was twenty-four thousand, about the same as New London’s, and no automobiles were allowed on the island. Bermudians traveled exclusively about the countryside in surreys with a fringe on top, traps, and other horse-drawn vehicles.152

  The O’Neills rented two bungalows, Campsea and Crow’s Nest, perched high upon the cliffs overlooking the pink-hued beach and south shore of Paget parish (a site since occupied by the Coral Beach Club). The flowers and sultry air notwithstanding, the first weeks did not go well. Boulton had announced that she was pregnant, and the idea of a third “heir” exacerbated O’Neill’s drinking. Mentally, he felt “depressed and slushy … miserably disorganized” from booze, and he suffered from insomnia.153 Devoid of inspiration, not even for a swim in the azure sea, he was capable only of sifting through a pile of Saturday Evening Posts. For him, the weekly offered an intellectual vacation. “Talk about narcotics!” he wrote in his diary. “My favorite!”154

  By January 4, O’Neill had begun to taper off drinking and recorded in his diary how many drinks he consumed each day—one before lunch, three before dinner, and so on.155 After a week, he was back on the wagon, with only the occasional ale with lunch, and he even quit smoking. (Aside from such intermittent pulmonary holidays, O’Neill was at least a pack-a-day smoker for life.) He was finally able to settle down and cut Marco Millions down to a performable size. Within a few weeks he sent it off to Dario Belasco, who’d expressed interest in producing it. He also read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (“interesting stuff but damn dryly written”) and a book-length issue of the medical journal Practitioner on alcoholism (“very interesting + applicable to me”). On January 31, while reading David Seabury’s Unmasking Our Minds (“too primary school”), he’d begun his latest and most ambitious work yet, a mask play entitled The Great God Brown.156

  O’Neill’s abstinence might well have eased marital tensions had whiskey not been promptly replaced by another source of conflict by the name of Alice Cuthbert. Cuthbert was vacationing at the nearby Elbow Beach Club with her sister Charlotte “Tottie” Barbour, who worked in publishing and was acquainted with a few of the Provincetown Players.157 Upon their first meeting on the beach, O’Neill thought Cuthbert “a peach! Athletic swimmer’s figure—out-of-door girl—simple (perhaps too) + unspoiled.”158 He told an increasingly jealous Boulton that the young woman exuded “a rare & beautiful quality,” and she soon heard a rumor of their holding hands while swimming together. O’Neill denied this and swore they were merely “swimming in tandem.”159 Growing more and more enraged by the number of trysts between her husband and Cuthbert, Boulton reached a breaking point in early February, and O’Neill ruefully noted in his diary, “fight over Alice.” This time, if perhaps she had in the past, Boulton wasn’t overreacting; a love poem O’Neill wrote that winter titled “To Alice” longingly begins and ends,

  The sun

  And you

  Two things in life

  Are true. …

  You, the sun, & sea,

  Trinity!

  Sweet spirit, pass on

  Keep the dream

  Beauty

  Into infinity.

  Still, Boulton recognized that her compulsive husband had neither the time nor the emotional wherewithal for extramarital affairs—not of a sexual nature, she felt certain, at least not yet.160

  “Dirty day!” O’Neill groaned on February 21, 1925. “Wild cable from Madden.” Their production of Desire Under the Elms was about “to be indicted. Can’t believe.” “‘D’ played to 13,500 last week, fancy that! Helped by scandal, damn it! M. [Richard Madden, his agent] says ‘situation favorable’—jury trial Wednesday likely. Damned nonsense! … Wire from Kenneth saying no indictment, that ‘D’ has been referred to play jury. This is good news. Old [District Attorney Joab] Banton seems to be beaten again, the bloody ass! … Much talk of Banton’s calling me ‘damned fool.’ Ha-ha! Business booming. It’s an ill wind! But it attracts wrong audience, damn it!”161

  The play’s moral “distresses,” reported the Herald Tribune, “range from unholy lust to infanticide, and they include drinking, cursing, vengeance, and something approaching incest.” Once it moved uptown, District Attorney Banton again played right into the Triumvirate’s hands. The play was “too thoroughly bad,” said Banton, who charged the theater group with promoting “salacity and indecency.”162 As a public relations ploy, Macgowan was the one who suggested they invite a “citizens’ play-jury” to sit in on a performance, which they did on March 13. The play was duly exonerated, but the word was already out among New York’s theatergoing public. The Triumvirate looked on in delight as thousands ignored the scathing reviews, of which there were quite a few, and stampeded the box office. Gross ticket sales shot up from $10,000 or $12,000, which O’Neill already considered a “miracle,” to an astonishing $16,000 a week.163

  “The Desire censorship mess has been amusing, what?” he wrote George Jean Nathan after Banton’s rancorous attacks. “It has a background of real melodramatic plot—the revenge of Banton’s enraged Southern Nordic sensibilities on the author of All God’s Chillun.” Similarly, while paying off his dentist in New York, Dr. J. O. Lief, O’Neill noted the same delicious irony: “But don’t thank me, thank that so-amiable District Attorney!” “Seriously though,” he went on to Lief, “his press-agent work is bad in the long run. It attracts the low-minded, looking for smut, and they are highly disappointed or else laugh wherever they imagine double-meanings. Banton is a vindictive Southern jackass. This was all an attempted revenge on me for ‘All God’s Chillun’ which he tried so hard—and unsuccessfully!—to stop last season.”164

  Law enforcement officials fought the production in cities across the United States, and the furor spread across the Atlantic to Great Britain. (The Lord Chamberlain succeeded in delaying the play’s London premiere until 1940). Upon hearing that the entire cast of the touring company had been arrested in Los Angeles, O’Neill wrote the novelist Upton Sinclair, “I hear they have ‘pinched’ my play ‘Desire Under the Elms’ in your Holy City, Los Angeles. Well, well, and so many of the pioneers are said to have come from New England! Boston has also barred it.”165 A Los Angeles police sergeant, Officer Taylor, arrested the entire cast after attending a performance on behalf of L.A.’s wary Board of Education; he then testified in court, “I was painfully shocked, I blushed” during the scene in which Abbie Putnam is wearing a full-length flannel nightgown. “I sat there so embarrassed that I feared for the time when the act would end and the lights would again be turned on. After I left that place I couldn’t look the world in the face for hours.” Pressed by the judge, Taylor added that his “feelings were hurt, terribly hurt.” The New York Times reported that “snickers and giggles” could be heard from the gallery of the courtroom, “punctuated by the sharp crack of the bailiff’s gavel swung vigorously in a futile effort to preserve decorum.”166 “And so you object to flannel nightgowns, do you?” the defense attorney queried. “Yes, sir,” he replied, and the gallery burst out laughing.167

  After the judge ordered the cast to perform scenes in the courtroom, the actors were released from custody.168 Such an absurd courtroom drama might have come straight from O’Neill’s hand. Nearly all of O’Neill’s law enforcement officials are satirically drawn, and many plays—The Web, The Dreamy Kid, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, A Touch of the Poet, and The Iceman Cometh—conclude with policemen ineptly confr
onting his tragic heroes and heroines. These scenes depict the legal system as hopelessly petty when compared to the laws of nature and desire. “The injustice of Justice,” O’Neill said, “it’s big. It’s fundamental. Too much can’t be said about the farcicality of man-made laws.”169 The last line of Desire Under the Elms is spoken by the arresting officer, providing an absurd blindness to the tragic heights reached before his arrival: Abbie and Eben kiss and then are led off to face their punishment, while the sheriff gazes about Ephraim’s farm and mutters enviously, “It’s a jim-dandy farm, no denyin’. Wished I owned it!” (CP2, 378).

  O’Neill was soon confronted with a less amusing legal issue, however: rather too obvious similarities were inferred between Desire Under the Elms and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, which the Theatre Guild produced and which beat out Desire for the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. Howard’s play, though a comedy, resembles O’Neill’s triangular romance to such an extent that he was accused of plagiarism. Howard had, in fact, sent his script to the Triumvirate before O’Neill began working on his own play, which he completed in June, so the possibility was real. Malcolm Cowley noted of his visit to Brook Farm in November 1923 that when O’Neill informed him about his New England play, he repeatedly used the word “easy” as his “strongest expression of disapproval,” as Ephraim does; but O’Neill informed Walter Huston, who played the lead as Ephraim Cabot in the premiere, that he dreamed the entire plot one night between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1923. Kenneth Macgowan admitted later that he’d lent the Howard script to O’Neill, who then came to him in early 1924 with the astonishing news that the play had come to him in his sleep. At the time, Macgowan secretly believed that O’Neill’s borrowing was probably a case of cryptomnesia, what he called “unconscious plagiarism.” Howard, in the end, brought the matter graciously to a close by writing in his preface to the book version of his work that “no two plays could possibly bear less resemblance to each other than this simple comedy of mine and [O’Neill’s] glorious tragedy.”170

  The Novelist behind the Mask

  After his legal battles had been resolved, O’Neill exulted in the quietude of life in Bermuda: “There’s absolutely nothing interesting to do, and the German bottled beer and English bottled ale are both excellent,” he wrote George Jean Nathan, hoping to get him out for a visit. “The frost and hard cider of too many successive New England winters are slowly being rendered out of my system.” Along with the year-round swimming, “which I do above everything,” the lifestyle permitted him, by March 22, 1925, to complete his four-act mask play The Great God Brown. “Finish ‘B’ in tears!” his diary entry reads for that day. “Couldn’t help myself! … I think it really marks my ‘ceiling’ so far.” A few days later, he’d finished reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which left him in awe: “Most stimulating book on drama ever written!”171

  On March 30, Eugene Jr. arrived for a weeklong visit, and he and his father enjoyed another grand reunion, clothes shopping in Hamilton, taking long swims, and lounging on the beach. On April 10, after seeing Eugene off, the O’Neills moved into a large, coral stone house called Southcote. Having completed Brown, O’Neill fell right back off the wagon and consequently neglected to sign the lease, a crime in Bermuda. When the landlady, Aunt Lilla Smith, arrived at their doorstep, for the second time, she was furious to be told, again, that Mr. O’Neill was sleeping. “You don’t seem to realize who my husband is,” Boulton said. “I don’t care who he is,” Smith snapped back. “I shall be back in the morning and if he doesn’t sign you can all get out.” When morning arrived, Smith was finally compelled, if with a sniff of haughty disapproval, to accept Boulton’s signature instead. (After attending a production of Desire Under the Elms, Smith was appalled the O’Neills had occupied her house at all.)172

  Jimmy Light arrived from New York on April 17 and stayed at Southcote with the O’Neills for nine days. His visit wasn’t without its tensions. After a disappointing season, Light was worried that the Triumvirate were shortchanging the Provincetown Playhouse to the advantage of the Greenwich Village Theatre (which they were). He’d also been annoyed that after he managed the uproar over All God’s Chillun, O’Neill promised him the director’s job for Desire Under the Elms but then reassigned the play to Bobby Jones just before rehearsals. At the time, O’Neill asked Light to take a walk with him and was visibly agitated, the sweat pouring down his face and neck. He informed him, albeit contritely, that he was offering the position to Jones because Jones was a New Hampshire native and understood the New England dialect better than Light, a Midwesterner. (It was the “because” that had rankled Light. He might as well have been disqualified from directing the Glencairn cycle “because” he’d never gone to sea.) Most likely as a result of these disputes, O’Neill declined to show his new “mask play” to one of the few people who might readily have comprehended it. Light would again be passed up for director in favor of Jones for The Great God Brown, but when he read the script later in New York, he greeted O’Neill’s concept for the masks with such eagerness that he was tasked with their design. O’Neill, Light wrote later in “The Parade of Masks,” had contrived to build on their earlier deployment of masks in Spook Sonata and Ancient Mariner and “violate” the millennia-old tradition of immutability. The masks in The Great God Brown would expose a character’s duality by their removal but also change hands and even transform over time. In this way, they would reveal the development of the characters’ exterior as well as interior selves. “The violation of the use of the mask,” Light said, “enabled O’Neill to dramatize the change of character in the protagonist and the antagonist in revealing their opposite developments by the removal by the actor of the mask. The actors’ make-up behind the mask, showed the new state of the character’s soul. Thus, there were two masks—one, the actor changed, and one the mask maker changed.”173

  The play would also address what Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy identified as the central crisis of Western drama. Nietzsche compared the tensions that exist between internal desire and external reason with the conflict between the antithetical Greek gods Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, and Apollo, the sun god. As Greek tragedy developed from the openly imaginative work of Sophocles, Nietzsche contended, to the more temperamentally realistic and practical plays of Euripides, the Dionysian elements began to wane. Nietzsche thus argued for a rebalancing of the ecstatic beauty and structural moderation represented by Dionysus and Apollo, respectively. O’Neill would answer this call with The Great God Brown.

  Dion Anthony, another O’Neill protagonist with strong autobiographical overtones, represents in name and personality the Dionysian side of Nietzsche’s duality, that of instinct and sensuality. Behind his mask, Dion’s actual face is, O’Neill writes, “dark, spiritual, poetic, passionately supersensitive, helplessly unprotected in its childlike, religious faith in life” (CP2, 475). O’Neill regarded this type of ascetic, moral face (his own) as requiring a mask’s cynical protection from outside view (also his own)—hence the last name, evoking the “masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity as represented by St. Anthony.”174 Dion’s friend, the straitlaced architect William Brown, with his lackluster name and professional ambition, represents Apollonian restraint and reason.

  Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, in a later profile for the New Republic, praised O’Neill’s innovative use of the mask for the stage, but also for what it reveals to us about the playwright’s own inner battle with the world: the mask, she wrote, “signifies to him more than a stage trick, or a screen interposed between the crucial self and the bleary public eye. It is an integral part of his character as an artist. For, as he once said, the world is not only blind to Dion, the man beneath the mask, it also condemns the mask of Pan. O’Neill has known and feared the world’s sneer. He responded for long by giving back to life a lurid and caustic picture of itself. A picture whose distortions—like those of the Chamber of Horrors—are never those of i
llusion; whose dreams are nightmares. But gradually, through a deepening of his own currents, the warfare between himself and life grew sterile. All his slings and arrows had not altered the duality of the world. All the slings and arrows of the world had not altered the duality of O’Neill.”175

  Dion in the play marries a woman named Margaret, who wears the mask of a wholesome American “good girl.” As with her namesake, Marguerite from Faust, which O’Neill had also read that spring, Margaret is so blinded by her desire to bear children that she encourages her husband’s transformation into a hardened misanthrope—the type of man that is materially and emotionally equipped to prosper in a cynical world. (Only a prostitute named Cybel accepts Dion’s unmasked persona.) They have three sons, but Dion’s lack of artistic success on his own terms, in contrast to his corporate triumphs as an architect at Brown’s firm, leads him to sink deeply into alcoholism. Over time, Dion’s Pan-god mask transforms into a twisted Mephistophelean leer, and he dies of alcoholism. Brown, who has secretly loved Margaret, claps on Dion’s mask and passes as his friend. But the mask proves too tormenting for Brown’s earthly inner self. After Brown’s first mask is mistaken for the murdered body of Brown himself, he’s gunned down by the police who, because of the mask exchange, believe he’s Brown’s alleged murderer Dion. Jimmy Light understood that the way in which Dion’s mask becomes, as O’Neill specified, “distorted by morality from Pan to Satan,” and is then climactically transferred to Brown, would make for an incredible theatrical accomplishment.176 The only question was whether they could make it work.